Popular science usa 2013 03 by Science and Technology

August 1-10, 2013 Join the Mentor Series this summer in a land consisting of majestic seascapes, diverse cultural heritage, and vibrant beauty. Nikon professional photographers Dave Black and Bill Durrence will guide you as you embark on this scenic photographic journey of Scotland, which promises much more than memories of vivid rolling hills, secluded coastal towns, and lush highlands. We will start our adventure in Edinburgh, and continue on to the dramatic coastline to capture images of quaint ﬁshing villages and breathtaking vistas. We will head into the heart of the Highlands where vibrant colors of the surrounding hills, forests, and haunting castle ruins await your lens. Enjoy the opportunity to learn how to best capture Scottish bagpipers with a classic backdrop as these top Nikon pros assist you in mastering your craft.

A trip to Scotland wouldn’t be complete without considering the role the time-honored Whisky tradition plays and we will do so with a private tour of the Glenﬁddich Distillery. Here we will get a unique opportunity to get an up-close perspective of the process from mash to bottle with top distillers. Your mentors will continue to make sure your photos adequately tell your story as we witness the rich whisky-making experience at this picturesque distillery, which holds the honor for producing the world’s most-awarded single malt. A jaunt to the Isle of Skye will afford us the opportunity to admire the velvet moors, view the sparkling lochs, and capture the impressive jagged mountains and towering sea cliffs often iconic of this beautiful country. A Mentor Series Trek to Scotland will enchant, inspire, and change the way you approach photography for years to come.

Image courtesy of William Grant & Sons, Inc

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MARCH 2013 Volume 282 No. 3

FE ATURES

contents

THE RISE OF THE SUPERTALLS Engineering advances have architects striving for the mile-high skyscraper. By Clay Risen

34 40

COURTESY GENSLER; ON THE COVER: NICK KALOTERAKIS

Rewiring the Brain Five afflictions, including blindness and dementia, that neuroscience may soon fix. By Virginia Hughes Mental Combat As two wars wind down, the U.S. military begins its next big fight: beating PTSD. By Matthieu Aikins The Genius Within After brain damage, a few ordinary individuals acquired extraordinary talents. Could these accidental savants point to the brilliance in all of us? By Adam Piore Access videos, animations, and more with the POPSCI Interactive app. Just hover your smartphone over pages with this icon to launch the extras.

Once complete in 2014, the Shanghai Tower will be 2,073 feet tall.

DE PARTM EN TS

04 06 08 77 88

From the Editor Peer Review Megapixels: The biggest turbine FYI: So, the chicken or the egg? From the Archives

WHAT’S NEW 11 A fuel cell that charges phones for weeks

12 14 16 18 20

The Goods: The newest Nerf and more Mazda reinvents the diesel engine Smartphone-powered personal robots Golf gear that lowers handicaps A better you through Google Glass

HEADLINES 23 Why the best robots are squishy 26 The world’s tallest Ferris wheel

28 The Alvin sub gets a makeover 30 Inventing a healthier toilet 32 Torture, psychology, and Hollywood HOW 2.0 63 A giant vertical farm—in a museum 68 Gray Matter: See inside a burning rocket 71 Build a speaker with a potato chip 72 The pinball machine that paints

MARCH 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

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 Editors Joe Mejia, Leah Zibulsky 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 Rose Conry, Miriam Kramer, Taylor Kubota, Susan E. Matthews, Colleen Park, Ajai Raj

HY DO WE build incredibly tall buildings? What is it in the human psyche that requires us to go higher? Is it a masculinity problem? A desire to touch God? An unholy need to see all of the Earth at once? The early-Modernist architect Le Corbusier designed, in 1922, a “Contemporary City” for three million people. Decades before the engineering was possible, he imagined a cluster of 60-story towers that would bring a metropolis together in a single vertical habitat, leaving the surrounding countryside open. It was a revolutionary idea, but it turns out that skyscrapers beget more skyscrapers, not pristine farmland, because centralizing people into vertical habitats is a matter of economics, not land management. Now architects are redefining the notion of “tall.” Supertalls, as Clay Risen describes them on page 54, are a mystery to me. People wish to work and live in tall towers, okay— but do they really want to work and live a full mile above the Earth? And yet financial backers pour money into these projects, funding the creation of the world’s tallest buildings seemingly for the hell of it. Why can’t we get the supertall spirit into the public financing of science? The average NSF grant is $159,000, while the tallest buildings in the world cost more than 100 times that. Investigating the brain used to be something scientists did seemingly for the hell of it. The field of neuroscience wasn’t considered a legitimate discipline until 1969. 04

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MARCH 2013

Why can’t we get the supertall spirit into the public ﬁ nancing of science? Today, we’re pinning down the brain functions that govern sight, hearing, and dementia, and it looks as though we’ll soon be able to manipulate them. And yet the public funding that makes this research possible only narrowly escaped major cuts in January, as Washington steered away from the fiscal cliff. It’s likely that NSF research money will come under threat again this year. These days, the most far-out brain research probably looks as pointless to a Senate staffer as a mile-high tower does to me. But that’s the thing. Audacious, open-ended endeavors tend to yield big, unexpected rewards. The engineering of supertalls is undoubtedly going to give rise to new materials, new seismic protections, and new aerodynamic shapes that will transform our lives down here on the ground. Maybe the financial world is doing us all a favor by throwing so much private money at these otherwise insane projects. In the same way, let’s throw public money at understanding our own brains. We’d be crazy not to.

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

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YOU VOTED The Human Genome Project beat out Wi-Fi and the International Space Station as the best innovation of the past 25 years. See the bracket at popularscience.com.

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China Rises Peter W. Singer’s article on Chinese military growth [“Inside China’s Secret Arsenal,” January 2013] draws a comparison to Germany out-inventing the British during World War II. Yet Singer gives no real evidence that China is likely to out-invent the U.S. That is exactly the dimension along which the Chinese system is not designed to succeed. Their low respect for intellectual property rights consistently undermines the profit motive, which is what drives meaningful leaps in R&D—whether among the Krupps of Germany or the Northrop Grummans of the U.S. Erik Richardson Milwaukee FROM POPUL A R S C I E NC E .COM

Tom Foster investigated the football-helmet industry in January’s “The Helmet Wars.” Online readers had their own ideas about the role of helmets in sports. Instead of a better helmet, amend the rules. In rugby, soft helmets are optional and not worn by many players. Head injuries are not a major problem. African Rover This article could apply to cycling helmets. In very oblique

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impacts, helmets can convert a minor injury into a brain injury. In areas that mandate helmet use for cyclists, an ethical issue arises. We should be reluctant to exchange the risk of a laceration or fractured skull for the risk of a brain injury. AveryB BABY GENIUS Joe Reed of Grand Rapids, Mich., sent us this photo of his 23-month-old son Oliver with the November 2012 issue of POPULAR SCIENCE. “He’s not reading on his own yet, but he stared at the magazine for a very long time and paged through it like a pro. The look on his face reminded me of an old man intently reading a newspaper.”

We Apologize . . . The coronal mass ejection on page 7 of the January issue had a length of 200,000 miles, not 200,000 feet. The RQ-4 Global Hawk on page 46 belongs to the U.S. Air Force, not the Army. On page 12, we mischaracterized the price difference between the Chevrolet Volt and the Ford C-Max Energi. After tax credits, the Volt is only $1,650 more than the Energi.

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Bigger, Better Blades s T o R Y B Y Taylor Kubota

COURTESY SIEMENS

Last fall in Østerild, Denmark, the German company Siemens built the world’s largest wind turbine. Each of its three rotor blades measures 246 feet—nearly the wingspan of an Airbus A380. While most turbine manufacturers make blades in two separate pieces, from molds, Siemens casts them in one piece. Because the process eliminates the need for glue, the balsa-based blades are up to 20 percent lighter than traditional ones. The reduced weight helped make it possible to build longer blades, which capture more wind and therefore generate more power. The turbine produces up to six megawatts of electricity, enough to service 6,000 households, and Siemens will install 300 in the U.K. beginning this year.

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MARCH 2013

M E GA P I X E L S

MARCH 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

IF YOU ASK ME, YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO MANAGE YOUR INSURANCE ON THE GO. That’s why we let you quote and buy your policy, right from your phone. You can even call for roadside assistance or ﬁle a claim if you need to. Always being there for you. Now that’s Progressive.

Mazda reinvents diesel page 14

PLUS: Affordable personal robots powered by your iPhone page 16

EDITED B Y Corinne Iozzio wHAT sNEw@PoPscI.coM

Lilliputian Systems Nectar DIMENSIONS 4.6 by 3 by 0.9 inches SAFETY TSAapproved PRICE $299 ($10 per extra cartridge) AVAILABLE May

Pocket Power

A portable fuel-cell charger with weeks’ worth of juice

ellphone batteries once lasted a week on a charge. Today, powerhungry smartphones require daily plug-ins—sometimes more—which makes carrying adapters and hunting for outlets a part of everyday life. Engineers at Lilliputian Systems, a Massachusetts start-up, have developed the Nectar fuel cell, a portable charger that generates enough juice to power a USB-enabled phone once a day for two weeks. Unlike other portable power sources, which store energy in batteries, the Nectar runs on butane. When a user plugs his phone into the Nectar’s USB port, a replaceable butane cartridge releases fuel into the cell. As fuel passes over a ceramic membrane, oxygen ions pass through the surface, which generates a current. The process can run as hot as 1,830°F, so the engineers built a network of insulating silicon-nitride tubes to keep the Nectar’s exterior cool. Once the butane cartridge is empty, users can recycle it. After Lilliputian launches the Nectar in May, the company plans to focus on broader fuel-cell applications, such as building cells into laptops and other devices—pushing AC adapters ever closer to obsolescence.

sToRY BY Katherine Bagley

P H o To GRAPH BY Brian Klutch

MARCH 2013

POPU L AR S C I E N C E

WHAT ’ S NEW

Trigonometry will never be the same: The latest TI-84 graphing calculator comes with a color display. At 240 by 320 pixels, the backlit screen has a resolution that’s higher than previous models’. Plus, a user can transfer images from a computer and graph onto them. Texas Instruments TI-84 Plus Silver Edition C $150 (available spring) 5

The HTL9100 is the first sound bar that can transform into a surround-sound system. A user detaches the bar’s wireless 12-watt speakers—which last 10 hours— and places them anywhere in the room. Sensors automatically detect their state and adjust the audio balance. Philips Fidelio HTL9100 $800 (available spring)

A dozen great ideas in gear E D I T E D B Y Amber Williams

The Kickr turns any bicycle into a stationary trainer by replacing the back tire. When a rider using its accompanying app meets a “hill,” more power surges through magnets in the Bluetooth-connected device, creating a stronger pull on its flywheel and increasing resistance. Wahoo Fitness Kickr Power Trainer $999 3

The EnChroma Cx.UV450 are the first sunglasses that don’t block color. The lenses have a filter that lets in a range of light wavelengths typically muted by UV shades, so wearers see enhanced blues and greens. EnChroma Cx.UV450 $450

The Arduino Esplora is the controller for DIYers who want to game with custom functions. The 6.5-inch preassembled board includes temperature and light sensors, an accelerometer, a joystick, and more, plus 32 kilobytes of memory. To begin programming, a user connects it to a computer via micro-USB. Arduino Esplora $65

POPULAR SCIENCE

MARCH 2013

BlueBuds X are the smallest Bluetooth earbuds in the world. Thanks to improvements in battery technology, they’re more compact, but still last up to eight hours. iPhone users can track how much playtime remains on their phones. JayBird BlueBuds X $170

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY TEXAS INSTRUMENTS; COURTESY PHILIPS; COURTESY CHARGECARD; COURTESY EPSILON LABS; COURTESY QUIRKY; BRIAN KLUTCH; COURTESY HASBRO; C O U R T E S Y G E ; B R I A N K L U T C H ; C O U R T E S Y E N C H R O M A ; B R I A N K L U T C H ; C O U R T E S Y WA H O O F I T N E S S

The Silence Android app keeps phones quiet during meetings. A user outlines his schedule—or imports it from another calendar—and indicates whether the phone should be in ring, vibrate, or silent mode. The app changes the settings accordingly. Epsilon Labs Silence Free

At one tenth of an inch thick and the size of a credit card, the ChargeCard is the slimmest USB charger available. Engineers rearranged the circuitry to lie flat. A rubber port folds out and plugs into any USB device, and a micro-USB or iPhone port connects to a phone. ChargeCard $25

The Rough Cut 2x4 is the first Nerf gun that can fire two darts at once up to 75 feet. Its two ammo banks have separate pistons, so one pull of the trigger launches both darts at the same time. Hasbro Nerf N-Strike Elite Rough Cut 2x4 Blaster $20

Separating eggs is easier with the Pluck. A cook squeezes the silicone bulb to create a vacuum; upon release, it sucks up a yolk. Unlike a gravity strainer, the Pluck can hold several yolks at once. It breaks them less often, too. Quirky Pluck $13

The HE Topload Washer prevents users from adding too much detergent. During a quick first spin, sensors detect the size and absorption of any load up to 22 pounds. After internal calculations, the washer automatically dispenses the perfect amount of soap. GE High Efficiency Topload Washer $1,399

A D D I T I o NA L R E P o R T I NG B Y Corinne Iozzio

Clearing the yard is faster with the Ryobi Backpack Blower. Unlike other blowers, which have air tubes that run up the back and over the engine, this one has tubes that stay below the engine, and go around the waist. Because it doesn’t have to push air upward, the 42-cc motor maintains a higher force. Ryobi 2 Cycle Backpack Blower $199

M A RCH 2013

POPU L AR S C I E N C E

ANNUAL U.S. FUEL CONSUMPTION Gasoline 137 billion gallons

WHAT ’ S NEW

Diesel 35 billion gallons

FI V E FEAT URES

Under Pressure How Mazda reinvented the diesel engine

Diesel-engine designers have long grappled with a dilemma: Reducing emissions meant either cutting eﬃciency or adding expensive equipment. With the Skyactiv-D, Mazda engineers decreased pollution, boosted mileage, and eliminated the cost of exhaust after-treatments by building the world’s lowest-compression diesel

2014 Mazda6 ENGINES 2.5-liter Skyactiv-G gasoline engine (available now) or 2.2-liter Skyactiv-D diesel (available late 2013) BASE PRICE $20,880

sToRY B Y Lawrence Ulrich

engine. They then added two turbochargers and a capacitor-based regenerative braking system. When it arrives in U.S. showrooms late this year, the Skyactiv-D–equipped Mazda6 should deliver approximately 56 highway mpg while meeting strict emission standards, proving that diesel engines have many miles left in them.

LIGHTWEIGHT COMPONENTS The Skyactiv-D’s engine overhaul has a side beneﬁt: Engineers were able to build the engine with lighter, lower-friction components, including 25-percent lighter pistons and an aluminum cylinder block that trims 55 pounds.

SMART TURBOCHARGER A two-stage turbocharging system contains a small turbine that boosts low-end torque, as well as a larger turbocharger that increases highend horsepower. An electronic controller runs the turbochargers, tuning performance to conditions.

LOW COMPRESSION RATIO

NO EXHAUST TREATMENTS

ULTRA-CAPACITOR BOOST

Diesel engines ignite fuel by combining it with air and compressing it to extremely high pressure. Yet compared to that of gasoline, the high pressure and temperature of diesel combustion produce more smogforming nitrogen oxides and sooty particulate matter. To meet pollution standards, modern clean diesels delay combustion until the piston begins its descent—but that reduces power and eﬃciency. Mazda’s solution: new fuel injectors and exhaust valves that allowed engineers to lower the compression ratio from 16.3:1 to 14.0:1.

Before exhaust even enters the tailpipe, the engine’s low compression ratio cuts emissions of nitrogen oxides and other pollutants enough to meet present (and future) standards both in Europe and the U.S. As a result, the Mazda6 does away with expensive urea tanks (which drivers have to reﬁll every 10,000 miles or so) that many diesels use to neutralize emissions.

i-ELOOP, one of the industry’s ﬁrst regenerative braking systems to store energy in a capacitor rather than a battery, further improves fuel eﬃciency. When the driver decelerates, an alternator generates up to 25 volts, charging the capacitor in seconds. Stored energy can supply all electric needs—headlights, climate control, audio system— for one minute. Capacitors have been used to boost power on F1 cars; eventually, they could be used to do the same in passenger electric cars.

POPULAR SCIENCE

MARCH 2013

COURTESY MAZDA

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656 FEET The distance traveled by the first flying robot, a wooden bird most likely propelled by steam, built by philosopher and engineer Archytas of Tarentum circa 400 B.C.

WHAT ’ S NEW TECH T REND

1 Double Robotics Double

A new generation of smartphonebased robot companions

2 Romotive Romo

Romo, a robotic toy pet, interacts with its playmates autonomously. Engineers developed computer-vision software that picks out people and shapes, which the robot can track, follow, or avoid. Facialdetection software allows Romo to see people, take pictures of them, recoil if they get too close, or cry if they leave it alone for too long. $150

s T o R Y B Y Miriam Kramer

THE TREND The average smartphone today has as much processing power as a 1970s supercomputer—enough (as luck would have it) to act as the hub of a streaming homeaudio network, serve as a mobile medical lab, or even run a robot. So now, instead of building robots from scratch, companies can construct models around smartphones.

3 Tovbot Shimi

The Shimi speaker dock is a personal DJ and dance partner. Speech recognition in Shimi’s app lets the robot respond to requests for speciﬁc artists or genres—even cue up tunes that match the user’s mood. The app also registers the tempo of the music, so it can send commands to Shimi to tap its free foot and bob its head to the beat. $199 (available summer)

THE BENEFIT In the past, developing the central processing computer and software to get a robot to do even a simple task cost tens of thousands of dollars. By outsourcing brainpower, companies can cut the ﬁnal price to hundreds. And since apps, not specialty code, determine how a robot acts, software developers can easily update a robot with new capabilities and behaviors. Eventually, companies may even open up their software so users can create custom robotic personalities.

OFFICE WHIZ The robot Double can give any telecommuter a physical presence in meetings.

POPULAR SCIENCE

MARCH 2013

3 2

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY DOUBLE; EVERETT COLLECTION; COURTESY TOVBOT; COURTESY ROMOTIVE

iPhone for Brains

Double is a wheeled robot avatar that stands up to ﬁve feet tall. It holds an iPad where its head should be, while a human driver—whether across the oﬃce or across the country—uses a custom video-chat app to see what the iPad sees and steer the robot. Double has a gyroscope-balanced stand, which allows it to roll at speeds up to 1.5 mph without tipping over. $2,499

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61% of golfers admit to bending the rules on occasion

12% bend the rules every time they play 27% claim they never do

WHAT ’ S NEW THE SET UP

Gaming the Golf Course

How science can lower handicaps sT o R Y B Y David Cassilo P Ho T o GR A PH B Y Brian Klutch 1

PUTTER The Ghost Spider S stops bad swings. TaylorMade designers wrapped the putter’s three-ounce aluminum center with eight ounces of steel. The extra weight adds momentum to the swing and makes it harder for a golfer to twist the club. TaylorMade Ghost Spider S $180

DRIVER Off-kilter swings lead to hooked or sliced drives, so Nike designers built the VRS Covert driver to ensure straight shots. They dug a cavity out of the back of the clubhead and moved the lost weight—about 0.4 ounce—toward the face. That heft makes the clubhead less likely to wobble and twist the ball at launch. In tests, the Covert added up to 15 yards. Nike VRS Covert Tour $400

BAG A set of several-hundred-dollar clubs deserves some protection, which the Chamber bag provides. To prevent clubheads from moving and nicking one another, designers inserted molded plastic fingers at the bottom of the bag and a slotted silicone membrane at its top. OGIO Chamber bag $300

IRONS Callaway’s new irons work around a simple idea: increase speed, increase yardage. A deep groove behind the clubface allows it to flex on impact and fling the ball like a catapult. Shots off the six iron [shown], for example, launch four mph faster and fly more than nine yards further. Callaway X Hot Irons $699 (set of eight) 4

TRAINER The Swingbyte 2 can cut down on pricey lessons. Golfers attach the device to the shaft of a club and record video on a Bluetooth-paired smartphone. Accelerometers, gyros, and magnetometers feed data, including swing speed and angle, to the Swingbyte app. The app then displays the data next to the video and offers tips to help the player improve his form. Swingbyte 2 $149

POPULAR SCIENCE

MARCH 2013

+49%

What ’ s neW

The change in weight of recycled materials one year after Cincinnati introduced incentives through a program called Recyclebank

OUTLO OK

Computer Guidance How wearable head-up displays could help build a better you

n 1961, Claude Shannon and Edward Thorp built the world’s first wearable computer. The cigarette-pack-size device tracked the speed of a roulette wheel and sent tones via radio to a gambler’s earpiece to help predict where the ball would land. The goal of wearable computers hasn’t changed much since. Like Shannon and Thorp’s system, Google Glass and other head-up displays (HUDs)—from companies including Vuzix and Epson—are intended to heighten a person’s awareness. But the latest discreet HUDs can do much more than augment our reality— they could also help us better ourselves. One of the newest methods for spurring self-improvement is to turn every task into a game. So-called gamification apps keep score in real-life situations to promote certain behaviors—whether it’s taking out the trash, going for a run, or complimenting someone. Users compete against other players and themselves— and it works. According to internal research, a person who uses the Fitbit health-and-fitness tracker, for instance, takes 43 percent more steps on average than a nonuser and loses an average of 13 pounds. Yet the systems have problems. Users must be actively involved in the scoring process from start to finish—opt in, sometimes wear a device, and even manually input data into a smartphone app. Those tasks interrupt—even intrude upon—everyday life, turning the entire experience into a painstaking chore. What’s more, an app doesn’t know when you’re lying.

P O PU La R sCIe nC e

M arch 2013

s to r y by Bryan Gardiner

illustration b y Paul Lachine

Gamification has problems; an app doesn’t know when you’re lying. Wearing a computer instead of carrying one could eliminate all those downsides. The Google Glass prototype projects information—photos, e-mails, navigation cues—onto a screen positioned in front of one eye. The system will most likely have its own cellular radio, so it could work independently of a smartphone. Motion sensors, a video camera, and a GPS radio will allow developers to code apps that monitor a person’s behavior in real time. An HUD implementation of the Google Goggles image-recognition software, for example, could keep track of what a person eats, reads, and buys. New apps

could establish an instant feedback loop— perhaps a reward for skipping the morning doughnut in favor of a banana. More-advanced tracking may eventually allow HUDs to predict and prevent bad behavior instead of merely recording it. Google, Apple, and Microsoft have already filed eye-tracking patents, which could be used to monitor what a person is looking at and help the HUD respond with positive and negative cues accordingly. So if the HUD sees a person’s pupils dilate when he’s passing a dive bar on the way to the gym, it could flash a prompt to “keep on walking.”

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The tallest Ferris wheel page 26

PLUS: A legendary research sub gets a makeover page 28

E DITE D BY Susannah F. Locke

HEADLINEs@ P oP sc I.coM

Soft Bots

Why squishiness will let robots and humans work side by side

s T o R Y B Y Adam Hadhazy P HoT o GR A P H B Y Scott M. Lacey

PLAYING NICE iRobot’s AIRarm, attached here to a PackBot base, uses inflatable airbags and cables to gently grasp objects.

ODAY’S industrial robots have superhuman power, precision, and speed to tirelessly paint, weld, and transport massive objects. But they have to be programmed for each specific task (and if one accidentally smacks you in the face, it could kill you). And so, for all their success in factories and warehouses, robots remain conspicuously absent from our homes and everyday lives. To make human- and robot-kind more compatible, researchers have begun to develop machines with soft, deformable parts instead of hard ones. The promise of these squishy bots is twofold: They could operate more safely around other squishy objects—like us, for example.

MARCH 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

1984 A man dies of cardiopulmonary arrest after being pinned by a die-casting machine, becoming the first recorded robot-related fatality in the U.S.

HEADL I NE S THE TR END

V ISUAL DATA

In the past couple of years, robots resembling starﬁsh have clutched an egg and a live mouse. treaded machine used to defuse bombs. PackBot’s standard metal arm weighs 21 pounds and is loaded with motors and sensors. The AIRarm weighs half a pound, so it would use less battery power, and because it has flexibility and fewer moving parts, it should be cheaper and more reliable. It can lift three pounds, giving it a strength-to-weight ratio about nine times that of the standard arm. And when not in use, the AIRarm can deflate and be compactly stowed in a robot’s body, freeing up room for other payloads. So far, the arm has toted bottles and briefcases. With a new round of funding from DARPA, the AIRarm team is designing modular components that zip together to create different arm shapes, and it might add Kevlar-based skin for durability. Although the AIRarm is made to work on a traditional hard-robot platform, other researchers are developing robots that are completely soft. For example, chemist George M. Whitesides’s lab at Harvard has created several squishy silicone robots that use air for propul-

sion. In the past couple of years, robots resembling starfish have clutched an egg and a live mouse; a tentacle bot has held a flower. And a four-legged walker has crawled, sneaked under obstacles, and changed color when dye was pumped into tiny channels in its body. Whitesides and others think that some of the first applications of squishy robots will be in assistive medicine and rehabilitation. “We’re talking about situations where you want to have a robot in contact with a human being, but in soft contact,” says Whitesides. A soft robot could be an extra pair of hands for surgeons, carefully cradling organs. Firm yet forgiving exoskeletons could help the disabled move around in their homes. And pliable machines could aid with search and rescue, where terrain is unpredictable and varied. In many applications, the way to make robots function better is to make them more like us. “If we want to integrate robots more into our everyday lives,” says Trimmer, “they need to be more organic.”

Stronger gravity

Lunar Pull NASA recently created the most detailed maps of the moon’s gravity to date, and the ﬁeld is far from uniform. Measured by spacecraft of the GRAIL mission, the diﬀerences here indicate variations in the crust’s thickness and density. 24

POPULAR SCIENCE

MARCH 2013

Weaker gravity

F R O M T O P : C O U R T E S Y D A R PA / W H I T E S I D E S L A B ; C O U R T E S Y N A S A

More important, their malleability makes them versatile enough to interact with a variety of objects (credit cards, dog food, coffee cups) without becoming astronomically expensive. Barry Trimmer, of Tufts University, is editor-in-chief of the field’s first dedicated journal, Soft Robotics, which launched in November. “You want precision in the factory, but in the real world, a lack of precision actually helps,” he says. “Soft materials let you automatically deal with your environment.” Some of the simplest tasks remain tough for robots to do. “Grasping is still one of the greater challenges in robotics,” says Carmel Majidi, a soft-machines researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. Generating the perfect shape and pressure to squeeze something delicate without crushing it usually requires a lot of intelligence and sensory feedback. But soft robots can mold themselves to an object’s shape and apply pressure across a greater surface area, eliminating troublesome high-pressure spots. Massachusetts company iRobot, which makes the vacuuming Roomba, has built several soft robots that may someday pick up all sorts of objects they haven’t encountered before. For example, the Advanced Inflatable Robot arm (AIRarm) consists of a fabric tube with a soft, two-pronged pincer at the end. Inside are six inflatable bags that act like bones, along with musclelike cables that move them. To grab something, the AIRarm adjusts the bags’ positions to mold its pincer around the object. For demonstration, the AIRarm currently attaches to iRobot’s PackBot, a

NIGHTCRAWLER Air-powered silicone robots are especially ﬂexible and can change colors (and even glow) when injected with various solutions.

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HEIGHT New York Wheel 625 feet Typical county fair wheel 100 feet

HEADL I NE S SUPER L ATI V E OF THE MONTH

PASSENGER COMFORT Each enclosed 40-person pod consists of two capsules, one nestled inside the other—an insulating design that cuts heating and cooling costs.

hen it’s finished, the New York Wheel will stand 625 feet above Staten Island, making it the tallest observation wheel in the world. It will depart from the design of other supertall observation wheels in several key ways. The 541-foot Singapore Flyer and the 443-foot London Eye, for example, are held in place by stability cables that run from their spindles to the earth. But to fit the New York Wheel on its narrow site,

6.8 B IG FAT S TAT

sToRY B Y Colleen Park

engineers will give it vertically oriented 320-foot-long legs anchored to the ground. For weatherproofing, engineers moved motion-control hardware from outside to inside the passenger capsules. (This will also make repairs much easier.) Construction of the $250-million project begins on-site next year. If all goes well, in 2016, passengers onboard will experience a 38-minute ride with views of the Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan (and Staten Island, too).

M I L L ION Y E A R S The time it takes for every DNA bond to break, even in ideal preservation conditions. The youngest dinosaur fossils are 65 million years old. So much for Jurassic Park.

LO S T & F OUN D

LOST: Rarest Whale

FOUND: Talking Whale

Scientists had never seen a spadetoothed whale; they only knew it existed because of skull fragments. Then, in 2010, a New Zealand local came upon a pair of dead whales on a beach, which rangers classified as Gray’s beaked whales. But DNA tests by biologists at the University of Auckland later showed that both were the elusive spade-toothed species. When a group went last year to exhume the skeletons from the beach, the head of one was already gone.

A male beluga at a research facility was making calls that sounded like a distant human conversation. So staff at the National Marine Mammal Foundation in San Diego recorded him. They found that the sound waves were several octaves lower than a normal beluga’s and matched the range of human speech. In October, they published their study, the first analysis of a beluga mimicking the human voice.

POPULAR SCIENCE

MARCH 2013

—AMBER WILLIAMS

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HEADL I NE S ANNOTATED M ACHINE

Alvin Redux

The sub Alvin stays buoyant with the help of syntactic foam, now rated to go four miles underwater. The foam is composed of billions of glass air bubbles the size of powdered sugar, encased in resin.

A life-support system includes a scrubber that removes carbon dioxide from the air and tanks of extra oxygen.

a 49-year-old research sub gets a makeover

s t o r y b y Brooke Borel i l l ust r at i o n b y Kevin hand

To record data from each mission, Alvin’s mother ship, Atlantis, has been upgraded from CDs and DVDs to a hard drive. The ship, which dates from 1997, has a customized hangar and crane to transport the sub.

POPULAR SCIENCE

March 2013

The sub is powered by inexpensive 5,000-pound leadacid batteries—the same type used since its first dive. But it could go on longer missions after new lithium-ion models pass safety tests to prove that they won’t catch fire.

inset: courtesy Mark spear © Woods Hole oceanograpHic institution

he ocean covers nearly three quarters of our planet, yet humans have probed a mere 5 percent of it. To better explore its greatest depths, scientists will soon board the revamped Alvin, the workhorse of human-operated deep-submergence vehicles. Owned by the U.S. Navy and operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, the sub has logged 4,664 dives since 1964. It has explored the Titanic wreck 12 times, retrieved a lost live H-bomb, and survived a swordfish attack. Next month, engineers will begin sea trials to scrutinize its seven-year-long $40-million update (still cheaper than the $50-million-plus it would have cost to build a sub from scratch). New features include a larger cockpit with more windows, widerreaching arms, and HD cameras. Alvin’s team also started upgrading the vehicle to withstand greater pressures. After a second overhaul, the submersible will be able to dive 30 percent deeper, to four miles—far enough to explore 98 percent of the seafloor.

A swordfish attacked Alvin during a 1967 dive, got stuck on the sub, and was then dragged to the surface, cooked, and eaten

An 18 percent larger, seven-footdiameter personnel sphere holds a pilot and two scientists (one more scientist than any other research sub). To ensure that the sphere can withstand the 10,000 pounds per square inch of pressure at four miles deep, builders modeled the stress it would experience underwater at half a million different locations across its surface.

A new hard drive can hold the 1 to 1.5 terabytes of data scientists expect to collect on each dive—an improvement over the VHS tapes and laptops previously used.

Alvin received three twomegapixel HD video recorders and a 14-megapixel still camera. All of them use LEDs to illuminate deep seascapes and their inhabitants.

New horizontal hinged sections extend Alvin’s manipulator arms, increasing their reach by 90 percent, to 114 square feet.

Arm controller

Three forward-facing seveninch-diameter windows have been reoriented to give the scientists views that overlap with the pilot’s. Two five-inchers now provide port and starboard visibility.

Engineers made the original Alvin purely for observation and tacked on sampling equipment as an afterthought. Now a modified frame, including a stronger front platform, doubles the carrying capacity for tools and samples to 400 pounds.

Specialized experimental tools include drills for sampling rock, chemical sensors to analyze deep-sea vents, and a unique jellyfish-sucking “slurp” gun to collect these specimens.

March 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

THREE THINGS with more bacteria than a toilet: cellphone, kitchen sponge, sink faucet

HEADL I NE S BLUEPR INT

No Ordinary John Engineers invent a healthier toilet

“

One-and-a-half million children die each year from diseases related to poor sanitation. We’re building a disinfecting toilet that doesn’t need running water or massive treatment plants and is cheap and odor-free. It’s a squat toilet, which is what many people around the world prefer. The waste falls onto a sloped conveyor belt. Solids stick, and liquids run off into a bed of sand, which filters everything 10 micrometers or larger, including most parasites and their eggs. Then the liquid falls into a shallow trough, where an ultraviolet lamp—running on five watts from a solar panel on the roof— destroys any other pathogens in minutes. The sand filter’s top layer will get clogged, so a corkscrew mechanism skims it off to join the solids, which another belt squeezes to remove moisture so they can be burned efficiently. The user would light the waste in a smolder unit every night, which would leave just a tiny bit of ash and sterile sand. To test our components, we’ve decided to use a nonhazardous feces surrogate—same calorific content, same moisture content, looks like it, feels like it, but made out of ingredients like miso paste and peanut butter. When the full prototype is built by December, we’ll switch to the real stuff.” —Jason Gerhard, an engineer at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, is working on the disinfecting-toilet project with Yu-Ling Cheng, Mark Kortschot, and José Torero. As told to Flora Lichtman.

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“Every film trains its spectator.” —David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film

HEADL I NE S F=M A

Zero Eﬀect A Hollywood thriller meets the science of perception

RITICS HAVE applauded the realism of the film Zero Dark Thirty, an Oscar favorite that claims to re-create the hunt for Osama bin Laden. But some have protested an early scene in which intelligence officers torture a man, then use the threat of further torture to persuade him to reveal a crucial bit of evidence. The New York Times called the controversy “a national Rorschach test on the divisive subject of torture.” In 2009, two Harvard psychologists, Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner, published the results of a more scientific test. The researchers seemed to cause a subject pain (by dipping her hand in ice water), then asked volunteers if she was answering a series of questions truthfully. In fact, the “subject” was acting, and the questions and answers were scripted. What Gray and Wegner really wanted to know was whether the volunteers (the “audience,” so to speak) would judge guilt differently according to their distance from the person being tortured. They found that, on balance, people listening in the room next door thought the actor was guilty, but those listening to a recording of the interrogation assumed she was innocent. I asked Gray, now at the University of North Carolina, what accounted for the reactions of the people who were closer. “It’s just cognitive dissonance,” he said. When you’re up close, “you feel really 32

POPULAR SCIENCE

MARCH 2013

s To R Y BY Luke Mitchell

ILLUsTRATIoN B Y Ryan Snook

so we think there must be a reason for it. In movies the effect may be more pronounced: The giant screen brings us even “closer” to an interrogation. We condone the torture because the cinematic intimacy causes us, the audience, to feel complicit. This proximity bias—a variation of confirmation bias we might call the Zero Effect—is relevant for scientists engaged in all kinds of observational research. It is also a crucial consideration for those of us watching interrogators at work, onscreen or in life.

People in the next room thought the subject was guilty, but people listening to an audio recording assumed she was innocent. terrible about this person’s suffering, and you think there must be a reason for it.” When you listen to the tape, however, you’re more likely to engage in “moral typecasting,” linking suffering to innocence. “Put a little physical distance in there and you get a complete reversal of the effects.” Gray’s research suggests that torture’s very repugnancy is what causes some of us to defend its use—we feel terrible about it,

Luke Mitchell (luke.mitchell@popsci.com) covers constraint and creativity each issue.

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FUTURE

N SCIEN

SOMATOSENSORY CORTEX

MOTOR CORTEX

PARIETAL LOBE

FRONTAL LOBE

OCCIPITAL LOBE

TEMPORAL LOBE

CEREBELLUM

POPULAR SCIENCE

MARCH 2013

RE W I RI NG

TH E BRAIN

STORY BY

Virginia Hughes Medi-Mation

ILLUSTRATIONS BY

How neuroscience will fight five age-old afflictions

SEIZURES

A device delivers targeted drugs to calm overactive neurons

For years, large clinical trials have treated people with epilepsy using so-called deepbrain stimulation: surgically implanted electrodes that can detect a seizure and stop it with an electrical jolt. The technology leads to a 69 percent reduction in seizures after five years, according to the latest results. Tracy Cui, a biomedical engineer at the University of Pittsburgh, hopes to improve

upon that statistic. Her group has designed an electrode that would deliver both an electrical pulse and antiseizure medication. “We know where we want to apply the drug,” Cui says, “so you would not need a lot of it.” To build the device, Cui’s team immersed a metal electrode in a solution containing two key ingredients: a molecule called a monomer and the drug CNQX. Zapping the solution with electricity causes the monomers to link together and form a long chain called a polymer. Because the polymer is positively charged, it attracts the negatively charged CNQX, leaving the engineers with

their target product: an electrode coated in a film that’s infused with the drug. The researchers then placed the electrodes in a petri dish with rat neurons. Another zap of electricity disrupted the electrostatic attraction in the film, causing the polymer to release its pharmacological payload—and nearby cells to quiet their erratic firing patterns. Cui says her team has successfully repeated the experiment in living rats. Next, she’d like to test the electrodes in epileptic rats and then begin the long process of regulatory approval for human use. The body’s blood-brain barrier protects the organ from everything but the smallest molecules, rendering most drugs ineffective. As a result, this drug-delivery mechanism could treat other brain disorders, Cui says. The electrodes can be loaded with any kind of small drug—like dopamine or painkillers— making it useful for treating Parkinson’s disease, chronic pain, or even drug addiction.

Electrode array Polymer

1 A surgeon identifies where in the brain seizures occur using electrodes placed on the scalp, then inserts an electrode array directly into that region. 2 A seizure starts when neurons become overly excited, causing a prominent electrical signature. The array detects this signature and emits its own electrical pulse, which disrupts the neurons. 3 The pulse also puts a negative current on a polymer enveloping the electrodes on the array, causing its charge to change from positive to neutral. Negatively charged antiseizure-drug molecules drop away from the electrodes, further calming the nearby neurons.

Antiseizure-drug molecules

Neuron

RE W IRI NG THE BR A IN

DEMENTIA

Electrode arrays stimulate mental processing

Dementia is one of the most well-known and frustrating brain afflictions. It damages many of the fundamental cognitive functions that make us human: working memory, decision-making, language, and logical reasoning. Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s diseases all lead to dementia, and it’s also sometimes associated with multiple sclerosis, AIDS, and the normal process of aging. Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineer at the University of Southern California, hopes to help people stave off the symptoms of dementia with a device implanted in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, a region crucial for sophisticated cognition. He and colleagues at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center tested the device in a study involving five monkeys and a memory game. First the team implanted an electrode array so that it could record from layers 2/3 and 5 of the prefrontal cortex and stimulate layer 5. The neural signals that jet back and forth between these areas relate to attention and decision-making.

The team then trained the monkeys to play a computer game in which they saw a cartoon picture—such as a truck, lion, or paint palette—and had to select the same image from a panel of pictures 90 seconds later. The scientists initially analyzed the electrical signals sent between the two cortical layers when the monkeys made a correct match. In later experiments, the team caused the array to emit the same signal just before the monkey made its decision. The animals’ accuracy improved by about 10 percent. That effect may be even more profound in an impaired brain. When the monkeys played the same game after receiving a hit of cocaine, their performance dropped by about 20 percent. But electrical stimulation restored their accuracy to normal levels. Dementia involves far more complicated circuitry than these two layers of the brain. But once scientists better understand exactly how dementia works, it may be possible to combine several implants to each target a specific region.

Microprocessor

Layer 2/3

Electrode array Gray matter

Layer 5 White matter

1 A surgeon implants an electrode array into the prefrontal cortex so that it touches neurons in layer 2/3 and layer 5.

2 The electrodes record brain activity and send it to a microprocessor that sits under the skin at the top of the head.

3 When the microprocessor detects a specific pattern, such as the neural signature of the person trying to recall a memory, it commands the array to send electric pulses into the surrounding area, stimulating mental processing.

1 An eye diseased with retinitis pigmentosa has damaged photoreceptors, or rods and cones. Doctors inject the eye with a nonharmful virus containing the gene channelrhodopsin-2, or ChR2.

Optic nerve

BLINDNESS

Gene therapy converts cells into photoreceptors, restoring eyesight

Millions of people lose their eyesight when disease damages the photoreceptor cells in their retinas. These cells, called rods and cones, play a pivotal role in vision: They con-

2 The virus migrates into the retina at the back of the eye and inserts the gene into ganglion cells, which relay signals from the rods and cones to the optic nerve. The ganglion cells begin expressing the ChR2 protein in their membranes.

Damaged rods and cones

Retina

Virus Channelrhodopsin-2 Ganglion cell

3 Incoming light activates the ChR2 protein in ganglion cells, stimulating them to fire an electrical impulse. That message travels through the optic nerve to the brain’s visual cortex, which interprets it as a rough image.

vert incoming light into electrical impulses that the brain interprets as an image. In recent years, a handful of companies have developed electrode-array implants that bypass the damaged cells. A microprocessor translates information from a video camera into electric pulses that stimulate the retina; as a result, blind subjects in clinical trials have been able to distinguish objects and even read very large type. But the implanted arrays have one big drawback: They stimulate only a small number of retinal cells— about 60 out of 100,000—which ultimately limits a person’s visual resolution.

A gene therapy being developed by Michigan-based RetroSense could replace thousands of damaged retinal cells. The company’s technology targets the layer of the retina containing ganglion cells. Normally, ganglion cells transmit the electric signal from the rods and cones to the brain. But RetroSense inserts a gene that makes the ganglion cells sensitive to light; they take over the job of the photoreceptors. So far, scientists have successfully tested the technology on rodents and monkeys. In rat studies, the gene therapy allowed the animals to see well enough to detect the

edge of a platform as they neared it. The company plans to launch the first clinical trial of the technology next year, with nine subjects blinded by a disease called retinitis pigmentosa. Unlike the surgeries to implant electrode arrays, the procedure to inject gene therapy will take just minutes and requires only local anesthesia. “The visual signal that comes from the ganglion cells may not be encoded in exactly the fashion that they’re used to,” says Peter Francis, chief medical officer of RetroSense. “But what is likely to happen is that their brain is going to adapt.”

MARCH 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

RE WI RI NG THE BRA IN

1 Surgeons implant electrode arrays in two areas of the brain: the motor cortex and the somatosensory cortex.

Microprocessor Electrode array

Somatosensory cortex Motor cortex

PARALYSIS

A brain-machine interface controls limbs while sensing what they touch

POPULAR SCIENCE

MARCH 2013

Tactile feedback

4 When the foot touches the ground, pressure sensors on the exoskeleton’s surface generate a tactile signal. That signal is sent back to the electrode array in the patient’s sensory cortex. With this feedback loop, the patient can both “feel” the ground and kick the ball.

Brain stimulation

Brain signal

Motor command

3 The microprocessor wirelessly transmits these commands to a lowerbody exoskeleton, which has its own processor. The leg moves toward the ball.

Exoskeleton

Pressure sensors

E X O S K E L E T O N I L L U S T R AT I O N : K R I S H O L L A N D

Last year, clinical trials involving brain implants gave great hope to people with severe spinal cord injuries. Two paralyzed subjects imagined picking up a cup of coffee. Electrode arrays decoded those neural instructions in real time and sent them to a robotic arm, which brought the coffee to their lips. But to move limbs with any real precision, the brain also requires tactile feedback. Miguel Nicolelis, a biomedical engineer at Duke University, has now demonstrated that brain-machine interfaces can simultaneously control motion and relay a sense of touch—at least in virtual reality. For the experiment, Nicolelis’s team inserted electrodes in two brain areas in monkeys: the motor cortex, which controls movement, and the nearby somatosensory cortex, which interprets touch signals from the outside world. Then the monkeys played a computer game in which they controlled a virtual arm—first by using a joystick and eventually by simply imagining the movement. The arm could touch three identical-looking gray circles. But each circle had a different virtual “texture” that sent a distinct electrical pattern to the monkeys’ somatosensory cortex. The monkeys learned to select the texture that produced a treat, proving that the implant was both sending and receiving neural messages. This year, a study in Brazil will test the ability of 10 to 20 patients with spinal cord injuries to control an exoskeleton using the implant. Nicolelis, an ardent fan of Brazilian soccer, has set a strict timetable for his team: A nonprofit consortium he created, the Walk Again Project, plans to outfit a paraplegic man with a robotic exoskeleton and take him to the 2014 World Cup in São Paulo, where he will deliver the opening kick.

2 As a subject thinks about kicking the ball, his brain sends neural commands from the motor cortex. These are picked up by the array and transmitted to a microprocessor mounted on the patient’s skull.

1 A surgeon makes an incision behind the patientâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ear and inserts new auditory cells, derived from stem cells, into the spiral ganglion at the base of the cochlea.

Spiral ganglion

Cochlea

New auditory cells

Auditory nerve

2 These cells grow, forming projections that reinforce a damaged auditory nerve. They ultimately connect with cells in the brain stem.

DEAFNESS

Stem cells repair a damaged auditory nerve, improving hearing

Over the past 25 years, more than 30,000 people with hearing loss have received an electronic implant that replaces the cochlea, the snail-shaped organ in the inner ear whose cells transform sound waves into electrical signals. The device acts as a microphone, picking up sounds from the environment and transmitting them to the auditory nerve, which carries them on to the brain. But a cochlear implant wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t help the 10 percent of people whose profound hearing loss is caused by damage to the auditory

nerve. Fortunately for this group, a team of British scientists has found a way to restore that nerve using stem cells. The researchers exposed human embryonic stem cells to growth factors, substances that cause them to differentiate into the precursors of auditory neurons. Then they injected some 50,000 of these cells into the cochleas of gerbils whose auditory nerves had been damaged. (Gerbils are often used as models of deafness because their range of hearing is similar to that of people.) Three months

after the transplant, about one third of the original number of auditory neurons had been restored; some appeared to form projections that connected to the brain stem. The animalsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; hearing improved, on average, by 46 percent. It will be years before the technique is tested in humans. Once it is, researchers say, it has the potential to help not only those with nerve damage but also people with more widespread impairment whose auditory nerve must be repaired in order to receive a cochlear implant.

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MENTAL COMBAT witH a deca de of wa r win d i ng d own, p ost-tr aUmati c str es s d i sor de r i s a n inc r e a s i ng lY U r g e nt pr ob le m. tH e U. s . a r m Y H a s l aUncH e d a n am b iti oUs ef fo r t to fi gHt it. bU t wi l l it wo r K?

stor Y bY M AT THIEU AIKINS illUstr ations bY CHRIS KOEHLER

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THE ROAR OF THE CHOPPER’S ENGINES made it hard to hear. First Sgt. James Kelley signaled with his hands and yelled: “Five minutes!” In the murky light of the Chinook’s cargo bay, rows of helmeted fgures sat surrounded by rifles and camouflage rucksacks. It was four in the morning. Bulldog Company from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, along with dozens of Afghan National Army soldiers, forward air controllers, military intelligence officers, and bomb-dog handlers, were air-assaulting into enemy territory. Under the light of the full moon, rows of mist-shrouded grapevines and mud compounds rushed below. The mission, Operation Lion Strike, was to land in a Taliban-controlled area in one of the most violent parts of Kandahar Province, southern Afghanistan. The soldiers would then push northward, into a cluster of villages Army command suspected of harboring insurgents and weapons caches. By landing before dawn, the soldiers hoped to surprise the insurgents, preventing them from setting up ambushes or laying improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. For added insurance, they had ordered F-15 jets to drop 500-pound guided bombs above

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the landing zone; the pressure wave would help trigger any IEDs the insurgents might have already hidden. I had embedded with Bulldog Company to understand frsthand the conditions that forward-deployed infantry routinely experience during the course of combat—conditions that are causing a mental-health crisis in the military. Suicides among service members have outpaced combat deaths. In other words, the young men around me in the Chinook were more likely to die by their own hand than by the Taliban’s. For an uninitiated civilian, an assault into Taliban-held territory is an overwhelming experience. My heartbeat and adrenaline spiked as my nervous system’s fear response kicked in. My sense of time shifed; events felt simultaneously rushed and glacial. Later, I noticed that my memory of the assault was flled with gaps. Yet something diferent was unfolding in the minds and bodies of the soldiers of Bulldog Company. They had done this so many times during training that they were operating from muscle memory. The surge in stress sharpened their attention, heightened their performance. The problem is, becoming good at war ofen involves becoming bad at peace. In every 20th-century conflict the U.S. has fought, more American soldiers have been psychiatric casualties than have been killed in combat. Since 2001, the Department of Veterans Afairs has diagnosed more than 200,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—nearly four times as many as were injured or killed. And while most soldiers readjust well to civilian life, a signifcant portion struggle. In addition to the spike in suicides, cases of spousal or child abuse and neglect, and referrals for drug and alcohol abuse, have increased among service members. The Chinook banked hard to the right, slowed, and sank rapidly, its tail dipping downward. A ripple ran through our lines as the men started to shrug on their gear and wield their rifles. We stood up, grasping at each other for assistance in the narrow confnes of the cargo bay, then shuffled toward the open bay door. The moonlit feld of grass, flattened by the downwash of the rotor blades, came into view as the chopper dipped its back ramp against the turf. “Let’s go!” shouted Sgt. Kelley. And then we were on the ground, jogging through the heat of the helicopter’s exhaust. The soldiers fanned out and hit the dirt, and the chopper’s engines screamed as it clawed its way into the night.

THE TRAUMA OF WAR has been a subject of literature since Homer’s Iliad, but it only entered medical discourse during World War I, when doctors coined the term “shell shock.” They thought the new phenomenon of days- or weeks-long artillery bombardments were rattling the brains of soldiers, causing infantrymen to experience problems that ranged from nightmares to uncontrollable tremors. By the end of the war, however, doctors had come to understand that what they called shell shock was more than physical—it was also emotional. During World War II, psychologists replaced shell shock with battle fatigue, which described the condition as overwhelming physical and mental exhaustion. Afer the Vietnam War, researchers better understood what the brain and body go through in combat. They knew that a complex mixture of psychological and

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DOG OF WAR chief clinician at the freedom restoration center at bagram airﬁeld, the ﬁrst military mental-health clinic in afghanistan, is major timmy, the therapy dog.

physiological reactions trigger anxiety and intense flashbacks in many soldiers. And in 1980, PTSD—a term covering a variety of symptoms that occur afer exposure to trauma, including hypervigilance, insomnia, flashbacks, and inappropriate emotional responses to everyday situations—entered the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Over the past decade, the two million American service members deployed in combat zones have provided military researchers with the largest body of data on PTSD since the Vietnam War. Now the Army, in collaboration with the National Institute of Mental Health, has implemented a massive $65-million epidemiological study known as STARRS, which collects blood samples as well as surveys from more than 100,000 current soldiers and new recruits. The aim is to identify risk factors for combat stress and suicide. The study will wrap up next year. That, of course, will be too late for soldiers who have already been deployed. For them, the Army has rolled out a variety of programs designed to fght PTSD. One, a $125-million initiative called Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness (CSF2), seeks not to treat PTSD but to prevent it—to create enduring soldiers for an age of enduring conflicts. It is an unprecedented, integrated training regimen designed to manage all aspects of the soldier’s well-being: emotional, social, physical, and even spiritual. But will it work? For that matter, can anything prevent PTSD? THE FREEDOM RESTORATION CENTER at Bagram Airfeld, the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan, is a sort of retreat for soldiers who have experienced psychological trauma or stress while deployed there. It has a staf of behavioral specialists, plus overstufed sofas, DVD players, an Xbox, and a specially trained therapy dog, a cartoon-eyed golden Lab named Major Timmy. When I visited one sunny winter day, four soldiers were attending a class on relaxation techniques. We sat in a small plywood building with the lights of and the curtains drawn. Just a few strips of sunlight seeped through into the interior gloom. Outside, armored trucks crunched by on gravel roads, and departing jets roared in the distance. A woman’s mellifluous voice flled the room. “Let yourself relax, and realize that an endless well of peace and tranquillity exists within you. . . .”

U.S. AIR FORCE PhOtO/AIRmAN FIRSt CLASS ERICkA ENgbLOm

beco ming go o d at war o f ten invo lves b eco ming bad at pe ace.

Around me, young men in combat fatigues slouched in their chairs, their eyes closed, their heads tilted back. “Well, that was the deep-relaxation track,” drawled a young corporal leading the session. He fanned out small MP3 players across the table. “You’re welcome to take one for later. We also got some of the guided meditation tracks from yesterday.” He looked around the room. “So, uh, what else do you do to relax?” the corporal asked afer a moment’s silence. “I like to take a nice, long, hot shower,” ofered Daniel Piotrowski, a bullet-headed sergeant, his pale skin sunburned and freckled. “Just kind of get away and block everything out.” There was another awkward pause. I asked Piotrowski if they had decent shower facilities at his base. He nodded slowly. “Well, we did, until they were destroyed by a 2,000-pound bomb.” His company’s small combat outpost, named Dasht-e Towp, was located in the Tangi Valley in Wardak Province, a Talibancontrolled area the insurgents would mortar nearly every day. A highway ran alongside it. When Piotrowski’s unit from the 10th Mountain Division moved in, the senior sergeant took one look at a row of prefabricated barracks that abutted the road and ordered everyone to move into buildings and shipping containers on the other side of the base. Soon afer, a dump truck carrying 2,000 pounds of explosives veered of the highway and halfdemolished the compound. “Just for reference,” Piotrowski said, “the bomb at Oklahoma City was 4,000 pounds.” The blast buckled the walls of the building he lived in and blew him out of bed. His sergeant’s foresight—earned the hard way, through several tours of duty—likely saved dozens of lives. Twenty-six people were wounded, but only the suicide bomber died. Piotrowski sufered a traumatic brain injury. He had been hit before, by a roadside bomb in Iraq, and the explosion brought

back his old trauma. He started having problems sleeping. He couldn’t concentrate on his work. He felt like he was losing his grip, and so his commander suggested he check into the restoration center for a few days. CSF2 is designed to enable Piotrowski and others like him— soldiers who have accumulated layers of injury and trauma—to withstand multiple deployments overseas by the use of “positive psychology.” Rather than focusing on distress and pathology, which has been the approach of psychologists going back to World War II, positive psychology seeks to encourage qualities like emotional awareness and self-control. It’s modeled on the Penn Resiliency Program, which researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have been using to teach resilience to nearby middle- and elementary-school students, with the goal of preventing depression and anxiety. Martin Seligman, one of the founders of the feld of positive psychology, directs the Penn Positive Psychology Center. Seligman has a long career in this sort of behavioral modifcation. He’s famous for developing the theory of learned helplessness, which explains psychological breakdowns in captivity as a result of losing a sense of personal agency. The theory was adopted by the military’s interrogation-resistance training programs and later used, controversially, under the Bush administration’s program of torture against high-value terrorism suspects afer the 9/11 attacks. (“My career has been devoted to fnding out how to overcome learned helplessness,” Seligman, who has condemned torture, said, “not how to produce it.”) CSF2 divides resilience into fve areas of ftness: emotional, physical, social, family, and spiritual. By embracing this philosophy, the Army has ostensibly become concerned not only with the ability of its soldiers to shoot straight, march far, and obey orders, but also with their feelings, friendships, marital relations, and spiritual beliefs (or lack thereof). Clinics like the Freedom Restoration Center are just one component of the Army’s broader push to combat PTSD. As part of the CSF2 program, all new Army recruits now fll out a Global Assessment Tool, a questionnaire that will help evaluate their resilience and provide a baseline for tracking each soldier’s progress. Throughout their career, soldiers participate in individual and group training sessions. Psychologists and behavioral specialists even accompany some units during combat tours. When the relaxation session at the Freedom Restoration Center came to an end, the soldiers quietly fled out, returning to their bunks for some downtime. They would have a few days before returning to their companies. Part of their struggle will be

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with the stigma typically associated with psychological troubles in the military. Piotrowski shrugged when I asked him about it. “I’m the frst one to come here,” he said, “but hopefully now that I’ve come, some of the other guys will too.”

THE HOSPITAL AT KANDAHAR AIRFIELD—the main military base in southern Afghanistan, about 10 miles from the village cluster of Pashmul and Bulldog Company’s patrol—sits at the end of an airstrip, so that wounded soldiers who arrive on medevac ﬂights can be treated immediately. Next door, an outpatient-care facility known as Role 2 includes the 883rd Medical Company, a combat-stress detachment consisting of psychiatrists and behavioral-health specialists. Lt. Col. Richard Toye, commander of the 883rd, bowed his head with a little smile as the roar of a fghter jet taking of momentarily flled the room, rattling the thin plywood walls. “As you can see, it’s quite relaxing here,” he joked. In the U.S., Toye works as a psychiatrist at a state mental hospital. Here in Afghanistan, where he is deployed as a member of the Army Reserve, he helps monitor and care for the mental well-being of service members, any one of whom could be exposed to combat trauma through IEDs or gunfre. “Every part of the theater is the front line,” he said. His team’s job is to keep as many soldiers as possible functioning in their assigned units—a departure from civilian psychology, where the focus is individual, rather than group, welfare. “Our mission is to fx them and send them back.” Toye’s staf engage in a variety of preventive and therapeutic techniques, most of which he considers to be commonly accepted practices. Still, he has his doubts about some components of the Army’s anti-PTSD efort. He is highly skeptical of CSF2, for example. “If we train you to be spiritual and to have a social network and to be physically ft and to have lots of hobbies, well, just because those are the characteristics of people who are stress-resilient, it doesn’t mean that I can take those demands and put them on your head and make you stress-resilient,” Toye said. “It is pseudoscience. And we put a lot of money into it.” Psychologists are also divided about the signifcance of the Penn Resiliency Program’s results. Some children who participated showed increased resilience against depression and anxiety. Yet every major therapeutic approach—so long as both the therapist and patient have faith in its eﬃcacy—tends to show some positive results, a kind of placebo efect. And even if positive psychology works for children in the classroom, critics say, that doesn’t mean it will work for soldiers in combat. “The program is modestly efective with certain populations—for example, kids with mild depression and anxiety,” says Roy Eidelson, former president of the nonproft Psychologists for Social Responsibility. “The research itself is not nearly that persuasive in terms of how likely the program is going to be able to translate to combat situations.” A WAR-RELATED SURGE in government funding has stimulated a search for other means of treating and preventing PTSD, through the use of drugs, genetic screening, and new technologies. One study by the National Institute of Mental Health found that patients with PTSD had fewer of a certain type of receptor for the neurotransmitter serotonin; another study found that, 44

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afer a shooting on their college campus, women with a serotonintransporter gene variant linked to increased anxiety were more likely to develop PTSD. Presumably, the Army could use this knowledge to predict which soldiers will be better suited to combat. Meanwhile, researchers at the Sheba Medical Center in Israel have hypothesized that injecting patients with hydrocortisone immediately afer a traumatic event could, by interrupting stress pathways, help stop symptoms of PTSD from later emerging. And in 2011, the Pentagon awarded $11 million to study whether the drug D-Cycloserine could help reduce fear associated with traumatic memories. Research of this sort has long bothered some experts. In the 1980s, the military scholar Richard Gabriel advised against the development of a purely pharmacological solution to the problems of combat stress. His argument: A miracle drug that eliminates the trauma of killing would result in armies of sociopaths. Soldiers throughout history have proved naturally averse to

have come up with similar fndings at battlefelds such as Gettysburg, where 90 percent of 27,574 abandoned muskets recovered afer the battle were still loaded. The Army responded by introducing training tactics that more realistically simulated killing—for example, they switched from bull’s-eyes to man-shaped-silhouette targets. Today, as soon as they’re inducted into the Army, soldiers are placed in aggressive and stressful conditions. Their egos are broken down and rebuilt within the context of group unity and loyalty. The verbal abuse of the drill instructor, the fring drills, the hand-to-hand combat—all are intended to get them accustomed to violence. The shif in training has vastly improved the willingness of U.S. soldiers to fre their weapons in battle, from 55 percent in the Korean War to approximately 90 percent in Vietnam. Soldiers are expected to spend months or years fghting and killing, then return to the U.S. as stable, well-adjusted citizens, spouses, and parents. The challenge, then, is achieving balance between the training that will enable soldiers to survive battle and the skills that will help them reacclimate to civilian life. Advocates of the CSF2 program point out that some people who undergo trauma experience what they call “post-traumatic growth.” So instead of allowing the experience of combat to lead them down a self-destructive path, soldiers could use the trauma as a motivating event, a reason to grapple with family or personal issues they may have had before ever going to war. If it works, CSF2 should, ideally, enable soldiers to leave the battlefeld in better shape than when they went in.

tH r o U gH oU t Hi stor Y, soldi e r s H av e pr ove d av e r se to Ki l li ng tH ei r ene m i es . killing their enemies. During World War II, an Army researcher named Col. S.L.A. Marshall interviewed a large set of infantrymen immediately afer intense combat and found that 80 to 85 percent, when faced with an enemy target, didn’t fre their riﬂes. While his methodology has been criticized, other researchers

AS THE SUN ROSE OVER Kandahar Province, the soldiers of Bulldog Company and their Afghan allies were taking up positions in the muddy felds bordering Pashmul. We shivered as the mist dissipated, having waded through armpit-deep water in frigid canals to avoid crossing footbridges, which were more likely to contain IEDs. The soldiers began to sweep through the villages, searching for insurgents and weapons caches. It was agonizing work, at once deliberate and improvised. They knew that ingeniously rigged booby traps—a buried piece of tire rubber that, when stepped on, pressed two wires together, or a trip line strung up in the trees to catch a backpack-radio antenna—could lurk around every corner. Bulldog Company had seen their friends killed by them. The men went in hard but warily, weapons at the ready. They picked through haystacks, riﬂed through bedrooms. They detained several villagers when they found an AK-47 and rocketpropelled grenades buried in a yard. A knot of wide-eyed children gathered to watch as they bound and interrogated the men. It was aggressive work, but work that the soldiers were trained to do. And the soldiers of Bulldog Company don’t mind admitting that sometimes, war can be very exciting. “It’s fun, as long as you’re not dead,” said First Lt. Nick Williams, a platoon leader who had led his team through hellish engagements in Pashmul. The next challenge that tens of thousands of soldiers like the members of Bulldog Company will face—readjusting to their lives back home—could be much less exciting than combat. But for some, it could be just as diﬃcult. Matthieu Aikins is a writer living in Kabul, Afghanistan.

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genius Within B r a i n da mag e h a s unle a shed e x tr ao r d inar y ta l e nts i n a s ma ll g r oup o f other wise o r din ar y i n d ivi dua l s . wi ll sc i e nc e f ind a way fo r e v er yon e to ta p th e i r i nne r v ir t u oso? stor y By ADAM PIORE i l lustr ati on s By PAu l l AchIn E An D g R Ah AM Mu RDOch

erek Amato stood above the shallow end of the swimming pool and called for his buddy in the Jacuzzi to toss him the football. Then he launched himself through the air, head frst, arms outstretched. He fgured he could roll onto one shoulder as he snagged the ball, then slide across the water. It was a grave miscalculation. The tips of Amatoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fngers brushed the pigskinâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;then 46

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his head slammed into the pool’s concrete foor with such bonejarring force that it felt like an explosion. He pushed to the surface, clapping his hands to his head, convinced that the water streaming down his cheeks was blood gushing from his ears. At the edge of the pool, Amato collapsed into the arms of his friends, Bill Peterson and Rick Sturm. It was 2006, and the 39-yearold sales trainer was visiting his hometown of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, from Colorado, where he lived. As his two high-school buddies drove Amato to his mother’s home, he drifed in and out of consciousness, insisting that he was a professional baseball player late for spring training in Phoenix. Amato’s mother rushed him to the emergency room, where doctors diagnosed Amato with a severe concussion. They sent him home with instructions to be woken every few hours. It would be weeks before the full impact of Amato’s head trauma became apparent: 35 percent hearing loss in one ear, headaches, memory loss. But the most dramatic consequence appeared just four days afer his accident. Amato awoke hazy afer near-continuous sleep and headed over to Sturm’s house. As the two pals sat chatting in Sturm’s makeshif music studio, Amato spotted a cheap electric keyboard. Without thinking, he rose from his chair and sat in front of it. He had never played the piano—never had the slightest inclination to. Now his fngers seemed to fnd the keys by instinct and, to his astonishment, ripple across them. His right hand started low, climbing in lyrical chains of triads, skipping across melodic intervals and arpeggios, landing on the high notes, then starting low again and building back up. His lef hand followed close behind, laying down bass, picking out harmony. Amato sped up, slowed down, let pensive tones hang in the air, then resolved them into rich chords as if he had been playing for years. When Amato fnally looked up, Sturm’s eyes were flled with tears. Amato played for six hours, leaving Sturm’s house early the next morning with an unshakable feeling of wonder. He searched the Internet for an explanation, typing in words like gifed and head trauma. The results astonished him. He read about Tony Cicoria, an orthopedic surgeon in upstate New York who was struck by lightning while talking to his mother from a telephone booth. Cicoria then became obsessed with classical piano and taught himself how to play and compose music. Afer being hit in the head with a baseball at age 10, Orlando Serrell could name the day of the week for any given date. A bad fall at age three lef Alonzo Clemons with permanent cognitive impairment, Amato learned, and a talent for sculpting intricate replicas of animals. Finally Amato found the name Darold Trefert, a worldrecognized expert on savant syndrome—a condition in which individuals who are typically mentally impaired demonstrate remarkable skills. Amato fred of an e-mail; soon he had answers. Trefert, now retired from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, diagnosed Amato with “acquired savant syndrome.” In the 30 or so known cases, ordinary people who sufer brain trauma suddenly develop almost-superhuman new abilities: artistic brilliance, mathematical mastery, photographic memory. One acquired savant, a high-school dropout brutally beaten by muggers, is the only known person in the world able to draw complex geometric patterns called fractals; he also claims to have discovered a mistake in pi. A stroke transformed another from a 48

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MUSIC MAN An accident left Derek Amato with a severe concussion and a surprising ability to play the piano. One theory is that his brain reorganized, making accessible existing memories of music. Another is that his brain no longer ﬁlters sensory input, enabling him to hear individual notes rather than melodies.

mild-mannered chiropractor into a celebrated visual artist whose work has appeared in publications like The New Yorker and in gallery shows, and sells for thousands of dollars. The neurological causes of acquired savant syndrome are poorly understood. But the Internet has made it easier for people like Amato to connect with researchers who study savants, and improved brain-imaging techniques have enabled those scientists to begin to probe the unique neural mechanisms at work. Some have even begun to design experiments that investigate an intriguing possibility: genius lies in all of us, just waiting to be unleashed.

ruce Miller directs the UCSF Memory and Aging Center in San Francisco, where as a behavioral neurologist he treats elderly people stricken with Alzheimer’s disease and late-life psychosis. One day in the mid1990s, the son of a patient pointed out his father’s new obsession with painting. As his father’s symptoms worsened, the man said, his paintings improved. Soon, Miller began to identify other patients who displayed unexpected new talents as their neurological degeneration continued. As dementia laid waste to brain

C O U R t E S y D E R E k A m At O

AmAtO seArcheD the internet fOr An explAnAtiOn, typing in wOrDs like gifted AnD head trauma. the results AstOnisheD him.

regions associated with language, higher-order processing, and social norms, their artistic abilities exploded. Though these symptoms defed conventional wisdom on brain disease in the elderly—artists aficted with Alzheimer’s typically lose artistic ability—Miller realized they were consistent with another population described in the literature: savants. That wasn’t the only similarity. Savants ofen display an obsessive compulsion to perform their special skill, and they exhibit defcits in social and language behaviors, defects present in dementia patients. Miller wondered if there might be neurological similarities too. Although the exact mechanisms at work in the brains of savants have never been identifed and can vary from case to case, several studies dating back to at least the 1970s have found lef-hemispheric damage in autistic savants with prodigious artistic, mathematical, and memory skills. Miller decided to fnd out precisely where in the lef hemisphere of regular savants—whose skills usually become apparent at a very young age—these defects existed. He read the brain scan of a fve-yearold autistic savant able to reproduce intricate scenes from memory on an Etch-a-Sketch. Single-photonemission computed tomography (SPECT) showed abnormal inactivity in the anterior temporal lobes of the lef hemisphere—exactly the results he found in his dementia patients. In most cases, scientists attribute enhanced brain activity to neuroplasticity, the organ’s ability to devote

more cortical real estate to developing skills as they improve with practice. But Miller ofered a wholly diferent hypothesis for the mechanisms at work in congenital and acquired savants. Savant skills, Miller argues, emerge because the areas ravaged by disease—those associated with logic, verbal communication, and comprehension—have actually been inhibiting latent artistic abilities present in those people all along. As the lef brain goes dark, the circuits keeping the right brain in check disappear. The skills do not emerge as a result of newly acquired brain power; they emerge because for the frst time, the areas of the right brain associated with creativity can operate unchecked. The theory fts with the work of other neurologists, who are increasingly fnding cases in which brain damage has spontaneously, and seemingly counterintuitively, led to positive changes—eliminating stuttering, enhancing memory in monkeys and rats, even restoring lost eyesight in animals. In a healthy brain, the ability of diferent neural circuits to both excite and inhibit one another plays a critical role in efcient function. But in the brains of dementia patients and some autistic savants, the lack of inhibition in areas associated with creativity led to keen artistic expression and an almost compulsive urge to create.

n the weeks afer his accident, Amato’s mind raced. And his fngers wanted to move. He found himself tapping out patterns, waking up from naps with his fngers drumming against his legs. He bought a keyboard. Without one, he felt anxious, overstimulated; once he was able to sit down and play, relief washed over him, followed by a deep sense of calm. He’d shut himself in, sometimes for as long as two to three days, just him and the piano, exploring his new talent, trying to understand it, letting the music pour out of him. Amato experienced other symptoms, many of them not good. Black and white squares appeared in his vision, as if a transparent flter had synthesized before his eyes, and moved in a circular pattern. He was also plagued with headaches. The frst one hit three weeks afer his accident, but soon Amato was having as many as fve a day. They made his head pound, and light and noise were excruciating. One day, he collapsed in his brother’s bathroom. On

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another, he almost passed out in Wal-Mart. Still, Amato’s feelings were unambiguous. He felt certain he had been given a gif, and it wasn’t just the personal gratifcation of music: Amato’s new condition, he quickly realized, had vast commercial potential. Cultural fascination with savants appears to date as far back as the condition itself. In the 19th century, “Blind Tom” Bethune became an international celebrity. A former slave who could reproduce any song on the piano, he played the White House at age 11, toured the world at 16, and over the course of his life earned well over $750,000—a fortune at the time. Dustin Hofman introduced the savant to millions of theatergoers with his character in the 1988 movie Rain Man. Since then, prodigious savants have become staples of shows like 60 Minutes and Oprah. But acquired savants, especially, are perfect fodder for a society obsessed with self-improvement, reality television, and pop psychology. Jon Sarkin, the chiropractor turned artist, became the subject of profles in GQ and Vanity Fair, a biography, and TV documentaries. Tom Cruise purchased the rights to his life story. “To be honest, I don’t even mention it to my wife anymore when the media calls,” Sarkin says. “It’s part of life.” Jason Padgett, the savant who can draw fractals, inked a book deal afer he was featured on Nightline and in magazine and newspaper articles. Reached by phone, he complained that his agent no longer allowed him to give interviews. “It’s very frustrating,” he said. “I want to speak to you, but they won’t let me.” To Amato, acquired savantism looked like the opportunity he’d been waiting for his entire life. Amato’s mother had always told him he was extraordinary, that he was put on the planet to do great things. Yet a series of uninspiring jobs had followed high school—selling cars, delivering mail, doing public relations. He’d reached for the brass ring, to be sure, but it had always eluded him. He’d auditioned for the television show American Gladiators and failed the pull-up test. He’d opened a sports-management

MASTER MINDS KIM PEEK the inspiration for rain man, peek could read two pages of a book simultaneously (one with each eye) and instantly commit them to memory. his recall of more than 12,000 books made him a walking encyclopedia. peek, who died in 2009, could also sum columns of numbers in the telephone book.

STEPHEN WILTSHIRE wiltshire, who is autistic, was drawing buildings by age 8. As an adult, he has created stunningly accurate portraits of cities from memory. in 2007, he ﬂew over the thames for 15 minutes, then sketched seven square miles of london’s streets, rivers, and buildings, precise down to the windows.

company, handling marketing and endorsements for mixedmartial-arts fghters; it went bust in 2001. Now he had a new path. Amato began planning a marketing campaign. He wanted to be more than an artist, musician, and performer. He wanted to tell his story and inspire people. Amato also had another ambition, a goal lingering from his life before virtuosity, back when he had only his competitive drive. He wanted, more than anything, to be on Survivor. So when that frst interviewer called from a local radio station, Amato was ready to talk.

ew people have followed the emergence of acquired savants with more interest than Allan Snyder, a neuroscientist at the University of Sydney in Australia. Since 1999, Snyder has focused his research on studying how their brains function. He’s also pressed further into speculative territory than most neuroscientists feel comfortable: He is attempting to produce the same outstanding abilities in people with undamaged brains. Last spring, Snyder published what many consider to be his most substantive work. He and his colleagues gave 28 volunteers a geometric puzzle that has stumped laboratory subjects for more than 50 years. The challenge: Connect nine dots, arrayed in three rows of three, using four straight lines without retracing a line or lifing the pen. None of the subjects could solve the problem. Then Snyder and his colleagues used a technique called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to temporarily immobilize the same area of the brain destroyed by dementia in Miller’s acquired savants. The noninvasive technique, which is commonly used to evaluate brain damage in stroke patients, delivers a weak electrical current to the scalp through electrodes, depolarizing or hyperpolarizing neural circuits until they have slowed to a crawl. Afer tDCS, more than 40 percent of the participants in Snyder’s experiment solved the problem. (None of those in a control group

wh e th er peOpl e AcQu ir e s AvAnt sy nDr O me Or A r e BO r n with it, the y e xhiBit A r Ange O f A stOun Ding skil l s. mOst shAr e O ne cO m mO n th r e A D : tr em en DO us memO r y. LESLIE LEMKE Blind since birth, lemke has a verbal iQ of 58. when he was 14, his family watched a movie featuring a tchaikovsky piano concerto. hours later, his mother awoke to the music and discovered lemke playing it. he has performed around the globe and can reproduce thousands of songs from memory.

FLO AND KAY LYMAN the identical-twin autistic savants can name the day of the week for any date, past or future. they also have prodigious autobiographical memory and can recall what they had for dinner on any given night, what they were wearing, what the weather was like, and what they did that day.

DANIEL TAMMET tammet can recite pi to 22,514 decimals, master a new language in one week’s time, and perform lightning-quick calculations. Asked by one researcher to compute 37 to the power of 4 (answer: 1,874,161), he did so instantly. he perceives numbers and days as having distinct colors and emotional tones.

JIM CAROLLO An acquired savant, carollo gained exceptional mathematic ability after recovering from a severe auto accident at age 14. Just months later, he achieved a perfect score on a geometry mastery test without having studied. he later passed calculus exams, though he’d never taken trigonometry.

SOURCE: Islands of GenIus by DAROLD tREffERt

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AcQuireD sAvAnts Are perfect fODDer fOr A sOciety OBsesseD with self-imprOvement, reAlity televisiOn, AnD pOp psychOlOgy.

COURtESy

NANCy mASON/gIftED hANDS

SUDDEN SCULPTOR After suﬀering a head injury as a toddler, Alonzo clemons began to spontaneously sculpt animals with incredible accuracy and speed. savant skills lie on a spectrum of ability; clemons is considered the rare prodigious savant—one whose talent would be exceptional even for a person not impaired in any way.

given placebo tDCS identifed the solution.) The experiment, Snyder argues, supports the hypothesis that the abilities observed in acquired savants emerge once brain areas normally held in check have become unfettered. The crucial role of the lef temporal lobe, he believes, is to flter what would otherwise be a dizzying food of sensory stimuli, sorting them into previously learned concepts. These concepts, or what Snyder calls mind-sets, allow humans to see a tree instead of all its individual leaves and to recognize words instead of just the letters. “How could we possibly deal with the world if we had to analyze, to completely fathom, every new snapshot?” he says. Savants can access raw sensory information, normally of-limits to the conscious mind, because the brain’s perceptual region isn’t functioning. To solve the nine-dot puzzle, one must extend the lines beyond the square formed by the dots, which requires casting aside preconceived notions of the parameters. “Our whole brain is geared to making predictions so we can function rapidly in this world,” Snyder says. “If something naturally helps you get around the flters of these mind-sets, that is pretty powerful.”

Trefert, for one, fnds the results of the experiment compelling. “I was a little dubious of Snyder’s earlier work, which ofen involved asking his subjects to draw pictures,” he says. “It just seemed pretty subjective: How do you evaluate the change in them? But his recent study is useful.” Snyder thinks Amato’s musical prodigy adds to mounting evidence that untapped human potential lies in everyone, accessible with the right tools. When the non-musician hears music, he perceives the big picture, melodies. Amato, Snyder says, has a “literal” experience of music—he hears individual notes. Miller’s dementia patients have technical artistic skill because they are drawing what they see: details. Berit Brogaard believes the lef-brain, right-brain idea is an oversimplifcation. Brogaard is a neuroscientist and philosophy professor at the Center for Neurodynamics at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. She has another theory: When brain cells die, they release a barrage of neurotransmitters, and this deluge of potent chemicals may actually rewire parts of the brain, opening up new neural pathways into areas previously unavailable. “Our hypothesis is that we have abilities that we cannot access,” Brogaard says. “Because they are not conscious to us, we cannot manipulate them. Some reorganization takes place that makes it possible to consciously access information that was there, lying dormant.” In August, Brogaard published a paper exploring the implications of a battery of tests her lab ran on Jason Padgett. It revealed damage in the visual-cortex areas involved in detecting motion and boundaries. Areas of the parietal cortex associated with novel visual images, mathematics, and action planning were abnormally active. In Padgett’s case, she says, the areas that have become supercharged are next to those that sustained the damage—placing them in the path of the neurotransmitters likely unleashed by the death of so many brain cells. In Amato’s case, she says, he learned bar chords on a guitar in high school and even played in a garage band. “Obviously he had some interest in music before, and his brain probably recoded some music unconsciously,” she says. “He stored memories of music in his brain, but he didn’t access them.” Somehow the accident provoked a reorganization of neurons that brought them into his conscious mind, Brogaard speculates. It’s a theory she hopes to explore with him in the lab.

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many savants exhiBit exQuisite computational or artistic capacities, But almost always at the expense of other things the Brain does.

n a beautiful los angeles day last October, I accompanied Amato and his agent, Melody Pinkerton, up to the penthouse roof deck of Santa Monica’s Shangri-La Hotel. Far below us, a pier jutted into the ocean and the Pacifc Coast Highway hugged the coastline. Pinkerton settled next to Amato on a couch, nodding warmly and blinking at him with a doe-eyed smile as three men with handheld cameras circled. They were gathering footage for the pilot of a reality-TV series about women trying to make it in Hollywood. Pinkerton is a former contestant on the VH1 reality show Frank the Entertainer and has posed for Playboy; if the series is green-lit, Amato will make regular appearances as one of her clients. “My whole life has changed,” Amato told her. “I’ve slowed down, even though I’m racing and producing at a pace that not many people understand, you know? If Beethoven scored 500 songs a year back in the day and was considered a pretty brilliant mind, and the doctors tell me I’m scoring 2,500 pieces a year, you can see that I’m a little busy.” Amato seemed comfortable with the cameras, despite the pressure. A spot on a reality show would represent a step forward in his career, but not a huge leap. Over the past six years, Amato has been featured in newspapers and television shows around the world. He was one of eight savants featured on a Discovery Channel special in 2010 called Ingenious Minds, and he was on PBS’s NOVA this fall. He recently appeared on a talk show hosted by his idol, Jef Probst, also the host of Survivor. In June, Amato appeared on the Today show. Musical renown (and a payday) has yet to follow. He released his frst album in 2007. In 2008, he played in front of several thousand people in New Orleans with the famed jazz-fusion guitarist Stanley Jordan. He was asked to write the score for an independent Japanese documentary. But while Amato’s musical prowess never fails to elicit amazement in the media, reviews of his music are mixed. “Some of the reaction is good, some of it’s fair, some of it’s not so good,” he says. “I wouldn’t say any of it’s great. What I think’s going to be great is working with other musicians now.” Still, as we strolled down Santa Monica Boulevard to a sushi restaurant afer the flming, he hardly could have seemed happier. At the table, Amato smiled broadly, gestured manically with meaty forearms tattooed with musical notes, and poked the air with his chopsticks for emphasis. “There’s book stuf, there are appearances, performances, charity organizations,” he said. “There are TV people, flm 52

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people, commercial people, background stuf. Shoot, I know I missed about another half dozen. It’s like I’m on a plane doing about 972 miles an hour! I’m enjoying every second of the ride!” Amato hasn’t exactly been coy about his desire for fame, mailing packets of material to reporters, sending Facebook requests to fellow acquired savants, and continuously updating his fan page— behavior that has raised some doubts among experts. Rex Jung, a neuroscientist at the University of New Mexico, grew suspicious of Amato afer reading about his history as an ultimate-fght promoter. “I couldn’t be more skeptical,” he says. Jung studies creativity and traumatic brain injuries, and he has spent time with Alonzo Clemons, the savant who sculpts animals. He believes acquired savantism is a legitimate condition. But he notes Amato does not display other symptoms one would expect. Many savants, Jung says, exhibit “exquisite” computational or artistic capacities, but “almost always at the expense of other things the brain does.” Clemons, for example, has severe developmental disabilities. “I am highly skeptical of savants that are able to tie their shoes and update their Facebook pages and do strong marketing campaigns to highlight their savant abilities all at the same time.” There is no way to defnitively prove or disprove Amato’s claims, but a number of credible scientists are willing to vouch for his authenticity. Andrew Reeves, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic, conducted MRI scans of Amato’s brain for Ingenious Minds. The

PhOtOgRAPhS by LIAm kINg

TORTuRED ARTIST Jon sarkin says he saw things diﬀerently, more vividly, after suﬀering a brain hemorrhage and a stroke. and while the chiropractor had always dabbled in art, he suddenly became obsessed with creating it. “eight years ago, i didn’t draw for a while and i found out what happened,” he says. “i had a nervous breakdown. and i have been drawing pretty much constantly ever since.”

tests revealed several white spots, which Reeves acknowledges could have been caused by previous concussions. “We knew going in that it was unlikely to show any sort of signature change,” Reeves says. But Amato’s description of what he experiences “fts too well with how the brain is wired, in terms of what parts are adjacent to what parts, for him to have concocted it, in my opinion.” Reeves believes the black and white squares in Amato’s feld of vision somehow connect to his motor system, indicating an atypical link between the visual and auditory regions of his brain. As I drove through the streets of L.A. with Amato last fall, it seemed to me that there was something undeniably American about his eforts to seize on his accident—which struck when he was close to 40, staring into the abyss of middle-age mediocrity—and transform himself from an anonymous sales trainer into a commercial product, an inspirational symbol of human possibility for the legions of potential fans dreaming of grander things. Trefert, Snyder, and Brogaard all spoke enthusiastically about unraveling the phenomenon of acquired savantism, in order to one day enable everyone to explore their hidden talents. The Derek Amatos of the world provide a glimpse of that goal. Afer parking on Sunset Boulevard, a few blocks

from the storied rock-and-roll shrines of the Roxy and the Viper Room, Amato and I headed into the Standard Hotel and followed a bedraggled hipster with an Australian accent through the lobby to a dimly lit bar. In the center of the room sat a grand piano, its ivory keys gleaming. The chairs had been fipped upside down on the tables, and dishes clinked in a nearby kitchen. The club, closed to customers, was all ours. As Amato sat down, the tension seemed to drain from his shoulders. He closed his eyes, placed his foot on one of the pedals, and began to play. The music that gushed forth was loungy, full of fowery trills, swelling and sweeping up and down the keys in waves of cascading notes—a sticky, emotional kind of music more appropriate for the romantic climax of a movie like From Here to Eternity than a gloomy nightclub down the street from the heart of the Sunset Strip. It seemed strangely out of character for a man whose sartorial choices bring to mind ’80s hair-band icon Bret Michaels. Amato didn’t strike me as prodigious, the kind of rare savant, like Blind Tom Bethune, whose skills would be impressive even in someone with years of training. But it didn’t seem to matter. There was expression, melody, and skill. And if they could emerge spontaneously in Amato, who’s to say what spectacular abilities might lie dormant in the rest of us?

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E S I R E H T

S L L A T R E P U S E H T OF

TS HI T EC R C R A VE PE ES HA SK YSCR A C N A V H AD HIG E R I N G T H E M I L EE N I G EN EN Y RIS G FO R A N L I C V I BY STR STO R Y

HIGH MARK When the 2,717-foot Burj Khalifa [left] opened in Dubai in 2010, it topped Taipei 101, then the world's tallest building, by more than 1,000 feet.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Bill Baker, a structural engineer with the architecture frm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), was at his ofce in downtown Chicago. SOM is the undisputed leader in skyscraper design, and, at least on the engineering side, Baker is its undisputed king. In the past 30 years, he has overseen or worked on six of the world’s 15 tallest buildings. But 9/11 was a bad day to be king: As the World Trade Center collapsed and rumors circulated about a rogue plane headed for the Sears Tower, Baker and his colleagues watched as the symbols of their profession became objects of terror. A few days later, Baker and some of his co-workers drove to New York. The contractors at ground zero needed volunteer engineers to help take apart the towers. “They broke up the site into four zones,” he said. “Each zone had four structuralengineering teams, and we were the Chicago team.” As Baker picked through the rubble, it was hard not to question the future of high-rise architecture. One article in The Associated Press noted that architects were asking bluntly, “Should we ever build iconic skyscrapers again?”

Barely 18 months afer 9/11, Baker returned to New York—this time to talk about designing the world’s tallest building. The frm won the contract; six years later, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai topped out at 2,717 feet, more than half a mile tall. Rather than an era of architectural modesty, the decade since 9/11 has seen a fowering of skyscraper construction. In the 70 years before 9/11, the record for the tallest building grew 230 feet. Since then, it has shot up 1,234 feet. And it’s poised to rise much higher over the next decade. Today’s tallest skyscrapers are new in every respect: new structures, new materials, designed and tested with new methods. The result isn’t just taller buildings but an entirely new category of building: the supertall skyscraper.

ECHNICALLY, the supertall category, as defned by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, covers anything taller than 300 meters, or 984 feet. That includes the 1,250-foot Empire State Building, a supertall half a century before the term’s invention. The two World

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the ri se of the s up er ta l l s

Trade Center towers, which began to rise in 1966, reached 1,368 and 1,362 feet. But only within the past 15 years have architects and engineers begun to see supertalls as a separate class, with its own challenges and opportunities. “When you get above the World Trade Center size, you’ve got to change your fundamental thought process,” Baker says. Baker is a tall, professorial type given to illustrating his comments with back-of-a-napkin sketches. Last October, we met for cofee across the street from 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York. The iconic 850-foot tower opened in 1933, capping a frenzied era of ultra-tall-skyscraper construction. Then the growing stopped. For the next 30 years, steel-frame towers like 30 Rock and the Empire State Building seemed to be as high as architects could go. That began to change in the mid-1960s, when an engineer named Fazlur Khan, one of Baker’s predecessors at SOM, introduced a new structural system called the tube. Khan replaced the traditional internal steel frame with a series of columns running up the outside of the building. The columns are connected to one another and to the building’s core, which houses the elevators, stairs, and utilities. That way, the strongest part of the building is on the outside, where it can best resist wind—which, above 40 stories or so, can be a greater concern than gravity. The advent of the tube set of a surge in tall buildings in the ’60s and ’70s, including the John Hancock Center, the Sears Tower, and the World Trade Center. But by the time Baker arrived at SOM in the early 1980s, architects and engineers had run into new problems. The tube has a major limitation: It can go as high as an architect wants but only if the base grows proportionally. “If you make it twice as tall, you have to make it twice as wide and twice as deep, and the volume goes up by a factor of eight,” Baker says. That won’t work for a supertall building—150 foors means several million square feet of ofce space, much of it deep inside the building, enough to make investors nervously loosen their ties and look for the closest exit. In the mid-1990s, two things happened that helped push architects beyond the foor-space conundrum, both of which were critical in unleashing the supertall revolution. The frst was economic. The tallest skyscrapers used to contain mostly ofce space. Now supertalls are home to hotels, condominiums, shopping centers, and restaurants. Residential and retail spaces require narrower foor plates than ofces, which allows buildings to go higher with the same amount of material while also providing a diversity of real-estate options that make very tall buildings easier to fll. In 2000, only fve of the 20 tallest buildings in the world were mixed-use; by 2020, only fve won’t be. The move to mixed-use towers facilitated the second big shif in skyscraper design: discarding the tube itself. In 1998, Baker and Adrian Smith—an SOM architect who designed many of the frm’s tallest projects, including the Burj Khalifa, before leaving to start his own company—released their plan for Chicago’s 7 South Dearborn. The tower was supermodel-slim: It would have risen 2,000 feet on just a quarter of a city block. Instead of a tube, they used a “stayed THE MIDDLEWEIGHT mast,” which featured a central core When completed in closely surrounded by eight enormous 2017, the 2,087-foot columns, out from which cantilever the Wuhan Greenland Center top 60 of 108 stories of mixed-use space. could be the world’s third-tallest building. The dot-com recession scotched the 56

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3,000

TALL BUILDINGS THROUGH TIME

2,000

1,000

WOOLWORTH BUILDING New York, 1913, 792 feet

EMPIRE STATE BUILDING New York, 1931, 1,250 feet

SEARS TOWER Chicago, 1973, 1,451 feet

PETRONAS TOWER Kuala Lumpur, 1998, 1,483 feet

SUPERTALL SKYSCRAPERS ARE NEW IN EVERY RESPECT.

O p e n i n g pa g e : S O M / n i c k M e r r i c k c O p y r i g h t h e d r i c h bleSSing; left tO right: © adrian SMith + gOrdOn gill a r c h i t e c t u r e ; S O M / c O p y r i g h t paw e l S u l i M a

construction of 7 South Dearborn, but its innovative approach inspired architects and engineers to design dozens of “post-tube” skyscrapers. Baker and Smith teamed up again on the Burj Khalifa, and again they came up with an entirely new structural system, the “buttressed core.” It involves a central, hexagonal, concrete core, on three sides of which they placed triangular buttresses. Imagine a rocket ship with three long, thin stabilizing fns. Of course, it’s not enough simply to design a tall building; architects and engineers also have to fgure out how to move people through it. They’ve turned to solutions including sky lobbies, double-decker elevators, and so-called destination-dispatch elevators. Still, even the smartest elevators can rise at only about a

TAIPEI 101 Taipei, 2004, 1,667 feet

BURJ KHALIFA Dubai, 2010, 2,717 feet

SHANGHAI TOWER Shanghai, 2014, est. 2,073 feet

KINGDOM TOWER Jeddah, 2017, est. 3,280 feet

kilometer a minute and descend at only about two thirds of that— otherwise most passengers’ ears can’t withstand the pressure. To go even higher will require a radical rethinking of the elevator itself. “If you’re going really tall, then you’ve got to get rid of the cables,” says Leslie Robertson, the chief structural engineer for the original World Trade Center. The practical limit of conventional hoist elevators, he said, is about 1,500 feet. “You need, for example, a car that’s driven electromagnetically. That’s certainly the wave of the future.” Last year, a company called MagneMotion unveiled a cableless elevator powered by a linear synchronous motor, akin to the maglev motors on some trains. MagneMotion’s elevator, developed for the U.S. Navy, is designed to move ammunition around a ship, but the company says it could easily adapt it for passengers.

ODAY’S SUPERTALLS are diferent both in design and composition. Steel was once the material of choice for highrise buildings, but engineers have begun to jettison steel in favor of concrete. Leonard Joseph, a structural engineer with the frm Thornton Tomasetti, says, “This concrete is not your grandpa’s cement and stone and water.” Rather, it involves complex recipes of chemicals and advanced materials, including microfbers that can replace bulky steel rebar. Structural steel has a compressive strength of about 250 megapascals; in the 1950s, the strongest concrete could withstand about 21 megapascals, limiting all-concrete structures to about 20 foors. Today’s strongest concrete tops 130 megapascals, and the addition of microfbers could nearly double that number. Another advantage is that concrete structures have a greater mass than steel structures—thus a concrete tower can be thinner than a steel one and still have the same resistance to wind forces. Concrete, unlike steel, doesn’t need freproofng. As some engineers move toward concrete, others are already thinking beyond it, to carbon-fber composites, the same lightweight, superstrong material that provides the structure in racing bikes and jet aircraf. But scientists will need to work out some signifcant challenges. Not only is carbon fber very expensive, but its advantage—its lightness—would also be disturbing for anyone inside the building. People are used to the solidity of concrete and steel under STONE GIANT their feet; in a carbon-fber building, they Kuwait City’s 1,354-foot would feel like they were walking on a Al Hamra Tower is the drumhead, a disconcerting sensation at tallest skyscraper with a continuous stone facade. 1,500 feet.

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TWO FACADES The tower has two glass facades, one inside the other— essentially, a tube within a tube. The space between them, which ranges from 3 to 33 feet, provides room for light-ﬁlled sky lobbies, but it also acts as a Thermos-like insulator, so the building needs less active heating and cooling. Reduced energy use in a supertall is good for the environment and makes the building economically viable. Gensler estimates that its energy-eﬃcient innovations will save $2.5 million a year.

MULTIUSE FLOORPLAN

Like most modern supertall skyscrapers, the Shanghai Tower will house more than just offices. “A tower this big can have its own zip code,” says Benedict Tranel, technical director for Gensler. Each of the nine zones will have its own sky lobby and atrium tucked between the inner and outer glass walls. The first zone will be retail, zones two through six will be office space, and zones seven through nine will contain a hotel and an observation deck. Each sky-lobby floor will have its own retail shops and restaurants, making it a sort of vertical neighborhood.

LAYERED STRUCTURE

The building relies on three interlocking systems to remain upright. The first is a 90-by-90-foot concrete-andsteel core, which provides vertical strength. A ring of steel “super-columns” [above, left] surround the core, connected to it by steel outriggers. The columns buttress the building against lateral forces. Every 14 floors, two-story belt trusses hug the building’s perimeter; each marks the start of a new zone. “The structure works like a wedding cake in nine sections,” says Dennis C.K. Poon, an engineer with the firm Thornton Tomasetti, which worked on the building.

When it opens in 2014, the Shanghai Tower won’t just be the world’s second-tallest building. The 2,073-foot-high skyscraper, designed by the San Francisco architecture ﬁrm Gensler, will be a showcase of 21st-century engineering, introducing the innovations that could become standard in the next generation of supertall towers.

HOW TO BUILD A 2,073-FOOT SKYSCRAPER

t h e r ise of t h e sup e r ta lls

The tower, which from above looks like a guitar pick, twists approximately one degree per ﬂoor as it rises. The twirling design slows wind currents as they circle the building, disrupting the vortex shedding that can cause a skyscraper to shake violently in the wind (the same way a blade of grass vibrates when you hold it between your ﬁngers and blow). Wind-tunnel tests on scale models predict that the twisting shape will reduce the lateral forces by 24 percent—and that will be critical when the next typhoon hits Shanghai.

TWISTING SHAPE

gENSLER ARChItECtS

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DEEP FOUNDATION

“Not every supertall tower requires deep foundations,” says Leonard Joseph of Thornton Tomasetti. “But shallow, strong bedrock like that found in Manhattan is the exception, not the rule, in cities around the world.” Shanghai is in an earthquake zone, and the site (which is located on a river delta) has soft, clay-heavy soil. So before lifting a single steel beam, engineers drove 980 foundation piles into the ground as deep as 282 feet. Then they poured 2.15 million cubic feet of reinforced concrete to create an 20-foot-thick foundation mat.

FAST ELEVATORS

Designed by Mitsubishi, the tower’s express elevators, which will shoot passengers up to the sky lobbies, will feature pressurized cabins and converters that regenerate electricity, reducing energy use by 30 percent. They’ll be the world’s fastest, with a top speed of more than 40 miles per hour—twice as fast as usual. Seven of the 106 elevators will be double-deckers.

the rise of the s up er ta l l s

S BUILDINGS RISE TALLER, they face a series of increasingly complex forces. At ground level, a breeze might barely register. A hundred foors up, it could be gusting at 40 mph. Of particular concern to engineers is something called vortex shedding: As wind passes the sharp edges of buildings, it creates eddies, which pull on the structures in unpredictable ways. The ability of engineers to model external forces has also enabled the growth of buildings. Until the 1970s, engineers had to overdesign towers with redundant strength because there was no way to test a building until it was built. Around that time, engineers began wind-tunnel-testing models. But it wasn’t until fast, cheap computing power and 3-D printing arrived that design frms could test many scenarios rapidly. These days wind-engineering frms can churn out multiple 3-D models of a building in hours, then test them in quick succession in a specialized wind tunnel. “They can go through 18 variations in a day,” says Baker. “It’s a long day, but still.” Hundreds of sensors cover each model, taking hundreds of pressure readings a second that engineers later feed into a computer simulation that shows where the building is weakest. Toward the end of the process, they even re-create a scale version of its surroundings: hills, other buildings, even pedestrians, all of which create complex wind patterns. Wind-tunnel analysis has helped engineers develop solutions to vortex shedding, such as rounded edges and notches at a building’s corners, and dampers—similar to shock absorbers—that reduce a tower’s tendency to move in the breeze. Without them, many supertalls would sway wildly; even if they didn’t fall apart, they’d be impossible to work in. “You’re on top of a wet noodle, and you get a really sickening ride,” Joseph says.

N 1906, NOT LONG INTO the dawn of the skyscraper age, the landscape architect H.A. Caparn called the new building type “a revolt against the laws of economics.” The only justifcation for going so tall, he said, was ego and money. More than a hundred years later, critics still level that charge. It’s no coincidence, they say, that supertalls are concentrated in places like the Persian Gulf and China. They’re like architectonic hothouse fowers, growing in the artifcial climate of money and bad sense. Yet rather than a revolt against economics, supertalls could be its purest expression. Dubai and Shanghai aren’t ancient Egypt or 17th-century France, where a monarch could will a pyramid or palace into existence. The market, not the man, determines whether a supertall gets built. Take, for example, the Burj Khalifa. On its own, the building represents valuable real estate. But its developer, Emaar Properties, also made it the centerpiece of a new business and residential district, charging a premium for properties with clear views of the

SUPERTALLS REPRESENT A NEW VISION: VERTICAL URBANISM. 60

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march 2013

skyscraper. Even if the Burj Khalifa fails to turn a proft, Emaar is betting that its presence will raise the surrounding property value enough to more than ofset the diference. Real-estate bets aside, something more fundamental drives the proliferation of supertalls: demographics. By 2050, the world population will have grown to nine billion, from about seven billion today. Some 70 percent of that population will live in urban areas. For much of the 20th century, urban planning in the developed and developing world was antiurban; the dense verticality of the industrial city was supposed to be a thing of the past. Supertalls represent not just the rejection of that vision but also an embrace of a new synthesis: vertical urbanism. Buildings like the Burj Khalifa and the Shanghai Tower are ofen called vertical cities, but they have none of the cluttered vibrancy of 19th-century London or New York’s Lower East Side. In Hong Kong, the 1,588-foot International Commerce Center has its own airport rail link; that combined with a high-end mall, ofce space, and a hotel inside the tower means visitors can fy into the city, spend weeks in the I.C.C.—and never take a breath of the local air. Whether we like it or not, that’s the promise of supertall skyscrapers. In 2017, Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, designed by Adrian Smith, will open at an estimated 3,280 feet, replacing the Burj Khalifa as the world’s tallest building. Sitting inside the café at Rockefeller Center with Baker, I asked him whether the Kingdom Tower, at well over a half-mile high, might represent the outer limits of what man could design. Could he do, say, a mile? He thought about it for a moment. “Sure,” he said. All he needed was the right client. Clay Risen is an editor for The New York Times op-ed section.

Taught by Joel Sartore, Professional Photographer national geographic magazine

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Fundamentals of Photography lecture titles 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Learn the Inside Secrets of Professional Photographers Photographs can preserve cherished memories, reveal the beauty of life, and even change the world. Yet most of us point and shoot without really being aware of what we’re seeing or how we could take our photo from good to great. Just imagine the images you could create if you trained yourself to “see” as the professionals do. With Fundamentals of Photography, you’ll learn everything you need to know about the art of taking unforgettable pictures straight from National Geographic contributing photographer Joel Sartore—a professional with over 30 years of experience. Whatever your skill level, these 24 engaging lectures allow you to hone your photographer’s eye, take full advantage of your camera’s features, and capture magical moments in any situation or setting imaginable.

Ofer expires 04/12/13

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Making Great Pictures Camera Equipment—What You Need Lenses and Focal Length Shutter Speeds Aperture and Depth of Field Light I—Found or Ambient Light Light II—Color and Intensity Light III—Introduced Light Composition I—Seeing Well Composition II—Background and Perspective Composition III—Framing and Layering Let’s Go to Work—Landscapes Let’s Go to Work—Wildlife Let’s Go to Work—People and Relationships Let’s Go to Work—From Mundane to Extraordinary Let’s Go to Work—Special Occasions Let’s Go to Work—Family Vacations Advanced Topics—Research and Preparation Advanced Topics—Macro Photography Advanced Topics—Low Light Advanced Topics—Problem Solving After the Snap—Workﬂow and Organization Editing—Choosing the Right Image Telling a Story with Pictures— The Photo Essay

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Designed to meet the demand for lifelong learning, The Great Courses is a highly popular series of audio and video lectures led by top professors and experts. Each of our more than 400 courses is an intellectually engaging experience that will change how you think about the world. Since 1990, over 10 million courses have been sold.

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

engineered to grow The farm’s 280 plants thrive on nutrients dissolved in water. When the sun goes down, ribbons studded with red, white, and blue LEDs keep shining.

Yo u B u i lt Wh at? !

Vertical Veggie Farm

story b y clay Dillow p hotog rap hs b y Justin Steele

INSEt: AMNH/C. CHESEk

A soil-free gardening system developed by a DIY community

edible exhibit The American Museum of Natural History will host the window farm through August 11, 2013.

Britta riley grew up in rural southeast Texas, where locals with a mastery of gardening subsisted on their land. “They really turned me on to the idea of growing my own food,” Riley says. With the help of an open-source community, Riley now has her own productive plot— a 20-by-30-foot vertical garden hanging in a glass pavilion at New York City’s American Museum of Natural History— and a start-up to put similar farms in windows around the world.

After Riley moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 2003, she grew potted vegetables in her dimly lit apartment. The results were far from successful. Her plants strained for light on a confined windowsill, and they poured their energy into growing expansive root systems instead of lush, edible greens. A rooftop garden, meanwhile, exposed her crops to the Northeast’s finicky weather. Riley thought using the entire vertical, sunsoaked space of a window—not just the

March 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

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H2.0 sill—could grow more and healthier vegetables. Stringing planters together seemed like the answer. To keep her tiny vertical farm lightweight and encourage leafy growth, Riley tried hydroponics. The method forgoes heavy soil for a circulating liquid solution enriched with nutrients (see “SoilFree Living,” page 67). Suppliers catered only to big operations, so in 2009, Riley cobbled together a prototype from plastic bottles, a water pump, and a bucket. The pump drew fluid from the bucket through a tube and into the top planter; the fluid trickled down from planter to planter and collected in the bucket. It worked, if inelegantly; Riley grew a salad’s worth of greens per week. Neither an expert in agriculture nor in hydroponics, Riley launched an online forum, called Windowfarms, to crowdsource advice for her design. Users flocked to the site and, over the years, developed and tested more than a dozen different configurations before sharing their biggest breakthrough: an aquarium airlift pump. Instead of noisily sucking a column of liquid through tubing, the pump quietly lifts slugs of fluid atop bubbles of air. In 2011, Riley launched a Kickstarter campaign to produce a consumer-ready hydroponics kit for about $179. The project raised $257,307—more than five times her goal. Riley says the kit helps people who aren’t keen on building their own window-farming system from scratch get started. Meanwhile, the Windowfarm community continues to tweak designs and share tips. The simplest community-developed model (Version 2.0) can be built in an hour for about $30. Riley’s next project is to collect the wisdom of her 38,000 users and build a searchable database of urban hydroponic farming knowledge. “We’re not just building more farms but more farmers,” Riley says. “That’s how you make agriculture smarter.” C O N t I N U E d O N PA g E 6 7

POPULAR SCIENCE

March 2013

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U.S. GOV’T GOLD RELEASE AMERICA’S GOLD AUTHORITY.

GOLD AROUND $1,675 PER OZ. EXPERTS PREDICT $10,000/OZ. FEDERAL RESERVE LAUNCHES NEW STIMULUS GOLD PRICES SET TO SKYROCKET AS DOLLAR WEAKENS CITIZENS SCRAMBLE TO TRANSFER DOLLARS INTO GOLD

2013 U.S. GOV’T GOLD SPECIAL VAULT RELEASE

GOLD MARKET EXPLODES

REASONS TO BUY GOLD NOW

The U.S. Money Reserve Vault Facility today announces what could be the ﬁnal release of 5,000 U.S. Gov’t-Issued Gold Coins previously held in The West Point Depository/U.S. Mint. U.S. citizens will be able to buy these 2013 Gov’tIssued $5 Gold Coins at an incredible price of only $179.50 each. An amazing price because these U.S. Gov’tIssued Gold Coins are completely free of dealer markup. That’s correct – our cost. Please be advised: Our U.S. Gov’t Gold inventory will be available at this special price while supplies last or for up to 30 days. Gold, which is currently around $1,675 per ounce, is predicted by experts to have the explosive upside potential of reaching up to $10,000 per ounce. A limit of ten U.S. Gov’t-Issued Gold Coins per customer will be strictly adhered to. Orders that are not immediately reserved with our order center could be subject to cancellation and your checks returned uncashed. Order immediately to avoid disappointment. Call Toll-Free 1-800-308-9452.

If you had $50,000 in the bank and you transferred it into Gold at today’s prices, you would now have an opportunity to gain as much as 6 times its value – $300,000. That’s because when you convert money to Gold, you haven’t spent your money, but have transferred its value from a declining paper currency to a precious metal that is rising in both market and numismatic value. Gold can protect your money in today’s very volatile market. The collapse of the housing market, major bank failures, continued worldwide volatility and the U.S. debt at $16 trillion, are just a few reasons to move paper assets into Gold. Catastrophic debt and ﬂoundering economies have proven to be the perfect breeding ground that sends Gold through the roof. With prices currently around $1,675 per ounce, it is crucial that individuals move now because as soon as tomorrow, Gold could start its predicted steep rise to $10,000 per ounce. Do not miss out on this opportunity.

Gold has outperformed Nasdaq, Dow, and S&P 500 over the past ten years. In our opinion, smart individuals are moving up to 30% of their assets into U.S. Gov’t Gold Coins. With the National Debt at $16 trillion and rising, Gold may have an upside potential that has not been seen since the 1980s. Now could be the best time to take your money out of the bank and transfer it into legal tender U.S. Government Gold Coins. Our U.S. Gov’t Gold inventory will be priced at $179.50 per coin while supplies last or for up to 30 days. Call now before these U.S. Gold Coins sell out! We hope that everyone will have a chance to buy Gold at this current low price. Special arrangements can be made for Gold orders over $50,000.

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THE MARKETS FOR COINS ARE UNREGULATED. PRICES CAN RISE OR FALL AND CARRY SOME RISKS. THE COMPANY IS NOT AFFILIATED WITH THE U.S. GOVERNMENT AND THE U.S. MINT. PAST PERFORMANCE OF THE COIN OR THE MARKET CANNOT PREDICT FUTURE PERFORMANCE. SPECIAL AT-COST OFFER IS STRICTLY LIMITED TO ONLY ONE LIFETIME PURCHASE OF 10 AT-COST COINS (REGARDLESS OF PRICE PAID) PER HOUSEHOLD, PLUS SHIPPING AND INSURANCE. PRICE NOT VALID FOR PRECIOUS METALS DEALERS.

BEGINNING TODAY, TELEPHONE ORDERS WILL BE ACCEPTED ON A FIRST-COME, FIRST-SERVED BASIS ACCORDING TO THE TIME AND DATE OF THE ORDER

U.S. hydroponic farms took in $544 million in 2011, yet their crops made up less than 1 percent of the produce market

C O N t I N U E d f R O M PA g E 6 4

HOW IT WOrks 1 Premade Windowfarms planters hang vertically, one on top of the other, over a reservoir of nutrient-enriched water.

In the amount of time it takes to do this, you could have installed a Premium K&N Air Filter Designed to Improve Engine Performance.

2 Tubes carry slugs of fluid, lifted by a pump, to the topmost planter.

3 Bundles of thin roots grow around clay pellets that sit in a basket and absorb the fluid. These compact root systems soak up water and nutrients more efficiently than thicker roots do in soil, reserving energy for leafy growth.

2 4

4 Excess fluid trickles through the planters and into the reservoir, forming a closed loop.

Easily installs in just 5 minutes and never needs to be replaced

Soil-FREE liViNG Most crops thrive on nutrients in soil, but hydroponic plants grow only in liquid. Below are 12 elements that must go into hydroponic plant food and a sample of their functions:

Mg K Ca

Periodic table of elements Mn Fe

Just unclip the lid on the factory air box, remove the old filter, and replace it with a K&N, knowing you will never need to replace another air filter. And since they flow more air than a standard paper air filter, they can help your car run better too.

N P S

Cu Zn

nitrogen

Potassium

Magnesium

Sulfur

Part of proteins, enzymes, DNA, RNA, and more

Drives photosynthesis; prevents wilting

Component of chlorophyll molecules

Used in amino acids (which form proteins)

iron

Calcium

boron

Copper

Releases energy stored in starches

Component of rigid cell walls; slows aging

Essential in cell division and flower formation

Required to form pollen, lignins in woody plants

Zinc

Manganese

Molybdenum

Phosphorus

Needed to build chlorophyll for photosynthesis

Releases oxygen from water during photosynthesis

Aids in the absorption of nitrogen

Helps store and transport energy

March 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

Find yours today at K N F I LT E R S . C O M / P S 800-437-1304 ext. 2051

ÂŠ 2013 K&N Engineering, Inc.

H2.0

sT oRY BY Theodore Gray

WARNING Do not attempt. Burning acrylic emits toxic fumes and can cause severe burns. Oxygen gas can create powerful, unpredictable explosions.

PHoT oGRAPHs BY Mike Walker

G RAY M AT T E R

Blue flames signal efficient, high-temperature combustion in a stream of pure oxygen.

A proper nozzle could increase thrust, but the acrylic fuel serves as its own simple nozzle in this model.

The smoldering acrylic rod burns rapidly in the presence of pure oxygen gas.

A metal pipe feeds oxygen gas into the hollow acrylic cylinder.

Real Clear Rocket Science

Watch a hybrid rocket burn from the inside out Space tourism front-runner Virgin Galactic hopes to launch customers toward the edge of space later this year. To get them there, in a winged craft called SpaceShipTwo, the company will light up hybrid-fuel rockets. Hybrid-fuel engines marry two classic designs: liquid-fuel (like the space shuttle’s main engines, which combine liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen) and solid-fuel (like the shuttle’s boosters, which use solid aluminum and ammonium perchlorate). Solid-fuel engines are powerful, but they burn until the fuel is gone—whether you like it or not. Pilots can throttle liquidfuel engines, but they’re very complex machines. Hybrid-fuel engines are the inbetweens. They burn solid fuel with a liquid oxidizer, which pilots can adjust, but they 68

POPULAR SCIENCE

MARCH 2013

are far simpler than liquid-fuel engines. Learning how rocket engines work can be tricky, so wouldn’t it be cool to see through one? This is easier than you might think. I built a transparent rocket by drilling a half-inch-wide hole through the length of a 6-inch-long by 2-inch-wide acrylic rod. That’s the whole engine: The acrylic tube is the fuel, housing, and nozzle, all in one piece. To ensure the fuel would burn rapidly, I inserted a half-inch-thick metal pipe in one end and blew pure oxygen gas through the acrylic. (Liquid oxygen would be more authentic but far more dangerous; it’s hard to handle and can lead to explosions.) I stuck a wad of flaming paper towel into the acrylic rod to light it, then opened the oxygen-gas valve to generate a modest

BURNOUT Cutting the oxygen stops this hybrid rocket from burning acrylic and melting into goo.

amount of thrust. Increasing the gas flow boosted the engine’s power, transforming a gentle pencil flame into a roaring blast. The rocket is hypnotic: It’s like watching a fire from the point of view of the fuel. The force of combustion drives forward ripples of gooey, burning plastic until finally, the whole cylinder starts to melt. Then it’s time to cut the gas and figure out what to do with a flaming, half-molten mass of acrylic.

$6,670,000 Price of Shape Audio’s 474-pound Organic Harmony speaker, made almost entirely of 18-karat gold

H2.0 f o oD.i .Y .

Crispy, Crunchy Audio

courtesy WiLLiam gursteLLe

raid your kitchen to build this potato chip speaker in 1921, two scientists made the first modern loudspeaker out of magnets, wire, and paper. Now manufacturers use synthetic fibers and even ferrofluid. Why stop there? Your kitchen contains plenty of materials to build a functional woofer. A potato chip works as a soundemitting diaphragm here, but other rigid foods work just as well.

1 Gather the parts 25 feet of 30-gauge magnet wire Two ¾-inch-diameter-by¼-inch cylindrical refrigerator magnets Two cardboard strips, ½ inch by 1.5 inches A wooden cutting board or piece of particleboard One 6-inch-long, ¾-inchdiameter dowel Sandpaper A hot-glue gun Potato chips (thick-cut chips work best)

Time 5 to 10 minutes CoST A few bucks DiFFiCULTY ▯●●●●

story b y William Gurstelle

2 Build a voice coil Wrap the magnet wire tightly around the dowel to make a ⅜-inch-tall coil, leaving 12 inches of wire on each end. Smear the coil with hot glue, let it cool, and slide the coil off the dowel. Sand an inch of paint off the wire’s ends.

Assemble the speaker Fold the cardboard strips into a Z shape. Hot-glue the magnets and strips to the particleboard, and then the coil to a chip. Next, glue a cardboard strip to each end of the chip while centering the coil over the magnet.

4 Rock out Connect the sanded speaker wires to an amplified audio source, such as a home entertainment center (a portable player may lack enough power), and listen to the saltiest, crispiest music you’ve ever played.

New electronic lure may catch too many fish; one state bans it. Blinks A bass every seven minutes. by Mike Butler

NEWARK, DE– A new fishing technology that set a record for catching bass in Mexico is now showing its stuff in the U. S. It has out-fished shrimp bait in Washington State and beat top-selling U. S. lures three to one in Florida. The new technology is so effective one state, Wyoming, has banned its use. The breakthrough is a tiny, batterypowered electrical system that flashes a blood-red light down a lure s tail when its moved in water. Fish think it s an injured prey and strike. Some fishing authorities, like those in Wyoming, think that gives fishermen too much of an advantage. They may be right. Three fishermen using a flashing lure in Mexico caught 650 large-mouth bass in just 25 hours. That s a bass every seven minutes for each person, and a record for the lake they were fishing. They said the bass struck with such ferocity they hardly lost a strike. In Florida two professionals fished for four hours from the same boat. One used a flashing-red lure; the other used some top-selling U. S. lures. The new, “bleeding” lure caught three times as many fish. Before reporting this, I asked a veteran

blood red fisherman in my office for his opinion. Monday morning he charged into my office yelling “I caught six monster U.S. and international fish in an hour with patents pending this thing! Where did you get it?” Then I phoned an ichthyologist New Bite Light® lure uses a blinking red light to create appearance of a live, bleeding prey. Triggers strikes. (fish expert). “Predators lions, sharks,” he said, “will always go hours in the water. One kit of three Bite Lights® costs for the most vulnerable prey. Fish are predators, so if a fish sees a smaller fish $29.95, two or more kits cost $25.00 bleeding, it knows it s weakened and will each. Each kit has the same three models, but in different colors: S/h is only $7.00 strike. “If a lure could appear to be a live, no matter how many kits you buy. To order, go to www.FishingTechToday bleeding fish, a few fishermen could .com or call 1-800-873-4415 anytime or probably empty a lake with it.” day and ask for the Bite Light® lure I told him three almost did. (Item # kbl). Or send your name, address Fishes top, middle and deep and a check to Scientific Edge LLC There is a U.S. company that (Dept. BL-563), 40 E. Main Street, Suite offers a kit of three blinking lures 1416, Newark, DE 19711. (one each for shallow, middle and The company gives your deep water) called the Bite Light® money back, if you don t catch Each lure is a different color. They more fish and return your purwork in fresh or salt water, contain chase within 30-days. rattle attractants inside and last 300 BL-14H © Scientific Edge LLC 2013 Dept. BL-563

Pro je ct of t he mon t h

Inkball Wizard

Website of the month

story b y colleen Park

A hacked pinball machine that paints gameplay on posters Sam van Doorn couldn’t let a friend trash a 1970s-era pinball machine, so the Dutch graphic artist turned it into a printer. Van Doorn stripped away the game’s haggard facade and repaired its inner workings. Then he tested 50 types of paper as ready-to-ink playing surfaces. Van Doorn named the machine STYN after his friend Styn Geurts, who helped with the build. STYN’s pinballs bang around like those in any arcade classic, but they’re dipped in lithographic ink. Every roll marks the ball’s movement— and each game’s unique play pattern—onto the paper.

SeeedStudio.com

Time 6 months CoST $1,316

You just designed the perfect circuit board but don’t have the cash to fund its manufacture. Seeed Studio, an “open hardware” company in Shenzhen, China, helps tinkerers move their concepts onto the assembly line. Inventors can submit an electronics schematic to Seeed for review; a community of inventors and customers then improves the design with feedback. If interest is high, Seeed builds the device, sells it online, and shares its profits with the inventor. — C o l l e e n P A r k

L e f t t o r i g h t : c o u r t e s y s a m va n d o o r n ; c o u r t e s y s e e e d s t u d i o . c o m

H2.0

28 Hours Duration of the longest arcade pinball marathon, achieved by Alessandro Parisi in an Australian shopping mall on January 23, 2007

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Grow Young with HGH From the landmark book Grow Young with HGH comes the most powerful, over-thecounter health supplement in the history of man. Human growth hormone was first discovered in 1920 and has long been thought by the medical community to be necessary only to stimulate the body to full adult size and therefore unnecessary past the age of 20. Recent studies, however, have overturned this notion completely, discovering instead that the natural decline of Human Growth Hormone (HGH), from ages 21 to 61 (the average age at which there is only a trace left in the body) and is the main reason why the the body ages and fails to regenerate itself to its 25 year-old biological age. Like a picked flower cut from the source, we gradually wilt physically and mentally and become vulnerable to a host of degenerative diseases, that we simply weren’t susceptible to in our early adult years. Modern medical science now regards aging as a disease that is treatable and preventable and that “aging”, the disease, is actually acompilation of various diseases and pathologies, from everything, like a rise in blood glucose and pressure to diabetes, skin wrinkling and so on. All of these aging symptoms can be stopped and rolled back by maintaining Growth Hormone levels in

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Q: Does thinking too

hard wear you out?

GeOrGe mArKs/retrOFILe/Getty ImAGes

SHORT ANSWER

If it does, it’s all in your head.

LONG ANSWER The brain makes up about 1 ⁄50 of our body weight but consumes about one fifth of the oxygen we breathe. It’s natural to assume that overtaxing the cerebrum would leave one feeling lethargic, but that’s not quite true. The brain uses most of its energy just to maintain its baseline state; one tenth of our energy at rest goes to pumping sodium and potassium ions across brain-cell membranes, a simple process that keeps each neuron charged and ready. Specific mental activity, whether chatting with a friend or doing a crossword, does not suck up much extra energy. That said, studies show that people do slow down after performing taxing mental tasks. One experiment, conducted by Samuele Marcora of the University of Kent,

split subjects into two groups. Members of the first played a mentally challenging computer game. Those in the second group watched a documentary about trains or sports cars. Then everyone took an endurance test on an exercise bike. Marcora found that people who were “mentally exhausted” gave up pedaling more quickly than the documentary-watching controls. It was as if the heavy thinking had worn them out. At the same time, Marcora found no correlation between the mental task and measures of their cardiovascular response, such as blood pressure, oxygen consumption, or cardiac output. In other words, the mental workout didn’t seem to slow their bodies so much as it appeared to skew their perception of how hard a given physical task might be.

Q: Which came ﬁrst: the SHORT ANSWER LONG ANSWER

The egg

Chickens, as a species, became chickens through a long, slow process of evolution. At some point, a chickenlike bird produced an offspring that, due to some mutation in its DNA, crossed the threshold from mere chicken likeness into chicken actuality. That is to say, a proto-chicken gave birth to a real-life official chicken. And since that real-life official chicken came out of its own egg, we can say that the egg came first. Another way to look at the question would be to ask which came first in evolutionary history. Once again, the egg takes precedence. Many characteristics of the modern avian egg—namely an oblong, asymmetrical shape and a hardened shell—were in place before birds diverged from dinosaurs about 150 million years ago. “A lot of the traits that

we see in bird eggs evolved prior to birds in theropod dinosaurs,” says Darla Zelenitsky, of the University of Calgary. Another key moment in the history of avian eggs occurred at least 150 million years before that, when a subset of four-limbed vertebrates evolved to produce amniotic eggs. The embryos within the eggs were surrounded by three fluid-filled membranes that provide nourishment, protection, and a way to breathe. The earliest amniotic eggs contained large amounts of yolk, says James R. Stewart, a reproductive physiologist at East Tennessee State University. “You still see that in birds, crocodilians, and snakes,” he explains. Like other placental mammals, we humans lost our yolk somewhere along the line, but our eggs still come with a vestigial yolk sac.

PIER/GETTY IMAGES

chicken or the egg?

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Q: Do meteor

LONG ANSWER

showers ever run out of meteors? SHORT ANSWER

Yes, but it takes a long, long time.

Meteor showers occur when the Earth passes through a field of cosmic debris. As that debris crosses into the Earth’s atmosphere, each piece burns up, sometimes creating the blazing streaks of light we call shooting stars. These chunks of rock or ice are gone for good, so it’s true that a meteor shower loses some of its material, or fuel, with every flurry.

ADAstrA/Getty ImAGes

Have a burning science question? E-mail it to fyi@popsci.com, or tweet @popsci hashtag #PopSciFYI.

But there are ways for a shower to be replenished, says David Meisel, executive director of the American Meteor Society. The Geminids, which appear every December, are fragments from an asteroid called 3200 Phaethon. When 3200 Phaethon swings past the sun, it heats up and pieces break off, littering its orbit with fuel for shooting stars. Given that the asteroid is about three miles in diameter, it will take a long, long time—“millions of years,” says Meisel—for all that material to be exhausted. Even if the asteroid or comet behind a meteor shower were to break apart altogether, it would still take tens of thousands of years for the dust to disperse. A small portion would burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere, but most of the dust would collide with itself and spiral into the sun. A meteor shower doesn’t have to run out of fuel to disappear. The outer planets can tug a comet out of its natural periodicity, such that its debris may lie in Earth’s orbital path on one pass and not at all on the next. “You can’t depend on a comet to produce a nice, steady stream all the time,” says Meisel. “If we understood it all, there would be no fun.”

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Popular Science reserves the right to refuse any advertising order. Only publication of an advertisement shall constitute ﬁnal acceptance of an order. Publication does not constitute an agreement for continued publication. All orders are subject to the applicable rate card, copies of which are available upon request sent to the address provided. Popular Science, 2 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10016

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From The archiv es replay phot os.com / popula rsci en cephot ost or e

AUGUST 1964

Deeper Diver s t o r y b y Taylor Kubota

Own This COver! Order prints of vintage PopSci covers from our online store.

Undersea Science In the fall of 1986, Popular Science contributor Robert Gannon (center) became the first magazine writer to dive in Alvin. Gannon’s mile-and-a-half descent off the coast of New Jersey was part of an expedition to study how underwater canyons form.

POPULAR SCIENCE magazine, Vol. 282, No. 3 (ISSN 161-7370, USPS 577-250), is published monthly by Bonnier Corp., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. Copyright ©2013 by Bonnier Corp. All rights reserved. Reprinting in whole or part is forbidden except by permission of Bonnier Corp. Mailing Lists: We make a portion of our mailing list available to reputable frms. If you would prefer that we not include your name, please write to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing ofces. Subscription Rates: $19.95 for 1 year. Please add $10 per year for Canadian addresses and $20 per year for all other international addresses. GST #R-122988066. Canada Post Publications agreement #40612608. Canada Return Mail: Pitney Bowes, P.O. Box 25542, London, ON N6C 6B2. Printed in the USA. Subscriptions processed electronically. Subscribers: If the post ofce alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within two years. Photocopy Permission: Permission is granted by POPULAR SCIENCE® for libraries and others registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) to photocopy articles in this issue for the fat fee of $1 per copy of each article or any part of an article. Send correspondence and payment to CCC (21 Congress St., Salem, MA 01970); specify CCC code 0161-7370/85/$1.00–0.00. Copying done for other than personal or reference use without the written permission of POPULAR SCIENCE® is prohibited. Address requests for permission on bulk orders to POPULAR SCIENCE, 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016 for foreign requests. Editorial Ofces: Address contributions to POPULAR SCIENCE, Editorial Dept., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. We are not responsible for loss of unsolicited materials; they will not be returned unless accompanied by return postage. Microflm editions are available from Xerox University Microflms Serial Bid Coordinator, 300 N. Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48106.

POPULAR SCIENCE

march 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE ARChIvE

In August 1964, the Popular Science cover featured “stubby little Alvin,” one of a new class of submersibles designed to explore the ocean. The 22-foot-long sub had a mechanical arm and could dive 6,000 feet for up to eight-and-a-half hours. Because the steel sphere that housed Alvin’s crew was only 1.33 inches thick, the sub weighed just 13 tons; it could drop its batteries and float to the surface unassisted in the event of an emergency. Alvin’s first big mission, in 1966, was to search for a hydrogen bomb that had fallen into the Mediterranean Sea after a B-52 bomber crashed into a tanker during in-flight refueling. The sub’s crew located the bomb in just 80 days, and a torpedo-recovery vehicle helped bring it back to the surface intact. Since then, Alvin has been active nearly nonstop; it’s now the world’s oldest research sub. This year, Alvin will get a $40-million makeover, including HD cameras and a larger cockpit. Turn to page 28 to learn more.

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