Popular science usa 2013 08

P. 54

HOW TO LIVE WITHOUT FOOD + The Gene-Patent War + 25 Geek Trips

BIO THE

REVOLUTION

How Doctors Print Organs From Living Tissue

NEW GESTUROEL CO N T R ATA SCULPT D R WITH YOSU D N HA

No Donor Needed Bioprinters can produce scaffolds of organs and infuse them with a patient’s own cells.

The holy grail: a new heart.

We create chemistry that makes compost love plastic.

Most plastics don’t biodegrade, but ecovio® plastics from BASF biodegrade completely when composted in a controlled environment*. Using compostable bags for collection of organic waste makes disposal more hygienic and convenient. Rather than ending up in landfills, the ecovio® bagged organic waste can be turned into valuable compost where programs exist. When the plastic bag you use today can mean a cleaner future for the environment, it’s because at BASF, we create chemistry. www.wecreatechemistry.com

*ECOVIO ® POLYMERS ARE CERTIFIED GLOBALLY BY THE BPI ACCORDING TO ASTM D6400, DIN CERTCO ACCORDING TO EN 13432, THE JBPA ACCORDING TO GREENPLA AND THE ABAM ACCORDING TO AS4736-2006 SPECIFICATIONS.

Contents DEPARTMENTS 06 From the Editor 08 Peer Review 10 Megapixels 80 FYI: What would happen if we killed all the mosquitoes?

88 From the Archives

AUGUST 2013

VOLUME 283 NO. 2

FE ATURES 44

THE BODY SHOP How 3-D printers are building people from scratch

By Steven Leckart 54

SOYLENT LEAN Say good-bye to solid food.

By Caleb Hannan 56

13 Recycled headphones 14 The Goods: A badass bike helmet, and more 18 The small-engine takeover 20 Intel’s best chip yet 22 New uses for coconut husks 24 Tune your guitar in five seconds 26 The giant hurdle for the Internet of Things

SAM K APL AN; ON THE COVER : NICK K ALOTER AKIS

HEADLINES 29 How coral reefs could survive climate change 32 Cleaning solar mirrors in the desert 34 Artificial-poop transplants 36 The economics of helium 38 The Scale: metabolic rates 40 Meet the Shrewbot 42 Why it’s okay to patent a virus

HOW 2.0 71 A 33-ton pirate-proof yacht 76 Build a lab-grade centrifuge 77 Orchestral instruments made from junk 78 The Instagram-inspired photo booth 79 Turn beets into a drum machine

END OF THE INTERFACE Forget keyboards. Forget the mouse. Leap Motion will change the way you interact with a computer.

By Tom Foster 62

NERD TRIPS Twenty-five curious, mysterious, or otherwise beguiling destinations to satisfy your inner geek

By Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley 68

SINGLE-STREAM RECYCLING See inside the machine that means you’ll never separate paper from plastic again.

By Katie Peek

“ SOYLENT CAUSES PEOPLE TO DEEPLY QUESTION THE NATURE OF FOOD. “

WHAT’S NEW

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

AUGUST 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 0 3

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The dampers, which have a rapidly increasing spring rate under compression, also allow the liner within a liner to shear omni-directionally within the helmet. This new technology claims to provide improved performance against oblique impacts and reduced rotational brain injuries caused by angular acceleration.

AT-1 helmet in action.

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From the Editor

THE FUTURE NOW

AUGUST 2013 / POPULAR SCIENCE Editor-in-Chief Jacob Ward Creative Director Sam Syed Executive Editor Cliff Ransom Managing Editor Jill C. Shomer EDITORIAL Articles Editor Jennifer Bogo Editorial Production Manager Felicia Pardo Senior Editor Martha Harbison Information Editor Katie Peek, Ph.D. Projects Editor Dave Mosher Senior Associate Editors Corinne Iozzio, Susannah F. Locke Assistant Editor Amber Williams Editorial Assistant 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 Lillian Steenblik Hwang, Sarah Jacoby, Pavithra S. Mohan

Synthesis

M

06 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

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, Francie Diep, Shaunacy Ferro Web Intern Joey Carmichael

We need new knees.

Bioprinting could provide them. list. Consider Sarah Murnaghan, a 10-year-old suffering from end-stage cystic fibrosis. At press time, she had finally found a lung donor after languishing for months without hope. Many patients never find a donor. I think it’s clear that this is about more than just knee joints.

But knees are what I think of. I don’t believe we should be synthesizing supplements and parts at random. (I can’t imagine living on Soylent, the liquid food alternative described on page 54, for instance.)

And my wife’s Olympic dreams are over. But our two-year-old daughter is already unimaginably coordinated and fast. Bioprinting could give my wife—and many parents—the upgrade necessary to keep up.

JACOB WARD jacob.ward@popsci.com @_jacobward_

Executive Vice President Eric Zinczenko Group Editorial Director Anthony Licata BONNIER TECHNOLOGY GROUP

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MARIUS BUGGE

Y WIFE IS a former semipro athlete. She was a track-and-field star in high school and earned a place on the Stanford University team, eventually taking second in the Pac-10 championship in the heptathlon. She made it as far as the Olympic trials before retiring, at the age of 23, due to bad knees.

But even in retirement, man, could she run. In the early days of our romance, I introduced her to Ultimate Frisbee, a fledgling sport in which a co-ed team of soccer and lacrosse refugees chase a disc around a field. Where the rest of us had two gears—jogging and running—my wife had something like four or five. She also had a 30-inch vertical. She could outleap anyone guarding her, hanging in the air with enough reserved momentum to make decisions—Catch it with my left hand? Nah, I’ll use my right—while up there.

But soon she began spending more of each game with ice wrapped around her swollen knees. Before long, her physician advised her to find a form of exercise that didn’t involve running. The meniscus in each knee, after two surgeries and nearly a decade of seven-event training, is in tatters. Between now and the end of her life, she can only hope to fight a rearguard action against pain.

Each year in the U.S., 340,000 people like my wife undergo knee replacements, and thousands more require meniscal repair or ACL surgery. We need new knees.

Bioprinting could provide them. As Steven Leckart describes in our cover story, researchers can now print body parts, such as skin and ears.

Tissue engineering has even given rise to a prototype knee meniscus.

Full-fledged organs could be next.

Automating their manufacture could do away with waiting on a donor

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Well-versed

“COLD HARD FACTS” [June 2013] got me thinking of possible methods for dealing with the rise in sea levels. I wonder if it would be feasible to pump massive amounts of excess seawater through desalination plants built along the world’s coastlines and use that water to irrigate drought-stricken areas of the planet. Perhaps in some distant-future scenario, we could even freeze the “extra” water and ship it off to the moon and Mars.

Rudy B. Fort Lauderdale, Fla. In 1957 and 1958, I was assigned to the U.S. Army Engineering Arctic Task Force on the glacier east of Thule, Greenland. The primary function was to drill for ice cores, which were preserved and sent to Snow Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment (SIPRE) scientists. This work, done more than 55 years ago, appears to parallel that currently being conducted by NEEM. It would be interesting to see comparisons of the findings by SIPRE and those by NEEM. E.L. Loh Bowie, Md.

“Do Parasites Get Parasites?” [June 2013] reminded me of a couplet my father would repeat when biting insects bothered me as a young lad: Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

George McPherson Perdido Beach, Ala. Editors’ note: Many readers sent us this rhyme, which is from “The Siphonaptera,” by 19th-century mathematician Augustus De Morgan.

Far-flung Reader Michael Oleary, a contract field engineer working in Afghanistan, sent us this photo of himself with our April issue. “After I read each issue, I share it with the rest of the field engineers to enjoy,” he writes.

THE FUTURE NOW

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FROM POPULARSCIENCE.COM

Story queries: queries@popsci.com

POPSCI: Could wealthy people buy their way to safety?

Annalee Newitz: The wealthy may have access to more resources that could allow them to survive in the short term. For example, if we were threatened by famine or pandemic, they would have access to food and health care that others wouldn’t, or if there’s a radiation disaster, they may be able to buy their way 08 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

into underground facilities. But if there’s an asteroid strike, a giant volcanic eruption, or gamma-ray bombardment from space? Nope.

PS: Are there any lessons to be drawn from previous major extinctions on Earth?

AN: One of the big lessons for us is most previous mass extinctions were caused by climate change.

Catastrophes like massive volcanoes

Comments may be edited for length and clarity. We regret that we cannot answer unpublished letters.

This product is from sustainably managed forests and controlled sources.

COURTESY MICHAEL OLEARY

We held a Facebook conversation with author Annalee Newitz, whose latest book, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, explains how to survive mass extinction:

or asteroid strikes set off a chain of events that often led to extreme cooling, and then global warming.

PS: What is one thing people can do today to help make sure humanity makes it, no matter the devastation?

AN: We can start planning. The first order of business is to deal with how we’re likely affecting the planet’s carbon cycles. In the long term, we have to face the fact that Earth is dangerous. Even if we are able to control carbon cycles, the place may still blow up or get smacked by a space rock. We need to invest now in space programs that can eventually help our progeny build cities among the stars.

PLUG

PLAY?

EcoBoost速 fuel economy and Turbocharged performance.* And is better. The 2013 FOCUS ST. Only Ford gives you EcoBoost fuel economy and a whole lot more. ford.com

*EPA-estimated rating of 23 city/32 hwy/26 combined mpg. Actual mileage will vary.

POPULAR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

Megapixels UN D E R G ROU N D COSMOLOGY A

lmost a mile beneath Gran Sasso mountain in Italy sits the DarkSide detector. DarkSide, which started operating in May, is designed to capture the faint signals generated by dark matter, the elusive particles that scientists suspect are partially responsible for the gravitational pull of the universe. Despite an immense international effort, scientists have yet to observe dark matter because it doesn’t frequently interact with standard matter. The subterranean DarkSide consists of two nested chambers: a 13-foot-diameter outer sphere surrounded by 100 quartz sensors that measure background radiation, and a liquid-argon-filled inner cylinder with 38 similar sensors poised to capture flashes of light, produced if a dark-matter particle collides with an argon nucleus.

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STO R Y BY A M B E R W I L L I A M S PHOTOGR APH BY E N R I CO S ACCH E T TI

AUGUST 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 1 1

FREEZING UP IS FOR

BUNGEE JUMPING AND PUBLIC SPEAKING.

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Self-tuning guitar PAG E 2 4

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Three pintsize engines that deliver real power PAGE 18

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AUGUST 2013

Each Re:Plattan purchase preserves five square meters of rainforest in Costa Rica.

Urbanears Re:Plattan Frequency range 20hz–20khz Repurposed parts 60 percent Price $80

The Greenest Headphones A Swedish company cuts off electronic waste at the source

E

VERY YEAR, we globally throw out up to 44 million tons of electronic garbage. Only a small fraction of it gets recycled, leaving landfills full of heavy metals, such as lead and mercury, that can bleed into the ground. To help slow the pileup—and inspire other companies to do the same—Urbanears, a Swedish

STO R Y BY BRIAN CL ARK HOWARD PHOTOGR APH BY CL AIRE BENOIST

headphones maker, is trying something new. Instead of tossing large stocks of unsold headphones, the company disassembles them and uses the ear cups, headbands, and hinges to create the Re:Plattan headphones. Each pair has brandnew guts, contains about 60 percent repurposed material, and, because the components vary in color, has its own unique look.

After the initial, limited run of 3,000 Re:Plattans, designers will

Reclaimed parts include [left to right] connectors, hinges, and ear cups.

have to wait for a new supply of parts or find an untapped source. While the company plans to experiment with other material streams, it’s also toying with the idea of a true recycling program, in which consumers can donate old headphones to the cause.

AUGUST 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 1 3

WHAT’S NE W

the goods

A dozen great ideas in gear

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The Chrome extension Silencer blocks spoilers from social networks by filtering out posts with words that could ruin a TV episode or sporting event. A user enters a keyword or chooses a list; for example, the Arrested Development list weeds out 38 trigger words.

The Rainshader is the toughest umbrella on the market. Because its 10 fiberglass ribs extend below a user’s shoulders, the helmetshaped umbrella is less likely to invert. In wind-tunnel tests, it withstood gusts up to 38 mph without blowing inside out.

Meet Arduino’s first preassembled robot. The 7-by-4-inch wheeled robot has two microprocessors—one for the motor and one for the sensors—an LCD screen, a digital compass, and a handful of other inputs.

The GeForce GTX 780 graphics-processing unit records gameplay constantly, so a player has instant proof of his epic moves. With this feature, called ShadowPlay, the GPU’s encoder auto records the last 20 minutes of action, at 1080p and 30 frames per second.

The Fastback II onehanded utility knife opens three times faster than two-handed versions. After a user pushes a release button on the handle, the carbon-and-steel blade swings into place with a flip of the wrist.

Silencer Free

Hospitality Umbrellas Rainshader $33

With a 100-foot range, the Centurion shoots farther than any other Nerf gun.

To boost distance, engineers added a massive spring. They also designed a heftier dart with twice the circumference of a standard one so it gains more momentum and carries farther.

14 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

Arduino Robot $265

Hasbro Nerf N-Strike Elite Centurion $50

Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 $650

Milwaukee Tool Fastback II $17

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEF T: COURTESY SILENCER ; COURTESY A R D U I N O ; C L A I R E B E N O I S T; C O U R T E SY B I G A S S FA N S ; COURTESY KREG TOOL; COURTESY BROOKSTONE;

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COURTESY GIRO; COURTESY HASBRO; COURTESY VERTUS AUDIO; COURTESY DEVOTEC; COURTESY NVIDIA ; COURTESY R AINSHADER

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The Fuel Micro Charger is the smallest backup cellphone battery yet.

The lithium-ion battery connects via micro-USB to a phone, providing about 25 minutes of extra talk time.

Engineers used flexible printed circuit boards to fit all the components in the 1.3-by-0.9-inch aluminum housing.

The blades, motor, and lights are all integrated into the body of the Haiku LED ceiling fan, making it the thinnest one available, at just 2.6 inches thick.

Air foils on the motor help direct heat away from the electronics, which control the 18 dimmable LEDs.

The Automaxx bench clamp automatically adjusts to the thickness of a piece of wood. Instead of turning a knob to hold down a two-by-four, a user just closes the clamp. When a bar within the handle slides down to the cam lock, the bar and lock engage, keeping everything steady.

With a pair of Vertus receivers, a user can stream music to two speakers in different rooms. The Bluetoothenabled dongles plug into any speakers with a 3.5mm connector. Then they pair with an audio source as well as each other. They have a 30foot range for makeshift stereo systems or indoor-outdoor parties.

The Brookstone shower mirror won’t fog up no matter how steamy the bathroom gets.

A user fills the cup above the 12-by-9-inch stainless-steel mirror with water. The water trickles down behind the metal, bringing it to the temperature of the shower and preventing condensation.

The Air Attack helmet significantly reduces drag. After wind tunnel tests, Giro engineers found that the tapered tail on a helmet doesn’t aid aerodynamics in many situations. So they nixed it. For cooling, a suspension system holds the shell three millimeters above the head; as a result, air flows under the helmet at the forehead.

Devotec Industries Fuel Micro Charger $25

Big Ass Fans Haiku LED $920

Kreg Tool Automaxx Bench Klamp 3" Reach $31

Vertus Audio Vertus $89 for pair

Brookstone Fogless Shower Mirror $60

Giro Air Attack $200

AUGUST 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 1 5

B VITAMINS. PROTEIN. SIZZLE.

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WHAT’S NE W / TECH TREND STO R Y BY L AWRENCE ULRICH

Incredible Shrinking Engines New cars deliver all the power in half the space Last summer, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation threw down the gauntlet: They set a new standard that will require the average car to run at 54.5 miles per gallon—nearly double today’s average—by 2025. Carmakers could reach that goal the easy way, making vehicles smaller and lighter but, at the same time, less powerful. Instead, several are getting there the hard way, building pint-size engines that squeeze out as many horses as their beefier predecessors.

THE BENEFIT

Consumers, especially those accustomed to luxury, often dismiss small engines as weak, noisy, and unreliable.

But modifications like turbocharging and direct fuel injection allow more-precise fuel delivery and nearcomplete combustion, boosting an engine’s horsepower even as it consumes less gas. And of course, burning less fuel reduces greenhouse emissions and saves drivers money.

FORD FIESTA Turbocharging and direct fuel injection helped Ford engineers to get 123 horsepower—a healthy amount for a compact—out of the Fiesta’s tiny 1-liter engine. The four-door hatchback or sedan will clock more than 40 mpg on the highway. $15,800 (est.)

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BMW i8 The i8’s three-cylinder, 1.5-liter engine, called the B38, cranks out 220 horsepower. An electric motor on the drivetrain adds a jolt of acceleration that propels the car from zero to 60 mph in 4.6 seconds. Analysts expect that the engine, which helps the i8 peak at 80 mpg, will also power the nextgeneration Mini and 1-series coupe. $125,000 (est.)

MERCEDES CLA45 AMG The 2-liter M133 engine in the AMG produces 355 horsepower, a record output-to-displacement ratio for any engine. A twin-scroll turbocharger adds 26.1 pounds per square inch of engine pressure, which sends the compact sedan from zero to 60 in 4.5 seconds.

Even with all that power, it should approach 30 mpg. $48,375

FROM LEF T: COURTESY FORD ( 2 ) ; COURTESY BMW ( 2 ) ; COURTESY MERCEDES ( 2 )

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WHAT’S NE W / FIVE FE ATURES PHOTOGR APH BY CL AIRE BENOIST

The Most Efficient Chip A major processor overhaul makes laptops last longer 1 MORE ON BOARD The more components a chip has, the more room manufacturers have to install larger batteries in their devices. Intel shrank the platform controller hub—a traffic cop that routes data to RAM, graphic cards, and hard drives—and moved it from the motherboard onto the chip.

2 SMARTER STANDBY The new chips support an “active idle” mode, in which programs keep running (receiving e-mails and tweets or streaming music) while the laptop is closed. Visual processes, such as graphics, stop, allowing some devices to run for up to 13 days.

I

n the world of chip design, there’s one spec people typically care about most: speed.

But as demand for mobility increases, efficiency has become as important a quality as any.

In the Intel 4th-Generation Core Processors, engineers rethought the way components communicate to create the world’s most efficient and powerful laptop chips. The processors, which began appearing in devices this summer, should run 10 to 15 percent faster than their predecessors and can extend a device’s battery life by two hours— the biggest bump in Intel’s history.

3 SHARED DATA Previously, if the central processing unit (CPU) needed to work on something that the graphics processor (GPU) had loaded—say, a piece of game code—it would have had to make a copy. On some chip models, the CPU and GPU share the same cache, so they won’t waste energy copying data.

The U-series chip [shown] has both a CPU and a GPU.

LOW-VOLTAGE MEMORY Intel engineers designed the chips to work with the RAM commonly used in phones and tablets (known as LPDDR3 RAM). The memory runs at 1.2 volts; the typical PC RAM needs 1.5 volts.

5

20 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

BAT TLE B O TS

2014 / CLOUDROBOT A red player can send a remotecontrolled jab to a blue sparring partner across the world.

2012 / BATTROBORG Wii-mote–style controllers sync player motions with those of these 3.5-inch boxers.

1964 / ROCKEM SOCKEM ROBOTS Joystick-driven plastic boxers pummel each other until one opponent’s head pops off.

4

WATTAGE DROP Depending on the chip, power consumption bottoms out between six and 11.5 watts. The average laptop processor, by comparison, can gobble as much as 35 watts.

TIMELINE

Intel U- and Y-series Core Processor Processor cores 2 Clock speed From 1.3Ghz

1950s–60s / PUNCHING PUPPETS Levered arms send quick jabs.

Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell were popular opponents.

. . . BEFORE THAT / DOING THINGS THE OLDFASHIONED WAY Things get ugly when the only thing to punch is each other.

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STO R Y BY M AT T S A F FO R D

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WHAT’S NE W / M ATER I A L S STO R Y BY BERNE BROUDY

PHOTOGR APH BY CL AIRE BENOIST

Shelled Out W The surprising benefits of coconut husks

hile biking near his home in Thailand, Paolo Cechetti noticed a man weaving raw coconut-husk fibers into bags. Cechetti, an engineer at the water-sports-equipment manufacturer Cobra International, is always hunting for techniques to make surfboards stronger and lighter. Typically that

NSP Coco Mat Paddleboard Length 10.2 feet Weight 25.6 pounds Price From $1,325

translates into a spin on a carbonfiber-based core, but Cechetti decided to try using coconut fiber [below] instead. The new Coco Mat core, which is now used in boards from Australian brand NSP, is stronger than carbon fiber—and more sustainable.

Designers begin to build the boards by separating and cleaning the coconut-husk fibers by hand.

Next, they lay them out randomly, sandwich the layer of strands in fiberglass, and insert a polystyrene core. Finally, they place the construction into a vacuum mold and inject epoxy. Coconut fibers absorb less epoxy than other materials do, which reduces the weight of the board by as much as 30 percent. It also eliminates up to 40 percent of toxic materials from the process.

HUSK, UP CLOSE Coconut husks contain the planet’s second most common organic material, lignin. Found in the cell walls of wood and woody plants, lignin adds rigidity, resists fire and microbes, and absorbs ultraviolet rays. Woven together, the fibers protect a coconut’s fruit in falls of up to 80 feet.

COCONUT CLOTHING Clothing and textile manufacturers are drawn to coconut’s odor-reducing and UV-blocking properties.

Colorado-based Cocona makes fabrics that contain carbon derived from coconut shells. Large sportswear companies, including La Sportiva and Adidas, use them to produce exercise clothes, such as running shirts and jackets. — S A R A H J A C O B Y 22 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

INSETS: COURTESY NSP

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Robotic pegs automatically tune any guitar in seconds ATTAC H

T

hroughout their 23-year history, automatic guitar tuners have remained stubbornly complex systems that cost thousands of dollars and require tedious professional installation.

Chris Adams, CEO of Tronical in Hamburg, Germany, has figured out a way around these problems.

Using an off-the-shelf microprocessor, custom tuning algorithms, and six lightweight motors, Adams developed the first system that musicians can retrofit onto nearly any guitar’s headstock—without any wiring, drilling, or soldering. Once attached, his $299 TronicalTune can make an instrument pitch-perfect in about five seconds.

800-437-1304 Ext. 2051 2 4 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013 © 2013 K&N Engineering, Inc.

Gibson debuted the system as the Min-ETune on several models last year.

The TronicalTune consists of a three-inch computer and six motorized tuning pegs, which screw onto the headstock in place of the existing pegs. On traditional tuning pegs, strings thread through holes—a technique that can cause breakage when strings rub against the edges. TronicalTune uses a gentler method: The strings coil around rods on the pegs.

TUNE After selecting from 12 presets (e.g., standard, open E), a user strums all six strings at once. A piezoelectric sensor picks up the vibrations, and a processor separates out the tones of each string. When it detects an off-pitch note, it signals the servomotor in the peg to turn, tightening or loosening the string to adjust the pitch. Once all six strings are tuned, the system turns itself off.

REFINE Different guitar bodies and strings create slight variations in timbre, so Adams programmed the TronicalTune to grow accustomed to a guitar over the course of 10 to 20 tunings. The processor tracks the overtones and adjusts its tuning accordingly.

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Anarchy of Things Can smart devices work in harmony?

E

VERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT the Internet of Things, a proposed network of intelligent devices that could one day automate much of the world around us. HVAC and lighting systems would adjust depending on a user’s whereabouts. Lawns would know when to water themselves. Meanwhile, product manufacturers have been hastily preparing for this transition. The average household already has 10 connected gizmos, and experts predict that number will jump to 50 by 2022. But making devices and getting

them to work in sync are two different tasks. Creating harmony will be the hard part.

Protocols—systems of digital messaging and rules for exchanging those messages—are the glue that binds devices together. For the Web alone, there are at least 50 protocols. Wireless devices interact through a different set of protocols, such as ZigBee, Bluetooth, RFID, and BACnet. And those devices share information with the Web through yet another set of protocols, including 802.15.4e and CoAP. The result is that the Internet of Things is actually hundreds of smaller, fractured Internets. Devices exist in their own discrete networks, which forces consumers to either choose among them or operate in several at once. Even items that should logically work in tandem—say, smart lightbulbs and a set of Wi-Fi–enabled window blinds—can’t. And each device requires its own smartphone app to control.

In the short term, engineers are finding ways around these barriers. Revolv, a home-automation company, sells a hub with seven wireless radios that speak 10 wireless languages. The hub automatically connects to any wireless device on a home’s Wi-Fi network, including thermostats, lights, and even garage doors.

Smartphone and tablet users can control individual

Items that should logically work in tandem—say, smart lightbulbs and Wi-Fi–enabled window blinds—can’t. devices or groups of them through the Revolv interface.

They can also set up prompts, such as “If I turn on the lights, then reset the thermostat to 71 degrees.” People can patch automated systems together themselves too.

MakerSwarm, a new authoring tool by Maya Design, is like a roll of duct tape for the Internet of Things; it lets users cue up long chains of commands through multiple devices. For instance, an array of moisture sensors could send a signal to a sprinkler system.

Patched systems may work for a while, but the Internet of Things will need actual standardization to reach its full potential and really change how we live. IBM, Cisco, and other companies are pushing for an open standard for connected devices. The Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol is one option. Facebook uses MQTT for live iOS notifications, but it’s flexible and scalable enough to serve as a kind of http for smart devices. With such a standard in place, the billions of wireless devices may finally be able to talk to one another, so we won’t have to talk to them at all.

26 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

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Why helium prices are crazy PAGE 36

PLUS: The artificialpoop cure

“The important thing is not to stop questioning.”

PAGE 34

—Albert Einstein

HEADLINES@POPSCI.COM

POPSCI.COM / @POPSCI

Apocalypse Averted?

AUGUST 2013

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

RED REEFER A gorgonian fan (Subergorgia suberosa) in the Great Barrier Reef.

Why some coral reefs might survive climate change STO R Y BY JA M E S V L A H OS

MICHAEL AW/GETT Y IMAGES

T

HE WORLD IS clobbering coral reefs, home to 25 percent of all marine species. Agricultural runoff pollutes the water around them; coastal developments tear them up; overfishing kills their inhabitants; and carbon dioxide emissions make the oceans too hot and acidic. In a provocative op-ed for the New York Times last year, Roger Bradbury, an ecologist at Australian National University, declared that reefs are “zombie ecosystems . . . on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation.” The slightly more hopeful consensus statement from last summer’s International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS), attended by 2,000 scientists, noted that while 25 to 30 percent of the world’s reefs were already “severely degraded,” they could still be saved through “global action to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and via improved local protection.”

There’s an emerging third scenario, though, one positioned between those of the doomsayers and the relative optimists, and it’s the most controversial and least publicly discussed. It forecasts a world in which governments create marine sanctuaries but don’t manage to dramatically reduce carbon AUGUST 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 2 9

HEADLINES

Coral may be able to adapt, at least somewhat, to future increases in temperature and acidity. tral Pacific Ocean. The reefs there that aren’t exposed to local human impact (such as runoff and overfishing) are, as you would expect, in excellent shape compared with others nearby. What’s more surprising: The protected coral seem better equipped to survive global 30 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

warming and an acidifying ocean, the same way that a previously healthy person has a better chance of fighting off a serious infection than someone who’s already sickly.

All told, scientists have measured up to 80 percent live coral cover in the protected reefs, versus about 20 percent in others.

The battered coral of Moorea, French Polynesia, meanwhile, also demonstrate how protected reefs are better equipped to withstand big threats. The outer reefs were almost completely destroyed after an assault by ravenous starfish in 2008 and by a violent 2010 cyclone.

(Cyclones appear to be increasing in size as the climate changes.)

But some healthy reefs closest to shore now serve as nurseries for young fish (that are protected by local regulations from overfishing), which grow up and move to the outer reef. There, they gobble up algae that would otherwise block new coral from growing, says Andrew Brooks, a scientist at the Moorea Coral Reef Long-Term Ecological Research site.

Some coral may even be able to fight back on their own. Onshore on Moorea, professors Bob Carpenter and Peter Edmunds of California State University, Northridge, pump large tanks containing living coral with various levels of acidity-boosting carbon dioxide.

One might expect that in the harshest conditions, the coral would not only stop growing but that their calcium carbonate skeletons would begin to dissolve. Instead, the scientists observed in 2011 that

although coral growth slowed as acidity increased, it never stopped entirely, even in their worst-case scenario. The coral even appeared to be bulking up their tissue. And the researchers learned that not all species are created equal.

Pocillopora damicornis, a variety of branching coral that is common throughout the South Pacific, barely slowed its growth at all.

These various snippets of good news about reefs are the exception, not the rule, but some scientists say the resilient coral offer the most constructive insights for the future.

By examining the survival secrets of the winners, we can put conservation money where it will have its biggest impact.

WE’RE BAAAACK! The coral reefs of Moorea, French Polynesia, are returning, after a starfish attack and a cyclone.

OCEAN INVERTEBRATES

CORAL BLEACHING 101

One of the reasons coral are so vulnerable to environmental change is that most depend on other organisms for survival: Colorful, microscopic algae that live inside them, providing food to their hosts in exchange for shelter. When waters become unusually warm, the coral expel the algae, making themselves look as if they had been bleached. Many die soon after.

—LILLIAN STEENBLIK HWANG

FROM TOP: CHAD EHLERS/GE T T Y IMAGES ; NOA A/DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE/DAVID BURDICK

emissions. Scientists in this camp hypothesize that reefs of the future won’t be the same as those of today—they’ll become fewer, with fewer species—but they might just adapt and survive.

Reefs aren’t all dying off at the same rate. A small minority are doing a little better and appear especially resilient through some combination of genetics, favorable water conditions, natural defenses, and conservation strategies.

Consider the reefs of Kaneohe Bay, Oahu. Because of unusual water circulation, the bay is more acidic and a few degrees warmer than the regional norm. This is a climate-change–like scenario that most Hawaiian coral won’t confront until midway through the 21st century or later—and yet, as the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology’s Christopher Jury reported at the ICRS conference, “growth is strong and reef development robust.” Over the past few years, Jury has come to believe that coral may in fact be able to adapt, at least somewhat, to future increases in temperature and acidity. But barring any action to reduce carbon emissions, he says, “things still look very, very bad for coral reefs.”

Another positive story comes from the Line Islands in the cen-

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HEADLINES / TOOL KIT STO R I ES BY A M B E R W I L L I A M S

Solar Scrubber

VISUAL DATA

Specially designed trucks keep a solar farm’s mirrors bright and shiny

B

ecause of its cloudless skies and favorable latitude, the Rub’ al-Khali desert in the United Arab Emirates is a good home for the world’s largest operational concentrated solar plant, the eight-month-old Shams 1. Its 258,048 parabolic mirrors reflect sunlight to heat water into steam to turn a turbine, generating 100 megawatts. But in addition to plenty of high-intensity sunlight, there’s also plenty of, well, sand, and if the mirrors get too dusty, the plant’s efficiency dramatically decreases.

That means a lot of cleaning. Special

MIRROR, MIRROR Five trucks use hydraulic and pneumatic arms to keep everything clean.

trucks take three days to clean the nearly seven million square feet of mirror surface area. Scrubbing happens after the sun sets, and it’s almost entirely automatic. The operator pulls up to a row of mirrors and pushes a button to extend the truck’s robotic arms. Radar sensors detect how close the mirrors are to the arms, which stretch accordingly. Then, the operator turns on the water, sets the brushes spinning, and drives at about two miles per hour, polishing away.

10,800°F 32 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

Crabs, birds, and manta rays regularly try to crush sea horses for dinner, but a sea horse has some unusual protective armor.

Its tail can be compressed to half its normal size without lasting damage, researchers at the University of California, San Diego, recently found. The tail’s resilience comes from its structure: approximately 36 square segments, each made of four bony plates. The plates connect to the spinal column’s vertebrae with collagen and can glide past one another, keeping the spine safe. Ultimately, the researchers would like to build a robotic arm out of 3-D–printed plates that mimic the seahorse’s flexible and tough tail and use it for underwater excursions or to detonate bombs.

BIG FAT STAT

The temperature of Earth’s core.

A recent analysis—almost 2,000 degrees higher than expected—means that our planet’s center is about as hot as the surface of the sun.

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HEADLINES / Q&A STO R Y BY I A N CH A N T

And we add the bacteria from a small amount of human feces.

Since oxygen is poison to anaerobic gut bacteria, each vessel is sealed to make it airtight, while sensors monitor temperature and acidity.

PS: What’s the worst part about working with synthetic poop?

EAV: Because of regulations, we can’t just flush the waste down the toilet. So we have to sterilize it by cooking it at a very high temperature and then throw it out. That means we have to do it at night when no one is there, because the whole building starts to smell like poop.

This researcher’s fake-poop project could save your life

D

one with your lunch? Good, here we go: You may know that implanting feces from healthy people into sick people can treat the deadly gastrointestinal infection caused by the bacterium Clostridium difficile. But Emma Allen-Vercoe and her colleagues at the University of Guelph in Ontario believe that they can improve on this wholesale transplantation strategy. They’re working to tailor mixtures of gut microbes for individual patients. Unfortunately, these bacteria are finicky and don’t grow well in petri dishes, so her team makes artificial poop.

POPSCI: What’s the special recipe for fake feces?

Emma Allen-Vercoe: It contains things like the indigestible cellulose that’s left after a meal has passed through your digestive tract and down to your distal gut, the end of the line for digestion. It’s pretty nasty-looking.

It’s a brown sludge, it’s got lumps of starch, and it’s kind of gloopy. It doesn’t look or smell very appetizing.

PS: How do you turn that sludge into a fecal transplant?

EAV: Robogut. Robogut is made of six big beakers full of that sludge that are warmed to body temperature.

PS: What keeps you up at night?

EAV: Because governments are making it very difficult to get the medical supervision for a fecal transplant, there’s this sort of underground culture of people doing them on each other, just getting the information off the Internet and then transplanting without any supervision.

With no proper surveillance, they could be doing far more harm than good. I am terrified for them.

YOU WANT TO PUT WHAT IN W H E R E ?

F E CA L T R A N S P L A N T S 1 01 As Clostridium difficile has become more resistant to antibiotics—causing diarrhea linked to 14,000 deaths in the U.S. per year—doctors have been performing fecal transplants to restore healthy gut bacteria and outcompete the nasty bug. The process is straightforward: Doctors dilute feces from a healthy donor with saline or milk and use a nasal tube or colonoscope to send it to the patient’s small intestine. While transplants have reportedly cured more than 300 people, the first controlled trial wasn’t published until this winter. The results? Subjects recovered, without a relapse, more than twice as often. —SARAH JACOBY

34 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

FROM TOP: COURTESY UNIVERSIT Y OF GUELPH; JANICE CARR

A New Movement

DIRTY JOBS Emma Allen-Vercoe in the lab with collaborators

PS: What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned from your research?

EAV: That microbes are not the enemy. Within the next 20 years, we’ll be moving away from this idea that pathogens cause most disease.

We’ll be looking at diseases that are brought on by a breakdown in the microbial ecosystem—of an imbalance in the good microbes that already live in your body.

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HEADLINES / TIMELINE

Leak detection 5%

MRI machines (cryogenics) 22%

Weather balloons and airships 5%

STORY AND ILLUSTR ATION BY K ATIE PEEK

Analysis 5%

WORLDWIDE HELIUM USE

Other cryogenics 7%

Controlled atmospheres 6%

2012

Welding 17%

Helium Supply

Party balloons 8%

Heat transfer 14%

Pressurization and purging 11%

The ups and downs of a crucial element’s global business n a free market, supply follows demand. But in the helium market, regulations set price and production, and with good reason.

Helium gas—essential for MRIs, rockets, and space telescopes— is a limited resource. Radioactive elements in Earth’s crust emit helium, which gets trapped in natural-gas fields, and we then extract it—or let it escape as we burn the gas. Until recently, the U.S. made most of the world’s refined helium. Now it’s a global game. Here’s a history of the price, world production, and rising power of helium.

I

START HERE 1962 1963 1964 1965 1939

1966

Legislation: 1960 The U.S. government required the Bureau of Mines to cover its helium production costs, so in 1962, the price more than doubled.

1940

The U.S. had concerns like the space race—and only cold, inert helium can pack combustible liquid fuel into rockets. So the Bureau of Mines built a national stockpile, injecting most helium from 1962 to 1973 into a natural 500-foot-thick rock formation near Amarillo, Texas.

1967 1968

1969 1970

The Future Helium isn’t trapped by the shale natural gas that’s mined by fracking, so as fracking comes to dominate the U.S. market, refiners will need to find new helium sources.

Possibilities include deposits of unusable, low-BTU natural gas or continued reliance on foreign sources.

1971 1972 1973 1941 2012

$150

The U.S. Bureau of Mines—which started extracting helium in 1929—was the world’s sole producer from 1937 to 1960.

2011

1974 1947

1975

1949 1976

1948 1955

1977

1950

Price per thousand cubic feet of refined helium, adjusted for inflation

1959

$100

During World War II, the U.S. didn’t publish reports on helium or other commodities deemed important to the war effort.

1978

From 1962 to 1981, the Bureau of Mines sold refined helium at $35 per thousand cubic feet. Adjusted for inflation, however, the price appears to fall.

Legislation: 2013 Bills before Congress might allow the BLM to reestablish the helium reserve, protecting users from sticker shock.

2010 2009

2008

1961 1951 1953 1952

1979

2007

1980 1983

1981 1984

1991

1985 1982

1992 1994 1995 1993

1987 1986

1997

2003

1996

1988

2004 1989 1990

2002 1998 2001

2000 1999

$50 Science and technology applications drove production up after 1982.

Helium is stable, electrically and thermally conductive, and liquid down to 4.2 kelvin, which made it useful for MRIs, fiber-optics manufacture, and other growing fields.

2006 2005

Legislation: 1996 To pay off debt incurred from building the helium stockpile and its pipeline to Kansas refineries, Congress mandated selling off the helium reserve by 2015, which has kept the prices low ever since. Also in 1996, control of helium moved to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

In 1998, the BLM stopped selling refined helium, but it continues to sell crude—about 50 to 80 percent helium— to private refiners at a fixed rate.

The U.S. made less than half the world’s helium for the first time in 2005. Algeria and Qatar have become major producers.

$0 1 Production of refined helium worldwide, in billions of cubic feet

36 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

2

3

4

H E L I U M P R O D U C T I O N A N D P R I C E D ATA : U . S . B U R E A U O F L A N D M A N A G E M E N T ; WORLDWIDE HELIUM USE, 2012: RICHARD CLARKE, CULHAM CENTRE FOR FUSION ENERGY

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HEADLINES / THE SCALE STO R Y BY PAV I T H R A S . M O H A N

Metabolic Rates At the gym, humans burn roughly two watts of power per kilogram of body weight—only slightly more than an elephant just standing still. But the fastest metabolisms in nature put even our best athletes to shame.

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ILLUSTR ATION BY TRE VOR JOHNSTON

Shrewbot A blind robot that navigates by touch

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We’re doing two things here: using robots to test ideas about how brains work and using biology to develop new robots.

Shrewbot is the size of a small dog, can move its head around, runs on batteries, and has omnidirectional wheels—and no eyes. Its only sense is touch, from its plastic whiskers.

Its snout has 18 of them, which move back and forth five times a second. (Real shrews whisk twice as fast.) When a whisker touches something, it bends backward, pushing a magnet at its base. A magnetic sensor detects the displacement and sends it to Shrewbot’s computer processor. Shrewbot uses these touch signals to create a picture of its environment and distinguish shapes and textures.

4 0 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

Shrewbot is completely autonomous.

When it finds an object, a computer model based on a real shrew’s brain tells it to explore the object and changes the motion of its whiskers so they lightly touch it, like a real animal’s do. The whole process can be fairly fast. Shrewbot can investigate about three feet of a wall in 30 seconds.

Robots like this one might be good for search and rescue in smoky or dusty buildings where vision is impaired, or for remote inspection of damage.

For example, it could explore a sewer, where certain whiskered animals are very comfortable, and use its skills to check for cracks in pipes.”

Tony J. Prescott, neuroscientist and director of the Sheffield Centre for Robotics at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. Prescott co-designed Shrewbot with the Bristol Robotics Laboratory.

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ILLUSTR ATION BY RYAN SNOOK

A patent creates a financial incentive for innovation and discovery.

Patenting Pathogens Letting people own a piece of nature seems wrong, but it promotes research—and saves lives

I

N JUNE, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that people can’t patent isolated human genes, which it considers a product of nature, but they can patent something exceptionally similar: cDNA, a synthesized copy from which someone has removed the noncoding parts. Given that fine line, it’s not entirely clear how the decision will play out in practice or how it will affect work on nonhuman genes. But it’s a hot area of debate.

Earlier this year, Dutch scientists received a patent from their country on the newly discovered MERS virus that killed at least 30 people. The researchers had isolated the virus in their laboratory from a sample 42 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

sent by a Saudi doctor. The Saudi Ministry of Health protested that the patent would restrict research and lead to more deaths; the World Health Organization (WHO) said it would investigate the legality and take action. But they’ve got it backward. Patents are one of the best tools for quickly fighting disease.

A patent creates a financial incentive for innovation and discovery. The patent holders get something like a limited-time monopoly on their creation, and they can license full or partial rights to others (including to companies better at commercialization).

Patents also force people to share information about innovations and their commercial potential. U.S. patents are public record and must disclose enough detail for anyone to theoretically replicate the patented thing (although one can’t legally replicate it without a license). After 20 years, all that actionable information becomes public domain.

Biological patents have already been saving lives for some time. In the 1920s, the researchers who isolated insulin from the pancreas patented it in order to ensure that only trustworthy drug manufacturers could make it. Then they licensed it to the University of Toronto for $1. Later, in 1984, researchers patented HIV. A 1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision in favor of bio-patents sparked the booming biotech industry we have now. At about the same time, the European patent office decided that patenting biology was illegal.

Naturally, start-ups multiplied like crazy in the U.S., not Europe. By 1998, Europe had changed course and encouraged biotech to return.

The Dutch researchers say they grabbed the rights to the new virus to prevent others from hogging them and that they’ll forgo profits and share the isolated virus with other researchers for free. (Whoever comes up with a treatment or vaccine would be able to patent that product for themselves.) But the patent system isn’t perfect. A greedy patent holder can just as easily stifle innovation by refusing to collaborate. Even then, there’s an out: If it’s in the public interest, the government can just violate a patent and risk getting sued. For example, after 9/11, anthrax scares prompted federal officials to call for unlicensed production of the treatment Cipro, which was patented by Bayer. (The company later agreed to license it cheaply.)

As viruses mutate, spreading from animals to humans to other humans, we’ll always be fighting some deadly new disease. The WHO shouldn’t set a precedent of investigating researchers who study microbes. Instead, it should be helping patent holders find the best scientists to collaborate with and advance their research.

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KEVIN HAND

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THE

BODY SHOP

3-D PR INTERS HAVE TR ANSFORMED MANUFACTURING. NOW THE Y ’RE POISED TO RE VO LU TIONIZE MEDICINE. HOW THE MACHINES WE’VE BUILT ARE BUILDING BITS AND PI ECES OF US. BY

Steven Leckart

AUGUST 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 4 5

BIOPRINTING POPUL AR SCIENCE.08.13

The honeycombs are human livers, says Sharon Presnell, chief technology officer of Organovo—or at least the foundations of them. The tiny masterpieces of biomedical engineering are nearly identical to tissue samples from real human livers, and they are constructed from actual human cells. But instead of growing them, scientists in the gleaming, 15,000-squarefoot headquarters of Organovo print them, just as they 46 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

would a document. Or, more accurately, just as they’d print a scale model.

In two decades, 3-D printing has grown from a niche manufacturing process to a $2.7-billion industry, responsible for the fabrication of all sorts of things: toys, wristwatches, airplane parts, food. Now scientists are working to apply similar 3-D–printing technology to the field of medicine, accelerating an equally

COURTESY ORGANOVO

quietly whirs to life. The contraption isn’t filled with fresh, pungent grounds but, instead, spoonfuls of opaque, sterile goo. Its robotic arm moves briskly: It hovers, lowers, and then repositions a pair of syringes over six petri dishes. In short, rapid-fire bursts, they extrude the milky paste. Soon, three little hexagons form in each dish. After a few minutes, the hexagons grow to honeycomb structures the size of fingernails. No one here is getting a latte anytime soon.

dramatic change. But it’s much different, and much easier, to print with plastic, metal, or chocolate than to print with living cells.

“It’s been a tough slog in some ways, but we’re at a tipping point,” says Dean Kamen, founder of DEKA Research & Development, who holds more than 440 patents, many of them for medical devices. In labs around the world, bioengineers have begun to print prototype body parts: heart valves, ears, artificial bone, joints, menisci, vascular tubes, and skin grafts. “If you have a compass and a straight edge, everything you draw is a box or a circle,” Kamen says. “When you get better tools, you start thinking in different ways. We now have the ability to play at a level we couldn’t play at before.”

From 2008 to 2011, the number of scientific papers referencing bioprinting nearly tripled. Investment in the field has spiked as well. Since 2007, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health has awarded $600,000 in grants to bioprinting projects. Last year, Organovo, raised $24.7 million in equity.

Three factors are driving the trend: more sophisticated printers, advances in regenerative medicine, and refined CAD software. To print the liver tissue at Organovo, Vivian Gorgen, a 25-year-old systems engineer, simply had to click “run program”

with a mouse. Honeycomb-shaped liver tissue is a long way from a fully functioning organ, but it is a tangible step in that direction. “Getting to a whole organ-in-abox that’s plug-and-play and ready to go, I believe that could happen in my lifetime,” says Presnell. “I cannot wait to see what people like Vivian do. The potential is just out of this world.”

At Organovo’s headquarters in San Diego, engineers print human tissues for drug testing.

T

HE VERY FIRST bioprinters weren’t expensive or fancy. They resembled cheap desktop printers because, in fact, that’s what they were. In 2000, bioengineer Thomas Boland, the self-described “grandfather of bioprinting,” eyed an old Lexmark printer in his lab at Clemson University. Scientists had already modified inkjet printers to print fragments of DNA, in order to study gene expression. If an inkjet could print genes, Boland thought, perhaps the same hardware could print other biomaterials. After all, the smallest human cells are 10 micrometers, roughly the dimension of standard ink droplets.

Boland emptied the Lexmark’s ink cartridge and filled it with collagen. He then glued a thin, black silicon sheet onto blank paper and fed it into the printer. He opened a Word document on his PC, typed his initials, and hit print. The paper spooled out with “TB” clearly AUGUST 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 4 7

BIOPRINTING

Flesh and Bones Tissue engineers have begun to print a variety of body parts.

Here’s what the operating room of the future may hold: PART EAR TEAM CORNELL UNIVERSITY HOW IT’S MADE Bioengineers take a 3-D scan of a child’s ear, design a seven-part mold in the SolidWorks CAD program, and print the pieces.

The mold is injected with a highdensity gel made from 250 million bovine cartilage cells and collagen from rat tails (the latter serves as a scaffold). After 15 minutes, the ear is removed and incubated in cell culture for several days. In three months, the cartilage will have propagated enough to replace the collagen.

BENEFIT At least one child in 12,500 is born with microtia, a condition characterized by hearing loss due to an underdeveloped or malformed outer ear. Unlike synthetic implants, ears grown from human cells are more likely to be successfully incorporated into the body.

delineated in off-white proteins.

By 2000, Boland and his team had reconfigured a Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 550C to print with E. coli bacteria. Then they graduated to larger mammalian cells, farmed from Chinese hamsters and lab rats. After printing, 90 percent of the cells remained viable, which meant the product was useful, not simply art. In 2003, Boland filed the first patent for printing cells.

While Boland’s lab worked out the problem of bioprinting, other engineers applied 3-D printers to different medical challenges. They printed bone grafts from ceramic, dental crowns from porcelain, hearing aids from acrylic, and prosthetic limbs from polymer.

But those engineers had an advantage that Boland and his colleagues did not: They could print in three dimensions rather than just two.

So Boland and other bioprinting pioneers modified their printers. They disabled the paper-feed mechanisms in their inkjets and added an elevator-like platform controlled by stepper motors; the platform could move up or down along the z-axis. Labs could print one layer of cells, lower the platform, and print another layer.

Suddenly, bioengineers went from drawing life on a flat canvas to building living sculptures.

“It was like magic,” says James Yoo, a researcher at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine who is developing a portable printer to graft skin directly onto burn victims. The ability to print cells in three dimensions opened up new applications.

“Every wound is different; the depth is different; and they’re very irregular,” Yoo says. “By mapping the area, you can determine how many cell layers are needed for the subdermal tissue, as well as the epithelial area. The advantage of the printer is that you can deliver cells more accurately and precisely.”

Scientists could also print with many types of “ink.” Cornell engineer Hod Lipson, co-author of Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing, prototyped another kind of tissue: cartilage. “The spatial control over the placement of cells has never been possible to this degree,” he says. “That opens up multiple dimensions of possibilities.” Lipson and his colleagues decided to print a meniscus, the C-shaped piece of cartilage that cushions the knee and other joints. The team used CT scans to create a CAD file of a sheep’s meniscus and extracted cells from the sheep to print an identical one.

Although Lipson’s first meniscus looked promising, when he showed it to knee-replacement surgeons, they deemed it too weak to withstand the body’s routine abuse. “As somewhat of an outsider coming in [to biology], my impression was ‘Okay, I’m gonna put the cells in the right place, incubate it for a while, and we’re gonna have our meniscus,’ ” Lipson says. “There is more to making a meniscus than just putting the cells there. Real menisci are actually pounded every day, all the time, and they shape up and become stiff. So the pounding that’s in their environment is actually very much a part of their growth.”

A printer that can dispense the right ink, in other words, is only the first step. Cells have specific requirements, depending on the tissue they’re destined to become. In the case of a meniscus, it might mean developing a bioreactor that can approximate pounding or use heat, light, or auditory pulses to stress the tissue into formation. “For some tissues, even the simple ones, we don’t even know exactly what it takes to make the tissue behave like a real tissue,” says Lipson. “You can put the cells of a heart tissue in the right place together, but where’s the start button?”

SUDDENLY, BIOENGINEERS WENT FROM DRAWING LIFE ON A FLAT CANVAS TO BUILDING LIVING SCULPTURES.

48 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

C O U R T E SY C O R N E L L U N I V E R S I T Y; FA C I N G PA G E: P H OTO G R A P H BY T I M OT H Y H O G A N

POPUL AR SCIENCE.08.13

HOW IT WORKS

NOVOGEN M MX BI OPR INTER

The first commercial 3-D bioprinter, developed by Organovo, is manufacturing functional liver tissues that will soon help biochemists test new drugs.

Here’s a look at the printing process.

STEP 1: Engineers load one syringe with a bio-ink (A) made up of spheroids that each contain tens of thousands of parenchymal liver cells and a second syringe with a bioink (B) containing non-parenchymal liver cells that bolster cellular development and a hydrogel that helps with extrusion.

C

E

STEP 2: Software on a PC wired to the bioprinter instructs a stepper motor attached to the robotic arm to move and lower the pump head (C) with the second syringe, which begins printing a mold. The mold looks like three hexagons arranged in a honeycomb pattern.

STEP 3: A matchbox-size triangulation sensor (D) sitting beside the printing surface tracks the tip of each syringe as it moves along the x-, y-, and z- axes. Based on this precise location data, the software determines where the first syringe should be positioned.

B A

STEP 4: The robotic arm lowers the pump head (E) with the first syringe, which fills the honeycomb with parenchymal cells.

STEP 5: Engineers remove the well plate (F)—which contains up to 24 completed microtissues, each approximately 250 microns thick—and place it in an incubator.

There, the cells continue fusing to form the complex matrix of a liver tissue.

D

F

J ULY 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 4 9

BIOPRINTING POPUL AR SCIENCE.08.13

M

PART KIDNEY

Scaffolds provide tissues with mechanical stability, and they can be used to deliver genes and growth factors to developing cells. But, as in the case of polymers, they can introduce foreign materials into the body and cause inflammation. Cell types also respond differently to certain scaffold materials, and so the more complex the organ, the more complicated the necessary framework—and the more difficult to predict how the cells will migrate around it. As a result, not everyone believes scaffolds are necessary, including Gabor Forgacs, Organovo’s co-founder and a biological physicist at the University of Missouri.

Forgacs’s plan is to print an organ composed entirely of living human tissue and let it assemble itself. “The magic,” he says, “happens after printing has taken place.” Therein lies the biggest misconception about bioprinting: What most people think of as the finished product—the newly printed cellular material—isn’t finished at all.

At Missouri, Forgacs studied morphogenesis, the process that determines how cells form organs during embryonic development. By arranging cellular aggregates—tiny spheres containing thousands of cells—into a circle, his lab could watch them fuse and form new structures. The aggregates accomplish this

TISSUE

BUILDING BLOCKS In order to form tubular structures, the basis for blood vessels, scientists at Organovo use a bioprinter to deposit layers of hydrogel rods (blue) and a

50 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

bio-ink made of spheres or cylinders that contain thousands of human cells (yellow). After printing, the bio-ink fuses into a tube, and the hydrogel can

be removed to leave behind the vessel.

Vascular grafts could be combined with liver, lung, or cardiac tissue to eventually build complex organs.

TEAM WAKE FOREST INSTITUTE FOR REGENERATIVE MEDICINE HOW IT’S MADE A 3-D bioprinter deposits multiple types of kidney cells—cultivated from cells taken by a biopsy—while simultaneously building a scaffold out of biodegradable material. The finished product is then incubated.

The scaffold, once transplanted into a patient, would slowly biodegrade as the functional tissue grows.

BENEFIT An estimated 80 percent of patients on organ-transplant lists in the U.S. await kidneys. Bioprinted kidneys are not yet functional, but once they are, the use of a patient’s own cells to grow the tissue means doctors will someday be able to provide every recipient with a perfect match.

COUR TESY WAKE FOREST INSTITUTE FOR REGENER ATIVE MEDICINE; 2 0 1 0 B I O FA B R I C AT I O N 2 0 2 2 0 0 1 © I O P P U B L I S H I N G

OST ORGANS ARE HIGHLY sophisticated structures with dozens of cell types and complex vasculatures evolved to do very specific jobs. The liver alone performs more than 500 functions. Like machines, bodies wear out and break down over time, sometimes unexpectedly. Even when transplants are feasible, donated organs can’t keep pace with demand. So as mechanical engineers began to build early 3-D printers, tissue engineers tried growing replacement organs in a lab.

They started by pipetting cells into petri dishes by hand. Then, led by Anthony Atala at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, researchers began to seed those cells onto artificial scaffolds. Made from biodegradable polymers or collagen, the scaffolds provide a temporary matrix for cells to cling to until they’re robust enough to stand alone. The system worked beautifully: Atala successfully implanted the first lab-grown organs—bladders—into seven patients at Boston Children’s Hospital between 1999 and 2001.

Researchers soon adopted 3-D printers to make scaffolds more precisely. But manually placing the cells onto them remained a time-consuming and arduous process. Printed bladders can be made with just two cell types; kidneys, for example, consist of 30. “When you try to engineer more complex tissues, there’s no way you can manually place different cell types into different locations that can replicate the native tissue structures,” says Yoo. “Hands are not the optimal method for delivering cells.”

At Wake Forest, Yoo’s and Atala’s teams built custom bioprinters that are faster than modified inkjets and can print with many more cell types—including stem cells, muscle cells, and vascular cells. They also designed one printer to create both the synthetic scaffold and tissue in one fell swoop; they’re now using it to produce intricate ears, noses, and bones.

build tissue by stacking piles of cells along the z-axis. In fact, scientists at Organovo did this with cardiac cells; when they fused, they beat in unison, just like a heart.

Biologically, however, there’s still a major hurdle: It needs to thrive. An organ requires networks of blood vessels to distribute nutrients and oxygen. Without this core function, cells will wither and die.

Organovo’s researchers have made relatively robust vasculature by printing filler, such as hydrogel, among tubes of tissue cells. The filler can later be extracted, leaving empty channels for blood cells. Ibrahim Ozbolat, a mechanical engineer at the University of Iowa, has also developed a bioprinter, which uses multiple arms moving in tandem, to deposit a vascular network and cellular aggregates at the same time.

“The major challenge,” Ozbolat says, “will be creating very small capillaries”—the hairlike blood PART BLOOD VESSEL TEAM UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA AND MIT

C O U R T ESY U N I V E R S I T Y O F PE N N SY LVA N I A

HOW IT’S MADE Using an opensource RepRap printer and custom software, researchers print a network of sugar filaments inside a mold and coat the filaments in a polymer derived from corn.

They then dispense a gel containing tissue cells into the mold. Once it sets, they wash the structure in water, which dissolves the sugar and leaves empty channels in the tissue.

BENEFIT Researchers showed that pumping nutrients through the channels increased the survival of surrounding cells.

Because blood vessels maintain tissue health, learning how to scale up and print a larger, more robust vascular system is the key to eventually printing entire organs.

ONCE RESEARCHERS SCALE UP THE VASCULAR SYSTEM, PRINTED ORGANS WILL BECOME ONLY A MATTER OF TIME. by working together. A molecule on one cell causes a receptor protein on the cell membrane to change shape, tugging on the cytoskeleton of a second cell. A cascade of communication ensues, eventually reaching the nucleus and triggering a change in gene expression.

A grant from the National Science Foundation enabled Forgacs and his team to experiment with bioprinters instead of laying down aggregates by hand, and the technology transformed their research.

“What had taken us days, we could do in maybe two minutes,” he says. Using a bioprinter, Forgacs proved that aggregates containing different cell types also fuse, without any human intervention or environmental cues.

Tissue engineers shouldn’t place cells where they’d be in a finished organ, Forgacs says; they should arrange cells based on where they need to be to start forming an organ, as in an embryo. “The cells know what to do because they’ve been doing this for millions of years. They learned the rules of the game during evolution.”

Another key lies in printing cellular aggregates.

“You will never build an extended biological structure, a big organ or tissue, by putting down individual cells,” Forgacs says. “A tissue is very well organized, according to very stringent rules, in cellular sets. A half-millimeter aggregate is already a little piece of tissue. Those pieces bind together and exchange information.”

Technologically speaking, it’s already possible to

vessels linking larger vessels to cells. He foresees wrestling with this in two years. Once researchers can scale up the size and complexity of the vascular system, graduating from biological parts and pieces to whole printed organs will become only a matter of time.

A

CTOR BRUCE WILLIS gazes at visitors from the side of a machine in a 1,500-square-foot clean room at Organovo. Several of the company’s 10 bioprinters have been named and labeled for characters from the 1997 sci-fi film The Fifth Element. Steps from Willis’s “Dallas,” past a half dozen refrigerator-size incubators, sit the bioprinters “Ruby” and “Zorg,” adorned with photos of Chris Tucker and Gary Oldman, respectively.

In the film, set in the 23rd century, an automated pod with two robotic arms uses cells from a severed human hand to print and reanimate an entire woman.

Science is a long way from accomplishing anything remotely close to this feat—and it may never get there.

But a major milestone would be to develop tools advanced enough to clearly visualize and model the entire process.

What bioprinters so far lack—and what will enable the field’s next wave of breakthroughs—is biologically sophisticated software. With an inanimate object like a coffee mug, a 3-D scanner can create a CAD file in AUGUST 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 5 1

PART SKIN GRAFT

“In the very short term, we’re going to dramatically reduce the time it’s going to take them to bioprint,” Olguin says. “But in the mid-term, by removing them from this amazingly tedious work of creating the most basic shapes, we would hope they would then be able to focus on more interesting applications.”

Organovo’s first biological product will be liver tissue for drug testing. Every year, the pharmaceutical industry spends more than $39 billion on R&D. According to the Food and Drug Administration, liver toxicity is the most common reason for a drug to be pulled from clinical trials—as well as from the marketplace after it’s been approved. There’s still no reliable way to evaluate how a drug will affect the human liver before it’s ingested—not even animal trials.

“There are some pretty significant species differences between animals like rats and humans,” says Organovo’s Presnell. “So you can get a lovely answer from a rat that says, ‘Yeah, go forth!’ And in reality, in a human, it would not do well.”

At Stanford, researchers have tried to get around this problem by breeding mice with livers made up mostly of human cells. A study published in October showed the mice predicted how well a drug for treating hepatitis C would be metabolized by humans. Scientists at MIT have built miniature liver models using micropatterning, the same soft lithography technique used to put copper wires onto computer chips. The problem, says Presnell,

“INSTEAD OF PRINTING A TEST TUBE OUT OF PLASTIC TO DO CHEMISTRY IN, LET’S PRINT OUR TEST TUBE OUT OF TISSUE.” 52 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

TEAM WAKE FOREST INSTITUTE FOR REGENERATIVE MEDICINE HOW IT’S MADE First, a custom bioprinter scans and maps the patient’s wound.

One inkjet valve ejects the enzyme thrombin, and another ejects cells mixed with collagen and fibrinogen (thrombin and fibrinogen react to create the blood coagulant fibrin).

Then, the printer deposits a layer of human fibroblasts, followed by a layer of skin cells called keratinocytes.

BENEFIT For traditional grafts, surgeons take skin from one area of the body and splice it onto another. The Wake Forest researchers hope to print new skin directly into a wound. Ultimately, they plan to build a portable printer that can be used in war and disaster zones.

COUR TESY WAKE FOREST INSTITUTE FOR REGENER ATIVE MEDICINE

minutes and upload the design to a 3-D printer. There is no medical equivalent.

“An MRI doesn’t tell you where the cells are,” says Lipson. “We’re just completely in the dark in terms of the blueprints. That’s half the puzzle. There’s also no Photoshop—no tools to move cells around. That’s not a coincidence. It’s beyond what most computer software can handle. You can’t have a software model of a liver.

It’s more complicated than a model for a jet plane.”

Sensing an opportunity, Autodesk has teamed with Organovo to develop CAD programs that could be applied to bioprinting. “The areas we explore don’t always have an immediate business case to be made, but they may have one in the coming years,” says Carlos Olguin, head of Autodesk’s Bio/Nano/Programmable Matter Group. “If so, we want to be ready not just to explore but deliver.”

As a first step, Autodesk plans to create a modern cloud-based CAD shell to help streamline the design process. Eventually, its goal is to integrate the math that describes self-assembly and other cellular processes into bioprinting software. In April, Olguin’s team released Project Cyborg, a Web-based platform geared toward nanoscale molecular modeling and simulations for cellular biology. Ultimately, researchers want to be able to design cellular aggregates digitally, press “enter,” and visualize, in seconds, how the structure would change and evolve into a finished living tissue.

BIOPRINTING POPUL AR SCIENCE.08.13

BIOPRINTERS COULD BUILD ORGANS WITH TUMORS SO THAT SURGEONS COULD PRACTICE. PART BONE TEAM WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY

C O U R ESY WA S HI N GTO N STAT E U N I V E R S I T Y

HOW IT’S MADE Researchers print scaffolds with a ceramic powder (human bone is 70 percent ceramic), using the same 3-D printers that produce metal parts found in electric motors. An inkjet covers the ceramic with a layer of plastic binder. This structure is baked at 2,282˚F for 120 minutes and placed into a culture with human bone cells.

After a day, the scaffold supports them.

BENEFIT Every year, millions of automobileaccident survivors suffer from complex fractures, which are difficult to repair using traditional methods. Using MRIs for reference, doctors could print a custom graft that perfectly matches the fracture.

is that micropatterned structures are typically only a couple of cell layers thick, which limits the complexity of questions researchers can ask and answer.

Next year, Organovo will begin selling its liver assay—a petri-dish-like well plate containing liver cells arranged in a 3-D structure 200 to 500 microns thick (two to five times as thick as a human hair).

The potential market is vast. Every drug taken orally, whether a painkiller, an anti-inflammatory, or a new cancer pill, must pass a liver tox.

“People normally do a reaction, purify the chemicals, take the drug, add it to cells, look at the response, formulate, maybe do animals, and then go to humans,” says Lee Cronin, a University of Glasgow chemist and nanoscientist developing a 3-D printer to manufacture medicine using chemical inks. “Instead of printing a test tube out of plastic to do chemistry in, let’s say we now print our test tube out of tissue, and we do chemistry in the tissue and look at the response in real time. That’s where things get really interesting.”

If bioprinted assays provide pharmaceutical researchers with better, quicker data, the entire drugdiscovery process will accelerate. Moreover, they could lessen the need for extensive animal testing.

Ozbolat’s goal, at the University of Iowa, is to print pancreatic tissue for therapy instead. It would be made up of only the endocrine cells capable of producing insulin. Implanted in people, such tissue could regulate blood sugar and treat type 1 diabetes, he says.

Bioprinters could also prove invaluable for medical schools. Students now train on cadavers, but when it comes to procedures like cutting out cancer, nothing matches the real experience. Rather than printing healthy tissue, bioprinters could build organs with tumors or other defects so that surgeons could practice before entering an operating room.

Whole, transplantable organs that function properly will be the ultimate challenge, but also, in the long run, change lives most profoundly. In the U.S., more than 118,000 people are currently on the national donor waiting list, which grows by 300 every month. It’s not just an issue of supply versus demand. The odds of finding a suitable match are low. Bioprinting organs with cells grown from a patient’s own body could eventually help doctors churn out perfect matches at will.

Perhaps, scientists say, bioprinters could even enable bionic organs—body parts that don’t just restore, but extend human ability. To that end, researchers at Princeton University have been experimenting with integrating electronics into bioprinting. Earlier this year, they created a matrix of hydrogel and bovine cells in the shape of an ear, incorporating silver nanoparticles to form a coiled antenna. The system could pick up radio frequencies beyond the range of normal human hearing. In a similar manner, bioengineers might one day incorporate sensors into other tissues—for example, creating a bionic meniscus that can monitor strain.

Bioprinters are already demonstrating scientists’ remarkable mastery of biology and engineering. Back at Organovo, inside an otherwise unremarkable, neonlit clean room, “Dallas” arranges human cells into intricate patterns that mirror those of nature. For young researchers like Vivien Gorgen, there’s little reason to stop and marvel at this. The machine has become just another tool—one that helps build tissue more precisely. A printer can put all the human pieces in the right places. But, as Forgacs continues to wonder, why do those pieces do what they do? Only life itself knows. At least, for now.

Steven Leckart is a writer-at-large for Pop-Up Magazine, which is created and performed for a live audience.

AUGUST 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 5 3

Could This Liquid Replace Food?

BY C A L E B H A N N A N PH OTOG R APH BY S A M K APL A N

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PROP ST YLING : SAR AH GUIDO FOR HALLEY RESOURCES

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SINCE MID-JANUARY, Rob Rhinehart has eaten very little of what most people would consider real food. At times, he’s gone nearly a month between meals. Instead, the 25-year-old electrical engineer from San Francisco has survived almost entirely on Soylent, a nutrient-packed drink he manufactures in his kitchen.

To Rhinehart and a growing legion of followers, the cloudy, white liquid is a substantial step toward changing how humans eat—or don’t.

Our physiological dependence on food has blossomed into an almost sacred attachment, subdivided into countless cultural, commercial, and aesthetic variations. But food is only fuel. And that fuel costs time and money. Last summer, Rhinehart found himself broke in San Francisco. He’d moved there after graduating from Georgia Tech to start a wireless-communications company. It failed, and he was left subsisting on the cheapest diet possible: ramen noodles and Costco corn dogs. He says he and his roommates began taking supplements

On January 12, Rhinehart measured each of his ingredients on a scale, dumped them into a pitcher, and added water. “I watched my life flash before my eyes,” he says, “and chugged.” He quickly realized he’d forgotten to include fiber, which helps regulate absorption; while he felt great after immediately metabolizing 800 calories, he soon crashed, feeling exhausted and out of it. After a few adjustments and a brief bout of potassium poisoning (which left Rhinehart with heart palpitations), he created a working formula. He went a month, then two, then three, ingesting almost nothing but Soylent, a name he came up with as a nod to the 1970s science-fiction film Soylent Green. He consumed three or four liquid meals a day, each of which took about a minute to prepare, drink, and clean up. To make sure he was healthy, he got occasional blood tests, and he tracked his progress on his blog, Mostly Harmless. There, he noted changes to the formula, such as replacing one third of the maltodextrin

to ward off scurvy. “I was unhealthy, hated cooking, shopping, and cleaning, and my only major expenditure was food,” Rhinehart says. Rather than suffer the thrice-daily burden of cooking, eating, and cleaning up, he decided instead to streamline his food intake.

For three months, Rhinehart pored over pirated textbooks, learning what he could about biochemistry and nutrition.

He assembled a list of ingredients—mostly chemicals—that would provide everything he needed to survive: whey isolate for protein; maltodextrin for carbs; even micronutrients like zinc and chromium.

He began ordering them from foodadditive and chemical suppliers on Amazon and eBay. Soon he had a kitchen full of powders ready for mixing.

There are plenty of products that can take the place of a normal meal, but those drinks are not meant as complete food replacements; in the long run, they are expensive and unhealthy. Done properly, though, liquid diets are feasible.

In 1965, the National Institutes of Health used California inmates in a 19-week experiment to test whether astronauts could live on a liquid diet. The prisoners wound up happier and healthier (rumor is, the astronauts objected to the lack of flavor).

with oat powder in order to get more fiber and a lower glycemic index. He also began recording changes to his life.

Not buying food and not cooking saves him a lot of time and money. The raw materials in the 2,692 calories per day he drinks cost him only $154.82 per month, as opposed to the $500 he says he used to spend on solid food. Rhinehart also credits Soylent with a marked increase in energy, clearer skin, and less dandruff. While documenting his progress, he has gained a following.

The response to Soylent has been mixed, mostly because it causes people to so deeply question the nature of food

I WATCHED MY LIFE FLASH BEFORE MY EYES AND CHUGGED.

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and their relationship to it. That has prompted some to lash out at Rhinehart.

“Have fun dying of cancer,” one person wrote. Nutritionists, too, are skeptical.

According to Joy Dubost, a dietitian and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, “Everything we eat is a chemical, so in that sense, I don’t have a problem with it. What I do have a problem with is his one-size-fits-all approach to nutrition. There’s no scientific evidence that indicates it’s going to do what he says it will do.” Also, Dubost says, “I’ve tried it, and it tastes terrible.”

Yet, for every anti-Soylent response, Rhinehart has received one in favor of it. These “reverse foodies,” as a few of his fans call themselves, are driven by the same frustration over food and its constraints. They include people like Daniel Dow, a 27-year-old chemistry and

+ Maltodextrin (250g) for carbs + Oat powder (125g) for carbs and fiber + Whey isolate (60g) for protein + Medium-chain triglycerides (65g) for fats + Potassium gluconate (27g) for electrolytes + Calcium carbonate (2.5g) for bone density + Lycopene (500mcg) for antioxidants + Sodium chloride (5.8g) for electrolytes + Copper (2mg) for collagen formation + Vanadium (100mcg) for glucose regulation

math teacher in central Indiana who has spent the past few months happily eating almost nothing but a Soylent imitation he began making once Rhinehart posted his formulas online.

Reverse foodies like Dow won’t have to subsist on their own for too long. In May, Rhinehart and three friends started an online crowdfunding campaign to raise $100,000, with the goal of mass-producing Soylent. They thought they’d need a month. Instead, they raised the money in two hours. At press time, the total was nearly $600,000, and donations were still coming in.

In an ideal world, Rhinehart says, he would like to make enough off Soylent sales to subsidize it for poor and famine-ridden regions overseas. He would also like to supply some big customers. While he won’t specify which branch, Rhinehart says the U.S. military is interested in providing Soylent to soldiers. What he wants most of all, though, is to change the perception of what does and does not constitute food—a line he blurs every time he sits down to eat.

*Rhinehart does not publish his complete formula, and he updates it frequently. For news, visit robrhinehart.com.

Caleb Hannan is based in Denver. He has not tried Soylent. Yet.

SELECTED INGREDIENTS*

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END OF THE

Can two grade-school friends remake the way we interact with STO R Y BY TO M FOS T E R PHOTOGR APHS BY CODY PICKENS

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INTER F A E C computers?

David Holz [left] and Michael Buckwald have built a device called the Leap Motion controller that allows users to interact with computers with a wave of a hand.

AUGUST 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 5 7

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D

avid Holz took the main stage at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive, the annual innovation conference in Austin, Texas, looking like a hobbit on casual Friday. He wore an oversize blue polo shirt and billowy khakis with a big wallet bulge in the front pocket and had a wild nest of curly hair that frizzed around a thinning patch in the back. Even at South by Southwest (SXSW), a gathering teeming with bright-eyed inventors with big ideas and little time for haircuts, the 24-year-old founder of the company Leap Motion, which makes a new motion-tracking controller for computers, stood out as a particularly glorious example of the species geek.

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk was scheduled to speak immediately after Holz, and Al Gore was up right after that, so eager fans were filing into the auditorium during the Leap Motion presentation, as if it were a kind of opening act—some background music as everyone picked their sight lines for the main event. Holz, who shared the stage with his co-founder and best friend, Michael Buckwald, didn’t seem to notice.

He spoke with a combination of barely contained enthusiasm and uncanny selfassuredness. The title of the presentation was “The Disappearing User Interface,” and it called for a sweeping reinvention of how we interact with computers. “I should be able to log in to any computer and not have to know some language to use it,” he said. “I should just do what makes sense to me intuitively. It’s on the technology to understand me.”

“It’s becoming very clear that the thing holding back devices from doing more isn’t their power or their cost or ubiquity or size,” Buckwald explained.

“It’s that the way users interact with them is very simple. And that, unfortunately, leads to things like drop-down menus and keyboard shortcuts . . . elements that require people to learn and train rather than just do and create.” The audience, many of whom were pecking away at laptops and tablets, perked up.

And then Holz began his product demo.

The Leap Motion controller looked like a miniature iPhone and sat on a table in front of a computer onstage.

Within an eight-cubic-foot cone of space above it, the controller can track motions as small as .001 millimeters, making it significantly more sensitive than Microsoft’s Kinect. Holz started waving his hands above the Leap, and tracer lines danced across the computer screen. He wiggled his fingers, barely perceptibly, and zoomed in on the display until the tracers again filled it, only this time they were following movements within one centimeter of space. He panned around the display to show the tracers in three dimensions. A few people gasped. He stuck both hands out above the device, and a detailed 3-D picture of them appeared on the screen. He pulled up a block of virtual clay and, in a few seconds, sculpted a Bart Simpson–like character in thin air and spun it around for the audience to see from all angles. “I’m very proud that that is now possible,” he said simply. The audience cheered.

In the days that followed, a stream of curious conference attendees flowed into the Leap Motion tent behind the Austin Convention Center. Most of them had never heard of the product before, but they understood its implications. Leap Motion is not about gesture control. As Holz explained in his demo, it’s about ushering in a new era in which people interact with digital information as directly and naturally as if it were real. “Everywhere there’s a computer can benefit from this type of interaction,” he’d said. “That means things like tablets and phones but also things like robotic surgery.”

One afternoon, hundreds of developers converged on the tent to try to get face time with Holz and Buckwald.

A proud few showed off apps they’d already built—one, a security app that, instead of relying on passwords or retina scans, identifies people based on the unique biometric signature of their hands. Another developer set up behind a laptop in the corner and buzzed the

crowd with a black quadcopter drone that he was controlling with his Leap by simply weaving his outstretched hand in the space in front of him, like a kid miming an airplane.

It all looked like magic, a roomful of people pawing at the air and grinning at the effects, as if the way they interact with computers would never be the same. To Holz, it was the beginning of a revolution he’d been planning for most of his young life.

S

ince before he could read or write, David Holz has been obsessed with technology.

He grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in a coastal community of large homes, elderly people, and very few young families. Without friends nearby, Holz busied himself in the garage, taking apart any kind of electronic device he

IT’S A NEW ERA IN WHICH PEOPLE INTERACT WITH DIGITAL INFOR 58 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

Sensors on the Leap Motion controller capture movement within an eight-cubic-foot cone.

Holz’s algorithms translate hand motions into 3-D data with .001 millimeter accuracy.

could get his hands on. “I accumulated this supply of electrical stuff from people in my town. Somebody would break their computer and give it to me,” he remembers. He’d examine the parts of things he’d dismantled and try to figure out new uses for them.

Holz seems to have inherited the hacker mentality from his parents. When his mother was a girl, she tried to build a rocket; it left an eight-foot-wide crater in the ground. His father built a home chemistry lab as a kid, and after he left for college, his parents had to call the fire department to remove all the hazardous materials he’d been harboring. Shortly after marrying, the couple spent a few freewheeling years sailing around the Caribbean while David’s father, a dentist, picked up odd jobs in his field.

Around the age of eight, Holz started channeling his curiosity into making things rather than taking them apart. “I was pretty good at building paper airplanes by then—I had already

experimentally verified which ones were good in which ways,” he says. But he needed to understand exactly how they worked, so he started fashioning wind tunnels in the garage, using Plexiglas, cardboard, big fans, and weighting and balance systems. His fascination with wind tunnels crescendoed in seventh grade, when he started building one that he hoped could break the sound barrier (it had compressed helium on one side and a vacuum chamber on the other). His parents stopped him before he finished, fearing for his safety. Holz simply switched projects. He read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and developed a simple way to test the theory of special relativity: by monitoring clocks he would send to places at various altitudes around the world.

In his experiments, Holz realized early on that computers were powerful tools. “I always felt like I was better with technology than without it,” he says. But at a certain point, he started to notice

the opposite effect. In middle school, he taught himself to use sophisticated design software and began building 3-D models of things he wanted to create. “I could mold a piece of clay in a few minutes, but it would take me, like, five hours to do so on a computer. And so I started saying, ‘Well, what’s the problem here? Why am I worse with this technology?’ ” There had to be a better way to mold virtual clay. “It’s like, the computer is powerful enough, and I know what I want, so it’s not me but the input system that’s the problem,” he says. “If I were to design the best way to mold the piece of clay, it wouldn’t be to push a bunch of buttons. It would be to use my hands.” Like that, the seed for Leap Motion was planted.

Meanwhile, at school, he had befriended a small group of other smart kids who had no interest in sports—among them, a young debate junkie named Michael Buckwald. The group started holding round-table sessions where they’d try to

MATION AS NATURALLY AS IF IT WERE REAL. AUGUST 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 5 9

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A

month after SXSW, Holz sits cross-legged in a black swivel chair in a conference room at Leap Motion’s San Francisco headquarters, a bunker-like underground space across the street from the Bay Bridge on-ramp and less than a block from where he shares an apartment with Buckwald. Not that Holz really lives in the apartment—he eats catered meals here in the bunker and often sleeps on his beanbag chair. Some co-workers have taken to calling his hair “the nest.”

Like any good digital start-up, Leap Motion has clever names for its conference rooms—in this case, various sci-fi spaceships. There’s Galactica, Death Star, and the one we’re in now, Enterprise. The name is apt. One of the longest-running plot devices on Star Trek was called the Holodeck, in which characters could interact with holograms—say, a scale model of a vintage New Orleans jazz club or a combat simulation—for R&R or training.

When Holz and Buckwald set out to create their company, they intended to build something akin to a Holodeck.

The prototype wasn’t pretty—about two backpacks full of electronics that took 30 minutes to set up—but the system’s eight networked boxes were sensitive within an area large enough to create what Holz called a “holodesk.” Holz had made some breakthroughs in the math behind the machine in college, and the core principles he developed then continue to drive the product today.

Buckwald, who is almost painfully shy, remembers discussing a potential company with Holz back in 2010 and realizing that as crude as the first device was, it represented a big opportunity. Buckwald was only 21 at the time, but since graduating early from George Washington University (with a double major), he had already started and sold an online listings company called Zazuba and spent a year in Madagascar, setting up operations for One Laptop per Child. The weekend of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, Holz came to visit Buckwald in Washington, D.C. The two spent long hours talking about the technology, much as they had discussed so many other transformative ideas in middle school. By the time Colbert packed off, they had decided to form

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEF T: COURTESY NASA ; COURTESY INTUITIVE SURGICAL INC.; COURTESY LE AP MOTION; ISTOCKPHOTO.COM (2); TEEKID/GET T Y IMAGES

reimagine big ideas, such as the education system and presidential politics.

School itself was a challenge, though, because Holz couldn’t get his teachers to answer his incessant questions, especially in math and science. One of them would explain, for instance, that the square root of a negative is an imaginary number, and Holz’s hand would shoot up. “I’d be like, ‘Okay, I understand that that works, but why do we live in a universe that has that sort of mathematical construct?’ Which is actually a very deep mathematical question, and there’s a totally reasonable answer, but the teacher would say, ‘I’m not going to answer that.’ ” College, at Florida Atlantic University, was a little better. Then he headed to the University of North Carolina– Chapel Hill to pursue a Ph.D. in applied math. In some ways, Chapel Hill was a dreamland for Holz. There were mathematicians everywhere, and he was drawn to them because he felt they understood problems “all the way down.”

Even better, “UNC is the only place in the world where mathematicians have access to as much stuff as most physicists do,” he says. “They had giant wind tunnels. They had a huge wave pool so people could understand the math behind waves.”

But it wasn’t enough. Holz started applying to join different research teams, taking on as many as a dozen projects outside of his studies. There were projects with NASA’s Langley Research Center studying laser radars and methane on Mars, a neuroscience project with the Max Planck Florida Institute, a fluid-dynamics project at UNC. And yet, he kept coming back to his favorite idea: building a new gesture-based way to interact with computers. He’d returned to it periodically since middle school, and by grad school he’d built a prototype. Between that, his other projects, and his graduate work, Holz was spread thin and had to make some decisions. “I sort of felt like, ‘These aren’t the problems I want to be working on, and maybe I have the skills and everything I need at this point. Do I finish my Ph.D., go work at NASA, and use that position to eventually start a company? Or can I skip all that and just go straight to the company?’” He chose the latter and left UNC without a degree after only about a year.

APPS

WELCOME T O THE REVOLUTION How gestural control could change everything

REMOTE CONTROL: Developers have already created hacks that allow a user to control real aircraft simply by mimicking the roll, pitch, and yaw motions of flight with an outstretched hand.

The apps mostly apply to small quadcopter drones, but engineers at NASA recently used the same technique to control Athlete, the agency’s 2,000-pound flying planetary rover.

ROBOTIC SURGERY: With accuracy of up to .001 millimeters, a Leap Motion device could enable doctors to perform precise surgical procedures by manipulating robotic arms. It could also allow them to treat patients remotely— particularly useful for soldiers in combat zones or astronauts in space. The ability to manipulate robotic arms precisely and at a distance could transform other detailed or remote mechanical work—for example, repairing a fighter jet on the other side of the world.

3-D DESIGN: David Holz’s frustration with 3-D computer-aided design was the impetus behind Leap Motion. It makes sense, then, that one of the company’s first partnerships is with the designsoftware company Autodesk. With a Leap plug-in, users will be able to “shape” a 3-D model just as they would a lump of clay.

SECURITY: With password-based computer security increasingly compromised, hardware makers are looking for new biometric security systems. Technologies such as retina scanning are prohibitively expensive, however. A company called Battelle has developed an app that can identify an individual based on the unique shape and movement of his hand. With the app and a Leap Motion–equipped machine, one can sign on by simply waving at the sensor.

EDUCATION: With gestural control, students could interact directly with complex visualizations.

They could model chemicals or DNA. They could explore space (the app Exoplanet already allows them to do so). Or they could easily manipulate data visualizations to test different scenarios.

Holz makes the analogy that people develop an understanding of basic physics by interacting with the world. By allowing virtual exploration to take on experiential qualities, gestural control could make the most abstract concepts real and intuitive.

a company. Holz would focus on the math, while Buckwald would help turn his friend’s ideas into a business.

The dream of gesture control is not a new one, but it became reality only in the past few years. Nintendo’s Wii controller, which came out in 2006, was the breakout device in some ways. And although it was a lot of fun, it was of limited use beyond gaming because users had to hold a special wand.

There have been other attempts at gestural interface—other wands, wired gloves, and, more recently, an armband that reads electrical activity in muscles, developed by a company called Thalmic Labs. But until now, the state-of-the-art approach has been that of Microsoft’s Kinect, which was released as a game controller for Xbox just days after Holz and Buckwald decided to start their company. It required nothing of the user other than moving around in the space in front of the device.

At first the Kinect used a technology known as “structured light,” in which it projected many points of light across a room and tracked how they were interrupted by a moving object. This works well when detecting relatively large movements, like a golf swing or a punch.

But to track small individual finger movements, it would have to measure so

Buckwald [left] and Holz, shown here at age 11, met in fifth grade in Florida and have remained friends since; they are now business partners.

many points of light that it would require prohibitively large amounts of processing power. This spring, Microsoft replaced structured light with “time of flight,” which works more like radar. By projecting infrared light and measuring the time it takes to reflect off objects, the machine achieves a sense of depth perception and is able to build a 3-D image of what it sees. The new approach is more accurate than structured light, but it’s not nearly as precise as Leap Motion’s technology.

The Kinect works best from a few feet away. Get up close to do fine work, and the accuracy degrades.

Leap Motion works completely differently. Holz compares the information a Leap gathers to that of an analog camera in soft light, which means it can detect subtle shadings that describe the curves and tiny nuances of an object. It then tracks how those shadings change as an object moves. The company has been silent about how exactly the device turns its image files into real-time 3-D motion, but the secret is in Holz’s proprietary math. What’s perhaps most impressive is that all the processing happens with virtually zero delay (whereas Kinect has long been dogged by complaints about lag time). “We’re using only a small percentage of a single core of the CPU [central processing unit],” Buckwald says.

“There’s no special silicon in the device, and we’re using off-the-shelf sensors, offthe-shelf cameras. Everything we do today CONTINUED ON PAGE 82

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STORY BY GEOFF MANAUGH AND NICOL A T WILLEY

Popular Sc ience PRESENTS

T we n ty-fi ve c u r io us, mys te r i o us, or other w ise beguiling destinations to satisfy yo ur inner science-history geek 15 14

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CATEGORY

N THE PAST 16 MONTHS, writers Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley have toured 150 of the built, natural, and virtual landscapes of the United States, collecting images and interviews. They call the project Venue, and they are documenting their progress at v-e-n-u-e.com. For POPULAR SCIENCE, they selected 25 of their favorite sites, each one open to the public and perfect for a late-summer road trip.

SPACE AGE 01 SOUDAN UNDERGROUND MINE STATE PARK SOUDAN, MINNESOTA N 47.819302 / W 92.242954

This 19th-century iron mine in the boreal forests of Minnesota has been repurposed as one of the deepest physics experiments in North America—and the deepest that’s open to the public. In this subterranean lab, a neutrino detector looks for changes in subatomic particles emitted 460 miles away at the

THE BEST NERD ROAD TRIPS

SPACE AGE

04 VERY LARGE ARRAY SOCORRO, NEW MEXICO N 34.078700 / W 107.618251

The Very Large Array is a 20-mile-wide collection of 27 radio telescopes trained permanently on the skies above. Astronomers have used the glinting white receiving dishes to make discoveries for decades— including ice on Mercury and microquasars. Signage along a walk amid the telescopes illustrates how vehicles push the 230-ton dishes over 40 miles of rails into four observing configurations.

Visitor center and museum open daily, 8:30 a.m.–sunset, with guided tours on the first Saturday of each month. Free.

Fermilab particle accelerator. Another experiment searches for dark matter.

Visitors take a three-minute minecage ride for a physics lesson half a mile below the Earth.

GEOFF MANAUGH AND NICOL A T WILLE Y (2)

Open daily until September 30, 2013; check website for hours and tour times. Adults: $12.

02 AEROJET-DADE ROCKET FACILITY HOMESTEAD, FLORIDA N 2 5. 36 2 1 1 8 / W 8 0.5 6 2 3 9 2

A three-mile walk down a closed road in the Everglades leads to the unprotected remains of an abandoned rocket factory—including the shell of the largest solid-fuel rocket booster ever built, still sealed inside its 150-foot-deep test silo. The aerospace company Aerojet built the facility in 1963 to produce four test rockets for the space program.

Aerojet tested three boosters, nose

down, with massive detonations that could be seen 80 miles away. But after NASA decided the liquid-fuel Saturn rockets would perform better in space, Aerojet walked away from the project, leaving filing cabinets, ignition panels, and the case of the fourth solid-fuel rocket booster rusting in the swamp.

Enter at your own risk. Free.

03 NATIONAL RADIO QUIET ZONE WEST VIRGINIA–VIRGINIA BORDERLANDS N 38.430791 / W 7 9.818249

The U.S. enforces strict limits on the placement and broadcast power of cellphone towers and other transmitters over 13,000 square miles in the Appalachian Mountains.

In the National Radio Quiet Zone, the Green Bank Telescope searches

the radio universe for targets like star-forming clumps of gas. Nearby, the Naval Information Operations Command is used by the National Security Administration to intercept international communications. The zone has also become a haven for people who claim to suffer from electromagnetic sensitivity.

The National Radio Quiet Zone covers an area the size of Maryland.

Free.

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THE BEST NERD ROAD TRIPS

N 3 2.9 9 0 3 0 8 / W 1 0 6.9 7 5 2 6 1

Virgin Galactic plans to offer 20 minutes at the edge of space as early as next year for a mere $250,000.

Those without money to burn will have to settle for ticketed tours of the firm’s future spaceport. So far, the facility consists of a dual-purpose hangar and terminal designed by architect Norman Foster; a smaller dome that houses administrative offices and the air, fire, and rescue team; and a 12,000-foot runway named after former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, who in 2005 helped pass the legislation that allowed construction of the world’s first commercial spaceport.

Tours twice daily Friday–Saturday, once daily on Sundays. Adults: $59.

The body of McMath-Pierce solar telescope points due north, angled at about 32 degrees—Kitt Peak’s latitude.

A mirror at the top of the building’s hypotenuse reflects an image of the sun into the telescope. The mirror rotates throughout the day to follow the sun across the sky.

06 MCMATH-PIERCE SOLAR TELESCOPE TUCSON, ARIZONA

CATEGORY

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Free.

07 FORT IRWIN NATIONAL TRAINING CENTER FORT IRWIN, CALIFORNIA N 35.349436 / W 116.594167

Prior to combat deployment, units of the U.S. military spend a few weeks at Fort Irwin, a base in the Mojave Desert the size of Rhode Island. There, they simulate combat, clearing tunnels, performing houseto-house sweeps, and reacting to carefully choreographed car bombs.

Visitors watch soldiers move through the dusty streets of 11 fake towns built from shipping containers.

Twice-monthly tours fill up quickly. Free.

08 CINDER LAKE FLAGSTAFF, ARIZONA

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Once inside the doorway at the base of a 100-foot-tall white triangle, visitors find themselves inside the world’s largest solar telescope.

The aboveground structure points skyward; belowground the building stretches another 300 feet. The McMath-Pierce telescope is singular but not alone: There are more than two dozen astronomical instruments on Kitt Peak, a windy mountaintop 40 miles west of Tucson.

In 1967, NASA engineers unleashed a four-day aerial-bombing campaign in the black cinder remains of an ancient volcanic field 11 miles northeast of Flagstaff. Their goal was to duplicate the precise landscape of craters found in the Sea of Tranquillity, where Apollo astronauts would land two years later. Fully suited astronauts drove prototype lunar rovers, practiced their routes for extravehicular excursions, and tested geologic equipment. Today, intrepid visitors can hike half a mile from a small parking area on Forest

Tours daily, but check website for restrictions. Adults: $8; the self-guided tour is free.

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Road 776 to explore the rapidly weathering Apollo-era pockmarks.

With careful planning, a modern-day explorer could even re-create Neil Armstrong’s first steps.

09 BAY MODEL SAUSALITO, CALIFORNIA N 37.864216 / W 122.495370

Opened in 1957, the Bay Model served for decades as an analog calculator for high tides and storm surges in the San Francisco Bay. The Army Corps of Engineers still fills the 1.5-acre scale model with flowing water, but as an educational tool and tourist attraction in a waterfront warehouse in Sausalito.

Hours are seasonal; check website for details. Free.

CATEGORY

TOOLS AND SURVEYING 10 KORESHAN STATE HISTORIC SITE ESTERO, FLORIDA N 26.433601 / W 81.812155

In 1894, a “hollow Earth” cult called the Koreshan Unity Foundation settled on a homestead near what is now Naples, Florida. Cult members believed the Earth was round but hollow and that humans lived on the inside, with the sun at the center. Members took to the wide sandy beaches near Naples to try to measure the planet’s curvature, using

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEF T: GEOFF MANAUGH AND NICOL A T WILLE Y; COURTESY U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVE Y; GEOFF MANAUGH AND NICOL A T WILLE Y

05 SPACEPORT AMERICA SIERRA COUNTY, NEW MEXICO

TOOLS AND SURVEYING

13 MERCER MUSEUM

DOYLESTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA N 40.30784 / W 75.127198

What did buckets look like before machines could stamp them out of steel? Henry Mercer, 19th-century gentleman anthropologist, thought future generations ought to know. So he collected the preindustrial tools of everyday life as they were becoming obsolete: tiny butter molds, car-size threshing machines, and, yes, wooden buckets, three feet across and made from the hollow trunks of black gum trees. Today, 40,000 objects are on display in a soaring poured-in-place concrete castle that Mercer built near his home. The sprawling collection is housed behind glass, propped up against walls, and even strapped to arches, banisters, and ceilings.

Open Monday–Saturday 10 a.m.–5 p.m. and Sundays 12–5 p.m.

Adults: $12.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEF T: GEOFF MANAUGH AND NICOL A T WILLE Y ( 2 ) ; COURTESY THE M E R C E R M U S E U M & L I B R A R Y, D OY L E S TO W N , P E N N . ; G EO F F M A N A U G H A N D N I C O L A T W I L L E Y

This “Vampire Killing Kit,” a leather-covered briefcase whose contents include flowers of garlic, engraved bullets, and lead balls, is displayed in a hallway outside the museum proper. It was removed from the collection when 21st-century scholarship concluded it was a fake, likely assembled in the mid-1900s and donated to the museum.

their purpose-built “rectilineator.”

The site is now a small state park, preserving for curious visitors the Koreshan Unity houses, general store, and other structures.

Open year-round, 8 a.m.–sunset. Adults: $4.

11 CENTER FOR LAND USE INTERPRETATION CULVER CITY, CALIFORNIA N 3 4. 02 5 9 0 6 / W 118.394825

From its small storefront gallery on Venice Boulevard, the Center for Land Use Interpretation is conducting an ambitious survey of America’s manmade environments. The Center curates rotating exhibitions, like a taxonomy of construction-site office trailers—shown in a temporary onsite office trailer. Visitors may come away with a new perspective on contemporary American civilization.

Open Friday–Sunday 12–5 p.m. and by appointment. Free.

12 CENTRAL PARK BOLT NEW YORK CITY N 4 0. 76 9 4 1 8 / W 7 3.9 7 3 4 3 6

In the 1810s, before concrete and skyscrapers consumed Manhattan, surveyor John Randel laid out

the city’s future street grid. An unassuming iron bolt hammered into Central Park bedrock is one of the few remaining products of his work.

It marks an intersection that never came to be: West 65th Street and Sixth Avenue.

Despite receiving no explicit attempts at preservation or historical signage, the Central Park bolt is now part of the National Spatial Reference System, a database of officially verified physical reference points that allow surveyors to demarcate land in the U.S.

Free.

CATEGORY

EARTHWORKS 14 FREE ENTERPRISE RADON HEALTH MINE BOULDER, MONTANA N 4 6.2 7 1 7 4 9 / W 1 1 2.154152

Visitors to this former uranium mine pay to sit in lounge chairs 85 feet belowground and breathe the radon gas seeping from the tunnel’s rock walls. The facility, founded in 1952, is one of four radon-therapy sites in the U.S., all in Montana. Radon gas—emitted by radium, a radioactive byproduct of uranium—causes lung cancer in high doses. Here, exposed

to more moderate levels, radon bathers seek relief from arthritic, respiratory, and other chronic illnesses.

Hours are seasonal; check website for details. Treatment prices vary; a 60-minute visit costs $8.

15 BERKELEY PIT BUTTE, MONTANA N 46.017618 / W 112.512016

The Berkeley Pit may be a highly AUGUST 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 6 5

THE BEST NERD ROAD TRIPS

Kansas Underground Salt Museum— offers tours of the cavernous tunnels created by miners extracting solid rock salt. The site is the only active salt mine in North America that’s open to the public. Visitors see exhibits on the mechanics of a salt operation as they wander the glittering halls of what 275 million years ago was the bed of a Permian Age sea.

Open Tuesday–Saturday 9 a.m.–6 p.m.; Sundays 1–6 p.m. Adults: $14.

17 SAN ANDREAS FAULT PALMDALE, CALIFORNIA

EARTHWORKS

19 PUENTE HILLS LANDFILL WHITTIER, CALIFORNIA N 3 4. 02 0 2 6 1 / W 118.009300

Puente Hills is a 500-foot-tall mountain built from 130 million tons of Los Angeles County trash, given shape by garbage-moving heavy machinery and contaminantsealing geotextiles. Before the recession, the site took in more daily trash than any other U.S. landfill. Today, visitors watch engineers sculpt each day’s deliveries into a terraced landscape. Puente Hills will close its gates on October 31, when its permit expires. The sanitation department will divert trash to other nearby dumps, including the Mesquite Regional Landfill—a site whose 20,000-tons-a-day capacity should last a century.

Occasional free public tours (or you can pay to dump).

66 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

contaminated and deeply flooded open-pit copper mine, but it’s also a story of hope. In the early 1990s, chemists Donald and Andrea Stierle discovered that extremophiles— microorganisms evolved to endure seemingly impossible conditions— were slowly decontaminating the site’s 40 billion gallons of acid-mine waste. They’re now isolating those microorganisms for possible use in pharmaceuticals. A small viewing platform lets visitors look out over the dark waters—which are still so acidic they pose a lethal threat to geese unlucky enough to land there.

Heading north from Los Angeles to Palmdale, drivers will glimpse frozen crashing waves of rock, revealed by a roadcut on Highway 14. The undulations mark the San Andreas Fault, sliced open

by California highway engineers and laid bare for the geologically curious. To get a better view than a drive-by affords, visitors can risk walking across some private land from nearby Pelona Vista Park and contemplate geology in action from the western edge of the cut.

Free.

18 CAHOKIA MOUNDS STATE HISTORIC SITE COLLINSVILLE, ILLINOIS N 38.655052 / W 90.059191

N 38.043384 / W 97.867831

The largest pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico, Cahokia Mounds is a broad meadow punctuated by nearly 90 artificial hills. The site has been studied by anthropologists since the 1960s. At its prime, 900 years ago, Cahokia was larger than London was at the time. Today, volunteers can help uncover American Indian history at ongoing archaeological excavations.

More than 650 feet beneath the prairie, Strataca—also known as the

Hours are seasonal; check website for details. Recommended donation: $7.

Open March–November (call for hours).

Adults: $2.

16 STRATACA HUTCHINSON, KANSAS

F R O M L EF T: CO U R T ESY T H E S A N I TAT I O N D I ST R I CTS O F LOS A NG E L ES CO U N T Y; CO U R T ESY ST R ATAC A

N 34.562649 / W 118.132457

CATEGORY

C LO CK W I S E F R O M TOP L EF T: CO U R T ESY C E N T E R FO R P OST N AT U R A L HI STO R Y; G EO F F M A N AU GH A N D N I CO L L A T W I L L E Y ( 2)

CROSS-SPECIES 20 CENTER FOR POSTNATURAL HISTORY PITTSBURGH N 4 0. 46 5 3 4 5 / W 7 9.9 4 4 6 2 8

This artist-curated cabinet of Anthropocene curiosities displays organisms that have been altered by humans through methods like selective breeding and genetic engineering. In August, a new specimen will join the collection: a taxidermic goat from the BioSteel herd, engineered to produce spidersilk proteins in their milk. The proteins can be spun into fabric stronger than Kevlar.

Open Sundays 12–4 p.m., first Fridays of the month 6–9 p.m., and by appointment. Free.

21 THE POLLINATOR PATHWAY SEATTLE N 4 7. 6 0 9 2 1 6 / W 1 2 2. 3 1 6 8 0 3

Still a work in progress, the Pollinator Pathway is a mile-long corridor of bee-, butterfly-, and hummingbirdfriendly planting strips to help pollinators navigate between two of Seattle’s green spaces. Artist Sarah Bergmann conceived the project in 2008 as a response to the honeybeecolony collapse. The garden plots will replace grass between the sidewalk and the street with a mix of 80 percent native plants for the pollinators and 20 percent decorative

ones for the people. Volunteers can help mulch and plant on organized work days in May and October.

Free.

22 SUGARLOAF KEY BAT TOWER LOWER SUGARLOAF KEY, FLORIDA N 2 4.6 4 9 2 7 9 / W 8 1.572728

In 1929, Richter Clyde Perky had a mosquito problem at his fishing resort in the Florida Keys. Hoping to install mosquito-eating bats, he built this 30-foot wooden tower, complete with a louvered bat entrance, a central guano-removal chute, and cypress roosting shelves. All of his bats left. More than 80 years later, the tower still stands, an ignominious monument to biological pest control.

Free.

23 LUTHER BURBANK EXPERIMENTAL GARDENS SANTA ROSA, CALIFORNIA N 38.435936 / W 1 2 2.711702

The most famous plant breeder and botanical inventor of his day, Burbank used four acres here as his home, seed vault, greenhouse, nursery, and experimental fields. From 1875 to 1926, Burbank introduced more than 800 new plant varieties to American growers—an achievement that inspired the Plant Patent Act of 1930.

His Santa Rosa plum and Shasta daisy are still grown today, and his Burbank potato led to the Russet Burbank, the kind McDonald’s makes into French fries.

Open Tuesday–Sunday, April–October, 10 a.m.–3:30 p.m. Adults: $7.

24 CHILE PEPPER INSTITUTE GARDEN LAS CRUCES, NEW MEXICO N 32.280094 / W 106.770462

In its demonstration garden, the nonprofit Chile Pepper Institute grows 150 pepper varieties, including the new world’s hottest—the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion, packing 2 million Scoville heat units—and the former world recordholder—the Bhut Jolokia, deposed in 2011.

The institute also grows heirloom and proprietary varieties.

Self-guided tours free; guided tours $25 per person, reservations required.

25 THE HUMONGOUS FUNGUS MALHEUR NATIONAL FOREST, OREGON

The Chile Pepper Institute has developed a line of holiday-themed ornamental chiles, which it hopes will overtake flowers and candies as popular gifts. The Valentine chile [above] starts out cream-colored and gradually blushes to red, and the Easter peppers change from lavender to pale yellow to orange.

N 44.489801 / W 118.484938

This honey mushroom is the world’s largest organism, stretching across more than 2,300 acres of forest in eastern Oregon. Though underfoot, the Armillaria ostoyae fungus is hard to see: Its black filaments are one millimeter in diameter and woven like netting throughout the soil and beneath the bark of infected trees.

In the fall, the gigantic organism produces fruit, sending out clusters of diminutive brown mushrooms.

Free.

AUGUST 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 6 7

HOW IT WORKS STORY BY K ATIE PEEK

ILLUSTR ATION BY G R A H A M M U R D O CH

S I N G L E -S T R E AM R E CYCL I N G T

he most annoying aspect of recycling—and one of the biggest hurdles to its widespread adoption—is having to separate paper, glass, and plastic before they hit the curb. New recycling machines are changing that. With single-stream recycling, recyclables go into one bin, which a truck delivers to a materialsrecovery facility, such as Willimantic Waste

Paper in Willimantic, Connecticut. There, a largely automated system of conveyor belts, screens, magnets, and lasers separates materials so that they can be sold to metal and plastic recyclers and paper mills.

Of the 570 recycling facilities in the U.S., 240 now have single-stream operations, according to Eileen Berenyi, of the solid-waste research-and-consulting firm Governmental

Advisory Associates. While the system isn’t perfect—its high-speed operation can lead to contamination from broken glass—the simplicity of it means households actually recycle more. “If people want a higher recycling rate, it has to be convenient,” says Chaz Miller, of the National Solid Wastes Management Association. “And I think the technology is only going to improve.”

5

4

3 1

1 TIPPING FLOOR Dump trucks deliver mixed recyclables to the facility and pile them on the floor. The driver checks to make sure no oversize objects, such as a car engine, are in the mix.

2 DRUM FEEDER A mechanical claw grabs a handful of material from the tipping floor and drops it into a spinning drum, which evenly distributes the recyclables onto a conveyor belt.

68 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

3 INITIAL SORTERS Workers extract plastic bags, coat hangers, and other items that might jam up the line, as well as anything that won’t fit through the sorter.

4 LARGE STAR SCREENS A series of offset star-shaped discs called star screens—originally invented by the Dutch in the 1950s for sorting tulip bulbs—lift out corrugated cardboard. Smaller items fall through the screens and continue down the conveyor belt.

5 SECOND SORTERS As the material travels away from the star screens, human workers positioned along the line remove smaller contaminants.

“This is where we pull out people’s wallets,” says John DeVivo, a co-owner of Willimantic Waste Paper.

6 MEDIUM STAR SCREENS Three smaller star screens lift out different grades of paper, which makes up two thirds of recycled material at Willimantic Waste Paper.

Plastic, glass, and aluminum fall through the screens and roll back down onto the main belt.

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

2

Recycling Rates in the U.S. 250 million tons of solid waste STATS

2.4

200

Tons of carbon dioxide kept out of the atmosphere per ton of solid waste recycled, whether by single-stream or otherwise

Miscellaneous Rubber and leather Glass Textiles

150

One third Fraction of municipal solid waste in the U.S. that’s currently recycled

Wood Metals Plastics Yard trimmings Food scraps Paper and paperboard

100

100 million Number of U.S. residents served by singlestream recycling programs Fraction recycled in each category

92 Percentage recycling rates increased when Florida’s Miami-Dade County implemented single-stream recycling in 2008

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

9

10

8 6

11

7

12

7 GLASS SORTER Glass, which is heavier than plastic and aluminum, falls through the star screens and lands in bins below. A separate system of conveyors moves the material to a different area on-site, where it’s ground into a coarse sand for shipment to glass recyclers.

8 MAGNETIC METAL SORTER A 3,900-gauss magnet passes above the conveyor and attracts anything magnetic— usually only 4 percent of the total recyclable material.

9 EDDY CURRENT SEPARATOR A magnetic field induces electrons in aluminum to create a magnetic field of their own, known as an eddy field. By interacting with the machine’s magnetic field, the eddy field pushes aluminum off the main conveyor onto another one.

10 INFRARED LASERS At this point, only plastic remains.

Infrared laser beams shine on the plastic items, and a sensor detects the signatures of different grades of plastic. Strategic puffs of air separate the recyclable and nonrecyclable kinds into different bins.

11 BALER Every 70 seconds, the last machine on the conveyor belt makes a bale of recycled paper, plastic, cardboard, or metal. A single bale of paper is five feet by four feet by three feet and weighs approximately one ton.

12 LANDFILL Whatever items are left—jar lids, shoes, Happy Meal toys— go into a landfill. In Willimantic Waste Paper’s singlestream system, that’s about 5 percent of the material it collects.

AUGUST 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 6 9

Life in Our Universe Taught by Professor Laird Close lecture titles

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1. Is There Life Elsewhere in Our Universe?

2. Bang! A Universe Built for Life 3. A Star Is Born—Forming the Solar System 4. The Early Earth and Its Moon 5. Impacts—Bringers of Death … or Life?

6. Evidence of the First Life on Earth 7. Common Themes for All Life on Earth 8. Origin of Terrestrial Life 9. Astrobiology—Life beyond Earth 10. Has Mars Always Been Dead?

11. Evidence for Fossilized Life from Mars 12. Could Life Ever Have Existed on Venus?

13. Liquid Assets—The Moons of Jupiter 14. Liquid on Titan and Enceladus 15. Discovery of Extrasolar Planets 16. The Kepler Spacecraft’s Planets 17. A Tour of Exotic Alien Solar Systems 18. Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life 19. SETI—The Search for Intelligent Life 20. The Fermi Paradox—Where Is Everyone?

21. Space Travel—A Reality Check 22. Terraforming a Planet 23. The Future of Terrestrial Life 24. The Search for Another Earth

Are We Alone in the Universe?

Does the cosmos pulse with signs of life? This is one of the most profound issues facing mankind—and one of the unresolved questions that science may finally be able to answer in this century. No matter what the answer, one thing is for certain: The implications are vast.

Life in Our Universe reveals the cutting-edge research that leads scientists to believe that life is not exclusive to Earth. Taught by Dr. Laird Close, an award-winning Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at The University of Arizona, these 24 visually stunning lectures take you on a remarkable journey through space and time, from the big bang to NASA’s Kepler mission, which has identified more than 2,000 likely new planets. It’s an unprecedented opportunity to join astrobiologists on the hunt for microbial life elsewhere in our solar system and Earth-like planets in alien solar systems—one of the field’s “holy grails”—as you explore the subject of life and the mysteries that remain.

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POPSCI.COM

Turn a Dremel tool into a lab centrifuge

PLUS:

Use beets to build a drum machine PAGE 79

AUGUST 2013

HOW 2.0 H20@POPSCI.COM

PAGE 76

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

YOU BUILT WHAT?!

Pirate-Proof Yacht A semitrailer-size boat built by a retired teacher in his yard

TIME 5 years COST Undisclosed STO R Y BY N AT H A N B R OWN PHOTOGR APHS BY CHRIS CONE

T

om West has tackled some impressive builds over the years, including telescopes, a sawmill, and his house in Poland, Indiana. But West, a retired teacher, recently completed his swan song: a 30-ton, 56-foot-long sailboat named Faith. The one-mast vessel is longer than a double-decker bus, outfitted with wind turbines, and armored with a hull and cabin doors made from steel to thwart pirates on global voyages. “Everything you see, we did,” West says, standing next to the craft

@POPSCI

in his yard. “This all started out in pieces—the whole damned boat.”

West had little sailing experience, let alone boat-building know-how, before deciding to construct a huge ship in a landlocked farm town.

He’d simply seen a lot of sailboats on a Hawaiian vacation and wanted to make one big enough to live on.

West eventually settled on plans for a Bruce Roberts 532 vessel—a design sometimes used for charter boats— and refined them into his dream.

Most recreational cruisers are

MARITIME TRIUMPH Tom West says local media often joked about his project. (The most common offense: Noah’s ark references.) In an act of support, however, a California boat builder mailed West thousands of dollars’ worth of lights to illuminate Faith’s interior.

AUGUST 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 7 1

fiberglass boats measuring 26 to 40 feet long. Faith dwarfs these. It has two bathrooms, a full kitchen, lounging and dining areas, and room to sleep 12 people. A door with a ¼-inch-thick steel core protects the master cabin, which has the only access to the rudder controls, should pirates attempt a raid.

Building Faith took West, his wife, Martha, her brother Lloyd, and Tom’s late brother, Frank, five years—three more than they’d anticipated. They started work in West’s front-yard tennis court (another one of his custom creations). Using a plasma torch, the team welded steel beams together over concrete blocks to support the skeleton of the upside-down hull. Next they built two gantries to flip the hull upright. Anything that West could make, he did—including stainlesssteel handrails, rope tie-offs, and the 65-foot-tall mast.

Getting Faith into water proved nearly as challenging as building the boat. The Ohio River, located about 150 miles away, was the nearest suitable connection to waterways leading to the Gulf of Mexico. It took the Wests a month to find a towing company able to execute a hair-raising one-day slog along highways and back roads. “The trailer was about an inch off the ground,” West says. “It rubbed the ground every so often.”

West says he named the craft Faith because he had to believe that one day he’d actually complete it (and it wouldn’t sink). The moment of truth arrived in late April, at a Cincinnati 72 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

HOPE FLOATS The Wests stowed Faith’s 65-foot-tall mast while navigating waterways east of the Mississippi.

Once they reached a bay with access to the Gulf of Mexico, they began installing the mast.

marina. “There was a whole bunch of guys pushing on the boat,” West says. “But the current was so fast that the ramp scratched the bottom.”

Then, after West started the engine, it blew a head gasket. Leaky pipes also plagued the maiden voyage, but the Wests successfully repaired their ship

and headed downriver toward the ocean. They hope to pilot Faith to several continents, but their exact route is open to the winds of chance and curiosity. “This has added years to my life,” West says. “I think that’s the secret to life: get out and do something.”

HOW IT WORKS

Crafting part of a 56-foot-long yacht is one thing. Learning to build Faith and install, maintain, and repair all of its parts is another. Here are just a few of the nautical systems West mastered during his five years of toil.

A

POWER A 100hp diesel motor and 500 gallons of diesel fuel give Faith 1,000 miles of range without wind.

NAVIGATION (A) A computer autopilot, radar system, sonar scanner, GPS unit, and a gyroscopic compass all work together to get Faith to its destination—with or without a captain.

SAFETY To guard against pirates, West made the core of the master cabin’s door from steel and incorporated a thick metal lock bar. The only access to the rudder controls is through the master cabin, so if there’s a raid, the Wests can hunker down inside and disable the ship’s steering. (A gun cabinet in the master cabin holds last-resort countermeasures.)

B

C

ELECTRICITY (B) Two wind turbines on the back of the boat provide power for lights, electronics, and other systems.

Faith also has a 10,000kW diesel generator, which fulfills most of its electrical needs.

INTERIOR (C) West harvested walnut trees from 50 acres of forest that he owns, cut the timber in his homemade sawmill, and used it to build the boat’s cabinets, control panel, and tables.

WATER Faith’s water-treatment system converts seven to nine gallons of seawater into tap water every hour, using carbon filters and a bacteria-killing ultraviolet light to get the job done.

TOP: COURTESY LLOYD AND MARY BURNS

H2

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1999

36 LED SOLAR SECURITY LIGHT

Item 69644 shown

SAVE SOLAR LED LIGHTS LOT NO. 95588/ 66% 69462/60561

4

$ 99

& %&

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Non-transferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 11/16/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.

99

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2900 LB. CAPACITY LOT NO. 68784/69387 WEIGHS 306 LBS. HIGH GLOSS FINISH!

SAVE $

52999

TRIPLE BALL TRAILER HITCH

1/2" PROFESSIONAL VARIABLE SPEED REVERSIBLE HAMMER DRILL Item 68169 shown

$

LIMIT 3 - Good at our stores or HarborFreight.com or by calling 800-423-2567. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last.

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LOT NO. 68169/67616/60495

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LOT NO. 68530/69671 LOT NO. 68525/69677 ! $&# $#!*

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CO Non-transferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 11/16/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.

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ANY SINGLE ITEM!

(420 CC)

LOT NO. 953/69136/ 69248/69128/69210

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$149.99

5 FT. 6" x 7 FT. 6" ALL PURPOSE WEATHER RESISTANT TARP

Item 953 shown

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90 AMP FLUX WIRE WELDER

SAVE $60

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5 SPEED DRILL PRESS

LOT NO. 38119/44506/60238

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4999

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1500 PSI PRESSURE WASHER LOT NO. 68333/69488

$

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3 GALLON, 100 PSI OILLESS PANCAKE AIR COMPRESSOR

Item 95275 shown

$

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16" x 30" STEEL SERVICE CART

220 LB. CAPACITY

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3 PIECE TITANIUM NITRIDE COATED HIGH SPEED STEEL STEP DRILLS

R !

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Item 91616 shown

LOT NO. 66418/61364

SAVE 60%

4

$ 99

LIMIT 7 - Good at our stores or HarborFreight.com or by calling 800-423-2567. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last.

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R !

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1500 WATT DUAL TEMPERATURE HEAT GUN (572°/1112°)

SAVE 69%

Item 5107 shown

2799

R !

PE ON SU UP LOT NO. CO 97711/60658

Item 97711 shown

3/8" x 14 FT. GRADE 43 Not for TOWING CHAIN overhead lifting.

R !

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LIMIT 8 - Good at our stores or HarborFreight.com or by calling 800-423-2567. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last.

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AUTOMATIC WRIST BLOOD PRESSURE Requires two MONITOR AAA batteries

4" x 36" BELT/ 6" DISC SANDER

1699

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14" ELECTRIC CHAIN SAW

12 VOLT, 250 PSI AIR COMPRESSOR LOT NO. 4077

LOT NO. 67255

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LOT NO. 67455/ 69626/69925/96933

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LOT NO. 47257

6" DIGITAL CALIPER Includes two 1.5V button cell batteries.

SAVE 59% $ 99 $ 29

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5499

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LOT NO. 97181/93981

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LOT NO. 91616/ 69087/60379

& %&

LOT NO. 5107/60390

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Item 66418 shown

MULTI-USE TRANSFER PUMP

SAVE 64%

LOT NO. 95275/ 60637/69486

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LIMIT 8 - Good at our stores or HarborFreight.com or by calling 800-423-2567. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last.

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YOUR CHOICE!

9 PIECE FULLY POLISHED COMBINATION WRENCH Item 42304 SETS shown SAE SAVE

5

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$

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Non-transferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 11/16/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.

SAVE $65

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LOT NO. 68751

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AND OBD II PROFESSIONAL SCAN TOOL

RETRACTABLE AIR/WATER HOSE REEL WITH 3/8" x 50 FT. HOSE

Item 93897 shown

PORTABLE GARAGE LOT NO. 69039/ Item 69039 68217/60727 shown

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$

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GRAND OPENINGS

LOT NO. 93897/69265

5999

&

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8-IN-1 SOCKET WRENCHES

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SAE METRIC LOT NO.

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LOT NO. 65498/60830

65497/60829

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6

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Covina, CA Chicago, IL Green Brook, NJ Albuquerque, NM Kenneth City, FL Kansas City, MO Pennsauken, NJ Bronx, NY

H2

HOW 2.0 / BIOHACKS STO R Y BY DANIEL GRUSHKIN

ILLUSTR ATION BY SON OF AL AN

Spin Master Turn a Dremel tool into a lab-grade centrifuge or any garageista ready to tackle molecular biology, the centrifuge is an essential laboratory tool. Its super-rapid spin supplies the right G-forces to neatly separate biological materials—including cells, proteins, and DNA—from a liquid.

University-grade centrifuges sell for about $2,000, but synthetic biology enthusiast and inventor Cathal Garvey figured out how to build one with a Dremel tool and a 3-D–printed wheel.

The combination can spin samples up to 33,000 rpm, creating forces 50,000 times stronger than Earth’s gravitational pull.

The 3-D–printed wheel looks deceptively simple, with six slots for standard 1.5-microliter Eppendorf tubes, oriented horizontally. Garvey says his early prototypes often deformed, which cracked and shot off tubes like oversize plastic bullets.

“People said I was mad,” Garvey says. Yet he prevailed, reshaping the wheel’s slots to safely cradle the tubes’ thick rims. “I’ve never had a tube eject since,” he says. Still, Garvey advises using extreme caution—and proper eye protection— when running what he’s dubbed the Dremelfuge.

TEST RUN

The cells lining your inner cheeks constantly slough off into saliva but are too small to see individually— which makes them perfect candidates for testing the Dremelfuge.

76 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

INSTRUCTIONS

The Dremelfuge

1 Download schematics for the Dremelfuge wheel from gitorious.org/dremelfuge. Two designs are available; pick the one that fits a Dremel 300 (not a standard drill).

TIME 1 hour COST $50 or less DIFFICULTY ▯○○○○

2 3-D–print the wheel in ABS plastic, using hexagonal infill to strengthen it. (PLA is another common printing material, but Garvey says it tends to shatter under high G-forces.) If you lack a 3-D printer, order the wheel from Shapeways.com for about $50.

DREMEL

3 Screw a rotary-tool disc holder into the wheel’s axis, and attach it to a Dremel.

4 Fit any tubes containing a biological sample into the wheel, ensuring each has a counterweight: a tube on the opposite side with an equal amount of liquid. Otherwise, they might damage the wheel and the Dremel and make a mess.

5 Hold the Dremelfuge in a Styrofoam cooler, and let ’er rip! The foam will absorb the impact if a tube pops off.

EPPENDORF SAMPLE TUBES

3- D – PR I N T E D WHEEL

WAR N I N G : USE SHAT TE RPROOF EYE PROTECTION, AND OPER ATE THE DREMELFUGE INSIDE A STURDY CO NTAINER , AS THE DEVICE CA N TH ROW OFF HUNKS OF PL ASTIC AT DANGEROUSLY H IGH SPEEDS .

Swab a Q-tip inside your mouth for about 10 seconds to grab some cheek cells.

Dip the cotton tip repeatedly in a tube filled with isotonic saline solution to dislodge the cells. (Make your own solution from salt and distilled water, or buy wound wash at a pharmacy.)

Fill a second tube to the same level as the other one. Insert the tubes in opposite slots in the 3-D– printed wheel.

Run for one minute at the Dremel’s second setting (about 10,000 rpm).

You’ll see a whitish pellet at the bottom of the tubes. Voilà!

Isolated cheek cells.

MARTIN SHIELDS/GETTY IMAGES

F

HOW 2.0 / THEME BUILDING

H2

STORIES BY SUSAN E. MAT THEWS

Symphonic Junk Artists who build fine instruments from stuff nobody wants HYBRID ORCHESTRA Diego Stocco crafted his first Frankeninstrument when he was 16.

Today the 37-year-old Italian musician enlists more than 30 unique creations to write and play scores for popular movies, TV shows, and videogames. One of his favorites, and the centerpiece of his eclectic ensemble, is the Experibass. Stocco built it on a whim in 2009, melding parts from a broken violin, a viola, and a cello to an upright bass [pictured] just to see how it would sound. The finished device resonates somewhat like a piano when he plays, Stocco says, but none of the instruments it’s sourced from are easy to distinguish. “It doesn’t really sound like anything else,” Stocco says.

“It’s just the Experibass.”

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY L ANDFILL HARMONIC; COURTESY PEDRO R E Y E S A N D L I S S O N G A L L E R Y, L O N D O N ; C O U R T E S Y D I E G O S TO C C O

TIME 1 to 2 weeks COST $250

TIME 2 weeks COST $0 SALVAGED SAX Metallurgist Tito Romero built this soprano saxophone for the Recycled Instruments Orchestra from a metal gutter, bottle caps, plastic buttons, and dinnerware.

LANDFILL HARMONIC Environmental technologist Favio Chávez visited a slum in Cateura, Paraguay, in 2006 to start a recycling program. But the sight of school dropouts rummaging in a landfill inspired Chávez—a part-time music instructor—to provide the kids with a new opportunity: becoming trained musicians.

Traditional instruments cost more than a house in Cateura, so Chávez asked local residents Nicolás Gómez and Tito Romero for help. The duo built cellos from oilcans, drums from radiographs, and violins from paint cans and forks. Their saxophone [above] was made from beer caps and a water pipe.

The kids learned to play their instruments so well that they formed a group, called the Recycled Instruments Orchestra. They’ve performed in Brazil and the Netherlands and have a U.S. appearance in the works. Their ensemble is also the subject of an upcoming documentary, Landfill Harmonic, expected to premiere in early 2014. Executive producer Alejandra Nash says Chávez has infused the children with a newfound sense of pride.

“They love showing off their instruments,” she says. Gómez has even begun to teach the kids to build their own music makers from junk.

TIME: Four days COST: $225

DISARMING ENSEMBLE In 2008, Mexican artist Pedro Reyes melted down 1,527 discarded guns, cast the metal into 1,527 shovels, and began planting 1,527 trees with them. The Mexican army took notice and, last year, gave Reyes 6,700 confiscated guns. Reyes and a small team of musicians bent, sliced, and fused the weaponry into an ensemble called Disarm. They cut rifle barrels into a xylophone [above]. Gun barrels became flutes. Still other firearms formed an electric-guitar body. Reyes’s instruments now tour the world, so that musicians can play them—and spread a message of peace. “The same kind of transformation that the material experienced is a transformation that I wish to see in society,” he says.

AUGUST 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 7 7

H2

HOW 2.0 / DIY EVOLUTION STO R Y BY PAV I T H R A S . M O H A N

Instant Gratification Two photography projects that capture the do-it-yourself spirit NOW

INSTAGRAM PHOTO BOOTH

lexander Morris lugged a camera around everywhere during high school, making him the unofficial class photographer. Even after he graduated last year, his alma mater in Antrim, Northern Ireland, asked him to document its 2013 prom. Morris couldn’t resist. In addition to traditional shots, the organizers wanted a photo booth. Rather than spend money he didn’t have to rent one or hire an assistant to man a camera, Morris built a stylish booth that could run itself.

The compact and fully automated system fits inside a rounded wooden box, which Morris made to resemble the cartoonish logo of Instagram, the popular photosharing service. The contraption’s brain is an Arduino microcontroller. Morris wired a circuit to it so that when a

HOT SHOTS To prevent overheating the camera and other electronics, Morris cut two ventilation holes into the bottom of the wooden shell and put a computer fan over each one.

prom-goer presses a big red button, the Arduino starts a 10-second countdown on an LED clock. When the clock reaches zero, two flashguns fire, and the shutter of a digital SLR camera takes four snapshots. Then the images load onto a 15-inch monitor so users can review them.

The booth was such a success that Morris is working on an upgrade: a highly portable, battery-powered model that uploads photos to the Web. He’s also designing a translucent plastic exterior that can light up in a rainbow of hues. “It acts like a second photographer working for me,” Morris says. “One that I don’t have to pay.”

COURTESY ALEXANDER MORRIS/ ALEX ANDERMORRIS.CO.UK

A

F O O D . I . Y. / H O W 2 . 0

H2

STO R Y BY ROSE CONRY

BeetBox How to turn garden vegetables into a drum machine

FROM LEF T: POPUL AR SCIENCE ARCHIVE; COURTESY SCOT T GARNER

THEN

POCKET CAMERA

In July 1932, POPULAR SCIENCE told readers how to build a cheap, palm-size camera comparable to then-popular Kodak box cameras.

The device recorded photos on standard movie film that was cut in half, placed in a wooden chamber, and wound around a spool. The plans also called for a fixed-focus Brownie box-camera lens. Wowed by its size and convenience, editors wrote that amateur photographers would “appreciate the value of owning a high-grade miniature camera.”

People conduct electric charges, and so do vegetables.

This simple fact spurred designer Scott Garner to build the BeetBox: a machine that plays drum-kit sounds with every tap of a beet. The veggies absorb some of the electrical energy stored in humans, which a sensor plugged into a Raspberry Pi minicomputer (“Pi”) can detect. Each touch triggers software to produce one of six percussion sounds.

Garner hid the electronics inside a wooden container so that striking the beets emits thumps and snare hits as if by magic.

FOR COMPLE TE INSTRUCTIONS, V I S I T: POPSCI.COM / B E E TB OX

TIME 3 days COST About $75 DIFFICULTY ▯▯▯○○ INSTRUCTIONS Box. Build a wooden box to house a Pi, a capacitive sensor, a power supply, speakers, and cables, plus a stand for six beets [see above].

Computer. Load Garner’s touch-sensing software onto the Pi. Beets. Solder six wires to individual ports on a MPR121 capacitive touch-sensor breakout board. Poke each wire into a different beet.

Wiring. Connect the breakout board’s SDA port to pin 3 of the Pi, and the SCL port to pin 5. Link the board and the Pi’s grounds. Connect the board’s 3.3V line to pin 1 of the Pi, then its IRQ line to pin 7.

Speakers. Hook up small speakers to Pi’s audio port, put the electronics in the box, and drop some beats.

For Men Who Want to Stay Active!

FYI POPSCI.COM

AUGUST 2013

ANSWERS BY DANIEL ENGBER

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

QUESTION

Stamina Endurance Performance Available for purchase with coupon in fine stores everywhere or online at:

www.appliednutrition.com Enter Coupon Code: 011242

T - S T R O N G

SAVE $3 EXPIRES 10/31/13

MANUFACTURERS COUPON

Consumer: Redeemable at retail locations only. Not valid for online or mail-order purchases. Retailer: Irwin Naturals will reimburse you for the face value plus 8 (cents) handling provided it is redeemed by a consumer at the time of purchase on the brand specified. Coupons not properly redeemed will be void and held. Reproduction by any party by any means is expressly prohibited. Any other use constitutes fraud. Irwin Naturals reserves the right to deny reimbursement (due to misredemption activity) and/or request proof of purchase for coupon(s) submitted. Mail to: CMS Dept. 10363, Irwin Naturals, 1 Fawcett Drive, Del Rio, TX 78840. Cash value: .001 (cents). Void where taxed or restricted. ONE COUPON PER PURCHASE. Not valid for mail order/websites. Retail only.

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food & Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

C A N S TAY ING P O S I T I V E E X T END Y OUR L IF E ?

SHORT ANSWER

Maybe, but no one has ever proved it.

LONG ANSWER

The belief that optimism can keep you alive—or at least stave off cancer—gained traction after the release of a study in the Lancet medical journal in 1979. The study followed six dozen recovering breast-cancer patients for five years. Researchers found that those who responded to their situation with a “fighting spirit” fared better—longer survival, fewer signs of residual cancer—than those who had feelings of “helplessness” or “hopelessness.” Subsequent studies seemed to corroborate the result, and the benefits of optimism crept into medical doctrine.

Rather pessimistically, a few recent largescale meta-analyses (reviews of multiple studies) have found a lack of convincing evidence that optimism really extends the lives of cancer patients. Neither positive emotions like fighting spirit nor the absence of negative ones such as helplessness or hopelessness reliably predict a better outcome. “There will always be new claims, 8 0 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

and if people look for associations, they can find them,” says James Coyne, director of the Behavioral Oncology Program at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Coyne gives one explanation for the earlier results: “If you’re healthy, and if you’re living in conditions that make you healthy, then you’ll probably be happier.”

Despite the lack of definitive data, the belief in the power of positive thinking has become so widespread that it might actually be doing harm. Cancer patients may feel inclined to act upbeat even when they’re distraught, hide their despair instead of seeking solace or treatment, or blame themselves if their disease progresses.

In fact, this sort of pressure could even complicate future scientific studies of positive thinking, since it’s hard to know if a patient truly has a fighting spirit, or if she’s just pretending because she knows that’s how patients are “supposed” to act.

JOAN VICENT CANTO ROIG/GET T Y IMAGES

All-in-One Formula for Men:

FYI

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

QUESTION

OLIVIER LANTZENDORFFER/GETTY IMAGES

W H AT W OUL D H A P P E N IF W E K IL L ED A L L T HE MOSQUI T OE S ?

SHORT ANSWER

The world might be a better place.

LONG ANSWER

No one knows exactly what would happen if mosquitoes, which comprise 3,500 distinct species, were exterminated. The insects provide sustenance for dragonflies, spiders, bats, and birds, and their waterborne larvae are food for fish and other predatory insects. Nonetheless, experts differ on the ecological impact removing them might have.

Jo Lines, who studies vector biology and malaria control at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical

Medicine, says the effects would be minimal. “There’s no food chain that we know of where mosquitoes are an inevitable link in a crucial process,” he says. If mosquitoes disappeared, related insects (though not bloodsucking ones) might fill their ecological niche. “There’s an awful lot of things out there that, while they’re in the water, look a lot like mosquitoes,” Lines says. “Even when they come out of the water, they’re the size and shape of mosquitoes; their wings look like mosquitoes’— they’re just missing that needle sticking out the front.”

The question of eradication has been tested before. Just prior to World War I, public-health officials on

the island of Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea managed to remove the tsetse fly, which carries the parasite that causes sleeping sickness. No one saw another tsetse fly on the 84-squaremile island until 1956, and the local ecosystem did not collapse.

That said, eradicating mosquitoes would be a large and expensive task.

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END OF THE INTERFACE CONTINUED FROM PAGE 61

could have been done 10 years ago”—if only someone had had Holz’s math.

Bill Warner, the founder of Avid Technology, which makes multimedia editing products, learned the secret behind Leap Motion shortly after Holz and Buckwald’s weekend in D.C. (he agreed to become the company’s first investor on the spot).

He describes the approach as head-slappingly straightforward. “As with any great invention, those insights are really hard to come up with, but once you hear them you go, ‘Of course!’ You didn’t think of it because you weren’t looking at it that way.” Holz managed to understand the problem of gestural control all the way down, which allowed him to see things everyone else has missed. “A lot of times with people as smart as David, it’s hard to follow them and see what they are seeing and what they understand,” Warner

says. “That’s not the case with David. Part of his brilliance is that he makes things really simple, even for himself.”

With the math in place, the more immediate challenge for Holz was accessibility—turning his eight networked boxes into a viable product, either for regular consumers to buy or for other companies to embed in their products. Andy Miller, a former Apple executive, was working as a venture capitalist when he met Holz and Buckwald in 2012. He’d heard stories of these two genius founders, one with crazy Young Einstein hair, plunking backpacks full of hacky-looking but amazing electronics on investors’ conference tables.

He asked to see a demo. “David was looking extremely wacky that day,” he recalls, “and Michael was sort of talking to me with his head down. I was expecting to see what I’d heard about, which was this big system, but they were like, ‘We’re all set up, this is it.’ It

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82 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

was just one little box, and it was pretty beautiful.”

Miller invested a significant amount in the company and came on board as president a few months later. “The more time I spent with David, you know, you’re just blown away,” he says. “I’ve been fortunate enough to work with Steve Jobs, and David is one of these guys kind of like Steve, where he’s a mile wide and deep.”

After Miller joined Leap Motion, the company refined the design further, planned an Apple-like app store called Airspace, and created a demo video that went viral; 15,000 developers applied to build software for the device in the first week. “I spent an entire week going through every e-mail that came in asking about partnership opportunities,” Miller remembers. “There were thousands. You know: ‘We think this can be a big help in automotive.’

‘We think this can help people with disabilities.’ ‘Can you help us with our workflow at Jack in the Box?’ ”

I

n late March, a few weeks after SXSW, Victor Luo, a humaninterface engineer from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in California, stood in front of a Leap Motion controller in San Francisco and operated a one-ton space robot in a lab 350 miles away. The rover, called Athlete (shorthand for “all-terrain hex-limbed extraterrestrial explorer”), has six arms and can fly. NASA built an application that mapped the rover’s limbs to a human hand, and Luo was able to move its arms by wiggling his fingers. Luo was performing this feat onstage at the annual Game Developers Conference. As he raised his hand, the audience watched the rover’s jets fire on a big simulcast screen. The enormous machine lifted off the ground. Luo’s colleague, NASA supervisor Jeff Norris, addressed the crowd: “I want us to build a future of shared

immersive tele-exploration—everyone exploring the universe through robotic avatars, not just peering at a picture on a screen but stepping inside a Holodeck and standing on those distant worlds.”

The NASA demo is one of the strongest votes of confidence for Leap Motion, and it’s far from the only one. In the months since the company started sending out developer’s kits and test units, there’s been an influx of demo videos of early apps.

Google Earth announced it added Leap Motion support, and a corresponding video showed a person’s hand zooming Superman-style across the San Francisco Bay, through the courtyard of the Louvre, and out into space. An electronic musician named Adam Somers released a demo of something beautiful he called an AirHarp.

This spring, HP announced that it will start bundling Leap Motion controllers with some PCs and that it plans to one day embed the technology in devices. In the meantime, anyone will be able to buy a controller off the shelf and plug it in as a peripheral. Out of the box, the device will allow users to control some basic computer functions, like cursor movement, but improving existing systems is not really the point. “If we’re successful and build something that is a fundamentally better way to interact with a computer, there are essentially an unlimited number of use cases,” Buckwald says. “Eventually, anything that has a computer could be controlled with it—every laptop, every desktop, every smartphone, every tablet, every TV, every surgical station, every robot, potentially even a Leap in every car.”

In the history of computer user interfaces, there have been only two major sea changes: in the mid-1980s, when Apple replaced the old command line interface with the mouse-based graphical user interface, and, more recently, when Apple introduced the world to multitouch mobile devices. In both cases, the intent was to make human-computer interaction more intuitive, to minimize the barriers between man and machine. “If you think about the mouse, it extends your reach to the screen.

And the touchscreen extends it further, so you’re actually touching the screen,” says Warner. “Leap Motion is extending your reach inside the screen.”

It’s hard to say what kinds of applications gestural interface will enable. Few could have predicted that multitouch would bring, say, Angry Birds. Gestural

interface probably won’t act as a wholesale replacement for existing interfaces, though. Just as multitouch improved certain functions (flipping through a digital magazine, for example) but not others (creating a digital magazine), Leap Motion controllers and

devices like them will excel at some uses and not others. Manipulating a spreadsheet, for one thing, probably wouldn’t be any easier with natural interface; the desktop experience is already pretty highly evolved.

And even the most naturally 3-D

psshowcase END OF THE INTERFACE

applications have their limits. One of the first things you notice when you start using a Leap Motion controller is the lack of anything tactile; there’s no haptic feedback to help calibrate touch, as there would be in the real world. When I ask Holz about this, he shrugs it off. “Because it’s digital, we can put more information in there than you might get in the real world,” he says—lighting changes, for instance, can cue when your finger is touching something. And in time, Holz says, virtual haptic feedback is entirely possible, probably by means of focused ultrasound, a process developed by researchers at the University of Tokyo. “I think you may see a lot of that in the near future.”

Another limitation: As a user moves his hands in three dimensions, the results appear on a two-dimensional screen. This can be disorienting. Short of building a real Holodeck, of course, it’s unavoidable, and getting over that hump will require the development of better 3-D–display technology. Holz imagines Leap Motion integration with head-mounted displays such as Google Glass as maybe the best solution. “It’s like I’m in a Holodeck without needing to have a Holodeck. You turn the space around you into a Holodeck.”

I ask him if the company is in talks with Google to create just that. “I don’t think I can say details, but, uh . . . it would make sense,” he says.

It’s a heady vision, the kind of thing that gets Holz excited, and he spins off into talk of giving people superpowers—for example, the ability to “undo” virtual actions in this fused digital-physical world, the same way you can undo actions in, say, a Photoshop file. Or the ability to sculpt something in midair, then quickly replicate it with a 3-D printer, turning a thought into an object in a matter of moments.

“The idea is that we should be able to have the same sort of fine degrees of interaction with the virtual world as we do with the real world,” Holz says. “And that gives us a lot more power. We can define the rules in a digital world however we want, so we can do a lot of things that we just couldn’t before. It’s one of those situations where, through technology, we can actually be better.

Tom Foster wrote about helmet technology and football’s concussion crisis in the January issue.

84 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

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From the Archives POPUL AR SCIENCE / AUGUST 2013

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

Steely Defense T

he open seas have always been dangerous.

Whether the threat comes from wartime submarines or Somali pirates, a lack of maritime defense could sink even the most advanced ships. In March 1942, POPULAR SCIENCE introduced a new World War II naval fleet designed to keep subs and torpedoes from destroying allied forces. The largest vessel measured 160 feet long, weighed 500 tons, and could lay and repair three-inch-thick steelmesh nets to guard the mouth of a harbor. Concealed underwater mines, detonated remotely by onshore Army personnel, provided additional fortification. With the diminished incidence of formal naval warfare, engineers have shifted focus to antipirate technology: lasers, recon bots, and long-range acoustic devices.

To see how one captain built his own pirate-proof yacht from scratch, turn to page 71.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the USS Boxwood, pictured at right, installed defense nets in Washington’s Puget Sound. The ship went on to tend harbors in Alaska before it was decommissioned in 1946.

POPULAR SCIENCE magazine, Vol. 283, No. 2 (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.

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