Popular science usa 2013 06

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t are The toys tha ur training yo children P. 28

Five clean technologies that will set us free P. 45

JOURNEY TO MASDAR A technology oasis at the edge of the world P. 62

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Harbor Power The 150Kw TidGen underwater turbine

Contact us at 1-800-PORSCHE or porscheusa.com. Š2013 Porsche Cars North America, Inc. Porsche recommends seat belt usage and observance of all traffic laws at all times.

When carving your niche, use the sharpest instrument available.

The new mid-engine Cayman

Its aggressive sharp lines cut a striking figure. A fitting stance for a sports car with notorious precision and agility— thrilling traits born from the remarkable balance of its mid-engine design. And those drawn to the Cayman are sure to leave an impression that will never be mistaken. CaymanCode.com. Porsche. There is no substitute.

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JUNE 2013 / POPULAR SCIENCE 06 From the Editor 08 Peer Review 10 Megapixels 97 FYI: Do wind farms make it less windy?

108 From the Archives

WHAT’S NEW 13 The smartest chair 16 The Goods: A phone breathalyzer and more!

20 Jaguar finally reenters the sports car race 23 The best earbuds 24 Building sports gear from a new type of carbon 26 Android gaming consoles 28 How toys prime kids for a future full of robots

VOLUME 282 NO. 6

Contents FE ATURES 45

ENERGY FIX Independence from foreign oil could come at a steep environmental cost. Here, the best ideas for pursuing freedom―the smart way— including more efficient solar, networked turbines, and cleaner fracking.

PLUS: We map global renewables and the trajectory for U.S. energy independence

BY CURTIS BR AINARD, DAVID FERRIS, SUSAN E. MAT THEWS, K ATIE PEEK, AND ERIK SOFGE 72

SNIFF TEST Dogs are the best bomb detectors we have. Can scientists build an artificial nose that’s more sensitive?

BY JOSH DE AN 62

CITY OF LIGHT How the energy company Masdar is building the world’s most sustainable city—in the deserts of Abu Dhabi

BY DAN BAUM

HEADLINES

31 Ancient climate change 34 Deep-sea hydropower 36 An extreme weather lab 38 A brick-making machine 40 How to move a bridge 42 Why beliefs shape the way people view facts

COURTESY FOSTER + PARTNERS

HOW 2.0

89 A people-launching catapult 92 Three hacked classic games 94 Printing with living cells as ink 95 MacGyver a barf bag into a miniature theater

JUNE 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 05

From the Editor

THE FUTURE NOW

JUNE 2013 / POPULAR SCIENCE Editor-in-Chief Jacob Ward Creative Director Sam Syed Executive Editor Cliff Ransom Managing Editor Jill C. Shomer

JACOB WARD

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 Lindsey Kratochwill 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, Pavithra S. Mohan, Ajai Raj

Powerful Ambitions

I

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

Executive Vice President Eric Zinczenko Group Editorial Director Anthony Licata

The Kardashev Scale is an elegant way of describing our dreams the shift in oil supply and demand could make the United States a self-sufficient oil economy. This year, Citigroup’s global head of commodities research suggested that in five years we may need to buy oil from only Canada. Happy news!

We decided, as Kardashev might have, that these are only half measures. So for this issue we went about assembling ideas that could truly revolutionize American energy.

And I hope the undersea turbines, conical solar installations, and waste-to-energy systems in this issue inspire you. But I also picture Nikolai Kardashev, arms crossed, shaking his head. Because as he articulated so well, we have a long way to go.

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

JACO B WA R D

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

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MARIUS BUGGE

N THE EARLY 1960s, a Soviet astrophysicist, Nikolai Kardashev, was contemplating mysterious radio signals coming from a recently discovered quasar and theorized that they might be evidence of extraterrestrial beings. In 1964, Kardashev debuted a system for categorizing alien civilizations.

Kardashev didn’t make it a question of weaponry or space travel. Instead, he measured these hypothetical civilizations by their command of energy. His scale has three categories.

A Type 1 civilization uses merely all the energy on its planet.

A Type 2 civilization uses all the energy in its star.

A Type 3 civilization, the most advanced, uses as much energy as is in its own galaxy.

Never mind whether judging aliens means one is nuts. (And in his defense, Kardashev is head of the Astro Space Center at the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.) The Kardashev Scale is an elegant way of describing our dreams, and others have seized on it. Carl Sagan went so far as to devise equations that subdivide the categories into a score, presumably to make the scale more useful, or perhaps less depressing.

By his math, if a Type 1 civilization commands a planet’s worth of energy, in 1973 we humans rated only a 0.7. The difference between 1 and 2 is a factor of 10 billion.

The scale puts things in perspective. The International Energy Agency’s 2012 World Energy Outlook concluded that by 2035

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We ran an online Q&A with Mary Roach, whose book Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal we excerpted in our April issue [“The Chemistry of Kibble”]. Here’s a peek: Q: Why do my emotions influence my stomach/GI tract so easily? Is there a way to stop stress vomiting?

MR: The GI system has its own primitive nervous system. We started out more or less as a big gut. Connections between the gut and mind are complex and rich.

WA R P D R I V E AFTER 50 YEARS of reading science fiction, I believe we need three primary technologies for interstellar flight: instant communication, protection against space-borne matter, and, of course, the faster-than-light drive itself [“Warp Factor,” April 2013]. My suggestion is to focus on communication. If there are advanced civilizations out there that already travel between the stars, surely they must have developed such a technology in order to “phone home.” Maybe we can eavesdrop on their conversations and learn how to achieve the other technologies.

Tim Orton Hertford, N.C. Warp speed is a fascinating possibility. As a longtime Trekkie, one conundrum has always bothered me about it: Traveling fast is great, but what about stopping? What if a baseball-size meteorite or football-field-size asteroid crossed one’s path? Maybe one needs “warp brakes”?

Victor Turner Carterville, Ill.

Northrop Grumman’s X-47B warplane beat out Boston Dynamics’ four-legged BigDog and the University of Pennsylvania’s quadrotor “Eagle” drone to win our extra-nerdy March Madness competition. See our full land robots vs. aerial drones bracket at popularscience.com.

Q: Is digestion a particularly good medium for catching and keeping people’s attention?

MR: It seemed like a natural Roach topic. It was right there under my nose all along—and in my nose. Anything that relates to the human body is a great way to capture people’s attention.

Everyone can relate.

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MUSICAL TRIBUTE

Jeff Tobin of Columbus, Ohio, sent us a video of his band Tobin-Wilcox performing its song “Rocket Belt.” Our favorite lyric:

“ You can have your therapy, but it’s Popular Science for me.”

WE APOLOGIZE . . . On page 71 of the April issue, a press forge and wire mill don’t use molten metal; they use heated metal.

08 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

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Q: Were you squeamish about eating anything before you wrote this book, and what do you think now?

MR: I try most anything. I might draw the line at the Sudanese condiment fermented heifer urine!

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Tree extra-loud cheers for third-row seating. An efcient yet powerful 290-horsepower V6. Available 550-watt Infnity® audio, and standard voice-activated Blue Link® navigation that helps you fnd fun wherever it’s hiding. Fun just got way bigger, with the new 7-passenger Santa Fe. Hyundai.com 2013 Santa Fe GLS model shown. Infinity audio available on LIMITED model only. Infinity is a registered trademark of Harman International Industries, Inc. Only use Blue Link and corresponding devices when it is safe to do so. Blue Link subscription service agreement required, sold separately after initial trial period. Features and fees vary by subscription plan. For additional details and system limitations visit HyundaiBlueLink.com or see your local Hyundai dealer. Blue Link is a registered trademark of Hyundai Motor America. Hyundai is a registered trademark of Hyundai Motor Company. All rights reserved. ©2013 Hyundai Motor America.

Megapixels GU T CH E C K IN THE JUNGLES of Belize last January, entomologist Alex Wild noticed something odd about the trap-jaw ants passing through his outdoor insect photography class: They all had shrunken heads and swollen abdomens. A day after making the observation, Wild and his students came upon an ant with a worm bursting out of its side.

Parasites were at work. Nematode worms enter the ants as larvae and grow inside the ants’ body cavity, siphoning off nutrients and distorting their hosts’ natural anatomy. When the eight-inch-long nematodes are ready to mate a few weeks later, they push their way out of their half-inch-long hosts, killing them.

10 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

JUNE 2013 / POPULAR SCIENCE STOR Y BY A JAI R A J

INFECTED In the abdomen of a trap-jaw ant, a parasitic nematode lives off nutrients from the surrounding fluids and changes the morphology of its host.

PHOTOGR APH BY ALE X WILD

HEALTHY The jaws of a parasite-free worker can snap shut on prey in just 1/10,000 of a second—the fastest known mechanical action in nature.

JUNE 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 11

Promotion

Popular Science is on every tablet...

Apple iPad™

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You name the device, we’re on it!

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Jaguar, Back in the Race PAGE 20

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PLUS:

The material that’s changing sports PAGE 24

WHAT’S NEW JUNE 2013

EDITED BY CORINNE IOZZIO WHATSNE W@P OP SCI.COM

Smart Support Engineers redesign the ofce chair for smartphone and tablet users

T Steelcase Gesture Max recline 128 degrees Price $979 Available November

STOR Y BY SUS AN E. M AT THE WS PHOTOGR APH BY BRI AN KLUTCH

HE WAY people work is changing quickly. About two thirds of workers use at least two devices—tablets, smartphones, computers—every day.

Trouble is, standard office chairs are built for people who sit in front of a monitor: back straight, elbows down, feet firmly on the floor. When a person leans, lifts, or hunches, the chair’s armrests and back don’t move with him, causing discomfort. So furniture designers at Steelcase built Gesture, the first chair that supports the slouched backs and roving elbows of mobile-device users.

The designers began by creating a seat and backrest that move in tandem to ensure that the lower back remains supported. The bottom of the backrest connects to a large hinge; reclining forces the hinge closed, which lifts the bottom of the backrest to meet the user’s lower back.

Hunching forward lets the hinge open, holding the backrest upright. The team also built the armrests on top of four pivot points so that users can move the arms through a complete orbit—up and in for reading a tablet, for instance—without losing stability.

Kicking back with cat videos has never been so comfortable.

JUNE 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 13

Special Promotion

Every new cask of spirit has the “ same opportunity of becoming a 12-year-old Scotch as it does of becoming one of the extremely rare casks that make up our incredible 50 Year Old.

”

Brian Kinsman

Glenfiddich Malt Master

THREE MODES OF CASK AGING

SUBTRACTIVE:

Wood casks remove impurities within the whisky.

The inside of American oak barrels is usually charred.

Charcoal, with its billions of tiny pores, is a great purifier. It has the ability to remove unwanted components such as sulfur-containing compounds.

On the other hand, European wood is only lightly toasted and therefore does not have the same pronounced subtractive qualities.

THE SCIENCE OF ALCOHOL AGING

The complete science of barrel-aging whisky is something we have only recently come to understand. In the 1970s we began to uncover the full details of what happens when the Glenfiddich distillery men lay the base spirit to rest in oak casks and store it in one of our 46 warehouses. Our Malt Master, Brian Kinsman, told me that every new cask of spirit has the same opportunity of becoming a 12-year-old Scotch as it does of becoming one of the extremely rare casks that make up our incredible 50 Year Old. While we cannot predict what will happen in each individual cask, we do know that approximately 70% of the flavor characteristics of Glenfiddich come from the wood and the time spent maturing in it. In Scotland, we predominately use two types of wood to mature whisky–American white oak (Quercus alba) and European oak (Quercus robur).

American wood is the most popular, accounting for approximately 90% of casks used today, but it is important to remember that each different wood gives its own unique characteristics to the whisky. For example, Q. alba produces vanilla flavors (fruity, sweet) while Q. robur yields a rich, tannic kick. At the Glenfiddich distillery we take the base spirit, which comes off the still at 65.6% ABV, and add it into the casks. The wood casks perform three important functions to the aging of the whisky: ‘subtractive,’ ‘additive,’ and ‘interactive.’ The relationship between the liquid and the wood is one of the many intriguing aspects of whisky. After all, that mysterious and storied past is part of the allure of Scotch whisky!

by Mitch Bechard, Glenfiddich Ambassador

ADDITIVE: Wood gives flavor and character to the whisky. Oak wood contains hemicellulose, lignin and tannins.

These elements cultivate chemical reactions with the base spirit, adding aromatic molecules to produce flavors such as coconut, vanilla and fruit. Wood also varies the color of the whisky. We find that Scotch whisky matured in European wood will have a darker, more reddish hue to it than that which has spent most of its life in American wood.

INTERACTIVE: Wood is semi-porous, meaning that the cask is always breathing and interacting with its warehouse environment. Around 2% of the volume of each cask—water and ethanol—evaporates from the cask each year. We call this “the angels’ share.” As we age the whisky, the alcohol content of the liquid drops. We must be mindful of this, as spirit below 40% ABV can no longer legally be called Scotch whisky.

AIR WHISKY SUBTRACTIVE Unwanted compounds diffuse into the wood ADDITIVE Color and aroma compounds are extracted from the wood

To learn more about the fascinating world of single malts, visit

GLENFIDDICH.COM SKILLFULLY CRAFTED. ENJOY RESPONSIBLY. Glenfiddich® Single Malt Scotch Whisky is a registered trademark of William Grant & Sons Ltd.

INTERACTIVE Water and ethanol evaporate through the wood; air diffuses in

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the goods A dozen great ideas in gear

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The Ryobi Hybrid is the only yard tool that can run corded or cordless. The sevenpound string trimmer contains both AC and DC circuitry, so a user can switch power sources between an 18V lithium-ion battery and electricity from a socket.

For cooks who like to use their tablets as recipe books, the iSpoon keeps messy hands away from the screen. A capacitive silicone stylus serves as the end of the seven-inchlong beechwood mixing spoon.

Hair can block a vacuum’s airflow and reduce suction when it wraps around the machine’s brush. But hair won’t get caught on the Dyson DC50 tangle-free turbine, which has two counterrotating brushes that push hair directly into the suction tube.

The Chrome extension Glimpse is picturein-picture for a Web browser. Instead of opening a new page or tab, a user enters a site’s address in the Glimpse box. It calls up a streamlined version of the site, so the user can browse it on the side or use the box to compare two pages at once.

The Morphus carryon converts to two full-size bags. The top of the 14-by-9-inch wheeled bag zips off to become a backpack.

A user then pulls out the rolling bag’s lining, which becomes its new top.

Breathometer is the first smartphone breathalyzer. Users plug the keychain-size device into a phone’s headphone jack and blow into it. The associated app displays blood-alcohol content.

Umbra iSpoon $7

Ryobi Hybrid $119

Dyson DC50 $500

Eagle Creek Morphus 22 $395 (available July)

Breathometer Inc. Breathometer $50 (available July)

Arc90 Glimpse Free

16 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEF T: BRIAN KLUTCH ; COURTESY DYSON ; COURTESY E AGLE CREEK; COURTESY KITCHENAID ; COURTESY MILWAUKEE; COURTESY SE A TO SUMMIT; COURTESY ROKU; BRIAN KLUTCH(3 ); COURTESY ARC90 ; COURTESY GOOGLE; COURTESY RYOBI

EDITED BY AMBER WILLI AMS

ADDITIONAL R EP OR TING BY R OSE CONR Y, COR INNE IOZ ZIO, AND A JAI R A J

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The Elite insulates better than any other cooler. With two inches of polyurethane foam between double walls and a seal similar to a freezer’s, it retains ice for up to 10 days in 90-degree weather.

There’s no need to push food through the Pro Line 16-Cup: It’s the first home food processor to draw food in automatically.

After a user throws ingredients into it, an angled blade in the dicing attachment drives the food through a steel grid to make eightmillimeter cubes.

With a superwide aperture and the largest pixels, the camera on the HTC One captures 300 percent more light than any other smartphone camera.

More light results in more realistic color and brighter photos.

With the Roku 3, a person can watch a movie without bothering everyone in the house. When a viewer plugs a pair of headphones into a standard 3.5mm jack on the remote, the Roku signals the set-top box to send audio over Bluetooth only to the remote.

The Milwaukee Demolition Screwdrivers are the toughest on the market. Engineers added a hardened tip and a steel cap to the handle, which a user can hit—co-opting the driver as a chisel— without damaging the tool.

For summer camping trips, the Spark SpI sleeping bag is the warmest for its weight. Filled with 850-loft mature down, it’s rated for temps as low as 46 degrees, and at 12.3 ounces, it packs to the size of a grapefruit.

Milwaukee 2PC Demolition Screwdrivers $20 (two-piece set)

Sea to Summit Spark SpI $269 (available August)

Pelican ProGear Elite Cooler $260 for 35-quart

KitchenAid Pro Line Series 16-Cup Food Processor $650

HTC One $200

Roku 3 $99

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JUNE 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 17

THE BEST OF WHAT WE’RE

MADE OF

PRECISION AND SKILL FUSED WITH PASSION AND PRIDE. POWERFUL REASONS WHY IT’S THE MOST AWARDED SUV EVER.*

Grand Cherokee Summit shown. *Jeep Grand Cherokee has received more awards over its lifetime than any other SUV. Jeep is a registered trademark of Chrysler Group LLC.

Jeep.com/GrandCherokee

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WH AT’S NE W / FI V E FE ATURES STOR Y BY L AWRENCE ULRICH

The Cat’s Back

Can the long-awaited E-Type successor live up to its lineage?

Retracting dashboard vents and a low cowl keep visibility high.

I

N 1961, Jaguar debuted the E-Type, a roadready two-seat version of the company’s champion racecars. It quickly became legend, praised by Enzo Ferrari as “the most beautiful car ever made.” But in 1974, Jaguar discontinued the E-Type and shifted its focus to genteel luxury coupes and sedans. This summer, the company will resurrect the two-seater in the F-Type, which features a 495-horsepower engine, adaptive controls, and, of course, a look reminiscent of its beloved predecessor. Even against Porsche and Corvette, which have been consistently updating their sports cars in the interim, the F-Type does plenty to make up for the 40-year hiatus.

should hold off on an upshift until the car exits a turn.

4 /ADAPTIVE SUSPENSION

0–60 4.2 seconds Top speed 186 mph Price From $92,000

1 /OPTIMIZED AIRFLOW The 564-pound aluminum chassis is Jaguar’s lightest to date. An active rear spoiler deploys at speeds above 60 mph and generates 264 pounds of downforce to keep the comparatively light F-type close to the road even at the highest speeds. Designers looked to reduce drag everywhere they could; for example, the door handles retract when they’re not needed, smoothing airflow.

2 /SUPERCHARGED CYLINDERS Jaguar will release three F-Type variants, the most powerful of which squeezes 495

20 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

horsepower out of a 5.0-liter supercharged V8 engine. Dubbed the F-Type V8 S, the car goes from zero to 60 in just 4.2 seconds and has a top speed of 186 mph. (The base V6 model tops out at 161.)

3/INTELLIGENT EIGHT-SPEED Designers gave the F-Type an intelligent eight-speed automatic transmission. The system tracks conditions and driving style— how a driver accelerates, brakes, and takes turns—and selects one of 25 preprogrammed shifting models. By monitoring G-forces, for instance, the transmission knows that it

5 /CUSTOM PERFORMANCE CONTROLS Owners can create custom settings in the F-Type to match their driving habits. Using a touchscreen on the dash, they can save presets that soften or stiffen the steering and suspension, adjust the shifting sensitivity, and modify engine responsiveness. The F-type’s “dynamic launch control” also times the throttle to create drag-strip starts with a single button push.

COURTESY JAGUAR (3)

Jaguar F-Type V8 S

A double-wishbone suspension logs chassis motions 100 times per second and steering inputs 500 times per second, so it can adjust individual shocks to keep the car level and the ride smooth. The system knows, for example, that much of the car’s weight will wind up on the front-right tire during a left turn and stiffens the shocks accordingly.

40 million computer users don’t trust the power grid.

This worldwide event is coming to a city near you in June 2013!

Today’s more sophisticated server and networking technologies require higher availability. That means you need more sophisticated power protection to keep your business up and running at all times. But that’s not all. In today’s economy, your UPS must safeguard both your uptime and your bottom line. Only APC by Schneider Electric™ helps you meet both of these pressing needs. Specifically, the APC by Schneider Electric Smart-UPS™ family now boasts models with advanced management capabilities, including the ability to manage your energy in server rooms, retail stores, branch offices, network closets, and other distributed environments.

Why Smart-UPS is a smarter solution

Intelligent UPS management software.

PowerChute™ Business Edition, which comes standard with Smart-UPS 5 kVA and below, enables energy usage and energy cost reporting so you can save energy and money by tracking energy usage and costs over time; CO2 emissions monitoring to reduce environmental impact through increased understanding; and risk assessment reporting so you can identify and proactively manage threats to availability (e.g., aging batteries).

Best-in-class UPS. Our intelligent, interactive, energy-saving APC by Schneider Electric Smart-UPS represents the combination of more than 25 years of legendary reliability with the latest in UPS technology including an easy-to-read, interactive, alphanumeric LCD display to keep you informed of important status, configuration, and diagnostic information; a unique battery life expectancy predictor; and energy-saving design features, like a patent-pending “green” mode.

Now, more than ever, every cost matters and performance is critical. That’s why you should insist on the more intelligent, more intuitive APC by Schneider Electric Smart-UPS.

Intuitive alphanumeric display: Get detailed UPS and power quality information at a glance — including status, about, and diagnostic log menus in your choice of up to five languages.

Configurable interface: Set up and control key UPS parameters and functions using the intuitive navigation keys. On rack/tower convertible models, the display rotates 90 degrees for easy viewing.

Energy savings: A patent-pending “green” mode achieves online efficiencies to 97 percent or higher, reducing heat loss and utility costs.

Download our FREE Server Room Efficiency Kit and enter to win a Google Nexus 10 tablet!

Visit www.apc.com/promo Key Code z328v Call 888-289-2722 x6533 ©2013 Schneider Electric. All Rights Reserved. Schneider Electric, APC, Smart-UPS and PowerChute are trademarks owned by Schneider Electric Industries SAS or its affiliated companies. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. www.schneider-electric.com • 998-1177097_GMA-US_Nexus

C R U S H P R O O F, S H O C K P R O O F, F R E E Z E P R O O F

A N D W A T E R P R O O F. A L L S O Y O U C A N B R I N G B A C K A C T U A L P R O O F.

Shots taken with the Olympus Tough.

Demand more than durability with the Olympus Tough TG-2 iHS. It’s not enough to have a camera as durable as your lifestyle.

Now you can capture your adventures with a clarity you once thought unthinkable. The TG-2 iHS is one of the only rugged cameras on the market to include an ultra-bright, high-speed f2.0 lens, allowing you to capture dramatic low light and high-speed action shots.

Paired with a 12 Megapixel Backlit CMOS Sensor, 1080p Full HD Video and High-Speed Sequential Shooting, you can now bring back stunning proof of your life’s adventures. getolympus.com/tough

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STOR Y BY MIKE KOBRIN

PHOTOGR APH BY CL AIRE BENOIS T

Sennheiser IE 800 Weight 0.3 ounces Frequency range 5 Hz–46,500 kHz Price $1,000

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SPEAKER DRIVER Rather than use the compact drivers typical of earphones (called balanced armatures), designers shrank a dynamic driver, a larger mechanism found in speakers and cans.

Audio transmits through a copper coil, and the coil pushes a diaphragm, which generates sound waves. One driver can produce the entire audio range.

2

For deep bass, the diaphragm must make large movements.

After it pushes air—sound waves—into the ear canal, it snaps back, pushing air backward. Without an exit, the backward-moving waves would cause distortion, so designers added a pair of vents to the rear of the IE 800’s housing.

Small Wonder

Half-inch earphones that sound as good as over-the-ear cans

3

Waterproof 50ft Shockproof 7ft

or all their convenience, earphones have never matched the quality of over-the-ear headphones (a.k.a. cans). Their compact drivers can’t range from deep bass to high soprano. Companies have tried using multiple, differently tuned drivers, but that can degrade the signal. Instead, designers at Sennheiser built a new, seven-millimeter driver and acoustic housing for the IE 800—the first earphones with over-the-ear sound.

EXPLODED VIEW

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Bass vents

Freezeproof 14OF Expand your TG-2 iHS system with the F-CON Fisheye Converter lens or the T-CON Teleconverter lens.

SOUND ABSORBERS When sealed by earphones, the ear canal vibrates with certain frequencies (around 7–8.5 kHz), which can drown out other frequencies. To combat this, a pair of resonating chambers traps tones in the problem range. A layer of polyamide mesh damping material also helps muffle unwanted noise.

F

Stylus Tough TG-2 iHS

BASS VENTS

Ceramic housing Resonating chambers

Driver

Damping material

JUNE 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 23

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WH AT’S NE W / M ATERI AL S STOR Y BY DAV ID CA S SILO

PHOTOGR APH BY BRI AN KLUTCH

Making a F Racquet

How the world’s strongest material improves tennis swings

or years, racquet designers at HEAD struggled with the same problem: They couldn’t increase the power of their racquets without adding weight. The more weight a racquet has, the more momentum it generates during a swing and the more power it delivers to the ball. Too much weight,

HEAD YouTek Graphene Speed Pro

though, and a racquet becomes hard to control. The designers discovered that adding weight to the top of the head and the handle would make for a more balanced racquet. But with less weight in the middle, their prototypes kept cracking. So they looked to graphene, the world’s strongest material by weight [see inset]. By incorporating a small amount of graphene into the middle of the frame, designers improved its strength dramatically. The result is the YouTek Graphene Speed Pro, one of the first racquets to deliver both crushing power and precise control.

Weight 11.1 ounces Swing weight 292 Length 27 inches Price $200

GRAPHENE, UP CLOSE First isolated by researchers at the University of Manchester in 2004, graphene consists of an atom-thick layer of carbon in a honeycomb pattern. (Graphite, its cousin, is several stacked layers.) Although graphene is thin, it’s orders of magnitude stronger than other materials of the same weight. It’s also stretchable, transparent, and conductive.

Graphene’s first consumer uses lend strength to sporting goods, including lacrosse sticks, bike frames, and, of course, tennis racquets.

W E AR AB LE E LE C TR O N ICS Under Armour isn’t interested in graphene for its strength but for its conductivity. Engineers have experimented with prototype textiles overlaid with graphene circuits, which could be used to track biometric data, such as heart rate and temperature.

And because the graphene is so durable, the conductive fabrics would also be machine washable.

24 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

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WH AT’S NE W / TECH TREND STOR Y BY DANIEL DUM A S

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1

At launch, Project Shield will have one of the largest game libraries of any console. The device can connect to either the Google Play store, which has tens of thousands of titles, or STEAM, a PC-based service that can deliver more than 1,950 games from the cloud. The clamshell device has its own five-inch, 720p display, so gamers can play on the road. They can also connect to a TV over HDMI. Price not set (available summer)

Game the System Portable, afordable consoles that run on Android THE TR EN D Android might have started off as a smartphone operating system (OS), but in the five years since its launch, companies have adapted it to run everything from robots to TVs to home appliances. The latest version (4.2 or Jelly Bean) includes graphics upgrades that allow hardware manufacturers to build the first videogame consoles around the OS. Most important, processors can now load and cue up chunks of data faster because of a feature called triple buffering.

NVIDIA PROJECT SHIELD

2

GAMESTICK The GameStick is the smallest complete console available— Android or otherwise. The system includes a two-inch HDMI dongle and a controller. Gamers download titles over Wi-Fi, and all the processing and rendering happens in the dongle, which has a 1.5GHz processor and one gig of RAM. The controller syncs with the dongle over Bluetooth. $79

THE B EN EF I T Because most Android games, such as the graphics-heavy Blood and Glory: Legend, can run on mobile processors and don’t require a lot of memory, console makers can build devices with mostly offthe-shelf parts, reducing the final price. Without heavy hard drives and cooling fans, the consoles are small enough to toss in a backpack.

And because developers can publish games themselves, they avoid licensing fees typically owed to console makers, so most titles will likely remain under $10.

26 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

3

OUYA Designers at OUYA encourage hackers to fiddle with their consoles. The box, which currently supports more than 100 games, also has a developer kit, so anyone can design programs to do things like run emulations of classic Nintendo games. Tinkerers can also crack open the shell with a screwdriver to upgrade the processor and memory to run more demanding titles. $99

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WH AT’S NE W / OUTLOOK STOR Y BY CORINNE IOZ ZIO

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Kids’ perception of technology is diferent.

Devices can be friends or teachers, not just tools.

Generation Robot

How toys are preparing kids for a future with robotic companions

F

OR CHRISTMAS in 1993, my father gave me a My Magic Diary, a children’s version of Casio’s digital organizer. From that point on, I always had some iteration of that device—whether a PalmPilot or the iPhone 5 I carry today. Like most others my age, I was raised around mobile devices, so now as an adult, I’m generally unfazed by a new phone or tablet or piece of sofware. The next generation, Generation Z, will be raised with something entirely diferent. That thing will be robots.

28 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

Just as I had my little digital organizer, children today are growing up in a world where people touch and talk to their gadgets. Whether it’s on their mother’s iPad or a kid-friendly LeapPad tablet (a touchscreen device that plays interactive educational games), children are learning to interact with devices in new ways. “With touchscreens, there’s an intuitive interaction with what they’re craving,” says Jody Sherman LeVos, a child-development expert at LeapFrog. And that interaction is not limited to touch. Speech- and facialrecognition sofware lets kids talk to gadgets—and lets the gadgets talk back.

Because children are accustomed to this social relationship, their perception of technology and its purpose difers from those of their parents.

Devices can be friends or teachers, not just tools or entertainment. Last year, a team at Boston-based research frm Latitude asked children to imagine how robots could ft into their lives. Sixty-four percent imagined a social humanoid, and the bots were more likely to act as tutors, playmates, or companions than exclusively as maids or assistants.

Members of Generation Z will also be the frst to have advanced robot companions at home. Last fall, Hasbro released a new generation of Furby that gathers data from sensors—including an accelerometer that measures how gentle or rough a child is with the toy— and changes its personality based on how it’s treated.

Several more robots launching this year, including Romo and WowWee RoboMe, use a smartphone as a computing brain, so they’re able to utilize the camera and facial recognition to react to people. (The toy market has been a proving ground for innovative technologies before; the Speak & Spell, for one, was the frst device with a single-chip voice synthesizer when Texas Instruments launched it in 1978.)

A generation of children raised with robots could power a new wave of innovation. Just like sofware development, which moved from labs to start-ups to anyone with even a passing interest in code, robotics development will become democratized. Current robotic platforms, such as the Robot Operating System developed at Willow Garage in Menlo Park, California, are open. Like a smartphone SDK, the OS turns robots into a canvas for a developer to create applications. In the same way kids as young as 12 are creating mobile apps today, they will create robot apps tomorrow. Need a trainer? A Spanish tutor? A friendly ear? Just download an app, and it’s literally there.

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POPSCI.COM

PLUS:

Deep-sea water power PAGE 34

COURTESY NEEM ICE CORE DRILLING PROJECT; INSE T: COURTESY SEPP KIPFSTUHL

JUNE 2013

FROZEN IN TIME A cylinder of 130,000-year-old ice drilled from the Greenland ice sheet [above] tells the story of an ancient warming period. Dorthe Dahl-Jensen [inset] led the project that retrieved it.

How to move a 3,400-ton bridge PAGE 40

HEADLINES HEADLINES@POPSCI.COM

@POPSCI

“The important thing is to not stop questioning” —Albert Einstein

E D I T E D B Y S U S A N N A H F. L O C K E

Cold, Hard Facts Ancient ice suggests that scientists may be dangerously underestimating future sea levels

T

HE SKIES do strange things at the NEEM camp, a remote ice-drilling and research facility on the northern Greenland ice sheet. Midnight sunshine. Low clouds of sparkling ice crystals known as “diamond dust.” But when rain fell instead of snow last summer, complete with a rainbow arcing over the camp, the NEEM scientists couldn’t believe it. “I’ve been all over that ice sheet, and to have it rain that far north—that’s a shock,” says James White, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Colorado who led the American team working alongside those from 13 other countries at NEEM.

It’s fitting that part of the NEEM study’s fieldwork, which retrieved a two-and-a-half-kilometer shaft of ice, took place during one of the hottest Greenland summers on record. What that ice core has revealed about a warm period 130,000 years ago could be one of the most critical new tools for predicting how our planet will respond to a warmer future.

The NEEM ice core has provided the first picture of the Greenland ice sheet during the entire Eemian interglacial period, a 15,000-year span of natural warming that occurred between the two most recent ice ages. (NEEM is a rough acronym for North

STOR Y BY JOHN M AHONE Y

JUNE 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 31

H

HEADLINES / TOOL KIT

SOAKED CITIES

SEA LEVELS TODAY

When the Arctic

25 FEET HIGHER

Los Angeles

New York

Greenland Eemian ice drilling.) During the was 3–5°C warmer than today, sea Eemian, natural variations in Earth’s orbit levels were about brought the planet closer to the sun, making 25 feet higher— global temperatures up to 2°C warmer than covering a zone right before the industrial revolution. (The home to 9 percent U.N. and other international organizations of the people have established a limit for tolerable warming in the lower 48 states. Researchers of 2°C above pre–industrial temperatures.) In at the nonprofit addition, Eemian Arctic temperatures were Climate Central 3–5°C warmer than today. That makes the have calculated Eemian especially attractive for study, because how water 25 feet the Arctic has already warmed 2°C since the above high tide early 1980s and is projected to warm at least as would flood the Los Angeles area and much as the Eemian by the end of the century.

New York.

What scientists are learning about the Eemian Ñ K AT I E P E E K period could be cause for present-day concern.

Based on the study of the paleoclimate record in ice cores as well as the former locations of beaches and coral reefs, researchers believe West Antarctic ice is capable of melting far more than that the Eemian temperature increase likely pushed previously thought. global sea levels as high as eight meters (26 feet) above An accurate understanding of what was ice at where they are today. That would put many coastal what point in time is a key tool for testing computer cities deep under water including Miami, the Los models that forecast when, where, and how ice sheets Angeles metropolitan area, and large parts of New will melt in the future. As data on ancient climates York [see graphic]. During the Eemian, the polar ice becomes more reliable, scientists can use that data to sheets melted over several thousand years; an abrupt check their models and improve them. increase within the next century—seen by many scienJust five years ago, such ice-sheet modeling was a tists as inevitable, despite international goals—will not “cottage industry,” says Schmidt—improvisational result in a 26-foot rise right away. “Even if you stabiat best, inaccurate at worst. In 2007, when the U.N. lize temperature by 2100, sea levels will keep rising Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for many centuries after that,” says Gavin Schmidt, a released its fourth and most recent assessment report NASA climate modeler at the Goddard Institute for (which guides climate science and policy for the Space Studies who specializes in paleoclimate data. years to come), it projected that sea levels would The ice sheets will take hundreds of years to fully react rise anywhere between 18 and 59 centimeters by to warmer ocean temperatures, he says, “And there 2100—a range that many scientists saw as a poor estiwon’t be very much you can do about it.” mate based on inadequate data. The report inspired The ice core pulled from the NEEM site has dispaleoclimatologists who study ancient climates and crete, often visible rings, like a tree trunk—each physicists who build climate modseason’s snowfall creates a new layer of fresh ice. els to start to collaborate closely, What scientists By studying the chemical makeup of the layers, the according to Schmidt. “The last are learning about NEEM scientists learned both the atmospheric temreport kind of punting on the the Eemian period perature and the ice sheet’s height over the years. This whole sea level thing has been the data yielded a significant discovery: Previous models driver of an enormous amount of could be cause had assumed that the Greenland ice sheet was at least effort in ice-sheet modeling,” says for present-day half gone at the Eemian’s hottest point, but the ice Schmidt. “It really was time to concern. core showed that the sheet’s total volume decreased step up their game.” just 25 percent. That meltwater would account for Unfortunately, a clearer picture only about two meters of global sea rise, according of the future is not necessarily a brighter one. In to Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, a paleoclimate researcher at September, the IPCC will release the science portion the University of Copenhagen who led the NEEM of its fifth and latest report, and its sea-level projecproject. Therefore, the remaining six meters of water tions for the coming century are expected to increase, had to come mostly from Earth’s other major sea-level based in part on new models of how ice sheets melt. In “co-conspirator,” as James White likes to call it: the a field that predicts the future, a little hard data from Antarctic ice sheet. This new finding suggests that the past can go a long way.

32 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

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HEADLINES / BLUEPRINT STOR Y BY FLOR A LICHTM AN

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Aqua Turbine

A generator that harnesses energy from ocean currents

“

The magic of ocean currents is that they surround every continent on Earth and they run all day, every day.

That’s what sets this energy source apart from wind, solar, tidal, or wave—all of which are cyclical, meaning that during certain periods they don’t produce power.

The ocean-current generator we’re planning to build would float 100 to 200 feet below the sea surface. The device is a 65-foot-diameter cylinder shaped to speed up water flow, with propeller blades attached to its frame. As water flows through, it strikes the blades and spins a rotor, which generates electricity. A 17-foot center opening would allow animals to pass through unharmed. We estimate that in the Gulf Stream, a few miles offshore from West Palm Beach, Florida, the five-knot current would turn the blades about eight times per minute, generating about a megawatt of power.

We are designing the turbine to steer itself into the best current so that it generates maximum power, which is principally why our small submersibles manufacturing group, Triton Submarines, is involved. To make the turbine float, we’d create it partly out of syntactic foam, a buoyant material that we can shape easily but won’t collapse under

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34 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

high ocean pressures. The device would be tethered to the seafloor with a cable and adjustable straps that lengthen or shorten to move it in response to onboard water current, depth, and power output sensors.

The cable would then transmit power to a seafloor junction box, which would boost the voltage, convert it from AC to DC, and send it to a collection and distribution center onshore. In the future, we imagine an array of anywhere from 15 to 50 generators working together.

Our goal is to produce a $5-million device, which could pay for itself in five or 10 years. With funding, we could have our first working model within a year.”

—Patrick Lahey, president of Triton Submarines in Vero Beach, Florida.

(Eaton Corporation is handling the electrical transmission, and Eclipse Group leads deployment and maintenance.) As told to Flora Lichtman

HE ADLINES / WORK SPACE

H

STOR Y BY SUS AN E. M AT THE WS

Light Duty

The Army fres up a sunshine simulator ach year, some 20 soldiers experience Afghanistan’s 118°F heat for the first time not in the field but in a lab in Natick, Massachusetts.

For six decades, the Doriot Climatic Chambers has created everything from deserts to blizzards to test equipment before real-world deployment— and it’s the U.S.’s only military lab that uses human volunteers to do it.

The chambers are divided into two areas: tropic and arctic. Josh Bulotsky, the electrical engineer who manages the lab, can control every aspect of each climate. Two 500-horsepower cooling systems and a heater create –70°F to 165°F temperatures; dehumidifiers and water misters produce 10 to 90 percent humidity; sprinkler heads simulate rain; and a snow machine makes winter storms. In the chambers, soldiers sometimes walk on treadmills that fit five people (to simulate a group march). And to track their health, they can swallow telemetry pills that relay their core temperatures to lab technicians. In January, the lab added the sun: eighteen 1,500-watt metal-halide vapor lamps so bright that it’s impossible to look straight at them—perfect for testing portable solar panels. Brutal as the tests are, better that the troops and their equipment fail now than on the other side of the world.

THE SCALE

T E M P E RATURE

–273°C –223°C Absolute OGLE-2005-BLG-390L b, zero coldest known planet

–273°C Absolute zero

464°C Surface of Venus

36 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

A HOT HIKE Soldiers walk on a treadmill in the tropical chamber [above] and test gear in the arctic one [left].

STOR Y BY A JAI R A J

–89°C Lowest temperature recorded on Earth

–2.9°C Coldest body temperature recorded in a mammal

1,540°C WASP-12b, hottest known planet

5,500°C Surface of the sun

47°C Hottest body temperature recorded in a human

464°C Surface of Venus

35,000°C Surface of Eta Carinae B, one of the most massive stars known

COURTESY U.S. ARMY (2)

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Building Blocks

Dirt mix

Dirt-cheap bricks— just add pressure

B

ricks are fairly easy to make, but in the developing world, traditional fired bricks are sometimes weak and crumble-prone, while cement ones are often unaffordable.

The Vermeer BP714 is the first compressed-earth-block machine that makes strong air-dried bricks out of dirt. Its bricks don’t just exceed U.S. cement-code strength requirements— they’re 20 to 30 percent stronger, and cheaper than other machines’ too.

The process is simple. An operator mixes dirt with a bit of water and cement and shovels the concoction into the Vermeer. A portion of the mix moves into a chamber hydraulically pressurized by an integrated diesel engine, where steel plates slam 55,000 pounds of pressure upward to squeeze the dirt into a block. To make the bricks strong and uniform, the machine does something unique: Two cylinders slide into the brick, compressing the dirt even further.

The Vermeer can pound out a 7-by-14-by-4-inch block every 15 seconds. And the bricks are the first that can interlock and accept steel reinforcements for earthquake and hurricane zones.

Tapered cylinders Tank for hydraulic fluid

CLIMATE CONTROL Because compressed-earth blocks absorb and release heat more slowly than fired bricks, they can keep interiors cooler during the day and warmer at night.

38 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

Steel plate Ridges to interlock bricks

Do something

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Submit your project idea before June 15 at popsci.com/crowdgrant

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HEADLINES / THE BIG FIX

H

STOR IES BY AMBER WILLI AMS

V ISUAL DATA

2000

Electric field strength (volts per meter)

0

THE PROBLEM When the Sellwood Bridge in Portland, Oregon, was built in 1925, it wasn’t designed to carry 30,000 vehicles a day. Or to hold back a slow landslide.

But by the 1980s, cracks were forming in the bridge’s supports, leading inspectors to rate the bridge a 2 on a 100-point federal safety scale and to eventually ban heavy trucks, buses, and fire engines. So county engineers decided it was time for a new bridge, and the least expensive option ($306 million) was to move the existing structure over to serve as a detour while a new one was built in its place. But the bridge’s rare design—a one-piece, 1,100-foot, 3,400-ton truss—posed an unusual problem. How do you move a whole bridge at once?

T H E S OL U T ION The great shift took place over 14 hours on January 19. Between the Sellwood’s old and new locations, engineers built tracks, covered with Teflon pads and doused with liquid soap to make them slippery. Then 40 150-ton hydraulic jacks picked up the bridge and placed it on ski-like steel beams that could slide inside the tracks. Finally, a second set of jacks pushed the bridge inch by inch to its new home. (Because Sellwood’s west end had to move 66 feet and its east end only 33, the engineers developed a system that tempered the flow of fuel to each jack, controlling how fast they pushed.) The new bridge is expected to open in 2015, after which the old Sellwood will be scrapped.

THE EQUATION

+ U RINE

= DN A

40 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

BR AIN

By the Numbers 3,400 tons Weight of the Sellwood Bridge 33–66 feet Distance the bridge needed to move ~25 Number of workers required 50 Number of hydraulic jacks

Bumblebees distinguish flowers based on their colors, patterns, scents, and—as scientists recently discovered—electric fields.

Researchers from the University of Bristol created charged and neutral artificial flowers [above] and, based on thousands of flight landings, found that bees could tell differently charged flowers apart.

While bees are usually positively charged, flowers are negatively charged; the difference in electric potential helps pollen stick to bees. And because a flower’s electric field changes shape after an insect lands on it, bees may use that information to preferentially visit flowers where bugs haven’t yet nabbed the nectar.

Duanqing Pei and his colleagues at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health in China make neurons from an unlikely source: human urine. The cells found there—epithelial cells that lined the kidney—are more malleable than other types of cells. And the source is sterile. Pei adds a piece of DNA that reprograms those cells into the precursors of brain cells, which mature when inserted into the brains of newborn lab mice. In the future, the technique could help people with neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s.

“We could turn their own urine cells into the neural cells they need and transplant them back,” says Pei. And because the cells are the body’s own, they’re less likely to be rejected.

L EF T TO R I GHT: THE O R E G ON I AN, R A NDY C. R A S M US S E N ( 2 ) ; COU R TESY U NIVE R S IT Y O F BR ISTO L

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HEADLINES / SUBJECTIVE MEASURES STOR Y BY ERIN BIBA

ILLUSTR ATION BY RYAN SNOOK

to evaluate proposed (fctional) policies about welfare reform, with political parties’ endorsements clearly stated. They found that their subjects sided with their political parties regardless of their personal ideologies or the policies’ content. A study by a diferent group in 2011 asked people to identify whether certain scientists (highly trained and at well-respected institutions) were Before people will understand science, credible experts on global warming, disposal of nuclear scientists must understand people waste, and gun control. Subjects largely favored the scientists whose conclusions matched their own values; N 1954, a study published by Princeton the facts were irrelevant. and Dartmouth researchers asked their This behavior is called “selective perception”—the students to watch a recording of a football way that otherwise rational people distort facts by game between the two schools and count infractions. putting them through a personal lens of social infuence The Princeton students reported twice as many and wind up with a worldview that ofen alters reality. violations against Princeton as Dartmouth students Selective perception afects all our beliefs, and it’s a did. In a 2003 study, Yale researchers asked people major stumbling block for science communication.

What divides us, it turns out, isn’t the issues. It’s the social and political contexts that color how we see the issues. Take nuclear power, for example. In the U.S., we argue about it; in France, the public couldn’t care less. (The U.S.’s power is about 20 percent nuclear; France’s is 78 percent.) Look at nearly any science issue and nations hold diferent opinions. We fght about gun control, climate change, and HPV vaccination. In Europe, these controversies don’t hold a candle to debates about GMO foods and mad cow disease. Scientifc subjects become politically polarized because the public interprets even the most rigorously assembled facts based on the beliefs of their social groups, says Dan Kahan, a Yale professor of law and psychology who ran the 2011 science-expert study.

The problem is, our beliefs infuence policy. Public attitudes change how politicians vote, the products companies make, and how science gets funded.

So what can we do? The science world has taken note.

For example, the National Science Foundation recently emphasized grant–proposal rules that encourage scientists to share their research with the public. And several conferences on science communication have sprung up. It’s not a bad start. As people hear more from scientists, scientists will be absorbed into the public’s social lens--—and maybe even gain public trust. Having scientists tweet is good, but the most infuential public fgures are the ones folks can relate to (à la Carl Sagan).

We need to get more fgures like him—fast. According to Kahan, People synthetic biology is a prime distort candidate for the next controversy.

Building man-made versions of facts by DNA or engineering better humans putting can be risky, and the public will them need to make decisions about it. To ensure that those decisions are through clear-eyed, scientists need to stop a personal communicating as, well, scientists lens. and speak like the rest of us.

Not Just the Facts I

42 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

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Let’s KeeP tHe LIgHts oN WHeN sHe’s YoUR Age. What sort of world will this little girl grow up in? Many experts agree that it will be a considerably more energy-hungry one. There are already seven billion people on our planet. And the forecast is that there will be around two billion more by 2050. So if we’re going to keep the lights on for her, we will need to look at every possible energy source. At Shell we’re exploring a broad mix of energies. We’re making our fuels and lubricants more advanced and more efficient than before. With our partner in Brazil, we’re also producing ethanol, a biofuel made from renewable sugar cane. And we’re delivering natural gas to more than 40 countries around the world. When used to generate electricity, natural gas emits around half the CO2 of coal. Let’s broaden the world’s energy mix. www.shell.com/letsgo

Let’s go.

JUNE 2013 / POPULAR SCIENCE

INSIDE!

46

SOLAR

Reinventing the array could usher in a new age for solar. Plus: beyond batteries.

48

WASTE

Municipal trash, heat, and spent nuclear fuel could power the U.S. for decades.

ILLUSTR ATION BY GR AHAM MUR DO CH

A

t long last, energy independence seems tantalizingly close. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects oil exports will surpass imports for the frst time in 2014. The International Energy Agency forecasts the U.S. could become nearly self-sufcient by 2030—and Citigroup puts the milestone for North America at 2018. Ending reliance on foreign oil could bring more jobs and security, but along with them, potential hazards. Oil will remain part of global markets and subject to price swings. More important, independence won’t stop climate change. Doubling down on fossil fuels could crowd out cleaner options.

Today, the U.S. has an opportunity to pursue selfsufciency intelligently, not blindly. “Coal is suddenly on the retreat,” says Daniel Kammen, director of the University of California, Berkeley’s Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory. “If we take advantage of this moment to put in a whole new mix, where the dirtiest fuel is natural gas and renewables are a clean addition, it changes the scenario entirely. Together, they can open up a horizon we didn’t have fve years ago.” Engineers will need to clean up hydraulic fracturing and squeeze more power from solar, wind, water, and waste. Here’s how to do it. — T H E E D I T O R S

50

GLOBAL LANDSCAPES What’s the greatest driver of renewable energy development? Geography.

54

WATER

Engineering triumphs over wave and tidal forces. Plus: the craziest ideas in power.

56

WIND

Blades get bigger; turbines get smarter.

Plus: the pitfalls of energy politics.

58

OIL AND GAS

How to clean up fracking’s bad rep. Plus: efficient new natural gas turbines.

60

THE ENERGY GAP When will the U.S. reach energy independence—really?

OPEN HERE FOR MORE JUNE 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 45

THE FUTURE OF ENERGY STOR Y BY ERIK SOFGE

ILLUSTR ATION BY GR AH AM MURDOCH

SOLAR The solar market has been on fire. In the U.S., it’s grown by 600 percent over the past five years, culminating in 3,313 installed megawatts in 2012.

This past March, seven solar projects added the only new utility power of any kind to the U.S. grid. But solar energy isn’t quite cost-competitive yet. Bridging the final gap requires breakthroughs that increase efficiency while cutting costs.

THE DR AM ATIC REIM AGINING

Conical Solar Panels

▶ Even for photovoltaic (PV) panels, there’s such

a thing as too much sun—when cells overheat, they become less efficient. V3Solar solved that problem with Spin Cell, a conical array that floats on magnets.

An outer cone made of specialized lenses concentrates bands of sunlight on an inner cone covered with PV cells. The cells capture light energy but spin away before thermal energy can transfer. This constant cooling means V3Solar can use cheaper, less heat-tolerant material than other light-concentrating systems.

46 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

JUNE 2013 / POPULAR SCIENCE

For greater power density, V3Solar plans to sell a Power Pole with Spin Cells arranged to minimally shade one another.

THE WH Y NOT ? PL AN

STOR AGE

Drape the Planet with Solar Fabric

BEYOND BAT TERIES

▶ Would embedding solar cells in every

The first commercial Spin Cells, slated for 2014, should produce about 1,000 watts of electricity.

The inner cone of PV uses about 10 watts to spin.

bolt of fabric make a dent in our fossil-fuel consumption? It’s worth a shot. Greg Nielson, a Sandia National Laboratories researcher—and 2012 POPSCI “Brilliant 10” honoree—has developed solar glitter that could turn nearly any surface into a power source. Clusters of the dust-size cells (as small as 250 microns across) could be incorporated into standard PV panels, doubling their efficiency, or into the material for bags and clothing.

Solar couture is also a future goal of the New York City firm Pvilion, which produces power-generating fabric for larger-scale commercial applications. Its flexible panels can be as efficient as rigid ones but far easier to manipulate into structures like canopies for electric-vehiclecharging stations. Pvilion engineers are currently designing a covered footbridge in Florida and curtains for a building in New York City—in both cases, the fabric will power lighting for the entire structure—and a 124,000-watt solar facade membrane for a new U.S. embassy in London.

Spin Cells don’t need the racks or permits required for rooftop arrays, so V3Solar says the cost to homeowners could be half that of traditional panels.

THE BACK-TO -N AT URE SOLUTION

Arrays That Mimic Plants ▶ Concentrated solar farms typically use heavy-duty

steel drives and motors to direct sunlight from rows of giant mirrors (called heliostats) onto a central tower. San Francisco–based Sunfolding devised a way to get the job done far more cheaply. Inspired by plants, which use tiny shifts in internal pressure to crane toward the sun, engineers designed Sunfolding’s heliostats to use compressed air to pivot into position. Made from plastic, the miniature drive system can be mass-produced at one fifth the cost of conventional models.

In order to deliver steady power, renewable energy systems require storage—a place to temporarily offload electrons. Facilities for compressed-air energy storage last much longer than grid-scale batteries.

They use power produced during off-peak hours to compress air into underground caverns and then release it through a turbine to generate electricity when demand is high. LightSail Energy made that process mobile and modular by designing air-storage tanks that fit inside shipping containers.

Plus, the company uses water to capture waste heat and boost efficiency.

1 As pistons compress air, a fine mist of water absorbs the released heat.

2 The compressed air sits in low-cost tanks for storage.

3 Thermal energy is stored separately or routed to nearby buildings to heat them.

4 As air expands again, it absorbs heat from water and converts that to mechanical energy for power.

JUNE 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 47

THE FUTURE OF ENERGY

WAST E STOR Y BY DAV ID FERRIS

ILLUSTR ATION BY TRE VOR JOHNS TON THE R ADIOACTI V E OP TION

Next-Next-Gen Nuclear Power

▶ U.S. nuclear reactors store nearly 70,000 metric tons of commercial spent fuel, which remains dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years. Engineers at a start-up called Transatomic Power say a reactor they designed could use this stockpile to meet the nation’s energy needs for 70 years. Their 500-megawatt Waste-Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor (WAMSR) is based on a fluoride molten salt reactor developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1960s. But two Transatomic cofounders, PhD candidates at MIT, made crucial modifications: They shrunk the reactor by a factor of 20 and engineered it to capture 98 percent of the energy in spent fuel pellets. Half of WAMSR’s own waste product, which totals only four kilograms, becomes inert within a couple of hundred years.

The world throws away enormous amounts of energy each day. In the U.S. alone, waste streams could account for 100,000 megawatts of untapped electrical capacity. New technology could convert those overlooked sources into usable power.

WASTE-ANNIHILATING MOLTEN SALT REACTOR A mixture of molten salt and spent fuel pellets flows from the reactor core through a loop of pipes.

TURBINE

REACTOR CORE

Molten salt in a second loop absorbs heat from the salt-fuel mixture.

Water in a third loop absorbs heat from the molten salt and converts to steam, which spins a turbine to produce electricity.

CONTAINMENT VESSEL

A chilled plug of salt below the reactor would liquify during a power failure, allowing molten salt to flow into a containment vessel and solidify.

PUMP

THE OPPOR T UNIS T

Gas from Trash

▶ Producing biofuel typically requires growing a

feedstock, such as switchgrass, that consumes valuable land and water. But any carbon source could provide that biomass, including garbage. Fulcrum BioEnergy says the plant it plans to build near Reno, Nevada, in 2015 could convert 160,000 tons of municipal trash into 10 million gallons of transportation fuel per year—and for less than 70 cents a gallon. Machines would shred wood, fabric, and nonrecyclable paper and plastic into two-inch bits and feed them to a gasifier. A chemical reaction would then convert the gases into ethanol, jet fuel, or diesel.

48 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

THE SCAV ENGER

Heat to Electricity

▶ U.S. factories blow off as much as 13 quadril-

lion BTUs of waste heat each year. Alphabet Energy believes it can convert some of that heat back into electricity, improving the efficiency of plants by several percent. The company’s system sandwiches a thermoelectric material between two heat exchangers, one containing exhaust gas and the other a coolant. The material generates electricity from that temperature gradient. And because it’s made of silicon, it can be produced with standard semiconductor equipment.

LET’S PUT CLEANER ENERGY ON THE MENU. In an ever-expanding world, hungry for energy, Shell is at the forefront of the exploration and production of natural gas, which we supply to more than 40 countries around the world. And that’s just for starters.

In China, where the fast-growing economy needs cleaner energy, we are working to unlock large reserves of natural gas to generate electricity for years to come. And with natural gas emitting around half the CO2 of coal when used to generate electricity, it could provide us with cleaner energy for around the next 250 years. Let’s broaden the world’s energy mix. www.shell.com/letsgo

LET’S GO.

THE FUTURE OF ENERGY STOR Y BY K ATIE PEEK

100%

Portugal

ILLUSTR ATION BY FATHOM INFORM ATION DESIGN

GLOBAL LANDSCAPES

RENEWABLE ENERGY as a proportion of total produced

HO W GEOGR APHY DRIVES ENER GY DE VELOPMENT

WORLDWIDE RENEWABLE energy production reached 66.83 quadrillion BTUs in 2010. The countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development—which keeps detailed records for its 34 members [see map]—produced 16.50 quadrillion BTUs that year. Which technology works in which country is often a matter of topography.

Denmark has 5,078 wind turbines, or one for every 1,100 people. The country’s position in the North Sea makes wind an effective resource.

17.06 Quadrillion BTUs Top per-capita production in each category

Israel 11% Germany 21% Denmark 2.9% Germany 14% U.S. 36% Iceland 11%

Germany aims to produce 30 percent renewable energy by 2020. Lacking ready access to new hydro or geothermal, the country has focused on wind and solar.

Mexico 17% U.S. 27% Iceland 0.9%

Norway 8.7% Iceland’s volcanism allows it to produce 78 percent of its energy geothermally. The rest of the energy it produces is hydropower.

U.S. 24% Canada’s hydropower plants generate 63 percent of the country’s electricity.

Solar 2% Wind 7%

2000 to 2011

50 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

Chile

Austria

Hydro 28%

Luxembourg

Hydroelectric dams are a big slice of the renewables pie because they’re a mature—and thus relatively cheap— technology.

60%

Finland Canada 27%

Finland 3.3%

Farmland—and farm subsidies—have made corn ethanol the major driver of biofuel growth in the U.S.

80%

Geothermal 8%

Biofuel & Waste 55%

Finland is the second-most forested country in Europe— the most forested is Sweden. In both countries, biofuel is largely a by-product of the forest industry.

Iceland

France 5.3%

Percentages reflect countries’ production within each subcategory.

Italy 40%

“Biomass is the oldest energy being used by mankind,” says Cédric Philibert, an analyst at the International Energy Agency, “but the long-term potential is much lower than solar and wind.”

The OECD collects and analyzes data to make policy recommendations for its member countries.

New Zealand Turkey Switzerland Israel

Spain

20%

Germany 11%

U.S. 37%

Sweden

0

Ireland Slovenia Estonia Japan Greece Germany Slovak Republic France Hungary Canada Denmark Belgium Mexico Poland Czech Republic U.S. Norway Netherlands South Korea Australia U.K.

S O U R C E: WO R L D P O P U L AT I O N DATA A N D R ENE WABLES INFOR MATION 2012 ©OECD/IE A

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THE FUTURE OF ENERGY STOR Y BY ERIK SOFGE

ILLUSTR ATION BY NICK K ALOTER AKIS

WATER Water is 800 times denser than air, and building a generator able to withstand the tremendous force it generates has hampered the development of nextgen hydropower.

If engineers can harness its energy, water holds great potential: about 1,420 terawatt-hours per year, or roughly a third of U.S. annual electricity usage.

SO CRAZY IT COULD WORK? Energy independence will require big ideas--maybe even bizarre ones. Here are 12 that someone, somewhere, is actually hard at work on.

54 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

Engineers designed TidGen, which is 98-feet wide and 31-feet tall, for tidal bodies, such as bays, between 60 and 150 feet deep.

THE BOT TOM FEEDER

Tame the Tide

▶ Tidal currents are among the most predictable energy sources on Earth.

Until recently, the only way to capture their power was to construct massive dams that impeded the flow of water, often in sensitive marine areas. The TidGen, developed by the Ocean Renewable Power Company (ORPC), sits at the bottom of a free-flowing deep river or bay instead. The company installed its first commercial unit in Maine’s Cobscook Bay last summer, and it began delivering electricity to the U.S. grid shortly thereafter. A TidGen can produce up to 150 kW, or enough electricity to power 25 homes, but ORPC plans to add 5 megawatts of capacity within three to five years.

AMPLIFY THE POWER OF DANCE MOVES WITH PIEZOELECTRIC FLOORS

CAPTURE WASTE HEAT FROM CREMATING DEAD BODIES

ACT UA L LY H A PPEN I NG

COVER EVERYTHING WITH PEELAND-STICK SOLAR STICKERS

HAVE STUNT KITES PULL VEHICLES THAT GENERATE MECHANICAL POWER

UNLEASH ANACONDA, THE WAVEEATING ENERGY SNAKE

A permanent-magnet generator mounted between the four turbines produces up to 150 kw.

The TidGen’s helical turbines have teardropshaped foils and rotate in a single direction, regardless of the flow of the current.

A power-and-data cable connects an array of up to a couple of dozen TidGen units to an onshore substation.

THE S TORM CH A SER

Catch the Waves

▶ Wave energy is more evenly distributed across the

globe than tidal currents, but it’s also more violent: Generators floating on the surface of the ocean must function while being thrashed around. London-based 40South Energy built a wave-energy converter that cleverly avoids abuse. It remains submerged in the water column, automatically adjusting its depth to find optimal conditions

TRAP RAINBOWS TO IMPROVE SOLAR PANEL EFFICIENCY

USE BODY HEAT TO POWER PERSONAL ELECTRONICS

O N SO M EO N E’ S WO R KBE NCH

MASS PRODUCE MINIATURE NUCLEAR REACTORS

HARNESS MANMADE TORNADOES TO DRIVE TURBINES

and dodge rough storms. The machine generates energy as its top half, attached to a suspended platform, pulls against the bottom half, moored to the seafloor. 40South plans to deploy its first commercial unit, the 150-kilowatt R115, near Tuscany, Italy, this summer. It’s also developing a 2-megawatt version and setting up pilot wave-energy parks in India, Italy, and the U.K.

CAPTURE ENERGY FROM SMALL DAILY TEMPERATURE CHANGES IN AMBIENT AIR

FUEL HYDROGEN VEHICLES WITH TANKS OF SUGAR

TAP TREES FOR BIOFUEL INSTEAD OF SAP

FAR OU T BY AL L DEFI N ITI ONS

JUNE 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 55

THE FUTURE OF ENERGY STOR Y BY ERIK SOFGE

ILLUSTR ATION BY GR AH AM MURDOCH

WIND In 2012, wind power added more new electricity production in the U.S. than any other single source. But even with 60 gigawatts powering 15 million homes, wind supplants just 1.8 percent of the nation’s carbon emissions. Tomorrow’s turbines will have to be more efficient, more affordable, and in more places.

300ft

151ft

232ft

Statue of Liberty

Boeing 747

Metal inserts built into the carbon-fiber blade during manufacture mean the root end, bolted to the hub, can be slimmer, stronger, and more aerodynamically efficient.

THE SUPERSIZE ROUTE

Bigger Blades

▶ Big rotors generate more electricity, par-

ticularly from low winds, but oversize trucks hauling blades the length of an Olympic pool can’t reach many wind-energy sites. Blade Dynamics fabricates its 160-foot, carbon-fiber blade in multiple pieces, which can then be transported by standard trucks and assembled at a nearby location. It’s a stepping-stone for 295-foot and 328-foot blades now being designed for offshore turbines. (Currently, the world’s longest prototype is 274 feet.) The colossal size should enable 10- to 12-megawatt turbines, double the generation capacity of today’s biggest models.

56 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

JUNE 2013 / POPULAR SCIENCE An erosion-protection material molded into the leading edge of the blade reduces wear and tear over the blade’s lifetime.

Fabricating the carbon fiber in modular pieces, rather than one long blade, ensures the material’s consistency and reduces the risk of failure.

THE H YBRID HAIL MARY THE NE T WORKED SOLUTION

Smarter Turbines

▶ Reducing the variability of wind energy

could position it to compete as a stable source of power. General Electric’s new 2.5-megawatt, 394-foot-diameter wind turbine has an optional integrated battery for shortterm energy storage. It also connects to GE’s so-called Industrial Internet so it can share data with other turbines, wind farms, technicians, and operations managers. Algorithms analyze 150,000 data points per second to provide precise region-wide wind forecasts and enable turbines to react to changing conditions, even tilting blades to maximize power and minimize damage as a gust hits.

Man-Made Thunderstorm Power

▶ Solar Wind Energy’s downdraft tower is either

ingenious or ludicrous. The proposed 2,250-foot-high concrete tower will suck hot desert air into its hollow core and infuse it with moisture, creating a pressure differential that spawns a howling downdraft. “You’re capturing the last 2,000 feet of a thunderstorm,” says CEO Ron Pickett. The man-made tempest would spin wind turbines that could generate up to 1.25 gigawatts (though it’s designed to operate at 60 percent capacity) on the driest, hottest summer days—more than some nuclear power plants. The Maryland-based company plans to break ground in Arizona as soon as 2015, provided it can secure $900 million in funding—a large sum but perhaps not outlandish when compared with a $14-billion nuclear reactor now under construction.

E NERGY P OLITICS

PROJECTS ON THE C HOPPING BLOCK

FOR MORE THAN 40 YEARS, MIT has been at the forefront of fusion research, thanks to its tokamaks—powerful devices that use magnets to confine plasma. Alcator C-Mod, the latest version, is one of just three tokamaks in the United States. It’s responsible for the livelihood of 100 staffers and 30 current PhD students, in addition to the dozens of fusion physicists that preceded them.

As of press time, C-Mod will likely be forced to shut down.

Standoffs in Washington have triggered more than $1 trillion in federal budget cuts, and the president’s 2014 budget slashes spending for domestic

fusion research beyond reductions first proposed for 2013.

MIT’s fusion lab stands to lose as much as 70 percent of its funding, which would lead to dismantling C-Mod and the entire program—no tokamak means no new PhD students.

“We’re giving up the leadership in fusion,” says Miklos Porkolab, director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. “We had a world-class, first-rate program, and we’re letting it disappear.”

The C-Mod is not the only program in jeopardy. Even the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E initiative, which supports dozens of solar, wind,

and energy-storage projects each year, is up for reauthorization under the America Competes Act. As U.S. programs face cuts, there’s a surge of investment overseas, including billiondollar-class fusion reactors in China, Germany, and Japan and the internationally funded ITER in France. When ITER achieves high-burning plasma in 2020, it will be the world’s largest fusion reactor, made possible by some $2 billion in U.S. contributions. “And we’re not going to be able to use it,” says Porkolab. Even if we have the will, we may not have enough physicists.

JUNE 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 57

THE FUTURE OF ENERGY STOR Y BY CUR TIS BR AIN ARD

ILLUSTR ATION BY GR AH AM MURDOCH

OI L GAS AND

Hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have opened up huge reservoirs of oil and gas across the U.S. The Energy Information Administration predicts that production of shale gas in particular will continue to rise steeply, increasing 44 percent between 2011 and 2040. If fossil fuels are to remain a large part of the nation’s energy mix, engineers need to reduce their environmental impacts.

THE CLOSED CYCLE

Wastewater Treatment ▶ Oil and gas companies send millions of gal-

lons of pressurized water—along with chemicals and sand—down wells to fracture shale. But the liquid, called flowback, returns to the surface filled with contaminants, making it unusable for other purposes—even fracturing new wells.

Water-treatment technology is still in its “45rpm phonograph” stage says David Burnett, a Texas A&M petroleum engineer who oversees pilot studies of prototype systems for the Department of Energy. Of various methods now in development, membrane-filtration technology is especially energy efficient and site adaptable: Engineers can fine-tune a series of membranes to remove different substances from water as it passes through.

Such on-site systems could reduce the need for freshwater, critical in arid regions of the U.S.

NATURAL GAS

DRILLING FLUID

Drillers inject a fluid (almost always water) carrying sand and other additives into a well at high pressures. This fractures the rock and frees natural gas to flow back to the surface—along with some of the drilling fluid and natural contaminants.

58 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

FRACTURES

Flaring natural gas converts methane to carbon dioxide, which is a less potent greenhouse gas. But methane can also leak or be vented directly into the atmosphere.

Tanker trucks typically deliver between two and five million gallons of water to fracture one well.

THE H YDROCARBON FIX

THE MICROBI AL RESCUE

Waterless Fracking

▶ Ideally, drillers would eliminate the use of

water in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, altogether.

A Canadian well-fracturing company called GasFrac has developed a substitute: a gel made from liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and propane. Because it’s a hydrocarbon, the gel dissolves into the target oil or gas and returns to the surface with the rest of the payload. But because the gel does not dissolve salts or clay in the shale, it doesn’t sweep natural contaminants back out of the well. Chevron reported that LPG used in a pilot test conducted in Colorado in 2011 significantly increased naturalgas production while minimizing water usage.

POWER PRODUCTION

COURTESY SIEMENS

A MORE EFFICIENT TURBINE

Methane Recapture

▶ In 2011, oil and gas operations flared or

vented almost 210 billion cubic feet of natural gas that they couldn’t use or store—enough to heat more than two million homes for a year. In North Dakota’s Bakken shale formation, drillers flared or vented 32 percent of the gas produced during oil extraction (the national average is less than 1 percent) because they lacked sufficient pipelines and processing facilities. A consortium that includes the National Renewable Energy Laboratory launched a project in January to convert the surplus gas into diesel or jet fuel. Scientists will genetically engineer microbes that naturally feed on methane to boost the amount of lipids they produce. They will then convert those lipids into a feedstock that could be piped to a refinery or used on-site.

GAS-FIRED ELECTRICITY generation grew 3 percent from 2010 to 2011 while coal-fired generation fell 6 percent—positive trends for the climate.

Burning natural gas produces half as much carbon dioxide as coal and also fewer nitrogen and sulfur oxides. More efficient turbines could make gas even cleaner. The Siemens H-class turbine operates at higher temperatures and pressures, raising the efficiency of a combined-cycle power plant to more than 60 percent. (The average efficiency of gas plants in the U.S. is 42 percent.) Combined-cycle plants use both gas and steam turbines; as a result, they can ramp up and down quickly, making them good grid complements for intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar. In September 2012, GE announced that its new FlexEfficiency gas turbines will drive a combined-cycle plant that surpasses 61 percent efficiency.

JUNE 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 59

THE ENERGY GAP

PREDICTING THE FUTURE Since 1977, the EIA has published annual projections of U.S. energy needs. In many cases, the forecasts [thin lines] depart from actual values [thick lines] in the very year the report was published—predictions of even the current year’s consumption and production often prove inaccurate.

WHAT GOVERNMENT FORECASTS SUGGEST AB OUT U.S. ENER GY INDEPENDENCE

SINCE LONG BEFORE the rise in big data, the U.S. Energy Information Administration has tracked the country’s energy consumption and production [thick lines]. The size of the gap between the two reflects how close the country is to energy independence. The EIA also projects energy production and usage into the future to help guide industry regulations and policy decisions. A computer program—which took the EIA nearly two decades to build and requires 35 analysts to run—generates its predictions [thin lines] based on current energy laws and regulations. While it’s impossible to predict influential events such as wars and recessions, the general trend suggests that since 2005—when the energy deficit [red] peaked—the U.S. is making more of its own energy and using less overall.

“We as a society are valuing energy independence more,” said Steven Wade, an economist for the EIA.

1989

Total Consumption Quadrillion BTUs

1986 1983

1989

1983 1986 MODEL REVISIONS The first prediction shown, for 1980, was calculated with a different computer program than the one currently in use. The EIA then revised the simulation method and prediction length, initially running shorter forecasts until the software improved.

Total Production Quadrillion BTUs

ENERGY CRISES Petroleum resources became inconsistent following the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo and the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and U.S. energy consumption dropped as a result.

Energy Deficit Quadrillion BTUs

SELF-SUFFICIENCY The difference between supply and demand is an approximate indicator of the country’s dependence on energy imports. When the U.S. attains energy independence, the red line will dip below zero.

30.84

4.34 1970

1973

1976

60 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

1979

1982

1985

1988

1991

1994

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THE FUTURE OF ENERGY STOR Y BY SUS AN E. M AT THE WS

ILLUSTR ATION BY PITCH INTER ACTI V E

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Predicted consumption in 1980

Predicted production in 1980 2004 2001

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2013 Production Cases Low oil import High economic growth High oil import Low economic growth

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FINANCIAL CRISIS The financial crisis of 2008 preceded a sharp dip in consumption and a slight dip in production. Most of the decrease in demand came from the industrial and transportation sectors.

NATURAL GAS The recent uptick in U.S. production is largely attributable to natural gas, captured through hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. In 2012, drillers extracted 700,000 barrels per day, equivalent to approximately one quadrillion BTUs annually.

MODEST GROWTH Since 2007, analysts have revised their estimates for U.S. energy consumption, accounting for the economic downturn as well as standards passed by the Obama Administration that will double fuel efficiency in cars by 2025.

120 105 90 75 60

CASE BY CASE In addition to making its main predictions [thin lines], the EIA runs its model to see how various scenarios might affect the country [dotted lines].

This year, the EIA tested which conditions would make the U.S. oil independent [low oil import]. Self-reliance requires limiting consumption to a 3.5 percent increase while revving up oil production 36 percent by 2020, to 10 million barrels per day.

45 30

THE FUTURE Based on the business-as-usual projections, the U.S. is not on track to attain energy independence before 2040. The projected deficit that year—9.18 quadrillion BTUs—could be overcome by doubling the country’s current renewable energy production.

15.96

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SOUR CE: U.S. ENER GY INFOR MATION ADMINISTR ATION

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WH y Wou L D a pe tr o - state e r eCt a so L ar - p oWer eD eCo - Me tr op o L Is In tHe M IDDLe oF tH e a r a B I a n Deser t ? to CHanGe tHe Wo r L D. stor y By dan BaUm

62 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

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A

t frst glance, Masdar City appears a mirage.

From a distance it looks like a single multicolored building, standing lonely on the horizon. Part of the illusion is due to the city’s strange setting: next to Abu Dhabi airport, just across the highway from the Arabian Gulf, in a deeply inhospitable stretch of desert. Between it and downtown Abu Dhabi lie 20 miles of the most wasteful urban development I’ve ever seen—a featureless plain studded with ostentatious walled houses the size of the Supreme Court and crisscrossed by empty six-lane boulevards. But the illusion is also a matter of density.

Masdar City, an $18-billion experiment, will hold 40,000 residents in only two square miles.

taming the desert When completed in 2025, Masdar City will pack 40,000 inhabitants into two square miles of carbon-neutral buildings.

JUNE 2013 / popuL ar sCIenCe / 63

As the world’s most ambitious eco-city, Masdar does not allow cars. Visitors must instead leave their vehicles in a giant garage at the city’s northern edge. As I pulled in, a trim Westerner wearing a dark suit despite the heat stepped from the shade to introduce himself.

Stephen Severance, a 45-year-old American, is the city’s program manager. He came to Masdar four years ago, afer working at the consulting frm Booz Allen.

Severance led me past ranks of parked cars to a set of smoky glass doors, which opened with a whoosh upon a marble lobby. Beyond a second glass wall, Masdar’s Personal Rapid Transit pods, or PRTs, sat waiting. The little white driverless cars function as an ecological upgrade for passengers who have ditched their outmoded internal-combustion machines.

Severance and I took seats facing each other, the automatic door slid closed, and the little pod began scooting through what looked like a gigantic basement at 15 miles an hour. It ran almost silently on rubber tires, following magnets buried in the foor and using proximity sensors to avoid collision.

Under the original plans, the PRTs were supposed to provide transportation across all of Masdar City, Severance explained. But to make space for them beneath the buildings, engineers would have needed to construct the entire city on 20-foot-tall pedestals. They 64 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

Wind CatCher The 148-foot-tall tower beside the Masdar Institute directs cool wind from above the city into a courtyard to create a perpetual breeze.

built the existing center of Masdar City in this way— about a third of a square mile—but elevating the whole metropolis was unafordable. The rest of Masdar will be built at ground level, and its transportation infrastructure remains undetermined: electric buses, perhaps, or solar-powered carts.

Severance gestured at the pod. “This is a little, I don’t know, Jetsons,” he said. “It was a nice idea, and we’ve proven that it works. We’re running right now on solar power. These cars get where they’re going and don’t run into each other.” But the PRT line that Severance and I boarded was the only functioning one, he told me, and the PRTs follow only one route: from the garage to Masdar Institute, about half a mile.

As the pod slid into its parking space, an electronic voice reminded us to take our belongings. We stepped into the lobby of the PRT terminal underneath the institute and followed a sweeping spiral staircase to an open-air courtyard at street level. A half-dozen mid-rise buildings rose in a cluster, separated by a tight maze of connected courtyards. One building, a terra-cotta– colored apartment house, is home to the 119 students of the Masdar Institute—the city’s only residents so far. Another, wrapped in a steel facade, houses the institute itself. Severance led me on a tour of the small and strange collection of businesses that make up the

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THE ENTIRE CITY WOULD BE AN EXPERIMENT, A CLEANTECH INCUBATOR ON A GRAND SCALE. commercial district, among them a sushi restaurant, a cofee shop, a mini supermarket, a travel agency, and a cellphone-company ofce.

This small, artifcial pocket of urbanity didn’t feel like the seed of a true metropolis, but that’s the plan.

Over the next 12 years, this little cluster of buildings will grow into two square miles of dense mixed-use real estate. A recycling plant is already under construction.

There will be a functioning smart grid and improved power generation and distribution. The city will draw residents on the promise of quiet walkable streets and a sustainable lifestyle. By 2025, Severance told me, Masdar, Arabic for “source,” will have transformed itself from university campus and commercial mishmash to a working city of the future.

I

T HE EX PE RIME NT B E G INS n 2006, the government of Abu Dhabi, the largest and most oil rich of the United Arab Emirates, announced that it intended to spend $22 billion to become a leader in renewable energy. Abu Dhabi is the very defnition of a petro-state. About the size of South Carolina, it holds the world’s sixth-largest oil reserves—20 percent more than Russia. The U.A.E., a nation that contains fewer people than the Los Angeles metropolitan area, has the third-highest ecological footprint per capita in the world.

Unlikely as it seemed, the government of this tiny state on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf proposed to do something no other nation had seriously attempted. It would build a carbon-neutral, zero-waste city from the ground up on an empty piece of desert. The entire city would be an experiment, a clean-technology incubator on a grand scale, powered by renewable energy projects. A graduatelevel, sustainable-technology research university in partnership with MIT would serve as the idea factory, and a feet of driverless electric cars would shuttle the inhabitants from place to place. Over every building, engineers would mount huge photovoltaic roofs. The initial drawings looked like fantasy.

For such a pillar of the oil economy to express such an interest in renewable energy reeks of either penitence—like the munitions tycoon Alfred Nobel sponsoring a peace prize—or outright fraud. But as the years passed, the project became real. High-efciency apartment houses, ofces, and businesses began to rise. The driverless electric cars materialized—and they worked. The fedgling city consumed less electricity

green CamPUs Most development in Masdar is centered around the Masdar Institue (steel facade) and its dormitories (clay facade).

than its solar arrays generated, and the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology assembled a faculty of 76 PhDs, 13 of them from MIT. Even at the height of the fnancial crisis, as renewable energy projects stalled around the world, Masdar City moved forward. In 2009, the International Renewable Energy Agency made the unlikely selection of Abu Dhabi as its world headquarters. Then, in 2011, the Masdar Institute graduated its frst class of 70 master’s students. But it wasn’t until 2012, when the German technology giant Siemens was putting the fnishing touches on its new Middle East headquarters in Masdar City, that the experiment morphed from grand gesture to something much more signifcant: a new and viable model for renewable energy development on a massive scale.

But even a city of the future, muscled into existence by oil money and sheer will, was not immune to the troubles of the present. The fnancial crisis of 2008 forced planners to scale back their ambitions. Afer the crash, Masdar shaved about $4 billion from its budget, and engineers had to abandon the most futuristic features. The elaborate solar-collecting roofs disappeared from the drawing board; instead, they’ll situate photovoltaic arrays at the edge of town. The PRTs devolved from a citywide system to a parkingJUNE 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 65

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O

T HE N EW E NE RG Y MODE L il made settled life possible in Abu Dhabi.

The Trucial Coast Oil Development Company discovered the frst commercial oil feld here in 1960. At the time, the settlement was little more than a collection of camels and bedouin tents, a port where men in loincloths waded through the surf to unload dhows by hand. Then, in less than half a century, oil brought the Emirates from abject poverty to the world’s sixth-highest GDP per capita. Abu Dhabi is now a roaring metropolis flled with famboyant skyscrapers—a tower shaped like a giant coin standing

on edge, another like a 40-story videogame joystick.

Commuters drive Ferraris and Jaguars. Malls stock Piaget and Versace.

Yet Emiratis are planning for a post-oil world. In 2002, the Emirates’ crown prince, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, ordered the creation of Mubadala Development Corp., an investment frm owned by the government and dedicated to diversifying the nation’s economy beyond oil and gas. In 2005, Mubadala’s 31-year-old energy chief, Sultan al-Jaber, set of on a seven-month tour of renewable energy projects in such places as South Korea, Germany, and Silicon Valley and reached a very futuristic conclusion. Renewable

New-topias Five eco-friendly cities built from the ground up LAVASA

DESTINY

SONGDO

Maharashtra, India

Osceola County, Florida

Incheon, South Korea

Planned population: 300,000 Projected completion date: 2021

Planned population: 250,000 Projected completion date: Unknown

Planned population: 65,000 Projected completion date: 2017

Lavasa’s designers are using biomimicry to transform an arid site in India’s Western Ghats into a lush city. Building foundations will store moisture, as trees do, while a multitude of tiny channels, modeled after those that harvester ants use to protect their nests, will prevent flooding during monsoon season.

With plans for 200 miles of navigable waterways—complete with water taxis—and an expo center for researching and developing sustainable technologies, Destiny looks like the love child of Venice and epcot Center. If Venice weren’t sinking and epcot were a real city, that is.

perhaps the most successful eco-city so far, songdo is already home to 30,000 residents; engineers completed phase one in 2009. a pneumatic waste-collection system transports garbage by tube instead of by truck, and songdo’s parking garages come with charging stations for electric cars. —Ajai Raj

FUJISAWA SUSTAINABLE SMART TOWN

DONGTAN

Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan

Planned population: 500,000 Projected completion date: Unknown

Planned population: 3,000 Projected opening date: spring 2014

If Fujisawa succeeds, it could provide a template for designing cities with smart grids from the ground up. each home will be equipped with solar arrays that will be wired to the grid. there will also be sharing services for electric cars and bikes.

66 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

Chongming Island, China

Dongtan was to be the first largescale eco-city in the world. plans included bioreactors to turn the city’s waste into energy and zero emissions buildings with green roofs. But problems with funding and community relations put the project on hold. It now consists of a lone wind farm.

Big dreams Songdo in South Korea [above] already has 30,000 residents.

Dongtan in China [below] is still in development.

FroM top: sJ. KIM/Get t y IMaGes ; MCt VIa Get t y IMaGes

garage shuttle. Complicating matters, Masdar had originally intended to desalinate its own water using the sun, but the local well water turns out to be three times as salty as the Gulf’s. Desalinating it would require signifcantly more energy than planned and, perhaps worse, would create a gigantic brine-disposal problem. Instead, Severance told me, Masdar will aggressively monitor the use of water. Compared with the bold vision Masdar once was, the adjusted plans can’t help but disappoint.

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“IN OIL AND GAS, THE QUESTION IS ‘WHY INNOVATE?’ HERE IT IS ‘WHY NOT INNOVATE? WHY DO IT IN THE NORMAL WAY IF YOU DON’T HAVE TO?’ ” technology, he determined, was far more mature and practical than the investment world at the time seemed to believe. But the various interests necessary to develop it were not coordinated. Scientists were discovering new materials and technology that stalled before reaching market. Companies tried to market clean-energy products at a steep cost disadvantage to fossil fuels, and government regulators hadn’t a clue how to support them. “There wasn’t a true champion across the world for renewable energy,” Jaber told me.

Masdar is intended to unify those elements by addressing everything there is to know about renewable energy—from the technology of generation and consumption to the economics of fnancing projects to the politics of getting them approved. “We’re trying to capture the whole thing,” said Bader al-Lamki, the 38-year-old director of Masdar Clean Energy, which builds and owns solar projects in Abu Dhabi and elsewhere and has a big stake in a gigantic ofshore wind farm near Great Britain. Lamki and I were sitting in a temporary building at the edge of the Masdar City construction site; he adjusted the red-and-white ghotra draped around his head and neck and nodded to a South Asian gentleman in a blue smock serving us tea.

“In other places, people are focusing on only one part,” he said. “Here, we integrate the whole value chain.”

Lamki’s division is one of four components of Masdar, the others being the Institute of Science and Technology; Masdar Capital, which bundles investors’ money into projects; and the centerpiece city itself.

Already, the organization has led renewable energy projects in Spain, Tonga, Mauritania, and elsewhere in the Emirates. One of Lamki’s most surprising prospects is in Saudi Arabia, which expects to have to triple its electricity production in the next 20 years. The Saudis already consume within their borders almost a third of the oil they produce, which is in large part due to air conditioning. They’re talking with Lamki’s group about trying to meet some of their future demand with power from the sun, the one resource the country has in greater abundance than oil.

I

M A K I NG S OL AR WORK f it’s to prove anything, Masdar must get solar power right. Abu Dhabi, where the temperature reaches 120°F and every drop of water must be desalinated, now burns so much natural gas to generate power that it has become a net importer. With Masdar, the country is trying to show that it can create huge 68 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

OiL-Free Cars are not allowed in Masdar. the personal rapid transport (prt) pods travel underground from the city’s edge to the Masdar Institute.

quantities of electricity without fossil fuels.

Masdar has spawned a handful of solar projects so far, but the largest is a concentrated solar power plant about a hundred miles from the city; on my second day, I drove out to see it. This part of the Arabian Peninsula looks less like the billowing-dune set of Lawrence of Arabia than like a vast plain of kitty litter. Crossing it in a rented marshmallow of a Kia was a 90-minute experiment in sensory deprivation. Airborne dust so obscured the horizon that the beige desert blended seamlessly with a beige sky.

Humans have generated heat by concentrating the sun’s rays at least since Archimedes reportedly used mirrors to torch a Roman feet attacking Syracuse in the third century B.C. Masdar’s plant contains 192 parabolic-mirrored troughs, each a little longer than a football feld and nearly 20-feet wide. A glass-clad steel pipe full of oil runs above each trough, at the focal point of the parabola. In the fve minutes it takes electric pumps to push a gallon of oil up one trough and down another, the gathered rays of the sun heat that oil to a blistering 740°F. Afer leaving the troughs, the hot pipes pass through a chamber of water. The heat from the oil converts the water to steam, which turns a turbine. The cooled oil then fows back to the mirrored troughs for reheating. Computer-operated hydraulic pistons constantly rotate the mirrors to trace the sun’s arc across the sky.

Afer a safety briefng in a trailer, I donned a hard hat, joined a group of engineers, and was shuttled by truck into the refector feld. One of the troughs was pointed sideways for maintenance, so we walked along it to get a good look. By the time we reached the end, the heat was so intense that it had all but set the backs of our pants on fre.

Concentrated solar technology has been around

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The Beam Down Optical Experiment the Beam down tower at Masdar is a step forward in concentrated solar power (Csp). unlike other plants, the system reflects sunlight twice, once from the heliostats to the central tower and once from the tower down to a collection platform at the system’s base. Because scientists can focus the sunlight at a very small area, they can achieve great heat. they recently concentrated solar energy to 1,100 degrees. the plant is currently only 100 kW, but designers say it could scale up easily. —Ajai Raj CONCENTRATE THE SUN thirty-three heliostats—mirrors arranged in the shape of a parabola—circle the 66-foot tower in three concentric rings.

Motors adjust the elevation and angle of the heliostats throughout the day to track the sun and direct the reflected light toward the underside of the tower.

BEAM IT DOWN an array of 45 mirrors made to reflect as much solar radiation as possible, also arranged in concentric circles, lines the underside of the central tower. each ring corresponds to a specific ring of heliostats. When the reflected sun from the heliostats reaches the tower array, the mirrors redirect the light down toward the base of the tower.

GENERATE POWER a ceramic receiver at the base of the tower absorbs the radiation. researchers at the Masdar Institute measure only radiation at their plant, but in commercial models— like planta solar 10 in spain—the radiation heats a tank filled with molten salt, air, or water. the medium then heats water to produce steam and drive a turbine.

for decades, but the Masdar plant was, when I visited last December, the biggest such project in the world.

(This year, it will be surpassed by one near Phoenix and one in northern Nevada; several more, as much as four times the size of Masdar’s, are under construction worldwide.) It is growing fast, with almost two gigawatts—enough to power up to two million homes— expected online worldwide by the end of 2013 and four times that under contract. That’s small compared with other renewables, such as photovoltaic power, which generated 20 times as much electricity worldwide at the end of 2010, and wind, which generated 100 times as much that same year. But concentrated solar has advantages that wind and PV lack. Of the three, it 70 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

MASDAR IS A MODEL FOR INNOVATION, A PLACE DEDICATED TO THE GENERATION OF SUSTAINABLE IDEAS. plant in July 2010 and the day he switched it on in December, Chinese companies so fooded the market with inexpensive photovoltaic panels that concentrated solar lost a lot of its cost advantage. “If this turns out to be a transitional technology, that’s okay,” said Abdulaziz al-Obaidli, a wiry young Emirati engineer on Longuet’s staf. “We’re learning about optics. We’re learning about metallurgy, astronomy, fuid dynamics, thermodynamics, manufacturing processes. It’s not just about power generation.” Obaidli also pointed out that the plant, obsolete or not, works. It can continue generating electricity for decades with, essentially, zero fuel costs.

T

INSIDE THE E NE RG Y LABS he more time I spent at Masdar, the more I realized that every aspect of the city is a research project. Cloaked in a brushed steel facade, the Masdar Institute is a warren of electronics-cluttered benches, humming machinery, and glass dividers covered with algorithms scrawled in grease pencil. Each lab focuses on a diferent kind of technology. In the Bio-Energy and

Co ntInu e D o n paG e 9 8

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alone generates heat, which, in addition to providing power, can be used to do things like desalinate water.

And unlike photovoltaic, concentrated solar power plants can also contribute power much more cheaply at night because they store energy as heat instead of in expensive batteries. A Masdar-afliated company built three concentrated solar power plants in Spain that use molten salt as its medium, improving heat capture and storage even further.

“Masdar wanted to make this simple and big, the frst of its kind in the Middle East,” said Laurent Longuet, the plant’s project manager. Longuet came from the French oil-and-gas company Total and found the transition to the renewables world a pleasant shock. “Oil guys are very conservative,” he said. “In oil and gas, the question is ‘Why innovate?’ Here, it’s ‘Why not innovate? Why do it in the normal way if we don’t have to?’ ” As we spoke, Longuet surprised me by conceding that his plant, though brand-new, is essentially obsolete. One of the concentrated solar power plants that Masdar built in Spain uses clustered mirrors around a central tower instead of parabolic troughs, which generates much higher temperatures. Also, between the time Longuet started building the Masdar

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S NIFF TE ST Dogs are the best bomb detectors we have.

Can scientists do better?

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BY JOSH DEAN

JUNE 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 73

SNIFF TEST

in Oxford, Alabama, and were it not a weekday morning, the tiled halls would be thronged with shoppers, and I’d probably feel much weirder walking past Victoria’s Secret with TNT in my pants. The explosive is harmless in its current form—powdered and sealed inside a pair of fourounce nylon pouches tucked into the back pockets of my jeans—but it’s volatile enough to do its job, which is to attract the interest of a homeland defender in training by the name of Suge.

Suge is an adolescent black Labrador retriever in an orange do not pet vest. He is currently a pupil at Auburn University’s Canine Detection Research Institute and comes to the mall once a week to practice for his future job: protecting America from terrorists by snifng the air with extreme prejudice.

Olfaction is a canine’s primary sense. It is to him what vision is to a human, the chief input for data. For more than a year, the trainers at Auburn have honed that sense in Suge to detect something very explicit and menacing: molecules that indicate the presence of an explosive, such as the one I’m carrying.

The TNT powder has no discernible scent to me, but to Suge it has a very distinct chemical signature. He can detect that signature almost instantly, even in an environment crowded with thousands of other scents.

Auburn has been turning out the world’s most highly 74 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

tuned detection dogs for nearly 15 years, but Suge is part of the school’s newest and most elite program. He is a Vapor Wake dog, trained to operate in crowded public spaces, continuously assessing the invisible vapor trails human bodies leave in their wake.

Unlike traditional bomb-snifng dogs, which are brought to a specifc target—say, a car trunk or a suspicious package—the Vapor Wake dog is meant to foil a particularly nasty kind of bomb, one carried into a high trafc area by a human, perhaps even a suicidal one. In busy locations, searching individuals is logistically impossible, and fxating on specifc suspects would be a waste of time. Instead, a Vapor Wake dog targets the ambient air.

As I approach the mall’s central courtyard, where its two wings of chain stores intersect, Suge is pacing back and forth at the end of a lead, nose in the air. At frst, I walk toward him and then swing wide to feign interest in a table covered with crystal curios. When Suge isn’t looking, I walk past him at a distance of about 10 feet, making sure to hug the entrance of Bath & Body Works, conveniently the most odoriferous store in the entire mall. Within seconds, I hear the clattering of the dog’s toenails on the hard tile foor behind me.

As Suge struggles at the end of his lead (once he’s better trained, he’ll alert his handler to threats in a less obvious manner), I reach into my jacket and pull out a well-chewed ball on a rope—his reward for a job well done—and toss it over my shoulder. Christmas shoppers giggle at the sight of a black Lab chasing a ball around a mall courtyard, oblivious that had I been an actual terrorist, he would have just saved their lives.

That Suge can detect a small amount of TNT at a distance of 10 feet in a crowded mall in front of a shop flled with scented soaps, lotions, and perfumes is an extraordinary demonstration of the canine’s olfactory ability. But what if, as a terrorist, I’d spotted Suge from a distance and changed my path to avoid him? And what if I’d chosen to visit one of the thousands of malls, train stations, and subway platforms that don’t have Vapor Wake dogs on patrol?

STR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

It’s Christmas season at the Quintard Mall,

POPULAR SCIENCE PERFECT SCENT Bomb-sniffing dogs have become common in airports and train stations, like this one in Beijing, because they can detect minuscule concentrations of explosives.

Dogs may be the most refned scent-detection devices humans have, a technology in development for 10,000 years or more, but they’re hardly perfect. Graduates of Auburn’s program can cost upwards of $30,000. They require hundreds of hours of training starting at birth.

There are only so many trainers and a limited supply of purebred dogs with the right qualities for detection work. Auburn trains no more than a couple of hundred a year, meaning there will always be many fewer dogs than there are malls or military units. Also, dogs are sentient creatures. Like us, they get sleepy; they get scared; they die. Sometimes they make mistakes.

As the tragic bombing at the Boston Marathon made all too clear, explosives remain an ever-present danger, and law enforcement and military personnel need dogs—and their noses—to combat them. But it also made clear that security forces need something in addition to canines, something reliable, mass-producible, and easily positioned in a multitude of locations. In other words, they need an artifcial nose.

IN 1997, DARPA CREATED A PROGRAM to develop just such a device, targeted specifcally to land mines.

No group was more aware than the Pentagon of the pervasive and existential threat that explosives represent to troops in the feld, and it was becoming increasingly apparent that the need for bomb detection extended beyond the battlefeld. In 1988, a group of terrorists brought down Pam Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. In 1993, Ramzi Yousef and Eyad Ismoil drove a Ryder truck full of explosives into the underground garage at the World Trade Center in New York, nearly bringing down one tower. And in 1995, Timothy McVeigh detonated another Ryder truck full of explosives in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168. The “Dog’s Nose Program,” as it was called, was deemed a national security priority.

Over the course of three years, scientists in the program made the frst genuine headway in developing a device that could “snif” explosives in ambient air rather than test for them directly. In particular, an MIT chemist named Timothy Swager honed in on the idea of using fuorescent polymers that, when bound to molecules given of by TNT, would turn of, signaling the presence of the chemical. The idea eventually developed into a handheld device called Fido, which is still widely used today in the hunt for IEDs (many of which contain TNT). But that’s where progress stalled.

Olfaction, in the most reductive sense, is chemical detection. In animals, molecules bind to receptors that trigger a signal that’s sent to the brain for interpretation.

In machines, scientists typically use mass spectrometry in lieu of receptors and neurons. Most scents, explosives included, are created from a specifc combination of molecules. To reproduce a dog’s nose, scientists need to detect minute quantities of those molecules and identify the threatening combinations. TNT was relatively easy. It has a high vapor pressure, meaning it releases abundant molecules into the air. That’s why Fido works. Most other common explosives, notably RDX (the primary component of C-4) and PETN (in plastic explosives such as Semtex), have very low vapor pressures—parts per trillion at equilibrium and once they’re loose in the air perhaps even parts per quadrillion.

“That was just beyond the capabilities of any instrumentation until very recently,” says David Atkinson, a senior research scientist at the Pacifc Northwest National Laboratory, in Richland, Washington. A gregarious, slightly bearish man with a thick goatee, Atkinson is the co-founder and “perpetual co-chair” of the annual Workshop on Trace Explosives Detection. In 1988, he was a PhD candidate at Washington State University when Pam Am Flight 103 went down. “That was the turning point,” he says. “I’ve spent the last 20 years helping to keep explosives of airplanes.” He might at last be on the verge of a solution.

When I visit him in mid-January, Atkinson beckons me into a cluttered lab with a view of the Columbia River. At certain times of the year, he says he can see eagles swooping in to poach salmon as they spawn.

“We’re going to show you the device we think can get rid of dogs,” he says jokingly and points to an ungainly, photocopier–size machine with a long copper snout in a corner of the lab; wires run haphazardly from various parts.

Last fall, Atkinson and two colleagues did something tremendous: They proved, for the frst time, that a machine could perform direct vapor detection of two common explosives—RDX and PETN—under ambient conditions.

In other words, the machine “snifed” the vapor as a dog would, from the air, and identifed the explosive molecules without frst heating or concentrating the sample, as currently deployed chemical-detection machines (for instance, the various tracedetection machines at airport security checkpoints) must. In one shot, Atkinson opened a door to the direct detection of the world’s most nefarious explosives.

AS THE BOMBING AT THE BOSTON MARATHON MADE CLEAR, WE NEED DOGS—AND THEIR NOSES. JUNE 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 75

SNIFF TEST

As Atkinson explains the details of his machine, senior scientist Robert Ewing, a trim man in black jeans and a speckled gray shirt that exactly matches his salt-and-pepper hair, prepares a demonstration. Ewing grabs a glass slide soiled with RDX, an explosive that even in equilibrium has a vapor pressure of just fve parts per trillion. This particular sample, he says, is more than a year old and just sits out on the counter exposed; the point being that it’s weak. Ewing raises this sample to the snout end of a copper pipe about an inch in diameter. That pipe delivers the air to an ionization source, which selectively pairs explosive compounds with charged particles, and then on to a commercial mass spectrometer about the size of a small copy machine. No piece of the machine is especially complicated; for the most part, Atkinson and Ewing built it with of-the-shelf parts.

Ewing allows the machine to snif the RDX sample and then points to a computer monitor where a line graph that looks like an EKG shows what is being smelled. Within seconds, the graph spikes. Ewing repeats the experiment with C-4 and then again with Semtex. Each time, the machine senses the explosive.

A commercial version of Atkinson’s machine could have enormous implications for public safety, but to get the technology from the lab to the feld will require overcoming a few hurdles. As it stands, the machine recognizes only a handful of explosives (at least nine as of April), although both Ewing and Atkinson are confdent that they can work out the chemistry to detect others if they get the funding. Also, Atkinson will need to shrink it to a practical size. The current smallest version of a high-performance mass spectrometer is about the size of a laser printer—too big for

THE MACHINE “SNIFFED” JUST AS A DOG WOULD AND IDENTIFIED THE EXPLOSIVE MOLECULES. 76 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

police or soldiers to carry in the feld. Scientists have not yet found a way to shrink the device’s vacuum pump. DARPA, Atkinson says, has funded a project to dramatically reduce the size of vacuum pumps, but it’s unclear if the work can be applied to mass spectrometry.

If Atkinson can reduce the footprint of his machine, even marginally, and refne his design, he imagines plenty of very useful applications. For instance, a version afxed to the millimeter wave booths now common at American airports (the ones that require passengers to stand with their hands in the air—also invented at PNNL, by the way) could use a tube to snif air and deliver it to a mass spectrometer. Soldiers could also mount one to a Humvee or an autonomous vehicle that could drive up and snif suspicious piles of rubble in situations too perilous for a human or dog. If Atkinson could reach backpack size or smaller, he may even be able to get portable versions into the hands of those who need them most: the marines on patrol in Afghanistan, the Amtrak cops guarding America’s rail stations, or the ofcers watching over a parade or road race.

Atkinson is not alone in his quest for a better nose. A research group at MIT is studying the use of carbon nanotubes lined with peptides extracted from bee venom that bind to certain explosive molecules.

And at the French-German Research Institute in France, researcher Denis Spitzer is experimenting with a chemical detector made from microelectromechanical machines (MEMs) and modeled on the antennae of a male silkworm moth, which are sensitive enough to detect a single molecule of female pheromone in the air.

Atkinson may have been frst to demonstrate extremely sensitive chemical detection—and that research is all but guaranteed to strengthen terror defense—but he and other scientists still have a long way to go before they approach the sophistication of a dog nose. One challenge is to develop a snifng mechanism. “With any electronic nose, you have to get the odorant into the detector,” says Mark Fisher, a senior scientist at Flir Systems, the company that holds the patent for Fido, the IED detector. Every snif a dog takes, it processes about half a liter of air, and a dog snifs up to 10 times per second. Fido processes fewer than 100 milliliters per minute, and Atkinson’s machine snifs a maximum of 20 liters per minute.

Another much greater challenge, perhaps even insurmountable, is to master the mechanisms of smell itself.

OLFACTION IS THE OLDEST of the sensory systems and also the least understood. It is complicated and ancient, sometimes called the primal sense because it dates back to the origin of life itself. The singlecelled organisms that frst foated in the primordial soup would have had a chemical detection system in order to locate food and avoid danger. In humans, it’s the only sense with its own dedicated processing

COUR TESY PACIFIC NOR THWEST NATIONAL L ABOR ATOR Y

LAB NOSE David Atkinson at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has created a system that uses a mass spectrometer to detect the molecular weights of common explosives in air.

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POPULAR SCIENCE

station in the brain—the olfactory bulb—and also the only one that doesn’t transmit its data directly to the higher brain. Instead, the electrical impulses triggered when odorant molecules bind with olfactory receptors route frst through the limbic system, home of emotion and memory. This is why smell is so likely to trigger nostalgia or, in the case of those sufering from PTSD, paralyzing fear.

All mammals share the same basic system, although there is great variance in sensitivity between species.

Those that use smell as the primary survival sense, in particular rodents and dogs, are orders of magnitude better than humans at identifying scents. Architecture has a lot to do with that. Dogs are lower to the ground, where molecules tend to land and linger. They also snif much more frequently and in a completely diferent way (by frst exhaling to clear distracting scents from around a target and then inhaling), drawing more molecules to their much larger array of olfactory receptors. Good scent dogs have 10 times as many receptors as humans, and 35 percent of the canine brain is devoted to smell, compared with just 5 percent in humans.

Unlike hearing and vision, both of which have been fairly well understood since the 19th century, scientists frst explained smell only 50 years ago. “In terms of the physiological mechanisms of how the system works, that really started only a few decades ago,” says Richard Doty, director of the Smell and Taste Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “And the more people learn, the more complicated it gets.”

Whereas Atkinson’s vapor detector identifes a few specifc chemicals using mass spectrometry, animal systems can identify thousands of scents that are, for whatever reason, important to their survival. When molecules fnd their way into a nose, they bind with olfactory receptors that dangle like upside-down fowers from a sheet of brain tissue known as the olfactory epithelium. Once a set of molecules links to particular receptors, an electrical signal is sent through axons into the olfactory bulb and then through the limbic system and into the cortex, where the brain assimilates that information and says, “Yum, delicious

The Mechanical Bomb Snifer

Vacuum pump

Ionization source Reaction tube

Explosive molecules

Last fall, David Atkinson and a team at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory announced that they had “sniffed” certain explosives in ambient air for the first time. Most common explosives— RDX, PETN, blasting gels—exist in very low ambient concentrations, often in the parts-per-quadrillion range. Existing detectors are not that sensitive, meaning security forces need to test suspects directly, as in airports. A version of Atkinson’s machine could simply sniff targets, speeding the process. “It could change the way we do screening for explosive threats,” he says. —Josh Dean

78 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

BOMB PATROL To condition detection dogs to crowds and unpredictable situations, such as Washington, D.C.’s Union Station at Thanksgiving [above], trainers send them to prisons to interact with inmates.

NO3 ions

Mass spectrometer

Adducts

1

2

3

4

5

Scientists spike a glass slide with residue from a few known explosives.

A vacuum pump within the detector sucks air through a one-inch wide opening at a rate of between one and five liters per minute.

The vapor passes through a copper tube toward an ionization source.

Nitrate ions, which have a high charge affinity, collide with the highly polar explosive molecules, so they tend to stick together, forming an adduct—or cluster molecule.

To ensure that many of the explosive molecules in the airstream are ionized, Atkinson’s team used a long, copper reaction tube to extend the reaction period to approximately two seconds.

Electric fields on the front of the commercial mass spectrometer guide the charged ions through a 600-micron-wide passage into the mass spectrometer itself.

The mass spectrometer analyzes the sample and determines the molecular weight. Currently, Atkinson’s team can detect at least nine explosives, including PETN, RDX, C-4, Semtex, smokeless powder, and some blasting gels.

MANDEL NG AN/AFP/GE T T Y IMAGES ; ILLUSTR ATION BY TR E VOR JOHNSTON

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POPULAR SCIENCE

Five Feats of Smell FIND SCHOOLS OF FISH: The albatross can smell fish from the air. Researchers have found that an albatross will alter its course toward prey located well out of visual range. The birds can monitor a miles-wide swath of ocean as they fly in a single direction.

SMELL IN STEREO: Scientists recently discovered that the Eastern American mole smells in stereo. Because they’re blind and have little use for hearing, moles use stereoscopic smell to determine their location and the location of their prey.

LOCATE A DISTANT MATE: Moths don’t have noses.

Instead, they have antennae covered in scent receptors.

While they don’t detect every scent well, male silkworm moths can sense a single molecule of female sex hormone from at least a mile away.

DETECT SPECIFIC PROTEINS: Sharks breathe with their gills, so their noses serve only to smell. They are particularly well tuned for hunting. Sharks can sense a prey’s amino acids at concentrations as low as one part per billion.

TARGET A SINGLE SCENT: Dogs have a keen ability to discriminate among smells. An Auburn tracking dog can follow a single human trail, laid more than 24 hours before, across a campus crisscrossed by tens of thousands of students. —Susan E. Matthews 80 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

imagine. For instance, humans don’t dream in smells, he says, but dogs might. “They may have the ability to conceptualize smells,” he says, meaning that instead of visualizing an idea in their mind’s eye, they might smell it.

Animals can also convey metadata with scent.

When a dog smells a telephone pole, he’s reading a bulletin board of information: which dogs have passed by, which ones are in heat, etc. Dogs can also sense pheromones in other species. The old adage is that they can smell fear, but scientists have proved that they can smell other things, like cancer or diabetes. Gary Beauchamp, who heads the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, says that a “mouse snifng another mouse can obtain much more information about that mouse than you or I could by looking at someone.”

If breaking chemical codes is simple spelling, deciphering this sort of metadata is grammar and syntax. And while dogs are fuent in this mysterious language, scientists are only now learning the ABC’s.

THERE ARE FEW PEOPLE who better appreciate the complexities of smell than Paul Waggoner, a behavioral scientist and the associate director of Auburn’s Canine Research Detection Institute. He has been hacking the dog’s nose for more than 20 years.

“By the time you leave, you won’t look at a dog the same way again,” he says, walking me down a hall where military intelligence trainees were once taught to administer polygraphs and out a door and past some pens where new puppies spend their days.

The CRDI occupies part of a former Army base in the Appalachian foothills and breeds and trains between 100 and 200 dogs—mostly Labrador retrievers, but also Belgian Malinois, German shepherds, and German shorthaired pointers—a year for Amtrak, the Department of Homeland Security, police departments across the U.S., and the military. Training begins in the frst weeks of life, and Waggoner points out that the foor of the puppy corrals is made from a shiny tile meant to mimic the slick surfaces they will encounter at malls, airports, and sporting arenas. Once weaned, the puppies go to prisons in Florida and Georgia, where they get socialized among prisoners in a loud, busy, and unpredictable environment. And then they come home to Waggoner.

What Waggoner has done over tens of thousands of hours of careful study is begin to quantify a dog’s olfactory abilities. For instance, how small a sample dogs can detect (parts per trillion, at least); how many diferent types of scents they can detect (within a

FROM TOP: STE VE ALLEN/GE T T Y IMAGES ; JUSTUS DE CUVEL AND/GE T T Y IMAGES ; PAUL BE ARD/GE T T Y IMAGES ; JEFF ROTMAN/GE T T Y IMAGES ; DOHLONGMA -HL MAK/GETT Y IMAGES

WHILE DOGS ARE FLUENT IN THE MYSTERIOUS LANGUAGE OF SMELL, SCIENTISTS ARE ONLY NOW LEARNING THE ABC’S.

cofee is nearby.”

As is the case with explosives, most smells are compounds of chemicals (only a very few are pure; for instance, vanilla is only vanillin), meaning that the system must pick up all those molecules together and recognize the particular combination as gasoline, say, and not diesel or kerosene. Doty explains the system as a kind of code, and he says, “The code for a particular odor is some combination of the proteins that get activated.”

To create a machine that parses odors as well as dogs, science has to unlock the chemical codes and program artifcial receptors to alert for multiple odors as well as combinations.

In some ways, Atkinson’s machine is the frst step in this process. He’s unlocked the codes for a few critical explosives and has built a device sensitive enough to detect them, simply by snifng the air.

But he has not had the beneft of many thousands of years of bioengineering. Canine olfaction, Doty says, is sophisticated in ways that humans can barely

POPULAR SCIENCE

BOTH THE DOG PEOPLE AND THE SCIENTISTS WORKING TO EMULATE THE CANINE NOSE HAVE A COMMON GOAL: TO STOP BOMBS FROM BLOWING UP.

ANIMAL MIND Paul Waggoner at Auburn University treats dogs as technology. He studies their neurological responses to olfactory triggers with an MRI machine.

certain subset, explosives for instance, there seems to be no limit, and a new odor can be learned in hours); whether training a dog on multiple odors degrades its overall detection accuracy (typically, no); and how certain factors like temperature and fatigue afect performance.

The idea that the dog is a static technology just waiting to be obviated really bothers Waggoner, because he feels like he’s innovating every bit as much as Atkinson and the other lab scientists. “We’re still learning how to select, breed, and get a better dog to start with—then how to better train it and, perhaps most importantly, how to train the people who operate those dogs.”

Waggoner even taught his dogs to climb into an MRI machine and endure the noise and tedium of a scan. If he can identify exactly which neurons are fring in the presence of specifc chemicals and develop a system to convey that information to trainers, he says it could go a long way toward eliminating false alarms. And if he could get even more specifc—whether, say, RDX fres diferent cells than PETN—that information might inform more targeted responses from bomb squads.

Afer a full day of watching trainers demonstrate the multitudinous abilities of CRDI’s dogs, Waggoner leads me back to his sparsely furnished ofce and clicks a video fle on his computer. It was from a lecture he’d given at an explosives conference, and it featured Major, a yellow Lab wearing what looked like a shrunken version of the Google Street View car array on its back. Waggoner calls this experiment Autonomous Canine Navigation.

Working with preloaded maps, a computer delivered

specifc directions to the dog. By transmitting beeps that indicated lef, right, and back, it helped Major navigate an abandoned “town” used for urban warfare training. From a laptop, Waggoner could monitor the dog’s position using both cameras and a GPS dot, while tracking its snif rate. When the dog signaled the presence of explosives, the laptop fashed an alert, and a pin was dropped on the map.

It’s not hard to imagine this being very useful in urban battlefeld situations or in the case of a large area and a fast-ticking clock—say, an anonymous threat of a bomb inside an ofce building set to detonate in 30 minutes. Take away the human and the leash, and a dog can sweep entire foors at a near sprint. “To be as versatile as a dog, to have all capabilities in one device, might not be possible,” Waggoner says.

It’s important to recognize that both sides—the dog people and the scientists working to emulate the canine nose—have a common goal: to stop bombs from blowing up. And the most efective result of this technology race, Waggoner thinks, is a complementary relationship between dog and machine. It’s impractical, for instance, to expect even a team of Vapor Wake dogs to protect Grand Central Terminal, but railroad police could perhaps one day install a version of Atkinson’s snifer at that station’s diferent entrances. If one alerts, they could call in the dogs.

There’s a reason Flir Systems, the maker of Fido, has a dog research group, and it’s not just for comparative study, says the man who runs it, Kip Schultz. “I think where the industry is headed, if it has forethought, is a combination,” he told me. “There are some things a dog does very well. And some things a machine does very well. You can use one’s strengths against the other’s weaknesses and come out with a far better solution.”

Despite working for a company that is focused mostly on sensor innovation, Schultz agrees with Waggoner that we should be simultaneously pushing the dog as a technology. “No one makes the research investment to try to get an Apple approach to the dog,” he says. “What could he do for us 10 or 15 years from now that we haven’t thought of yet?”

On the other hand, dogs aren’t always the right choice; they’re probably a bad solution for screening airline cargo, for example. It’s a critical task, but it’s tedious work snifng thousands of bags per day as they roll by on a conveyor belt. There, a snifer mounted over the belt makes far more sense. It never gets bored.

“The perception that sensors will put dogs out of business—I’m telling you that’s not going to happen,” Schultz told me, at the end of a long conference call.

Mark Fisher, who was also on the line, laughed. “Dogs aren’t going to put sensors out of business either.”

Josh Dean lives in Brooklyn and is the author of Show Dog: The Charmed Life and Trying Times of a Near-Perfect Purebred.

82 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

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POPSCI.COM

The world’s smallest arcade machine PAGE 92

PLUS:

A do-it-yourself printer that uses living microbes as ink PAGE 94

JUNE 2013

HOW 2.0 H20@POPSCI.COM

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WAR NING 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.

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AIR TIME Jason Bell’s 2,500-pound contraption is powered by compressed air. He estimates that 24 BASE jumpers have used it to fly off the New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia.

YOU BUILT WHAT?!

Human Catapult An air-powered lever that launches people into the sky

M

echanical engineer Jason Bell has helped people throw themselves off the New River Gorge Bridge in Fayetteville, West Virginia, for more than a decade. About 400 BASE jumpers each year, in fact, leap from the 876-foot-high span before deploying their parachutes at Bridge Day, an annual extreme sports event Bell helps run. But two years ago, he decided to build a new thrill for spectators and jumpers alike: a catapult that hurls daredevils head over heels into the chasm below.

Bell’s creations include an electric go-kart and an automated towrope to pull his kids up their backyard sledding hill; he even built smart features into his home. (He can remotely adjust lighting, audio, security, and video camera systems.) But he had never attempted to build anything quite as daring as a human catapult.

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JUNE 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 89

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“Very few have been built, and many have resulted in disaster,” he says.

“That just made it all the more challenging.”

The basic elements, at least, came together easily. Every October on Bridge Day, local authorities allow Bell to co-opt a 20-foot-deep section of the bridge for BASE jumpers, which means his catapult could be no longer than that. Bell spent a year drafting the structure—a sturdy base and an arm made of steel tubing— using a 3-D design software called SolidWorks. He eventually settled on a rotating arm 12 feet long, which a local workshop agreed to machine to his specifications. Meanwhile, Bell spent nights and weekends in his garage constructing a compressedair launching system [see “How It Works,” facing page].

In the first tests, Bell and his friend Joe Caulfield launched stuffed animals, laundry bags, and 200-pound sandbags across his front lawn. The catapult hurled even the heaviest objects more than 50 feet.

At one point, however, the stress forced a bearing to shoot out of the catapult’s arm joint like a bullet. (On Bridge Day, two of the caster wheels even cracked from the strain exerted by the 2,500-pound machine.) Bell created and installed a custom bearing, added spring-loaded shocks to cushion stress on the casters, and tweaked a few other features to handle the abuse.

Last summer, Bell towed the catapult to a local lake to try it out with some friends. He sat in the chair as a buddy threw open a ball valve, retracting a piston with compressed air.

The arm sprang up within a second, hurling him high above the lake.

“This smooth but sudden sensation launches you upward, and then, all of a sudden, you say, ‘Hey, I’m not in the chair anymore,’ ” he says. “I came out of the water hootin’ and hollerin’ like a teenager.” Bell says the catapult’s official debut at Bridge Day later that year was just as big a hit among BASE jumpers. “It’s something I’ll remember for the rest of my life,” he says.

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90 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

H U M A N C ATA P U LT

HOW IT WORKS

Time 2 years Cost $25,000

5 1 2

3

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THE MACHINE An 11hp gas motor [1] turns a belt to drive an air compressor [2], which feeds a 120-gallon steel holding tank [3]. When Bell turns a ball-valve handle, air pressurized to 130 psi rushes into a pneumatic cylinder [4] attached to the base of a forward-swinging arm. The bucket seat that Bell installed at the top of the arm [5] can accommodate a BASE jumper’s parachute pack. When the cylinder’s piston retracts, it yanks the arm’s base and—like a lopsided seesaw—pivots and flips the chair from horizontal to nearly vertical in less than a second.

THE TECHNIQUE Tests at the lake proved sitting upright in the seat wasn’t ideal for deploying a parachute—Caulfield and other volunteers flew headfirst into the water. They solved the problem by sitting upside-down, which flipped them into a stable vertical position.

THE FUTURE Although the catapult can launch a person 20 feet high and 50 feet away, that’s not good enough for Bell. He plans to retrofit the device with lightweight aluminum parts so its piston can fling people higher and farther. “I’m also looking into buying a big airbag so I can launch people onto that,” he says.

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HOW 2.0 / THEME BUILDING STORY BY SUSAN E. MAT THEWS & ROSE CONRY

Hacked Classics

Three games shrunk, digitized, and boozed up to a whole new level

I

Time 6 Months Cost $90

n 2006, Mark Slevinsky fixed a Tron arcade game that a friend had left for trash. The work inspired similar gaming projects, ultimately leading him to a nerdy world record this year.

While surfing the Web, Slevinksy saw printed-paper models of arcade machines, each about the size of a Game Boy. Since he had already created an operating system for small microcontroller computers, he wondered: Why not build a functional mini arcade? He started by adapting the software to play classics such as Tetris, Space Invaders, and Breakout.

Next, he needed power. Two 1.5-volt AAA batteries could support 13 hours of game play yet lacked the juice to run a tiny, five-volt LED screen. Retail power supply circuits couldn’t handle the voltage conversion—they all blew up—so he eventually made his own.

Slevinsky tucked the components into a wooden case and outfitted it with a joystick and button. He named it the Markade, and Guinness World Records deemed it the smallest device of its kind this year. Slevinsky’s friends typically play five minutes, which he says lasts “a round of each game, or until they develop hand cramps”—on par with old-school arcade consoles.

Time 2 months Cost $175

92 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

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Time 3 months Cost $150

TWEETING FOOSBALL TABLE BATTLESHOTS Bored by beer pong, Kevin Kittle turned Battleship into a booze-infused board game.

He built Battleshots’ playing surface out of wood, steel, and acrylic and applied a grid using fluorescent paint that glows under a blacklight. Then Kittle drilled holes in wooden ships to hold neon shot glasses.

As in the real game, a player tries to guess the locations of his opponent’s ships. If someone’s vessel takes a hit, he must do a shot. Kittle suggests using tonic-infused concoctions, because quinine glows in ultraviolet light. Sink responsibly.

To build office camaraderie at SinnerSchrader, a Hamburg-based technology company, a team of developers designed a Foosball table that sends scores and standings to the Web in real time. Players log in to a mobile application with their Twitter handles. Photo sensors in the table’s chutes register goals and relay the data to a Wi-Fi–enabled Arduino microcontroller. The device updates players’ Twitter accounts while pushing game stats to their phones.

At first, the company worried that publicizing games would discourage play, but two of the project’s developers—Thomas Jacob and Uli Schumacher—say it has created more foosball fanatics than ever before.

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HOW 2.0 / DIY EVOLUTION STOR Y BY A JAI R A J

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f office printers can build images by spraying tiny blobs of ink onto paper, why couldn’t they also print in living cells?

The question compelled Patrik D’haeseleer and a few collaborators at Biocurious, a biohackerspace in Sunnyvale, California, to build a machine that prints patterns of bacteria engineered to glow green. The team first altered a Hewlett-Packard 5150 printer but met two complications: The ink cartridges used filters and nozzles too fine to allow bacteria through, and the device’s single range of motion thwarted printing directly onto gelatinous petri dishes. So they started over, beginning with an Arduino-controlled

IT’S ALIVE! Biohackers created microbial ink that glows in UV light [top] by engineering E. coli bacteria to produce green fluorescent protein only in the presence of arabinose sugar.

printing device called the InkShield—a gadget with inkjet nozzles large enough to accommodate E. coli. Next, they built a two-axis printing platform out of old CD drives.

They filled the cartridge with bacteria engineered to glow in the presence of arabinose (a sugar E. coli likes to eat) and printed the microbes on petri dishes laced with arabinose. Soon, living luminescent words appeared.

D’haeseleer is now replacing the nozzles on the machine with a syringe pump that can print in gels as well as liquid solutions. He says he hopes to use it to lay down 3-D biological structures on the fly—perhaps even an artificial leaf that performs photosynthesis.

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Barf Bag Phone Mount THEN

POPULAR SCIENCE ARCHIVE

Clothes Wringer Etching Press In 1939, POPULAR SCIENCE published instructions for building an etching press out of an old clothes wringer.

With the addition of a 35-cent scribing tool (about $5.79 today) and a few easy modifications to the clothes wringer, aspiring printmakers could etch patterns onto paper and even silk. It was a great way to bring a design to life—though not quite as literally as today.

Become the envy of fellow passengers on TV-free airplanes

On the streets of Manila, Flynn Jason Siy entertains himself with urban gymnastics. On airplanes, he avenges boredom with barf bags. During a budget flight to the resort island of Boracay—on a plane lacking TVs—Siy made a cradle for his smartphone from the metal closure tabs of several bags, allowing him to comfortably watch movies on the device. Here’s how to engineer your own seat-back screen in a few minutes.

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headphones, sit back, relax, and (actually) enjoy the flight.

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HAVE A BURNING SCIENCE QUESTION? E-mail it to fyi@popsci. com, or tweet @popsci hashtag #PopSciFYI.

ANSWERS BY DANIEL ENGBER

Q: LEF T TO RIGHT: SCIENCE PICTURE CO/GE T T Y IMAGES ; GIORGIO MAGINI/GE T T Y IMAGES

Q:

DO PA R A SI T E S GE T PA R A SI T E S ?

SHORT ANSWER YES— AND THOSE PAR ASITES GET PAR ASITES TOO. LONG ANSWER

Parasites of parasites—sometimes called hyperparasites—seem to be quite common. In fact, parasites of parasites are themselves prone to parasites, leading to what might appear to be an endless progression of interspecies abuse.

Studies in the lab and field have identified some of these elaborate, nested relationships. Last November, a team of researchers in the Netherlands published research on a wasp that lays its eggs inside a caterpillar, which in turn feeds on cabbage leaves. That means the nutrients and energy pass through three distinct organisms, and the same lab has documented related systems with even more layers of interaction.

Seth Bordenstein, a microbiologist at Vanderbilt University, studies a five-tiered system that starts with

a fledgling bird. Blowflies infest the bird’s underside with bloodsucking larvae, which then drop off and fall prey to hyperparasitic wasps. The wasps, in turn, carry a parasitic bacterium called Wolbachia, which has evolved to modify its host’s reproductive system.

The bacteria are subject to their own invasion, though, from tiny viruses known as bacteriophages, which hijack Wolbachia’s cellular machinery to expand their population.

Just how small can parasites get?

The final layer of these systems might be the transposon, which is a roving bit of nucleic acid—a single, parasitic gene. Transposons have been discovered inside viruses that infect other viruses, which in turn infect amoebas that infect human beings.

“I think it’s difficult to see where one organism begins and another one ends,” Bordenstein says. “We are only beginning to appreciate how intertwined these layers of organisms are in large flora and fauna.”

DO W IND FA RMS M A K E I T L E SS W IND Y ?

SHORT ANSWER THEY CAN, AND THEY A L SO CH A N G E TH E TE M PE R AT U R E.

LONG ANSWER Wind turbines extract kinetic energy from the air around them, and since less energy makes for weaker winds, turbines do indeed make it less windy. Technically speaking, the climate zone right behind a turbine (or behind all the turbines on a wind farm) experiences what’s called a “wind speed vacuum,” or a “momentum deficit.” In other words, the air slows down.

The effect has implications for wind-farm efficiency.

Upwind turbines in a densely packed farm may weaken the breeze before it reaches the downwind ones. It could even have a more general impact. If wind farms were constructed on a truly massive scale, their cumulative momentum deficit could conceivably alter wind speeds on a global scale (though how winds would change is complex—they’d likely slow in places and speed up in others).

Wind farms can also affect the local temperature.

According to Somnath Baidya Roy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois, as a breeze passes over a wind farm, the turbines create an atmospheric wake where wind speeds drop and turbulence increases. The rotors spawn a set of eddies that mix air from above with air from below.

The eddies can lift cool air and sink warm air or vice-versa.

That turbulence could raise or lower local temperatures. In a paper published in 2012, one group of researchers studied areas over several wind farms in Texas and found that local surface temperatures had risen by a small but significant amount.

JUNE 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 97

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Environmental Lab, students are developing microbial fuel cells that could generate power while remediating waste. In the Smart Technology for Electric Vehicles and Automotive Systems lab, they are designing integrated networks that could connect drivers and vehicles to road and trafc conditions. There are labs that focus on artifcial intelligence, nano-materials, nanoscale energy storage, solar cells, and more.

In the microsystems lab, I met Jerald Yoo, a professor of engineering from South Korea. Sitting at a bench littered with bits of wire and tools, he held up a black T-shirt with a silvery pattern silk-screened on it.

“Printed circuits,” he said. Someday, he said, circuitry embedded into our clothes will constantly monitor our health, perhaps sending regular updates to our phones. That could have big implications for those with health conditions; for example, Yoo told me, bandages with his circuits could detect seizures 10 seconds before they happen.

With that much warning, he said, a current can be applied to supress the seizure. I asked how his project related to Masdar’s goal of an energy-sustainable future. “The circuits have to consume extremely little energy,” he said. “Masdar’s mission is not only how to produce energy sustainably but also how to consume the least energy to do the work.”

The institute’s marquee project is a gigantic tower of mirrors on the edge of town called the Beam Down Solar Thermal Concentrator. The device not only concentrates solar rays to generate heat but will one day also split light into various wavelengths for scientifc experiments, thermal energy production, and even more efcient energy generation. Its mastermind is Matteo Chiesa, a young Norwegian professor of nano-science who doused me with a fre hose of technical jargon in the apparent belief that I, too, held a PhD in applied mechanics. I nodded politely as he paced his ofce in a T-shirt and sandals, pulling on his long, wild hair. He struck me as a little stir-crazy. Chiesa has been in Masdar for fve years—he claims to have been the institute’s 37th employee—and in that time, he and his colleagues have published more than 60 scientifc papers.

I asked him whether he liked being here.

“Happiness means death,” he said. Until other residents beyond the students and faculty at the institute begin to call Masdar home, the place and its inhabitants will remain pretty isolated.

98 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

O

THE IM P OSSIBLE CITY ne particularly blazing afernoon, I joined Stephen Severance on a stone bench in the center of Masdar City.

I wanted an impression of life in the city of the future.

What struck me frst was the almost shocking quiet of the place, devoid, as it was, of horns, idling trucks, and sirens.

Then, I noticed the temperature. It was much cooler here than in downtown Abu Dhabi. For one thing, we were out of reach of the sun. Severance pointed out that the designers had angled the densely packed buildings to maximally shade one another and the courtyards in between.

Pedestrians like us could sit in comfort and the buildings themselves require less air conditioning. Also keeping us cool was a stif breeze. Severance stood and motioned me across the courtyard to a hollow tower on steel legs—a vertical tube 20 feet across and fve stories high. The tower acts as a wind catcher, drawing in cool breezes from above the city and directing them down to the courtyard.

The street-level breezes it generates are constant and virtually free. It’s not a modern invention—wind towers are likely Persian in origin and were used centuries before oil brought wealth to this part of the world. Engineers at Masdar improved upon the tradition by mounting computeroperated louvers at the top of the structure to maximize efciency; the panels open and close according to prevailing winds.

They also added misting units to cool the air even further.

On my way back to the hotel in Abu Dhabi, I made a wrong turn and ended up at the Al Wathba camel-race track, an eightkilometer oval etched onto the hard, brown foor of the desert. From where I stood, in a grandstand built for thousands, the track disappeared into the distant haze.

I wandered down to the bedlam of the starting gate, expecting to be shooed away; instead, a beaming youth bearing a silver urn ofered me tea in a china cup. As the camels lined up for the day’s third race, I noticed that they had on their backs not human riders but a metal contraption with a threefoot stick poking out the back. I struck up a conversation with a nearby cameraman, who turned out to be covering the race for Egyptian television. He explained that camel owners had pressed generations of Co ntInu e D o n ne X t paG e

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children into service as jockeys, but afer enough of them fell of and were trampled to death, the federation that regulates the sport ordered them replaced with robots.

The camels were lean and long-legged— genetically engineered at tremendous expense for speed and endurance. As they took of with their weird slow-motion gait, a phalanx of SUVs roared afer them on a track, weaving for position and blaring their horns in a jumbled, parallel race. Each vehicle contained a trainer, shouting at his camel through a loudspeaker attached to the beast’s robot and stabbing at a button to remotely rap the beast with the threefoot stick. The trainers were in turn taking orders from the camels’ owners, who were watching at home on television and barking instructions via cellphone. The strategy, the cameraman explained, is to use the stick only when the camera is not on one’s own camel, because a camel seen on television as needing the stick is a less valuable camel than one that is not.

In the explosion of wealth and unchecked development that is Abu Dhabi, where ancient technology anchors a futuristic city and where robots ride camels, Masdar attempts to corral it all into a plan. Critics can complain that Masdar’s goals have been tempered, but that doesn’t make them irrelevant. If designers had not scaled back during the fnancial crisis, it would have signaled that the project was little more than a pricy plaything for an oil-rich emir.

Instead, Masdar is bound to real-world economics, which means that it can teach real-world lessons. “You can talk about environmental sustainability all you want,” Lamki had told me, “but there has to be economic sustainability too.”

No one I spoke to during my visit to Masdar was under the illusion that the city was perfect. The world is not about to tear down its infrastructure and start over with walkable, solar-powered, smart-grid cities.

In that regard, Masdar will never be a model for development. It is instead a model for innovation, a place dedicated more to the generation of sustainable ideas than sustainable technology. In creating an irreproducible city—isolated, expensive, and nearly empty—the architects of Masdar may be building a better place for us all.

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Item 95588 shown

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Item 69293 shown

35

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Item 69465 shown

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9

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Item 68751 shown

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Item 38119 shown

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Time travel at the speed of a 1935 Speedster?

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Minted in one Troy ounce of pure silver bullion

Shown smaller than actual size of 6" x 21∕2"

New York Mint Announces the Limited Mintage Striking of an Extraordinary Silver Proof—the Newest United States $100 Bill Struck in Pure Silver Bullion. Discount Price $99 This extraordinary piece of pure silver bullion has a surface area that exceeds 15 square inches...and it contains one Troy ounce of pure silver bullion!

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.999 SILVER

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• Is Fully Encapsulated to Protect Its Mirror-Finish. • Includes a Deluxe Presentation Case.

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The 2013 $100 Silver Proof is being released exclusively through New York Mint and is not available anywhere else. NOTE TO COLLECTORS: When you place your order for the $100 silver proof, it will be processed immediately, and the earliest orders will receive the coveted lowest registration numbers. By placing your order now, you can acquire this giant silver proof for only $99.

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Prices and availability subject to change without notice. Past performance is not a predictor of future performance. NOTE: New York Mint® is a private distributor of worldwide government coin and currency issues and privately issued licensed collectibles and is not affiliated with the United States government. Facts and figures deemed accurate as of December 2012. ©2013 New York Mint, LLC.

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popsci.com PoPular Science 107

From the Archives P OPUL AR SCIENCE / JUNE 2013

STOR Y BY SUS AN E. M AT THE WS

Wind Catchers I

n August 1939, windmill technology was mostly reserved for small tasks like milling flour, charging radio batteries, and powering lights in rural homes. But POPULAR SCIENCE predicted that wind turbines could soon generate electricity on a much larger scale, thanks to two innovations that would “bring the old Dutch mill up to date.” One inventor planned to place a 500-foot wheel atop a skyscraper in the path of stronger winds to power a city of 100,000. Another, Peter Bendmann, designed the two turbines on this cover to connect at right angles and swivel around a track to catch wind from all directions.

Today, engineers are still constructing turbines that can draw more energy from wind. Turn to page 56 to read about three of these projects.

1880

TIMELINE 1887 James Blyth builds the first electricity-generating windmill. The technology powers his Glasgow home for 25 years.

1941 In Vermont, the first largescale wind turbine conects to the U.S. electric grid.

1980 The world’s first wind farm opens in New Hampshire.

2009 StatoilHydro and Siemens construct the first full-scale floating wind farm off the coast of Norway.

2013

2013 The 630-megawatt London Array becomes the world’s largest offshore windfarm.

P OPUL AR SCIENCE AUGUS T 1939

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