Popular science usa 2013 07 by Science and Technology

P. 54

MY DRONE ARMY: How I Attacked A Neighborhood

PLUS

DEEP-SEA DEATH ASTEROID KILL-SAT 50’ DIY WATERZOOKA SUBORBITAL BACTERIA

SCIENCE-FICTION SPECIAL How Sci-Fi Predicts the Future

Hollywood Technology Dissected

Our First Collection of Original Fiction

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Contents DEPARTMENTS 04 From the Editor 06 Peer Review 10 Megapixels 85 FYI: What are the least essential organs in your body? 92 From the Archives

WHAT’S NEW 13 Board games go digital 14 The Goods: A feedback-less guitar and more 16 Water-gun shoot-out 22 3-D–printed sneakers 26 How circuit boards power new garden tools 29 Cruise control that steers too 30 Car gadgets that help lower your gas expenses

J U LY 2 0 1 3 / P O P U L A R S C I E N C E

VOLUME 283 NO. 1

FE ATURES 47

THE FIVE BIGGEST IDEAS IN THE SKY New breakthroughs will transform aviation. Our skies will teem with swarming drones, 3-D–printed planes, and perpetual motion aircraft. 61

DISPATCHES FROM THE FUTURE Get a glimpse of humankind’s potential tomorrows from today’s top science-fiction writers and artists. 70

SCIENCE OF BLOCKBUSTERS How strong can someone get? Will exoskeletons ever fly? We answer the most interesting questions behind this summer’s movies, including Man of Steel and Elysium. BY DANIEL ENGBER AND ERIK SOFG E

HEADLINES 33 Tech to bust counterfeit drugs 36 Watch streaming video of Earth shot from space 39 Where we should spend our federal research dollars 40 Forensics on the seafloor 42 Shooting asteroids with lasers 44 Studying bacteria that live 33,000 feet in the air

STEPHAN MARTINIERE

HOW 2.0 79 A remote-control Dalek from Doctor Who 82 Turn matches into mini rockets 83 A robotic shelf that obeys voice commands 84 Build your own Waterzooka

A utopian city of the future, imagined by artist Stephan Martiniere.

J ULY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 0 3

From the Editor

THE FUTURE NOW

J U LY 2 0 1 3 / P O P U L A R S C I E N C E 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

Dream Machines

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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

Modern life looks a lot like the dreams of the past century. Why not ask today’s best sci-fi minds what they dream about? there, visionary sci-fi in our digital edition. And on your tablet, July includes my conversation with M. Night Shyamalan, who reinvented our planet as it might look 1,000 years from now in his first space opera, After Earth. You’ll also find a hard-core geek-out between writers Dan Engber and Erik Sofge, who dissect the jetpacks and robot interfaces of summer blockbusters in this issue. Please let us know if you enjoy our effort to forecast tomorrow based on today’s dreams. Because we just might do it again.

BONNIER TECHNOLOGY GROUP

Publisher Gregory D. Gatto Chief Marketing Officer Elizabeth Burnham Murphy Vice President, Corporate Sales John Driscoll Associate Publisher, Marketing Mike Gallic Financial Director Tara Bisciello Eastern Sales Director Jeff Timm Northeast Advertising Office David Ginsberg, Margaret Kalaher Photo Managers Sara Schiano, Mark Huggins Ad Assistant Amanda Smyth Executive Assistant to CMO & Publisher Christine Detris 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 Managers 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 Campaign Managers Wilber Perez, Ed Liriano Digital Managers Elizabeth Besada, Maureen O’Donoghue Digital Coordinator Stephanie Hipp Digital Promotions Director Linda Gomez Group Sales Development Director Alex Garcia Senior Sales Development Manager Amanda Gastelum Sales Development Managers Anna Armienti, Vanessa Fimbres, 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 Director Laura Nealon Promotions Managers Eshonda Caraway-Evans, Lynsey White 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

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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

light is freedom. The power to rise into the air and reach a destination unshackles us from gravity, distance, topography, and time. This is why we, as a publication, return to flight so often. It is humanity’s greatest victory against the limitations of being human. It can also, at its fringe at least, seem a bit fantastical. For example, I recently shook hands with Bertrand Piccard, adventurer and pilot of the Solar Impulse, just before he set off from California on the first cross-country flight of a sun-powered plane. I pointed out that the craft seemed a bit rickety. In order to make it on today’s meager batteries, it needs to be unbelievably light. Piccard smiled brilliantly. “When the Wright Brothers went up, no one could have imagined a plane carrying 300 people,” he said. He’s right. Dreaming far beyond today’s limitations made flight possible. That was the spirit with which we undertook our survey of the Future of Flight. We want to provide a showcase for all that could be when you strip limitations away. Likewise, it was with this same spirit that we undertook an experiment. As Hollywood’s summer flood of rockets and phasers began, we asked sci-fi writers and artists (people whose award-winning work will undoubtedly be optioned soon, at which point they’ll stop emailing us back) to take on a few big topics. Cities. Work. Space travel. The self. Modern life looks a lot like the dreams of the past century. Why not ask today’s best sci-fi minds what they dream about? We’ve also included whole chapters of out-

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Double-Helix Debate POINT: Who cares if someone knows my DNA sequence [“Don’t Be Afraid of Your DNA,” May 2013]? Go ahead, look at it. Chances are that sometime in the near future, whatever embarrassing genetic defect I may have will be corrected. D13 via popsci.com COUNTERPOINT: If DNA is unique to each individual, then we must own our DNA outright. We may spread it around everywhere we go, but that does not give anyone the right to gather and use it for financial gain. ssilletti via popsci.com

S H A RK TAL ES

Birds of a Feather

WHAT A WONDERFUL and insightful article by Brian Lam [“Apex Predator,” May 2013]. I know many people are terrified of sharks, but they truly are beautiful specimens. If this technology can save them from extinction, well, that would be truly remarkable. Jeﬀ Swanson Everett, Wash. I’m 16 years old and right now, I’m working on a high school project to try to change the world. The subject my partner and I have selected is shark conservation. Your article “Apex Predator” is informative and has helped me with my research immensely. Maddie Pratt Mill Valley, Calif. POPULAR SCIENCE would do the world and its readership much more good with an in-depth piece exposing shark finning for what it really is. Put forth ideas on what the world can do to stop this, and then you will be providing valuable, popular science. Rick Moder Park City, Utah

I don’t have much knowledge about aerodynamics, but it would seem to me that John McGinnis of Synergy Aircraft [“Family Flier,” May 2013] and Solar Impulse’s Bertrand Piccard [“Sun Shot,” May 2013] should get together to discuss solar design and total wing shape to see what combining their ideas would produce. Ray Briggs

Tell Me More Many of you asked for details about the HYPER APU, featured on page 42 of our Invention Awards package in May, so we’ve provided them at popsci.com/hyperapu. WE APOLOGIZE . . . In May’s “Making New Elements,” we stated that technetium was the only radioactive element lighter than uranium. Technetium is merely the lightest element that has no stable isotopes.

THE FUTURE NOW

MAIN OFFICE 2 Park Ave., 9th Floor New York, NY 10016 popsci.com NEW SUBSCRIPTIONS popsci.com/subscribe SUBSCRIPTION INQUIRIES Change of address or subscription problems: Popular Science P.O. Box 420235 Palm Coast, FL 32142 386-597-4279 popsci.com/cs INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS Inquiries regarding international licensing or syndication: syndication@popsci.com LETTERS To the editor: letters@popsci.com FYI questions: fyi@popsci.com Ask a Geek: h20@popsci.com Story queries: queries@popsci.com Comments may be edited for length and clarity. We regret that we cannot answer unpublished letters.

COSMOLOGY LESSON: LIGHT-YE ARS ( DISTANCE) VS. YE ARS ( TIME)

A A

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Two galaxies, A [red] and B [blue] are moving away from each other as the spacetime between them expands. Galaxy A emits a ray of light [black] that’s headed toward galaxy B.

B B

By the time the light from galaxy A reaches galaxy B, A has moved far beyond its starting point. The farthest observable objects are 45 billion light-years away, after just 14 billion years.

FASTER THAN LIGHT? Because galaxies are carried apart by expanding spacetime—not by movement through space—the distance between them may grow at faster-than-light speeds.

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How can the visible universe have a radius of 45 billion light-years if the universe is only about 14 billion years old [“Armed Telescope,” May 2013]? Dozens of readers wrote in with that question. Here’s why that figure wasn’t a typo:

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Megapixels D R E SS R E H E A R SA L I

n February, astrobiologist Gernot Grömer found himself on Mars in the midst of a desert storm. Well, he felt like he was on Mars. In reality, he was in the Sahara, participating in a monthlong simulation in eastern Morocco. While there, Grömer and his 10-person crew from the Austrian Space Forum (a volunteer organization of aerospace professionals) tested lasers, weather stations, and deployable shelters in the quasi-Martian environment. When communicating with their control center, they mimicked the delay between Earth and the red planet. They also wore spacesuits equipped with an air-ventilation system and contamination-proof compartments to preserve samples of possible extinct life. At right, Grömer monitors the mobility of the Hungarian Puli prototype: a rover whose four “whegs”—a cross between a wheel and a leg—allow it to trek through steep, rocky terrain.

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STO R Y BY PAV I T H R A S . M O H A N PHOTOGR APH BY K ATJA Z ANELL A -KUX

J ULY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 1 1

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WHAT’S NEW

A Cadillac that steers itself PAGE 29

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J U LY 2 0 1 3

A wireless die signals movements in IdeaCentre games.

EDITED BY CORINNE IOZZIO

Lenovo IdeaCentre Horizon Screen size 27 inches Games at launch Nine Processor speed From 2.0 GHz Price From $1,599

The glass screen can withstand an eight-ounce steel ball dropped from a height of 39 inches.

Board Game Redux

A home computer that transforms into a tabletop game center

HEN MICROSOFT DEBUTED the Surface tabletop computer in 2007, the company envisioned groups of people sitting around a giant screen, sharing videos and playing games. But the Surface and the second-generation Samsung SUR40 are hugely impractical—too large for the typical living room, and too expensive for the average consumer. The engineers at

STO R Y BY CORINNE IOZ ZIO PHOTOGR APH BY S A M K APL A N

Lenovo circumvented this problem by modifying a full-featured all-in-one PC to convert into a Surface-like game table, called the IdeaCentre Horizon. The base of the Horizon connects to a spring-supported hinge, which allows users to tilt the PC flat. When horizontal, the computer switches to Lenovo’s Aura touch interface, which can capture 10 points of contact at once. Through Aura, users can browse photos and video or play games. The Horizon comes with four joysticks and four game pieces, each with a

conductive pad that interacts with the touchscreen. The system even includes an accelerometer-equipped die that communicates with the board over the 2.4 GHz frequency. Lenovo and videogame studios, including EA and Ubisoft, are already using the Aura developer kit to code touch versions of new and classic games, such as Monopoly and air hockey. Players will be able to download more as they’re published, eventually allowing the Horizon to replace both a computer and a closetful of games. J ULY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 1 3

WHAT’S NE W

WN the goods

A dozen great ideas in gear 4

The Impact Shield is the toughest screen protector available. As thin as a sticker, it’s composed of three layers: The hard top layer disperses blows, the middle one prevents cracks with a material used in bulletproof glass, and the soft base absorbs energy. The shield reduces impact forces by 80 percent.

The GDC Hook Knife is one of the safest keychain blades made. To release the blade from the sheath, a user slips his index finger through the aluminum ring handle and braces his thumb on the grip. The twoinch stainless-steel knife is sharp enough to cut through a seat belt.

The foot-tall RoboMe is a customizable iPhone-based robot toy. Through its app, a user chooses eye shapes, facial-hair styles, and accents. And because RoboMe has voice-recognition software and an infrared sensor, it can learn vocal commands and avoid obstacles. WowWee RoboMe $100

Olympus socks are guaranteed to last for life. Designers at KEEN reinforced the toes and heels with Dyneema, a fiber 15 times stronger than steel that’s also used in cut-resistant gloves. The result is a sock that won’t get holes. Now, if they could just figure out how to keep it from getting lost in the dryer.

The touchscreen on the Kirabook laptop won’t wobble when it’s pressed. To increase stability, engineers switched the typical two-millimeter-wide hinge to a fivemillimeter-wide one. The larger hinge means a user can poke the screen without bracing it with the other hand.

Gerber Daily Carry Hook Knife $11

The Flex is the first programmable flashlight. Complete with a microprocessor, the six-inch aluminum light plugs into a computer via USB. Once connected, users can program it with open-source codes: for example, a mode that switches the light on or off depending on its orientation. HexBright Flex $119

KEEN Olympus From $20

Tech21 Impact Shield $30

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Toshiba Kirabook From $1,800

EDITED BY A M B E R W I L L I A M S

ADDITIONAL REPOR TING BY S U S A N E. M AT TH E WS AND A JAI R A J

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEF T: SAM K APL AN ; COURTESY HE XBRIGHT; DAN BR ACAGLIA ; COURTESY 3M ; COURTESY SPRIZ ZI ; COURTESY KWIKSE T; COURTESY ARQBALL; COURTESY APPLE; COURTESY MISSION; COURTESY TOSHIBA ; SAM K APL AN(2); COURTESY TECH21

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The EnduraCool towel retains its chill even in the hottest sun. A user first soaks the 27-by-55inch towel and wrings it out. As air flows around the special hollow fibers, the water inside evaporates, bringing any remaining droplets to 30 degrees below body temperature.

With the FocusTwist iOS app, photographers can refocus an image after shooting it. First, over the course of about two seconds, the phone camera takes dozens of pictures with different focal points. Then users tap the area they’d like to focus on.

The acoustic-electric Pegasus guitar cuts down on screechy feedback. Instead of a sound hole, it has two 18-inch-long slits. As a result, the strings and body vibrate less with the sound the speakers emit when the guitar is plugged in.

Keys aren’t necessary with the Kwikset Kevo lock. Over Bluetooth, a user pairs the batterypowered dead bolt with a smartphone running the UniKey app. The lock opens with a touch, but only when the phone is nearby.

Arqball FocusTwist $1.99

Jon Kammerer Guitars Pegasus Guitar From $2,000

The SPRiZZi carbonation machine makes soda in one step. A user pops a twoounce flavor pod into the cartridge. Inside, carbon dioxide from a replaceable canister mixes with chilled water and the flavor. Each pod costs about 35 cents; the life cycle of the CO2 canister is 100 pods.

Mission EnduraCool Instant Cooling Towel $40

Kwikset Kevo powered by UniKey $249

SPRiZZi $399 (available August)

The 3M Paint Defender keeps car paint looking new. The polyurethane-based coating sprays on as a liquid and dries into an invisible film in approximately three hours. The coating lasts about a year—longer than other sprays—at which point it can be peeled off and reapplied. 3M Paint Defender $25

J ULY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 1 5

WHAT’S NE W / TESTED STO R Y BY DA N I E L D U M A S

Nerf Super Soaker Switch Shot Clip capacity 20 ounces Price $30 Extra clip $8

PHOTOGR APH BY S A M K APL A N

Crossing the W Streams Can the new Super Soaker out-douse the competition?

hen the original Super Soaker debuted in 1989, it changed backyard water wars forever. With a pressurized reservoir system, it could hold more water and shoot farther and more accurately than its dime-store squirt-gun competition. As the rest of the field played catch-up, Super Soaker tanks grew larger—the biggest topping one gallon—which made for more soaking but also long refill times. With a recent Super Soaker refresh, which includes the Switch Shot, designers worked to speed things up, ditching the tank for water-filled magazines. The Switch Shot works like a syringe. Users snap a 20-ounce cartridge into the bottom of the gun and pull back the handle. This creates a vacuum that draws water from the cartridge. Pushing the handle forward closes a valve over the cartridge and sends water out the nozzle. The design makes for lighter, more easily refilled guns, the Nerf designers say. Is that enough for Super Soaker to remain king of the backyard? The results are mixed.

THE TEST We pitted the Super Soaker against two powerful competitors: the Water Warriors Python 2 ($15), which uses a reservoir, and the Stream Machine TL-750 ($18), which uses a piston to draw water from a bucket or pool and ﬁre it. To assess range, we ﬁred each over concrete and noted the furthest drop. To test output, we shot into a bucket for three seconds. To determine accuracy, we counted how many tries it took to shoot a cup from 20 feet away. THE RESULTS 0.6 oz/sec*

Accuracy (number of attempts)

Water Warriors 1 attempt Stream Machine 2 attempts

3.7 oz/sec Super Soaker 4 attempts 0

0.6 oz/sec 20

Range (feet)

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*Splash area represents output, adjusted to include reﬁll time.

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BEHIND THE SCENES What Inspires You? “My passion is creating landscapes that make the viewer say ‘Wow!’ I begin by finding a good subject, then transforming it into something memorable by composing it in context. This image of a frozen waterfall is a fine example. Including the lonely highway conveys a sense of place and space. It tells a story, elevating the image into a personal vision worthy of being shared.”

What Enables You? “My Canon EOS 6D camera is the perfect tool for shooting landscapes in any light because it provides full-frame coverage with wide-angle lenses and captures a phenomenal dynamic range, with incredible shadow detail in the RAW files. It delivers brilliant color and superb hi-res, low-noise images even in low light and at high ISOs. It’s extremely rugged and reliable, and its built-in wireless technology lets me view, set, and shoot remotely via my iPad®.” - Dustin Abbott

What Inspires You? “I am inspired to showcase the natural world, which I view as God’s creation. The art is already there—I just have to find it and express it in a simple, elegant composition that refines my vision and makes a statement. My goal is to create images that guide the viewer’s eye and make people feel what it was like to be there. It’s not about what you put into the frame, but what you leave out.”

What Enables You? “The Canon EOS 6D camera is rugged, compact and full-frame, a big plus when you’re trekking up mountains and need fullformat coverage with wide-angle lenses. The images it captures are simply breathtaking in terms of color accuracy, extended dynamic range, and exquisite detail, and they’re clean and crisp up to ISO 8000, which is mind-blowing. Low-light AF performance is amazing, and built-in wireless technology is icing on the cake.” - Justin Lowery

For more “Behind The Scenes” stories, go to www.PopSci.com/BehindTheScenes

DUSTIN ABBOTT

JUSTIN LOWERY

WHAT’S NE W / TIMELINE STO R Y BY TIM NE WCOMB

PHOTOGR APH BY S A M K APL A N

NOW

Brooks Glycerin 11 ($150) The more panels on a shoe’s upper, the more seams there are that can rub a foot raw. The Glycerin 11’s upper has almost no seams; a 3-D printer deposits 15 to 18 layers of a liquid polymer over a ﬁne, molded mesh to fashion it. The nearly stitchless panel makes the shoe more form-ﬁtting, more pliable, and more comfortable. SOON

Nike Vapor Laser Talon In February, Nike debuted the Vapor Laser Talon, a football cleat whose 3-D– printed spikes are positioned forward to aid acceleration during the 40-yard dash. In the future, designers could modify their computer models to tailor shoes for other sports and positions, whether shortstop or linebacker. They could change cleat patterns to help boost a player’s speed, grip, or ability to move laterally. LATER

New Balance

Foot Prints

Your next pair of sneakers will be printed-to-order

ustom-ﬁtted shoes do more than increase comfort; they can improve performance and even reduce the risk of injury. But made-to-order shoes are also prohibitively expensive: A single foot mold, for example, can cost thousands of dollars. For those who can’t spend like a professional athlete, manufacturers are starting to

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adopt 3-D printing. They’re already using the process to make mass-produced sneakers that better contour to feet, but they’re also working on methods that will allow them to personalize soles, uppers— even entire shoes—from a series of 3-D scans. One day soon, a pair of custom-made shoes could run hundreds, instead of thousands.

This year, designers at New Balance started printing track spikes for their sponsored athletes. Eventually, they plan to expand the program and print shoes for amateur runners, too. Because most runners want the support of a cushioned midsole, the engineers are working to incorporate printing methods that produce compressible parts. Unfortunately, there’s no set timeline for the rollout.

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What happens in the corners, stays in the corners. The new mid-engine Cayman S

The Cayman and its driver keep certain things between them. What’s possible in an apex, for example. And the thrillingly instant response of a sports car born to turn. It’s a feeling that can’t be described. Which is just as well. CaymanCode.com. Porsche. There is no substitute.

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THREE-HEADED LAWN MONSTER The CORE Power Lok battery pack (1) can run three different tools: a hedge trimmer (2), a string trimmer (3), or a blower (4).

Gardening Circuit

The guts of gadgets rebuilt for serious yard work

ince the 1950s, the brain of any electronic device has been a printed circuit board (PCB), a piece of substrate that contains all—or most—of a device’s electrical components, including wires, switches, and processors. Rather than using PCBs simply as a control center, engineers at Montana-based CORE Outdoor Power are using them as a power source. They’ve developed a PCBbased rotary motor that’s as strong as a gas-powered one, but without the emissions and noise. The CORE motor consists of a circular multilayer PCB sandwiched 26 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / JU LY 2 0 1 3

between two ring-shaped magnets. Electricity from a lithium polymer battery passes through 10 layers of copper conductors in the PCB. The current causes the magnets to spin, which then turns the motor. CORE’s motor is built into the Power Lok yard-tool system. A battery-equipped base unit transfers power to swappable hedge-trimmer, string-trimmer, and blower heads, each with its own 0.5–1.5hp motor. The company says the technology is scalable; it’s already created motors that produce up to 4,000 hp—enough to run wind turbines, ventilation systems, and even oil pumps.

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WHAT’S NE W / HOW IT WORKS STO R Y BY L AWRENCE ULRICH A system in development integrates steering control with throttling and braking.

Taking the Wheel Cadillac’s Super Cruise is a big step toward automotive autopilot

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ACTIVATE The driver initiates Super Cruise by pressing a button on the steering wheel. At that point, the system takes control of the wheel, accelerator, and brakes.

WATCH A video camera in the rearview-mirror assembly scans for highway lane markers. A processor analyzes the data to adjust the steering and brakes to keep the car safely in the center of the lane. The system also adapts to driver behavior; for example, if the car detects that the driver prefers plenty of room between his vehicle and big semis, it will cheat toward the lefthand lane marker.

hile Google’s prototype self-driving car does a ﬁne job commanding headlines, automakers have been rolling out the features that will ultimately lead to a roadready autonomous vehicle. Cadillac Super Cruise is an important step in that process. Like current adaptive cruise-control systems, Super Cruise, which GM will likely debut by 2016, controls the throttle and brakes and adjusts the distance between the car and surrounding traﬃc. But Super Cruise adds another detail: It steers. A processor combines camera, radar, and GPS data to guide the car down the center of its lane.

SENSE The system can assess traﬃc patterns as well. The processor combines input from three radar sensors (short-, mid-, and long-range) to detect and classify stationary and moving objects. Then it adjusts the throttle and brakes to maintain a minimum distance (the driver can also opt for a longer one) between the car and traﬃc ahead.

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DOUBLE-CHECK GPS tracks the car’s location, comparing its path to road maps, which allows the system to anticipate upcoming curves, for instance. And if conditions get too hairy for Super Cruise to handle—say, bad weather— motors in the seat vibrate to tell the driver to take the wheel.

the T-CON Teleconverter lens. J ULY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 2 9

WHAT’S NE W / OUTLOOK STO R Y BY BRYAN G ARDINER

ILLUSTR ATION BY PAUL L ACHINE

Data Driven

As efficient as engines may be—the best get 50 mpg— they can’t compensate for one glaring inefficiency: us.

Programming ourselves to save fuel

ast year, American car buyers named fuel economy the most important consideration when shopping for a car, outranking even quality and safety. The change coincides nicely with the flood of hybrid and high-efficiency internalcombustion engines on the market. But as efficient as an engine may be—the best among them can get up to 50 miles per gallon—they can’t compensate for one glaring inefficiency: us. Poor driving habits (floor it!) can slash fuel economy by as much as one-third. To

30 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / JU LY 2 0 1 3

maximize it, engineers need to not only remake the cars; they need to remake the drivers. In his dissertation “Charismatic Computers,” B.J. Fogg, a psychologist at Stanford University, demonstrated how technology can influence behaviors. In his model, an action is the result of three elements—motivation, ability, and a trigger. For drivers, the motivation for efficiency is clear: saving fuel saves money. (What’s more, it can help reduce their carbon footprint.) And any driver has the ability to save gas just by sticking below 50 mph and avoiding abrupt acceleration and braking. What’s been missing is the trigger. Until the late 1990s, drivers had no way of knowing how much fuel they were consuming at a given time. Then Honda introduced the Insight, the first massproduced hybrid in the U.S. It was one of the first cars with a real-time fuel-consumption meter in the dash. The trigger was born. Now the dashboards of eco-friendly cars, whether it’s the Ford Fusion or the Nissan Leaf, are packed with instruments that are designed to encourage better habits. The Fusion’s LCD, for example, shows leaves and vines to signify good driving. Real-time data interfaces are spilling into cars with conventional internal-combustion drivetrains, as well. In the past few years, developers have launched a number of smartphone apps that analyze a phone’s accelerometer data to provide readouts of driving style and its effect on fuel efficiency. Other apps, including Torque and Automatic, incorporate dongles that plug into a car’s onboard diagnostics port. The Bluetooth-connected dongles relay engine-performance information from a car’s onboard computer to an app. The Automatic app, for instance, chimes when it detects speeding, hard braking, or hard acceleration. Just as Fogg predicted, these triggers work. A study by the University of California Transportation Center found that when drivers were provided with instantaneous miles-per-gallon feedback, fuel economy improved on average by 6 percent on city streets. Apply those gains across only one-third of the cars in the U.S. and drivers could save billions of dollars in gas. Monitoring and controlling driver behavior could also pave the way for automotive advances. Quantifying cars is an important step toward automating them. The more performance data automakers collect, the better able they will be to perfect the algorithms that will eventually direct our automatic chauffeurs.

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lecture titles 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Components of Fitness How Fit Are You? Overcome the Barriers to Exercise Your Heart in Action The Fitness of Breathing You Can Reduce Stress Fitness and Pregnancy Refuel, Recover, and Reenergize Thinking—The Brain-Body Connection Healthy Joints for Life Protecting Yourself from Injury The Amazing Beneﬁts of Balance Fueling Fitness Why Everyone Should Exercise in Water The Secret Life of Muscles Strong to the Bone Getting Your Back on Track 21st-Century Yoga Walk Your Way to Fitness The Amazing Beneﬁts of Stretching Stay Active—Defy the Aging Process Sitting Disease Exercise for Weight Loss Mobilizers and Stabilizers— Managing Your Abs Body Weight Workout Medicine Ball Workout Step and Interval Workout Dumbbell Workout Combat Workout Fitness Ball Workout Balance Board Workout Kettlebell Workout Plyometrics Workout Resistance Band Workout Training Bar Workout Stretching Routine

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Microbes that live 33,000 feet in the air PAGE 44

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“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

Bad Medicine Deadly counterfeit drugs are everywhere. Here’s the new tech to bust them.

NICK VEASEY/GET T Y IMAGES

ROWING UP in Pakistan in the 1980s, Muhammad Zaman and his family always knew which pharmacy to trust when they got sick. Today, even the pharmacists don’t know whom to trust. Just last year, more than 200 people in Lahore died after contaminated cardiac medicines containing a toxic amount of an anti-malaria drug hit the city’s supply. More than a thousand got sick. The crisis of poor quality drugs is worst in the developing world, where regulatory oversight is weak and patients are desperate for affordable medicine. Consider this: The World Health Organization says that at least 10

percent to 30 percent of the pharmaceutical market in these countries is compromised. “Everybody in the developing world knows about this problem, but nobody ever does anything about it,” says Zaman, now a biomedical engineer at Boston University. The bogus-drug trade isn’t just a problem for the world’s poorest patients: About 1 percent of it circulates in the U.S. and other highly industrialized nations. That might not sound like a lot, but hardly a week goes by without federal health officials warning about fake Viagra, Tamiflu, Botox, and others entering the U.S. through Web dealers and

STO R Y BY MICHAEL ROSENWALD

J ULY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 3 3

importers. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned consumers about fakes of Adderall, the attention-deficit-disorder drug, which contained a powerful painkiller. Now new technology, verification systems, and researchers like Zaman are working to make sure that the drugs people take are what they’re supposed to be. Detecting dangerous or substandard drugs is generally difficult. Verifying a medication’s manufacturing origin is simple only when it comes from a big, international company with a tracking system in place—and that’s often not the case. When health-care providers in the developing world can afford only drugs that don’t have a built-in security network, it takes valuable time and complicated equipment to analyze their chemical composition. One common solution is Global Pharma Health Fund’s Minilab, an unwieldy system that requires the testers to mix chemicals in beakers and use ultraviolet lamps and a hot plate stored in two heavy suitcases. Zaman has made a cheap handheld scanner called PharmaCheck to quickly identify fake medicine in villages, clinics, and hospitals. Users (who need only a few days’ training) dissolve samples inside a small beaker in the machine. The liquid then runs onto a microfluidic chip the size of a postage stamp, where it combines with a molecule designed to bind solely with the drug in question. Binding sets off a fluorescent probe, whose light can be analyzed with a cellphone camera. The process reveals how much of the drug is present and how quickly it dissolves, and takes 15 minutes or less. “We can know what we’re dealing with,” Zaman says. And how much is an important thing to find out. Some drugs are entirely fake—snake oil, sawdust, chalk. But others, particularly those in developing countries, might contain an ineffective amount of medicine or release the right amount in the wrong way; either case is potentially deadly. PharmaCheck is designed to recognize these drugs as well. Too strong a signal right away could mean that the medicine wasn’t made properly and is probably toxic. Too weak a signal means there might not be enough of the active ingredient to be effective (in antibiotics, low doses could lead, over time, to drug-resistant microbes). Zaman’s PharmaCheck prototype has already been successful in lab tests on oxytocin, a lifesaving drug given to women after childbirth to prevent hemorrhaging. Later this year, his team hopes to publish its findings and build several more devices for field tests. Zaman and his collaborators are looking for a commercial partner to produce the devices in larger quantities and at prices low enough for practical use. Meanwhile, the FDA is ramping up deployment of its own handheld scanners, which detect a drug’s active ingredient and determine its provenance via form 34 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / JU LY 2 0 1 3

DRUG DETECTIVES The portable PharmaCheck device [above] can tell if a drug has the wrong dose. And the FDA’s CD-3 scanner [left] shows optical differences between genuine and fake drugs and packaging.

and packaging. Called CD-3, the Some drugs are device shines ultraviolet to infraentirely fake. red light on an object as it captures Others contain an an image. The user compares that image to one of a genuine sample. ineffective amount If the two don’t look the same, of medicine. then they’re presumably made of different materials or ingredients. The FDA has about 30 CD-3 devices deployed at international mail facilities, where counterfeit drugs slip into the country, and more at other points of entry. While not as sophisticated as Zaman’s PharmaCheck— CD-3 can’t determine a pill’s dose or how it’s released in the body—FDA officials say the device is great for screening lots of drugs. This spring, the agency signed an agreement with Corning to continue refining CD-3 for later large-scale manufacturing. A group of chemists from St. Mary’s College in Indiana and Notre Dame has gotten into the detective game, too. Its convenient and still-unnamed product— a lab on a piece of paper the size of a business card— directly detects a drug’s ingredients. (Each paper can detect one type of drug.) Rub some crushed Tylenol or anti-malarial on it, for example, dip it in water, and the results are rendered in colors. Users then send a photo of the paper to an automatic Web service for a “real” or “fake” response. The team has applied for patents and is looking for a company to help commercialize its invention. Its goal is less than a dollar per test. And at that price, it’s potentially the cheapest system yet.

FROM TOP: COURTESY MUHAMMAD Z AMAN/BU; COURTESY FDA

HEADLINES / THE TREND

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

HE ADLINES / FAQ STO R Y BY A M B E R W I L L I A M S

ILLUSTR ATION BY K ATIE PEEK

FIELD OF VIEW Cameras on the International Space Station can capture anything between 52 degrees north and 52 degrees south. Here, the ISS’s path over the course of 48 hours.

Hour 48 Hour 0

Free streaming video of our planet, from space

t this moment, dozens of government satellites are taking high-resolution pictures of the planet. But citizens get only limited services such as Google Earth, which provides imagery that’s sometimes 10 years old. This fall, however, the Canadabased company UrtheCast (in partnership with the Russian space agency) will install two cameras on the International Space Station (ISS) that will continuously capture still images and high-resolution video and upload them to a free public database online, where the curious can study their yards and the entrepreneurial can obtain needed data. 36 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / JU LY 2 0 1 3

Will I be able to find myself? No, but you could find your car or house. UrtheCast’s video camera has a three-foot resolution and can distinguish groups of people, not individuals. It will shoot approximately 150 video clips a day. The still camera has a 16-foot resolution that can capture buildings, rivers, and roads. It will take a photo every millisecond. How do cameras survive in space? They’re wrapped in insulation to protect against temperatures from –250°F to 250°F, equipped with dampeners to prevent shaking as they travel 17,000 mph in orbit, and tested to confirm they can withstand space radiation. How does all that data get down to Earth? Each day, onboard hardware compresses 2.5 terabytes of data into 250 gigabytes. Then transmitters beam the info as radio waves to one of 10 receiving stations.

How long is the delay on the video stream? It ranges from about 20 minutes to a couple of hours, depending on how close the ISS is to the Earth station that receives the video. What kinds of things will people use UrtheCast for? Anyone will be able to suggest where the video camera should point, and nonprofits could use it to monitor events of concern like illegal logging and humanitarian crises. But UrtheCast hopes to profit by charging businesses. For example, coffee traders might want to view their fields from above to predict harvests.

SAY “CHEESE!” This 16-footresolution camera will take photos every millisecond as it orbits Earth.

COURTESY URTHECAST

Eye on Earth

HEADLINES / SUBJECTIVE MEASURES STO R Y BY ERIN BIBA

No-Brainer

The government should be spending money on science that nobody else wants to fund

N APRIL, President Obama announced, to much fanfare, that the government would spend $100 million on a detailed map of the human brain and how its neurons interact. The project is a waste of money. Brain mapping is well funded by public and private sources, and the feds should instead spend your dough on important things that business won’t. The brain map was going to happen anyway. For example, IBM has a computer simulating 530 billion neurons; the Blue Brain Project is modeling the rat brain at the cellular level; the Allen Brain Atlas is

ILLUSTR ATION BY RYAN SNOOK

mapping how genes in the brain turn on and off. Projects like these already have validity, and some have been funded by the government for years. To a certain extent, Obama’s initiative is making a big deal out of something the government had been doing for some time. Also, brain research is already commercially viable. Mind-machine interfaces are available in the toy aisle, where you can buy Mattel’s Mindflex Duel, a headset that lets you move a ball by changing your concentration. Between that and the automated health care and banking that IBM’s artificial-intelligence computer Watson makes possible, there’s plenty of money to be made. If the government wants to fund a grand national effort, it should attack problems whose solutions are bad for business. For instance, let’s cure cancer. The biomedical Attack industry treats cancer with problems drugs, surgery, and other highbudget interventions. But it has whose no financial incentive to find a solutions cure, which would destroy its are bad for $82-billion-a-year business. The business. U.S. government spent only $5.1 billion on cancer research in 2011. We need more funding for cures. And if we really threw some money at it, we might even find out what environmental factors help cause cancer and then move from curing it to preventing it altogether. The same argument applies to other major maladies in the U.S.: heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. The government should also fund research into how to get more low-income students to graduate from high school. Studies have shown time and again that increasing education rates leads to a decrease in crime. One key paper found that raising the graduation rate by just 1 percent in 1990 would have resulted in 100,000 fewer crimes that year, saving the country approximately $2 billion. While preventing crime is in every citizen’s interest, private industry certainly isn’t going to make it happen. It takes the passage of a generation (and the new scientists and engineers that come with it) to see the benefit. And getting any return on investment would be exceptionally difficult, if not impossible, because the financial gains would be so widely distributed across the economy, investors wouldn’t be able to measure any direct profits. The sad reality is that Obama’s initiative is more about good public relations than good science. If problems such as cancer and crime were easy to solve, maybe they’d have gotten the nod. But then, we wouldn’t have needed the government to solve them in the first place. J ULY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 3 9

HE ADLINES / ANNOTATED MACHINE STO R Y BY BROOKE BOREL

ILLUSTR ATION BY DAV E T H O M P S O N

INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY A two-ton node—basically a large waterproof Ethernet hub—connects the experimental setup to a 1.5-inch cable, which provides power and transmits video, photos, and data over the Internet for scientists and the public to check out.

Node

Cable

Burial at Sea

A swine’s grisly fate could teach coroners about human death

dead pig is a good proxy for a dead person: It’s roughly the size of a human torso, it has no fur, and its gut holds similar bacteria. These parallels mean that injury and decay are comparable in the two species, which can help forensic pathologists learn more about how corpses behave. On land, this dark research is easy—place the pig somewhere, and watch it rot. But what about bodies at sea? When a corpse turns up in a marine environment, whether as a result of murder, accident, or tsunami, coroners and pathologists don’t have the information they need to 40 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / JU LY 2 0 1 3

determine even the time of death. In 2000, forensics researcher Gail Anderson, of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, was the ﬁrst to simulate a marine grave; she sent divers to place pig carcasses underwater and chronicled the decay that followed, as crabs, shrimp, and sea lice devoured them. Then, in 2006, Anderson began conducting research with Venus, a cabled ocean observatory that broadcasts underwater views of oﬀshore British Columbia live over the Internet. The researchers used a remotely operated vehicle to plunk a pig in view of a camera, which recorded the action as

sea life destroyed it. Twenty-two pigs later—and with more scheduled for this fall—Anderson’s team is learning how to tell whether a body decayed on a sandy or rocky surface, whether it came from fresh- or saltwater, and whether its wounds are from a knife or a crab. The work is already paying off. After several human feet clad in athletic shoes started washing up on Vancouver’s shores in 2007, Anderson quashed speculation that a serial killer was lopping them off. The cause of death still isn’t clear, but we now know that sea life snipped away enough tissue that the feet fell off on their own.

HOG-TIED Two pigs are tethered to an instrument platform to keep sea critters from dragging them out of camera range. One sits in the most natural setting possible, while a backup is encased in a cage—a feature added after an experiment was largely ruined by hungry sixgilled sharks.

BRINY BOT The deep-sea vehicle Ropos (remotely operated platform for ocean sciences) delivers the pigs and their instrument platform to a node and plugs in a webcam and sensors with dexterous arms. When the experiment ends, Ropos swims back, unplugs everything, and brings the remains and the platform back to its mothership.

LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION The experiments run hundreds of feet underwater, where it is pitch black. In order to capture the pigs’ decomposition on video, four lights flash on for a few minutes every quarter hour (constant light would scare away too many animals, changing how the pigs decay). The highdefinition camera can be panned or tilted remotely.

DEVICES, DUNKED A set of sensors measures the water’s temperature, salinity, and oxygen concentration, all of which could impact how the pigs decompose.

Sensors

High-definition camera Lights

Pigs

BACON ON THE SIDE The platform’s bottom is plastic mesh, which lets silt microbes eat away at the pigs while collecting the bones for later study (by Lynne Bell, a forensics anthropologist at Simon Fraser University).

J ULY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 41

HEADLINES / BLUEPRINT A S TOLD TO FLOR A LICHTMAN

ILLUSTR ATION BY TRE VOR JOHNSTON

Death Star PRESENTED BY

NEW TECHNOLOGY FOR AMERICAN ENERGY INDEPENDENCE See new projects from around the country and around the world and learn how they could change America’s future. Visit popsci.com/energyﬁx for a video series hosted by Popular Science editor-in-chief Jacob Ward. You’ll get a look at the cutting-edge wind turbines, wave energy installations, wasteto-power systems, and ﬂexible solar fabrics that could soon provide us with entirely new sources of power. Come see the future for yourself.

POPSCI.COM/ENERGYFIX

A space laser to vaporize dangerous asteroids

“

DE-STAR is designed to vaporize or divert asteroids that threaten Earth. This isn’t science fiction—I build things that have to work in practice. DE-STAR stands for Directed Energy Solar Targeting of Asteroids and exploRation. It looks like an open matchbook with lasers on one flap and a photovoltaic panel for power from sunlight on the other. By synchronizing the laser beams, we can create a phased array, which produces a steerable 70-gigawatt beam. An onboard system receives orders on what to target. Our laser beam would then produce a spot about 100 feet in diameter on an asteroid that’s as far away from the satellite as we are from the sun. The laser would raise an asteroid’s surface temperature to thousands of degrees Celsius—hot enough that all known substances evaporate. In less than an hour, DE-STAR could have completely vaporized the asteroid that broke up over Russia this winter, if we had seen it coming. Plus, as the material evaporates, it creates a thrust in the opposite direction, comparable to the space shuttle’s rocket booster. That

4 2 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / J ULY 2013

means you could divert the asteroid by changing its orbit with a shorter laser blast. DE-STAR could also power things on Earth or in space. You could send the electrical power it produces—not via laser beam but via microwaves. Or you could use the laser to directly propel spacecraft. But here’s the thing: For full-blown asteroid vaporization, each flap of the matchbook would have to be six miles long. We’ve never built a structure this size in space, but if there were the worldwide will, I could see building this within 30 to 50 years. But since it’s completely modular, we propose starting smaller. We could begin with a version that’s three feet per side right now. With that, you could cook your dinner from 600 miles away.” Philip Lubin is a physicist at UC Santa Barbara and co-inventor of DE-STAR with statistician Gary Hughes, of California Polytechnic State University.

LET’S FIND CLEANER SOURCES OF ENERGY TODAY, TO HELP PROTECT HER TOMORROW. The world’s population has reached seven billion and is forecast to reach around nine billion by 2050. As the world’s population grows its need for water, food and energy will increase. Meeting this challenge will be difﬁcult and will place demands on all of us. At Shell we are determined to help meet the energy challenge, supplying a broad mix of lower-emission energy sources. 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.

STO R Y BY S T E PH A N I E WAR R E N

Bacteria at 33,000 Feet

AWESOME! Earth’s upper atmosphere—below freezing, nearly without oxygen, flooded by UV radiation—is no place to live. But last winter, scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology discovered that billions of bacteria actually thrive up there. Expecting only a smattering of microorganisms, the researchers flew six miles above Earth’s surface in a NASA jet plane. There, they pumped outside air through a filter to collect particles. Back on the ground, they tallied the organisms, and the count was staggering: 20 percent of what they had assumed to be just dust or other particles was alive. Earth, it seems, is surrounded by a bubble of bacteria.

The living atmosphere

s ple m Sa m fro ky es th

NOW WH AT ? Scientists don’t yet know what the bacteria are doing up there, but they may be essential to how the atmosphere functions, says Kostas Konstantinidis, an environmental microbiologist on the Georgia Tech team. For example, they could be responsible for recycling nutrients in the atmosphere, like they do on Earth. And similar to other particles, they could influence weather patterns by helping clouds form. However, they also may be transmitting diseases from one side of the globe to the other. The researchers found E. coli in their samples (which they think hurricanes lifted from cities), and they plan to investigate whether plagues are raining down on us. If we can find out more about the role of bacteria in the atmosphere, says Ann Womack, a microbial ecologist at the University of Oregon, scientists could even fight climate change by engineering the bacteria to break down greenhouse gases into other, less harmful compounds.

It’s alive! In the midst of airborne sea salt and dust, researchers from Georgia Tech unexpectedly found thousands of living fungal cells and bacteria, including E. coli and Streptococcus.

44 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / JU LY 2 0 1 3

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEF T: COURTESY GEORGIA TECH PHOTO, G ARY MEEK ( 2 ) ; NASA

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POPULAR SCIENCE

THE FIVE BIGGEST IDEAS IN THE SKY 1 VERTICAL-LIFT AIRCRAFT 2 SWARMING DRONES 3 PERPETUAL FLIGHT 4 3-D–PRINTED PLANES 5 CONGESTIONKILLING AIRCRAFT

THE FIVE BIGGEST IDEAS IN THE SKY

PLUS A visit to the unregulated, slightly terrifying frontier of ﬂight by Adam Piore J ULY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 4 7

FUTURE OF FLIGHT BY C L AY D IL LOW

HELICOPTERS WILL FLY LIKE AIRPLANES THE FIVE BIGGEST IDEAS IN THE SKY 1 VERTICAL-LIFT AIRCRAFT 2 SWARMING DRONES 3 PERPETUAL FLIGHT 4 3-D–PRINTED PLANES 5 CONGESTIONKILLING AIRCRAFT

IN THE WAKE OF the unsuccessful Iran hostage-rescue attempt in 1980, when three of eight helicopters failed and crippled the mission, military planners came to a realization: The U.S. fleet was in desperate need of an aircraft that could combine the speed and range of a jet with the vertical lift of a helicopter. In response, they designed the tilt-rotor V-22 Osprey. The V-22 can carry two dozen troops 1,000 nautical miles at speeds around 250 miles an hour. It is one of the most versatile craft in the U.S. Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) fleet, which includes helicopters and jump jets. It is also the youngest: The V-22 represents the last major addition to the VTOL arsenal in more than 20 years. As modern warfare evolves to include more lightning-fast, covert strikes similar to the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound, VTOL is once again a priority for U.S. military planners. Two programs launched this year could improve the speed, range, and hover efficiency of VTOL aircraft: In March, the Army launched a program that officially began accepting designs for technology that could be used in next-generation rotorcraft. Sikorsky and Boeing filed a joint proposal based on Sikorsky’s X2

rotor and propeller system; Bell Helicopter, the co-developer of the V-22, submitted an updated tilt-rotor; and European aerospace giant EADS put forth a design likely based on Eurocopter’s experimental X3. And in February, DARPA announced a $130 million VTOL X-Plane program that asks aerospace engineers to propose entirely new approaches to VTOL—a fixed wing, a rotary wing, or maybe something in between. With top speeds of more than 250 mph, improved VTOL

aircraft could increase military reach, shorten travel time for combat troops, and deliver personnel and cargo virtually anywhere, regardless of terrain. While the precise designs will remain secret for a while—both the Army and DARPA programs plan to fly demonstrations by 2017—they will likely draw from three existing technologies, as illustrated on the next page. After 24 years without significant innovation, VTOL is flying high once more.

July 1924 POPULAR SCIENCE

FROM THE ARCHIVES

N O , R E ALLY, W H E R E ’S MY FLYIN G CAR ? In July 1924, famed fighter pilot, racecar driver, and automotive designer Eddie Rickenbacker wrote the first story about flying cars in POPULAR SCIENCE. The headline read “Flying Autos in 20 Years.” Since then, readers have waited patiently—for generations. We’ve learned not to make promises, but in the next two years a few functioning, legal flying cars are set to reach the market or enter development. Call it a revolution. Call it about time. Just don’t call it science fiction. —Davin Coburn

HOW CLOSE ARE WE TODAY? READ ON! CONTINUED ON PAGE 50 48 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JU LY 2 0 1 3

HOVER CRAFT Engineers are designing the first major addition to the U.S. VTOL fleet in more than two decades. The plans are mostly secret, but the craft will likely draw from tilt-rotor, VTOL fixed-wing, and compound helicopter technologies.

M O D E LS O F LIFT As engineers rethink VTOL, they’ll look to these aircraft for inspiration TILT-ROTOR Tilt-rotors like the V-22 rely on two huge turboprops—one at each wingtip—to provide vertical thrust during takeoﬀ, landing, and hover. Once airborne, the propeller nacelles rotate forward, essentially converting the V-22 to a turboprop plane. Their dual function keeps aircraft weight down. One design that’s drawn attention is a four-prop, heavy-lift tiltrotor concept developed by the Bell team that created the V-22.

CO M P O U N D H E L I CO P T E R These designs combine conventional vertical-lift propellers with forwardfacing propellers that signiﬁcantly increase cruising speeds. Eurocopter’s X3 design incorporates small wings to provide additional lift during forward ﬂight, while other concepts, such as the Piasecki PA61-4 Advanced Wing Compound, trade side-mounted propellers for huge rear-mounted, ducted propellers to increase forward thrust.

V TO L F I X E D W I N G VTOL fixed wings resemble airplanes more than they do helicopters. Most derive their vertical thrust from downward-facing jet nozzles. Many VTOL fixed-wing prototypes have proved capable, but they come with limitations (and spotty safety records). One design that’s getting another look is the Sikorsky S-72, a hybrid aircraft developed in the 1970s that incorporates a large rotor atop a turbofan-powered fixed-wing airplane.

J ULY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 4 9

FUTURE OF FLIGHT BY DAVID HAMBLING

THE FIVE BIGGEST IDEAS IN THE SKY 1 VERTICAL-LIFT AIRCRAFT 2 SWARMING DRONES 3 PERPETUAL FLIGHT 4 3-D–PRINTED PLANES 5 CONGESTIONKILLING AIRCRAFT

LAST YEAR, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania Grasp (General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception) Lab gathered a dozen or so quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), programmed them to work in concert, and set them loose on a roomful of improvised instruments. The hovering swarm dutifully reproduced the James Bond theme song. In biology, a swarm is a collection of individuals that manifest complex behavior without a leader calling the shots. Imagine birds spontaneously gathering on a single tree, only to lift off en masse moments later. Scientists have applied swarm intelligence to driving robots, but they now have the processing power and sensing capability to apply it to flying ones too. To achieve a swarm, scientists program each unit with a set of simple rules. For example: Maintain constant separation, steer in the same direction, and always move toward the center of the swarm. The result is a mass of individuals that can move as a group. Scientists at Grasp recently used a UAV swarm to pick up and haul heavy objects.

WHERE’S MY FLYING CAR?

TE R R AFU G IA TR AN SITIO N Perhaps the most carlike of flying cars, the Terrafugia Transition is on the path to approval from the Federal Aviation Administration and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and has undergone multiple flight and simulated-crash tests. On the ground, it “drives” with its wings folded up and will likely top out around 65 mph. In flight mode, the wings fold out, and the craft can cruise at 105 mph. The $279,000 vehicle is due out in 2015. More than 100 people have put down deposits already.

There are many applications for UAV swarms, says Vijay Kumar, former director of Grasp. The most immediate could be search and rescue: A swarm could cover a lot of ground quickly and would require only one operator. Another could be exploration. Swarms could scan high-risk buildings and sites (think Fukushima post-tsunami) rapidly, whereas larger UAVs cannot. Others see even greater possibility. At Harvard, scientists on the RoboBees project are developing swarms of robotic insects that could be used for crop pollination, surveillance, or monitoring traffic. A group

of researchers in Switzerland recently developed a concept to use a UAV swarm as a distributed computing and communications network to assist emergency workers in disaster areas. Swarming UAVs could also play a role in defense: An attack could overwhelm standard missiledefense systems, so Timothy Chung, an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, has developed his Swarm vs. Swarm Grand Challenge. Chung plans to pit two teams of 50 UAVs against one another to refine countermeasures. If he’s right, the only army big enough to stop a swarm . . . is another swarm.

SWARMS WILL DOMINATE THE SKY

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COURTESY EPFL. OPPOSITE: COURTESY TERRAFUGIA

POPULAR SCIENCE

T HE T HR EE MO ST CR ITIC AL AVIATION ADVANCES THIS YEAR

Designers have a new generation of enabling technologies R F I D TAG S A regular addition to cellphones and bank cards, radio frequency identiﬁcation (RFID) tags are creeping into airplane cabins. With tags in life vests, seats, medical kits, and other frequently inspected equipment, attendants can cut down inspection times tenfold, saving money and improving plane turnarounds.

CA R B O N - F I B E R A I R F R A M ES Carbon fiber is much stronger and stiffer than aluminum. Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner was the first airliner to use a predominately carbon-fiber airframe. The Airbus A350 will join it this summer. The lighter frames allow increased fuel efficiency, and a stronger fuselage allows more comfortable cabin pressures.

BAT TERY SENSORS Batteries are little black boxes of chemistry, and when they fail, it can be hard to diagnose the problem. Scientists at PARC have embedded batteries with ﬁber-optic sensors. With internal data, engineers could optimize performance in real time or pinpoint the source of a problem to ﬁx the trouble in future designs.

SKYNET Researchers in Switzerland recently developed a concept to use a swarm of UAVs as a local communication network for emergency workers in disaster areas.

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FUTURE OF FLIGHT BY DAV I D H A M B L I N G

THE FIVE BIGGEST IDEAS IN THE SKY 1 VERTICAL-LIFT AIRCRAFT 2 SWARMING DRONES 3 PERPETUAL FLIGHT 4 3-D–PRINTED PLANES 5 CONGESTIONKILLING AIRCRAFT

IN 1883, Nobel laureate John Strutt, a physicist and the third Baron Rayleigh, put forward a radical idea. He had been studying the mechanics of pelican flight and proposed that the birds drew energy from differentials in wind speed, allowing them to remain aloft without beating a wing. By taking advantage of this technique (since named dynamic soaring), a craft could, in theory, fly with little or no fuel for weeks, months, or even years. For decades, work on dynamic soaring progressed slowly. Radiocontrol glider operators took advantage of the technique to extend their flights, but scientists

HOW IT WORKS Dynamic soaring relies on diﬀerentials in wind speed. 1 The glider rises through still air at low altitude, to a higher, windy level, facing into the wind.

didn’t know if they could apply it to larger craft. Then in 2006, a team from the U.S. Air Force and NASA flew a modified L-23 Blanik sailplane over Edwards Air Force Base, proving that a large craft is capable of dynamic soaring maneuvers. Now a team at Lehigh University, led by engineering professor Joachim Grenestedt, is refining the concept. Working with funds from their school and the National Science Foundation, the team is developing a large unmanned vehicle designed for perpetual flight. They recently

completed a 21-foot-long wing of carbon-fiber composite designed to fly in jet streams above 20,000 feet and able to withstand speeds of up to 300 mph and forces of up to 20 Gs (dynamic soaring can be tough on a wing). Later this year, the team will carry out low-altitude tests with a model sailplane. If all goes well, Grenestedt says, he will aim his craft, called the JetStreamer, into the jet stream, where winds can reach 200 mph. Once the constraint of engines and fuel disappear, flight becomes something

2 The glider maintains its ground speed as it slices across the boundary. The headwind gives the glider a higher airspeed and generates more lift as it moves across the wings.

4 Dropping out of the windy layer, the glider turns upwind to repeat the maneuver again. As long as there is a diﬀerence in wind speeds, the cycle can repeat indeﬁnitely.

3 Turning, the glider soars downwind, gaining distance as it goes.

Wind Wind 2

Still air

1 1

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3 Downwind phase

K ATIE PEEK. OPPOSITE, CLOCK WISE: COUR TESY LEHIGH UNIVERSIT Y; C O U R T E S Y N O R T H R O P G R U M M A N ; C O U R T E S Y P A L- V E U R O P E

FLIGHT BECOMES PERPETUAL

entirely different. In the future, dynamically soaring aircraft could become observation platforms, used to record weather or wildlife data. They could also serve as communication relays, carrying television or cellphone signals. They could even travel great distances at great speed. Philip Richardson, an oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, recently proposed a dynamically soaring robotic albatross that could cross oceans at 200 mph. It’s no pelican, but Lord Rayleigh would no doubt be impressed.

GLIDE PATH The Jet Streamer, which is in development at Lehigh University, will draw energy from differentials in wind speed, so it could fly with little or no fuel.

WHERE’S MY FLYING CAR?

PA L -V ON E Created by Dutch company Pal-V Europe, this twoperson motorcycle-gyrocopter mash-up can fly at 112 mph and can take off and land on very short runways. On the ground, the tail, rotor, and propeller fold away, and the machine transitions into a three-wheeler that gets 28 mpg. The Pal-V One made multiple test flights over the past year in the Netherlands; the company says it will deliver the first of the $285,000 vehicles in 2015.

AIR SH IPS AR E N O T TH E FU TU R E O F FLIG H T Bad news for blimp fans

Airship development tends to come in waves, the most recent of which arrived in the mid-2000s. Facing two wars and a need for new surveillance and logistics craft, the Pentagon undertook a flurry of airship development. The Navy was first, with the MZ-3A, a technology testbed. The Air Force and Army followed, with their Blue Devil and LongEndurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) programs. Both ships were about as long as a football field and capable of flying for weeks. But then the bottom fell out. The financial crisis hit (bad), the wars began to wind down (good), and a helium shortage struck (expensive). In June 2012, Blue Devil lost funding. Eight months later, the LEMV got the ax too. The MZ-3A is still flying, but its funding is on the chopping block. If there was an airship renaissance in the making, alas, it has come down to Earth. —C.D.

J ULY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 5 3

FUTURE OF FLIGHT BY ADAM PIORE

FLIGHT AT THE FRINGE

THE FIVE BIGGEST IDEAS IN THE SKY

MY CONTACT WAS A GRUFF, swarthy man, wearing a couple days’ stubble, an immaculate black shirt, and a scowl. He looked me up and down sourly, then exhaled as if weary. He’d done this before. Too many times, perhaps. His name was Mario. And yes, he could sell me a surveillance drone—if I could meet his price. Could he interest me in a remote-control spy tank with a night-vision camera while I was at it? Mario led me across the room and nodded wordlessly at a compact machine with four propellers. The quadrocopter’s body was about the size of half a Costco papaya. Four thin rotor arms jutted out at diagonal angles, each attached to a pair of sculpted black blades. With one forwardfacing camera and one that looked down, I could collect video footage and stills from up to 80 feet in the sky and 160 feet straight on. Mario pressed a button on the controller in his hand. The blades whirred, and the drone lifted off. He held up a screen. The images were crystal clear. As a journalist, I’d worked in Cambodia and trailed the U.S. military through Iraq’s Anbar Province. But to purchase my surveillance drone, all I had to do was trundle down to a Brookstone in the Palisades Center mall in New York. It was located between a sunglasses shop and Victoria’s Secret. I handed Mario a credit card. For $299, he handed me a Parrot AR.Drone, a piece of military-style hardware that would stream footage to my iPhone. I told him I planned to videotape my neighbors. “The only law I know of,” Mario advised, “is trespassing. My first day working here, I got a call from a police department in New Jersey. Some guy was flying a plane over a neighbor’s house.”

BY 2017, DRONE SALES IN THE U.S. COULD REACH 110,000 UNITS ANNUALLY. 54 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JU LY 2 0 1 3

Surveillance drones aren’t commonplace in the U.S., but they will be. Last year, Congress passed legislation directing the FAA to integrate unmanned aircraft into domestic airspace by 2015. The new regulation could allow recreational users far greater freedom to roam the skies, and it will almost certainly spur demand. The Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International estimates that drone sales in the U.S. could reach 110,000 units annually by 2017. “The law will do for drones what the Internet did for desktop computers,” says Peter Singer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on drones. “It will open up entire new markets.” That change won’t be met without resistance—or regulation. In Rancho Mirage, California, the city council will vote on what is likely the first municipal ordinance regulating the use of drones over residential neighborhoods—after someone complained that a UAV was hovering above his home. In Oregon, lawmakers are pushing a bill that would apply trespassing, stalking, and privacy laws to aircraft. In Texas, legislators are considering a ban on the use of drones to photograph private property without permission. Happily, legislators in New York, my home state, had not yet introduced such restrictions. Back safely in my man cave, I tore open my drone box like a kid on Christmas. In the Apple store, I downloaded the app that would allow me to control my plane and its cameras with my phone. I watched training videos. I called friends and bragged about future exploits. Outside, I connected the battery to my plane and stepped away. The propellers shuddered to life and the drone lifted off. I maneuvered the craft across the street. Flying was harder than I’d expected. First I almost clipped a power line, then I sent the quadrocopter sailing toward a tree. Horrified, I watched as the propellers brushed a branch and the kill switch kicked in. My prized drone dropped like a stone, hitting the pavement with a sickening smack. One of the propeller arms broke off, and the back camera mount snapped in half. Back at the mall, Mario informed me my warranty didn’t cover collisions. But I was already too deep into the project to turn back. I paid $299 for another

OPPOSITE, FROM TOP: PRNEWSFOTO/BROOKSTONE, INC./ AP; COURTESY ADAM PIORE

The unregulated, slightly terrifying frontier of personal flight

AR.Drone and vowed to train in a less windy environment. The mall’s large indoor atrium would do fine. “They’ll stop you immediately,” Mario warned. “Mall security doesn’t even like it when we fly past our property line.” I thanked him for the advice and five minutes later, a lacy baby-blue bra appeared on my screen, tightly hugging a Victoria’s Secret mannequin. Then, a dour face appeared. “Is there a way for you to not do that?” demanded a short saleslady with a tape measure draped around her shoulders. “Somebody could get hurt.” Customer injuries, I discovered, were a concern shared by many humorless salesclerks—at Foot Locker, Zales, and Staples, among others. So I decamped to the food court—equidistant from so many different stalls, I figured no single cashier would feel responsible for stopping me. My drone lifted off, and I buzzed two senior citizens eating salads (they ducked). As I waited for mall security to arrive, I made flyovers of five salads, an order of chicken nuggets, and three slices of pizza. Eventually, I grew bored and decided to head outside. In my quiet town, I soared above the meter man as he wrote parking tickets. I hovered in front of the Village Hall, hoping to gather footage of handcuffed prisoners heading into court. That night, I floated outside the home of a magazine editor who lived nearby. Sadly, he wasn’t home. The juiciest footage I gathered was of a teenager sitting motionless in front of a television. Frustrated, I drove to a park frequented by prostitutes and drug dealers. When I piloted my drone toward a crowd of young men on a notorious set of park steps, the laughter died out. Then they left, unnerved. As I drove home, I thought about Luis Sepúlveda, the state assemblyman from the Bronx who announced plans in April to write legislation that would ban individuals from arming their drones. I was suddenly struck with a feeling of deep unease. Beyond my run-in with the irritated clerk at Victoria’s Secret and a few other wage slaves, I had roamed my town, the mall—even the drug-dealer steps—with impunity. I had even charged my battery in the

Village Hall. If someone wanted to turn a drone into a mini cruise missile, he or she wouldn’t face a lot of resistance. And that got me wondering: Could I turn my cheap Brookstone drone into a weapon? The next day, I shelled out $50 at a local hobby shop for a detonator and three tubes packed with gunpowder normally used to launch model rockets. In an isolated park not far from my house, I sat on a rock and duct-taped a tube to my drone. When the craft lifted off, I checked twice to make sure no one was around, then pressed the detonator. Flames and smoke shot out of the back of my drone, whipsawing it violently, like a small animal

BACKYARD BATTLEFIELD The market for military, commercial, and recreational drones is on track to rise to $89 billion in the next decade. Above: The author’s drone did not survive weaponization.

COULD I TURN MY CHEAP BROOKSTONE DRONE INTO A WEAPON? caught in the jaws of an alligator. It slammed into the ground, convulsed, then went still. It was at once mildly disappointing and somewhat disturbing. In this Wild West age of unregulated personal flight, even a rank amateur like myself can transform a toy into a hazard, an action that should be—and probably soon will be—illegal. Yet for all my moral objections, I couldn’t help but stare at the remaining two rocket engines lying before me and think, Next time, I will use more gunpowder. J ULY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 5 5

FUTURE OF FLIGHT BY DAVIN COBURN

2 SWARMING DRONES 3 PERPETUAL FLIGHT 4 3-D–PRINTED PLANES 5 CONGESTIONKILLING AIRCRAFT

SAMSO N SWITCHBLADE The Switchblade is essentially a flying three-wheeled car. It will, in all likelihood, sell as an $85,000 kit. Three different engines will be available, including a 170-hp Suzuki Hayabusa, which will drive a ducted pusher fan at the rear of the vehicle, allowing top speeds of over 200 mph. Operators will need a motorcycle driver’s license and a private-pilot certification. In April, the company completed the first part for its full-scale flight prototype.

substantially expand its portfolio. As a result, companies are now using 3-D printing to create working parts, not just prototypes. For now, those parts aren’t critical aircraft components. For example, the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner includes 30 or so printed components—a record— but most of them are air ducts or hinges. That, too, could change. In November, NASA started printing parts to test for its next heavy-lift rocket. One company, DIYRockets, went even further: It launched a contest to develop an open-source, 3-D–printable rocket engine. Last fall, students at the

PLANES WILL BE PRINTED 56 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / JU LY 2 0 1 3

University of Virginia printed almost all the components of an operational UAV, including the 6.5-foot wingspan, and flew it around an airfield. Perhaps the most audacious plan comes from Bastian Schaefer, a cabin engineer with Airbus who designed a printable private jet. There are presently no printers large enough to generate some of its parts—Schaefer estimates he needs a machine 260 feet by 260 feet—but he will begin printing the smaller parts now and hopes to complete his plane by 2050, when, he says, technology catches up.

CLOCKWISE: PASIEK A/GE T T Y IMAGES ; TODD DE T WILER. OPPOSITE: COURTESY SAMSON

1 VERTICAL-LIFT AIRCRAFT

WHERE’S MY FLYING CAR?

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

THE FIVE BIGGEST IDEAS IN THE SKY

LAST FALL, GE Aviation quietly purchased two small 3-D–printing companies, Morris Technology and Rapid Quality Manufacturing, and in doing so made a loud statement: 3-D printing will shape the future of aircraft. For the past decade, aerospace manufacturers have used additive printing to prototype select parts. The process is fast and affordable. “We can make the first batch of parts faster than any toolmaker can make the molds and jigs,” says Brett Lyons, a materials and process engineer at Boeing Research & Technology. But companies used only a few materials and printing techniques, such as Selective Laser Sintering (SLS), a process that uses lasers to bond thin layers of metals or thermoplastics. That’s changing. Companies have an increasing number of printing techniques to choose from, such as electron-beam melting, which, like SLS, makes production-grade aerospace parts. They can also print with many materials, including titanium, ceramic, and resin. Arcam, a 3-D–printer manufacturer in Sweden, is working with select labs to develop new materials and

CUSTOM BLADES Engineers at NASA are testing functional 3-D–printed parts for a rocket engine. But printing a turbofan, as rendered below, is beyond reach—for now.

JE T FU E L B E CO ME S SUSTAINABLE

Boeing’s Billy Glover explains how petroleum-based aviation fuel could disappear THE CH ANGE Aviation has always run on petroleum. In fact, jet fuel had been the same from the dawn of the jet age up until about three years ago. Then the airline industry changed international jet-fuel specifications to allow the use of renewable fuel sources. Airlines can now use renewables alongside jet fuel in a 50 percent blend. Already, as an industry, we’ve flown 1,500 flights with passengers—real revenue flights— with sustainable biofuels. THE FUEL S With our current biofuels mix, we typically get an improvement in efficiency of 1 to 3 percent. We can design out some of the impurities that come in petroleum, and we can control properties like freeze point. For very-long-haul flights at high altitude across the polar caps, you might like a fuel that doesn’t freeze when you’re flying at 35,000 feet. We can actually design in those properties. THE FUTURE We’re just at the beginning with biofuels. At Boeing, we’re convinced that they could significantly reduce the carbon life-cycle footprint—that’s been demonstrated. We think there’s even possibilities that they can reduce it all the way to zero or, in some cases, push it negative. And it can be 100 percent of the fuel, as opposed to 50 percent now—there’s no impediment to making it entirely from renewables. Billy Glover is the vice president for global business development and policy at Boeing.

J ULY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 5 7

FUTURE OF FLIGHT BY DAV I N CO B U R N

NEW DESIGNS WILL END CONGESTION

1 VERTICAL-LIFT AIRCRAFT 2 SWARMING DRONES 3 PERPETUAL FLIGHT 4 3-D–PRINTED PLANES 5 CONGESTIONKILLING AIRCRAFT

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Other researchers studied how Cestol planes would integrate into existing infrastructure. Results show that in tandem with NextGen’s approach and departure routing, which could allow planes to fly outside traditional flight paths, Cestol aircraft could land at underused, shorter runways or at smaller regional airports. Spreading air traffic over more runways would relieve congestion and substantially reduce flight delays.

Because aircraft-design cycles can span decades, Cestol craft will probably not arrive on commercial runways for a dozen years or more. But when they do, Amelia will probably stand as an influence. “I don’t know that Boeing will make a plane that looks just like Amelia,” Marshall says, “But I do expect some of the technology to transition over.”

WHERE’S MY FLYING CAR?

MO LLE R M400X SKYCAR In development for two decades, Paul Moller’s M400X is perhaps the most famous—or infamous—flying-car R&D project. The craft uses four maneuverable, ducted fans for takeoff, flight, and landing. The tens of millions spent on R&D produced a series of tethered flights in 2002 and 2003. Nonetheless, Moller recently announced a $480 million deal with Athena Technologies, a developer of control and navigation systems for UAVs, to co-produce the VTOL aircraft in the U.S. and China.

FROM TOP: COURTESY ERIC PACIANO/CALIFORNIA P O LY T ECH N I C S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y; C O U R T E SY M O L L E R

THE FIVE BIGGEST IDEAS IN THE SKY

AIRCRAFT DESIGN is often overlooked in discussions of the FAA’s multibillion-dollar NextGen initiative, the elaborate mélange of satellite-based guidance, arrival, and departure technologies intended to modernize the outdated and much-criticized national airspace system by 2025. Yet a team led by researchers at California Polytechnic State University found that one of the easiest ways to improve system efficiency may be to reengineer the plane itself. As part of a five-year NASA research project, the team designed a 100-passenger Cruise Efficient, Short Take-Off and Landing (Cestol) airliner that could arrive and depart at steep angles to and from 3,000-footlong runways. “This plane was designed with a circulation-control wing, which generates higher lift at lower speeds,” says David Marshall, an associate professor with Cal Poly’s aerospaceengineering department. “We can reduce the field length by 50 percent.” For the past year, scientists have wind-tunnel-tested a 2,500-pound model with a 10-foot wingspan, nicknamed Amelia (for Advanced Model for Extreme Lift and Improved Aeroacoustics), at NASA’s Ames Research Center.

HOW IT WORKS: TH E C ES TOL A IRLIN ER OVER-THE-WING ENGINES Scientists at Cal Poly mounted the Cestol’s turboprop engines above the wing—as opposed to underneath it— for two reasons. First, exhaust passing over the wing increases lift. Second, the wing deﬂects engine noise, shielding communities below. “NASA wants aircraft noise reduced by 52 decibels,” Marshall says. “So far, we’re already looking at a 30-decibel reduction.”

CIRCULATION CONTROL Conventional wings often have multiple flap elements, which rotate downward to increase the curve of the airfoil. The Cestol has a single flap, augmented by a narrow slot that runs the length of the wing. When the flap rotates downward, the slot channels high-pressure air over the top of the wing and directs the wind stream downward, increasing lift.

DEFLECTING JET EXHAUST To combine the effects of engine exhaust and circulation control, the team moved the turbofans to the front of the wings. When the flaps rotate down, the exhaust is pulled into a low pressure region, which increases lift and allows for even slower and steeper ascents. “With this design, we can generate lifts five to 10 times higher than a conventional wing,” Marshall says.

R O B O T S A R E TH E N E W W IN G MAN

The next phase of combat aviation isn’t unmanned, it’s less manned This summer, the Navy’s X-47B robotic combat jet will make aviation history. For the first time, an unmanned aircraft free from direct human control will guide itself onto the deck of a bucking aircraft carrier. Autonomous flight is coming, but that doesn’t mean it will replace all human pilots. It might just replace some of them. Over the past few years, the Pentagon has been developing a concept of robotic flight operations called the “loyal wingman.” Under the supervision of a pilot or a remote operator, robotic wingmen could support human pilots. If so instructed, drones could do long-range reconnaissance or hold formation. The Navy is already a few years into development of a unmanned jet, which is slated for service around 2020.

And engineers in the Air Force are working on an optionally manned version of the stealth Long Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B), which could be ready by the mid-2020s. As tempting as it is to imagine these craft running their own long-range strikes, taking pilots out of harm’s way, that’s probably not going to happen. “The one mission that they’re going to hold onto for a long time is visual ID, where we actually need to get a set of eyes on a potential target,” says former Navy ﬁghter pilot Mary Cummings, an associate professor of aeronautics at MIT. Robotic sensors still can’t combine the visual acuity of eyes and the rapid decisionmaking power of the human brain. They may have loyal robot wingmen at their sides, but pilots will be ﬂying combat missions for a long time to come. —C.D.

J ULY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 5 9

A GREAT NEW LENS THAT DOES IT ALL SIGMA 18-250MM F/3.5-6.3 DC MACRO OS HSM

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Sharp as a bug’s eye! Exquisite close-up by Walter Arnold was shot with the new Sigma 18-250mm DC Macro OS HSM lens.

This innovative, all-in-one super-zoom for APS-C format digital SLRs sets a new standard for extended-range zooms, delivering unprecedented versatility, image quality, and user-friendly convenience in an impressively compact, lightweight package. The 18-250mm is ingeniously enhanced with Sigma’s exclusive Thermally Stable Composite (TSC) lens barrel, which provides a number of remarkable advances. These breakthroughs provide enhanced dimensional stability for consistently outstanding performance, even at extreme temperatures, and also contribute to not only size and weight reduction, but also a greater maximum macro magniﬁcation of 1:2.9 for exquisitely detailed close-ups.

CUTTING-EDGE DESIGN This lens is 5.6 oz lighter and 1/2 inch shorter than its predecessor. It incorporates

all of Sigma’s latest technical advances in optical design and construction, delivering outstanding corner-to-corner image quality over its entire extended wide-to-telephoto zoom range. The latest innovations in mechanical construction and material technology assure robust dependability and enhanced shooting ﬂexibility in a handy, lightweight, high-value package.

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REMARKABLE RANGE Covering an impressive 13.8X zoom range from true wide angle to super-telephoto (28-388mm equivalent), and providing upgraded macro capability, this exciting new lens enables photographers at all skill levels to capture virtually any subject or scene without changing lenses. Its ultra-smooth zoom action assures fast, jiggle-free framing

For more information, visit sigmaphoto.com

POPULAR SCIENCE

FEAT URED ARTIST

J OH N PICAC IO

D I S P A T C H E S F R O M T H E F U T U R E The best minds in science ﬁction describe how we will live and work— on Earth or in space—in the decades and centuries to come JU LY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 61

“Even as technology reduces burdens and eases struggles, the sum of humanity’s limits—and its eternal quest to exceed them— is what defines us as humans and makes life meaningful.”

Download the tablet edition or visit popularscience.com/sciﬁ2013 to read full chapters of some of the writers’ recent works.

SELF

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S CO T T LY N C H

VOLUNTEER FIREFIGH TER SCOT T LYNCH’S NEXT B O O K, T H E R E PU B L I C O F T H I EV E S , WIL L HI T S H E LV ES I N O CT OBER .

PICKLE- JAR TECH NOLO GY hasn’t moved an inch in nearly three hundred years, and the cap on the jar in my hands won’t move either. The kids find it hilarious, and their fingers fly above the table as they sketch ghostly images for my benefit. My visual augments display their bright illusions in the air around me—there’s the framework of an unlikely Rube Goldberg device, along with a caricature of me caught in the grip of a huge anthropomorphic pickle jar about to twist my head off. I grin and fire back with a double nod of my head, the signal for the house’s backbone computer to upload the week’s chore schedule to their visual augments. While they flick their eyes over the words of Parental Writ (invisible to me), I finally manage to pop the jar open. A satisfying scent of brine and mustard fills the air. Dinner is classic American comfort food from my childhood: tomato salad, garlic naan, flash-fried wasabi chicken. The pickled cucumbers, bell peppers, and okra are from our garden, laid down in rows In 2012, beside the solar tarps. researchers The backbone comp banishes the light successfully created photosketches and seals the family’s network voltaic ﬁbers connections behind emergency-only courfrom silicon. tesy walls. The outside world goes away for the day’s big formal meal, and the assorted information scrolls and data overlays behind everyone’s eyes begin to unroll gibberish. For those networked since toddlerhood, total disconnection is anything but restful, so the backbone comp temporarily supplies meaningless data that can be ignored. Enwombed in soothing white information, I smile and pass the pickle jar around. CI T Y

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IAN MCD ONALD

I A N M C D O NA L D L I V ES I N BE L FAST, N O RTH E R N I R E L A N D. H I S L ATEST N OV E L , BE M Y ENEM Y , WAS P U BL I S H E D I N 2 01 2 .

T H E G H OS T S A R R I V E D in 2014 when Hakon Evevoldsen first kissed his wife, Ales, over a flat white at the Tim Wendelboe roastery on Grüners Gate in Oslo and pinned the photograph to Thissis, the then-new Augmented Reality app that turned streets into social history. Within a year, every building in every city in the world was overlain with pictures, posts, comments, poems, stories of love and hate, hope and failure, life and death, all accessible to every passerby: The ﬁrst first through AR glasses, now through bionic-eye neural implant. Over years, decades, implant to restore sight centuries, each street and building in patients got accumulated layer upon layer of the FDA approval lives that passed through or by them— in February sometimes a moment, like Hakon’s 2013. kiss, sometimes a lifetime. Now,

in 2298, every city is many cities—histories and lives stacked on top of each other. Sometimes buildings, sometimes whole districts have gone, or changed, or flooded, but the ghosts remain—the ghosts of people, the ghosts of the buildings. Walk down any street: The walls whisper, We lived here. We each live ten thousand lives, ten thousand loves. WORK

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NANCY KRESS

NANC Y KRESS LIVES IN SEAT TLE. HER B O OK A F T E R T H E FA L L , B E FO R E T H E FA L L , DU R I NG T H E FA L L WO N TH E 2 01 2 N E BU L A F O R BEST N OV E L L A .

THE MONITOR AL ARM woke me at 5 a.m.: problem in a desalinization plant supplying fresh water to New York. The robocrew couldn’t repair it, and I couldn’t fix it remotely. Groggily, cursing the AI that is always promised but never quite arrives, I boarded the maglev train.

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FEAT URED ARTIST

DAVID PALUM B O

It was crowded with people going to the floating-pavilion beaches over lower Manhattan, with all its crafts, hologram entertainments, musicians, specialty cooks, sex workers, and VR parlors. The three-day workweek gave everybody so much free time that half of all jobs are leisurerelated—no other way to create full employment. My grandfather hated the Uniform Wage Act, which enforces equal wages for everybody so that even the CEO of Asteroid Mining makes the same salary as I do. I used to tell Grandpa, “Would a revolution have been better? Because that’s what we’d have got if we didn’t restructure the economy and curtail population growth.” He could never see it, but the new system works. The desalinization plant contained only bots: operations bots, cleaning bots, repair bots, security bots, all built atomby-atom with nanotech. I was the first human on-site in three months. After I found and fixed the software problem, I stopped at a black-market place to buy my daughter a

Demographer James Vaupel advocates that adults work only 25 hours a week, but until they’re 80.

“Though food and basic needs are relatively unchanged (and abundant), the social aspect of the family at dinner is unapologetically isolated as each individual pursues distractions.”

genemod pupcat. Technically illegal—but so cute! When it barked, its implanted software translated the bark into words: “Pet me!” Half a week’s salary, but Cassie will love it. After all, what’s money for? WORK

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IAN TREGILLIS

IAN TREGILLIS CONSORTS WI TH SCIENTISTS, WRI TERS, AND OTHER DISREPU TABLE T YPES. HIS N OV E L N EC ESSARY EVIL CAME OU T IN APRIL .

JOIN THE NERE RE VO LUTION! Clean water is a fundamental human need that unites our far-flung species: those of us who remain on Earth, those colonizing the

JU LY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 63

FEAT URED ARTIST

DAV E S EE L EY

XXXXXXXXXXXXX

“Since 1895, scientists have theorized about building orbital elevators, structures that overcome the enormous energy cost of using rockets to escape Earth’s gravity. Recent developments in lightweight, high-strength materials may eliminate the “roadblock” to viable space commerce.”

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JU LY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 65

POPULAR SCIENCE Tau Ceti is a star, similar to the sun, 11 light-years away. Up to ﬁve planets may orbit it.

asteroid belt, and even those en route to the stars. But the supply of clean water is not limitless. This is as true on Mars, Ceres, and Tau Ceti 3 as it is on Earth. Now a revolution in resource acquisition and management, made possible by Nanotechnological Environmental Remediation Engineering (NERE), could alleviate water woes. Since 2145, NERE techniques have cleansed almost a billion gallons of water throughout the inner and outer solar system. The power of NERE is its flexibility: An array of nanobots can cleanse a natural watershed, the body of water it drains into, and the artificial life-support ecology that mimics it on a molecule-by-molecule basis. Our expert engineers tailor each application to the problem at hand, designing bots for specific environments (including specific pollutants), overseeing their application, and monitoring their deactivation when the work is completed. And because the design work requires highlevel predictive modeling to anticipate and eliminate problematic interactions, NERE technologies have always made extensive use of the most advanced artificially intelligent algorithms. More than 20 percent of the growth in the AI sector over the past thirty years has stemmed directly from advances spurred by NERE applications. WORK

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KARL SCHROEDER

KA R L S CHR OED ER IS A WR I TER A ND FU T UR IST BASED IN T ORONT O. HIS NOVEL LOCKSTEP WIL L BE PUBLISHED NEXT SPRING.

GREE TINGS, JOB SEEKERS! Today’s jobs post includes some pretty exciting opportunities! Here’s what we’ve got for you as of Monday, June 10, 2030: Garbage Designer. As an apprentice GD, you’ll learn how to tune the waste products of one industrial process so that they can be sold as raw material for another industry. Ecosystem Rehabilitator. The old word for this job was farmer. Since we get most of our food from vertical farms now, you’ll be re-wilding countryside that used to be farmland. You’re still a steward of the land, but with a new motivation: to return the ecosystems of North America to a state of pre-Columbian lushness. Alternatives Historian. Working from home, you’ll employ massive simulations in virtual worlds to predict the results of government- and corporate-policy decisions. Clone Councillor. You will mine the online-purchasing, social, and behavTitan, the ioral data of individual clients to simuworld’s fastest late future career or personal paths computer, models phefor them. nomena such Product Evolver. You’ll use natural as global selection in virtual realities to literally climate-change evolve products to optimize their effiscenarios. ciency, attractiveness, and cost. Manners Master/Mistress. In a fully global society, getting along with strangers is more important than ever. Interpersonal-manners experts can help. Join this fast-growing profession today!

SPAC E

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KIM STANLEY ROBINSON KIM STANLEY ROBINSON LIVES IN DAVIS, CALIF ORNIA. HIS L ATEST B O OK, 2312 , WON TH E 2 01 2 N E BU L A F O R BEST N OV E L .

The solar

M A N Y PRO B L E M S in travel around the solar system has 2,467 known system were solved when asteroids were adapted asteroids with to the task. Thousands of ovoid asteroids were a diameter of hollowed out so that their insides were empty at least one cylinders, and then they were set spinning on kilometer. their long axes to create a gravity effect inside. Crews and passengers live at one g, well protected from cosmic radiation, and move in orbits around the solar system like giant ocean liners. They never slow down, and catching up to one in a little ferry can be a crushing experience, as your reporter recently learned. Each asteroid contains a particular biome, filled with the plants and animals from particular landscapes back on Earth. Some are more aquarium than terrarium. If species have been mixed to make a mongrel biome, as has happened on Earth since the first living creatures migrated from one ecosystem to another, the result is called an Ascension, after Ascension Island in the South Atlantic. The island was bare rock until HMS Beagle landed there, and Darwin himself planted a variety of plants which have since prospered. By a nice coincidence, your reporter’s recent voyage was on the Wegener, an Ascension asteroid composed of plants and animals from West Africa and eastern Brazil. It is a beautiful space, highly recommended, but all the terraria are gorgeous in their own ways—in effect, floating works of landscape art. Take a trip on one and see! SPAC E

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E L I Z A B E T H B EA R

E L I Z A BETH BE A R H AS W R I T TE N N E A R LY 1 0 0 S H O RT ST O R I ES A N D M O R E TH A N 2 0 N OV E LS, O F W H I C H THE MOST RECENT IS S H AT T E R E D P I L L A RS .

THE REPAIR COMPLE TED, I pause in the As early as web of lines connecting the rotating habitat of 2014, NASA the Kalpana Chawla to the vast, filmy glory of its will launch a solar sail and imagine the space ahead. My patch 13,000-squarefoot solar sail— is all but invisible; a job well done. Drones carry seven times out much of this work, but some is better—well, larger than any easier—done by human hands. sail launched When I pass through the air lock and unseal to date. after my space walk, I notice the smell. Space has a distinct and pleasing scent. I can’t detect it when I’m outside—I’m sealed in, and the vacuum is sealed out. But when I reenter, there it is, clinging to the skin of my suit. A hot, metallic reek—earlier astronauts, who had been on planets and eaten meat, called it “steaky”—lies over the familiar laboratory-machine shop-kitchen-locker-room smells of the habitat. I rack my suit. The lock is coded to my DNA. It’s a

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FEAT URED ARTIST

DA N I EL D O CI U “There are over three thousand satellites orbiting the planet, mapped diligently by Google Earth. It isn’t much of a stretch to imagine the future with Earth as Downtown, its suburbs spreading out to space, moving around yet connected, jostling for premium location, for a bigger share of free solar energy, perfecting zero gravity manufacturing processes.” JU LY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 67

POPULAR SCIENCE FEAT URED ARTIST

STEPHAN MARTINIERE

JAMES COREY

“I imagine our future in a holistic way, where urbanism could be a harmony between technology and nature. Buildings might be living organisms, grown and shaped to fulfill a multitude of purposes. Future architecture would result from a deep understanding of the surrounding ecosystem.”

proof against vandalism, not theft. Suits are tailored to each member of the bioengineered crew, and my suit— manufactured for someone with a prehensile tail and a hand on each limb—wouldn’t be much use to a swimmer or a spider. But some of the younger crew members, born in space, are disaffected with the idea of generations spent traveling to a destination they will never see. Some want to turn back. Others want to become fully adapted to space and give up entirely on living at the bottom of gravity wells. I can see their point; I have a hard time imagining giving up this infinite voyage for the limits of the shore. CI T Y

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SPAC E

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KATHLEEN ANN GO ONAN KATH L E E N A N N G O O NA N TEAC H ES AT TH E GE O R G I A I N STI T U TE O F TE C H N O L O GY. H E R N OV E L T H I S S H A RED DREA M CA ME O U T IN 2011.

F R O M M Y B R E E ZE- WA S H E D balcony, I see individual flats hanging like lily pads from shoots, and conduits that carry vehicles, pedestrians, and utilities wind through a wildlife-rich arboreal forest. Vibrant, diverse communities flourish at different levels and cross-pollinate, a lively frisson of arts, science, and emerging technologies. I am Alima, a bioarchitect for the city of Arcady, an engineered habitat of 250,000 grown from a nanotech seed. It’s 07:30 on a Tuesday and it’s time to go to work. I don my IMP (interface modulating profile), a bracelet linking me to the city. Arcadians harbor nanoparticles that monitor health, sharpen memory, transmit information, and, some argue, change our very identity. My neural profile has made me synesthetic. Smell, sound, vision, taste, and touch mingle, expanding my design abilities. I print and don the day’s winged bodysuit, an ultralight second-skin prosthesis that This year, executes intent as naturally as my own hands, researchers at and activate the wings with a thought. I catch Brown Univerthe northeast Drift, where a new commercial sity announced that they built district is planned. Textures, light, and struca wireless tural challenges—a tor, a river, the prevailing brain-machine winds—form tastes I shape with my hands. interface. Tantalizing smells of grilled, spiced food and the bossa nova of street musicians infuse the scene. With a touch of finger to glove, I record that and a thousand other concepts. Later, I will synthesize them in a seed incorporating the mathematics of Arcady and present it to the community for feedback.

JAM ES C OREY IS THE PSEUD ONYM OF AU THORS DA N I E L A BR A H A M A N D T Y F R A N C K. C O R EY ’S N EW B O OK, A BA DD ON ’S GAT E , ARRIVED IN JUNE.

IN THE APOLLO PROGR AM, we focused on technical problems like packing the electronics and propulsion systems into something light enough for our rocket technology to actually get off the ground. Those were enormous challenges, but the biology of space travel didn’t get nearly as much attention. We put our astronauts into claustrophobic spaces and just sort of hoped that flying in microgravity wouldn’t break them too badly. Over the years, we got pretty good with rockets and computers and materials technology—we could easily get to space. The big challenge we faced was then staying there. To achieve a successful space-faring society, we had to cure cancer. Space is Galactic such a stressful, high-radiation environment cosmic rays consist that addressing cells that get knocked out of mainly of round by ginormous blasts of high-energy protons and particles was an absolute necessity. We helium nuclei. were spoiled by the Earth’s magnetosphere. Once we got outside of it, we faced the constant danger of tiny little bullets going near c that break you at the molecular level. Biological science, specifically in terms of genetic repair, is essential to our survival among the stars. CI T Y

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VANDANA SINGH

PHYSICIST VANDANA SINGH’S ST ORY “SAILING TH E A N TA RSA” A P P E A RS I N TH E A N TH O L O GY T H E O T H E R H A L F O F T H E S KY, PUBLISHED IN APRIL .

THE BUSY STREE T S meander—they are made for walking. Robot-cars on the few broad avenues are used when the destination is more important than the journey. The buildings—thick, reinforced adobe—stretch to twenty stories tall. Even in summer they don’t need airconditioning, as rooftop and vertical gardens cool them. The skyweb runs from tower to tower, strung on selfhealing, biomimetic cables. The elevator rises above the spicy smells wafting from restaurants and the sounds of conversation from theater doors, to jasmine scents and birdsong in the garden. There, the residents harvest gourds while I wait for the skycar. On my flight across town I can see the giant petals of eight sun stations, capturing solar energy via artificial photosynthesis. Twentyseven farm towers feed the city—because of In 2013, the nations’s them, wilderness is returning to nowlargest vertical abandoned megafarms beyond the perimfarm opened eter, where birds flit above an artificial near Chicago. wetland that also serves as a natural wastewater-treatment plant. Everything is connected via the sensorweb—buildings tell their stories of energy production or vegetable yield, and trees boast of the carbon dioxide they have cleaned from the air, or the family of monkeys that have moved in.

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COURTESY WARNER BROS. PICTURES

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SCIENCE STORY BY DA N IEL EN GBER AND E R I K S O FGE

OF BLOCKBUSTERS

The answers to the most nagging, fascinating, and bizarre questions of the summer movie season

HOW STRONG CA N S O M E O NE B E CO M E ? I N S PI R E D BY MAN OF STEEL THE PLOT In the latest remake of the 75-year-old comic franchise, Superman, an innocent farmer’s son, discovers his powers and saves the planet from two deranged villains, General Zod and his henchman, Faora, who arrive from Krypton bent on destruction.

HEALTHY SKEPTICISM

uperman may be able to lift a bus or an oil platform, but humans come with pretty strict limits on strength, the first of which is the nature of muscle. The maximum force that humans produce depends on how our muscle fibers work. Over the years, scientists have extracted muscles from different vertebrates and tested their capacities. What emerged was a nifty rule of thumb: A muscle can produce about 30 newtons of force (or 6.75 pounds) for every square centimeter in cross-section. “By virtue of evolution being a conservative process, the components of all these muscles are basically the same,” says Peter Weyand, an applied physiologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. So why not just create more muscle? To a degree, humans have been doing that for ages: We’re more physically developed than we were even 500 years ago. But, says Geoffroy Berthelot, a sports analyst, “You can’t increase the mass of your muscle over a certain limit because your bones will not support

its strength.” Tendons, while quite sturdy, have limits too—15,000 pounds of pulling per square inch across. Berthelot says that humans may be approaching the upper bounds of athletic performance. Muscle composition limits human performance as well. Fast-twitch muscle fibers produce more power than their slow-twitch counterparts. With training, athletes may be able to alter their ratio of slow-to-fast, but research suggests it is mostly genetically predetermined. One way to raise the limit on human strength is to engineer an athlete that is, well, beyond human. A different bone structure could increase the leverage of certain movements. For example, according to Duke University evolutionary anthropologist Steven Churchill, male Neanderthals, when flexing at the elbow, were probably one-third stronger than average men today. So when considering Superman, it’s worth remembering his origin on Krypton. Like a Neanderthal, he is not technically human but humanoid, so different rules apply.

Superman’s suit is just about as indestructible as the man of steel. Comic-book writers have said its strength resulted from a force field or Kryptonian textiles, but that always rang hollow. The only way to make a bulletproof bodysuit would be to reinforce it with graphene, which is flexible, ultrathin, and 50 times stronger than steel.

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WH Y B O TH E R CO NTR O LLIN G A ROBOT WITH YOUR MIND ? I N S PI R E D BY PAC I F I C R I M THE PLOT: When colossal monsters called kaijus emerge from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, humanity tries to fend them off with giant battle bots controlled from afar by pilots linked to neural interfaces.

ell, sure. You could use a tried-and-true interface, as drone pilots do. But a brain-controlled interface (BCI) is much cooler. And in principle, it’s better: As any gamer knows, there is a biochemical limit to how fast a brain signal can travel to a muscle, and when battling kaijus, every millisecond counts. That said, scientists are a ways from that point. BCIs exist—scientists have used them to control robots—but they are pretty clunky. It is diﬃcult to get a clear signal from a brainwave pattern, which leads to errors and can slow response. “We’re very careful when we talk about BCI,” says Francisco Sepulveda, a bioengineer at England’s University of Essex who worked on neural interfaces for 20 years. “It wouldn’t be a standalone solution except in speciﬁc cases.”

LISTENED TO EXPERTS

SCI-FI GETS REAL How the indie ﬁlmmakers behind Europa Report put science in their ﬁction 72 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / JU LY 2 0 1 3

Better BCIs, for example, may one day allow quadriplegics to move about or help pilots immobilized by high gravitational forces. But even in those capacities, BCIs could be of limited utility; scientists could more easily create an interface that responds to voice commands or eye movements, or they may not need an interface at all. When it comes to planes or cars (or 2,700-ton robots), autonomous controls are likely a better option. For those pursuing BCIs, the pilots in Pacific Rim do present a useful idea: They drive their battle bots in pairs, with their brains linked by a “neural bridge.” Sepulveda’s group just finished an experiment on this concept. Participants were divided into teams of two, and software read brain signals from both team members as they tried to run a spacecraft simulator. By merging neural signals, the BCI averaged out some noise and flew with greater accuracy. Turns out two heads are indeed better than one.

HEALTHY SKEPTICISM According to production stills, the kaiju’s blood runs blue, which is odd but not unheard-of. The horseshoe crab, among other arthropods, has bluish blood. Its blood cells use proteins made from copper instead of iron to carry oxygen. Its blood also clots easily, which allows the crab, and presumably the kaiju, to recover quickly from wounds.

Director Sebastian Cordero and his producers worked with advisers from the Science & Entertainment Exchange, an initiative of the National Academies of Science. A pair of planetary scientists scrutinized every detail. One example: They figured out exactly how Jupiter would look, in terms of size and the orientation of its stripes, as the crew flew by.

REVIEWED NASA RECORDS

Since the film is presented as found footage, Cordero reviewed hours of Apollo film recordings to better understand how a space mission might look on camera. In particular, he noticed the stars—or lack thereof: They were so dim that the cameras didn’t pick them up. So rather than a starscape, Cordero used a black background in production.

DIDN’T SHOW WHAT THEY DIDN’T KNOW

For the movie’s more speculative aspects, Cordero used allusion more than illustration. “I was initially afraid that these guys would go too far with trying to depict what might be found on Europa,” says science adviser Kevin Hand. Instead, the film crew left the details tantalizingly—and sometimes terrifyingly—ambiguous. Europa Report premieres on demand on June 27 and in theaters August 2.

SCIENCE OF BLOCKBUSTERS

WILL WE EVER SWAP P E R F E CTLY LE TH A L G U N S FOR FANCY PHASER PISTOLS? I N S PI R E D BY STA R TR E K INTO DAR KN ES S

COURTESY PAR AMOUNT PICTURES. OPPOSITE, FROM TOP: COURTESY WA R N E R B R O S . P I CT U R E S ; C O U R T E SY WAY FA R E E N T E R TA I N M E N T

THE PLOT In the sequel to the 2009 J.J. Abrams film, a terrorist bombing in London triggers a planet-hopping manhunt for a traitorous Federation agent—and a climactic space battle between the turncoat’s vessel and the USS Enterprise.

ince it debuted in 1966, the Star Trek phaser has remained the stuff of Hollywood prop departments and Trekkie conventions. But directedenergy weapons may be coming to the battlefield soon. Boeing, for example, is developing the truck-mounted 10-kilowatt HEL MD (high-energy laser mobile demonstrator) to defend against swarms of incoming drones, missiles, or mortar rounds. Instead of launching a million-dollar-plus missile for every threat, defense experts could use lasers to destroy multiple targets with precision. Though smoke can dampen a beam’s intensity, lasers don’t have to account for wind speed or range, and they don’t ricochet, limiting any collateral damage. Boeing is also testing a smaller unit called the Tactical Laser System. While still far from holster-size, it could be mounted on naval vessels alongside an Mk 38 machine gun. The objective would be to defend against drone swarms or a fleet of smaller boats, either by destroying them outright or by using lower-

intensity beams to blind or fry sensors (or eyeballs). Where ray guns become unworkable is on smaller scales. For example, Boeing is working on a portable 2kw laser, capable of destroying unspecified targets (the company won’t go into details). But even this weapon is not small enough to replace the trusty assault rifle; it requires two soldiers to carry it. The laser would be most useful for stealth missions, since it could be set in place and fired remotely, with minimal light and sound.

HEALTHY SKEPTICISM

The greatest challenge in making handheld directed-energy weapons is the energy itself. A 100kw laser can consume two cups of diesel in a foursecond engagement. That’s a bargain compared to launching missiles. But a general-purpose, infantry-scale death ray would require fuel with an energy density that today’s researchers can only dream of. “We’re not close,” says Suveen Mathaudhu, a materials engineer in the U.S. Army Research Oﬃce. To create that, he says, “would require a major, major breakthrough, on the level of fusion technology.”

At one point in the film, Spock attempts to extinguish a volcano with something like a super ice cube. To quench an eruption, though, you’d need to solidify the magma all at once, says Erik Klemetti, a vulcanologist at Denison University. That would require instant cooling on a massive scale; anything less would only create lots of steam, which would just intensify the eruption.

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WILL EXOSKELETONS EVER FLY? THE PLOT: Rakish billionaire, inventor, and superhero Tony Stark faces a series of attacks—including an air strike on his home and wrestling matches with nanotech-enhanced goons—launched by an international terrorist who calls himself the Mandarin.

n Iron Man, Tony Stark’s suit is incredibly powerful, a wearable weapon system that can hurl cars and outmaneuver jet ﬁghters. In reality, it is the synthesis of two technologies: the jetpack and the exoskeleton, which is the more promising of the two. In terms of exoskeletons, no one will be bench-pressing Buicks anytime soon, but a number of systems already exist as assistive or rehabilitative medical devices. Companies such as Argo Medical Technologies and Ekso Bionics oﬀer motorized devices targeted to the disabled that can essentially walk for their wearers, allowing users a more versatile alternative to wheelchairs. There could be other applications for exoskeletons, too. At NASA, researchers are working to incorporate them into space suits. They have developed one that could eventually allow astronauts to hike across Mars for long stretches, loaded with gear, while expending little energy. Meanwhile, the development of rocket belts (the technical term for jetpacks) is at a relative standstill. A

74 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / JU LY 2 0 1 3

handful of models have debuted in the past decade—including Jet Pack International’s H202 and TAM’s Rocket Belt—but none have amounted to more than a PR stunt. The systems struggle to stay aloft for a useful amount of time, emptying fuel tanks in less than a minute. The additional weight of an exoskeleton would only exacerbate the problem. As for the future of exoskeletons, NASA engineer Chris Beck says that

today’s systems, such as the X1 that he’s developing, will lead to the superhuman systems of tomorrow. “We’re not just blowing smoke. An exo like ours, or an adapted version, could be used for strength augmentation,” he says. Exoskeletons might also ﬂy—just not with jetpacks. “What if you combined ultralight planes and our auto-balancing techniques?” says Larry Jasinski, CEO of Argo, whose ReWalk exo is for sale for personal use in Europe and Israel. Instead of a pilot’s seat and a traditional control layout, the ﬂier might simply squeeze into the aircraft’s integrated suit. “You could literally lean left or right, and the exoskeleton components could steer for you.”

HEALTHY SKEPTICISM Iron Man’s jet boots work underwater, which ignores the fact that combustionbased jets drown when submerged. DARPA sought proposals for submersible aircraft in 2008, but that project, it seems, is dead in the water.

EVOLUTION OF THE KILL BOT There are two kinds of robots in Hollywood: innocuous servants that are one glitch away from murdering their masters, and the bots designed for wholesale slaughter from the start. Here’s a look at the latter, a purpose-built class of killer machines—and the pioneering models that gave new shape to one of our oldest nightmares.

MECHANICAL MONSTERS: The stars of the 1941 Superman animated short presented the most lasting and awkward archetype of deadly robotics— the dreaded humanoid.

ED-209: While there’s nothing particularly deadly about the twolegged design of ED-209, which ﬁrst appeared in 1987’s RoboCop, it was iconic enough to remain intact for the 2014 remake.

SENTINELS: The Matrix (1999) provided the most alien take on killer bots: the horriﬁc squid-legged, spider-headed Sentinels, which attack victims with multitudes of razorsharp tentacles.

COURTESY SONY PICTURES. OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY M A R V E L S T U D I O S / WA LT D I S N E Y M OT I O N P I CT U R E S ; E V E R E T T C O L L ECT I O N ( 2 )

I N S PI R E D BY IRON MAN 3

CA N HU M A NS SURVIVE ON A P E R M A NE NT OR B ITA L COLONY? I N S PI R E D BY E LYSIUM THE PLOT In 2154, the wealthiest humans live on a posh orbital station called Elysium. One man tries to harness the upper crust’s lifesaving technology to save the poor, disease-ridden masses still on Earth—starting with himself.

HEALTHY SKEPTICISM Matt Damon’s rifle-size railgun should raise some eyebrows. The benefit of supplying some 100,000 amperes per electromagnetically propelled shot is a longer range. That might make sense for a ship-mounted weapon, like the one the U.S. Navy is conceiving. For gunfights that don’t span miles, though, gunpowder is more practical.

SCIENCE OF BLOCKBUSTERS

pectacular views notwithstanding, living in space is hard. Microgravity drains the mass from our flesh and bones, and the radiation normally blocked by Earth’s magnetosphere can shorten lifespans. So the premise of Elysium presents a conundrum: Why would the planet’s most pampered occupants pay to live in orbital habitats that turn them brittle and cancerous? In the film, the answer is that money cures everything. The station’s health care exceeds anything on Earth, with devices that erase nearly all physical ailments, including cancer. As for the hazards associated with low gravity, Elysium is a Stanford torus, a design first proposed in the

1970s, where inhabitants live on the interior of a gigantic, rotating wheel, with centrifugal force providing Earthequivalent G-forces. In theory, the torus is scientifically sound, but building it might be impossible. It would require hauling millions of tons of material into orbit. “It might literally be easier to colonize the moon than to construct this Stanford torus,” says John B. Charles, chief of human-research programs at NASA. It could also be difficult to innovate away the health threats associated with living at the edge of Earth’s magnetosphere. Present-day astronauts can absorb two to three years’ worth of radiation aboard the International Space Station, in multiple stays, before being grounded. According to Charles, a more permanent habitat would most likely use available materials such as wastewater to deflect radiation. In the end, it would take a lot of work just to avoid wasting away. Hope that view is worth it.

SCIENCE MIND Neil Blomkamp, the director of Elysium, once illustrated for POPULAR SCIENCE. He shares two secrets to making great sci-fi. CULTIVATE BELIEF: “When I design something, whether it’s for a movie or POP SCI, I need to believe it can work. If I don’t believe it, the audience won’t either. What leads to a unified vision is when the director has all those visuals in his head.” TELL REAL STORIES: “Science fiction is just a filter to look at real life. I’m not trying to tell a story that takes place in 2154. Elysium is a rich-and-poor film. A hundred fifty years from now, Earth will probably look a lot like the film: mass poverty, plagues, disease, too many people, and too few resources. And all the crazy life-changing technology will be in concentrated areas of wealth, with armed guards at the gate. What happens then?” See a gallery of Blomkamp’s work at popsci.com/blomkamp J ULY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 7 5

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Build a squirt cannon with PVC pipes

PLUS:

Turn matches into miniature rockets PAGE 82

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HOW 2.0

PAGE 84

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@POPSCI

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

EDITED BY DAVE MOSHER

EXTERMINATE! Jim Rossiter hacked a six-channel R/C remote to toggle the Dalek’s lights, swivel its head, and move its eye and arms up and down.

YOU BUILT WHAT?!

Evil Alien Cyborg The ultimate antihero from a sci-fi TV series

espite his devotion to Daleks—those cruel, armor-clad extraterrestrials from the TV show Doctor Who, now in its 50th year—Jim Rossiter has no interest in annihilating other civilizations. The 57-year-old Australian just likes how the aliens look. After decades of building radio-controlled vehicles, Rossiter made his own eerily accurate Dalek, right down its screeching battle cry: “Exterminate!” A typical Dalek resembles a giant saltshaker outfitted with a ray gun, a menacing eye on a long stalk, and a third appendage shaped like a sink plunger (which, on the show, can suck its foes to death). Beneath the exoskeletal armor lives a tentacled mutant soldier whose mission is to destroy all other life. Still, Daleks have an unusual B-movie charm that inspires fan adoration. Rossiter, a machinist by trade, found himself part of a global community of passionate Dalek builders who share plans, tips, and tricks, CONTINUED ON NE X T PAGE

STO R Y BY GREGORY MONE

TIME 14 Months COST About $2,000

PHOTOGR APHS BY JIM ROS SITER

J ULY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 7 9

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HOW 2.0

including advice about 3-D–printing replicas of rare 1960s ray guns. Rossiter began with a wood and fiberboard frame. What initially resembled a weird piece of furniture soon looked threatening, as Rossiter lathed several pieces of aluminum into the Dalek’s ray gun. He set the barrel of the gun in a spherical wooden bedpost, and later fit the bedpost inside the body so it could rotate like an arm in a shoulder socket. Next, Rossiter spent months sawing, sanding, and fiberglassing the Dalek’s body and dome-shaped head. To make the eyestalk move up and down, he first installed a windshieldwiper motor. Once he switched it on, though, it wouldn’t stop. “The motor kept trying to move the arm [on its own],” he says. He eventually opted for a simpler servomotor, and he used another servo—linked to a wheel from an old remote-control car—to rotate the head from the inside. Other fans built Daleks with room for a human driver, but Rossiter had a different plan. “I wanted to see it moving rather than see from inside,” he says. So he wired every part for remote control, and set the body on top of a concealed baseplate equipped with two caster wheels and a pair of fat mobility-scooter tires. Each tire moves on an independent motor, allowing Rossiter to drive the Dalek like a tank. Finally, he transferred sound bites of the Dalek’s bleating voice to an old MP3 player, pulled that apart, and wired it to a custom amp and a set of speakers in the body. He can activate the voice from afar, but he’s working on a remote microphone and voicemodulation system to twist his words into Dalek-speak in real time. Rossiter’s monstrosity has already terrorized nieces and nephews, but in October he plans to invade an Australian science-fiction convention called Armageddon. The challenge will be getting the alien there; it doesn’t fit through his shop door. “Daleks have their own spaceships,” Rossiter says. “I only have a little hatchback.” 80 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / J ULY 20 1 3

EVIL ALIEN CYBORG

HOW IT WORKS

BASE 1 THE The alien’s armored torso sits

on a wooden platform outfitted with caster and mobility-scooter wheels. Although the original Daleks drew power from their surroundings, Rossiter’s relies on a standard 12-volt car battery.

Scooter 15 Estimated Horsepower

BRAIN 2 THE A Wi-Fi receiver in the body picks up commands from a wireless remote control and sends them to the Dalek’s components, such as a speed controller that governs the scooter-wheel motors. From 300 feet away, Rossiter can activate LEDs and speakers and move the Dalek around.

SINISTER EYE 3 THE Rossiter created a convincing eyestalk by draining a Magic 8 Ball toy, adding a magnifying glass to one end, and attaching a hollow aluminum tube with a blue LED to the base. “It shines through the eyestalk into the eye,” he says. “It gives a good effect.”

K&N Intake System #57-2556* on a 2005 Ford F150 5.4L 15 More Estimated Horsepower†

THE DALEK VARIABLE

Some astronomers think 100 billion Earth-like planets may exist in the Milky Way galaxy. That number plugs into a formula, called the Drake equation, used to calculate the number of intelligent alien civilizations humans could discover. But Stephen Hawking and other scientists worry that reaching out could lead to our doom. Hence we propose adding the Dalek variable: the chance of an intelligent race surviving an attack by malevolent extraterrestrial invaders. Astronomers have guesstimates only for these

The point is, a little extra horsepower is a bigger deal than you might think ... and can be added to your truck in about 90 minutes.

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N = R* • fp • ne • fl • fi • fc • L • fd Number of alien civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy that emit detectable signals Rate at which stars that could host life-bearing planets form (number of stars per year) COURTESY JIM ROSSITER

Fraction of those stars that have planets Number of planets in each system that might host life

Fraction of planets that produce life Fraction of life-bearing planets that produce intelligent life Fraction of civilizations that develop the technology to send signals into space Length of time a civilization sends signals detectable by others (years) Proposed: The Dalek variable—fraction of those civilizations that can survive an alien attack

JU LY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 81

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KNFILTERS.COM/PS † Estimated horsepower gains based on specific or similar vehicle dynamometer tests. Results will vary. For more information, look up vehicle and/or testing protocols at knfilters.com.

WARNING: Kids, you need adult supervision. Launch only outside while wearing eye protection, and mind your aim (matches were designed to start fires).

HOW 2.0 / CHEAP TRICKS STO R Y BY SUSAN E. M AT TH E WS

TIME 10 minutes COST About $3 DIFFICULTY ▯○○○○

Turn matches into tiny rockets The swift strike of a match on July 4 typically precedes sky-high spectacles. But matches themselves can be ﬁreworks. When ignited, the bulb of fuel on a match’s tip combusts into space-hogging gases. By containing the gas in aluminum foil and directing it downward, you can create a miniature missile. Follow these steps to become a rocket scientist in your own driveway.

MATERIALS • Matches • Sewing pin or needle • Paper clips • Aluminum foil

INSTRUCTIONS

1 2

Bend a paper clip into a 45-degree angle. Presto! You have a launch pad.

Remove the pin. This leaves a hollow channel that will direct gas downward, so it can act as propellant.

Lay a pin along a matchstick so that the sharp tip touches the match head. Wrap the head with a piece of aluminum foil, and gently crease the foil around the pin (avoid tears and holes).

Rest the match on the launch pad, hold a small flame under the foil-wrapped match head, and start your countdown.

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A voice-activated organizer that finds spare parts

TheMakerMap.com Need to weld in Wellington, New Zealand? Looking to master CNC milling in N.Y.C.? Use The Maker Map to ﬁnd DIY havens such as fabrication shops, hackerspaces, and co-working oﬃces. Entrepreneurs Renee DiResta and Nick Pinkston built the online map and asked DIY communities across the globe to plot the best locations. By March 2013, it included more than 800 spots, featuring hackerspaces as far as Singapore. Anyone can propose a resource, and volunteers validate each one before adding it to the map.

Over 25 years, Danh Trinh had amassed thousands of screws, hinges, and other parts in his workshop. He filed them away in labeled drawers, but locating them still wasn’t easy. To solve that problem, he built StorageBot: a robotic organizer that summons components at the sound of his voice. Trinh first crafted a wooden cabinet to stack nine plastic storage boxes—each holding 40 drawers—into a grid. Then he installed stepper motors and pulleys to move behind the shelf along two axes. They connect to a rack-and-pinion system that pushes the drawers open. When a laptop recognizes a voice command, it feeds the data to an

TIME 3 months COST About $700

Arduino microcontroller, which operates the drawer-opening system and a border of LEDs. “The LEDs indicate the row and column of the drawer that is about to open,” Trinh says. Now if he needs a hinge, he doesn’t have to halt a project to get one. “Anything that breaks away from your brainstorming impedes your train of thought.”

HEAR AND OBEY StorageBot follows voice commands to retrieve parts listed in a database. Just one command can open a specific drawer or all the ones that contain, for example, screws.

HOW 2.0 / BUILD IT STORY BY DANIEL DUMAS

ILLUSTR ATION BY SON OF AL AN

DIY Waterzooka A homemade water blaster built from PVC pipes

ummertime means rising temperatures— and, often, rising tempers. If your friends and family want to beat the heat without beating each other, there’s a surefire option: squirt-gun fight! But shelling out for a few $20-or-more water weapons can rapidly thin a wallet. That’s why you should take matters into your own hands, visit the hardware store, and exercise some garage ingenuity to build an inexpensive yet durable arsenal of Waterzookas. POPULAR SCIENCE likes this version from the website Instructables.com, but we tweaked it to stay current with the latest water-gun technology [see “Crossing the Streams,” page 16]. Follow these instructions to keep your cool.

M AT E R I A L S 1. 2-inch-by-24-inch Schedule 40 PVC pipe 2. 1¼-inch-by-24inch PVC pipe

INSTR U CTIONS:

CUT: Take the thinner 24-inch pipe [2], and saw oﬀ a 2-inch-long piece. Smooth the edges with sandpaper.

DRILL: This is the fun part. New water guns let you pick nozzles that can soak people in a variety of ways. Imitate them by drilling one ¼-inch-diameter hole, or several ⅛-inch-diameter holes, in the end of one 2-inch PVC cap [3]. A small, ⅛-inch-wide slit also works well. (Our favorite conﬁguration? Three holes that deliver a shotgun-style blast.) Cut or drill a larger, 1¾-inch hole in the other 2-inch cap; this will be your piston guide.

3. Two 2-inch PVC caps 4. Two 1¼-inch PVC caps 5. 1¼-inch PVC coupler 6. Buna-N 1.6-inch ID by 0.21-inch CS O-ring 7. PVC glue (8 ounces is plenty) 8. Tube of waterproof silicone grease

GLUE: Assemble the piston by applying PVC glue [7] to one end of the 2-inch pipe you sawed oﬀ in step A and to one end of its 22-inch counterpart. Insert both glued ends into either end of the PVC coupler [5]. Ease the O-ring [6] over the 2-inch piece of pipe, then glue one of the 1¼-inch caps [4] to the 2-inch piece.

GREASE: To build the gun’s body, glue the nozzle (the 2-inch cap with the small hole(s) you drilled) onto the 2-inch-by-24-inch PVC pipe [1]. Let the glue dry for 15 minutes, then dab some grease [8] inside the pipe.

ASSEMBLE: Stick the piston into the body, then push, pull, and wiggle it around to evenly distribute the grease. This will create a smooth, watertight seal. Next, work the piston guide (the 2-inch cap with the 1¾inch hole you made) over the piston, and slide the piston guide onto the body. Don’t glue it! Take the other 1¼-inch cap and glue it to the piston.

DOUSE: Your Waterzooka is ready for action. Dip the business end into water—a lake, a pool, a bucket—pull the handle to suck water into the barrel, and then push it in to ﬁre. Just make sure to build a few for your spouse, kids, and mother-in-law so they can defend themselves. Well, maybe not your mother-in-law.

TIME 2 hours COST About $15 for a bunch of guns DIFFICULTY ▯▯○○○

WARNING: Never aim high-pressure streams of water at anyone’s eyes. It’s dangerous. And it hurts! 84 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / JU LY 2 0 1 3

FYI POPSCI.COM

J U LY 2 0 1 3

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QUESTION

W H AT W OUL D H A P P E N IF Y OU SHO T OF F FIRE WORKS IN SPACE ? SHORT ANSWER THE Y WOULD GO OFF WITHOUT A BANG.

Launching fireworks in a near-zerooxygen environment is completely feasible, says Stefan Bossmann, a chemist and rocket enthusiast at Kansas State University: “That would be no problem at all. They have an oxidizer, and they have a reductant.” That chemistry is not reliant upon oxygen, and similar reactions are responsible for powering space-shuttle thrusters and other large space-borne rockets. The trouble would come after launch, when the bursting charge releases and ignites the colorant pellets. The reaction that imparts a rocket’s metals and metal salts with enough energy to change pretty colors requires oxygen. Unless your fireworks were specially designed for bursting in space, their colors would quickly fizzle out. “There may be some color in the initial explosion,” says Bossmann, “but it wouldn’t be half as spectacular as what you see on the Fourth of July.” Even with space-enabled fireworks, a burst wouldn’t have any thunder. With no atmosphere to propagate sound waves, even the loudest of rockets would be reduced to silence.

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W H AT A R E T HE L E A S T E S S E N T I A L ORG A N S IN T HE HUM A N B OD Y ? There are two schools of thought when it comes to ranking organs in terms of their utility, or lack thereof. According to one theory, the least essential parts are those that come in pairs. Giving up an eye or ear wouldn’t be too bad, the thinking goes, so long as you keep the other one. It’s not life threatening to lose even a lung or a kidney. Still, there’s probably a reason the body comes with backups. “It’s a good thing to have reserves in case you get sick or have an injury,” says Robert Shmerling, a rheumatologist and professor at Harvard Medical School. When you lose a kidney, the one that’s left behind must work harder. If it fails, you’re in big trouble. Shmerling wonders whether doubled organs may turn out to be even more important: With humans living longer, redundant organs could be handy. LONG ANSWER

If you want to keep your pairs intact, the other theory dictates that the most disposable body parts would be the ones that seem to have no point. The appendix leads this list, though Shmerling notes that it isn’t quite a standalone component. “The appendix is a portion of the digestive tract,” he says. Same goes for the tonsils, which may be lumped in with the immune system. So which organ would Shmerling give up if he were forced to choose? The gall bladder. “I’m pretty sure I could do pretty well without it,” he says.

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From the Archives POPUL AR SCIENCE / JULY 2013

STO R Y BY PAV I T H R A M O H A N

Fly Another Day J

ames Bond films would not be complete without plenty of elaborate—and largely fictitious—spyware. But in You Only Live Twice, Sean Connery’s Bond dodged enemy aircraft in a real flying machine: the WA-116 autogyro, nicknamed Little Nellie. In June 1967, POPULAR SCIENCE profiled this “hummingbird among hawks” and its designer, Royal Air Force Wing Commander Ken Wallis— who stood in for Connery during flight scenes. In a dogfight with four helicopters, Little Nellie appeared to take a hit, but hidden detonators punched a line of bullet holes into a dummy rudder. Since then, special effects and aviation have advanced: Turn to page 70 to read about the science behind summer movies and to page 47 for new aircraft concepts.

Old-school movie magic… In November 1932, POPULAR SCIENCE went behind the scenes to watch the staging of some daring flight maneuvers. To make the film Air Mail, producers suspended toy-size “puppet planes” from cables and wires, creating the illusion of flight while keeping actors out of harm’s way. POPULAR SCIENCE magazine, Vol. 283, No. 7 (ISSN 161-7370, USPS 577-250), is published monthly by Bonnier Corp., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. Copyright ©2013 by Bonnier Corp. All rights reserved. Reprinting in whole or part is forbidden except by permission of Bonnier Corp. Mailing Lists: We make a portion of our mailing list available to reputable firms. If you would prefer that we not include your name, please write to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. Subscription Rates: $19.95 for 1 year. Please add $10 per year for Canadian addresses and $20 per year for all other international addresses. GST #R-122988066. Canada Post Publications agreement #40612608. Canada Return Mail: IMEX Global Solutions, P.O. Box 25542, London, ON N6C 6B2. Printed in the USA. Subscriptions processed electronically. Subscribers: If the post office alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within two years. Photocopy Permission: Permission is granted by POPULAR SCIENCE® for libraries and others registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) to photocopy articles in this issue for the flat fee of $1 per copy of each article or any part of an article. Send correspondence and payment to CCC (21 Congress St., Salem, MA 01970); specify CCC code 0161-7370/85/$1.00–0.00. Copying done for other than personal or reference use without the written permission of POPULAR SCIENCE® is prohibited. Address requests for permission on bulk orders to POPULAR SCIENCE, 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016 for foreign requests. Editorial Offices: Address contributions to POPULAR SCIENCE, Editorial Dept., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. We are not responsible for loss of unsolicited materials; they will not be returned unless accompanied by return postage. Microfilm editions are available from Xerox University Microfilms Serial Bid Coordinator, 300 N. Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48106.

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