Popular science usa 2013 04 by Science and Technology

HOW IT WORKS

Massive Payloads Three Rocket Cores

INSIDE AMAZING MACHINES SATELLITES DNA SEQUENCERS A ROBOTIC BUTCHER

AND

THE FALCON HEAVY LIFT ROCKET

KIBBLE! Mary Roach on the science of dog food

3.8 Million Pounds of Thrust

SPECIAL REPORT: NASA’S WARP DRIVE

Teach your kids to play dirty. Ten pack in the fun, with 35.4 cubic feet of cargo space behind the second row of seats, and stain-resistant, odor-repellent cloth seating because, well, you know, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve got kids back there. And maybe a wet dog. Te new Santa Fe. Hyundai.com Sport 2.0T model shown. Hyundai is a registered trademark of Hyundai Motor Company. All rights reserved. ÂŠ2013 Hyundai Motor America.

APRIL 2013 Volume 282 No. 4

contents

Sonny White runs an advanced propulsion lab called Eagleworks at Johnson Space Center in Houston .

JACK THOMPSON; ON THE COVER: NICK KALOTERAKIS

FEATURES

WARP FACTOR Meet Sonny White, the NASA scientist who claims to have the secret to traveling faster than light. By Konstantin Kakaes

How It Works Peer inside the guts of a heavy-lift rocket, a $1,000 genome sequencer, a robotic butcher, and five other awesome technologies.

The Chemistry of Kibble Mary Roach explores a little-known area of food science: getting cats and dogs to gulp down their dinners.

ACCESS VIDEOS, ANIMATIONS, AND MORE WITH THE POPSCI INTERACTIVE APP. JUST HOVER YOUR SMARTPHONE OVER PAGES WITH THIS ICON.

DEPARTM EN TS

04 06 08 76 88

From the Editor Peer Review Megapixels: An unlikely friendship FYI: Do lobotomies work? From the Archives

WHAT’S NEW 11 A projector for small rooms

12 14 16 18 20

The Goods: Convertible fridge and more! Cadillac goes electric Grab-and-go kayak kit Smarter, faster LEGO robots Can health trackers diagnose illness?

HEADLINES 23 Platform-free oil rigs 26 A robot made with living cells

28 Lessons from a moon-lander crash 30 The largest telescope dish on Earth 32 How to put more stuff into less space HOW 2.0 69 A DIY tractor for the postapocalypse 72 Gray Matter: Whipping up fire tornadoes 74 Turn a lightbulb into an April Fools’ trick 75 Build a dial-in resistor

APRIL 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

HOW DARKNESS WORKS

It was ﬁtting that we learned the truth about the Super Bowl blackout while putting together this issue. advocates of remaking the country’s electrical system told us this—no smart grid would have prevented it. Most important, we got a solid refresher course in things like how circuit breakers work, how electricity flows from a utility to a customer, and how long it takes to power down and restart the thousands of halide lights it takes to illuminate a football field—the real-life, nowand-today mechanisms that keep a stadium running and our TVs on. I still believe that America is going to need a smart grid—and soon. But it was fitting that we learned the truth about the Super Bowl blackout while putting together our How It Works issue. In these pages, we decode the intricacies of beehives, earthquake simulators, and the world’s most powerful spacecraft. Exciting, amazing stuff. But at the end of this particular scramble, we were reminded that it’s our job to understand how the world actually works—not just how we think it does.

ART Art Director Todd Detwiler Photo Editor Thomas Payne Designer, Information Graphics Katie Peek Designer, Motion Graphics Michael Moreno Digital Producer Griffin Plonchak Digital Art Director David Quaranta Digital Imaging Hiroki Tada POPULARSCIENCE.COM Online Content Director Suzanne LaBarre Senior Editor Paul Adams Associate Editor Dan Nosowitz Video Producer Dan Bracaglia Web Intern Krislyn Placide Contributing Writers Rebecca Boyle, Clay Dillow, Emily Elert, Colin Lecher

Executive Vice President Eric Zinczenko BONNIER TECHNOLOGY GROUP

Vice President/Group Publisher Steven B. Grune Vice President, Corporate Sales John Driscoll Associate Publisher Anthony Ruotolo Executive Assistant Christopher Graves Associate Publisher, Marketing Mike Gallic Financial Director Tara Bisciello Eastern Sales Director Jeff Timm Northeast Advertising Office David Ginsberg, Margaret Kalaher, Caitlyn Welch Photo Manager Sara Schiano Ad Assistant Amanda Smyth Midwest Managers Doug Leipprandt, John Marquardt Ad Assistants Katy Marinaro, Kelsie Phillippo West Coast Account Managers Rob Hoeck, Stacey Lakind, Sara Laird O’Shaughnessy Ad Assistants Sam Miller-Christiansen, Janice Nagel Detroit Manager Ed Bartley, Jeff Roberge Ad Assistant Diane Pahl Classified Advertising Sales Ross Cunningham, Shawn Lindeman, Frank McCaﬀrey, Chip Parham Advertising Coordinator Irene Reyes Coles Advertising Director, Digital Alexis Costa Digital Operations Manager Rochelle Rodriguez Digital Manager Anna Armienti Digital Project Coordinators Elizabeth Besada, Alexandra Wynn Digital Promotions Director Linda Gomez Group Sales Development Director Alex Garcia Senior Sales Development Manager Kat Collins Sales Development Managers Kate Gregory, Perkins Lyne, Kelly Martin Group Director, Creative Services Mike Iadanza Marketing Design Directors Jonathan Berger, Ingrid Reslmaier Marketing Designer Lori Christiansen Online Producer Steve Gianaca Group Events & Promotion Director Beth Hetrick Director of Events Michelle Cast Special Events Manager Erica Johnson Events & Promotions Manager Laura Nealon Events & Promotions Coordinator Lynsey White Promotions Manager Eshonda Caraway-Evans Consumer Marketing Director Bob Cohn Single-Copy Sales Director Vicki Weston Publicity Manager Caroline Andoscia Caroline@andoscia.com Human Resources Director Kim Putman Production Manager Erika Hernandez Group Production Director Laurel Kurnides

Chairman Jonas Bonnier Chief Executive Officer Dave Freygang Executive vice president Eric Zinczenko Chief Content Officer David Ritchie Chief Financial Officer Randall Koubek Chief Brand Development Officer Sean Holzman Vice President, Consumer Marketing Bruce Miller Vice President, Production Lisa Earlywine Vice President, Corporate Communications Dean Turcol General Counsel Jeremy Thompson

JACO B WA R D

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POPULAR SCIENCE

APRIL 2013

MARIUS BUGGE

N THE LAST Sunday before this issue went to press, the lights went out at the Super Bowl. I sat there, gaping, with a drink in my hand, as the ads, the field, Phil Simms, and one of the biggest televised events went dark in front of 108 million viewers. And then I put down the drink and got on the phone. The editors immediately went to work sorting things out. Was this a failure of Entergy, the local utility? Had the incredible power demands of the Super Bowl outstripped the rebuilt infrastructure of post-Katrina New Orleans? And was this the most damning evidence yet that the country needs the fabled smart grid we’ve been weighing all these years? We interviewed everyone we could find who’d been affected by the loss of power and who might be able to explain it. We spoke with producers at CBS who had to suddenly sort out who in the stadium still had a working mike. We spoke with smart-grid experts at MIT. We interviewed Gus Lodato, owner of a restaurant in Queens, whose all-you-can-eat-and-drink deal went south on him when suddenly he had to hand out 35 more minutes’ worth of booze and grub. Here’s what we learned: The power loss was pretty normal, all things considered. A relay—the industrial equivalent of a circuit breaker—blew in the stadium. On Twitter, Entergy indelicately blamed the “customer’s side” at first but later took responsibility for the problem. That’s it. As far as we can tell at press time—even the most ardent

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 Researchers Claire Levenson, Sophia Li, Erika Villani 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, Susan E. Matthews, Ajai Raj

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science fair

A BIG ONE When a Norfolk Southern train hauling chlorine through Graniteville, South Carolina, derailed in 2005, toxic gas poured into the town.

Calling students of all ages! POPULAR SCIENCE is hosting its 1st Annual Science Fair. We are calling on the youth of America to submit science projects to help improve the world that we live in. projects per grade level :

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Grades K-5: Earth Science Grades 6-8: Physical Science Grades 9-12: Biology College Students: Chemistry

ES TO UPGRAD ULD CO VERDUE LONG-O RAIL SYSTEM AIN TR ICA’S XT BIG AMER E THE NE T AR Y EN PREV E. SO WH CTANT PH RO RELU CATAST DS SO ILROA THE RA ? EM E TH TO MAK

System Failure Kudos for publishing Dan Baum’s comprehensive railroad safety article [“Derailed,” February 2013]. It provided a perspective that is easily lost when the events involved are widely dispersed in time and place. Doug Koehler Marshﬁeld, Wis. Railroads are by far the safest, most efficient, and most environmentally friendly mode of transportation. Why not do a story on 18-wheelers? Studies have shown that if big trucks paid road-use taxes commensurate with the expense of maintaining roads due to truck traffic, much of the freight that goes by truck would go by rail instead. That cargo could be shipped more safely, more cheaply, and with less environmental impact. John Shomin Liberal, Mo.

Michael Williams @mtwilliams717 Most deﬁnitely an advanced robot. I would not want other humans to risk their lives.

Squeeker @alienintraining The human would keep looking long after a statistical program has told the robot to give up.

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Popular Science @PopSci 24 Jan If you were trapped in a burning building, would you rather be rescued by an advanced robot or a human?

Win $7,000 in grants!

THE FUTURE NOW

Y BY ST OR UM BA DA N

J. Nathan Matias @natematias I would rather be rescued by Arnold Schwarzenegger, personally.

To the editor: letters@popsci.com FYI questions: fyi@popsci.com Ask a Geek: h20@popsci.com Story queries: queries@popsci.com Comments may be edited for length and clarity. We regret that we cannot answer unpublished letters.

UP! In September, JP Aerospace sent two POPULAR SCIENCE business cards to the edge of space on a helium balloon. The cards accompanied 1,000 student research projects. We Apologize . . . The Sony BDV-N790W magnetic fluid speakers on page 14 of the January issue have a frequency range of 200 Hz–20 kHz, not 87.5 MHz–108 MHz. On page 52 of the February issue, the train that derailed near Philadelphia International Airport was operated by Conrail, not CSX.

FREE TO ENTER! popsci.com/sciencefair 06

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APRIL 2013

This product is from sustainably managed forests and controlled sources.

Sometimes your hands could use a hand.

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APRIL 2013

SUPERVLIEGZUS 2010/GETTY IMAGES

M E GA P I X E L S

Friends in Low Places sT oRY B Y Susan E. Matthews

In the rainforests of South America, squirrel monkeys and capybaras would never meet. While squirrel monkeys live in trees up to 60 feet high, capybaras—the world’s largest rodents—dwell along river banks. But at the Beekse Bergen Safari Park in the Netherlands, the two species have shared an enclosure for eight years now, and they seem to be friends. The monkeys ride and groom the capybaras. They even eat and play together. Interspecies relationships are more frequent between captive animals, says behavioral ecologist Marc Bekoff. Because keepers feed them, they can spend time getting to know their enclosure mates instead of foraging for food. In 2005, a similar arrangement at a zoo in Japan went sour when a capybara mauled a monkey to death. But Bekoff says that, for the most part, zoos are safe environments for odd relationships.

APRIL 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

THE ALL-NEW ACCORD HAS EARNED A LOT OF RECOGNITION.

Car and Driver1 2013 10Best

KBB.com 2013 10 Best Family Cars4

“The Accord is the most-durable, longest-lasting car in its class.” – Polk7

A 2013 Edmunds.com Top Recommended sedan under $25,0002

NHTSA 5-Star Overall Rating5

2013 IIHS TOP SAFETY PICK+

KBB.com 2013 Best Resale Value Awards: Best Mid-Size Car3

2013 ALG Residual Value Award — Midsize Car6

Cars.com/USA Today Midsize Sedan Showdown Winner

BUT THE GREATEST RECOGNITION WE COULD EVER EARN IS YOURS.

The All-New Honda Accord facebook.com/hondaaccord 1

Car and Driver, January 2013. 2For more information, visit Edmunds.com. Edmunds and the Edmunds.com logo are registered trademarks of Edmunds.com, Inc. 3Vehicle’s projected resale value is specific to the 2013 model year. For more information, visit Kelley Blue Book’s KBB.com. Kelley Blue Book is a registered trademark of Kelley Blue Book Co., Inc. 4For more information, visit KBB.com. Kelley Blue Book is a registered trademark of Kelley Blue Book Co., Inc. 5Based on frontal crash, side crash and rollover categories. Government 5-Star Safety Ratings are part of NHTSA’s New Car Assessment Program (www.SaferCar.gov). Model tested with standard side airbags (SABs). Vehicles tested under the new program cannot be compared to MY10 and earlier vehicles. 6ALG is the industry benchmark for residual values and depreciation data, www.alg.com. 7Durability based on longevity. Longevity based on Polk U.S. vehicles in operation registration statistics 1998-2010 for Accord and competing models.

The ultimate robot kit page 18

PLUS: Are tiny personal trackers the future of health care? page 20

EDITED B Y Corinne Iozzio wHAT sNEw@PoPscI.coM

Big Screen, Small Room

LG Laser TV MAX SCREEN SIZE 100 inches BULB LIFESPAN 25,000 hours PRICE $8,999

Clear, 100-inch images from short distances

rojecting a large image in a small room is almost impossible, an unfortunate result of how most projectors work. In them, light passes from a bulb though a colored LCD panel and diffuses across a room. The farther back the projector, the more the light spreads, expanding the image; for example, a standard projector 12 feet from the wall produces a 100-inch picture. To create the same image from less than two feet away, engineers at LG used lasers instead of a bulb in the new Laser TV HD projector. The stronger, lessdiffuse light is easier to manipulate at short distances. The projector alters images in two ways. First, its processor runs the picture data through algorithms that expand the bottom corners of the image to compensate for the severe angle of the projection. The augmented image then bounces off a concave mirror opposite the laser light source, which expands the image and reflects it up, out, and onto the wall. The resulting picture is as bright and sharp as that of most flat-panel HDTVs.

sT oRY B Y Michael Berk PHoT oGRAPH B Y Sam Kaplan

APRIL 2013

P O P UL AR S CIE N C E

WHAT ’ S NEW

The ZoneGuard is the first radio to translate NOAA weather alerts into both audio and visual warnings. When dangerous weather conditions approach a specified county, the halfpound radio flashes lights that correspond to the severity of the alert: green for advisory, orange for watch, and red for warning. Etón ZoneGuard $40

A dozen great ideas in gear

The SmartSound Case amplifies a smartphone speaker without sapping any battery power. A flap unfolds from the back of the plastic case and, similar to a horn, passively increases sound by up to 10 decibels. It also doubles as a kickstand. SmartSound Case $40

E D I T E D B Y Amber Williams

The lower-right side of the T9000 fourdoor refrigerator can switch from fridge to freezer. To convert the six-cubic-foot section, a user selects the mode on an LCD screen, signaling two compressors and three evaporators to adjust the temperature and humidity levels accordingly. Samsung T9000 Four-Door Refrigerator $3,999

With the Kyocera Torque, callers will be able to hear their conversations anywhere—even in loud rooms. In place of the phone’s speaker, an actuator sends tiny vibrations through soft tissue in the face and directly to the eardrum. Kyocera Torque $150 (with two-year contract)

The 4.4-ounce foam Fly Max Football can soar 100 yards. A hollow center allows air to move through the ball, minimizing resistance. And adjustable fins increase spin and therefore distance. Geospace Fly Max Football $20

POPULAR SCIENCE

APRIL 2013

THX’s tune-up app simplifies surround-sound setup. After connecting a smartphone to a stereo receiver, a user enters the number of speakers in his system. The app then displays the ideal speaker layout and sends test tones to each one to make sure it’s in the right spot. THX tune-up $1.99

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: SAM KAPLAN; COURTESY KORKERS; COURTESY OMEGA; COURTESY PLAIR; COURTESY MOEN; SAM KAPLAN; COURTESY STEELSERIES; COURTESY THX; COURTESY G E O S PA C E I N T E R N AT I O N A L ; C O U R T E S Y K Y O C E R A ; C O U R T E S Y S A M S U N G ; C O U R T E S Y K E N O H C O R P

The KGB boot adapts to varying terrains. It has swappable rubber soles, which stay in place with plastic teeth and have different treads for rock, snow, or ice. Korkers KGB with Vibram OmniTrax $230

The Seamaster Aqua Terra is the first watch completely resistant to magnetism. Engineers made the watch from nonferrous metals, which are unaffected by magnetic fields that can interfere with accuracy. It can resist more than 1.5 Tesla—about the strength of an MRI machine. Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra >15,000 gauss $6,500 (available fall)

The PLAiR streams any Web video to a TV. First, a user downloads the PLAiR app onto a WiFi-enabled device and plugs the accompanying dongle into a TV’s HDMI port. After the user selects a video, the app sends the relevant source URL to the dongle—a Wi-Fi receiver—which then streams the video itself. PLAiR $99

The Apex keyboard will improve a gamer’s response times. Background software tracks a player’s keystrokes and generates a visual map that can be used to reprogram the keyboard. For example, by moving keys that are frequently pressed in tandem closer to one another, a player could speed up keystrokes. SteelSeries Apex $100

The MotionSense is the first kitchen faucet that cooks don’t have to touch to operate. Motion directly above a batterypowered infrared sensor on the top of the faucet turns the water on; the same motion turns it off. Moen MotionSense $399

The waterproof Walkman Sports MP3 Player will play for eight hours at depths up to 6.5 feet. The earbuds contain both the player and battery, and an adjustable elastomer band holds them in place while swimming. Sony Walkman Sports MP3 Player $100

ADDITIo NA L R E Po RTING BY Corinne Iozzio and Susan E. Matthews

A P RI L 2013

POPU L AR S C I E N C E

1935 The model year of the first Chevy Suburban; its continuous 78-year run is the longest in U.S. automotive history

WHAT ’ S NEW DREAM MACHINE

Uptown Volt The Cadillac version of Chevrolet’s plug-in hybrid is finally on its way. s T o R Y B Y Chelsea Sexton

In January 2009, General Motors unveiled the luxury cousin of the Chevrolet Volt—the Cadillac Converj concept. Yet almost immediately, GM started sending mixed signals. One moment the Converj was approved for production; the next it was on hold. Finally, at the most recent Detroit Auto Show in January, GM revealed the car the Converj had become: the 2014 Cadillac ELR. The two-door plug-in hybrid pairs a powertrain pulled straight from the Volt with Cadillac styling and a high-toned interior. The car is scheduled to go into production late this year. But it’s still unclear how committed to it GM actually is. At the Detroit show, group vice president Bob Ferguson insisted that the ELR will be built Cadillac only in very limited numbers. But if drivers embrace the ELR car, GM executives almost certainly will as well. POWERTRAIN Plug-in hybrid RANGE 35 miles electric-only; 300 miles with gasoline backup AVAILABLE Early 2014 PRICE Not set

CADILLAC BODYWORK

STRATEGIC ENERGY RESERVES

The ELR runs on GM’s Voltec powertrain—a lithium-ion battery pack and a pair of electric motors mated to a backup gasoline engine. The specs are also extremely Volt-like: roughly 35 miles of all-electric range from the 16.5kWh battery before the 1.4L gas engine kicks in. Total driving range: about 300 miles. And with 295 foot-pounds of nearly instantaneous torque, the ELR should be even more fun to drive than the surprisingly nimble Volt.

The sharply angled body and 20-inch wheels are for show, but the LED headlamps increase eﬃciency, and the hidden door handles and other exterior design tweaks give the ELR a respectably aerodynamic coeﬃcient of drag of 0.305—only slightly less slippery than the Volt.

Like the 2013 Volt, the ELR has a “hold mode,” which allows drivers to reserve remaining battery charge for later use—say, for when it’s time to leave the Interstate and drive around town, where battery power stretches farther.

POPULAR SCIENCE

APRIL 2013

PLASTIC BE GONE Designers replaced the Volt’s much-maligned iPod-looking center stack with leather and wood. The ELR comes standard with Cadillac’s CUE system, which in addition to the usual navigation and stereo options will deliver information on driving eﬃciency, energy use, and charging options.

RECHARGE ON DEMAND With Regen on Demand, drivers can use steering-wheelmounted paddles to quickly adjust the strength of the regenerative braking system. For example, it’s possible to quickly switch to heavy regeneration on a long downhill stretch to save brakes while recharging the battery. COURTESY GM

VOLT-LIKE POWERTRAIN

WHAT ’ S NEW

200 Multiple of its own weight a sheet of paper folded into an accordion can hold, enough to support a full bottle of wine

THE SET UP

Stow and Go

A kayaking kit that won’t eat up storage space s To R Y BY Elbert Chu

KAYAK The Oru folds into a water-ready craft in five minutes. Instead of a frame, the structure folds to support itself. Four folded layers, for instance, form the nose like a milk-carton spout. Rubber gaskets seal the top of the 12-foot boat. Oru Kayak $850

PH o To GR APH BY Sam Kaplan

FLARE The reusable Odeo can replace an entire bundle of pyrotechnic flares. Instead of a flame, the battery-powered flare has five eyesafe lasers attached to a 240rpm motor. It creates the light of three regular flares and will shine for more than five hours. Odeo $240 3

PHONE PROTECTION To survive going overboard, a phone needs waterproofing and flotation. The LifeProof system has a waterproof case and buoy. The float is a four-rubber blend that’s both rigid enough to grip the phone and buoyant enough to save it. LifeProof Fre $80 LifeJacket $40 5

LIFE JACKET The low-profile M.I.T. 100 inflates faster than most vests. When submerged, water dissolves a wood-based powder that covers a pin, which strikes the CO2 inflation cartridge. The process takes less than four seconds. Mustang Survival M.I.T. 100 $161 5

PADDLE Even the most punishing wave won’t snap the carbon-fiber X-Range paddle, whose titanium joints help it withstand up to 900 pounds of force. Assembled, the paddle weighs less than two pounds—the lightest in its class. Lendal X-Range $470 16

POPULAR SCIENCE

APRIL 2013

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WHAT ’ S NEW

WORLD’S FASTEST RUBIK’S CUBE SOLVERS

5.27 seconds Lego Mindstorms Cubestormer II (2011) 5.66 seconds Australian Feliks Zemdegs (2012)

FI V E FEAT URES

Modular Robotics The most customizable personal robot

ifteen years ago, Lego released the Mindstorms Robotics Invention System, and amateur roboticists went wild. With it, they could snap together motorized creations that they could program with an intelligent brick. Since then, the Mindstorms online community has shared more than 17,000 designs— as varied as automatic toilet ﬂushers and bumper cars—and started robotics leagues and engineering curriculums. This summer, Lego will release the EV3, the ﬁrst Mindstorms update in seven years. The kit will allow builders to create tens of thousands of new robots, all of which will be smarter, faster, and more responsive than before.

s T o R Y B Y Corinne Iozzio

1 Intelligence upgrade The heart of the EV3 is an upgraded processing brick. A 300-megahertz processor runs up to 10 times faster than its predecessor, so the brick can control more appendages and monitor more sensors at once. The system also has 64 megabytes of RAM to boost response time and 16 megabytes of storage.

Lego Mindstorms EV3 PIECES 594 PRICE $350 AVAILABLE Summer

2 Sensor suite EV3 robots can navigate autonomously. Designers embedded an infrared proximity sensor in the eyes, so robots can follow, attack, or run from what they encounter. Users will be able to buy additional bricks with gyroscopes, which will enable the robot to balance itself.

3 Faster motors Each kit comes with three motors. Two large ones transfer their 170 rpms to double-sided output drives; each motor can move pairs of legs, arms, or tentacles independently of one another. The third, smaller motor spins at 250 rpm and handles minute actions, such as firing ammo or flicking fingers. 4 Wireless control A Bluetooth radio on the processing brick’s circuit board lets builders control and program their robots through an iOS or Android app. They can also connect a Wi-Fi radio via a USB port on the processing brick; with a robot linked to a router, it’s accessible from anywhere. 5 Expansion-ready For massive, complicated creations, builders can daisy-chain up to four processing bricks together. A “master” brick sends commands to the other three bricks that rely on it and relays instructions to extremities, such as a command to pinch together a thumb and forefinger. P HoToG RAP H B Y Brian Klutch

POPULAR SCIENCE

APRIL 2013

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Shortage of surgeons, specialists, and primary-care doctors the U.S. will face by 2020, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges

What ’ s neW

OUTLO OK

An App a Day How personal trackers will change health care

n the privacy of their own bathrooms, people can find out whether they’re pregnant or have HIV. They can even swab for DNA to unravel their ancestry. Yet it’s difficult to answer simpler questions, like “Do I have the flu?” That’s because the most advanced diagnostic device in most medicine cabinets is a thermometer. Regularly measuring and understanding anything more complex than body temperature, such as respiratory rates and heart rhythms, is a physician’s job. So patients often go to the doctor when they don’t need to or don’t go when they should. By providing doctors with better data and patients with better decision-making tools, personal health monitors and diagnostics could break that cycle. In the last few years, medical-device manufacturers have begun using miniaturized sensors and mobile phones to gather clinical information. The AliveCor and iBGStar iPhone attachments, for example, monitor heart rhythm and blood glucose, respectively. The Tinké converts heart and respiratory rates into a stress rating. And devices that gather a broader range of metrics are on the way. The Scanadu Scout, a pocket-sized Bluetooth-enabled dongle that will be available later this year, uses several kinds of sensors, including infrared, to measure blood flow, blood oxygen, electrical heart activity, temperature, and heart rate. (The company is competing for the Tricorder X PRIZE, a competition to create the first no-contact mobile diagnostic tool.) The sheer volume of data produced by a network of devices like the Scanadu 20

P O PU La R sCIe nC e

aPRi L 2013

s to r y by Rebecca Boyle

illustration b y Paul Lachine

Patients go to the doctor when they don’t need to or don’t go when they should. could be a boon for public-health workers. A person who tracks one health metric every hour will generate nearly four times the amount of data in the Library of Congress in his lifetime. Spread over several metrics and many people, the data could provide a snapshot of national or local health at any given time. Epidemiologists could use that information to spot early indicators of disease and issue alerts before the infection has a chance to spread. For individuals, personal data could be paired with software-based diagnostic tools. Patients with hypertension, for

example, would be alerted to pressure spikes, which could enable them to better manage their condition with diet and exercise. Scanadu is developing apps that can analyze smartphone images of usercollected blood or urine samples and detect respiratory infections. The company plans to refine its software to synthesize a data sample, diagnose common ailments, and let patients know when they’re sick enough to need a doctor. For the first time, emergencies will be emergencies, and colds will be colds—and doctors won’t be the only people who can see the difference.

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A robot with living cells page 26

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F r o M t o P : A P P H o t o / u . S . C o A S t G u A r D , P e t t Y o F F i C e r 2 n D C l A S S Z A C H A r Y PA i n t e r , F i l e ; t i M A u B r Y / G r e e n P e A C e / A F P / G e t t Y i M A G e S

BEACHED After snapping its tow line in high winds, Shell’s drilling rig Kulluk was grounded off the coast of Alaska this winter [left]. It was later safely towed to a harbor [bottom].

Under the Sea Why moving rigs to the seaﬂoor could make Arctic drilling less risky

RILLING IN THE ARCTIC is a matter of when and not if. With summer sea ice having declined 30 percent since 1979 and continuing to shrink, companies are racing to prospect above 60° North. The Arctic contains an estimated 90 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas—nearly a quarter of the world’s undiscovered supply. Royal Dutch Shell has already spent $4.5 billion drilling off the coast of northern Alaska. ConocoPhillips wants to sink a well in the Chukchi Sea by next year. And Exxon announced a partner-

story b y Damon Tabor

ship with a Russian company to drill in the waters north of Siberia in 2015. But the industry’s current fleet of equipment—floating rigs and oil- and gasprocessing platforms—is ill-equipped for the Arctic’s Manhattan-size icebergs and 60mph winds. To evade surface hazards, Norway’s Statoil is developing the world’s first “seafloor factory,” a platform-free oilor gas-production system housed entirely on the seabed. The logic is straightforward. Moving operations underwater could decrease the risk posed by sea ice and violent storms—and, according to an industry website, be useful for “neatly

April 2013

PoPulAr SCienCe

250 million years Time it takes for fossils to become fuels

HEADL I NE S

Threats to subsea installations will include icebergs shearing open wellheads and even the specter of “strudel scour.”

THE TR END

sidestepping” the environmental issues associated with drilling in sensitive areas. For oil companies, the economics are compelling. Massive production platforms cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and require an expensive crew to operate; seafloor factories are cheaper to construct because they are smaller and can be run remotely. In the past several years, both Statoil and Shell Oil have begun testing subsea gas compressors—a crucial piece of a factory—in water-filled pits that simulate the ocean. Because oil and gas fields lose pressure as they age, companies use powerful platform-based compressors that pressurize fuel to boost flow through pipelines. Subsea compressors are actually more efficient than platformbased ones: The closer the equipment is to a well, the less energy it needs to drive hydrocarbons through a pipeline. By 2015, Statoil expects to have deployed the first subsea compressor, but it will be attached to a platform for power. Shell’s fully underwater version will get

all its energy through seafloor cables. Much of the other technology needed for subsea factories has already been built. The first computerized subsea blowout preventer was installed on a semisubmersible drilling rig in 1983. The first subsea separator, which removes sand and water from oil and reinjects the unwanted material under the seafloor, was introduced in 2007. (And Norway’s Marine Technology Research Institute is even designing an Arctic manned submarine that will be able to stay underwater for weeks to service subsea equipment.) Companies will need to develop an underwater power and communications grid. Then, the final challenge will be integrating all the various components. “The biggest hurdle is connecting the pieces we have today,” says Rune Mode Ramberg, Statoil’s chief engineer for subsea technology. “We are doing water injection, we are doing separation, and we are now doing gas compression. It’s about putting all these things together.” Statoil plans to assemble a subsea

factory by 2020, but the challenges of deploying such a system in the Arctic are formidable. Threats to subsea installations will include icebergs shearing open wellheads and even the specter of “strudel scour”—warm river water that bores through sea ice and creates a downward jet of water that exposes buried pipelines. Various reports have also warned that efforts to contain any spill in the region would be hampered by low light, frequent storms, and—at the end of the drilling season—sea ice that renders oil skimmers useless. (After the Deepwater Horizon blowout, cleanup crews in the Gulf of Mexico recovered only roughly 25 percent of spilled oil—in warm water and calm seas.) In a worst-case scenario, one of the last remaining options would be a method still unproven in icy conditions, what the industry calls ISB, or in situ burning: tossing a match and watching as the Arctic goes up in flames.

SEPARATOR AND COMPRESSOR TRAINS

UMBILICALS PIPELINES

TREE

BOOSTERS

THE prOCES S

CONTROL THE FLOW Installed atop a wellhead, a tree uses valves, gauges, and chokes to regulate oil and gas flow.

SEPARATE IT A separator can remove water and sand from the oil and gas “wellstream” and then pump them into

PoPulAr SCienCe

April 2013

a separate storage reservoir. (Wastewater can also be reinjected into aging oil and gas fields to increase their pressure.) Multiphase boosters capable of handling varying proportions of oil and gas—plus any remaining sand and water—pump the processed hydrocarbons through seafloor pipes.

COMPRESS IT Shell’s compressor trains, which require 12.5 MW

of power from a subsea electrical cable, can pressurize 15 million cubic meters of gas per day to increase its flow rate.

SEND IT TO SHORE Umbilicals include electrical lines, fiber-optic communication cables, and tubes that carry methanol to prevent icelike hydrate plugs from forming in pipelines.

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ANIMAL HEARTBEATS Fastest Hummingbird: 1,260 beats per minute Slowest Blue whale: 5–6 beats per minute

HEADL I NE S BLUEPR INT

A Robot with Heart Using cardiac cells as a motor

“

Our miniature bio-bot is made of a flexible polymer and living heart cells. The cells beat together, creating a contracting and releasing motion that inches the bot forward. We use a 3-D printer to build the bot’s body layer by layer out of a hydrogel—the material contact lenses are made from. It’s about a centimeter long, with a flexible leg that rests on a shorter leg like a cantilever. We also print collagen on the underside of the long leg so that the living cells can attach to it. After printing, we bathe the structure in a

solution of rat cardiac cells and support cells called fibroblasts, and the cells attach to the collagen-infused area. We store the bio-bot in an incubator that is 98°F (about the body temperature of a living rat) and that has proper CO2 levels for the cells to survive. A few days later, the growing cells form a sheet and start beating about once a second—the rate that a rat’s heart beats. Each contraction bends the longer leg down, propelling the robot forward. The whole thing moves about 15 millimeters per minute (and only in one direction). In the future, we’d like to try

bird heart cells, which beat five times as fast as rat ones and thus might make the bio-bot faster. We’d also like to make the robots more intelligent, so they could assist in surgery or be used to find toxins or parasites and release chemicals to neutralize them. We think this work moves synthetic biology and bioengineering forward. Instead of reengineering DNA or a single bacterial cell, our goal is to put different types of mammalian cells together, see which behaviors emerge, and use those behaviors to accomplish tasks. But it also raises new ethical questions: Is this alive? As long as the conditions are right, the bio-bots could keep walking around their petri dishes for months. How do we feel about that?” —Rashid Bashir, a bioengineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As told to Flora Lichtman

TH E S CAL E

sT o R Y B Y Susan E. Matthews

Stalactite and stalagmite 0.0039 inch per year Human toenail 0.47 in/yr Mid-Atlantic Ridge 0.98 in/yr Human hair 6.0 in/yr

Human infant 10 in/yr White pine tree 36 in/yr Young Burmese python 70 in/yr Blue whale infant 370 in/yr Bamboo 13,000 in/yr

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TREVOR JOHNSTON

Growth Rates

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There are more organisms in a handful of dirt than there are people on Earth

HEADL I NE S TOOL KIT

stories b y Amber Williams

lo s t & F o u nd

t’s not easy to see what’s going on in a handful of dirt, so some labs use gels and other substitutes to grow plants when they study them. Unfortunately, roots and most of the organisms that interact with them don’t grow as well in fakes. That’s why researchers at Scotland’s nonprofit James Hutton Institute have developed a transparent soil that more closely resembles the real deal. For the main ingredient, they use small particles of the polymer Nafion, which holds nutrients and becomes clear when mixed with water. With the transparent soil, scientists will be able to observe how roots grow, take up nutrients, and associate with microbes without having to destroy the setup. Using the soil, the researchers have already tagged E. coli with a fluorescent marker and became the first to watch it infect lettuce roots, which can then go on to cause illness in people.

test flight; the previous 26 had gone well. But this time, the 3,400-pound vehicle flew 16 feet high and, without spatial data to guide it, fell to the ground, where it burst into a 50-foot fireball. The goal of Project Morpheus When NASA technicians saw the is to help develop a space vehicle that can navigation system on the Morpheus land autonomously, and exploding prototypes lander prototype shut off less than a are part of the process, says Jon Olansen, second after liftoff, they knew the craft the project manager. “You just build another was doomed. It was August, at Kennedy one and continue on,” he says. “What we’ve Space Center in Florida, and the 27th learned hasn’t been lost.” An investigation finished in October concluded that vibration probably caused the crash by breaking a connection between the craft’s navigation instruments and the CPU or other hardware. For the next prototype, engineers will tweak both the launchpad and the vehicle’s internal design to protect against shaking. Reusing the old engine, the team morpheus dOWN is now building a new The 12-by-9-foot space lander Morpheus, which it plans carries 1,200 pounds of propellant for a 50-second test. to test this spring. l Es s on s in FA il ur E

Crash Test

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image tk

LOsT: Pacific Island On a research trip to the Coral Sea in the southwest Pacific last fall, geologists noticed a discrepancy between their maps and the horizon: A 16-mile-long island was missing. In its place, the scientists saw only water. “Sandy Island”—first mapped in 1902—had already been dropped by some maps but persisted in the World Vector Shoreline database, a main resource incorporated into many digital maps. Even Google Earth had included the island but has since removed it.

FOUND: Extraterrestrial River On Saturn’s moon Titan, liquid methane plays the role of water, raining from the skies and filling the rivers and seas. Last September, as NASA’s Cassini spacecraft passed by Titan, its radar captured images of a methane river—the largest river system found outside our planet to date. The 250-mile body flows downhill into a sea. Because the river doesn’t meander, scientists think it was likely created by a shifting fault.

CloCkwise from top left: lionel Dupuy, the James hutton institute; Courtesy uwe DeDering/wiki; Courtesy nasa (3)

Dirt, Uncovered

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

THE DISH The FAST dish is 1,640 feet across and made up of 4,400 triangular aluminum panels that can turn and pivot.

The Largest Telescope Dish China’s shape-shifting antenna to map the heavens

or the past 50 years, radio astronomers who wanted to study the dense, spinning remains of former stars and the structures of galaxies have gone to Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory, home to the world’s largest telescope dish. The instrument (which captures wavelengths from 3 cm to 6 m) lies cradled within a broad, circular depression in the ground, creating a 1,000-foot-wide aluminum crater amid jungle hills. Soon, however, astronomers will have an even more immense instrument at their disposal: China’s $122-million Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). Like Arecibo, FAST will rest in a slump created long ago by the collapse of a subterranean cave, but it will be in a more remote region, with less radio interference. And FAST will have two major advantages over Arecibo’s telescope. First, its 1,640-foot-wide dish (with a surface area larger than 40 football fields) will allow it to collect 10 cm to 4.3 m radio waves across a larger area, making it more than two and a half times as sensitive. Second, since a dish this size can’t move to adjust focus, it will be made of small panels that can shift to create smaller sub-dishes to aim elsewhere. Last fall, workers for the governmentfunded project finished shaping the dish’s site in Guizhou province. If the project goes according to schedule, astronomers will begin using FAST in 2016 to piece together the evolution of galaxies, search for extraterrestrial life, and detect faint, rhythmic radio pulses emanating from tens of thousands of spinning neutron stars. s t o r y b y Emily Elert i l l ust r at i o n b y Don Foley

POPULAR SCIENCE

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CABLE NET 2,300 steel cables connect the panels to actuators on the ground. The cables move the panels with 0.2-inch precision.

DISH WITHIN A DISH The main dish is too large to move as a unit. Instead, the small panels can shift to create a paraboloid dish of about half the full dish’s area. This smaller dish can aim at different regions of the sky.

78 billion trillion miles: the farthest distance a telescope has seen

RECEIVER CABIN A 30-ton cabinâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;suspended 450 feet above the dishâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; holds nine sets of receivers tuned to pick up different radio frequencies and amplifies them. It then sends the data through fiber-optic cables to the control center on the ground. Informed by a sensor system that reflects laser light off the cabin, cables and other mechanisms move the cabin to the focus point for any dish shape.

PANEL SENSOR SYSTEM To track the position of each panel as it moves, the receiver cabin bounces light beams off some of the 1,000 reflective targets on the dish and then records their reflections with three optical sensors.

APRIL 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

“. . . tonnage no longer represented prosperity.” —R. Buckminster Fuller

HEADL I NE S F=M A

An Unfolding Story How engineers are putting more stuﬀ into less space

AST SUMMER, researchers at Northwestern University set an unusual record: They created a material with the highest-ever ratio of surface to volume. A teaspoon’s worth could hold the equivalent of eight tightly folded football fields. Such improbable materials could help us store methane far more efficiently, the researchers said, but they also represent the latest advance in the ancient struggle to do more with less. Surfaces are extremely useful, after all. They can hold energy, as in the case of batteries, or convey information or soak up light. But they also take up a lot of space. They can be heavy. Large surfaces, such as giant solar cells, are hard to maneuver. How can we have the best of both worlds? Along at least five dimensions. INFLATABILITY: An old trick, but still a good one. NASA, for instance, recently hired Bigelow Aerospace to produce an inflatable addition to the International Space Station. If all goes well, astronauts will blow up the prefab unit (small enough to stash in the cargo trunk of a Dragon resupply rocket) into a 13-foot-long, 10.5-foot-diameter space home by 2015. FOLDABILITY: As world-changing innovations go, textiles are right up there with fire. Cloth folds neatly into a bundle and yet quickly expands into warm clothing, elaborate tents, or sails for exploring the world. Then came folio books, which collapsed matters even more efficiently. 32

POPULAR SCIENCE

APRIL 2013

s To R Y BY Luke Mitchell

ILLUsTRATIoN B Y Ryan Snook

The latest advance in the ancient struggle to do more with less.

they first etched the silicon into a spongelike structure, then crushed it, increasing its surface area 50-fold.

DIVISIBILITY: Grind flour and its surface area increases, making it more digestible (and more explosive). Researchers at Rice University recently proposed applying somewhat the same principle to making batteries: Crushing a silicon-based anode can give it far greater surface area, the better to soak up lithium ions.

VIRTUALITY: Chris Harrison, a Carnegie Mellon University doctoral candidate, has been studying ways to increase the input area of ever-shrinking touchscreens. The answer: Use other surfaces. One system involves tapping the skin, another senses the sound of fingers lightly scratching on tabletops, but each arrives at the ultimate ratio: all surface to no volume.

POROSITY: The Rice researchers more recently developed a process whereby

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

ON TWITTER: @bylukemitchell

THE WORLD’S MOST AWESOME VEHICLES, TOOLS, AND TOYS DISSECTED AND DEMYSTIFIED

PEEK INSIDE The SpaceX Falcon Heavy will be the world’s most powerful rocket when it launches later this year. It can carry a payload of up to 117,000 pounds in its clamshell fairing. The fairing is shown here open with the payload exposed, but on a mission it would remain closed until the ﬁrst stage has separated and the second stage has nearly reached orbit.

Timeline of a Launch T – 3 :00:00 Falcon Heavy is ready on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral. Engineers time liftoﬀ to achieve the optimal ﬂight path and desired orbit.

T – 0 :10:30 The countdown begins. All actions from here forward are preprogrammed, although Mission Control can abort the mission at any time.

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T – 0 :02:30 The launch director issues the ﬁnal launch command. T – 0 :00:40 Propellant tanks are pressurized.

APRIL 2013

T – 0 :00:03 First-stage engines ignite. 0:00:00 The onboard rocket computer commands the launch mount to release. Liftoﬀ.

T + 0 :01:25 The rocket reaches maximum aerodynamic pressure; mechanical stress peaks.

T + 0 :02:45 The rocket has now burned enough fuel (thus decreasing its mass) that the center core engines can throttle down.

T + 0 :03:00 The side cores separate and fall into the ocean, while the center core’s nine Merlin engines continue to burn for approximately 30 seconds.

T + 0 :03:30 The second stage separates from the remaining ﬁrststage core. The second-stage engine ignites and continues toward orbit.

T + 10–20 MINUTES When the rocket nears the desired orbit, the two halves of the clamshell fairing open and fall away. When in position, the payload separates from the second stage. Both the fairing and second stage eventually fall back to Earth.

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HOW IT WORKS

THE MOST POWERFUL SPACE ROCKET STO RY BY RO BE R T E AR LE HOW ELL S IL LUSTR ATI O N S BY N I CK K A LOTER A KIS

FIRST STAGE: THREE ROCKET CORES Falcon Heavy’s first stage consists of three cores. All three cores operate together at liftoff. About T+2:45 minutes into flight, the center core throttles down while the two side cores continue at full thrust until their fuel is nearly spent. At that point, pneumatic separators release the side cores, which plummet into the ocean, and the center core throttles up.

ENGINE CLUSTER Nine SpaceX Merlin 1D engines sit at the bottom of each of the craft’s three cores, or boosters. The engines are identical to those on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.

POPULAR SCIENCE

APRIL 2013

When the firm SpaceX launches its Falcon Heavy rocket into space late this year, the craft will become the mightiest rocket in the world. Only NASA’s Saturn V, which sent Americans to the moon, has ever generated more power. In rockets, the most important measure of power is thrust. Falcon Heavy’s 27 individual booster engines together generate 3.8 million pounds of thrust— enough to lift the 3.1-million-pound rocket and its 117,000-pound payload toward low-Earth orbit. The rocket’s success is critical for both SpaceX and the U.S. space program: The Air Force has already hired SpaceX and its Falcon Heavy to send two satellites into orbit sometime in 2015.

SECOND STAGE Powered by a single Merlin 1D engine modified to operate in the vacuum of space, the second stage delivers the final push that gets the payload into orbit. The engine can shut down and reignite as needed, enabling Falcon Heavy to deliver multiple payloads to different orbits.

CENTER CORE For payloads heavier than 100,000 pounds, Falcon Heavy uses a cross-feed system to run fuel from the side cores to the center core, leaving the center core almost fully fueled after the side boosters separate. What’s left is the equivalent of a complete Falcon 9 rocket already high in space.

FAIRING Falcon Heavy can carry either a Dragon capsule—SpaceX’s free-flying spacecraft, currently used to resupply the International Space Station—or up to 117,000 pounds of payload (think multiple military and commercial satellites) enclosed in a shell 45 feet long and 17 feet in diameter. The fairing consists of two clamshell-style halves made of an aluminum honeycomb core and carbon-fiber face sheets. When the second stage nears the desired orbit, pneumatic pushers split the halves apart, exposing the payload.

FUEL TANKS A liquid-oxygen tank at the top of each core feeds the engines through a center tube; the lower portion of the tank contains rocket-grade kerosene. The propellants are turbo-pumped into each Merlin engine’s injector, where they are mixed and fed into the combustion chamber.

MERLIN 1D ENGINE A single Merlin 1D generates 147,000 pounds of thrust at sea level, burning rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen fed by a turbopump into the combustion chamber. Falcon Heavy’s liquid propellant has an advantage over solid fuel: Liquid-fueled engines can stop and restart in flight, whereas solid-fuel engines burn until they are spent. Through proprietary adjustments that SpaceX won’t disclose, engineers recently lightened the engine to increase its efficiency, making it the most efficient rocket booster engine ever built.

S TAT S TOTAL THRUST 3.8 MILLION POUNDS MAXIMUM PAYLOAD 117,000 POUNDS NUMBER OF ENGINES 28 SIZE OF THE FAIRING 45 FEET BY 17 FEET IN DIAMETER

APRIL 2013

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HOW iT WOrKS

S TaT S qUeeNS peR hIve 1 wORkeRS peR qUeeN 10,000–50,000

Honeybee society

AveRAge LIfeSpAN Of A wORkeR bee, IN mONThS 3

STO RY bY CO R E Y BI N NS IL LUSTR ATI O N S bY TR E VOR J OHNSTON

A beehive buzzes with thousands of genetically similar female honeybees. Some nurse their queen and her eggs while others fly out in search of pollen and nectar. For decades, scientists knew that bees took on new jobs as they aged, but a team of researchers recently discovered that chemical tags attached to the bees’ DNA play an important role in determining their career paths. The tags, which are frequently methyl groups, control gene expression, which in turn affects how an organism behaves. Both the chemical tags and the behavior they induce appear to be reversible, says Arizona State University biologist Gro Amdam. Foraging bees, for instance, could become nurses if the hive requires it. Humans also carry epigenetic tags that may affect their behavior. Scientists found methyl groups attached to a stress-hormone-receptor gene in child-abuse victims who committed suicide. If these chemical cues can be changed in bees, scientists may find new treatments for people with psychological trauma, mood disorders, and learning disabilities too.

FlOwERINg SEaSON To exploit the increase in available food, young bees that would normally become nurses immediately develop into foragers, a switch reﬂected by changes in their epigenetic tags.

POPULAR SCIENCE

april 2013

mANAged hONeYbee cOLONIeS IN 2011 IN The U.S. 2.49 MIllION

BaSE pOpulaTION An average hive has 10,000 to 50,000 workers. At any given time, foragers account for about 30 percent of the workforce, but that proportion can change depending on environmental factors.

WORKFORCE IN THE HIVE SwaRMINg EFFECT when a queen gets old, she ﬂees the hive with a swarm of mostly nurse bees, leaving the colony and its larvae to her successor. Some foragers and free-agent bees will then shift to nursing. In a lab experiment, after half of a hive’s population was taken away, only 10 percent of foragers became nurses. Scientists say that fragility may keep many foragers from making the switch. foragers are programmed to be frail in order to protect the colony: Rather than bring infections or toxins back to the hive, they typically die out in the ﬁeld.

QUEEN When a colony’s queen grows old or inﬁrm, nurse bees secrete a royal jelly high in fatty acids and protein and feed it to a few larvae. The diet encourages ovaries to develop and produces a new queen who will spend her days laying thousands of genetically similar eggs. NURSE Most female bees begin their lives as nurses who care for the queen and larvae. They clean wax cells for the queen’s eggs and feed the larvae honey and pollen. FORAGER When most nurse bees turn two to three weeks old, the gene expression in their brains changes, and they switch to foraging for pollen, nectar, and water outside the hive using the sun as their compass. However, scientists have discovered this job change is ﬂexible: Workers of any age can nurse or forage. DRONE Male honeybees, which carry only one set of chromosomes, fertilize the queen's eggs.

HOW EPIGENETIC TAGS WORK TAGS Enzymes such as methyltransferase help transfer epigenetic tags to DNA. The mechanism for inducing epigenetic changes in bees is not well understood, but scientists suspect that pheromones exuded by the forager bees might play a role. GENES Epigenetic tags, such as methyl groups, determine how much of a gene is expressed or whether the gene is expressed at all.

ROlES A nurse bee starts with few dNA tags [1]. more tags turn it into a forager [2]. Tag removal reverts the bee to a nurse role [3].

PROTEINS The tags also dictate how pieces of genes are assembled into an mRNA transcript, which eventually determines the type of protein made from that gene. A protein produced in a nurse bee will look diﬀerent and serve a diﬀerent function than one produced in a forager.

april 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

HOW IT WORKS

DISASSEMBLY LINE 1 QUEUE Gutted whole chickens sit on metal cones as they travel along a conveyor belt, just as they would in a conventional poultry factory.

ROBOTIC CHICKEN BUTCHER STO RY BY N I CO L E DYE R IL LUSTR ATI O N BY DAN I EL SCHUMPER T A ND JASO N BR I N E Y

2 ASSESS Each chicken passes through a kind of photo booth. Inside, two pairs of stereo cameras scan the bird, one pair per side. A computer instantly renders the images into a 3-D map of the bird. It also identiﬁes useful markers, such as the humerus and the coracoid bones.

3 CALCULATE In a production model that the Georgia Tech researchers plan to build, two robotic arms work on opposite sides of the conveyor belt—one arm for each side of the bird. Equipped with a 3-D map of the incoming chicken, the robots calculate a cutting trajectory accurate to within three millimeters. Fortunately, the body proportions of a chicken adhere to quantiﬁable standards. So by calculating the dimensions of one body region the machines can deduce the dimensions of all the other body parts. 4 SLICE To remove the wings from the breast meat, the robotic arms slice into the chicken with a knife at the collarbone, move toward the shoulder, cut through the shoulder joint, and continue down the bird’s backside along the shoulder blade, all in two seconds. 5 REPEAT Nine billion times a year.

If you’ve ever wondered how boneless chicken parts end up that way, take a peek inside one of the 4,000 or so poultry processing plants in the U.S. Workers man massive assembly lines to scald, pluck, gut, slice, and wrap an estimated nine billion birds annually. Unsurprisingly, work in poultry plants is dirty and dangerous. The job of chicken deboner (who cuts through the shoulder joint to separate the wing from the body) is particularly brutal since it requires performing repetitive motions with a knife for hours on end in a room the temperature of a refrigerator. If ever 40

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there was a job for a robot, this is it. But teaching a machine to carve poultry is difficult. No two chickens are the same, and each cut must be perfect. If a robot splinters a bone, it contaminates the meat. If it leaves too much flesh behind, it costs its owner money. Later this year, a team from the Georgia Tech Research Institute in Atlanta will put the finishing touches on an autonomous robotic chicken butcher. The Intelligent Deboning System, a one-armed knifewielding automaton, has the brains and dexterity to debone a bird in four seconds flat, on par with a human butcher.

THE BUTCHER KNIFE ARM The business end of the robot is an industrial arm similar to those used to weld and paint car parts. The prototype features six degrees of freedom (one less than a human arm) to make cuts as ﬂuid and graceful as possible. FORCE FEEDBACK A force-torque sensor on the tip of the knife imparts sensitivity to the blade. Because the arm can sense resistance, it can move the blade along

the surface of the bone without slicing through it and can discern between meat, tendons, and ligaments. “The big challenge is teaching the robot to adjust its behavior in real time to account for all the variation in different birds,” says Ai-Ping Hu, senior research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. Force feedback is key to accomplishing this. Dull blade? The sensor knows that too and signals the robot to sharpen it. BRAIN To help the robot calculate the cutting path, algorithms compare 3-D maps of each chicken to a database of dozens of different body types. The machine also learns on the fly and gets smarter with each new chicken it carves.

S TAT S CALCULATIONS PER SECOND TO RENDER A MAP OF THE BIRD 1,000

SECONDS IT TAKES TO CALCULATE A CUT 0.5

SECONDS TO DEBONE AN INDIVIDUAL BIRD 2–4

ESTIMATED COST OF EACH ROBOT BUTCHER $350,000

POUNDS OF CHICKEN CONSUMED PER CAPITA IN THE U.S. EACH YEAR 84

HOW IT WORKS

Hairpin structure

FASTEST DNA SEQUENCER

DNA

STO RY BY V E RO N I Q U E G R EENWOOD IL LUSTR ATI O N BY DAV V I

5 DNA sequencing has revolutionized medicine and biomedical research. For example, DNA analysis can tell doctors which drug might work best against a particular cancer. But current technology usually sequences only short stretches of DNA and can take hours or days. To sequence anything longer than a few hundred base pairs, scientists mince up thousands of copies of the target DNA, sequence all the fragments, and use software to painstakingly reconstruct the order of the DNA bases by matching overlap within fragments. A new approach, called nanopore sequencing, can handle long strands of DNA at once, eliminating the need for overlap analysis. As a result, nanopore sequencers could be cheaper, faster, and more compact than other DNA sequencers. They can also accurately sequence stretches with many repeating base pairs. The MinION from Oxford Nanopore Technologies connects to a USB port. Soon, anyone with $1,000 and a computer will be able to sequence DNA.

DNA bases Enzyme

Nanopore

Membrane

Port

4 Electrical signal strength

1 Drop the DNA sample on a chip. Researchers place pretreated samplesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;blood from a patient or purified DNA, for exampleâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;into a small port. Within the device is a silicon chip with many thin membranes studded with tiny pores. 42

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S TAT S

Electrical signal

Sequence of bases

G A G C A T G T C G T A G C T

A G C T G A C A G C T A

Length of DNA strand

PRICE LESS THAN $1,000

DNA READ LENGTH 70,000 BASE PAIRS

HUMAN GENOME SIZE 3 BILLION BASE PAIRS

2 Unzip the DNA. An enzyme shuttles the DNA to the membrane’s nanopore. It then unzips the twin strands of DNA and feeds one end into the pore. The pore is a set of proteins arranged in a ring and derived from bacteria. The inner diameter of the pore is a couple of nanometers wide: 100,000 times thinner than a human hair. 3 Block the ion current. Electrodes send an ionic current, a flow of ions, through the open nanopore. As a group of a few DNA bases—the As, Ts, Cs, and Gs—threads through the neck of the pore, it blocks the ions and interrupts the current. A sensor records the electrical disturbance.

ROBOREEL IMAGE: DAN BRACAGLIA

4 Determine the sequence. Software in an attached computer analyzes the electrical signal recorded for every group of bases. Because each combination of bases blocks the current in a distinctive fashion, the software can deduce the identity and sequence of the individual bases in the group. As the DNA strand feeds through the pore, the software stitches together the sequence of bases on the entire strand. 5 Check for errors. The device can determine the sequence of a single strand of DNA, but for greater precision, it can also read the complementary strand. Once the first strand of the DNA ratchets through the pore, a small stretch of DNA called a hairpin structure acts as a tether to draw the matching half into the pore as well.

1. INITIATE The RoboReel’s 12-gauge power cord contains four wires, only three of which transmit current. The fourth runs between the circuit board and a button on the outlet head, which the user presses to initiate retraction.

swings the spool from side to side on rotors. That ensures that the cord winds in the same pattern every time it retracts.

2. RETRACT Once the circuit board receives the signal, it starts the motor, which revs at 4,500 rpms. A combo gear transfers the motion to the 8.8-inch-diameter spool, rotating it at about ﬁve feet per second.

SELF-COILING CORD STORY BY SA L VAG LICA I L LUSTR ATI ON BY TR E VOR JOHNS TON

Coiling up extension cords by hand is tedious. Spring-activated spools aren’t much better; the mechanisms break easily and can cause violent snapback at the end of the cord. Engineers at Texasbased Great Stuﬀ motorized the entire process. Using a combination of sensors and circuitry, the RoboReel neatly winds 50 feet of cable in 10 seconds, saving time and frustration.

4. SLOW AND FINISH To keep track of how much cord the spool has reeled in, an encoder counts the number of times a magnet on one side of the spool passes it. For the last two feet, the spool slows to about two feet per second, which prevents snapback.

3. WRAP Opposite the motor, a worm and helical gear move a cam arm in an elliptical pattern. The cam

5. MONITOR The circuit board also contains a pair of thermostats. When the internal temperature surpasses 122 degrees, an internal fan cools the wound portion of the cord. If the temperature exceeds 176 degrees, which could cause the system to catch ﬁre, the circuit board cuts the power.

Combo gear

Helical gear Cam arm

Rotor

Worm gear

S TAT S POWERFUL REACH The RoboReel’s 15 amps are enough to run a fridge, air conditioner, or space heater.

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APRIL 2013

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THE EARTHQUAKE MACHINE

Stationary rock Spinning rock

STO RY BY R E BECCA BOYLE IL LU STR ATI O N BY G R AH A M MUR DOCH

The fundamentals of earthquake mechanics are simple: Pieces of rock slip past one another along a fault to release pent-up energy. Some of that energy ripples outward, causing seismic waves that shake the earth. But how long it takes and exactly how the energy dissipates has remained elusive. To discern these processes, researchers recently built a machine at the University of Oklahoma to mimic what happens inside the earth’s crust. Two slabs of rock, ground against each other by a 500-pound flywheel, simulate fault stresses to provide data on the energetics of a tremor. “Most of the energy seems to go into heating, and some goes into grinding up material,” says David Lockner, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. “What we’re all familiar with—the energy that is radiated as ground shaking—ends up being 10 percent or less.” Lockner says that understanding how an earthquake’s energy evolves over time will help engineers design better earthquake-resistant structures.

Clutch

Central shaft

BUILD ENERGY The heart of the apparatus is a flywheel, a device that stores energy mechanically by spinning at high speeds. It’s driven by a 100hp motor that can reach 3,300 rpm within 1∕10 of a second. The flywheel connects to a central shaft. An additional shaft connects the clutch to a four-inch-diameter cylindrical block of granite or dolomite, which spins in sync with the flywheel. Researchers use the granite and dolomite as proxies for rocks in the Earth’s crust. Sensors next to and within the rock monitor how the material deforms, grinds, and heats up during the simulation [see inset, right]. For example, infrared sensors and thermocouples measure rock temperature, while other sensors measure how fast the rock spins.

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Flywheel

MODEL THE FAULT

S TAT S

To model earthquakes of varying magnitude, researchers start by spinning the flywheel at a given speed; a faster flywheel means a bigger quake. The researchers then disengage it from the motor, letting the flywheel spin on its own stored power.

HEIGHT OF THE MACHINE IN FEET 5.9 WEIGHT OF THE FLYWHEEL IN POUNDS 500

Immediately afterward, the clutch engages, and the attached block of granite starts to spin. It grinds into a stationary block of rock positioned above. Where both rocks meet is the experimental fault.

SECONDS THE CLUTCH NEEDS TO ENGAGE 0.03 MAGNITUDE OF THE LARGEST EARTHQUAKE YET SIMULATED 8.0

At the experimental fault, the spinning rock transfers some of its kinetic energy to the stationary one, and they begin to grind and slip past each other—an earthquake in miniature.

Experimental fault Thermocouple

Infrared sensor

Movement along the experimental fault speeds up before slowing down—matching the pattern of a real earthquake.

Friction spikes, drops as rock dust lubricates the fault, and then rises again as the rocks slow. The researchers are investigating how the fault dissipates energy to slow down and stop an earthquake.

Velocity, in meters per second, and friction

EARTHQUAKE IN A LAB

Rock velocity

Friction

Time, in seconds

E A R T H Q U A K E S I M U L AT I O N D ATA C O U R T E S Y J E F F E R S O N C H A N G

APRIL 2013

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HOW iT WOrKS

star-mapping spacecraft

light paths

STO RY bY Bro o ke Bor el I LLU STR ATI O N bY ke v in H a nd

From the outside, galaxies appear as a mass of stars orbiting a dense center. but inside, they are more complex, with some groups of stars moving at different speeds or directions, in part because they originated from separate galaxies that collided billions of years ago. To untangle these disparate components of the Milky Way, the European Space Agency plans to launch Gaia in October. The two-ton craft will map a billion of our galaxy’s more than 100 billion stars, collecting data on all three dimensions of each star’s position as well as its speed, direction, color, and brightness. Knowing where stars are located and headed will help astronomers determine where they came from. And that could shed light on how our galaxy formed and evolved.

Thermal tent

Sunshade

Service module

lithium-ion battery

earth to l2: 930,000 miles

Sun to earth: 93 million miles

Telescope

stability and power The key to Gaia’s success will be its stability: A steady position and temperature translates into an accurate galactic map. The craft’s payload is the first to be made entirely of silicon carbide, a stiff ceramic relatively insensitive to heat and cold. A 33-foot insulated sunshade keeps the payload in shadow, and the thermal tent

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April 2013

helps block stray radiation from the sun and from deep space. The power system includes a lithium-ion battery, which briefly runs a set of thrusters after the spacecraft disengages from the Russian Soyuz-Fregat rocket that will launch it from Earth. Not long after launch, Gaia’s battery will shut down, and the system’s 140-square-foot gallium-arsenide solar arrays will take over, powering the craft.

data ColleCtion

optical bench

The main data-capture instrument on Gaia is a 3-by-1.5-foot focal array made up of 106 charge-coupled sensors that total one gigapixel. Imagine it as 106 cameras joined together, with groups of cameras capturing different kinds of information. For example, 14 spacemapper cameras tag the information from each star to show which telescope spotted it, while 62 sensors in the astrometer map the star’s transit around the galaxy. Additional sections of the focal array capture radial velocity and photometry information. The data from the focal array routes to seven computers housed in the electronic service module. The computers process the data, which is transmitted back to the agency via an antenna for the eight hours a day that Gaia communicates with Earth-based antennas. Over its mission, Gaia will generate 200 terabytes of data. Another computer controls the power system and thrusters.

sKy CoVeraGe Gaia rotates around its axis [blue] every six hours.

As it spins, the axis changes direction like a gyroscope toy. It loops around every 63 days. Over Gaia’s five-year lifespan, the craft will capture information from each of one billion stars an average of 70 times. As each star passes into the view of two telescopes, mirrors relay images of the star to dedicated sections of detectors in Gaia’s focal array. The scopes are mounted 106.5 degrees from one another on the nine-foot-diameter

earth

Gaia

between the rotation and the loop—and the craft’s orbit around the sun— Gaia’s telescopes follow a path [yellow] that covers the whole sky.

hexagonal optical bench and are made of six mirrors apiece, two of which they share. Cold-gas micropropulsion thrusters keep the craft spinning on its axis and control its attitude, or the direction it points in space. A chemical propulsion unit maintains Gaia’s orbit around the sun.

Focal array

billions oF stellar MeasUreMents The astrometer identifies the position and movement of up to 8,000 stars per second. The stars’ images drift across the detector as Gaia spins. Electrical signals in the detector trace the path of each star.

Two photometers measure light from each star. Prisms filter the blue and red light coming into each photometer. This spectral data contains information on the physical and chemical properties of each star.

The radial velocity spectrometer clocks the rate at which each star is moving toward or away from Earth by measuring its red or blue shift.

STATS DIAMETER 33 FeeT WEIGHT 4,475 PoUndS LIFESPAN 5 YearS DISTANCE FROM EARTH 930,000 MileS

TIME TO REACH DESTINATION 1 MonTH LAUNCH DATE 2013 COST TO bUILD $900 Million

Focal array

STARS TO MAP 1,000,000,000

April 2013

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INDIUM TIN OXIDE Capacitive sensors found in most existing touchscreens, track pads, OLED displays, and other electronics use indium tin oxide (ITO) as an electrode. The conductive material transmits an electric current to a user’s ﬁngertips. ITO is also transparent, so light from the underlying LCD screen shines through. SENSOR BOARD The sensor board injects tiny electric currents into the ITO layer. When a user touches the screen (and thus the ITO layer), current ﬂows from the sensor board through the ITO to the person’s body. The sensor on the board measures the body’s unique impedance at multiple frequencies. The most recent prototype takes up to a second to recalibrate for each new user. Once calibrated, it can recognize a familiar body in 500 milliseconds. LCD PANEL An LCD provides the touchscreen's graphical interface.

STO RY BY N I CO L E DYE R IL LUSTR ATI O N BY G R AH A M MUR DOCH

Touchscreens treat all ﬂeshy ﬁnger pads alike: Most detect a simple change in electrical current or in sound or light waves regardless of who is swiping. Researchers at Disney Research, Pittsburgh, have built a touchscreen that can discriminate between users. Every person’s body has its own bone density, muscle mass, blood volume, and water content. The device, called Touché, sends a series of harmless currents 48

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User 1 Impedance

A TOUCHSCREEN THAT KNOWS YOU

Dual-Touch Measurement

User 2

Frequency of alternating current

through a user’s body. Physiological differences produce differences in the body’s impedance of that current. Touché measures this unique capacitive signature. Scientists could apply capacitive fingerprinting to any touchscreen, or to other ubiquitous objects, such as doorknobs and furniture, turning the world into an interactive device. Touché is still in development, and plans for commercialization, alas, are top secret.

S TAT S SCAN FREQUENCY RANGE 1 KHZ TO 3.5 MHZ SCANNING RATE 33 TIMES PER SECOND RECOGNITION ACCURACY 97.8 PERCENT RECOGNITION TIME 500 MS

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warp factor A NASA SCIENTIST CLAIMS TO BE ON THE VERGE OF FASTER-THANLIGHT TRAVEL:

IS HE FOR REAL?

STOR Y BY KONS TANTIN K AK AES PHOTOGR APHS BY JACK THOMPSON

AST SEPTEMBER, a few hundred scientists, engineers and space enthusiasts gathered at the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Houston for the second public meeting of 100 Year Starship. The group is run by former astronaut Mae Jemison and funded by DARPA. Its mission is to “make the capability of human travel beyond our solar system to another star a reality within the next 100 years.” For most of the attendees at the conference, advances in manned space exploration have been frustratingly slow in coming. Despite billions of dollars spent over the last few decades, space agencies aren’t capable of much more than they were in the 1960s. They may be capable of less. 100 Year Starship intends to accelerate the process of interstellar travel by identifying and developing promising technologies. Over the course of several days, attendees could join sympo50

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sia on such exotic topics as organ regeneration and organized religion aboard a starship. One of the most anticipated presentations was titled “Warp Field Mechanics 102,” given by Harold “Sonny” White of NASA. A nine-year agency veteran, White runs the advanced propulsion program at Johnson Space Center (JSC), down the road from the Hyatt. Along with fve others, he recently co-authored the agency’s 16-year “In-Space Propulsion Systems Roadmap,” which outlines NASA’s goals for the future of space travel. The plan calls for all manner of propulsion projects from improved chemical rockets to far-forward systems like antimatter and nuclear engines. White’s particular area of research is perhaps the most far-forward of them all: warp drive. Put plainly, warp drive would permit faster-than-light travel. It is, most assume, impossible, a clear violation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. White says otherwise. For half an

NASA engineer Harold â&#x20AC;&#x153;Sonnyâ&#x20AC;? White runs the Eagleworks lab at Johnson Space Center, where he works on advanced propulsion. White is trying to distort spacetime, research that he says could one day lead to a warp drive.

WARp FACtoR

he firSt MaiNStreaM USe of the expression “warp drive” dates to 1966, when Gene Roddenberry launched Star Trek. For the next 30 years, warp existed purely as a construct of one of science fction’s most enduring series. Then, a physicist named Miguel Alcubierre found himself watching an episode of the show. At the time, he was doing his graduate work in general relativity, and he asked himself what it would take to make warp drive physically

Physicist Miguel Alcubierre developed the model for warp drive after watching an episode of Star Trek.

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arp drivE w warp woUld frEE EXpl EXplorErs not only from Earth’s orbit, bUt from thE EntirE solar systEm.

plausible. He published a paper outlining the physics in 1994. Alcubierre envisioned a bubble in space. At the front of the bubble, space-time would contract, while behind the bubble, space-time would expand (somewhat like in the big bang). The deformations would push the craf along smoothly, as if it were surfng on a wave, despite the tumult around it. In principle, a warp bubble could move along arbitrarily quickly; the speed-of-light limitation of Einstein’s theory applies only within space-time, not to distortions of space-time itself. Within the bubble, Alcubierre predicted that space-time would not change, leaving space travelers unharmed. Einstein’s equations of general relativity are very difcult to solve in one direction—fguring out how matter bends space—but going backward is fairly easy. Using them, Alcubierre determined the distribution of matter necessary to create such a warp bubble. The trouble was, the solutions called for an obscure form of matter called negative energy. In the most basic of defnitions, gravity is the attractive force between two objects. Every object, no matter how small, exerts some attractive force on surrounding matter. Einstein’s insight was that this force is a curvature in space-time. Negative energy, though, is gravitationally repulsive. Instead of drawing spacetime together, negative energy would push it apart. Roughly speaking, for his model to work, Alcubierre needed negative energy to expand the space-time behind a craf. Though no one has ever measured negative energy, quantum mechanics predicts that it exists, and scientists should be able to create it in a lab. One way to generate it would be through the Casimir efect: Two parallel conducting plates, placed very closely together, should create small amounts of negative energy. Where Alcubierre’s model broke down is that it required a vast amount of negative energy, orders of magnitude more than most scientists estimate could be produced. White says he’s found a way around that limitation. In a computer simulation, White varied the strength and geometry of a warp feld. He determined that, in theory, he could produce a warp bubble using millions of times less negative energy than

C O U R t E S y C A m P U S PA R t y m E x I C O

hour at the symposium, he outlined the physics of a potential warp drive—walking attendees through things like Alcubierre bubbles and hyperspace oscillations. He explained how he’d recently computed theoretical results that could pave the way for an actual warp drive and that he was commencing physical tests in his NASA lab, which he calls Eagleworks. It almost goes without saying that functional warp drive would have tremendous implications for space travel. It would free explorers not only from Earth’s orbit, but from the entire solar system. Instead of taking 75,000 years to get to Alpha Centauri, the star system nearest to our own, warp-equipped astronauts,, White says, could make the trip in two weeks. d given In the wake of the shuttle program’s termination and it ﬂigh the increasing role of private industry in low-Earth orbit ights, us exp NASA has said it will refocus on far-ﬂung, audacious exploraundary of o the tion, reaching far beyond the rather provincial boundary lops n moon. But it can only reach those goals if it develops new propulth 100 Year sion systems—the faster the better. A few dayss afer the Starship gathering, the head of NASA,, Charles Bo Bolden, echoed wan to get to warp White’s remarks. “One of these days,, we want ster than th speed,” he said. “We want to go faster the speed of light, s.” and we don’t want to stop at Mars.”

Inside the warp bubble, neutral spacetime would leave the ship undisturbed. Passengers would experience a gravitationally calm zero-G environment.

The warp drive proposed by Miguel Alcubierre would achieve faster-than-light speeds by distorting space-time. The device would generate a ﬁeld of negative energy that would squeeze or stretch space-time, creating a bubble. The bubble would ride the distortions like a surfer on a wave. As evidenced in the big bang, space-time can expand so quickly that objects move faster than the speed of light.

Negative values [blue] imply a contraction in space-time. The contraction balances the expansion of space-time as the bubble moves forward.

The vertical dimension represents how much a given volume of space-time expands or contracts in Alcubierre's model. Positive values [red] imply an expansion. When space-time expands behind a craft, it propels the ship forward.

F R O m t O P : k R I S h O L L A N d , b A S E d O N E n t E r p r i s E d E S I g N b y m At t J E F F R I E S ; C O U R t E S y t h O m A S m ü L L E R A N d d A N I E L w E I S k O P F ( 3 ) , b A S E d O N m I L k y wAy PA N O R A m A b y E S O / S b R U N I E R

hOw It (COULd) wORk

FAStER-thAN-LIght dRIvE InSTEAd of uSInG roCkETS or THruSTErS, A CrAfT EquIppEd WITH WArp drIvE Would movE by dISTorTInG SpACE

thE ObStACLES negative energy Creating a warp drive requires negative energy—a mysterious form of matter that repels rather than attracts. While predicted to exist, it has never been measured in a laboratory, and known methods for creating it are extremely limited; they would generate so much positive (normal) energy that any negative energy effects would likely be drowned out. FaSter-than-Light LiMitatiOn If scientists could generate a powerful field of negative energy, they would need to position some of it in front of the craft. “The problem,” says Alcubierre, “is that you wouldn’t be able to make this field reach the region you need.” In other words, to get the energy in front of the craft, it would need to move at faster-than-light speeds, which is impossible.

watching warp If a ship with warp drive zipped past a stationary observer, according to a simulation by German researchers, he or she would see the drive’s effect on space, pinching as it approached [top], transitioning as it passed [middle], and dilating as the ship moved away [bottom].

DeStaBiLiZatiOn Even if scientists could generate and position a ﬁeld of negative energy, there is little reason to think the integrity of the ﬁeld would hold. A group of Spanish and Italian researchers wrote a paper in 2010 arguing that quantum mechanical radiation, analogous to the Hawking radiation that appears at the event horizon of black holes, would show up and “inevitably lead to [the warp bubble’s] destabilization whenever superluminal speeds are attained.”

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WARP FACTOR

Alcubierre predicted and perhaps little enough that a space craf could carry the means of producing it. “The fndings,” he says, “change it from impractical to plausible.”

Deep Space 1 was the ﬁrst craft to use ion thrusters for propulsion.

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DEEP-SPACE ENGINES PROPULSION SYTEMS THAT COULD CARRY ASTRONAUTS TO MARS AND BEYOND STAR-48 The fastest chemical rocket ever, the Star-48 engine was built to launch satellites and was recently incorporated into the New Horizons probe, which took oﬀ in 2006. Powered by burning a mixture of ammonium perchlorate and aluminum, it boosted the Pluto-bound probe to approximately 36,000 miles per hour. New Horizons should reach Pluto and its moons by July 2015. FIRST USED FOR PROPULSION: 1980

ION THRUSTERS Ion thrusters rely on electromagnetic effects to accelerate charged particles out the back of a spacecraft, generating propulsive force. Up to 50 times as efficient as chemical rockets, they are now primarily used for satellite stationkeeping. NASA’s Deep Space 1, launched in 1998, was the first probe to use an ion engine for main propulsion. Dawn, which is currently exploring the asteroid belt, also uses one. FIRST USED FOR PROPULSION: 1998

SOLAR SAILS Like regular sails that gather momentum from wind, solar sails rely on the momentum of sunlight. Only a handful have been tested in space so far, including the Japanese Ikaros, a private eﬀort called LightSail, and NASA’s NanoSail-D. Scientists are working on creating lighter materials and more reliable deployment methods, both of which could boost speeds. FIRST INTERPLANETARY FLIGHT: 2010

EXTERNAL PULSED PLASMA PROPULSION Probably the fastest propulsion system scientists could build right now, external pulsed plasma propulsion would explode hundreds of nuclear weapons behind a spacecraft. The ship would ride in front of the shock waves. The idea was ﬁrst studied in the late 1940s, and, technically, it could work. But implementing it is tricky: Launching a spaceship loaded with hundreds of nuclear weapons is far from safe. CONCEPT TESTED: 1957

FUSION ROCKETS Much like a regular rocket with a more eﬃcient heat source, fusion rockets would heat fuel and shoot it out the back. Scientists have been toying with the idea since the British Interplanetary Society’s Daedalus study in the 1970s. Recently, scientists in Project Icarus, an update of Daedalus, reimagined the fusion rocket with more modern techniques. But until researchers get fusion to work well on Earth, the rockets remain far-fetched. PROJECTED READINESS DATE: 2030

WARP DRIVE The only technology that would, in principle, cross the otherwise sacrosanct barrier of light speed, warp drive would use large amounts of negative energy to create a bubble in space-time. It would contract space-time in front of a craft and expand it behind. Instead of traveling through space, a warp-enabled craft would, in a sense, travel on space, riding the space-time deformations. PROJECTED READINESS DATE: TBD

COURTESY NASA

OHNSON SPACE CENTER SPRAWLS beside lagoons where Houston gives way to Galveston Bay. It has the feel of a suburban college campus, albeit one geared to the training of astronauts. The day I visit, White meets me in Building 15, the low-rise warren of hallways, ofces, and labs that contains Eagleworks. He is wearing a polo shirt embroidered with the Eagleworks emblem, which depicts an eagle, mid-swoop, soaring over a futuristic starship. White did not start his career in propulsion. He studied mechanical engineering, and he joined the agency in 2004 as part of its robotics group, having worked at JSC as a contractor since 2000. Eventually, he took command of the robot arm on the International Space Station while working on a Ph.D. in plasma physics. It was only in 2009 that he shifed his responsibility to propulsion, which had been a long-standing interest of his and the reason he came to work for NASA in the frst place. “Sonny is a pretty unique person,” says his boss John Applewhite, who heads the Propulsion Systems Branch within the JSC engineering directorate. “He’s defnitely a visionary, but he’s also an engineer. He can take his vision and turn it into a useful engineering product.” About the time he joined Applewhite’s group, White requested permission to open his own lab, dedicated to advanced propulsion. He dreamed up the name Eagleworks—a patriotic rif on the famous Lockheed Martin Skunk Works—and had NASA create a logo to his specifcations. Then he got to work. White leads me to his ofce, which he shares with a colleague who is looking for water on the moon and then takes me down the hall to Eagleworks. As we walk, he tells me about his quest to open the lab, which he frames as “a long arduous process of trying to fnd ways for advanced propulsion to help human space exploration.” He speaks with a slight drawl, a product of many years spent in the South—frst at college in Alabama and then 13 years in Texas. White shows me into the facility and ushers me past its central feature, something he calls a quantum vacuum plasma thruster (QVPT). The device looks like a large red velvet doughnut with wires tightly wound around a core, and it’s one of two initiatives Eagleworks is pursuing, along with warp drive. It’s also secret. When I ask about it, White tells me he can’t disclose anything other than that the technology is further along than warp drive. A 2011 NASA report he wrote says it uses quantum fuctuations in empty space as a fuel source, so that a spaceship propelled by a QVPT would not require propellant. White’s warp experiment is tucked into the back corner of the room. A helium-neon laser is bolted onto a small table pricked with a lattice of holes, along with a beam splitter and a black-and-white commercial CCD camera. This is a White-Juday

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warp feld interferometer, which White named for himself and Richard Juday, a retired JSC employee who is helping White analyze the data from the CCD. Half of the laser light passes through a ring—White’s test device. The other half does not. If the ring has no efect, White would expect one type of signal at the CCD. If it warps space, he says “the interference pattern will be starkly diferent.” When the device is turned on, White’s setup looks cinematically perfect: The laser is bright red, and the two beams cross like light sabers. There are four ceramic capacitors made of barium titanate inside the ring, which White charges to 23,000 volts. White has spent the last year and a half designing the experiment, and he says that the capacitors will “establish a very large potential energy.” Yet when I ask how it would create the negative energy necessary to warp space-time he becomes evasive. “That gets into . . . I can tell you what I can tell you. I can’t tell you what I can’t tell you,” he says. He explains that he has signed nondisclosure agreements that prevent him from revealing the particulars. I ask with whom he has the agreements. He says, “People come in and want to talk about some things. I just can’t go into any more detail than that.”

At Johnson Space Center, White works in the shadow of the Saturn V rocket.

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In sayIng that a warp drIve Is feasIble, whIte Is also sayIng that he can create a tIme machIne.

hile the theory of warp travel is intuitive enough—deform space-time to create a moving bubble—it sufers from a few signifcant obstacles. Even if White can drastically reduce the amount of negative energy that Alcubierre required, it may still be much more than scientists can produce, says Lawrence Ford, a theoretical physicist at Tufs University who has published dozens of journal articles on negative energy over the last 30 years. Ford and other physicists say there are fundamental physical limitations—not just engineering challenges—on the amount of negative energy that can exist in one place for any length of time. Another challenge is that in order to create a warp bubble that moves faster than light, scientists would need to distribute negative energy around a craf, including ahead of it. White doesn’t think this is a problem; when I ask him about it, he says rather vaguely that a warp drive would work because of an “apparatus you have that’s creating the conditions that you need.” But creating those conditions in front of a ship would mean generating a distribution of negative energy that travels faster than light, a violation of the theory of general relativity. Finally, warp drive poses a conceptual problem. In general relativity, faster-than-light travel is equivalent to moving about in time. In saying that a warp drive is feasible, White is also saying that he can create a time machine. Those obstacles raise some signifcant doubts. “I don’t think any normal understanding of physics predicts he’s going to see anything in his experiments,” says Ken Olum, a physicist at Tufs University, who served on a panel debating exotic propulsion at the 100 Year Starship gathering in 2011. Noah Graham, a physicist at Middlebury College who read two of White’s papers at my request, wrote in an e-mail: “I don’t see any valid science in either paper beyond the summaries of previous work.” Alcubierre, now a physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, is also doubtful. “Even if I’m in a spaceship in the middle and I have the negative energy, there’s no way I can put it where I need it,” he told me by phone from his home in Mexico City. “It’s a nice idea. I like it because I wrote it myself. But it has a series of limitations that I’ve seen through the years, and I don’t see how to fx them.”

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THE CHEMISTRY OF KIBBLE THE BILLION-DOLL AR, CUT TING -EDGE SCIENCE OF CONVINCING DOGS AND CATS TO E AT WHAT’S IN FRONT OF THEM.

STOR Y BY M ARY ROACH PHOTOGR APH BY S AM K APL AN

TH E CHEM iS TrY OF K iBBl E

Research technician Stacey Schlanker demonstrates a two-bowl test (the gold standard of consumption testing) with a basset hound named Roscoe. The ﬁrst food an animal sniﬀs is one measure of its palatability.

DesPIte the CryPtIC naMe and anonymous ofce-park architecture, the nature of the enterprise located at AFB International is clear the moment you sit down for a meeting. The conference room smells like kibble. One wall, entirely glass, looks onto a small-scale kibble-extrusion plant where men and women in lab coats and blue sanitary shoe covers tootle here and there pushing metal carts. AFB makes favor coatings for dry pet foods. To test the coatings, the company needs to make small batches of plain kibble to put them on. The coated kibbles are then served to consumers: Spanky, Thomas, Skipper, Porkchop, Mohammid, Elvis, Sandi, Bela, Yankee, Fergie, Murphy, Limburger, and some 300 other dogs and cats that reside at the company’s Palatability Assessment Resource Center (PARC), about an hour’s drive from its St. Louis–area headquarters. AFB’s vice president at the time, Pat Moeller, a few other staf members, and I are seated around an oval table. Moeller is middleaged, likable, and plainspoken. He has a small mouth with naturally deep-red lips and a pronounced Cupid’s bow, but it would be inaccurate to say he has a feminine appearance. Rather, he has the look of an Army man, which he was when he helped develop foods for NASA’s Apollo program. The fundamental challenge of the pet food professional, Moeller is saying, is to balance the wants and needs of pets with those of their owners. The two are ofen at odds. Dry, cereal-based pet foods caught on during World War II, when tin rationing put a stop to canning. Owners were delighted. Dry pet food was less messy and stinky and more convenient. As a satisfed Spratt’s Patent Cat Food customer of yesteryear put it, the little biscuits were “both handy and cleanly.” To meet nutritional requirements, pet food manufacturers 60

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blend animal fats and meals with soy and wheat grains and vitamins and minerals. This yields a cheap, nutritious pellet that no one wants to eat. Cats and dogs are not grain eaters by choice, Moeller is saying. “So our task is to fnd ways to entice them to eat enough for it to be nutritionally sufcient.” This is where “palatants” enter the scene. AFB designs powdered favor coatings for the edible extruded shapes. Moeller came to AFB from Frito-Lay, where his job was to design, well, powdered favor coatings for edible extruded shapes. “There are,” he says, “a lot of parallels.” Cheetos without the powdered coating have almost no favor. Likewise, the sauces in processed convenience meals are basically palatants for humans. The cooking process for the chicken in a microwaveable entrée imparts a mild to nonexistent favor. The favor comes almost entirely from the sauce—by design. Says Moeller, “You want a common base that you can put two or three or more diferent sauces on and have a full product line.” Pet foods come in a variety of favors because that’s what humans like, and we assume our pets like what we like. We’re wrong. “For cats especially,” Moeller says, “change is ofen more difcult than monotony.” Nancy Rawson, seated across from me, is AFB’s director of basic research and an expert in animal taste and smell. She says that cats prefer to stick to one type of food. Outdoor cats tend to be either mousers or birders, but not both. But don’t worry: Most of the diference between Tuna Treat and Poultry Platter is in the name and the picture on the label. “They may have more fsh meal in one and more poultry meal in another,” says Moeller, “but the favors may or may not change.” To gauge the acceptability of a new product, food science has

PET FOODS COME IN A VARIETY OF FLAVORS BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT HUMANS LIKE, AND WE ASSUME PETS LIKE WHAT WE LIKE. WE’RE WRONG.

PhOtOgRAPhy by jOhN fEdELE

traditionally relied on consumer panels: willing individuals who sample an array of products and report back on which they prefer. It’s no diferent with pets. It’s just that you can’t ask them. PyroPhosPhates have been described to me as “cat crack.” Coat some kibble with it, and the pet food manufacturer can make up for a whole host of gustatory shortcomings. Rawson has three kinds of pyrophosphates in her ofce. They’re in plain, brown glass bottles, vaguely sinister in their anonymity. I have asked to try some, which, I think, has won me some points. Sodium acid pyrophosphate, known afectionately as SAPP, is part of the founding patent for AFB, yet almost no one who works for the company has ever asked to taste it. Rawson fnds this odd. I do, too, although I also accept the possibility that other people would fnd the two of us odd. Rawson is dressed today in a long, foral-print skirt with lowheeled brown boots and a lightweight plum-colored sweater. She is tall and thin with wide, graceful cheek and jaw bones. She looks at once like someone who could have worked as a runway model and someone who would be mildly put of to hear that. Before she was hired at AFB, Rawson worked as a nutritionist at Campbell Soup Company and, before that, did research on animal taste and smell at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.

Rawson unscrews the cap of one of the bottles. She pours a fnger of clear liquid into a plastic cup. Although pet food palatants most ofen take the form of a powder, liquid is better for tasting. To experience taste, the molecules of the tastant—the thing one is tasting—need to dissolve in liquid. Liquid fows into the microscopic canyons of the tongue’s papillae, coming into contact with the buds of taste receptor cells that cover them. That’s one reason to be grateful for saliva. Additionally, it explains the appeal of dunking one’s doughnuts. Taste is a sort of chemical touch. Taste cells are specialized skin cells. If you have hands for picking up foods and putting them in your mouth, it makes sense for taste cells to be on your tongue. But if, like fies, you don’t, it may be more expedient to have them on your feet. “They land on something and go, ‘Ooh, sugar!’ ’’ Rawson does her best impersonation of a housefy. “And the proboscis automatically comes out to suck the fuids.” Rawson has a colleague who studies crayfsh and lobsters, which taste with their antennae. “I was always jealous of people who study lobsters. They examine the antennae, and then they have a lobster dinner.” The study animal of choice for taste researchers is the catfsh, simply because it has so many receptors. They are all over its skin. “They’re basically swimming tongues,” says Rawson. It is a useful adaptation for a limbless creature that locates food by brushing up

April 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

TH E CHEMiS TrY OF K iBBl E YE Ar i N S CiENCE

Nancy Rawson (left), director of basic research, and research associate Jean Stough at work in the AFB analytics lab . Far right: The “electronic tongue” provides data on a sample’s taste proﬁle.

against it; many catfsh species feed by scavenging debris on the bottom of rivers. I try to imagine what life would be like if humans tasted things by rubbing them on their skin. Hey, try this salted caramel gelato— it’s amazing. Rawson points out that a catfsh may not consciously perceive anything when it tastes its food. The catfsh neurological system may simply direct the muscles to eat. It seems odd to think of tasting without any perceptive experience, but you are doing it right now. Humans have taste receptor cells in the gut, the voice box, the upper esophagus. But only the tongue’s receptors report to the brain. “Which is something to be thankful for,” says Danielle Reed, Rawson’s former colleague at Monell. Otherwise, you’d taste things like bile and pancreatic enzymes. (Intestinal taste receptors are thought to trigger hormonal responses to molecules like salt and sugar, as well as defensive reactions—vomiting, diarrhea—to dangerous bitter items.) We consider tasting to be a hedonic pursuit, but in much of the animal kingdom, as well as our own prehistory, the role of taste was more functional than sensual. Taste, like smell, is a doorman for the digestive tract, a chemical scan for possibly dangerous (bitter, sour) elements and desirable (salty, sweet) nutrients. Not long ago, a whale biologist named Phillip Clapham sent me a photograph that illustrates the consequences of life without a doorman. Like most creatures that swallow their food whole, sperm whales have a limited to nonexistent sense of taste. The photo shows 25 objects recovered from sperm whale stomachs. It’s like Jonah set up housekeeping: a pitcher, a cup, a tube of toothpaste, a strainer, a wastebasket, a shoe, a decorative fgurine. Enough stalling. Time to try the palatant. I raise the cup to my nose. It has no smell. I roll some over my tongue. All fve kinds of taste receptor stand idle. It tastes like water spiked with strange. Not bad, just other. Not food. “It may be that that otherness is something specifc to the cat,” says Rawson. Perhaps some element of the taste of meat that humans cannot perceive. The feline passion for pyrophosphates might explain the animal’s reputation as a picky eater. “We make [pet food] choices based on what we like,” says Reed, “and then when they don’t like it, we call them fnicky.” There is no way to know or imagine what the taste of pyrophosphate is like for cats. It’s like a cat trying to imagine the taste of sugar. Cats, unlike dogs and other omnivores, can’t taste sweet. There’s no need, since the cat’s diet in the wild contains almost nothing in the way of carbohydrates (which are simple sugars). They either never had the gene for sweet-detecting, or they lost it somewhere down the evolutionary road. Dogs rely more on smell than taste in making choices about what to eat and how vigorously. The takeaway lesson is that if the palatant smells appealing, the dog will dive in with instant and obvious zeal, and the owner will assume the food is a hit. When in reality it might have only smelled like a hit. Interpreting animals’ eating behaviors is tricky. By way of exam62

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ple, one of the highest compliments a dog can pay its food is to vomit. When a gulper, to use Moeller’s terminology, is excited by a food’s aroma, it will wolf down too much too fast. The stomach overflls, and the meal is refexively sent back up to avoid any chance of a rupture. “No consumer likes that,” he says, “but it’s the best indication that the dog just loved it.” “everyone Wants to be Meow Mix." Amy McCarthy, head of PARC, stands outside the plate-glass window of Tabby Room 2, where an unnamed client is facing of against Meow Mix, Friskies, and uncoated kibble in a preference test. If a client wants to be able to say that cats prefer its product, they must prove it at a facility like this one. Two animal techs dressed in surgical scrubs stand facing each other. They hold shallow metal pans of kibble in various shades of brown, one in each hand. Around their ankles, 20 cats mince and turn. The techs sink in tandem to one knee, lowering the pans. The diference between dog and cat is obvious. While a dog will almost (and occasionally literally) inhale its food the moment it’s set down, cats are more cautious. A cat wants to taste a little frst. McCarthy directs my gaze to the kibble that has no palatant coating. “See how they feel it in their mouth and then drop it?” I see an undiferentiated ground cover of bobbing cat heads but say yes anyway. “Now look there.” She directs my gaze to the Meow Mix, where the bottom of the pan is visible through an opening in the kibble. McCarthy, who is in her thirties, speaks louder than you expect a

TIME TO TRY THE PALATANT. I ROLL SOME OVER MY TONGUE. IT TASTES LIKE WATER SPIKED WITH STRANGE. NOT BAD, JUST OTHER. NOT FOOD.

PhOtOgRAPhy by jOhN fEdELE

Dry pet food, which took oďŹ&#x20AC; in the 1940s, is nutritious but tasteless. Food scientists coat it with liquid or powdered palatants to entice cats and dogs to eat it.

April 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

YE Ar TH E CHEMiS i N S CiENCE TrY OF K iBBl E

person to, perhaps a side efect of time spent talking over barking. Down the hallway, dog kibble A, dressed in a coat of newly formulated AFB palatant, is up against the competitor. The excitement is audible. One dog squeals like sneaker soles on a basketball court. Another makes a hufng sound reminiscent of a two-man timber saw. The techs are wearing heavy-duty ear protection, the kind worn on airport tarmacs. A tech named Theresa Kleinsorge opens the door of a large kennel crate and sets down two bowls in front of a terrier mix with dark-ringed eyes. She is short and brassy with spiky magenta-dyed hair. “Kleinsorge” is German for “little trouble,” and it seems like a ftting name—trouble in the afectionate sense of well-intentioned mischief. She owns seven dogs. McCarthy shares her home with six. Dog love is palpable here at PARC. It is the frst pet food test facility to “group house” its animals. Other than during certain preference tests, when animals are crated to avoid distractions, PARC is a cage-free facility. Groups of dogs, matched by energy level, spend their days roughhousing in outdoor yards. The terrier mix is named Alabama. His tail thumps a beat on the side of the crate. “Alabama is a gobbler real bad,” Kleinsorge says. In making their reports, the AFB techs must take into account the animals’ individual mealtime quirks. There are gulpers, circlers, tippers, snooters. If you weren’t acquainted with Alabama’s neighbor Elvis, for example, you’d think he was blasé about both of the foods just now set before him. Kleinsorge gives a running commentary of Elvis’s behavior while a colleague jots notes. “Snifng A, snifng B, licking B, licking his paws. Going back to A, looking at A, snifng B, eating B.” Most dogs are more decisive. Like Porkchop. “You’ll see. He’ll snif both, pick one, eat it. Ready?” She puts two bowls at Porkchop’s front paws. “Snifng A, snifng B, eating A. See? That’s what he does.” PARC techs also try to keep a bead on doggy interactions in the yards. “We need to know,” says McCarthy. “Are you down because you don’t like the food or because Pipes stole your bone earlier?” Kleinsorge mentions that a dog named Mohammid has lately had an upset stomach, and Porkchop likes to eat the vomit. “So that’s cutting into Porkchop’s appetite.” And probably yours. In addition to calculating how much of each food the dogs ate, PARC techs tally the First-Choice Percentage: the percentage of dogs who stuck their snout in the new food frst. This is important to a pet food company because with dogs, as Moeller said earlier, “if you can draw them to the bowl, they’ll eat most of the time.” Once the eating begins, though, the dog may move to the other food and wind up consuming more of it. Since most people don’t present their dogs with two choices, they don’t know the extent to which their pet’s initial, slavering, scent-driven enthusiasm may have dimmed as the meal progressed. The challenge is to fnd an aroma that drives dogs wild without making their owners, to use an Amy McCarthy verb, yak. “Cadaverine is a really exciting thing for dogs,” says Rawson. “Or putrescine.” But not for humans. These are odoriferous compounds given of by decomposing protein. I was surprised to learn that dogs lose interest when meat decays past a certain point. It is a myth that dogs will eat anything. “People think dogs love things that are old, nasty, dragged around in the dirt,” Moeller tells me. But only to a point, he says. “Something that’s just starting to decay still has full nutritional value. Whereas something that 64

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ORGANS ARE AMONG THE MOST NUTRITIONALLY RICH FOODS ON EARTH. LAMB SPLEEN HAS ALMOST AS MUCH VITAMIN C AS A TANGERINE. bacteria have really broken down—it’s lost a lot of its nutritional value, and they would only eat it if they had no choice.” Either way, a pet owner doesn’t want to smell it. Some dog food designers go too far in the other direction, tailoring the smell to be pleasing to humans without taking the dog’s experience of it into account. The problem is that the average dog’s nose can be up to 10,000 times more sensitive than the average human’s. A favor that to you or me is reminiscent of grilled steak may be overpowering and unappealing to a dog. Earlier today, I watched a test of a mint-favored treat marketed as a tooth-cleaning aid. Chemically speaking, mint, like jalapeño, is less a favor than an irritant. It’s an uncommon choice for a dog treat. (As is jalapeño, although according to psychologist Paul Rozin, Mexican dogs, unlike American dogs, enjoy a little heat. His work suggests that animals have cultural food preferences too.) The manufacturers are clearly courting the owners, counting on the association of mint with good oral hygiene. The competition courts the same dental hygiene association but visually: The biscuit is shaped like a toothbrush. Only Mohammid preferred the minty treats—which may explain the vomiting. A dog named Winston is nosing through his bowl for the occasional white chunk among the brown. Many of the dogs picked these out frst. They’re like the M&M’s in trail mix. McCarthy is impressed. “That’s a really, really palatable piece.” One of the techs mentioned that she tried some earlier and that the white morsel tasted like chicken. Or, rather, “chickeny.” I must have registered surprise at the disclosure, because Kleinsorge jumps in. “If you open a bag and it smells really good. . .” The tech shrugs. “And you’re hungry. . .” In 1973, the nUtrItIonaL watchdog group Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) published a booklet, Food Scorecard, that claimed that one third of the canned dog food purchased in housing projects was consumed by people. Not because those people had developed a taste for it, but because they couldn’t aford a more expensive meat product. (When a reporter asked where the fgure had come from, CSPI cofounder Michael Jacobson couldn’t recall, and to this day the organization has no idea.) To my mind, the shocker was in the nutrition scores themselves. Thirty-six common American protein products were ranked by overall value. Points were awarded for vitamins, calcium, and

PhOtOgRAPhy by jOhN fEdELE

A tech pours palatant—which can include proteins, yeasts, and antioxidants—over unﬂavored kibble in a hand coater, which rotates to cover the pieces evenly. Roger, a beagle, is one of hundreds of taste testers at AFB.

trace minerals and subtracted for added corn syrup and saturated fats. Jacobson—believing that poor people were eating signifcant amounts of pet food and/or exercising his talent for publicity—included Alpo in the rankings. It scored 30 points, besting salami and pork sausage, fried chicken, shrimp, ham, sirloin steak, McDonald’s hamburgers, peanut butter, pure beef hotdogs, Spam, bacon, and bologna. I mention the CSPI rankings to Rawson. We are back at AFB headquarters with Moeller, this time in a diferent conference room. (There are fve of them: Dalmatian, Burmese, Greyhound, Calico, and Akita. The staf members refer to them by breed, as in “Do you want to go into Greyhound?” and “Is Dalmatian free at noon?”) It would seem that in terms of nutrition, there was no diference between the cheap meatball sub I ate for lunch and the Smart Blend the dogs were enjoying earlier. Rawson disagrees. “Your sandwich was probably less complete, nutritionally.” The top slot on the CSPI scorecard, with 172 points, is beef liver. Chicken liver and liver sausage take second and third place. A serving of liver provides half the RDA for vitamin C, three times the RDA for ribofavin, nine times the vitamin A in the average carrot, and good amounts of vitamins B-12, B-6, and D, folic acid, and potassium. What’s the main ingredient in AFB’s dog food palatants? “Liver,” says Moeller. “Mixed with some other viscera. The frst part that a wild animal usually eats in its kill is the liver and stomach, the GI tract.” Organs in general are among the most

nutritionally rich foods on earth. Lamb spleen has almost as much vitamin C as a tangerine. Beef lung has 50 percent more. Stomachs are especially valuable because of what’s inside them: The predator benefts from the nutrients of the plants and grains in the stomach of its prey. “Animals have evolved to survive,” Rawson says. They like what’s best for them. People blanch to see “fsh meal” or “meat meal” on a pet food ingredient panel, but meal— which variously includes fesh, organs, skin, and bones—most closely resembles the diet of dogs and cats in the wild. Animals’ taste systems are specialized for the niche they occupy in the environment. That includes us. As hunters and foragers of the dry savannah, our earliest forebears evolved a taste for important but scarce nutrients: salt and high-energy fats and sugars. That, in a nutshell, explains the widespread popularity of junk food. And the wide spreads in general—an attribute we now share with our pets. A recent veterinary survey found that more than 50 percent of dogs and cats are overweight or obese. People devoted to a healthier lifestyle have also begun to project their food qualms and biases onto their pets. Some of AFB’s clients have begun marketing 100 percent vegetarian kibble. The cat is what’s called a true carnivore—its natural diet contains no plants. Moeller tilts his head. A slight lif of the eyebrows. The look says, “Whatever the client wants.” Mary Roach is the author of the book Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, published this spring.

April 2013

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Get a Grip on Calculus Calculus has made it possible to build bridges that span miles of river, to travel to the moon, and to predict patterns of population change. Yet for all its computational power, calculus is the exploration of just two ideas—the derivative and the integral—both of which arise from a commonsense analysis of motion. Master them and open a new world for yourself! So why didn’t you grasp calculus the ﬁrst time? In school, many of us didn’t continue with mathematics, and so this great achievement remains a closed door. And for those of us who did, award-winning Professor Michael Starbird—coauthor of the acclaimed math book for nonmathematicians, The Heart of Mathematics: An invitation to effective thinking—can correct the clumsy classroom delivery that hid its beauty. In Change and Motion: Calculus Made Clear, 2nd Edition, the concepts and insights at the heart of calculus take center stage.

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lecture titles 1. Two Ideas, Vast Implications 2. Stop Sign Crime—The First Idea of Calculus—The Derivative 3. Another Car, Another Crime—The Second Idea of Calculus—The Integral 4. The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus 5. Visualizing the Derivative—Slopes 6. Derivatives the Easy Way— Symbol Pushing 7. Abstracting the Derivative— Circles and Belts 8. Circles, Pyramids, Cones, and Spheres 9. Archimedes and the Tractrix 10. The Integral and the Fundamental Theorem 11. Abstracting the Integral— Pyramids and Dams 12. Bufon’s Needle or π from Breadsticks 13. Achilles, Tortoises, Limits, and Continuity 14. Calculators and Approximations 15. The Best of All Possible Worlds—Optimization 16. Economics and Architecture 17. Galileo, Newton, and Baseball 18. Getting of the Line—Motion in Space 19. Mountain Slopes and Tangent Planes 20. Several Variables—Volumes Galore 21. The Fundamental Theorem Extended 22. Fields of Arrows—Diferential Equations 23. Owls, Rats, Waves, and Guitars 24. Calculus Everywhere

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HOW2.0 Tips, Tricks, Hacks, and Do-It-Yourself Projects

WarnIng We review all our projects before publishing them, but ultimately your safety is your responsibility. Always wear protective gear, take proper safety precautions, and follow all laws and regulations.

Edited b y Dave Mosher

H2 0@ p op sc i.co m

Small aND mighty The LifeTrac isn’t big like industrial tractors seen on most farms, but it can pull two tons, lift four, and work anything from a backhoe to a brick press.

I m A g E C O U R t E S y t R I S tA N C O P L E y S m I t H

Yo u B u i lt Wh at? !

Tractor for the Apocalypse A modular, open-source workhorse to help rebuild civilization story by Clay Dillow

Marcin Jakubowski didn’t study fusion physics to become a farmer. But the Polish-American scientist grew more disillusioned with academia the longer he worked toward his doctorate. Researchers withheld data to compete for grants, he says, instead of collaborating to solve big problems. “The further I went in my Ph.D. program, the less value I felt I was contributing to society,” he says. Seeking a fresh start, Jakubowski bought 30 acres of Missouri farmland and a tractor. Life in relative seclusion

proved uneventful until, one day in 2008, his tractor broke down for the second and last time, spurring him to start an open-source industrial revolution. To Jakubowski, the tractor seemed designed to fail. Why should he sink more money into fixing it or buy a replacement? He wanted a simple and useful machine, and one he could repair and upgrade on the fly. “It boiled down to lower cost in the long run,” he says. Jakubowski built the first LifeTrac, as he calls his DIY tractor, in three months

April 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

H2.0 for $6,000—about $30,000 less than a comparable mass-produced model. Seeing room for improvement, he built a second prototype in just six days. He posted his progress on the tractor and other machines to an online wiki, which attracted followers, who suggested their own design tweaks. Some even visited in person to help with builds—and Open Source Ecology took off. Led by Jakubowski, the group now designs open-source agroindustrial machines on his “Factor e Farm.” The fourth iteration of LifeTrac isn’t like the industrial equipment on most farms; it works with a variety of custom attachments, including two removable, office-copier-size hydraulic engines called Power Cubes. The cubes also power other pieces of the Global Village Construction Set: 50 machines—ranging from 3-D printers and CNC mills to bakery ovens and brick presses—that the group deems essential to modern society (see “Multipurpose Power,” right). Jakubowski isn’t preparing for the apocalypse, even though his civilization starter kit might come in handy after one. Rather, he wants to equip the world with affordable tools that enable productive farming, manufacturing, and other accoutrements of civilized life. Open Source Ecology has prototyped 15 of 50 designs so far, and Jakubowski plans to create the rest by the end of 2015. Once all of the blueprints hit the Web, the group will shift from prototyping to multiplying. The idea: With a few raw materials and a starter construction set, users could copy all the machines. Jakubowski hopes to field-test the concept around the world at centers where people learn to build the machines—and, in the spirit of open source, improve the original designs. “This isn’t about free versus paid,” Jakubowski says. “When people are free to build on each other’s work, innovation can increase exponentially.” 70

POPULAR SCIENCE

April 2013

265,000 TOnS Amount of coal that the world’s largest land vehicle, a German excavator called Bagger 288, can move daily

HOW IT WOrKS 3

“ I LOVE

F R O m t O P : C O U R t E S y t R I S tA N C O P L E y S m I t H ( 2 ) ; C O U R t E S y I S A I A H S A x O N , O P E N S O U R C E E C O L O g y / C C - B y - S A 2 . 0 ( 1 0 )

Two Power Cubes, each a 28-horsepower gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic pump (inset), lend the LifeTrac its muscle. Quick-connect mounts let users swap cubes into other machines.

Hydraulic motors drive the wheels, which operate in pairs to move the 4,000-pound tractor on tank-like treads. When equipped with two Power Cubes, the LifeTrac can drag two tons of weight.

LifeTrac’s creators designed their multipurpose tractor around a frame of sturdy, fourinch-wide steel tubes. Loader arms made from the tubes can lift loads weighing up to four tons.

Versatility defines the LifeTrac. In addition to a simple shovel, Open Source Ecology is prototyping attachments such as seeders, rototillers, well-drilling rigs, balers, and brick presses.

MULTIPURPOSE POWER maintaining a fleet of machines with different engines is arduous and expensive. The Global Village Construction Set attacks both problems with a single, versatile power source called the Power Cube. Below are a few of the machines and capabilities that a cube could enable by 2015.

CRYSTAL ROCK DEODORANT.” Chris Foster 4x San Diego Triathlon winner

Pure and natural 24-hour protection even after the most grueling triathlons Power Cube

agriculture

Construction

Hypoallergenic and no harmful chemicals

Manufacturing Press Forge Uses hydraulic power to punch molten metal into any number of heavy-duty parts

microtractor A tiller small enough to push around a field and prepare the soil for planting seeds

Sawmill Cuts unwieldy logs into lumber

truck A general-purpose off-road vehicle that can lug hefty loads for miles

Bulldozer Big-bladed tractor that can clear roads, dig water reservoirs, build up berms, and more

Wire mill Draws molten metal into bars, rods, and wire

hay Cutter Simultaneously mows down large fields of grass and prepares hay for a bailing machine

liberator Dirt goes in, bricks come out—makes nearly 1,000 small blocks an hour

metal Roller Shapes metal sheets into mechanical parts

April 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

Three bold fragrances - or unscented

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H2.0

WARninG Play with fire and you’ll get burned. Propane gas flowing into swirling air is an excellent way to test this theory.

G RAY M AT T E R

Funnels of Flame How nature scorches the skies with fire tornadoes

Every year I burn down my backyard. Not because I have an unhealthy fascination with fire (which I do), but because my backyard is native prairie. It needs regular burning to maintain the ecosystem. Sometimes I witness fire whirls—spinning columns of flame that last a few seconds and reach 30 to 40 feet into the air. But those are nothing compared to what much bigger backyards can create: fire tornadoes. Tornadoes are like upside-down drains. Water flowing down a sink spins as centrifugal force interacts with gravity. Similarly, when a column of warm air rises through cooler air, it can form a vortex. If that rising air contains fire, you get a fire whirl or, in extreme cases, a fire tornado— flaring monsters that can reach nearly a mile high and swirl flames faster than 200 mph. I’ve photographed a fire whirl only once, and I hope I never see a fire tornado. I probably won’t. The only one ever conclusively documented occurred in 2003, after wildfires erupted near Canberra, Australia. Even so, scientists couldn’t confirm what leveled more than 500 homes until they reanalyzed photos of the damage in 2012. I decided to create my own tabletop fire tornado with USB fans and propane gas. I hooked the fans around a turkey-fryer ring, turned them on, and lowered the fryer’s propane burner into the breeze. It was cheating, as updrafts power the vortex in a real fire tornado, but it still looked cool as the flames compressed into a two-foot-tall twister. (Box fans around a bonfire can create much bigger artificial fire tornadoes.) By the way, it’s myth that water drains only counterclockwise north of the equator. Fire whirls, like draining water, are too small for the Earth’s rotation to affect them (unlike story by huge hurricanes). Not Theodore Gray that this fact would help if you’re ever p h o t o g r ap h b y Mike Walker caught in one. 72

POPULAR SCIENCE

ApRil 2013

tablEtop twistEr Blowing fans can contort flames into a vortex, but powerful updrafts drive natural fire tornadoes.

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Warning Broken glass can cause deep cuts and gashes. Do not screw the modified lightbulb into any socket.

H2.0 Si m p l e p roje c t of t h e mon t h

WebSite of the month

Magic Mystery Bulb The Addams Family’s Uncle Fester is famous for popping lightbulbs into his mouth and making them glow. The TV trick inspired Kip Kedersha, a fan of the series, to build a prank lamp using an LED, batteries, and an old bulb. Create your own and light up a room on April 1. — r o s e c o n r y 1 Wearing thick gloves, carefully twist a glass lightbulb out of its metal base and save both parts. Discard the filament.

2 Solder a 2-inch wire to the base’s inside center and another to the side. Stack and zip-tie two three-volt button batteries.

Base

Batteries

leD

Bulb glass

Time 1 hour CosT $4 DiffiCulTY ▯○○○○

Autodesk 123D Catch

3 To the short lead (anode) of a white LED, solder the center wire. Tape the other wire to the battery pack’s negative end.

4 Tape one end of a third wire to the battery pack’s positive terminal. Solder the other end to the LED’s long lead (cathode).

5 Coax the LED into the glass, fit the battery pack and wires into the base, and reconnect the bulb’s two pieces with hot glue.

6 Grasp the base, touching a wire that’s hidden in your hand to its side and bottom. To the surprise of your pals, it should light up.

You don’t need costly gadgets and software to turn real-world stuff into precise 3-D models—just a digital camera and Autodesk’s free 123D Catch service. Take at least 20 photos of an object from various angles and upload them to the site, where algorithms stitch the pics into a meticulous 3-D rendering. Then polish away any errors using the editing program. You can order 3-D-printed or laser-cut models, download the data to use with your own gear, or share it online with other enthusiasts. — M i r i a M k r a M e r

L e f t t o r i G h t : s o n o f a L a n ; c o u r t e s y a u t o d e s k 1 2 3 d c at c h

Transform an old lightbulb into a glowing April Fools’ prank

Silver

Metal with the highest electrical conductivity. Most printed circuit boards use copper, however, because it’s cheaper and doesn’t corrode as quickly.

H2.0 GeAr U p

Non-Futile Resistance

c o u r t e s y G e o r G e G r av e s

Dial in the resistor you need and avoid digging through messy electronics bins if your desk isn’t cluttered, you aren’t doing your job. Gadget-building geeks know this adage well, thanks to resistors. The tiny components police electricity’s flow, yet it can take dozens of kinds to perfect a circuit (such as to spin a motor at a precise speed). Electronics hobbyist George Graves knew devices called decade boxes allowed users to dial in different levels of resistance, but retail models seemed expensive and confusing. So Graves built his own with used parts. Now you can too. — a J a i r a J Full instructions: popsci.com/decadebox

1 Get eight decimal thumbwheel switches. 2 Collect nine identical resistors for each switch, from 1 ohm through 100 megohms. (E.g., nine 1-ohm resistors for the first, nine 10-ohm resistors for the next, and so on.) 3 Set aside one resistor in each set. Bend the leads

Time 5 hours CosT $25 DiffiCulTY ▯▯○○○ of the other eight resistors to fit across sequentially numbered pins (e.g., from pins 1 to 2), solder them in place, and trim the leads (see inset). 4 Solder the unbent resistor

onto pins 4 and 5 and a piece of wire from pin 9 to pin C. Mark each switch’s magnitude.

each remaining pin, and solder all of the connections.

5 Stack each switch in order (from high to low), slip a wire through

6 Secure one wire to the last open pin at the stack’s top and another wire to its bottom. Connect each wire to a banana jack.

7 Wire the box into your circuit, dial in the value you need, and say good-bye to futile resistance.

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The Subject Vehicles are identiﬁed at the settlement website and in the full settlement notice available on the website or through the toll-free number below. The class includes persons, entities and/or organizations. This settlement does not involve claims of personal injury or property damage.

certain cash beneﬁts for which you may be eligible.

What does the settlement provide? The proposed settlement provides for: (a) cash payments from two funds totaling $500 million for certain eligible class members; (b) free installation of a brake override system on certain Subject Vehicles; (c) a customer support program to correct any defect in materials or workmanship of certain vehicle parts for other eligible class members; and (d) at least $30 million toward automobile safety research and education. Some of these Am I Included in the proposed settlement? beneﬁts require action by class members by Subject to certain limited exclusions, you are or before certain deadlines. included if as of December 28, 2012, Payments will vary depending upon • You own or owned, purchase(d), and/or several factors such as the number of claims lease(d) a “Subject Vehicle” that was submitted, the amounts claimed, and other • Distributed for sale or lease in any of adjustments and deductions. the lfty States, the District of Columbia, What are my options? Puerto Rico and all other United States territories and/or possessions or If you do nothing, you will remain in the class • Were a company that insured Subject and will not be able to sue Toyota about the Vehicles for residual value. issues in the lawsuit, but you may not receive

You can submit a claim form by July 29, 2013, if you don’t exclude yourself, for any cash beneﬁts for which you are eligible and which require a claim form.

What is the lawsuit about? The lawsuit alleges that certain Toyota, Lexus, and Scion vehicles equipped with ETCS are defective and can experience unintended acceleration. Toyota denies that it has violated any law, denies that it engaged in any and all wrongdoing, and denies that its ETCS is defective. The Court did not decide which side was right. Instead, the parties decided to settle.

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Q: Do lobotomies work? Surprisingly, yes.

The modern lobotomy originated in the 1930s, when doctors realized that by severing fiber tracts connected to the frontal lobe, they could help patients overcome certain psychiatric problems, such as intractable depression and anxiety. Over the next two decades, the procedure would become simple and popular, completed by poking a sharpened tool above the eyeball. According to one study, about two thirds of patients showed improvement after surgery. Unfortunately, not all lobotomy practitioners were responsible, and the technique left some patients with severe side effects, including seizures, lethargy, changes in personality, and incontinence. In response, doctors refined their techniques. They replaced the lobotomy with more specialized approaches: the cingulotomy, the anterior capsulotomy, and the subcaudate tractotomy. Studies of these procedures found evidence of benefit for at least one fourth of patients suffering from problems such as OCD and depression. Even with the risk of side effects, those in the field still say the procedures were by and large successful. “I feel that the principle behind ablative surgery was somewhat exonerated by the research findings, which LonG anSWEr

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showed that it worked for very specific indications,” says Konstantin Slavin, president of the American Society for Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery, and professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. By the 1980s, lobotomies had fallen out of fashion. “In general, the entire functional neurosurgery field moved away from destruction—from ablative surgery,” Slavin says. A then-new technique called deep-brain stimulation made ablative surgery obsolete. In the procedure, a surgeon drills holes in the head and inserts electrodes into the neural tissue. When current passes through the leads, they activate or inactivate patches of the brain. “The attractive part is that we don’t destroy the tissue,” Slavin says. Doctors can also adjust treatment if a patient suffers side effects. They can turn the current down or suspend it altogether—so as to “give the brain a holiday,” as Slavin calls it. Most deep-brain stimulation is now used to treat movement disorders such as Parkinson’s Disease. The surgical treatment of patients with OCD is FDA-approved but reserved only for extreme cases. Slavin and his colleagues have been examining broader uses in an ongoing study. “Within the next five years, we hope we’ll have a definitive answer of whether or not it works.”

bobbieo/Getty imaGes

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Q: What would it feel like

to travel at warp speed?

eveRett CoLLeCtioN

SHort anSWEr

It wouldn’t feel like much of anything.

If it were really possible to build a warp drive, using it wouldn’t make you fly back into your seat as in a science-fiction movie. “Inside the spaceship, it would feel absolutely normal,” says physicist Dave Goldberg of Drexel University. “You would be weightless, of course, because you wouldn’t have any acceleration on you at all.” That assumes you’re on the inside of what’s known as an Alcubierre Bubble—a hypothetical construct that could allow a patch of space to travel at many times the speed of light [see “Warp Factor,” p. 50]. The crew of a spaceship that had entered such a bubble probably wouldn’t have any sense of traveling at warp speed—“once you’re in there, it’s the most blasé thing in the world,” says Goldberg—but crossing the bubble’s border would be gut-wrenching. It could be as violent as falling into a black hole: The space-time deformation at the edge of the bubble would create an enormous tidal effect, one strong enough to rip your bones apart. LonG anSWEr

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No one has ever sampled the ice-capped lakes of Antarctica, so scientists can only guess at what lives in their depths. “We really don’t have any idea,” says Brent Christner, a microbiologist at Louisiana State University and member of one of the three teams that have been drilling into subglacial lakes. (Results are expected by the end of this year.) “But if there’s a viable ecosystem in these environments, it has to be driven by chemical energy.” In such a system, organisms would probably have evolved to subsist on dissolved minerals, perhaps derived from bedrock ground beneath the ice. “On the seafloor, people have described how basalts are colonized by organisms that are fueled by oxidizing iron,” Christner says. “This might be a very similar scenario.” Another hypothesis is that scientists will find the sort of life that shows up elsewhere beneath the Earth’s surface: stinky, anaerobic microorganisms that feast on bits of floating detritus. “We’ll know if we find that,” says NASA astrobiologist Chris McKay, “because it’s likely to smell of rotten eggs.” Alternatively, some of these subglacial environments—notably Lake Vostok—could be overflowing with oxygen as a result of a natural pumping mechanism that forces gas LonG anSWEr

Rock-eating or super-oxygenated microbes.

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beneath the surface of the ice. In that case, scientists might expect to find a new kind of microbe in the lakes, one that’s built to handle hyper-oxygenation. McKay cautions of another, less exciting possibility: “The polar cap itself is a huge block of distilled water; it’s not very life-rich,” he explains, and the subglacial lakes could be just as barren. In fact, this “dullest of all possibilities” may be the most likely result of the year’s experiments. “I expect distilled water,” he says. What about larger, macroscopic life beneath the ice? “Everything we know about big organisms is that they require a lot of food and a lot of oxygen,” says McKay. “We have to live in environments that are very productive biologically.” The subglacial lakes, in contrast, would provide at best a meager pasture. That said, if the lakes were full of rock-eating or super-aerobic microbes, then it’s at least a possibility—however remote—that we’d also find a critter that lives to gulp them up. Indeed, tiny nematodes, or roundworms, have been found in other equally inhospitable places; one was recently found in a gold mine nearly a mile beneath the Earth’s surface. “The nematodes would be the apex predators,” says Christner. “These would be the lions and tigers.”

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to the left of the main gate at Johnson, a Saturn V rocket lies on its side, its stages disconnected to show some of its guts. It’s massive. Just one of its many engines is nearly the size of a small car, and, laid on end, the rocket is a few feet longer than a football feld. It is a quiet testament to the difculty of space travel. It is also four decades old, and the time it represents—when NASA was part of a grand national efort to send a man to the moon—has long passed. Today, JSC feels like a place that once touched greatness but has since fallen from its orbit. A breakthrough in propulsion could spell a new age at JSC and NASA, and to a degree that age is already upon us. Dawn, a probe launched in 2007, is exploring the asteroid belt using ion thrusters. In 2010, a Japanese team deployed Ikaros, the frst interplanetary craf driven by a solar sail, another type of experimental propulsion. And in 2016, scientists plan to test VASIMR, a plasma-based system designed for high-thrust propulsion, on the ISS. While those systems might one day carry astronauts to Mars, they still will not be able to send astronauts beyond the solar system. To do that, White says NASA will need to embrace riskier projects. Warp drive is perhaps the most farfetched of all NASA’s propulsion eforts. The greater scientifc community says White cannot create it. Experts say he’s working against the laws of nature and physics. Nonetheless, NASA is behind it. “He’s not funded at a very high level in terms of what he’s trying to accomplish,” Applewhite says. “I think there’s very much interest within the directorate to continue growing his work. These are the kinds of theoretical concepts that, if they come to fruition, would be game changers.” In January, White packed up his warp interferometer and moved it to a new facility. Eagleworks had outgrown its frst home. The new lab is larger and, he says enthusiastically, “It’s seismically isolated,” meaning it is shielded from vibrations. But perhaps the best thing about the new lab is also the most telling. NASA assigned White to a facility that was built for the Apollo program, the same one that put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. Konstantin Kakaes is a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation.

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From the Archiv es

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“Who ever heard of a camera that does everything except ask the subject to look at the birdie and then hands you the picture on a platter?” —Arthur Fisher, editor

Instant Revolution st o r y b y rose pastore

The Polaroid SX-70 was an amateur photographer’s dream: a pocket camera that could produce vivid, durable color photos nearly instantly. When PoPular Science reviewed the collapsible 1.5-pound camera in January 1973, we called it “the most fiendishly clever invention in the history of photography” and praised Polaroid founder Edwin H. Land as the creator of “a pocketful of miracles.” The single-lens reflex camera, along with its selfdeveloping, mess-free film, would soon gain a cult following that included Ansel Adams and Andy Warhol.

How it worked Eyepiece Concave mirror Fresnel reﬂector

Mirror

Exposed ﬁlm

Lens

Processing rollers Film Fresnel reﬂector

Aim

Fire

Photo

Light from the subject enters through the lens and hits a slanted mirror, which directs it onto a flat, aluminum-coated plastic sheet exactly the size of the finished picture. That surface, called a Fresnel reflector, acts as both a mirror and a lens; it beams the light back to the top of the slanted mirror. From there it travels to a concave mirror, which forms the image seen through the eyepiece.

When the photographer presses the shutter button, the Fresnel reflector flips up against the slanted mirror, uncovering the film. Another mirror under the reflector beams light from the lens down to expose the film.

A 12,000rpm motor and gear train push the exposed film out of the camera past small processing rollers, which rupture a pod in the front of the film card containing titanium dioxide, alkali, and developer reagent. The chemicals spread inside the film and begin the development process, which continues outside the camera body. Meanwhile, the Fresnel reflector drops backs down to cover the film pack, and the camera returns to viewing mode.

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POPULAR SCIENCE

April 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE ARChIvE

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