Popular science usa 2013 05 by Science and Technology

THE NEW DAWN OF

INVENTION 10 BEST PROTOTYPES OF THE YEAR DIY SPACE SUIT•PAPER BIKE•PREFAB ROBOT GRAVITY LIGHT•DIGITAL AX•BOX-TAIL PLANE ...AND The Future of Crowdfunding, Hacker Spaces, and Patent Law

SHARK BAIT

At Sea With the Researchers Who Tag Predators By Hand

THE ATOM FACTORY

Scientists Build A Brand-New Element

SCREAM MACHINE

The World’s Most Terrifying Roller Coaster

CANON imageFORMULA "Scan-tini" Ultra-Portable Scanners Personal Solutions For Scanning And Sharing On The Go Smart, Stylish, And Easy To Connect

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NEW! Canon imageFORMULA P-208 "Scan-tini" Mobile Scanner. This ultra-compact personal document scanner measures a mere 2-inches wide and a tad longer than a standard ruler, slides easily into a briefcase or laptop bag. It can scan single or double-sided documents up to 8-1/2 x 11 inches, including receipts, business cards, photographs, bills, and contracts, on the go at up to 8 pages-per-minute, and convert them to digital ﬁles that can be easily searched, stored, and shared. The latest, most compact member of Canon’s advanced imageFORMULA “Scan-tini” line of portable document scanners also connects to your computer with an easy “Plug-and-Scan” setup without additional drivers or apps, uses a single USB port, minimizing the need for additional ports or powercords, has built-in optical character recognition (OCR) for converting paperbased documents to digital ﬁles, and lets you make multiple settings with the click of a mouse using built-in Canon CaptureOnTouch Lite software. The sleek P-208 includes a 10-sheet Auto Document Feed (ADF) and can handle thick, thin, or long documents— even embossed cards.

Connect the Canon P-208 “Scan-tini” to the optional WU10 Wireless Adapter and Battery Pack to broaden your connectivity choices. When combined with the optional WU10 Wireless Adapter and Battery Pack, the scanner not only works wirelessly in Windows and Mac environments, but also with iPad®, iPhone®, iPod touch™ and Android devices using the free downloadable Canon CaptureOnTouch Mobile app. It can also send scanned images directly to cloud applications such as Evernote ™ and Microsoft® SharePoint®. This mobile document scanner delivers a high level of ﬂexibility and userfriendly performance in a compact, high-value package. It’s the ideal way to help manage and organize your documents, whether you’re keeping track of your family bills, running a small mobile ofﬁce, or doing business on the road.

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Canon imageFORMULA P-215 "Scan-tini" Mobile Scanner. Slightly larger than the P-208, the P-215 “Scan-tini” still ﬁts easily in a briefcase, connects via USB, features single or double-sided (duplex) scanning and a 20-page ADF for multiple scans at up to 15 pages-perminute. A built-in dedicated card scanner lets you scan business cards to your computer on the go, and the included software provides the ability to scan directly to the Cloud including Google Docs, and to popular formats including PDF and PPTX. Aimed at “road warriors” and business professionals, the P-215 brings the power of high-performance document copying to virtually any mobile or stationary workspace.

Buy now and get a FREE carrying case. (Promotion ends 7/31/13)

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Ask an Allstate Agent about coverage options like Rider Protection Package and Genuine Parts Guarantee. Allstate Motorcycle Insurance – protection for bikes and the people who ride them. SM

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ADVANCED

RIDER PROTECTION

Powered by the staff at In recent years, a select group of manufacturers in the motorcycle industry have made great strides in the creation of new technologies in personal safety equipment. A great example that applies to both track racing and road riding is the invention of lightweight, personal air bag systems that inflate at lightning speed prior to impact in the event of a crash.

ALLSTATE ADVOCATES FOR RIDERS

Presented by

Every day in this country, motorcyclists are killed intersections.* Allstate thinks insane. Their message for riders and drivers is simple: twice, because Once is Never Enough (O.N.E.)

There are a number of products that feature personal air bag systems for motorcycle enthusiasts on the market today, with many more in development pipelines. For use on the racetrack, a suit created by Alpinestars can actually reduce the impact of a motorcycle crash to one-tenth of what a rider wearing more standard equipment might suffer. Computer technology that is built into the suit actually monitors the rider’s body and identifies the type of motion that occurs just prior to a crash. At that moment the suit’s computer deploys air bags along the rider’s collarbone and shoulders protect the rider from impact. [www.alpinestars.com] Another product on the market, largely intended for off-track road use, is a rechargeable air bag system designed to work with a rider’s helmet to reduce damaging neck movements in the event of an accident. For example, Spidi’s Neck DPS Airbag Tex Vest will inflate a double cushion in just 0.2 seconds as an accident is occurring, protecting the rider’s neck and shoulder areas. This particular vest is lightweight—at only 480 grams—and can be worn over conventional riding gear. [www.spidi.com]

three at that’s both Look

Allstate’s O.N.E. program was created to raise awareness and encourage people to stop and look twice for motorcycles at intersections. In 2012, Allstate worked with local governments to install 116 permanent Watch for Motorcycles signs around the country. In 2013 and beyond, Allstate will continue to advocate for safer roads for riders. You can help; if you know of a dangerous intersection in your community, post it at facebook.com/allstatemotorcycle.

GOODRIDESM BY ALLSTATE

Alpinestars Racing Replica 1 Piece Leather Suit

Allstate knows that part of safety is preparation. The free GoodRideSM app by Allstate not only helps you plan, track, and share the miles of every trip, but also helps you prep and log details of your bike to get the most out of your rides. The GoodRideSM Maintenance Log feature helps you keep tabs on your maintenance history. You can record oil changes, tire replacements and other repairs. You can even set alerts to remind you when your bike is due for service. And if you have more than one motorcycle, you can track each bike separately. Also, the GoodRideSM Rider Checklist reminds you of the important things to check on your bike before you start a trip. And when you’re ready to hit the road, GoodRideSM lets you tell your Facebook friends where you’re headed—at the same time, you can remind everyone to look twice for motorcycles! Those are features any rider can rally around. Download the free GoodRideSM app by Allstate today.

To download GoodRideSM by Allstate: Text RIDE to 25788. Spidi Neck DPS Vest

You’re In Good Hands With Allstate ®

Msg&Data rates may apply, text HELP for help, STOP to cancel. For more information on the privacy policy, visit allstate.com or call 877-571-0774. *Based on U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Fatality Analysis Reporting System averages.

We create chemistry that makes mosquitoes love to stay away.

In villages where malaria is a lethal threat, we supply Interceptor®* nets that stop mosquitoes and keep kids safe. But the nets save more than kids’ lives. With the dramatic decrease in infection, everyday activities like playing or going to school are possible again. A healthier, more educated population is a key to reducing poverty. When mosquito nets help the community ﬂourish, it’s because at BASF, we create chemistry.

www.wecreatechemistry.com *INTERCEPTOR® IS NOT OFFERED FOR SALE IN ALL COUNTRIES. ALWAYS READ AND FOLLOW ALL INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE. INTERCEPTOR IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF BASF.

MAY 2013 Volume 282 No. 5

FEATURES

38 50

SAM KAPLAN; ON THE COVER: NICK KALOTERAKIS

60 62 68

contents

SEVENTH ANNUAL INVENTION AWARDS Meet 10 rising inventors and their big ideas for a faster, safer, and more accessible future, including a gravitypowered light, a welding helmet that prevents lung damage, a prosthetic foot that can withstand highimpact sports, and more.

Apex Predator Humans are pushing sharks to the brink of extinction. Could tagging the ocean’s greatest predators pull them back? By Brian Lam

Making New Elements The heaviest atoms in the universe are manmade. Here’s how scientists do it. By Brooke Borel

Sun Shot This month, pilots will fly a plane powered by sunlight across the U.S. In 2015, they plan to circumnavigate the world. By Stephen Cass

The hand of Roy the Robot, a programmable animatronic robot kit and Invention Award winner

Wing and a Scare A record-breaking roller coaster— including the tallest upside-down drop—mimics the thrill of stunt flying. By Nicole Dyer

Access videos, animations, and more with the POPSCI Interactive app. Just hover your smartphone over pages with this icon.

DEPARTM EN TS

08 10 12 84 96

From the Editor Peer Review Megapixels: A telescope with 24 eyes FYI: When did garage inventions start? From the Archives

WHAT’S NEW 15 When TV and videogames collide 16 The Goods: Silent Velcro and more!

18 20 22 24

An ATV for both land and sea A portable beer for backpacking The best virtual-reality goggles Your next fridge will tell you what to buy

HEADLINES 27 How smart roads will change driving 30 Five clever ways to stop invasive species 32 A better brain map

34 The most advanced port on the planet 36 Why public genomes are the future HOW 2.0 71 Super Mario Kart hits a real racetrack 74 Ride a bike, charge your phone 78 How to replicate DNA with a lightbulb 80 Fix Granny’s computer from afar 81 Make wired headphones wireless

MAY 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

FROM THE EDI TOR THE FUTURE NOW

Editor-in-Chief Jacob Ward Creative Director Sam Syed Executive Editor Cliff Ransom Managing Editor Jill C. Shomer EDITORIAL Articles Editor Jennifer Bogo Editorial Production Manager Felicia Pardo Senior Editor Martha Harbison Information Editor Katie Peek, Ph.D. Projects Editor Dave Mosher Senior Associate Editors Corinne Iozzio, Susannah F. Locke Assistant Editor Amber Williams Editorial Assistant Rose Pastore Copy Editors Joe Mejia, Leah Zibulsky Researchers Kaitlin Bell Barnett, Sophia Li, Erika Villani 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

N 2007, my first year of working at Popular Science, we launched the Invention Awards, a celebration of dogged innovators everywhere, and gave one of the first to Leonard Duffy. His success until then had been limited to a cookbook stand, which sold for a time on QVC. Then, from his workshop in Vermont, he took a stab at updating the product that everyone wishes he or she had thought up: Velcro. His version, unflatteringly named the slidingly engaging fastener, was an interlocking patterned material that he used to make a breathable, waterproof replacement for a Velcro cast. We found him just as his material had won a NASA contest; today, it has evolved into 10 U.S. patents. I’ve always thought of him as the very model of what these awards are about. Since 2007, the process and products of invention have changed. Materials and tools are cheaper and more sophisticated. Amateurs with a $2,000 3-D printer can produce the sorts of prototypes only professionals with access to a machine costing tens of thousands of dollars could have created 10 years ago. And an idea need not take a physical form to have a worldwide impact. Ubiquitous platforms like smartphones are making coders, not welders, the new inventors. What’s perhaps most transformative, however, is that today the passion of an inventor, captured in a personal appeal on the Internet, can be more than enough to bring in the investment capital he or she needs

You might think that our media-saturated, app-based culture is doing away with the inventive instinct, but the opposite is true. to get something going, via crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter, RocketHub, and Indiegogo. While you might think that our media-saturated, app-based culture is doing away with the inventive instinct, those sites have revealed that the opposite is true. People who could never before afford to invent something suddenly have the means to make it happen. That last factor has caused us to expand our celebration of amateur achievement. Beyond the 10 innovators you’ll read about this month, we’re also putting out a call for 50 scientists, thinkers, and makers who want to achieve something important but lack the capital to do it. We’re going to give them a platform for soliciting seed money—a crowdgrant, we’re calling it—from you, our audience. The first step is finding worthy entrants. If you’re a bathtub geneticist, an amateur hydroelectric engineer, a weekend chemist, apply at popsci.com/crowdgrant for the chance to be one of the 50, and follow the #crowdgrant conversation on Twitter.

JACO B WA R D jacob.ward@popsci.com | @_jacobward_

ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY Art Director Todd Detwiler Photo Editor Thomas Payne Designer Michael Moreno Digital Imaging Hiroki Tada POPSCI.COM Digital Content Director Suzanne LaBarre Senior Editor Paul Adams Associate Editor Dan Nosowitz Assistant Editor Colin Lecher Video Producer Dan Bracaglia Web Intern Shaunacy Ferro Contributing Writers Kelsey D. Atherton, Rebecca Boyle, Francie Diep, Emily Elert

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POPULAR SCIENCE

MAY 2013

MARIUS BUGGE

REINVENTING INVENTION

recreation.

Way of life. is coming

to american motorcycles

THE FUTURE NOW

MAIN OFFICE

Better Brain Science

Jacob Ward has it wrong. We should not throw any public money at brain research. As he said in his editor’s letter, “Audacious, open-ended endeavors tend to yield big, unexpected rewards.” Public money and its restrictions do not lead to those types of endeavors. Release the innovators, dreamers, risk takers, and profit seekers to do their thing. Brian Sempsrott Cincinnati How do we incentivize the private sector to make brain research as ego-stroking an endeavor as supertall buildings? (One could apply the same question to carbon-capture and storage technologies that are our only hope to slow global warming.) We need to find a way to make funding research as glamorous as constructing taller buildings. Irfan Ali Herndon, Va. FROM THE EDITORS After the March issue went to press, President Obama announced plans for a 10-year scientific effort to build a comprehensive map of human brain activity—just the kind of “supertall spirit” that Ward mentioned in his letter. The initiative, essentially a Human Genome Project for the brain, could spark major advances in mental-illness treatment, artificial intelligence, and, ultimately, our understanding of consciousness.

Combat Trauma There is a treatment that is effective for military and civilian PTSD that is not addressed in your article [“Mental Combat,” March 2013]. EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) has a higher probability of symptom reduction and resolution than medication or exposure therapy. Bill Baker Meridian, Idaho WE APOLOGIZE . . . Our March 2013 “What’s New” page about the Mazda 6 with the Skyactiv-D diesel engine stated that the car should get approximately 56 miles to the gallon on the highway; the correct number is 44. Page 68 of the March issue listed the space shuttle’s fuel as being a combination of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. It’s actually gaseous hydrogen.

POPULAR SCIENCE

MAY 2013

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CHALLENGE

Need seed capital for your killer innovation? Join our Crowdgrant Challenge: popsci.com/crowdgrant

Womp Womp Reader responses to Daniel Engber’s FYI, “Which Came First: The Chicken or the Egg?” > Please be more serious in the articles you select to publish. Real science shows that chickens come from chickens.

INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS

Inquiries regarding international licensing or syndication: syndication@popsci.com LETTERS

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.

> Unless you can find a chicken’s grandfather, well, there’s some room for doubt. > Only a fool, madman, or atheist could write such an article. > The yolk’s on you. Admit it, scientists: You don’t know which came first. This product is from sustainably managed forests and controlled sources.

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

PEER REVIEW

M EG APIXELS

Armed Telescope At the edges of the visible universe, 45 billion light years away, sit some of the oldest known galaxies. How they formed and developed is a mystery, but a spectrograph installed on Chile’s Very Large Telescope—functional since March— should help astronomers find answers. The six-foot-wide, three-ton instrument contains 24 motorized robotic arms. Each eight-inch arm controls a mirror that focuses on a single galaxy. As a result, the telescope can collect infrared readings for 24 galaxies at the same time—data that show what they looked like when the universe was only a fraction of its current age. With the simultaneous observations, astronomers can perform faster and more precise statistical comparisons between galaxies than with isolated viewings. 12

POPULAR SCIENCE

MAY 2013

S T F C / U K AT C / E S O

s T o R Y B Y Susan E. Matthews

MAY 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

As the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s premier aeronautical university, Embry-Riddle is something of a star in the world of flight. There are many reasons for this. One is a program called NextGen. NextGen will transform air traffic control from todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ground radar-based system to a satellite-based system. Using GPS for navigation, the system will allow aircraft to fly shorter, more direct routes and enable more efficient runway use, thereby reducing fuel burned, carbon emissions, and noise. Yes, at Embry-Riddle we aim for the stars. But we always keep home close to our hearts.

A n e w way t o fly has benefit s for you and spaceshi p ear th.

SCAN TO SE E U S I N ACTION

w w w. e m b r y r i d d l e . e d u / n ex t g e n

Amphibious ATVs page 18

PLUS: The first affordable, at-home virtual reality system page 22

EDITED B Y Corinne Iozzio wHAT sNEw@PoPscI.coM

Deﬁance AIRTIME

Mondays at 9 p.m. on Syfy

PRICE OF GAME

$60

Worlds Collide

The first TV show and videogame that play together

COURTESY TRION WORLDS

o matter how frequently mediums borrow from one another— a game based on a movie, a movie on a book—the distinction between them has always remained clear. But those boundaries are starting to break down. This spring, the Syfy network, in tandem with game developer Trion Worlds, debuted Defiance, a story that unfolds simultaneously in a TV show and in an online gaming world. For the first time, gamers will have a chance to impact a show by playing an MMORPG. Defiance takes place on Earth 33 years in the future, after an alien war. The characters on the show—a mix of human and alien races—live in what remains of St. Louis, while the in-game characters live in San Francisco. For the first season, the developers and producers choreographed a series of interactions between the show and the videogame to familiarize the audience with the interplay between the two. Characters in the show might dictate gamers’ missions: A doctor in St. Louis, for instance, might ask a team in San Francisco to find a medical device. But eventually, the crossover between show and game could become more dynamic and freeform. In future seasons, gamers’ decisions would influence the show, creating a new— and spoiler-proof—crossmedia storyline. sToRY B Y Bryan Gardiner

MAY 2013

POPU L AR S C I E N C E

Golfers can customize the R1 Driver midgame to get the most yardage out of their swings. A player uses an included torque wrench to adjust loft between 8 and 12 degrees and choose between seven face angles to fix hooks or slices. TaylorMade R1 Driver $399

WHAT ’ S NEW

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

Only three ounces and the size of an egg, the Atom is the smallest smoke alarm made. It has a photoelectric sensor that detects smoke from smoldering fires, making it more sensitive than ionization alarms that detect fast-flaming fires. First Alert Atom Smoke and Fire Alarm $50

Runners won’t lose the spring in their step when wearing Adidas Energy Boost sneakers. The midsoles contain thousands of cell-shaped capsules made from thermoplastic polyurethane, which is more elastic than the EVA foam traditionally used in soles. Adidas Energy Boost $150

The Slussen turns an iPhone into a DJ station. The three-pronged adapter plugs into an iOS device, headphones, and speaker hookup. The accompanying app has scratch, cross-fader, and equalizer functions. Urbanears Slussen $15

POPULAR SCIENCE

MAY 2013

The Monolite is the only gyro-stabilized monocular in the world; it cancels out 98 percent of motion, such as trembling hands. Birders can use its smartphone attachment to record video of feathered friends more than 3,200 feet away. Fraser Optics Monolite $2,000

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: CLAIRE BENOIST; COURTESY COBRA; COURTESY JABRA; COURTESY A I R O C I D E ; C O U R T E S Y N O O LY ; C L A I R E B E N O I S T ; C O U R T E S Y T A R G U S ; C O U R T E S Y F R A S E R O P T I C S ; CLAIRE BENOIST; COURTESY URBANEARS; COURTESY FIRST ALERT; CLAIRE BENOIST

With the Sonos Playbar, late-night action movies won’t bother roommates. In night mode, the sound bar—which has nine amplifiers—automatically compresses highs and lows. Explosions diminish, while soft conversations come across clearly. Sonos Playbar $700

The Motion Bluetooth headset knows whether a user is walking or sitting still. An accelerometer inside the earpiece detects changes in speed and direction. Internal software analyzes the info and adjusts sound levels while the wearer is moving, which is when things get noisy. Jabra Motion $129

The iRadar Atom radar detector has the longest range of any model its size—about that of a deck of cards. It connects via Bluetooth to a smartphone, which serves as the screen and displays current speed and radars up to seven miles away. Cobra iRadar Atom $200

The Unidirectional HTH 719 is the first silent Velcro. Unlike in traditional Velcro, all the hooks on the strip face the same direction; with a pull, they slide out of their corresponding loops without making a ripping sound. Velcro Industries Unidirectional $0.05 per piece (available summer)

The weather app Nooly generates forecasts localized within 0.4 miles of a given spot. The software analyzes real-time radar and satellite data from NASA and NOAA to create hour-long predictions broken into fiveminute intervals. Nooly Free

12 11

With the Touch Pen, a user can convert any Windows 8 laptop monitor into a touchscreen. The bristle-tipped pen relays its position via infrared and ultrasonic signals to a USB receiver that attaches to the side of the screen with magnets. Targus Touch Pen $100

A D D I T I o NA L R E P o R T I NG B Y Susan E. Matthews and Ajai Raj

The Airocide purifies air without a filter. Inside each of two chambers, a 254-nanometer light activates a photocatalytic reaction on titanium-dioxidecoated glass rings. Anything with a carbon bond—allergens and bacteria—reacts with the rings and is destroyed on contact. Airocide $799

M AY 2013

POPU L AR S C I E N C E

22 MPH Top swimming speed of the amphibious gentoo penguin. On land, it waddles at only 2 mph.

WHAT ’ S NEW DREAM MACHINE

Amphibious Fun Machine The first land-and-sea ATV s T o R Y B Y Mark Anders

ersonal amphibious vehicles have always felt like half-baked mashups—boats with wheels or cars with fins. But a craft can eclipse those attempts if it does two things: move as fast over water as it does on land and transition quickly from land to sea. Last year, Gibbs Sports Amphibians, a private Michigan company, announced that it had built a suspension that retracts in just five seconds and a transmission that consistently propels a craft to 45 mph. Gibbs delivered its first vehicles, large “amphitrucks” for tasks such as waGIBBS ter rescue, last year. A smaller recreational version Quadski called the Quadski is on sale now.

SUSPENSION

SAFETY LOCKOUT

Gibbs engineers outfitted the Quadski with a modified automotive dual-wishbone suspension. To ensure that the fiberglass V-shaped hull has enough ground clearance, they repositioned the upright shaft, which attaches to the wheel, below the wishbone arms instead of between them.

The Quadski’s wheels will not retract unless it is in at least three feet of water. To make sure the water level is high enough, an optical sensor in the rear monitors the refraction of light through water; until the central computer receives the correct signal from that sensor, the wheels remain locked in road mode.

POPULAR SCIENCE

MAY 2013

RETRACTABLE WHEELS

LAND-AND-WATER POWER

HYDRODYNAMIC HULL

The driver pushes a button to initiate retraction. A control module disconnects the diﬀerential to prevent the wheels from turning. Servomotors, similar to those on aircraft landing gear, retract the wheels. Sensors on each motor detect the angle of the wheels; when they’re 15 degrees above the horizontal, the motors shut oﬀ.

A thumb-operated throttle controls the fourcylinder, 140-horsepower engine. Torque passes through a pulley-and-beltdriven output shaft to the Quadski’s wheels or a larger-than-normal seveninch water jet. In marine mode, the ﬁve-speed transmission remains in third gear. On land, the rider uses a shifter to toggle between gears.

In the past, amphibious vehicles used displacement hulls, which push water aside rather than lift a craft above it. Instead, the Quadski has a V-shaped hull, which forces the craft up and out of the water when it accelerates, allowing it to plane in about 3.5 seconds.

COURTESY GIBBS SPORTS AMPHIBIANS

TOP SPEED 45 mph TRANSITION TIME 5 seconds PRICE $40,000

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WHAT ’ S NEW

CONSUMED PER PERSON PER YEAR BEER: 20.3 gallons BOTTLED WATER: 29.2 gallons

LONG AWAIT ED

B EERS C I APPROVED

Pat’s Backcountry Beverages Pale Ale VOLUME 1.7 ounces per serving ALCOHOL BY VOLUME 5.2 percent PRICE $2.75

...AND ALSO

Anywhere Beer

A pint that ﬁts in your pocket

sT o R Y B Y Berne Broudy P Ho T o GR A PH B Y Claire Benoist

POPULAR SCIENCE

othing hits the spot after a long hike more than a beer, but lugging a six-pack through the wilderness isn’t as appealing. Brewers have toyed with portable beer concentrates before— by evaporating the water from finished brews. But along with the water go the hops, which impart flavor. Pat Tatera of Pat’s Backcountry Beverages developed a process to brew concentrate instead of beer. With seltzer—the company also sells a $30 carbonator bottle— campers can turn one pouch of it into a pint of full-flavored pale ale.

MAY 2013

Tatera’s brewing process starts like that of any ale. He boils water and malt to create wort—unfermented beer—then cools the mixture and adds yeast to ferment it. Instead of ﬁnishing the brew there, he builds a concentrate. He vacuum distills the mixture and reserves the ethanol, leaving behind a syrup. Then he starts the process again, adding the syrup instead of water. He ferments again, removes the ethanol, and repeats. In total, he brews each batch four times. He then soaks hops in the reserved alcohol and adds it to the syrup. The ﬁnal concentrate is 10 times the strength of beer, and with the addition of water, it’s ready to drink. Just add bubbles.

Dyle allows viewers to watch live TV from a phone or tablet—without chipping away at their data plan. Networks, including Fox and NBC, broadcast a duplicate signal on a dedicated frequency. Viewers attach a receiver, such as the Elgato EyeTV Mobile ($99) or Escort MobileTV ($100), to their handset and open a TV app to access the channel guide. Dyle is currently available in major cities with up to seven channels in each. – S U S A N E . M AT T H E W S

C O U R T E S Y E L G AT O

Your Phone as

IF A STOCK FALLS IN THE MARKET AND YOU’RE NOT THERE TO HEAR IT,

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196,900,000 Square mileage of the playable area in Microsoft Flight Simulator, which encompasses the entire planet

WHAT ’ S NEW COM ING SO ON

Oculus Rift (developers) WEIGHT 11.2 ounces PRICE $300

In Your Face

The most immersive virtualreality system yet almer Luckey built his first virtual-reality (VR) headset for a simple reason: Every attempt he’d seen, including his own collection of 46 pairs of goggles, failed in one way or another—too heavy, too slow, too limited a field of view. So he set out to invent the perfect pair himself. Three years after the first mockup, the company Luckey founded, Oculus, is launching a developer version of the Rift, the first consumer VR system to create a truly immersive experience. A player connects the Rift to a PC via USB and HDMI, and the PC’s graphics processor renders side-by-side 3-D images. The 11-ounce goggles contain a seven-inch LCD that displays both images. A pair of aspherical lenses separate them to create a 3-D effect with a field of view that’s 90 degrees wide and shifts with a player’s head movements. A sensor containing a gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, and microcontroller tracks the pitch, yaw, and roll of the player’s head. The sensor registers movement every millisecond 22

POPULAR SCIENCE

MAY 2013

PH o To GR APH BY Sam Kaplan

IN THE MEANTIME

PC GAMING GOES MOBILE (oﬀ-the-shelf sensors take up to four), so the image can refresh within two milliseconds. More than 9,000 developers currently have Rifts. Oculus expects them to use the goggles to create new, complex 3-D games, just as they would for a new PlayStation or Xbox. Once that happens, probably within a few years, Oculus will release a consumer Rift and make getting lost in a game a (virtual) reality.

The Razer Edge Pro tablet is a self-contained Windows 8 gaming system. Razer equipped the 10-inch slab with a 1.9-gigaherz processor, Nvidia graphics engine, and eight gigabytes of RAM—enough to render complex games smoothly. A dual-joystick grip connects to a docking port, merging the tablet and controller into one device. From $1,299

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s To R Y BY Corinne Iozzio

Tere’s power in numbers with an efcient yet powerful 290-horsepower V6. Tere’s even Driver Selectable Steering Mode so you can change the way the Santa Fe drives, depending on your mood. How cool is that? Te new Santa Fe with standard third-row seating. Hyundai.com 2013 Santa Fe LIMITED model shown. Hyundai is a registered trademark of Hyundai Motor Company. All rights reserved. ©2013 Hyundai Motor America.

$1,350 What ’ s neW

Minimum value of food thrown away by the average American family of four each year

OUTLO OK

Don’t Forget the Milk! How smarter appliances will simplify everyday life

lectronics manufacturers have a terrible, misleading habit. They slap a touchscreen and Wi-Fi radio on an appliance and call it Òsmart.Ó But in reality, access to Epicurious recipes and Facebook feeds doesnÕt impart a refrigerator, or any other appliance, with real intelligence. They canÕt think on their own; they just have a flashy new interface. To be smart, appliances need to be aware of their surroundings and adapt to them, a reality thatÕs only a few years off. Manufacturers have spent the greatest amount of time fiddling with the most commonly used household appliance: the refrigerator. In the early 2000s, GE set the benchmark, demoing a prototype refrigerator that kept track of groceries and compiled shopping lists based on what wasÑor wasnÕtÑinside. Trouble was, for the system to work, users had to scan barcodes every time they put in something new. Last year, LG showed off a fridge with similar features, but it suffered from the same problem: a lack of automation. Without that, neither fridge has found much success in the marketplace. The key to automation is to allow the fridge to sense whatÕs in it, which a low-power radio-frequency identification (RFID) system can accomplish. A group of computer-science students at NYU mocked up a concept. In it, a reader in the fridge scans RFID tags, which incorporate a short-range antenna and can store all the same information as a standard UPC code so that an internal computer can log a running tally of contents. Currently, shippers and warehouses 24

P O PU La R sCIe nC e

may 2013

s to r y by Corinne Iozzio

illustration b y Paul Lachine

the Com Pu t e r Cou Ld know how Long a ProduCt has be e n t he re and aLe rt u se rs to ImP e ndI ng e xPI rat Ion dat e s. use RFID tagging systems to keep tabs on large containers. The tags cost a few cents each, so it isnÕt economical to add them to millionsÑor billionsÑof supermarket items. But that could soon change. Thinfilm, a Norwegian company, has developed a method to digitally encode information onto a flat label for a fraction of the cost of other RFID tags. The Thinfilm process imprints components onto a plastic substrate much like an inkjet printer on paper. The company plans to roll out the first implementationsÑlikely for tracking pharmaceuticals and food

shipmentsÑnext year. Putting sensors, a computer, and Wi-Fi into appliances can help consumers in a number of ways. In the case of a fridge, it could know how long a particular product has been there and alert users to impending expiration dates. An Internetaccessible inventory could also help shoppers stop buying food they donÕt need. In fact, such a system could automate grocery shopping entirely. Users could sync their inventory with an AmazonFresh or FreshDirect account, allowing the fridge to restock staples all on its own.

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How to kill Asian carp page 30

PLUS: Why you should make your DNA public page 36

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THE ROAD AHEAD Lights that switch on only when needed [right] and temperature-reactive paint that displays warnings [below] could improve today’s streets.

COURTESY STUDIO ROOSEGAARDE (2)

Street Smarts

How intelligent roads—not just cars—will change transportation sT o R Y B Y Justin McLachlan

VERY YEAR, cars become more sophisticated. They can adapt to the speed of traffic, generate power from braking, and even park themselves. But the roads are pretty much made of the same stuff that was under your grandparents’ wheels, even though today we drive an average of 13,000 miles a year. Not since the 1800s, when we started replacing dirt and rocks with asphalt, has the driving surface seen a major change. But now, inventors, designers, and engineers are trying to make roads more useful, more visible, and less expensive. The cost of energy is a major fac-

tor. Cash-strapped communities in the United States and Europe are so desperate to cut costs that they’ve recently started shutting off streetlights, even though lighting has been shown to reduce accidents. Jacksonville, Florida; Santa Rosa, California; and Highland Park, Michigan, have all turned off lamps in an attempt to save money. Communities like these need new ways to keep the lights on. Piezoelectric materials can harness vibrations and

MAY 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

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ROAD POWER Magnets beneath the pavement charge this electric bus at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

pressure from passing cars and convert that energy into usable power. In 2008, a rail station in Japan used piezoelectrics in its floors to take advantage of the vibrations from footsteps, generating enough power to run holiday displays. In 2009, an Israeli company tested these materials in a 10-meter strip of road and reported generating an average of 2,000 watts, enough to theoretically power 30 60-watt lightbulbs. And now, the California Energy Commission is currently studying whether piezoelectric materials will be economically feasible to use on the state’s roads. Daan Roosegaarde, founder of international design lab Studio Roosegaarde based in the Netherlands, has another energy-saving idea: roads that glow. With the help of engineers from Heijmans, one of the largest road builders in Europe, he and his designers developed a highly photo-luminescent paint for delineating lanes that charges enough in sunlight (even on cloudy days) to glow bright green for up to 10 hours at night. This year, Roosegaarde plans to build a 300-meter-long prototype road to demonstrate both the glow-in-the-dark paint and another paint they’ve developed—one that changes from transparent to blue as the temperature drops below 32°F to warn drivers of icy conditions. Other untested ideas go further: lights that switch on as a vehicle nears and

roadside wind turbines propelled by updrafts from passing cars. Scott Brusaw, an electrical engineer in Idaho, is currently building a prototype solar-powered parking lot that can illuminate itself, with a grant from the Federal Highway Administration. The lot will consist of panels strong enough to drive on fitted with solar cells and LEDs that can reconfigure lines on demand or communicate with drivers by, say, flashing a message to slow down for a hazard. Based on his calculations, Brusaw says an individual three-by-three-foot panel could pay for itself in a decade or two, through extra solar energy or by displaying advertising. Some road innovations may even determine the kinds of cars we drive in the future. To combat the current range anxiety of electric cars, some people are building roads with magnets that can charge electric cars through induction. The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology is a leader in this area. In 2010, researchers started running an induction-charged bus in a Seoul amusement park, and another currently serves as a campus shuttle. The institute plans to put two similar buses on public roads this year. Economic pressures could make many of these innovations attainable, but the most important demand for new road technology is the most straightforward: The driving surface itself needs to cost less. Rising oil prices have made asphalt more expensive, which is why between 2007 and 2010, 27 U.S. states increased the percentage of recycled asphalt allowed in roads. Sometimes the most futuristic ideas of all involve reusing the past.

Some people are building roads with magnets that can charge electric cars through induction.

popsci.com/sciencefair 28

POPULAR SCIENCE

MAY 2013

C O U R T E S Y K O R E A A D VA N C E D I N S T I T U T E O F S C I E N C E A N D T E C H N O L O G Y

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106 POUNDS Weight of the heaviest Asian carp ever caught

HEADL I NE S THE LIST

ZAP! Asian carp are highly sensitive to disturbances, including noise from boats. Here, they jump during an electrofishing demonstration on the Illinois River.

F I V E WAY S

1 POISON THEM The United States Geological Survey (USGS) is developing poisonous microparticles designed to kill Asian carp exclusively. The idea is to put the poison in a package that only these carp can digest thoroughly enough to absorb a lethal dose. Researchers examined Mississippi River basin fish and found that Asian carp have more of the digestive enzyme trypsin. So they mixed a poison with compounds that only trypsin can break down. This spring, they plan to test the particles on Asian carp in the lab. 30

POPULAR SCIENCE

n the 1970s, fish farmers in the southern U.S. imported Asian carp to clean up scum in their catfish ponds. But in the years that followed, the fish escaped into the Mississippi River and quickly spread. Since then, they’ve moved into 23 states, outeating and outpopulating native species. sToRY B Y Amy Kraft

2 SHOOT THEM Silver carp, a type of Asian carp, can leap 10 feet out of water. They have been known to land in passing boats, breaking the bones of people onboard. During the summer, several charter-boat companies on the Illinois River offer “extreme aerial bowfishing”: a chance to blindly shoot the jumping fish with bows and arrows.

MAY 2013

3 EAT THEM The Asian carp’s anatomy makes it especially difficult to debone, but at least one Chicago restaurant has featured wild-caught Asian carp (which tastes similar to tilapia) on its menu. Its flaky, white meat is low in fat and mercury but high in nutritious omega-3 fatty acids. Fillets of the fish cost up to $15 a pound.

4 TRAP THEM Biologists at the USGS are developing tasty baits to lure Asian carp to locations where they could be easily captured en masse. So far, tests using common products from health food stores have been successful in the lab, and researchers are gearing up to try their carp-attracting “spirulina smoothie” in Missouri this spring.

5 BLOCK THEM In 2002, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers installed the first of three electric fences in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to stop Asian carp from entering the Great Lakes from the Mississippi River basin. But power issues have knocked the $30-million fences offline several times, and in 2009, researchers found evidence of Asian carp DNA in waters beyond the barrier. The Corps is currently researching other ways to keep the fish out, such as physically separating the canal using a huge mound of soil.

P H O T O : N E R I S S A M I C H E L S , I L L I N O I S N AT U R A L H I S T O R Y S U R V E Y ; I L L U S T R AT I O N S : N I C K J A C Q U E S

To Stop Asian Carp

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20,000 U.S. diagnoses of malignant brain tumors each year

HEADL I NE S TOOL KIT

AW ESOME! NOW W H AT ?

Brain Matters

ast year, a 54-year-old Canadian woman had a malignant brain tumor that was blurring her left field of vision and causing severe headaches. It needed to be removed. So David Fortin, a neurosurgeon at the Sherbrooke University Hospital Centre in Quebec, ordered a tractography map from Maxime Chamberland. A computer scientist at the hospital’s imaging center, Chamberland is one of an increasing number of researchers using tractography, a technique that follows water’s movement in the brain to map neuronal connections. Before surgery, he runs 64 3-D MRI scans through a computer program that calculates the direction of water diffusion. (In the map above, neural fibers near the tumor are red and the ones farther away, blue. The tumor itself is solid red.)

Knowing how the tumor is interfering with the brain helps Fortin make better judgments about what to cut. Before a typical three- to six-hour operation, Chamberland and Fortin sit at the computer together to plan out the surgery, navigating through the 3-D image to find the angle of attack that best avoids neurons crucial for sight, mobility, and cognition. In the future, Chamberland would like to combine these maps with pre-op functional MRI readings, which can indicate whether neural fibers are healthy or damaged, giving surgeons an even better understanding of which areas to slice before they’ve set foot in the operating room. In this case, Fortin removed more than 95 percent of the patient’s tumor and didn’t cut any critical connections. He has performed 27 surgeries using tractography maps so far.

4.2°F BIG FAT STAT

POPULAR SCIENCE

MAY 2013

The universe is that much colder now than it was 7.2 billion years ago—about half its present age. The recent measurement supports the big-bang theory, which predicts that the temperature of the universe decreases as it expands.

AWESOME! Because one cell has so little DNA, scientists typically pool together millions of cells to sequence a genome. Last December, Xiaoliang Sunney Xie and colleagues at Harvard University developed a technique to carefully copy single genes and then rapidly duplicate and sequence them using existing methods. Trumping other techniques for sequencing single cells, the new method covers up to 93 percent of a cell’s DNA. NOW WHAT? When scientists sequence together a group of cells, they can miss the mutations that make each cell unique—mutations that can also serve as important signs of disease. People may use the new technique to more quickly identify cancer cells, administer less invasive prenatal tests, perform personalized medicine, or even identify a suspect from a single cell left at a crime scene. sToRIEs BY Amber Williams

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

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HEADL I NE S ANNOTATED M ACHINE

Megaport

The robot-staffed, windmillpowered Dutch port poised to become the most efficient cargo handler ever

st o r y b y andrew Rosenblum

POPULAR SCIENCE

May 2013

FASTer Modern terminals move no more than 30 containers an hour. At Maasvlakte 2, automated equipment will blow past that rate and improve overall efficiency by up to 50 percent. People will control ship-to-shore cranes

[A] remotely from an office. Then, automated ground vehicles [B] will grab a container or two and navigate by following transponders in the pavement. Rather than wait in line for a crane to unload its cargo, the vehicles will unload themselves with

built-in hydraulic lifts. And instead of polluting and noisy diesel engines, they will run on rechargeable, 13-ton lead-acid batteries. After an eight-hour shift, the vehicles will enter a robotic batteryexchange station [C] to swap for a fresh one.

DeePer The world’s largest container ship, the CMA CGM Marco Polo, is larger than an aircraft carrier, and superships [D] of the future will be even bigger. That’s because the more goods crammed onto a

COURtESy PORt Of ROttERdAm; INSEt COURtESy APm tERmINALS

usiness is booming at Europe’s largest port, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, which sees the lion’s share of the continent’s imports and exports. About 34,000 ships and 12 million shipping containers—each large enough to hold 27 refrigerators, 175 bicycles, or 2,500 pairs of jeans—already pass through it each year. But that’s nothing compared with the 32 million containers it will handle by 2035. With no land for expansion, the Port of Rotterdam Authority has approved a $4-billion project to turn four square miles of 66-foot-deep ocean into dry ground for what will likely become the most advanced port in the world, Maasvlakte 2. The new facility will include automated container-moving vehicles powered by 13-ton batteries in place of diesel and a harbor so deep it will accommodate superships that haven’t even been built yet. So far, dredging boats have vacuumed up more than seven billion cubic feet of sand from the ocean to fill in the new site, which will open its first terminal next year. When the entire port is finished, in 2035, it will see enough containers each month to circle half the Earth.

179,141 miles Distance a large container ship travels in a year

I N S E t S f R O m t O P : PA U L W O O t t O N ; COURtESy APm tERmINALS; COURtESy PORt Of ROttERdAm

vessel, the cheaper the shipping cost per ton. The 16,000-container Marco Polo requires a port at least 53 feet deep. Berths at Maasvlakte 2 will be six feet deeper than that, appropriate for ships that carry 18,000 containers or more.

Greener If the world’s shipping industry were a country, its carbon footprint would be the sixth largest. But this port is pushing for electric container-moving vehicles, cleaner engines on water and land, and harbored ships that

use electric shoreside power. The port authority plans to shift goods onto more efficient rail [E] and inland ships to cut container-truck traffic by 25 percent by 2030. Electricity will probably come from windmills and two 1,100-megawatt coal

and biomass electric plants that will capture most of their carbon dioxide. The port authority has also launched a large-scale carboncapture and storage demo program to put 1.2 million tons of CO2 a year in exhausted undersea oilfields.

MOre FLOODPrOOF Manmade beaches and dunes, held in place by wind-resistant marram grass, form a soft seawall [F] on the port’s south and west edges. To protect the northwest side from stronger storms, engineers completed a

May 2013

more expensive hard seawall [G]: sand covered by stone, topped off by 19,558 44-ton concrete blocks—likely the largest concrete blocks in all of Europe. Computer modeling suggests the seawall could withstand waters 18 feet above sea level.

POPULAR SCIENCE

ÒWhen action grows unprofitable, gather information.Ó —Ursula K. Le Guin, novelist

HEADL I NE S PR I VATE M AT TE R

Don’t Be Afraid of Your DNA Privacy is a pipe dream. Let’s start saving lives.

N JANUARY, scientists scared the world by using public information to find the names behind five people’s anonymous, public DNA samples collected for research. The scientists then determined the identity of some 45 family members who had also donated DNA. How? By linking ages and locations associated with the five individuals to family trees associated with DNA on genealogy websites. (The subjects’ ages were then removed from public view.) The stunt, intended to raise awareness, also raised new fears— insurance companies denying coverage, discriminatory hiring practices, and the end of dating as we know it. But these 50 people aren’t any less safe than the rest of us. No one’s DNA is—or has ever been—private. We spray our genetic material everywhere. We slough off a million skin cells a day. And free genealogy databases need only a fraction of a Y chromosome to find a last name. Sequencing a genome cost $100 million in 2001; today, it’s less than $10,000; soon, it will be as cheap as buying lunch. Here’s the thing: Lack of genetic privacy isn’t just something to accept. We should embrace it. Scientists currently have just a tiny stock of human genomes, which they’re mostly unable to share between institutions because of restrictive regulations. The Human Genome Project is public, but it’s just one sequence. And most biotech com36

POPULAR SCIENCE

MAY 2013

s To R Y BY Erin Biba

ILLUsTRATIoN B Y Ryan Snook

Imagine the possibilities if we open-sourced all our DNA. panies, such as 23andMe, consider their databases proprietary. The two main groups that share full genomes of individuals (the 1000 Genomes Project and the Personal Genome Project) together have only about 1,500. This closed system is holding research back. Imagine the possibilities if we opensourced all our DNA—or at least tweaked consent forms to allow opt-ins for sharing genetic info with all scientists. John Wilbanks, chief commons officer at Sage Bionetworks (which offers a database of

public genomes), says the Human Genome Project covers only what we have in common. “What makes us unique is what makes us respond differently to drugs, to food, to environment, to disease,” he says. “A large database of individual genomes is going to be vital to help us understand how our variations make us healthy or not.” Genomic research today, he says, is like doing a Google search on only a handful of Web pages. With a few hundred thousand genomes, we would better understand how illnesses and drugs behave differently from person to person. Put aside the fear. It’s time to let science run free with our DNA.

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POPulaR SCIenCe

Seventh annual

InventIon AWA R D S 10 bold creations for a brighter, faster, safer, more efficient future

a 200hp turbodiesel engine expels heat below the impeller, adding thrust.

large wings allow slower takeoﬀs and landings.

expert OpiniOn “If these small aIrcraft are cheap, safe, QuIet, effIcIent, and easy to fly, you could travel wherever you want, whenever you want.” mark moore, aerospace engineer, nasa langley research center

POPULAR SCIENCE

May 2013

Box tails create airﬂow patterns that reduce drag and increase ﬂight stability.

SCale MODelS the mcginnis family—Pat, John, and Kyle—and pilot John Paul noyes [front to back] stand in their Kalispell, montana, workshop.

I L L U S t R At I O N b y N I C k k A L O t E R A k I S ; k A L I M C G I N N I S

an autopilot computer can land synergy at a nearby runway during an emergency; a ballistic parachute can also be deployed.

AviAtion

FA M i LY FLIer a homebuilt airplane designed with maximum efficiency in mind story by elbert Chu

InventOR John mcginnis COMPanY synergy aircraft InventIOn synergy COSt tO DevelOP undisclosed MatuRItY

>> JOhn MCGInnIS thinks ordinary families would rather skip the airport and fly themselves. so he is trying to reinvent the personal airplane with the help of his father, son, and a rotating crew of about two dozen volunteers. unlike small aircraft today—which can cost more than a house—mcginnis says synergy could be cheaper, quieter, and, at more than 40 mpg, three times as fuel-efficient. mcginnis, a 47-year-old composite manufacturer, flew his first airplane in

second grade. Perplexed by the inefficiencies of personal aircraft, he taught himself aeronautical engineering and fluid dynamics over two decades. one day, while perusing scientific studies at a desk in his daughters’ bedroom, he read a nasa researcher’s paper challenging a classic aerodynamic drag equation. mcginnis could see the possibilities. “i came out of the girls’ bedroom ranting like a madman to my wife,” he says. “ ‘honey, you’re never going to believe this. i think i just solved a problem i’ve been working on since i was a little kid.’ ” synergy’s wings bend upward and into a box shape for minimum drag and maximum efficiency. the top half of each wing swoops behind the body to function as a tail while providing greater in-flight stability. the doublebox tail design also makes gliding easier by counteracting tornado-like vortices at the wings’ tips. and instead of a front-mounted propeller, an impeller placed behind the bullet-shaped body quiets noise while adding thrust. mcginnis works on synergy in his father’s garage, where he uses cnc machines and custom molds to fabricate components and 3-d software to rapidly model new ideas. family members serve among the core build crew, with mcginnis’s son, Kyle, second-in-command. a quarterscale prototype made from fiberglass, carbon fiber, and Kevlar suggests that both the team’s manufacturing process and unusual wing configuration work. using about $80,000 in crowdfunded cash, they hope to finish a full-scale, five-person aircraft this year. “i work on it 90 hours a week, with a few hours of sleep,” mcginnis says. “What drives me to do it is that no one else will.”

May 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

TRANSPORTATION

CARDBOARD BIKE A $30 ride made of recycled packaging, bottles, and car parts Story by Charles Q. Choi INVENTOR Izhar Gafni COMPANY I.G. Cardboard Technologies INVENTION Alfa Bike COST TO DEVELOP $250,000 MATURITY

Q & A / C R OWDFUN DIN G

Most independent inventors don’t have bottomless bank accounts. To fund their dreams, many innovators are appealing to strangers on the Web for help. Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler weighs in on this growing source of grassroots venture capital. 40

POPULAR SCIENCE

MAY 2013

>> ONE DAY IN 2009, Israeli engineer Izhar Gafni sat in a quiet library designing a machine to extract seeds from pomegranates when his mind drifted to cycling, his favorite pastime. Gafni admired bikes made from sustainable bamboo, but their high cost seemed prohibitive. He wondered, Why not make them from cardboard, instead? Over the next two years, Gafni learned to fold cardboard sheets into the strongest possible shapes; his experimentation led to robust structures resembling honeycombs and bird nests. He then spent another year crafting the material into bicycle components. “I almost felt like the Wright Brothers going into unknown territory,” he says. The product of his labor is a singlespeed bicycle with spokes, rims, and a frame made from cardboard. Varnish protects the glued paper core from moisture, while old car tires serve as puncture-proof wheels. Gafni used a car’s timing belt as a chain and formed plastic bottles into pedal cranks. The 28-pound prototype, called Alfa, can safely support a rider nearly 20 times its weight. Gafni intends to mass produce four models: two 18-pound bikes for adults, assisted by optional rechargeable electric motors, and two smaller versions for children. He hopes to build each bike for less than $12 in materials and sell them for no more than $30. Through advertising plastered on each bike—or enough grant money—people in developing countries could ride them for free. Gafni can already envision fashioning his cardboard into baby strollers, wheelchairs, and even cars. “You can do almost anything with it,” he says.

How does crowdfunding work? >> Traditional funding channels support things with the potential to create revenue—you’re looking for hits. On Kickstarter, people fund the ideas that they think should exist. People have always had great ideas, and others have always wanted to be a part of them. We’ve made a space where that can happen on a massive scale. The JOBS Act now allows people to buy equity in projects. Will that beneﬁt both inventors and crowdfunders? >> Kickstarter won’t switch to an equity-based model. We believe the real

COURTESY I.G. CARDBOARD TECHNOLOGIES

INVEN TION AWAR D S

“THE NEGATIVE HEALTH IMPACTS ASSOCIATED WITH WELDING ARE WIDELY KNOWN, BUT IT HAS BEEN HARD TO ENGINEER OUT THOSE EXPOSURES. IF THIS HELMET WORKS, IT COULD BE A NICE STEP FORWARD.” Shawn Gibbs, occupational health expert, University of Nebraska Medical Center

SAFETY

FUME FIGHTER

A welding helmet to make metalwork safer

PHOTOGRAPH BY SAM KAPLAN

Story by Veronique Greenwood

>> WITHIN HIS FIRST 30 minutes on the job at an aluminum factory in 1999, metalworker Michael Buckman inhaled so many noxious fumes he was sick with bronchitis for three days. As he recovered, Buckman wondered whether a commercial welding helmet could have filtered his breathing air. “I didn’t see anything out there like what I was thinking about,” he says. So he set out to build the WindMaker: a helmet that can prevent lung damage.

WindMaker draws fresh air from behind the helmet, pushes it through a HEPA-rated filter, and then blows it toward the front, cooling skin while preventing fog on the glass faceplate. A fan near the chin helps expel air, blowing away toxic smoke in the work zone. LED lights on each side of the faceplate illuminate the welding job, while a thick shroud deflects sparks. Several companies have expressed interest in licensing the helmet. Before

disruption comes from people supporting things because they like them, rather than ﬁnding things that produce a good return on investment. On Kickstarter, inventors develop and build projects in a very public forum. What’s the beneﬁt of being so open? >> You come to Kickstarter not just to raise money, but to build a community around your project. Money gets spent, but a community will last forever if you do your job right. And those people will cheerlead you all along the way and give you feedback and be there for your next thing. That’s a true asset.

Yancey Strickler is a co-founder of Kickstarter, which has funneled more than $435 million from the siteÕs users to about 37,000 projects. Strickler has personally backed nearly 800 projects on Kickstarter.

anyone can sell WindMaker, however, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health needs to extensively test its air-filtering abilities—a costly process that requires consumer-ready units. If the device lives up to its claims, the convenient combination of eye, heat, spark, and respiratory safeguards could motivate more welders to protect themselves, says Shawn Gibbs, an occupational health expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. “And that increased use is something welding needs,” he says. Buckman already has ideas for high-tech add-ons, including wireless communication devices, solar panels, video cameras, and heads-up displays. Whatever futuristic features make it into the final helmet, Buckman is confident it will deliver on safety. “I got hurt on the job,” he says. “I had to go through that experience to design this.”

MAY 2013

INVENTOR Michael Buckman COMPANY None INVENTION WindMaker Helmet COST TO DEVELOP $200,000 MATURITY

POPULAR SCIENCE

INVEN TION aWaR D S

How It workS 1 660°F semitruck exhaust heats a lowpressure refrigerant [red] flowing through an exchanger.

2 A second exchanger 4 An insulated pressurizes the heated reservoir stores the refrigerant. chilled refrigerant.

Five implements notable inventors can’t live without

James Dyson, industrial designer, bagless vacuum pioneer 3-D PRINTER “You can produce something quickly and accurately and then test it to see if it works.”

ENERGY

H O T S AV I N G S Story by Sarah Fecht

May 2013

depressurizing a liquid refrigerant under high pressure into a gas—a process that absorbs energy. The gas then condenses to start the cycle anew. But instead of using electricity to drive the process, HYPER does it with a semitruck’s 660°F exhaust heat. MacDonnell says the APU stores between six and 10 hours of heating or cooling capacity after an hour of driving. Based on early tests, he thinks the device could cut a trucker’s yearly fuel consumption by 9 percent and carbon emissions by about 20 tons. The team is testing HYPER on a retrofitted semi in hopes of selling road-ready devices in 2014. With 2.5 million trucks on U.S. roads, HYPER could make a significant impact—but the team also hopes to retrofit buses, RVs, passenger vehicles, and more. “We would drastically cut emissions, fuel consumption, and be less dependent on foreign oil,” MacDonnell says.

Roger Brown, inventor of toys, tools, and kitchenware STEEL SCRAPER “It’s 10 tools in one—and great for taking things apart to see how they work.”

INVENTORS Jack MacDonnell, Dave Gibbs, John Stannard COMPANY EnerMotion INVENTION HYPER APU COST TO DEVELOP $800,000 MATURITY

Nikolai Begg, MIT engineer, inventor of medical devices SMARTPhONE “You’re able to snap a photo and have it in a collection you can quickly reference.” Lonnie Johnson, Super Soaker creator, battery and energy technology inventor SUPERGLUE “Mechanical devices glue together quite nicely for diving right into prototyping.”

I L L U S t R At I O N b y g R A h A m m U R d O C h ; P O R t R A I t S b y t O d d d E t w I L E R

Saul Griﬃth, engineer and founder of Otherlab CNC MILL “Mills can make real things in real materials. I’m still loving subtractive manufacturing despite the additive hype.”

An HVAC system powered by an 18-wheeler’s exhaust

POPULAR SCIENCE

6 The refrigerant condenses into a fluid, resetting the cycle.

Cool Tools

5 A fan blows air across a line of cold refrigerant fed by the reservoir, cooling the truck cab’s air.

>> SEMITRUCk DRIVERS idle their engines to heat or cool their vehicles’ cabs—a practice that burns a billion gallons of fuel each year. Small engines on the back of a cab, called auxiliary power units (APUs), get the job done with less fuel, but they’re loud and smelly. A team of five Ontario-based engineers and mechanics has devised what may be a better solution: an APU called HYPER that runs on waste heat. The group originally formed to build a 100mpg car for the 2008 X Prize competition. During one brainstorming session, someone wondered aloud: Why not use energy from a vehicle’s exhaust to run an HVAC system? “We did a lot of modeling and realized that the energy numbers made sense,” says team member Jack MacDonnell. He and two others decided to work full-time to develop a new kind of APU. Like a household refrigerator yet a third the size, HYPER chills air by

3 A nozzle depressurizes the fluid into a gas, cooling the refrigerant [blue] in an adjacent loop to 23°F.

“No oNe kNows what the robot of the future Is goINg to look lIke. It MaY look lIke roY the robot; It MaY be a lIttle dog. we have a lot of space for INNovatIoN aNd verY sMall thINgs caN Make such a huge dIffereNce.” siddhartha srinivasa, roboticist, carnegie Mellon university

ELEcTRoNIcS

ROBOTIC PErForMEr A programmable animatronic robot kit Story by Zach Zorich

INVENTOR Brian Roe COMPANY Roemotion INVENTION Roy the Robot COST TO DEVELOP $9,000

L e f t t o r i g h t : s a m k a p L a n ; c o u r t e s y m at t pa c i n i

MATURITY

DEFT DIGITS Six servomotors lend Roy the Robot’s laser-cut wood hands a wide range of motion similar to that of human hands.

>> BRIAN ROE SPENT nearly a decade building animatronic monsters for films such as Virus, A.I., and Scooby Doo 2. Then, almost overnight, Hollywood abandoned mechanical characters for computer renderings. Roe now works as a technology consultant, but with the surge of cheap, user-friendly microelectronics, he saw a market emerging for hobbyist robots. “It used to be that electronics and software were out of reach,” Roe says. “Over the past six or eight years, it has completely switched.” So Roe began developing a low-cost kit to teach anyone robotics. He calls his work-in-progress Roy the Robot. For now, Roy is a head, neck, and pair of lower arms. Yet, with about 1,200 parts controlled by animatronics software, the robot already looks and moves like a human. Roe laser-cut the robot’s frame from pliable, lightweight wood to retain complex architecture while keeping costs low. Twenty-eight inexpensive servomotors help Roy gesture with his hands; move his wrist, neck, and jaw; and even blink his eyes. To complete Roy’s upper arms and shoulders, Roe launched a successful crowdfunding campaign and sent backers DIY kits based on the hands and arms. He eventually hopes to sell the kits for about $300. That would fill a need for inexpensive manipulators. “The cheapest capable robotic arms are in the $20,000 range,” says Siddhartha Srinivasa, a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University. Roe estimates that a full robot kit with a torso and legs might cost $3,000, and he hopes to one day imbue Roy with enough artificial intelligence to learn human motion. “But my main goal is to help people build, program, and understand robotics,” Roe says. “Because, in the end, we’re going to live in a robotic society.”

May 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

“Competition is always good for innovation. as the suborbital market grows, there will be a need for Cheap, reliable suits.” Jonathan Clark, space medicine consultant, baylor College of medicine

INVEN TION aWaR D S

SPACE

s u b o r b i ta l safeguard

A sleek, comfortable space suit designed to protect high-flying tourists Story by Dave Mosher

>> During nASA’S 2007 Astronaut Glove Challenge, costume fabricator Ted Southern met fellow competitor Nikolay Moiseev, a Russian space-suit builder. Although each walked away from the competition empty-handed, they formed a productive friendship. Two years later, they entered a glove they built together and won $100,000. Southern and Moiseev are now building the third generation of a complete space suit, called 3G, in hopes of capturing a piece of the suborbital spaceflight industry—valued at $1.6 billion over the next decade. As companies such as Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, XCOR, and Blue Origin prepare to launch tourists toward the edge of space, Southern says the dangers of the environment have opened up a new market. “It’s almost a full vacuum up there,” he says. At about $200,000 each, modern space suits can cost more than the suborbital ticket itself. And most use an inflatable inner bladder and a durable outer restraint layer—a twolayer design that makes them heavy, bulky, and inflexible. Yet “comfort is a big requirement for suborbital flights. These are people paying a lot of money out of pocket,” says Jonathan Clark, a space medicine consultant at Baylor College of Medicine. In 2009, Southern and Moiseev began developing a single-layer space suit that they hope to sell for about $50,000. The designers build it by fusing together pieces of urethanecoated nylon—a durable, airtight, and pliable material. When inflated, carefully positioned seams and metal braces help a wearer maintain flexibility, and internal tubing circulates air for cooling. Ports on the front allow for custom life-support attachments. The NASA certification process, 44

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crucial for any new suit, isn’t cheap, so last year Southern and Moiseev sought crowdfunding. The $27,000 they earned has them 90 percent of the way to a finished prototype, and the duo has already begun testing key components for flight certification. The industry has taken note. “We recently had a visit from former astronaut Garrett Reisman,” a crew safety specialist for SpaceX, says Southern. “He saw a pressurized [second-generation] suit and was pretty impressed.”

inVEnTOrS Ted Southern, Nikolay Moiseev COMPAnY Final Frontier Design inVEnTiOn Third Generation (3G) Suit COST TO DEVELOP $300,000

PhOtOgRAPh by SAm kAPLAN

MATuriTY

FIT FOR SPACE The metal neck ring of the second-generation (2G) space suit proved uncomfortable for a wearer while lying down, so Southern [right] and Moiseev [left] plan to integrate a helmet with a flip-up visor into the 3G suit.

May 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

EMERGENCY RESPONSE

SMART BALL

A wireless data-gathering grenade to toss into danger Story by Gregory Mone

>> AfTER AN EARThqUAkE devastated Haiti in 2010, search-and-rescue teams descended upon Port-au-Prince to look for survivors. Francisco Aguilar, a graduate student in public policy at the time, was shocked to read stories

about crews relying on complex, expensive imaging systems. “Only a few teams had them, and you had to be really well trained to use them,” Aguilar says. He soon launched a start-up in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

Q &A / PAT EN T L AW

The America Invents Act went into full effect in March, overhauling the U.S. patent system while launching programs designed to help independent inventors. Patent commissioner John Calvert explains what to look for in a new legal era for innovation. 46

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INVENTOR Francisco Aguilar COMPANY Bounce Imaging INVENTION Bounce Imaging Explorer COST TO DEVELOP Undisclosed MATURITY

to develop a simple way to explore hard-to-reach places: a throwable, expendable, baseball-size probe. The Bounce Imaging Explorer has a shock-absorbing shell embedded with six cameras, plus clusters of nearinfrared LEDs to light up dark rooms (for the cameras). To deploy the Explorer, an emergency worker links it to a smartphone or tablet and chucks the ball into danger. It immediately begins taking photos and testing for methane, carbon monoxide, and dangerously high temperatures. A microprocessor inside the ball then stiches the photos together and converts the raw data for transmission over Wi-Fi. Just seconds after the toss, a wrap-around panorama—complete with environmental warnings—appears on the synced device. Aguilar quickly imagined applications beyond disaster areas, such as burning buildings, hostage crises, and combat zones, so he sought feedback from potential customers. His start-up cranked through dozens of prototypes in the first 18 months, tweaking the design as requests poured in. When several police officers said they wanted to be able to hear inside a room, for example, Aguilar added a digital microphone. Police, firefighters, soldiers, and nuclear-plant inspectors have offered to test the device, which Aguilar is determined to keep between $500 and $1,000. “We want to get it as cheap as possible so it can be as broadly deployed as possible,” he says.

how does the America Invents Act help small-time entrepreneurs? >> Section 28 started an ombudsman program to offer assistance before, during, and after an applicant gets to the patent office. Section 32 says the patent office must encourage property-law associations to form pro bono programs to assist financially under-resourced inventors and small businesses. Right now, we have four up and running: in Minnesota, Colorado, the D.C. metropolitan area, and California. how does the new first-to-file application system affect inventors? >> It’s really not a huge change from what we were doing. A lot of people

PhOtOGRAPh by SAm KAPLAN

“We have so much equipment, but a lot of times We don’t use it because it taKes thRee men to RetRieve it fRom a tRucK.” bernard hicks, ofcer, boston sWat

I N VE N T ION aWa R DS

LIGHTING

BALLAST BULB A household lamp powered by a bag of rocks

I L L U S t R At I O N b y G R A h A m m U R d O C h

Story by Amanda Tust

>> MORE ThAN 780 million people rely on kerosene to light their homes. But the fuel is pricey and is toxic when burned—not to mention a fire hazard. In 2008, London-based product designer Martin Riddiford and his colleague Jim Reeves decided to create a cheap, safe alternative. Riddiford knew a falling weight could produce enough energy to run a grandfather clock, so why not a light? To find out, he attached the crank of a wind-up flashlight to a bicycle wheel. He hung a weight from the wheel to cause it to spin; the wheel cranked the flashlight, and the device lit up. Over the next four years, Riddiford, Reeves, and a small team spent their downtime between projects in a basement, refining the GravityLight. To use it, a person hangs the device and fills an attached fabric bag with up to 28 pounds of rocks, dirt, or other material. Lifting and releasing the bag steadily pulls a notched belt through GravityLight’s plastic hub; the belt spins a series of gears to drive a small motor, which continuously powers an LED for about 30 minutes. The team used crowdfunding to manufacture 1,000 GravityLights, which it plans to send to developing countries for field testing—plus 6,000 more for backers. “It’s exciting to witness so much positive reaction to what

2 3 4

HOW IT WORKS 1

“anY affoRdable Replacement foR KeRosene lamps is GoinG to have a biG impact on public health in developinG countRies.” aviva presser aiden, engineer, harvard university

1 As a weighted bag descends, it tugs a belt to turn a series of plastic gears. 2 The gears work in unison to spin an electric motor. 3 The motor powers a small yet bright LED, providing continuous illumination for about 30 minutes—the maximum amount of time that the bag can take to descend. 4 External connectors can power low-voltage devices, and the entire system is designed to work for thousands of lift-and-drop cycles.

we’re doing,” Riddiford says. Besides remote villages, the lamp could prove handy in campsites, closets, and any dark nook far from a socket, so Riddiford also hopes to license a retail version for less than $10.

don’t realize that if two inventors come into the office at the same time, in at least 75 percent of the cases, the first to file would get the patent. But will this create a huge rush to file? >> I don’t think so. Most people need to be diligent anyway. But you ought to file as soon as you can and before you disclose. If you don’t file before you disclose, you risk losing your patent rights. Some inventors work collaboratively through hackerspaces now. Will first-to-file increase the risk of someone stealing their ideas?

INVENTORS Jim Reeves, Martin Riddiford COMPANY Therefore INVENTION GravityLight COST TO DEVELOP More than $300,000 MATURITY

>> The law says first inventor to file. Say I am working with Joe Smith and I disclose my invention, and he runs to the patent office. Is he the inventor? No. I can file a petition for derivation and prove that I actually invented it. I have the right to patent it because I’m technically the first inventor to file. So there is that protection in the law, and it’s new. Any important trend in patenting that people should know about? >> I think 3-D printing is going to have a significant impact on copyright infringement. What happens when somebody starts making iPhones with a 3-D printer? What you can do with that technology is fascinating.

May 2013

John Calvert is the acting associate commissioner for innovation development at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Oﬃce.

POPULAR SCIENCE

INVEN TION AWAR D S

MEDICINE

FIRM FOOTING

“SOLDIERS ARE COMING HOME WITH AMPUTATIONS SIMILAR TO MIKE’S. THESE INDIVIDUALS ARE PHYSICALLY FIT AND LOOKING TO GET BACK INTO RECREATIONAL ACTIVITIES. SOME EVEN WANT TO BE REDEPLOYED.” Matthew Justin Major, bioengineer, Northwestern University

A prosthetic limb that puts athletes back in the game Story by Clay Dillow

>> DURING A professional snowmobiling race in 2008, Mike Schultz lost control of his machine while speeding over a ragged stretch of snow. His left foot hit the ground so hard that his leg hyperextended nearly all the way in the wrong direction, shattering his knee and forcing doctors to amputate just above the joint. “I’m looking at my wife saying, ‘What are we going to do now?’ ” Schultz says. “I’m a professional athlete, and I’m not going to be able to do this stuff anymore.” Schultz’s instinct was right: Conventional prosthetic legs couldn’t stand up to his high-impact lifestyle. So in early 2009, he designed and built a limb that could. Its key feature was the Moto Knee, which uses an adjustable 250psi mountain bike shock absorber to regulate the joint’s stiffness with compressed air. But snowboarders and skateboarders also require critical toe pressure and ankle tension, so Schultz added the Versa Foot—a foot-ankle assembly that also uses a pneumatic shock absorber to emulate joint resistance. Together, the two parts complete an artificial lower limb that’s impact-resistant, waterproof, and quickly customizable for a range of high-performance activities. Schultz recently returned to competition and won a gold medal at the 2013 X Games Aspen. This spring, he expects to sell his new-and-improved prosthetic not only to amputee atheletes, but also to soldiers returning from conflicts with missing limbs. “This whole project started out because I wanted to allow myself to do the things I wanted to do, but it’s evolved way past that,” Schultz says. “I’m helping people do things they haven’t done since they had two good legs, and that’s worth it right there.” 48

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INVENTOR Mike Schultz COMPANY Biodapt INVENTION Versa Foot COST TO DEVELOP $15,000 MATURITY

Q&A/HACK ERSPACES When tinkerers want to collaborate, trade tips, or just hang out, many head to communal workshops called hackerspaces. Hardware guru Limor Fried explains how such groups drive a different kind of innovation.

“CONSIDERING THE UBIQUITY OF ELECTRONIC DANCE MUSIC TODAY, JAMSTIK IS A GOOD STEP TOWARD KEEPING THE GUITAR MUSICALLY RELEVANT.” Andrew Carton, guitarist, Peekamoose Custom Guitars employee

MUSIC

D I G I TA L AX

A compact MIDI guitar that helps budding musicians learn to shred

F A C I N G PA G E : C O U R T E S Y F O X ; T H I S PA G E : S A M K A P L A N

Story by Amanda Schupak

>> AS A KID, electrical engineer Dan Sullivan mastered the guitar. His teenage sons, however, prefer mastering videogames. With a realistic instrument, Sullivan thought, all the time devoted to games like Rock Band could produce impressive musical proficiency. “You can show off playing guitar when you’re my age,” says Sullivan, now 58. “Being able to beat level 17 isn’t going to stay with you.” Seven years ago, Sullivan left his cushy CTO job at a video-advertising company to develop JamStik, a digital six-string guitar. The compact neck has frets and strings like a real guitar but requires no tuning and doesn’t rely on push buttons like many digital models. Instead, small sensors embedded in the fret board track fingers illuminated by 52 infrared LEDs. Because the sensors are spaced just a fraction of an inch apart, firmware interpolates the data to filter overlapping signals and determine the precise placement of each finger. They can also trace the bending of a note for a bluesy tone or quivering fingertips for a dramatic vibrato. An onboard microprocessor converts the raw data into standardized musical instructions (MIDI), which a wireless antenna beams to a synced iPad or laptop. With a half-inch range of sensitivity

INVENTOR Dan Sullivan COMPANY Zivix INVENTION JamStik COST TO DEVELOP $1 million MATURITY

How are hackerspaces valuable to innovation? >> Each hackerspace is diﬀerent. Some have businesses, others share via open-source licenses, and many are workshop-focused. The best way to get innovation happening is to get a lot of smart people working together—that’s the DNA of a hackerspace. Does open collaboration interfere with mainstream measures of success, such as patenting and licensing? >> I don’t think innovation is all about ﬁling patents. In the biggest industries, like server technology, open source clearly drives a lot of

above the fret board, the sensors detect fingertips before they touch a string. This enables companion software, such as JamTutor for the iPad, to map hand positions in real time so that players can correct themselves. JamStik also works with more than 100 Wi-Fi–enabled apps, including

Garage Band. Sullivan hopes the instrument, slated to reach stores by the end of 2013, will do for the guitar what keyboards did for the piano. “Our hope is to help introduce a new generation to the pleasure of creating music,” Sullivan says, “rather than just being passive consumers of it.”

innovation. Twitter, Facebook, and Google were all founded using opensource software. I believe the open approach is shifting to hardware, such as cellphones running Android. I think we’re going to see hardware companies sprout out of hackerspaces. DARPA is committing millions of dollars to hackerspaces. Why? >> I believe they’re looking to be part of, and fuel, something that is community-driven and very wholesome. On their own, it’s really hard for a company or a government agency to inspire people in each city to celebrate making and sharing.

MAY 2013

Limor Fried is an electrical engineer and the founder of Adafruit Industries. Her company’s microelectronics help jump-start projects at hundreds of hackerspaces around the world.

POPULAR SCIENCE

reW OF Can a C nteerS U L O v d StS an SCienti WitH arMed rS tr aCKe e d a M HOMe arKS Save SH CtiOn? n i t X e FrOM n BY Bria

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L aM

May 2013

data driven Dr. Neil Hammerschlag (wearing a gray T-shirt) tracks sharks using a new kind of marine-animal tag that he helped design. His data could describe behavior and migration patterns in moment-by-moment detail.

May 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

I’M ON A SMALL BOAT.

A woman in a bikini stands next to me dumping gallons of blood into the sea. Beside her, a man in board shorts strings barracuda heads onto large fishhooks as crooked as a witch’s finger, and in front of him, toward the bow, an engineer fiddles with an instrument that looks like a cross between a model rocket and a giant hypodermic needle. I’m covered in fish guts.

We are in the Bahamas, in a marine preserve, fishing for sharks. We have a research permit to do what’s otherwise illegal in this country, but the boat and its crew have a rough, paranoid quality to them, everyone as superstitious as pirates. Since I came on board, we haven’t had a single strike. The ocean seems empty, the crew is agitated, and I get the sense that I’m being blamed for the dry spell. The lead fisherman tells me flatly, “I think you’re bad luck.” Just as the captain raises the anchor to motor to another spot, a spool of 900-pound monofilament begins unwinding furiously off the stern. A buoy attached to the line pinballs across the choppy ocean. A cameraman in a wetsuit readies his $50,000 waterproof HD-camera rig. A scientist grabs a steel lasso and a cordless drill, and an engineer snatches up the rocket-looking thing, which includes a plastic tube filled with sensors and a satellite transmitter. The rocket-looking thing is one of the reasons we’re all here. It is a prototype of a new kind of shark tag, one designed to last decades, not days or months as current models do. It will record a shark’s behavior every few seconds, beaming back data when it can. If the tags work, scientists will get an unprecedented look into the secret lives of sharks. But in order for them to work, we have to tag a shark. And to tag a shark, we have to catch one. Then the line goes limp, and the hook comes up empty.

Tagging grounds The Bahamas’ South Berry Islands Marine Reserve contains 70 square miles of cays and sand flats.

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>> The shark’s role in our oceans is almost entirely a mystery. Because scientists typically track sharks for only a few months and because sharks

P R E v I O U S PA g E : C O P y R I g h T m A C g I L L I v R Ay F R E E m A N F I L m S / P h O T O g R A P h E R : P E T E R K R A g h ; T h I S PA g E : C O P y R I g h T m A C g I L L I v R Ay F R E E m A N F I L m S / P h O T O g R A P h E R : m A R C O S T R I C K

a p ex predator

F R O m T O P : C O P y R I g h T m A C g I L L I v R Ay F R E E m A N F I L m S / P h O T O g R A P h E R : P E T E R K R A g h ; C O U R T E S y C h R I S T I N E S h E PA R d

live for decades, the gaps in our knowledge are immense. We don’t know—with much detail—their migration patterns or where they mate and give birth. More important, we don’t understand their contribution to the health of the oceans, though it’s almost certainly significant. Most sharks are apex predators, akin to lions on the African savannah or polar bears in the Canadian Arctic, and those predators typically serve critical roles in maintaining the ecosystem. One thing scientists do know is that sharks are in trouble. Every day, more than a quarter-million sharks die as bycatch or as a result of the finning trade. Some ecologists say populations are down by 90 percent from just a few decades ago. No one knows what might happen if they fall beneath a certain threshold or disappear entirely. “The ocean is like a fancy Swiss watch,” says Neil Hammerschlag, director of the marine conservation program at the University of Miami. “I don’t know how all the gears work together. But I do know that if you take a major spring out, it’s

“The Ocean is like a fancy swiss waTch. if yOu Take OuT a majOr spring, iT’s nOT gOing TO wOrk as well as iT is suppOsed TO.”

CaTCh and release A captured hammerhead will often struggle until it dies from exhaustion, so tagging operations need to be as fast and gentle as possible.

not going to work as well as it is supposed to.” Hammerschlag, 34, spends nearly every weekend out on the water in South Florida, armed with hooks, lines, and tags. As a result, he is intimately acquainted with the limits of current technology; most tags, he says, are too expensive and don’t last long enough. Two years ago, he partnered with Marco Flagg, an engineer, to develop a new device. The production version of the HammerTag, he says, will last years and maybe even decades attached to a shark; it will be hundreds of dollars cheaper; and it will provide a thousand times the data. Data, Hammerschlag says, will lead scientists to identify nurseries and hunting grounds for the first time. It will reveal life cycles to determine when the animals are most vulnerable. And with enough of it, conservationists could influence legislators. Without effective legislation, Hammerschlag says, shark populations will surely continue to decline—and the ocean with them. >> The day I’m supposed To fly from San Francisco to the Bahamas to go shark tagging, I fall ill. The fever’s slight, but the

May 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

a p Ex pREdatoR

The vessel has a roboTic sub, a six-person helicopTer, full dive gear, surfboards, JeT skis, and small, medium, and large Tender crafT. team shark Hammerschlag, fellow scientists, and students prep a shark together. During tagging, they pipe oxygenated water over a shark’s gills to ensure that it continues to breathe.

POPULAR SCIENCE

May 2013

Pretty bad, it turns out, means 15 stitches in his finger and blood everywhere. When I see Hammerschlag on the research vessel, he is wearing a large bandage and looks concerned. “Please don’t make a big deal out of my cut,” he says. “I grazed my finger on a tooth. It wasn’t an attack.” He then launches into a volley of shark trivia meant to be comforting. For instance, while shark attacks number 80 a year globally, he says cases of humans biting other humans average an impressive 1,600—and that’s just in the state of New York. Also, sharks tend to mistake humans for food in brackish water, not in clear salty water like the Caribbean. And he explains that during the last moments of their attack, sharks don’t rely on sight or smell. Instead, they rely on gel-filled electromagnetic sensing pores called the ampullae of Lorenzini for direction. It is because of this sixth sense, Hammerschlag theorizes, that he is standing before me with a bandaged hand. As the crew maneuvered the shark onto the stern, it sensed the whirling metal propeller nearby and twisted violently. Without malice or intent, its tooth—corkscrewed on one side to cut through turtle shells—simply happened upon the soft flesh of his finger. It was not an attack. >> I have tIme only to drop my baggage by a bunk when I get a tap on my shoulder. It’s time to go tagging. I jump on the little boat that will serve as our platform. Scattered over the decks I see spools of lines and giant hooks. It is then that I realize that shark tagging is actually a lot like sport fishing—but with a rodeo at the end. My colleagues on the boat, a combination of shark conservationists and eco-conscious volunteers, would disagree with me. Science and sport are separate, they would say. But it sure does not look like it. Amid the fishing-like gear, sit several buckets and pipes drilled with holes and stuffed with guts. These are called SADs, or shark attractant devices, and they are thrown overboard to bleed all night in the warm sea. There’s also a four-foot-long cooler filled with chum: fish heads; rotting barracuda, jack, grouper; and a few gallons of fish blood. I ask Hammerschlag what he calls it, but he doesn’t have a name other than “the cooler,” which sounds boring. I christen it “the Chum Coffin.” As soon as the hooks are out, we chum. The waters run red with blood and white with chunks of hand-mashed fish from the Chum Coffin, leaving an oily sheen on the surface. A field tech,

C O P y R I g h T m A C g I L L I v R Ay F R E E m A N F I L m S / P h O T O g R A P h E R : P E T E R K R A g h

cough is the kind that makes your brain rattle in your skull. I manage to let Hammerschlag know I’ll miss the plane and try for one the following day. Then I pass out. Twenty-four hours later I wake up and still feel terrible, but I pack my fins, underwater camera, mask and snorkel anyway. I send the crew members of the research vessel an e-mail saying I’ll be arriving by seaplane— the ship is already 25 miles north of Nassau. They write back that they’ll send a speedboat to pick me up. At the end, they sign off, “Request you bring five cases of beer.” A red-eye brings me to Nassau, where I deplane, pick up the beer—five cases of High Rock—and meet my seaplane pilot, Paul, who is wearing jean cutoffs and no shoes. Paul has lived in the Bahamas his entire life and has been flying nearly half of it. He rests his toes on the aluminum pedals and says, “Once you fly barefoot, you can never live anywhere else.” After jamming all the beer inside Paul’s tiny plane, I climb in. Paul tells me the research vessel is about 30 minutes away, somewhere between the Berry Islands and Chub Cay. When I first heard that we’d be working from a research vessel, I imagined some grotty live-aboard, given the current state of scientific funding. Not so. The vessel I am flying to meet has a robotic sub, a six-person helicopter, full dive gear, surfboards, Jet Skis, and small, medium, and large tender craft. It also has shag carpet, a hot tub, a bar, an interior design reminiscent of a James Bond set, and a fully uniformed crew, including a chef from Australia. Hammerschlag, it turns out, has some wealthy backers who are willing to let him use their boat. The only stipulation is that passengers sign a nondisclosure agreement. Apparently, the ship’s owners would rather not be named. As we approach the Berry Islands, Paul angles the plane toward the ocean. The stall sensor goes off a split second before its pontoons slap the water. We’re at low tide, so the water is only about knee deep. I kick open the door and hop down into the lagoon. After a little while, a zodiac from the research vessel shows up. I begin loading the beer and my luggage into the craft, and I ask the driver, “What did I miss?” “We just caught a 10-foot hammerhead and two juvenile tiger sharks,” he says. “Where’s Neil?” I ask. “He got cut up pretty bad wrangling the second tiger.”

THE TAG THAT COULD SAVE SHARKS shark behavior is one of the great mysteries of the ocean, and mediocre tags are primarily to blame. Scientists can’t understand something they can’t measure. Compared with other marine-animal tags, the HammerTag, now in prototype, is cheaper by hundreds of dollars, lasts years longer, and stores up to a thousand times more data. It can record a shark’s entire life, and when the shark dies, it will detach—via explosive charge—and ﬂoat to the surface to make a ﬁnal data dump. — b . L .

F R O m T O P : C O U R T E S y A . D R I E v E R , D E S E R T S TA R S y S T E m S L L C ; COURTESy JIm AbERNEThy

NOse CONe The nose cone connects the tag to the shark. It remains attached to the shark even after the micro-charge blows.

sOLar PaNeL aND maGNetOmeter The tag’s photovoltaic cells can collect energy at two times the distance of vertical visibility, so 100 feet at 50 feet of vertical visibility. Near the surface it can charge the battery in 20 minutes. A magnetometer determines a shark’s north-south position depending on the strength of the magnetic field. GPS does not work underwater.

eXPLOsIVe CharGe When the device senses that a shark has stopped moving, meaning it’s dead, it triggers a micro-charge to fire. The charge separates the bulk of the tag from the nose cone, freeing it to float to the surface, where it can transmit data.

FLOat BODY A head made from syntactic foam will float a tag to the surface once it detaches from the shark.

DePth seNsOr Nested in the foam head, a pressure sensor relays depth information to the central processor.

sateLLIte aNteNNa Providing the shark is near the surface, the ARGOS satellite antenna can transmit up to 120 32-byte packets a day, enough to convey momentby-moment details or a single-day summary.

PaYLOaD Constructed as a modular unit, the payload contains a backup battery, temperature sensor, and three-axis accelerometer that can determine whether the shark is resting or in pursuit.

nicknamed Dirty Curt, warns divers to stay clear of the slick. “Did anyone explain to Brian how Curt got his nickname?” Virginia Ansaldi, Hammerschlag’s lab manager, asks. “No, and don’t tell him,” Hammerschlag says. Curt, who looks a bit like Popeye, says, “Please don’t call me Dirty Curt.” The process of taking rotten fish steaks and picking off thumbsize bits of meat is called “chunking.” It tends to leave the chunker smelling badly. But this afternoon it is our only diversion. We get no bites. As the day grows long, a tropical storm creeps overhead, which punctures the sea with pinpricks of rain. I have no rain jacket, and I am cold. My cough rattles back to life. Dirty Curt calls it a day. We might not have gotten a shark today, but with all the chum we’re dumping, we’re bound to get some tomorrow, the crew tells me. At the worst, we’ll get some the following day— the last day of the expedition. That night, the air conditioning breaks. I sleep on deck, under a towel and a bright moon. >> a marIne-anImal taG is a simple device. It consists of a sturdy outer shell, sensing and communications equipment, and a means to connect the tag to the shark. Some tags transmit their data by satellite link; others quietly log information until they’re recovered by fishermen. Some tags measure general

attaChmeNt Scientists attach the tag to the shark in two ways. On smaller sharks, they use a small lance. On larger ones, they drill three small holes in the dorsal fin and string a nylon cord through them.

location with light readings; others use magnetometers to get a more accurate north-south position and compass headings. No matter the tag, though, none are particularly high-tech. Satellite communications that move at one bit per second. The kind of processor used in cheap digital wristwatches and discount microwave ovens. You’ll find more groundbreaking componentry in your grandfather’s cellphone. If tags are such crude devices, why haven’t scientists made better, cheaper, longer-lasting ones? On a breezeless afternoon, while standing on the bow of our tagging boat, I pose this question to Marco Flagg, the designer of the HammerTag. One reason, he says, is that higher-end electronics use more power, and power management is critical at sea. Another, Flagg tells me, is that there isn’t a lot of money to be made selling marine-animal tags to scientists, with their high standards and tiny budgets. The economics look even worse when devices last years. But economics aren’t Flagg’s concern. He’s a self-taught engineer who makes his money doing contract work for the Special Forces and deep-sea outfits. At the time of the expedition, he is developing underwater positioning systems for submarine war games and an alert system for scientists so fascinated by their surroundings that they don’t notice they’re about to run out of air. Tags are just a sideline, and he probably never would have

May 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

a p ex predator

SOMETHING BITES OUR LINE, AND THE BUOY TAKES OFF. THE BOAT GOES FROM LETHARGIC TO FRANTIC. I GET READY TO JUMP IN THE WATER. could add new sensors, allowing scientists to gather multiple data streams at once, including precise depth, acceleration along three axes, highly accurate location information, and water temperature. He also tweaked the transmission system. The HammerTag can send daily reports whenever it makes a satellite connection, but it also has a failsafe. When it senses that a shark is no longer moving and has reached an unsurvivable depth, it assumes the shark is dead, and a small explosive charge separates the tag from the body. The tag then floats to the surface and transmits a final batch of data. Even with the improvements, Flagg reduced the price of his tag dramatically. While commercial devices with less capability and a shorter lifetime can cost up to $5,000, the final HammerTag will cost about $2,500. The lower the cost, Flagg argues, the higher the rate of adoption and the more shark data scientists will have. >> Over the cOurse Of the secOnd day, we troll different spots, most of which are shallow enough that I can see straight to the sea-grass-covered bottom. When the shallows turn up nothing, we try our luck at the edge of a 6,000-foot trench. We tell stories to pass the hours. Ansaldi recalls the time in Hawaii Each point represents a moment at which a shark surfaced, allowing its tag to transmit data. The most recently recorded locations are white; older data points are darker.

The SecreT Life of jawS After tagging more than 75 sharks, researchers at the University of Miami have built a database that tracks the movements of several species. The nine individuals here have vastly different migration patterns. The bull shark Lia covered only 20 miles over 74 days, while Linda, a tiger shark, traveled more than 2,000 miles up the Eastern seaboard. “She encircles an area the size of a billion football fields,” says Hammerschlag. “I had no idea we would see that scale.”— k A t I E P E E k Bull ShArkS

GreAt hAmmerheAdS

tIGer ShArkS

hoover 83 days 90 miles

Arianna 84 days 16 miles

dominic 139 days 90 miles

lia 74 days 20 miles

Chad 20 days 60 miles

linda 310 days 2,100 miles

Springer II 104 days 340 miles

Sawyer 61 days 1,100 miles

Virginia 128 days 120 miles

Sawyer

linda

100 miles

Springer II

linda Sawyer hoover

lia

dominic Virginia

POPULAR SCIENCE

May 2013

Chad

Arianna

S h A R k t R A C k I N g d AtA C O U R t E S y N E I L h A m m E R S C h L A g

started working on them if a 17-foot great white hadn’t mauled him 18 years ago. The attack happened off the central California coast, while Flagg was testing a prototype diver-locator beacon. He was in a kelp forest off Point Lobos about 50 feet down when a set of jaws clamped around his torso. The shark probably would have killed him had it not chipped a tooth on his dive tank and the beacon’s metal housing, prompting it to retreat. Flagg managed to get to the boat, where he kept his wetsuit on fearing his guts might fall out, but remarkably, he needed only 15 stitches. When a local shark scientist later interviewed him about the attack, he offhandedly mentioned he needed new tags. Flagg, who had every reason to avoid sharks for the rest of his life, said he’d give it a try. Since then, Flagg has made various improvements to marinetag design, but it wasn’t until he met Hammerschlag that he felt compelled to rethink tags entirely. Hammerschlag challenged him to create a tag that could outlive a shark. For an engineer, it was a problem in need of solving. Flagg began by rethinking the power source. Marine-tag makers have typically eschewed the use of photovoltaics, opting instead for batteries. The assumption was that sharks don’t surface long enough to make use of solar panels. Flagg tested this notion by attaching a solar-powered tag to his back and diving to 100 feet. To his pleasant surprise, he found that his panels still charged effectively in as little as 2 percent of the surface light. With a new power source in hand, Flagg turned to energy management. He reduced power consumption by 90 percent by better controlling sensor activity and satellite transmissions. Paired with a backup battery that can last two years without recharging, the improved tag, he calculated, could last 50 years, perhaps longer. Because his new tag was so much more energy-efficient, Flagg

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a p ex predator

HAMMERSCHLAG JUMPS UP AND YELLS THE SINGLE WORD WE’vE ALL BEEN WAITING TO HEAR, “SHARK!”

>> the third day is Our last before heading home, and I wake up determined to change our luck. I ditch my plain shirt and put on the official, if slightly dorky, expedition T-shirt that everyone else is wearing. Perhaps solidarity will break the curse. When I board the tagging boat, I find that Dirty Curt has been considering my luck too and has fashioned me a charm: a necklace of monofilament looped through the eyes of a rotting rock hind grouper. He hands it to me roughly. “Don’t come within 50 feet of the boat without this necklace,” he says. I figure I’ll do just about anything to see a shark at this point, so I throw it on. Grease and blood begin to soak into my expedition T-shirt. We chum valiantly all day, but with four hours of sunlight left, we’re still coming up empty. The sharks are elsewhere. We motor the boat into a channel between Chub and Bird Cays known for its fast current. Dirty Curt says we may catch sharks as they funnel through the hourglass waterway. Almost immediately, something bites our line, and the buoy takes off at a furious pace. The boat goes from lethargic to frantic in a matter of seconds, with everyone madly assembling gear. My job is to photograph the tagging from the ocean, providing a shark’s-eye view of the event. I take off the fish head, change into my neoprene rash guard, and get ready to jump in the water. We motor into position, and Dirty Curt begins to reel in the hook, but there’s no resistance. It comes up empty. Dirty Curt looks slowly around the boat. He sees the fish head hanging from a post. Hammerschlag, speechless, points a finger at me, and Dirty Curt yells, “No one told you to take the fish head off!” I can feel every sullen crew member looking at my neck. I don’t say anything—I just slip the necklace back on. I smell like a Chinatown fish market, and I wish this day would end.

The awkward moment is broken by the radio. “Berry Island Club here,” it squelches. A radio operator from a dock a few hundred feet away has been watching us fish. “If you’re looking for sharks, down current there’s a local hammerhead that shows up when we clean our fish,” he says. Following the tip, we drift a mile down and drop anchor on a sandy shallow bottom. It is our last fishing spot on the trip. We have only a bit of sunlight left before the expedition’s end, but it seems that everyone’s just about given up. I know I have. >> in an age Of sensOrs and netwOrks, animal tagging is ripe for disruption. The HammerTag does not simply imply a new twist on tagging, it represents a paradigm shift. Flagg tells me that he can imagine a day when tag relay stations sit around the world. Instead of satellites, tags would connect to the stations over Wi-Fi, dumping massive loads of data directly into the cloud for all scientists to see. Researchers could monitor sharks and anything else large enough to accommodate a tag. Instead of mapping a single species, the data would convey the movements and actions of an entire ecosystem. Hammerschlag says he would like to have other kinds of data as well. He is considering a tag that would turn on a video camera when it senses sudden acceleration. Scientists could sit in their offices while watching sharks devour a school of smaller fish. It would be an entirely new way to see the ocean. Even current tags, which might report as few as five or six location blips a month, have revealed their share of surprises. Scientists have found that hammerheads roam hundreds of miles northeast of their predicted range. Great whites, it C O N t I N U E d O N PA g E 8 9

POPULAR SCIENCE

May 2013

EmmA SmIth/333 PROdUCtIONS

when she had to stomp barefoot on the carcass of a rancid tuna to create a paste for chumming. Dirty Curt is busy plotting. He says the current will take the bait into the deeper water. “In 30 minutes, we should have a shark,” he says. But as anglers know, predictions are a dangerous business. No sharks appear. The crew chums more aggressively. I help Ansaldi haul the Chum Coffin onto the rail of the boat, where she dumps a few gallons of blood directly into the sea. Austin Gallagher, one of Hammerschlag’s PhD candidates, is bailing fish over the stern so furiously that he slips and falls headlong into a crimson pool of gore. No matter how much bait we spread, though, our hooks go unnoticed. That night, I hear crew members whispering to each other about their bad fortune. Dirty Curt comes up to me and says, “We haven’t caught a thing in the last two days, and the only thing that’s changed is you.” “Well, for surfers, not finding sharks is the best luck you can have,” I say, laughing weakly. Dirty Curt just stares.

BIG hAul Sharks are much less powerful out of the water. Hammerschlag guides a bull shark away from the boat after tagging.

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INSTANT EXPERT

M A KING N E W E LE MENTS

STO R Y BY BRO O KE BO REL ILLUSTR ATIO N BY J IM KOPP

HOW SCIENTISTS CREATE SUPERHEAVY ATOMS

Foil target

ast year, scientists in Germany set out to create the heaviest known element in the universe: element 119. For five months, they attempted to fuse the atoms of two lighter elements to form one large atom with 119 protons in its nucleus. Like other artificially created superheavy elements (those with 103 or more protons), element 119 will decay in a fraction of a second. Scientists strive to make ever-heavier elements to win acclaim (U.S. and Soviet scientists battled over their discoveries frequently during the Cold War) and to understand the processes that govern the behavior of atomic nuclei. Since

wrapping up their experiment at the end of the year, the German researchers have been sifting through terabytes of data for a hint of element 119. If they find proof, the scientists will not only win the right to name it, they will do something even more unusual: add a new row to the periodic table.

Separation chamber

Berkelium

Element 119

Titanium beam

+ Titanium

= Berkelium

Element 119

A RECIPE FOR ELEMENT 119 1 Accelerate

2 Collide

3 Separate

A linear particle accelerator at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany, accelerates a beam of ionized titanium down a 400-foot tube at more than 67 million miles per hour—10 percent of the speed of light.

For five months, the ionized titanium beam smashed into a target studded with berkelium atoms. Scientists predict that once every few billion impacts, a titanium atom, which has 22 protons, collided with the target at just the right speed and position to fuse with a berkelium atom, which has 97 protons, creating a new atom with 119 protons.

The newly formed superheavy atoms are more massive and move much more slowly—only 2 percent of the speed of light—than the ionized titanium. They also respond differently to a magnetic field. Using powerful magnets, scientists can steer element 119 away from the titanium and toward a detector.

POPULAR SCIENCE

MAY 2013

BY THE NUMBERS 4

Number of known elements still lacking a permanent name

Number of elements that make up 99.9 percent of atoms in the human body

A BRIEF HISTORY OF HEAVY-ELEMENT DISCOVERY 118 Number of confirmed elements

177

200

Number of neutrons in the nucleus of element 119

Number of microseconds predicted in 119’s half-life

No. 43 Technetium Emilio Segrè made technetium, the first artificially created element, in 1937. With just 43 protons, it is the only radioactive element lighter than uranium.

No. 92 Uranium More than 100 years passed from when uranium was identified, in 1789, and when French physicist Antoine Becquerel discovered its radioactive properties in 1896.

Titanium Magnets

Nos. 93–103 Neptunium–Fermium In 1940, Berkeley physicists made element 93, the first element heavier than uranium. It was later named neptunium. Plutonium, element 94, quickly followed. Physicists created elements 95 through 103 between 1940 and 1961.

Detector

Periodic Table of Elements

No. 119?

Nos. 104–106 Rutherfordium– Seaborgium Between 1966 and 1974, Soviet and American researchers fought over credit for elements 104 through 106. Americans got 104 and 106; the Russians got 105.

4 Detect Atoms of element 119 embed themselves in a silicon detector. The new element is radioactive, and while it is in the detector, it gives off alpha particles—two protons and two neutrons—in a predictable fashion. The detector registers these decays, which scientists use to prove the existence of the new element.

Nos. 107–112 Bohrium– Copernicium Researchers at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research were the first to confirm element 107 in 1981. Over the next 15 years, they made elements 108 through 112.

Nos. 113–118 Ununtrium– Ununoctium Between 2003 and 2011, scientists from Livermore National Laboratory and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia collaborated to discover elements 113 through 118.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS How many elements are there?

What’s with the names?

Models predict that the heaviest element will have up to 126 protons. Higher than that and the atomic nucleus is too unstable to hold together. The models also suggest that an island of stability—atoms in the periodic table whose nuclei are less prone to radioactive decay—lies somewhere among the superheavies.

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry approves each element’s name. The process takes years, partly because research groups must validate the initial experimental results. While awaiting their permanent names, superheavy elements get Latin placeholders. Element 117 is called ununseptium, combining the Latin words for one, one, and seven.

MAY 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

FRAME Engineers built the plane’s ultralight skeleton by layering sheets of carbon ﬁber into struts and spars. Light and rigid foam forms the wing tips and insulates the gondolas and cockpit.

WING The plane’s long, thin wing spans 69 yards. The length reduces drag, maximizing aerodynamic eﬃciency, and also provides ample surface area for 10,748 solar cells.

SOLAR CELLS Made from monocrystalline silicon just 150 microns thick, the solar cells cover 239 square yards of the plane. They convert sunlight to electricity at an eﬃciency of 22 percent.

INSTRUMENTS Because of its wingspan and low speed—about 43 miles per hour—the plane can bank only up to ﬁve degrees, much less than a conventional aircraft. The Omega Instrument precisely measures bank angles and vibrates the control wheel if the pilot banks the craft too hard.

MAIN IMAGE: SOLAR IMPULSE/JEAN REVILLARD; INSET IMAGES CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: SOLAR IMPULSE/ STEPHANE GROS (2); SOLAR IMPULSE/FRED MERZ; SOLAR IMPULSE/JEAN REVILLARD

POPULAR SCIENCE

MAY 2013

COCKPIT Only one pilot ﬁts in the cockpit, and he must remain seated. He controls the plane using a joystick, rudder bar, and four levers.

THIS MONTH, A PL ANE WILL FLY ACROSS THE UNITED STATES ON SUNLIGHT ALONE. IN 2015, IT WILL CIRCUMNAVIG ATE THE WORLD. STOR Y BY S TEPHEN CA S S

GONDOLAS Each of four gondolas, or pods, ﬁxed under the wing spar contain a battery pack, 10-horsepower electric motor, and gear box that drive a propeller at 400 rpm. By distributing battery weight, the gondolas also reduce structural loads.

BATTERIES Totaling more than 880 pounds, the lithium-polymer battery packs account for a quarter of the plane’s weight. They are highly eﬃcient, storing about 109 watthours per pound.

MAY 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

the morning of March 21, 1999, Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones landed their balloon in the Egyptian desert, completing the frst such nonstop fight around the world. Amid the celebrations, Piccard made a sobering discovery: The propane tanks needed to keep his balloon alof were almost empty. “If the winds had been a little weaker over the Atlantic, I would have ditched,” he says. Piccard vowed then to devise a way to circumnavigate the globe using no fuel at all. Beginning in May, Piccard and a partner will take turns fying a single-seat, solar-powered airplane from San Francisco to New York—a prelude to an around-the-world fight planned for 2015. Named HB-SIA (for Solar Impulse Alpha), Piccard’s plane defes conventional aviation wisdom. When he frst told others about his dream, “almost everybody thought I was completely crazy,” he says. Although pioneers like Paul MacCready had been building manned solar-powered aircraf since the 1970s, none were capable of fying afer the sun had set, let alone LIGHT FLIGHT Pilot across the Atlantic and Pacifc for days at a time. Bertrand Piccard [above] The obstacle is weight. To fy through the night, a in 2012, after ﬂying a solar plane across the plane must draw upon power from batteries charged Mediterranean. Its wing during the day. But batteries hold far less energy [right] is made of carbonper pound than a tank of jet fuel, so a plane must ﬁber ribs and spars. carry more weight in batteries to travel an equivalent distance. A heavier plane needs more energy to fy, which in turn requires even more battery power. Add a cockpit father, Jacques, made the frst voyage to the ocean’s deepest point; and pilot and the craf could be too heavy to even take of. That’s in 1931, his grandfather, Auguste, was the frst balloonist to reach why solar-powered aircraf research has typically focused on the stratosphere. Piccard continued to promote his solar-powered unmanned vehicles, such as NASA’s fying-wing Helios. plane concept, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Piccard, a Swiss psychiatrist and aviator, comes from a family Lausanne (EPFL) agreed to conduct a formal feasibility study in of adventurers who don’t back down from challenges: In 1960, his 2003. It concluded that an ultralight plane with a long wingspan High altitude keeps the plane above any weather and sets up the height for the night glide.

The batteries typically fully charge as the plane reaches cruising altitude.

FLIGHT PATH During the day, the solar plane climbs to between 27,000 and 28,000 feet. When the sun goes down, the propellers throttle back to save energy, and the plane slowly descends to about 4,500 feet. It remains at that altitude until the sun comes up and the batteries begin to recharge. Team meteorologists use simulations to determine the best time during the day to climb, taking into account projected winds and cloud cover.

POPULAR SCIENCE

MAY 2013

ALTITUDE

After sunset, the engines are throttled back and the plane descends to 4,500 feet.

30,000 feet 20,000 feet 10,000 feet 0 feet 6 a.m.

9 a.m.

noon

3 p.m.

6 p.m.

9 p.m.

midnight

3 a.m.

RATE OF ENERGY CONSUMED 20 kW

0 kW

On ascent, the plane uses a third of its generation capacity.

The plane consumes almost no energy—a mere 300 watts—on its descent.

LEFT TO RIGHT: SOLAR IMPULSE/JEAN REVILLARD; SOLAR IMPULSE/STEPHANE GORS

SOLAR PL AN E

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to reduce drag and support solar cells could conceivably work. André Borschberg, the pilot and engineer who led the EPFL study, joined Piccard to ofcially found Solar Impulse, and they began recruiting corporate and individual donors to help fnance the $130-million, 10-year project. The two men immediately ran into problems fnding an aviation contractor to build the plane. None thought it was possible, so they assembled their own motley team of engineers. “I think we have more people from outside the feld of aviation than inside,” says Borschberg. Solar Impulse’s head of airplane development, Robert Fraefel, has a background in Formula One racing. Others come from industries such as photovoltaic manufacturing and die casting. “In some ways, it was a big asset not to be too experienced,” Borschberg says. “When you are experienced, you go back to the solution you know.” AERODYNAMIC PROFILE A crew loads The team decided to construct the frame’s ribs and the HB-SIA solar plane’s 208-foot-long wing spar entirely from carbon fber (manufactured wing into the nose of a 747. Engineers will rebuild it once it lands in San by a company that builds yachts) joined by highFrancisco for a coast-to-coast ﬂight that performance plastic screws and bolts. The materials begins this month. Right: The plane ﬂies are light yet strong enough to give HB-SIA a wingover Switzerland in 2011. span of 69 yards—almost exactly that of an Airbus A340-500 passenger jet. Yet the plane weighs just over 3,500 pounds, less than 1 percent of the weight valid—but it can’t fy around the world. At the slow speeds of of an Airbus and about 2,000 pounds less than a typical SUV. solar aviation—the HB-SIA cruises at about 43 miles per hour— To power the plane, engineers laminated nearly 12,000 silicon Piccard estimates it will take three days of nonstop fight to cross solar cells over the main wing and horizontal stabilizer. The cells the Atlantic and fve or six to cross the Pacifc. This requires a generate an average of 50 kilowatts over a 24-hour period, sendplane with redundant systems and a more ergonomic cockpit, ing electricity directly to the motors when the plane is in fight and enabling a pilot to sleep; greater efciency to create more energy directing any excess to four lithium-polymer batteries. A battery reserves; and leak-proof electronics for fying in humid conditions. management system ensures the batteries don’t get too cold, And so the Solar Impulse team is now midway through building reducing their efciency, or dangerously overheat. the HB-SIB. “The frst airplane has the technology of 2007. The Afer four years of design and two years of construction, the second airplane has the technology of tomorrow,” says Piccard. plane made its frst “fea hop”—fying 1,148 feet at an airfeld The HB-SIB, 11 percent bigger, will have an autopilot, more in Dübendorf, Switzerland—at the end of 2009. The real test efcient electric motors, and a skeleton made of even lighter occurred in July 2010, when Borschberg piloted the plane through carbon-fber materials. The batteries will have greater energy the night for the frst time above Payerne, Switzerland. “We didn’t density thanks to new electrolytes and electrodes developed by know how exactly the airplane would perform,” he says. “Would Solvay and Bayer MaterialScience—technology that has already we use more energy than what we planned? Would we encounter migrated to electric vehicles and consumer electronics. The two downdrafs?” With no autopilot, he few in a seated position for companies also developed rigid high-performance polyurethane 26 hours straight, using yoga techniques to stretch in the cramped foams for the plane’s wing tips and cockpit insulation that Bayer is cabin. When he landed, he had set four records, including the now using in refrigerators and the construction industry. highest altitude for a piloted solar aircraf, at 30,300 feet, and Piccard is pleased that his project has spurred technologies the longest solar fight, at 26 hours, 10 minutes, and 19 seconds. that may advance other industries, but he also hopes Solar The HB-SIA prototype proved the team’s aircraf concept was Impulse will galvanize the pursuit of renewable energy. “Very ofen when we speak of protection of the environment, it’s boring,” Piccard says. “It’s about less mobility, less comfort, less growth.” Instead, he hopes to prove that exploiting the sun’s potential will bring more freedom.

THE T WO MEN IMMEDIATELY R AN INTO PROBLEMS FINDING AN AVIATION CONTR ACTOR TO BUILD THE PL ANE— NONE THOUGHT IT WAS POSSIBLE.

POPULAR SCIENCE

MAY 2013

Stephen Cass is a Boston-based technology journalist who frequently covers aerospace and computing.

FROM TOP: SOLAR IMPULSE/NIELS ACKERMANN; SOLAR IMPULSE/JEAN REVILLARD

SOLAR PL AN E

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STOr y By nIcoLe dyer

AND A

A recordbreAking roller coAster thAt mimics the thrill of stunt flying

SCARE

figure 1 vesT

>> In the competitive world of roller-coaster design, engineers often obsess about smashing records and pushing the limits of human endurance. But records mean little if the ride leaves thrill seekers feeling beat-up. For the engineers at the coaster-design firm Bolliger and Mabillard (B&M), it’s not enough to simply go faster, taller, or twistier. “A good coaster should be smooth and comfortable,” says B&M founder Walter Bolliger. When the firm’s newest coaster, the Gatekeeper, opens this month at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, it will claim plenty of records, including one for world’s tallest upside-down drop—165 feet. It’s also the longest and loopiest of the world’s five “wing coasters.” A B&M signature, wing coasters seat passengers on each side of the track in order to mimic the sensation of riding on the wing of a plane. The Gatekeeper whips riders along nearly a mile of stunt-pilot trickery, including a maneuver that knifes the wings through two concrete-and-steel towers. It’s the thrill of stunt flying—minus the turbulence.

BAr WIng r AIL

5 4

Wings Cantilevered steel arms support six-foot-long steel wings. Designers made the wing more rigid under the seats than in the rail so that the wings vibrate at a diﬀerent frequency from the track. This avoids interactions that can cause structural problems. Harnesses Most looping coasters rely on hard over-theshoulder harnesses that can block views and box ears. The Gatekeeper has soft, ﬂexible vests that secure the upper body without the need for hard foam padding. A rigid restraint bar holds riders in place at their waist. 68

POPULAR SCIENCE

MAY 2013

Specs Top speed 67 mph InversIons 7 BIggesT drop 165 feet LengTH 4,164 feet rIde TIme 2 minutes, 40 seconds

c o u r t e s y c e d a r F a i r e n t e r ta i n m e n t ( 2 )

figure 1

e x t r e M e e ngi n e e r i ng

1 Wing Over Drop Once strapped in, riders climb 165 feet and roll upside down as they plunge into the tallest upside-down dive of any coaster. The drop is so high, in fact, that it generates all the kinetic energy the car needs to travel along the coaster’s 4,164 feet of track while completing six more upside-down moves (a.k.a. inversions).

2 The Immelmann Following the ﬁrst drop, riders bottom out around four times the force of gravity (4Gs) and hit 67 mph before rocketing into the next maneuver: an Immelmann. Named after a pilot trick, the Immelman is a horseshoe-shaped path that ascends a half loop, rolls 180 degrees, and sends riders ﬂying toward the next move. The short, tight vertical loop keeps forces aligned with riders’ spines, so it’s less jarring.

3 The Camelback Momentum from the Immelmann carries riders to the crest of a 105-foottall parabolic arc, where they’ll catch about two seconds of weightlessness. Airtime occurs when the upward force of the coaster balances out with the downward force of gravity.

4 The Corkscrew A corkscrew is really just a loop stretched into three dimensions. Its center of rotation is slightly oﬀset, so riders on the outermost part of the wing will experience more acceleration than riders closest to the center rail. 5 The Keyholes Just when the wings appear certain to slam into a pair of 62-ton concrete-andsteel towers, they rotate 90 degrees, slicing passengers through narrow slots. The clearance between the stretched limbs of the tallest rider (the height limit is 6'6'') and the sides of the towers is less than a foot. The track is mounted to each tower; without such supports, subtle track movements due to wind and temperature changes would have demanded a larger, less terrifying keyhole.

MAY 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

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

A pack of hacked go-karts that re-creates a classic videogame story by Gregory mone p hot o gr a ph s b y Jeﬀ Wilson

Edited b y Dave mosher

H2 0@ p op sc i.co m

Geek Squad Hunter Smith of Waterloo Labs [second from left] helped four interns transform gokarts into interactive racers fit for a Super Nintendo game.

yo u B u i lt Wh at? !

Super-Real Mario Kart

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.

One summer, a young engineer walked into Austin’s Park, an amusement center outside the Texas capital, and introduced himself to the manager as an intern from Waterloo Labs—a hacking collaborative sponsored by the engineering juggernaut National Instruments. He and his colleagues wanted to convert the go-kart track into a real-life, crash-happy version of the classic videogame series Mario Kart. The manager didn’t just agree. He lent him a kart. In Super Mario Kart, cartoon drivers

zoom around a track littered with interactive objects. Some boost a player’s speed, others hijack steering, and many can be launched at competitors. Four interns at Waterloo Labs grew up playing the game, so when someone suggested making a real-world version, they couldn’t resist. “We weren’t entirely sure how we were going to do it,” says intern Tim Lynch, “but we said, ‘Okay, we need to do this.’ ” Re-creating the game’s interactivity meant that objects on the track had to communicate with speeding go-karts.

may 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

H2.0

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At first, the team thought of using passive, close-range radiofrequency identification (RFID) tags. The interns tested that idea by tossing their ID cards at a security scanner to see whether the embedded chips transmitted a signal fast enough. “That didn’t work,” says Humphrey Huang. Next, they tried an active, selfpowered RFID system. It cost an extra $500 but could transmit signals as far as 30 feet away, allowing each kart to interact with objects via its own RFID reader. The interns’ biggest hurdle: overriding the kart’s controls. “We needed to be able to fight against someone trying to turn the wheel,” says Lynch. They eventually selected powerful pneumatic pistons, which they attached to the chassis using zip ties, duct tape, and braces. When a driver captured or collided with an item, a reader would send that item’s unique ID to the computer, which, in turn, ordered pistons, valves, or servomotors to swerve, stop, or speed up the kart [see “How It Works,” facing page]. They tested the hacked kart in the park’s garage, tossing plush toys embedded with RFID tags at the vehicle and watching it respond like a living creature. Then—with the track manager’s approval—they modified three other racers and added pneumatic cannons so that drivers could fire kart-crippling toys at competitors. On game day, Huang, Lynch, Dylan Caswell, and Peter Gaylor raced, crashed, and futilely tried to prevent their carts from careening into the railing when RFID-tagged toys took over the controls. Lynch learned to steer with his knees while grabbing objects from the track and loading them into his cannon. Huang shot a plush turtle shell across the track at Caswell, triggering the RFID system in his kart and jamming the brakes. “We were doing lap after lap and thinking, ‘It’s actually working,’ ” says Lynch. “ ‘We’re actually playing Mario Kart.’ ”

Mention the Discount Code PS513 when you call, or enter it on our web site for a special discount on any Cyclone Rake model. (Expires 12/27/2013) ©2013 Woodland Power Products, Inc., 72 Acton St., West Haven, CT 06516

POPULAR SCIENCE

May 2013

160 mPH Top speed of go-kart–size 250cc International Class Superkarts, which can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in three seconds

HOW IT WOrks Hacking go-karts into the racecars of the Mario Kart videogame series was no simple feat. Four interns from Waterloo Labs began with standard four-stroke-engine vehicles and added components such as ruggedized cRIO computer controllers, Wi-Fi routers, and RFID readers.

TOY CaNNON Compressed air fed into a PVC pipe can blast a plush toy at competitors as far as 30 feet away.

eleCTRONICS A suite of gadgets can detect the RFID codes of objects on the track and then control the kart.

FaSTeNeRS Zip ties, brackets, and other removable hardware made all modifications reversible.

STeeRING A 130psi air piston attached to each tie rod can steer a kart off-course.

aIR TaNkS A 3,000psi paintball tank stores 48 cubic inches of air to charge add-on pistons.

BRake OVeRRIde A valve can depress the brake pedal by directing high-pressure air into a piston.

TIme 8 weeks COST $1,200

“Let’S-a-go!”

drivers grab RFID-tagged toys to gain an advantage. The team wrote software that interprets the strength of each tag’s signal as a function of distance. This way, a driver passing close to someone holding a speed-boosting toy, for example, wouldn’t earn an extra kick as well.

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CAN YOUR DEODORANT DO THIS? ™ The red shell slows down a driver and jams steering. Air pistons attached to the front wheel’s tie rods lock it in place, while another piston depresses the brake pedal.

A driver who captures a green shell can stuff it into an air cannon and then launch it toward an opponent to fully stop his kart.

Plastic bananas cause one tie-rod piston to contract and another to expand, forcing the front wheels to the right on the leftaiming track. “We figured that would be most perilous,” says Hunter Smith, Waterloo Labs’ internship coordinator.

Normally, a spring prevents the throttle lever from opening more than 85 percent. The RFID tag in the plush mushroom, however, triggers a servomotor to pull on the lever— enabling the driver to reach speeds nearing 35 mph.

may 2013

The lucky driver who grabs a plush star temporarily earns a fully opened throttle, while his Wi-Fi– equipped controller orders all other karts to brake.

POPULAR SCIENCE

Online at www.rockdeodorant.com and facebook.com/RockDeo Available at Rite Aid, Duane Reade and other ﬁne retailers

500 watts power that a professional cyclist can produce during a race—enough to run a standard food processor

H2.0 build it

Time 1 day CosT $25 DiffiCulTy ▯▯▯○○

Get a GrIp Springs and tape help the generator wheel contact the rim.

Amp Your Ride Charge electronics on the go with a bike-mounted USB hub I’m a mechanical engineer who loves bicycling. When gas prices soared through the roof in 2009, I rode my bike to save money. I wanted to charge USB devices, such as my phone, during commutes but didn’t want to spend $150 (or more) on a commercial wheel-hub generator. In the end, I was able to build a cheaper system. Electrical work wasn’t my expertise, so I had to teach myself how to build circuits from the ground up. I’m now on version three of my two-port USB generator, which is about 70 percent efficient above 12 mph and creates less drag on bike wheels than other designs. With the right equipment, you can build one yourself.

To stepper motor +

–

Diodes + +

– –

Negative output To USB charger

–

Positive output

Stepper motor A stepper motor converts the rear wheel’s spinning motion into electricity. To keep the flow consistent enough to charge devices, get a five-volt, 3.3-amp model (about $10 at electronics surplus stores). Attach a small wheel—I cut one from plywood— to the stepper motor. Line the small wheel’s rim with foam padding and electrical tape to give it grip. When mounted against the bike’s rear rim, the small wheel will turn the motor.

POPULAR SCIENCE

May 2013

reCtIFIer USB devices use direct current, but stepping motors provide alternating current. Convert the flow by building a rectifier out of eight 1N4001 diodes ($1 a pair at hobby stores). Link the diodes in anode-to-cathode pairs, and solder them together to make four pairs. Solder two pairs side by side into a bridge, and repeat with the other pairs for a total of two bridges. Connect each bridge’s midpoints with four-conductor wire to the stepper motor’s positive and negative wires [see wiring diagram above].

USB Car CharGer Open a two-port USB car charger. Remove the spring on the cylindrical end (positive lead) and the two clips (negative lead) that normally secure the charger in a power port. Solder the rectifier’s positive and negative leads to corresponding terminals on the charger. Connect the other ends of the wires to the matching terminals on the stepper motor.

Generator Frame Build a frame to keep the generator’s small wheel in contact with a bike rim. My bike has a rear rack, so I cut a six-inch-long slab of aluminum to span two bars of the rack [see above photo]. I secured the slab under the generator with U-bolts. Next, I cut two 90-degree aluminum angles for the other side of the generator and bolted them to the slab to clamp everything in place. Attach the USB charging port wherever you’d like (I put mine below the seat), and start pedaling for portable power.

For full instructions on building a USB bike charger, visit popsci.com/usbbike

courtesy doug costlow

ÑDoug Costlow, as told to Colleen Park

Do something

a m azing

The Popular Science #CrowdGrant Challenge gives everyday makers and thinkers the funding they need to do something amazing. Submit your project idea before June 15 at popsci.com/crowdgrant

POPULAR SCIENCE

#CROWDGRANT

CHALLENGE

4 MEGABYTES File size of DNA co-discoverer James Watson’s entire 3-billion-nucleotide genome, compressed into digital data

H2.0

Thermistor in oil and water

Vial of DNA and reagents

4-inch-to-3inch adapter

Computer fan

B IOH AC K S

PILE UP Stack five pieces of PVC piping to form a silo [right] that holds vials of DNA, heats them with a lightbulb, and cools them with a computer fan. TOP Drill a dozen or so ¼-inch holes into the top of a slanted adapter (to hold the vials), fit a pipe inside the adapter’s base, and cut a square hole in the exposed pipe to match a computer fan’s exhaust port. MIDDLE Cut the same square port in the top of a straight PVC coupling and hotglue the fan in place. Drill a hole into the coupling’s side, just above the center, and bolt on a clamped lightbulb socket. BOTTOM Drill a hole in a second coupling for a bundle of wires leading to an Arduino Uno microcontroller.

Lightbulb and socket

4-inch-wide pipes

3¾-inch-tall couplings

Relays

Arduino Uno

Gene Machine

A pipe that copies DNA using the heat of a lightbulb

TIME 5 hours COST $50 DIFFICULTY ▯▯▯●●

WIRE UP Connect the socket and computer fan to 5-volt relays, and link them to the Arduino. Lead one socket wire to a 110volt AC power source, and wire a thermistor to the Arduino. Insert the thermistor into a vial containing mineral oil and water, and place it in a vial hole. This gives the Arduino temperature data, allowing it to turn the lightbulb—and heat—on and off.

Biology’s equivalent of an office copier is a PCR machine. PCR, short for polymerase chain reaction, is now a staple in crime-scene forensics, heredity tests, and organism hijacking. It’s a mind-boggling feat. Among billions of base pairs that make up DNA’s genetic code, PCR finds exact sequences and, in a couple of hours, makes billions of copies—enough to decode or splice together useful combinations of genes. Professional machines cost about $10,000 dollars each, but Russell Durrett has devised one from PVC pipes, a 150-watt lightbulb, a computer fan, a cheap microcontroller, and a few reagents he ordered online.

PICK A GENE Whether you’re testing breakfast cereal for genetically modified grains or screening yourself for HIV resistance, pick a gene to copy. You’ll need to order from the Internet reagents that can hijack DNA-copying molecules [see “How It Works,” below].

HOW IT WORKS PCR machines cycle temperature to enable DNA-copying reagents, including primers, nucleotides, and the enzyme Taq polymerase. 78

POPULAR SCIENCE

201ºF

131°F

162°F

DNA temporarily unzips into two strands.

Primers—small pieces of DNA that “prime” replication— attach to the ends of a gene.

Taq polymerase recognizes the primers, latches on, and copies DNA between them.

MAY 2013

sToRY B Y Daniel Grushkin ILLUsTRATIoN B Y Greg Maxson

. . . And Repeat In the first five minutes, PCR makes two copies of a gene. Subsequent 30-second cycles continue the doubling. By the eighth cycle, 256 genetic copies exist, and by the 30th— a couple of hours later—there are more than a billion.

For full details on how to build and use your PCR machine, visit popsci.com/pcrmachine

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H2.0

65 percent Rate of Americans who spend more time on a computer than with a significant other

How Can I Solve a Faraway Relative’s Computer Woes? Give your granny several states away the tech support she deserves—from a smartphone Every family has an unofficial IT guy or girl. When printers won’t print or files can’t be found, the odds are good, dear reader, that you’re the one answering relatives’ panicked distress calls. Unfortunately, troubleshooting can lead to head-banging frustration for both you and your less savvy kin. There’s an easy fix: Download remote-access software—a program that connects you to a faraway computer so that you see exactly what the other person sees. Even better, you can control that person’s machine with your own mobile device. Instead of a maddeningly slow back-and-forth dialogue, you can take the reins and work some magic directly. s tory b y Rick Broida What might this cost you? Nothing if you choose

the right product. LogMeIn Free and TeamViewer, for example, offer free remote access on Windows and Mac (the latter software supports Linux too). Both programs are also platform-independent, which means you can control a Mac from a Windows machine or vice versa. They even allow interaction via apps on mobile devices, so you can take charge from your tablet or smartphone. Now your family can pester you for help, even when you’re on vacation. Whether you answer the phone is still up to you.

L e f t t o r I G h t : m a r t I a L co Lo m b / G e t t y I m aG e s ; k r y s t I a n n aw r o c k I / G e t t y I m aG e s

A sk A G e e k

1 billion Estimated number of Bluetooth devices being sold annually

TiME 2 to 3 hours CosT $20 DiffiCulTy ▯▯○○○

Headphones

H2.0 C heAp TRiC ks

insTruCTions: Right channel Left channel Ground

bbostjan/Getty ImaGes

Bluetooth adapter

High-Tech, Old-School Headphones Untether your vintage cans using a cheap wireless hack

Female jack

Music fan Andrew Wayne loved the funky 1970s headphones he purchased from a flea market. But he didn’t like switching between the vintage pair and modern, wireless headphones compatible with his smartphone. So Wayne simplified his life using an inexpensive Bluetooth adapter. Give your own wired cans some brand-new abilities by following these steps. — r o s e c o n r y For full instructions, visit popsci.com/wirelesscans

1 Buy a Bluetooth adapter (about $15), pry open the case, and set aside its electronic innards. 2 Open your vintage headphones—the larger the cans, the better—and remove the speakers and wiring. 3 Grab one male and one female ⅛-inch stereo jack, plus three short lengths of speaker wire: two split into a Y shape and a third split into an X. Solder one end of a Y-shaped wire to the right speaker’s positive lead and the other two ends to the jacks’ right channels. Repeat for the left speaker and the jacks’ left channels. Solder the X-shaped wire to all ground terminals [see wiring diagram]. 4 Plug the male jack into the Bluetooth adapter’s female output. If necessary, drill holes in the headphones’ cans to access the Bluetooth receiver’s on/off switch and USB port. Otherwise, be sure the earpiece can be removed (to charge the receiver and turn it on and off). 5 Hot-glue the soldered connections to prevent electrical shorts, fit the receiver and wiring back into the headphones, and jam out.

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WHICH WOULD YOU RATHER HAVE UNDER THE HOOD OF YOUR CAR?

William Hewlett and David Packard work in their garage at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, California.

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Right after they invented the garage.

The modern garage first appeared in the 1920s, and inventors—of automobile parts, among other things—began to occupy them almost immediately. Walt and Roy Disney started making cartoons in a Hollywood garage in 1923; eight years later, an engineer named Gerhard Fisher started building his Metallascope metal detectors in a garage in Palo Alto, California; and in 1938, William Hewlett and David Packard rented their own garage space in Palo Alto. The Hewlett-Packard garage would become the most famous in the history of American entrepreneurship. In 1989, it was designated the “Birthplace of Silicon Valley,” an official state landmark. Still, the archetype of the “garage inventor”—and indeed the phrase itself—did not catch on until the 1960s and ’70s. “The attached garage is really a postwar thing,” says Eric Hintz, a historian at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian. He says that LONG ANSWER

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the structure gave moonlighting engineers in the developing suburbs a large, configurable space, where they might set up their tables and sawhorses. Garage-style inventors predate the existence of garages, however. Before the 1920s, a part-time inventor might have dreamed up ideas inside the carriage house, which housed a family’s horse and buggy. In 1885, for example, Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, set up a lab inside the carriage house behind his father’s home in Washington, D.C. These days, the garage has more symbolic meaning than utility. When Jeff Bezos was building Amazon in the early 1990s, he chose to rent a house in the suburbs of Seattle in place of a more conventional office space—he wanted to say that he’d started out in a garage. “Even if it is a construct, it works,” Hintz says. “It’s sort of a shorthand. It’s very romantic to say, ‘Here’s the garage.’ You can build a whole corporate culture around it.”

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Why aren’t hovercraft more useful? SHORT ANSWER

Blame the skirts.

The inventor of the modern hovercraft, Christopher Cockerell, once imagined that his vehicle would cross the Atlantic at 100 miles per hour, an ocean liner coasting on air. While small hovercraft still serve a role in recreation and military landings, Cockerell’s dream of hover liners is now defunct. The last significant commercial hovercraft service—which traversed the English Channel and carried 1.25 million passengers annually at its peak—was discontinued in 2000. What sank it? First, the fuel costs were prohibitive. The vehicle’s four Rolls-Royce engines consumed 1,200 gallons of fuel per hour. That was fine during the 1950s and 1960s, when fuel was very cheap, but the costs became more burdensome. The Neoprene skirt that encircled the craft created another problem. Engineers designed the skirt to bend and flex over choppy water while maintaining a bubble of air beneath the skirt. But at 75 mph, the rubber took a beating on most trips. According to Roger Syms and Robin Paine, two former hovercraft pilots who wrote a history of the vehicle, On a Cushion of Air, portions of the skirt needed daily repair or replacement. “When you have a car, you don’t expect that you’ll have to change the tires every night,” Syms says. To make a large-scale hovercraft commercially viable today, Paine says, “There would have to be a huge advance in skirt technology.”

You can win an all-expenses paid trip to King of Wake or a Mentor Series Trek and have your winning image showcased in Popular Science. Images that capture life’s must-see moments—from sports, music, food, travel and everything in between— are what we’re looking for and they can be shot anywhere and about anything. See these sights better with Transitions® lenses, the adaptive lenses that seamlessly adjust from clear indoors to dark and every shade in-between outdoors to enhance your vision. Submit your images to

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Investigate Clues to the Origin of Time Time rules our lives. From the rising and setting of the sun to the cycles of nature and the biorhythms in our day, nothing so pervades our existence and yet is so difﬁcult to explain. Time seems to be woven into the very fabric of the universe. But why? Join Professor Sean Carroll, noted author and Senior Research Associate in Physics at the California Institute of Technology, on a mind-bending journey for the answer to that question in Mysteries of Modern Physics: Time. Guiding you through the past, present, and future, these 24 riveting lectures illuminate how a phenomenon we all experience actually connects us to the instant of the universe’s formation—and possibly to a multiverse that is unimaginably larger and more varied than the known cosmos.

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a pex predator C O N t I N U E d f R O m PA g E 5 8

seems, can dive nearly half a mile down and also occasionally gather in a place between Hawaii and California known as the shark café. For scientists working to protect sharks and the oceans along with them, this kind of data is invaluable. After all, how can they protect what they don’t understand? >> with an hOur Of light left on the last day of tagging, the team is already packing its gear, resigned to yet another sharkless afternoon. Hammerschlag tries to put a brave face on things. Even when we don’t find sharks, he says, that’s data. “Apex predators are rare,” Gallagher echoes. “And becoming more so. They’re usually found away from mankind, and so it takes more and more gear to find them.” As we exchange conciliatory banter, waiting out the day, I look up to see Hammerschlag staring at the horizon. I can’t see exactly what he’s looking at, just that his eyes are tracking something. Then he jumps up and yells the single word we’ve all been waiting to hear, “Shark!” The buoy is running, but faster than before. Water is spraying off the float as it rips through the chop. Ansaldi and Gallagher pull in the other lines so they won’t tangle. Flagg gets tagging gear ready, including a mini harpoon the size of a leather awl. Dirty Curt readies a lasso made of braided metal for the front of the shark and a rope lasso for the tail. From a distance of about 10 yards, Hammerschlag identifies our catch as a black-tipped reef shark. It moves erratically, one minute drifting, exhausted, the next thrashing against its invisible foe. Everyone is rushing around. I ask whether it’s time to take off the fish head, but no one listens to me. I look at the lashings, which seem solid, toss off my charm, and jump into the water. I don’t know what compels me to do so. Perhaps it’s a sense of duty. Perhaps it’s just an excuse to get rid of my foulsmelling necklace. I spend a few seconds treading water and calming my breath and make three or four spins to scan the blue beneath me for more sharks, which I assume must be everywhere. I can’t see any, other than the one we have on the line. The shark is perfect, in the scientific sense. It’s old enough and big enough for

tagging but young enough that it has no scars from battles with fishermen or prey. I am just feet from it, floating face-to-face with one of nature’s most fearsome creatures. Its jaw hangs open, and I can see row upon row of teeth. As the crew reels the animal toward the boat, I move in to touch it but stop. I feel ashamed, as if I’m grabbing for a trophy that does not belong to me. I’m not a scientist. I’m not helping the species survive. What right do I have to lay a hand on this perfect form? Standing on the stern, Curt expertly lassoes the shark, settling the noose just behind the dorsal and pectoral fins. Slowly, he and another researcher draw the shark toward the stern of the boat, tying the lasso to the boat once the shark is close enough. Someone puts a piece of PVC pipe attached to a water pump into the shark’s mouth, and oxygenated water begins to gush over its gills. There is an urgency to the work. When tagging, scientists not only need to land a shark, they have to do so in such a quick and artful manner that the animal feels little stress. Too much strain can exhaust a shark. It might swim off only to die a few days later. With practiced precision, silent and focused and smiling faintly, Ansaldi and Gallagher use a syringe to draw a vial of blood from a hidden vein, filling it up with blood as red as yours or mine. They also clip a piece of fin as a sample for genetic testing and drill a small hole in the dorsal fin, so they can attach the tag with a zip tie. And then they’re done. Hammerschlag signals me to get out of the water, and the team works together to loosen the lines and push the shark back into the water. It swims off under the satellite eye of science.

even with these shortcomings, the prototypes provide extraordinary amounts of information. By luck, a colleague of Hammerschlag’s recovers a HammerTag from a shark captured in the wild. It contains 200,000 data points—one for every four minutes the shark swam. And it reveals surprising behavior. “[This] 14-foot tiger made frequent dives during the night to over 1,000 feet, including one massive dive to 1,300 feet lasting two hours, during which the shark was twisting, only returning to the surface to plunge to the depths again and perform the same behavior,” Hammerschlag tells me by phone. “Who knows what it was doing? Perhaps it was battling in the night with other sharks. I can’t say.” Brian Lam is based in Honolulu. He is still scared but no longer terrified of sharks.

>> in the weeks and months following the Bahamas expedition and other weekend trips like it, Hammerschlag and Flagg begin to see results. The tags have flaws; earlier prototypes aren’t transmitting enough data. Flagg has to refit the surface detection sensors so the tags know when to transmit. But

May 2013

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The First, The Last The ONLY!

50 Years later the 1964 Silver Proof Set still shines bright

n November 25, 1963, just three days after the tragedy in Dallas, the U.S. Mint began work on the 90% Silver Kennedy Half Dollar. It would prove to be one of the most popular half dollar designs in our nation’s history. Not surprisingly, when Americans discovered that the brand new Kennedy Half Dollar was the centerpiece of the 1964 U.S. Silver Proof Set, demand immediately soared through the roof!

Mean Green Fishing Machine

By January 11th, 1964, the Mint was forced to halt orders for the 1964 Silver Proof Set, and eventually had to reduce the original maximum order of 100 Proof Sets down to just 2 sets per buyer in the face of such staggering demand. Finally, on March 12, even the limit of 2 sets was halted because the Mint received orders for 200,000 Proof Sets in just two days! Fifty years later, the 1964 Silver Proof Set is still in great demand.

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Why? Because this set is chock full of “Firsts”, “Lasts” and “Onlys”:

Actual size is 30.6 mm

As we approach the 50th Anniversary of JFK’s 1963 assassination this year, the 1964 U.S. Silver Proof Set is back into the spotlight again. Each set contains the 1964 Lincoln Cent and Jefferson Nickel, along with three 90% Silver coins: the Silver Roosevelt Dime, Silver Washington Quarter, and the 1964 Silver Kennedy Half Dollar—the only 90% Kennedy Half Dollar ever struck for regular production.

Saved from destruction—but how many sets survived?

Collectors know that the key is to find those sets still preserved in the original U.S. Mint “flat pack” just as issued. And over the past 50 years, that has become more and more difficult! Since this set was issued, silver prices have risen from $1.29 per ounce to over $48 per ounce at the silver market’s high mark. During that climb, it is impossible to determine how many of these 1964 Proof Sets have been melted for their precious silver content. The packaging on thousands of other sets has been cut apart to remove the silver coins—so there is no way to know for certain how many 1964 U.S. Proof Sets have survived to this day.

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We expect our small quantity of 1964 U.S. Silver Proof Sets to disappear quickly, so we urge you to call now to secure yours. You must be satisﬁed with your set or simply return it within 30 days of receipt for prompt refund (less s/h). Limit: 5 per household.

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FRoM the aRChiv es

July 1980

Flying on Photons

EARLY ADOPTERS Solar Riser [above and left] could fly for three to five minutes on a full battery charge. Fred To [bottom right] told P oPul ar S cience he designed Solar One to carry 215 square feet of solar cells but could only afford to install 38 square feet [bottom left].

s t o r y b y Rose Conry

The first manned solar-powered airplane flight was more of a hop. Solar One, created by British entrepreneur Fred To, sailed 59 feet over Lasham Airfield outside London on December 19, 1978. Four months later, a photon-fueled hang glider called Solar Riser traveled half a mile over Riverside, California. “Hardly impressive stats,” PoPular Science editor Ben Kocivar wrote in July 1980, “yet these faltering flights. . .may be as significant as the Wright brothers’ first trials.” To achieve truly sustained solar-powered flight, the inventors of Solar One and Solar Riser needed lighter, cheaper, and more efficient components. Today, technology has caught up with the dream: Engineers in Switzerland are on track to send a pilot around the world in a solar aircraft for the first time. Turn to page 62 to learn more about the Solar Impulse project.

Wingspan feet

Maximum altitude feet

3.6 million (12 pages tall)

2,600

3,600

(Eight pages tall)

11,628

Solar cells

(One quarter of a page tall)

500

750

208 30

3,500 (One ﬁfth of a page tall)

120

Weight pounds

Longest ﬂight feet

POPULAR SCIENCE magazine, Vol. 282, No. 5 (ISSN 161-7370, USPS 577-250), is published monthly by Bonnier Corp., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. Copyright ©2013 by Bonnier Corp. All rights reserved. Reprinting in whole or part is forbidden except by permission of Bonnier Corp. Mailing Lists: We make a portion of our mailing list available to reputable frms. If you would prefer that we not include your name, please write to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing ofces. Subscription Rates: $19.95 for 1 year. Please add $10 per year for Canadian addresses and $20 per year for all other international addresses. GST #R-122988066. Canada Post Publications agreement #40612608. Canada Return Mail: Pitney Bowes, P.O. Box 25542, London, ON N6C 6B2. Printed in the USA. Subscriptions processed electronically. Subscribers: If the post ofce alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within two years. Photocopy Permission: Permission is granted by POPULAR SCIENCE® for libraries and others registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) to photocopy articles in this issue for the fat fee of $1 per copy of each article or any part of an article. Send correspondence and payment to CCC (21 Congress St., Salem, MA 01970); specify CCC code 0161-7370/85/$1.00–0.00. Copying done for other than personal or reference use without the written permission of POPULAR SCIENCE® is prohibited. Address requests for permission on bulk orders to POPULAR SCIENCE, 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016 for foreign requests. Editorial Ofces: Address contributions to POPULAR SCIENCE, Editorial Dept., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. We are not responsible for loss of unsolicited materials; they will not be returned unless accompanied by return postage. Microflm editions are available from Xerox University Microflms Serial Bid Coordinator, 300 N. Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48106.

POPULAR SCIENCE

May 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE ARChIvE

Cost 2012 dollars

230

(12 pages tall)

$158,000

$123,000

$130 million

Solar One 1978 Solar Riser 1979 Solar Impulse 2013

30,300

th e evol ution oF s ol a R a iRC R a Ft

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