Popular science usa 2013 09

HOW TO BECOME ANYTHING

DEMOLITIONS EXPERT

ALIEN HUNTER

THE NEXT

SPACE SHUTTLE Hybrid engines make runway-to-orbit missions a reality

GRAVE

DIVERS

THE ROBOTIC SEARCH FOR LOST WORLD WAR II AIRMEN

INDIANA JONES

Special Promotion

science fair AMERICA’S YOUTH HELP IMPROVE THE WORLD! P OPUL A R S CIENCE called on the youth of America to submit projects to help improve the world that we live in, and they answered! We would like to congratulate the Grand Prize Winners of the 1 st Inaugural Science Fair for their inspiring ideas.

ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

M IDDLE SCHOOL

Henry Stanley

Anushka Jogalekar

What happened to my Easter grass?

Effect of composting on herbicide residues in soil

H IGH SCHOOL

COLLEGE

Emily McDonald

Othon Nunez

Why do you buy bottled water?

How isoprene emissions react to drought stress

To view the winning Science projects visit:

POPSCI . COM /SCIENCEFA IRW INNERS

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Contents DEPARTMENTS

SEPTEMBER 2013

VOLUME 283 NO. 3

FE ATURES

06 From the Editor 09 Peer Review 10 Megapixels 75 FYI: Do insects have personalities?

84 From the Archives

WHAT’S NEW

HEADLINES

HOW 2.0

38

13 Transform a pencil sketch into a playable videogame 14 The Goods: The fastest zoom lens and more 16 The perfect parka insulation 18 Better night vision for your car 20 Sneakers that could help you run faster 22 How the new Kinect will transform gaming

24 A gigantic mobile telescope 26 The ultimate color guide for field biology 28 How robots of the future will walk 31 Using the beach to filter wastewater 32 A device that converts sunlight into hydrogen fuel 34 Vaccinating mosquitoes to stop malaria 36 The best way to teach science

65 A two-ton, six-legged vehicle called the Mantis 68 Gray Matter: A Venturi pump that shoots fire 70 Hack microbes into photographic film 72 An invisibility cloak that’s ready to print 73 How to spend your first bitcoin

AWESOME LABS Thinking about a science degree? Consider a college lab where research meets white-knuckled adventure.

By Brooke Borel 46

SHORT CIRCUIT A 12-year-old’s quest to remake education—one Arduino at a time.

By Susan Moran 52

AFTERMARKET EDUCATION Fine-tune your knowledge with online courses.

By Jefferson Mok 54

Go/Do/Learn THE EDUCATION ISSUE

FROM RUNWAY TO ORBIT AND BACK DIY electronics have trickled down to kids, whose creations include the autonmous FuzzBot.

A new hybrid engine could enable the first fully reusable spaceplane. By Nicole Dyer 58

DOWNED

BRIAN KLUTCH; ON THE COVER : NICK K ALOTER AKIS

Hundreds of warplanes shot down in World War II sit in the western Pacific Ocean. Robotic subs have been sent to find them.

By Andy Isaacson

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

SEP TEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 0 5

From the Editor

THE FUTURE NOW

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

An Awesome Education

I

06 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / SEP TEMBER 2013

ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY Art Director Todd Detwiler Photo Editor Thomas Payne Designer Michael Moreno Junior Designer Michelle Mruk

In this issue, we got back to what makes science education fun. wishes he were someone else— Indiana Jones, maybe, or an alien hunter. And lastly, we’ve completed our seventh roundup of “awesome labs,” chosen not for the dignity of their research or the distinction of their faculty, but because they let you stuff a dead body into the trunk of a car or build your own fireworks; in short, labs that just rock.

As much as I’d like to pretend otherwise, we’re subject to the same pressures my friend is. We didn’t put a lab on the cover. Instead, we chose to feature Skylon, a single-stage-toorbit spaceplane that could (when it’s finished) make resupply runs to low Earth orbit. I hope you’ll enjoy our look at the shifts and triumphs in science education, as well as the very fine and very fast spaceship on our cover. It’s all part of our future, and preparing for it is what education is all about.

JACOB WARD jacob.ward@popsci.com @_jacobward_

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, Lacey Henry

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

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

Chairman Jonas Bonnier Chief Executive Officer Dave Freygang Executive Vice President Eric Zinczenko Chief Content Officer David Ritchie Chief Financial Officer Randall Koubek Chief Brand Development Officer Sean Holzman Vice President, Consumer Marketing Bruce Miller Vice President, Production Lisa Earlywine Vice President, Corporate Communications Dean Turcol General Counsel Jeremy Thompson For reprints email: reprints@bonniercorp.com

FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SUBSCRIPTION QUESTIONS, please use our website: www.popsci.com/cs. You may also call 386-597-4279. Or you can write to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235

MARIUS BUGGE

HAD LUNCH in Los Angeles recently with a friend who hosts science videos on the Web. She interviews scientists, explains fundamental scientific principles, tours amazing labs—but she doesn’t publicly attach the word “science” to what she does.

“People just won’t watch the video if the word ‘science’ is in the title,” she lamented. The same is true, I’ve discovered over the years, with the word “education.” Slap that term onto an article and no one will read it.

It’s therefore doubly difficult, as a magazine entitled Popular Science, to pull off an issue committed to education. And yet here we are, banging away on the theme, because it’s absolutely essential to the country’s future. The prevailing wisdom is that if you don’t get kids interested in science before middle school, you’ve lost them forever. And we’re losing a lot of kids, creating a serious gap in the pipeline of scientists, engineers, and tech workers we’ll need to produce in the coming years, even as the pace of discovery and the value of research increase dramatically.

In putting this issue together, we chose not to wring our hands and instead got back to what makes science education—sorry, but that’s what it’s called—fun. We profile Quin Etnyre, an eighth-grade electronics prodigy who is trying to change the way students learn by teaching the joy of hands-on engineering. Turns out that when a kid builds a fart detector using Arduino technology, he doesn’t get in trouble. Instead, the school begins building a DIY-electronics curriculum. We’ve also included some joy for adults. Our infographic about aftermarket education—the online courses that allow you to study such varied topics as physics and videogame design without leaving home—is a guide for anyone who

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 Erin Brodwin, Lillian Steenblik Hwang, Sarah Jacoby, Jefferson Mok

© 2013 INDIAN MOTORCYCLE INTERNATIONAL, LLC

Peer Review

FLI G H T FR I G H T

WE FIGURED Adam Piore’s ďŹ rst-person story about the dark side of personal drone use [“Flight at the Fringe,â€?

July 2013] might get a few letters, but we had no idea.‌ To operate such an aircraft in a public space is a blatant disregard for public safety.

Painting a negative and potentially damaging light on what should be a safe and enjoyable hobby was unnecessary.

Ed Johnson I hope when I y my model planes and helicopters, I don’t incite fear in passers-by because of articles like yours.

Harlan Cox

T WIT TER @POPSCI

THE FUTURE NOW

MAIN OFFICE 2 Park Ave., 9th Floor New York, NY 10016 popsci.com NEW SUBSCRIPTIONS popsci.com/subscribe SUBSCRIPTION INQUIRIES Change of address or subscription problems: Popular Science P.O. Box 420235 Palm Coast, FL 32142 386-597-4279 popsci.com/cs INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS Inquiries regarding international licensing or syndication: syndication@popsci.com

This is as slanderous to the drone as could have possibly been imagined. I think you owe the drone a positive article.

Kim Hale Mesa, Ariz.

LETTERS To the editor: letters@popsci.com

DE-STAR De-clawed

Ask a Geek: h20@popsci.com

I like the idea of zapping threatening asteroids with vaporizing lasers [“Death Star,�

July 2013], but why scale DE-STAR to such enormous dimensions? A swarm of smaller ones could be more economical and reliable, and could be repurposed when not needed for Earth’s defense.

Carl Huber Riverside, Calif.

We Apologize‌ On page 59 of the July issue, we referred to the Cestol Airliner’s engines as turboprops.

They are actually turbofans. On page 72, the battle bots in the movie PaciďŹ c Rim are controlled from within rather than from afar. The FDA’s CD-3 scanner mentioned on page 33 visualizes variations that can be caused by any chemical dierences between an authentic drug sample and one in question.

It doesn’t detect a drug’s active ingredient and determine its provenance. On page 75, we spelled Neill Blomkamp’s name with one too few L’s, even though we once employed him. Sorry, Neill.

GUYS DON’T WEAR JEANS TO GET NOTICED

(THAT’S JUST A BONUS) NEW LEE MODERN SERIES

FYI questions: fyi@popsci.com

Story queries: queries@popsci.com 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.

SEP TEMBER 2013 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / 09

Š 2013 VF Jeanswear Inc.

E-MAIL LE T TERS@POPSCI.COM

AVAILABLE AT KOHL’SŽ AND KOHLS.COM/LEE

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@leejeans

STO R Y BY S A R A H JACO BY PHOTOGR APH BY G AVIN PE TERS

“The sheer violence with which these pieces hit the water . . . the most robust superalloys were crushed like an aluminum can.”

—Jim Remar, president of Cosmosphere

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POPULAR SCIENCE / SEPTEMBER 2013

Megapixels ENG INE F L U S H D

COURTESY K ANSAS COSMOSPHERE AND SPACE CENTER

uring NASA’s Apollo missions, the famously powerful Saturn V launch rockets hurled astronauts into space, many toward their lunar destination. After falling back to Earth, the spent F-1 engines sat at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean for nearly five decades.

Last March, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos led a recovery: With remotely operated vehicles, the expedition crew brought more than 25,000 pounds’ worth of F-1 remnants back to the surface. The restoration arm of Cosmosphere, a space museum in Kansas, is now salvaging the components. Technicians flush each piece with water to rinse away corrosive chlorides, then clean out sediment with chemicals, paintbrushes, and dental picks. They’re still hunting for the serial numbers that would tie the haul to specific missions. With so many damaged parts, they’ll be scrubbing away for about two years.

SEP TEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 1 1

We create chemistry that makes “wow” love “why”

Do you know kids’ most popular reaction to chemistry?

It’s “Wow!” One simple word with great scientific experience behind it. We’ve heard it many times, in more than 30 countries, at BASF Kids’ Lab. For one day, kids become scientists. They experiment in a playful manner and learn why and how the world’s marvels work. Because we believe that one day these kids will wow us in return.

When science can be seen as a foundation of wonder, it’s because at BASF, we create chemistry. www.wecreatechemistry.com

WHAT’S NEW Never hit a deer again PAGE 18

POPSCI.COM / @POPSCI

PLUS:

Sneakers that could make you run faster PAGE 20

SEPTEMBER 2013

EDITED BY CORINNE IOZZIO WHATSNE W@POPSCI.COM

Dream, Draw, Play An app makes anyone a videogame designer

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Pixel Press Platform iOS Price $10 Available Winter 2013

STO R Y BY CO RINNE IOZ ZIO PHOTOGR APH BY BRIAN KLUTCH

HO HASN’T sat on the couch at the end of a marathon gaming session and wondered what it would be like to make a game rather than just play one? With Pixel Press, anyone can do both—no coding required. The app, which debuts on iOS later this year, converts simple marks on paper into a playable videogame.

The Pixel Press team invented a sketchable language for game design.

Armed with custom graph paper and a small glossary of shorthand—lines, Xs, slashes—users draw games, which the app then scans and converts into an actual, playable videogame level. For example, the app reads a blacked-out square as a power-up marker, and Xs on a platform as spikes. It takes less than 30 seconds for the app to convert the marks; once that’s done, players add colors and textures.

At launch, the system will make only Mario-style sideways-scrolling games, but the developers at Pixel Press already have a prototype to create puzzles—and they’re also planning racing and adventure games.

SEPTEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 13

WHAT’S NE W

A dozen great ideas in gear

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Is that a fish nibbling at the line or a change in the current? The SmartRod is the first fishing rod that automatically detects a bite. An accelerometer on the handle records vibrations from the pole and sends the data to a microcontroller, which differentiates between a promising catch and background jiggling.

The Stealth hammer has a supersized striking face: 1.5 inches. Because it’s so big, a user can swing harder but still hit a nail squarely, so the 17-ounce solid-steel head strikes with as much force as a 32-ounce one.

The Satechi bottle top converts any water bottle into a humidifier. Powered via USB, the 2.5-ounce device contains a transducer that vibrates at an ultrasonic frequency to turn water into vapor.

With the Motion Tennis app, an iPhone becomes a Wii-like controller. After syncing the phone with an Apple TV, a user can swing it like a racket to play a game of on-screen tennis. Using the phone’s gyroscope, magnetometer, and accelerometer, the app translates movements into strokes.

The QuietComfort 20 noise-cancellation headphones are the first to let users choose which noises to block.

In Aware Mode, the headphones cancel out only lower frequencies, allowing mid and high frequencies to get through. As a result, it’s possible to have a conversation while still listening to music.

The Sigma 18-35mm F1.8 is the world’s fastest zoom lens.

Because its large aperture remains fixed no matter the level of zoom, photographers can consistently shoot at higher shutter speeds.

Rolocule Games Motion Tennis $8

Bose QuietComfort 20 $300

Vaughan Stealth $24

Tackobox Poletap SmartRod $46

14 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / SEP TEMBER 2013

Satechi USB Portable Humidifier $30

Sigma 18-35mm F1.8 DC HSM Art $799

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ADDITIONAL REPOR TING BY ERIN BRODWIN AND ELBER T CHU

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With Audible sunglasses, colors are more vibrant.

The lenses are the first to block wavelengths at both 480 and 580 nanometers— the regions on the spectrum where blues, reds, and greens intersect, creating muddy hues.

The Dyson Hard is both a vacuum and a mop. On the head of the 4.7-pound vacuum, a wet pad sits between two channels, through which dust and crumbs are sucked up into a bin. The lithiumion-powered motor runs for 15 minutes on a charge.

Dyson Hard $330

Even a perfectly crafted paper airplane will fly only so far for so long.

With the PowerUp conversion kit—an electric motor and combination propellerrudder—a paper plane can soar for up to 10 minutes. Users control the craft by tilting a Bluetooth-connected iPhone.

The Garmin HUD is a portable heads-up display for vehicle navigation. Drivers sync a Bluetooth-enabled phone with the 4.3inch projector, which displays information— turn arrows, distance to the next turn, time to arrival—onto a transparent film applied to the lower windshield.

The Tempour is the multi-tool of wine gadgets. It combines a filter, pourer, and stopper into one piece.

It also has a freezable gel-filled tube that a user can insert into a bottle of white to maintain a chill.

Smith Optics Audible $269

For those who digitally track health data, dead batteries mean lost results. The Pulse records info for an additional 24 hours after battery-save mode kicks in. The OLED screen disables, but the device still monitors stats, including steps, elevation, and sleep, while it waits for a charge.

Tailor Toys PowerUp 3.0 $50

Garmin HUD $150

Withings Pulse $100

Soireehome Tempour $50

SEP TEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 1 5

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

All-Weather Wear Jackets that keep warmth in but let moisture out

PHOTOGR APH BY BRIAN KLUTCH

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n 2010, the U.S. Army went to textile manufacturer Polartec with a problem: Troops needed a jacket that would breathe when they worked up a sweat but would also hold onto warmth when they sat still. Down and synthetic insulations don’t allow this to happen. They require quilting and

tightly knit, less-breathable fabrics to hold them in place and keep them dry. Polartec worked for more than a year to develop an insulation without those constraints. Last year, it gave the Army Polartec Alpha.

An Alpha-based jacket consists of a sheet of insulation sandwiched between loosely knit, breathable fabrics. When it’s hot, sweat evaporates; when it’s cold, Alpha traps warmth in its thousands of tiny air pockets. This fall, a dozen companies, including Marmot and The North Face, will release Alphabased jackets. And Polartec will make Alpha in multiple thicknesses, so the jackets will only get warmer from here.

ALPHA UP CLOSE A panel of Alpha insulation looks like high-pile fleece.

Strands of polyester loop around a central stitch. That meshwork serves two functions: helping hold the filament in place, and preserving the natural frizz that creates heattrapping air pockets.

IN RELATED NEWS

THE WARMEST DOWN 16 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / SEP TEMBER 2013

Patagonia has made the warmest natural insulation, down, even warmer—and water-resistant. Engineers use radio waves to separate individual tendrils on feathers, then spray on a layer of hydrophobic siloxane. The process exaggerates down’s treelike structure, keeping air pockets open and capable of trapping 30 percent more heat. Patagonia Encapsil Down Belay Parka $699

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WHAT’S NE W / LONG AWAITED ILLUSTR ATION BY K AKO FO N I A

Animal Avoidance An infrared system that spots wildlife from 500 feet away

S

ince their debut 13 years ago, in-car nightvision systems, which identify pedestrians approaching a roadway, have arguably made driving safer. But they come with a pretty big blind spot: animals. Each year, drivers in the U.S. strike about a million deer, causing 27,000 human injuries and $3.5 billion in damage. This fall, Swedish safety-system company Auto-

liv and Mercedes-Benz will roll out Night View Assist Plus on the 2014 S-Class. The system identifies people but also picks out cows, moose, horses, deer, camels, and even wild boar.

One reason the upgrade took five years is that recognizing animals is much more difficult than recognizing people. Species vary widely in size and shape, have profiles that change drastically when they turn, and move differ-

ently. (Humans, by comparison, have more or less the same shape and move in the same way.) To train the system, Autoliv cataloged thousands of animals across five continents.

Night View Assist Plus merges data from two cameras to create an illuminated view of what’s ahead. When an animal or pedestrian nears a roadway, the system highlights it on an in-dash display, and, if danger is imminent, sounds an alarm and pre-charges the car’s brakes. There’s one feature U.S. regulators have yet to approve, though: In the European version, a spotlight shines a tracking beam onto live obstacles in the road, making them almost impossible to miss.

2014 Mercedes S-Class

0-60 4.8 seconds Horsepower 455 Price not set

HOW IT WORKS 1. A thermal far-infrared camera in the grille scans for warmblooded creatures that are out of typical headlight range.

18 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / SEP TEMBER 2013

2. A near-infrared camera on the windshield captures an image of the open road.

3. A central control unit merges the data from both cameras, then cross-references the image with about 150 parameters, eliminating false positives.

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WHAT’S NE W / HOW IT WORKS STO R Y BY A M B E R W I L L I A M S

PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN KLUTCH

Adidas Springblade Blades 16 Weight 12.8 ounces Price $180

A sneaker that puts actual springs in your step

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R APID COOLDOWN

THE PROMISE By placing a hand in the vacuum-powered, waterfilled CoreControl glove, an athlete can cool down 33 percent faster than by resting alone.

Fleet of Foot

ushioned sneakers can help athletes jump higher—a compressed sole returns energy vertically. Adidas has now developed a shoe that could also help runners go faster.

Sixteen slanted plastic springs on the sole of the Springblade return a runner’s energy horizontally, providing extra forward momentum.

Engineers tuned each spring independently, optimizing thickness, height, and orientation to match the role it plays in a stride. Compared with footsteps taken on standard soles, those on Springblade should have measurably more forward propulsion.

LAB-TESTED

LANDING In a running stride, a person’s heel hits the ground with a force equal to three times his body weight. To absorb the impact, the single spring on the Springblade’s heel is thicker than the others. It’s also as wide as the foot, which helps the shoe grip the ground.

TRANSITION As the foot rolls forward, the springs—arranged in pairs for balance—compress, storing energy. The arch doesn’t take the same impact as the heel and toes, so these springs are thinner and can squeeze further, gathering even more energy.

PUSH-OFF When a runner’s forward momentum takes over, the heel begins to peel off the ground. That’s when the springs—from back to front—decompress and release energy. At this point in the stride, leg muscles generate thrust too, which puts about 2.5 times a person’s weight on the ball of the foot. Like those at the heel, the springs here are beefier to prevent slipping.

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THE RESE ARCH Stanford University biologists instructed college-age men to exercise on a treadmill in a hot room, use the lab model of the cooling system for three minutes, then do a set of bench presses.

T H E R ES U LT S Athletes were about 0.6 degrees colder with the glove than without it, allowing them to complete more reps in the follow-up set. The gentle vacuum inside the device keeps blood vessels in the palms distended, boosting heat transfer between the blood and the chilled water circulating inside the glove.

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Whoosh is just one example of how Haiku is (literally) the coolest ceiling fan in the world. With its patent-pending motor design that is both silent and powerful, Haiku is certified

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WHAT’S NE W / OUTLOOK COLUMN BY BRYAN G ARDINER

ILLUSTR ATION BY PAUL L ACHINE

Game Changer In the future, videogames will play you

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HEN MICROSOFT INTRODUCED the Kinect sensor in 2010, the company said the motion-capture system would transform gaming. That was only partially true; gamers could do novel things like swing an imaginary golf club or dance, but the Kinect wasn’t sensitive enough to register intricate maneuvers. The system, however, has become most popular among hackers, who used it to build smart shopping carts and gesture-controlled quadrocopters. In November, the company will launch

an upgraded Kinect with the Xbox One console. With that release, Microsoft could finally disrupt gaming at the level it had originally intended, changing not only how we interact with games but also how games interact with us.

Successful videogames have one thing in common: immersion. When drawn in, players lose track of time, their pulse rises, they become unaware of their surroundings, and, according to a recent study at the University College London, they have difficulty returning to reality. In short, their point of view shifts from the real world to the virtual world. But while it’s easy to identify an immersive game (or scene within a game) after the fact, developers have never had feedback of a player’s engagement in real time.

With the new Kinect, reams of information will flow from the gamer. And that data will be granular enough to detect extremely subtle signals. A high-speed 1080p camera can detect minute movements, including eye blinks, wrist twists, and muscle flexes. Using a combination of the camera’s color feed and the active infrared, the Kinect can also pick up fluctuations in a gamer’s facial blood flow to estimate heart rate.

Developers could mine that data to change the way games unfold. Along with a player’s skills—response

The intensity of a game could ratchet up as a player leaned forward or his heart began to race. time, shooting accuracy—his reactions could factor into gameplay. For example, the intensity of a game could ratchet up as a player leaned forward or his heart began to race. Games could even respond to facial expressions. Granted, precise emotions are hard to nail down (intense fear and intense joy both raise the heart rate). For that reason, applications may be basic at first—adjusting difficulty based on a player’s posture, for instance.

That probably won’t be the case for long, as sensors become more powerful, affordable, and easily integrated into devices. Already, Israeli company Umoove has created compact head- and eye-tracking systems that could adjust a player’s viewpoint based on head movements. And Irish start-up Galvanic has developed a prototype skin-conductivity sensor that can better correlate a player’s stress level and in-game performance. Consoles with such heightened senses will allow for games that are progressively more immersive—and blur the once stark line between the real world and the virtual one.

22 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / SEP TEMBER 2013

A better way to teach science PAGE 36

PLUS: How to stop malaria for good

“The important thing is not to stop questioning.”

PAGE 34

—Albert Einstein

HEADLINES@POPSCI.COM

POPSCI.COM / @POPSCI

SEPTEMBER 2013

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

ON THE MOVE Transporting the ALMA observatory’s 100-ton antenna dishes requires a truck with two 700-hp engines.

Terrascope T

HE FIRST SCIENTIST I meet at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope site is wearing a portable oxygen tank. At 16,400 feet in the Andes, he’d be unable to think clearly without the tube up his nose. He runs the observatory’s brain—a supercomputer as powerful as three million laptops working together that compares light from the telescope’s 66 dishes quadrillions of times every second. Everything 24 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / SEP TEMBER 2013

about this place is designed for high-altitude survival.

The curved roof can withstand 145mph winds. Heated blankets prevent the toilet cistern from freezing. The dishes themselves point to the sky with 0.6-arc-second accuracy, despite the winds and radical temperature swings. It’s the people that are the weak link. Workers are allowed to spend only six hours a day at the ALMA STO R Y BY REBECCA BOYLE

ES O / S . STA N G H E L L I N I

A new earthly installation will see the universe better than any space-based telescope

HEADLINES

MAP IMAGERY: UNEARTHED OUTDOORS

“high site,” the scientist explains.

As I write that down, I realize I’m feeling dizzy.

A few minutes later, flat on a cot under an oxygen mask to avoid fainting, I look out the medical room’s window at the lifeless, Mars-like landscape. The silvery radio dishes are engaged in a quiet ballet, swinging above the red dirt in perfect unison. Their synchrony and precision are two of the reasons ALMA is the most ambitious ground telescope ever built.

Another is the observatory’s unparalleled adaptability; it has the most dishes that can be trucked around to different locations. Because of all these special features, ALMA will produce images 10 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope does.

Telescopes have always had one major problem: the Earth’s atmosphere bends light, distorting images. That’s why telescopes are often built at high altitudes, where the atmosphere is thinner, and why NASA put Hubble in space—to get beyond the atmosphere entirely.

But space scopes aren’t perfect.

They’re a compromise by definition. They must be big enough to capture faint light but small enough to fit on a rocket, and repairs or upgrades either require exceptionally expensive trips into orbit or are simply impossible. Now, however, increasingly sophisticated adaptive optics that adjust for the atmosphere’s blurring effect are making many telescopes on Earth as good as anything that we could put in the sky. ALMA captures radio waves, and soon workers will

192 D ISH LOCATIONS 5 miles

break ground on two observatories that see visible light instead: the Thirty Meter Telescope, with a resolution more than 10 times as high as Hubble’s, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which will photograph the entire sky every few nights.

ALMA’s 66 antenna dishes work as one massive telescope, which can see sharp detail or broad features by changing its aperture from

tion of any scope looking at very short radio waves, which emanate from cool, dark sources such as interstellar dust and from bright, distant galaxies. But it’s already had some impressive finds. In March, astronomers discovered surprising numbers of “starburst” galaxies, where new stars were forming a billion years earlier than anyone thought. This summer, they might have found evidence of dust

High in the Atacama Desert in Chile, 192 cement bases sit wired to a supercomputer, each ready to be hooked up to one of 66 radio dishes.

The combinations give the ALMA observatory unprecedented flexibility: Astronomers can cluster the dishes for a broad view or place them as far as 10 miles apart to focus on details.

ALMA will watch a gas cloud spiral into the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. 500 feet to 10 miles. To achieve this flexibility, workers use massive trucks, each with 28 tires, to transport the 100-ton dishes. Each antenna is placed (to a fraction of a millimeter of accuracy) at one of 192 bases that have a hard line to the supercomputer nearby.

By the end of the year, when all of its dishes are online, ALMA will have 100 times the imaging resolu-

TIMELINE

TERMINAL VELOCITY

As sailboats get faster, they also get more dangerous.

After a sailor died in a crash during practice, the America’s Cup changed its rules, requiring competitors to wear helmets and body armor. Finals are this month. — L I L L I A N S T E E N B L I K H W A N G

traps near stars that help the formation of planets, asteroids, and comets. And eventually, ALMA will watch a gas cloud spiral into the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, look for molecular signs of life on faraway worlds, and measure the location and density of the mysterious substance scientists call dark matter—all from a high desert on planet Earth.

2007 APPROXIMATE TOP SPEED 14 mph DESIGN Soft sails, mono-hulled boat 2013 APPROXIMATE TOP SPEED 49 mph DESIGN Solid-wing sails, dual-hulled catamaran

SEP TEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 2 5

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

Coloring Book I

Opaline Green Color 106

Peach Red Color 70

Pistachio Color 102

A two-tailed giant day gecko, Phelsuma madagascariensis grandis

n field biology, describing a lizard as “green” just won’t do when the exact shade could be the key to identifying a species. You need to be specific: There’s pale green, grass green, citrine, and 48 other greens to choose from in the new Color Catalogue for Field Biologists. Gunther Köhler, who studies reptiles and amphibians at the Senckenberg Museum in Germany, created the book of swatches to standardize color descriptions in science, where reproducible data is a must.

The catalog contains 300 hues, as well as patterns, like blotches, specks, and mottling. And while carrying around a pocket guide may seem antiquated, other methods aren’t reliable.

Preserve a specimen? Nope—ethanol changes its color. Take a picture?

Sorry, photos often don’t capture true shades. In this case, paper is the best technology for the job.

TIGHT SPACE

The most people who have been on the International Space Station at one time, when the shuttle Endeavour docked in 2009. Six is normal occupancy.

26 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / SEP TEMBER 2013

JOEL SARTORE/GET T Y IMAGES

TRUE COLORS Köhler used his guide to detail 35 species in Mexico this spring—and discovered a new lizard.

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PROMOTION HEADLINES / THE LIST STO R Y BY S U S A N E. M AT TH E WS

1 Sprinter The bend in its L-shaped body serves as a pivot point, which extends and contracts

in a powerful, muscular stride.

This robot’s motions resemble a cheetah’s, and it clocked in as the fastest.

Speed

175,000 Ways to Walk

Key: Muscle 1 Muscle 2 Bone Tissue

ow will robots of the future get around? Some say tank treads. Some say legs and feet. But nobody knows for sure, and that’s why researchers at Cornell University designed a computer program to figure it out. The software simulates evolution. Robots begin as blocks of muscle, tissue, and bone, then natural selection kicks in: The fastest bots in each generation have offspring and are more likely to move on to the next round. The slower ones die out. Here are five of the most memorable variations from 175,000 generations.

H

3 Incher

4 Knuckler

5 Flailer

This bot was one of the first to develop long legs with bone, which give it the stability to run much like a horse.

No legs here—this one’s almost all soft tissue, and it creeps forward.

While not very fast, it seldom falls over thanks to its wide, stable base.

Robots relying on their front limbs to walk were rarely viable. The Knuckler survived. Its arms swing to lift its body off the ground, the same way a gorilla charges.

With so many descendants, you’re going to wind up with a couple of flukes. This legless bot vigorously (and pathetically) shakes its arms to scooch forward.

28 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / SEP TEMBER 2013

COUR TESY CRE ATIVE MACHINES L AB, CORNELL UNIVERSIT Y

2 Galloper

A new app from Popular Science.

What did you look like as a Neanderthal?

See for yourself the evolutionary steps that led from the early hominids through to modern Homo sapiens by mapping your own face onto ancient skulls discovered around the world.

Find it in the iTunes App Store

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

ILLUSTR ATION BY KE VIN HAND

Sand Trap

How to make a beach clean itself

I

n 2011, water pollution closed or drove visitors away from U.S. shores on more than 15,000 beach days across the country. In many places, the problem is getting worse. As coastal towns crowd with rooftops and parking lots, they produce more runoff from rain. The runoff picks up bacteria from animal waste and collects in pipes that then release the water into the ocean.

Pretty gross. But some engineers have a simple and effective solution: Send runoff underneath the beach instead, where sand can filter the bacteria out.

The research team, led by Michael Burchell at North Carolina State University, has already built three sand-filtration systems under the dunes of a beach about two hours from Raleigh and is considering sites for additional installations.

The materials to purify dirty storm water are quite simple: plastic tubing, gravel, and a little help from Mother Nature.

1

2

3

1 Dirty storm runoff is diverted into a five-foot-wide open-bottom plastic tube positioned 1.5 to 2.5 feet beneath the sand.

2 The water flows into a bed of gravel, spreading out onto a larger surface area of sand, which acts as a filter.

4

3 The runoff that reaches the groundwater is diluted, and whatever bacteria get trapped in the sand die.

4 By the time the storm runoff is 75 feet down shore, bacteria levels are comparable to normal groundwater’s.

SEP TEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 3 1

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Canned Sunshine “

The idea is to take the energy in light and store it as a fuel we can use later.

So we made the GRAFSTRR (GravityFed Solar-Thermochemical Receiver/ Reactor)—a 1,000-pound cylinder of insulated steel, about 3 feet wide and 2.5 feet tall. In the lab, 10 lamps simulate only 10 to 20 kilowatts of sunlight. (In the real world, though, tens of thousands of small mirrors across a field would reflect sunlight into the reactor.) The light enters the top of the reactor and passes through a circular quartz window that keeps out air, which can contaminate the chemical reaction inside. At the light’s most concentrated and hottest point—3,000°F— it enters the reaction cavity.

Fifteen hoppers drop zinc oxide powder into the cavity. When the radiation there hits the zinc oxide, it breaks the bond between the zinc and the oxygen, making 3 2 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / SEP TEMBER 2013

EDITOR’S NOTE A LT H O U G H B AT T E R I E S ARE GRE AT FOR SOME THINGS, THEY AREN’T QUITE UP TO STORING LARGE-SCALE SOLAR POWER FOR L ATER USE. THAT’S WHY MANY PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO MAKE FUEL FROM LIGHT INSTEAD.

free zinc. In the future, a second reactor would use the zinc to strip the oxygen from water, making hydrogen gas.

Theoretically, we could capture about 40 percent of the energy, but in lab experiments to demonstrate the design, we get less than 3 percent. Our reactor is mostly a proof-of-concept, but I think it could be scaled up in my kids’ lifetime.”

Erik Koepf is a mechanical engineer.

He worked on the reactor as a graduate student at the University of Delaware, in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

LET’S PASS ENERGY ON TO THE NEXT GENERATION. The Yoshida children have a lot of energy. But the country they’re growing up in doesn’t. Japan, like many other countries, needs a reliable source of energy. That’s why Shell is helping to deliver natural gas to more than 40 countries around the world. Not just for tonight’s bowl of warming noodles, but for years to come, when the children may have children of their own. Let’s broaden the world’s energy mix. www.shell.com/letsgo

LET’S GO.

HEADLINES / HYPOTHESIS STO R Y BY JES SE EMSPAK

Dinglasan’s team has found that Plasmodium—at a crucial stage in its life cycle—needs to bind to a protein in the mosquito’s gut called AnAPN1.

If you block this protein, you block transmission to humans. But how do you treat a mosquito? A teensy needle and steady hands? No. Here’s the clever part: You give people a vaccine against AnAPN1, turning them into living mosquito-treatment factories for years; their immune systems produce antibodies against AnAPN1. When mosquitoes bite vaccinated people, they’ll suck up the antibodies, which block AnAPN1 so that the mosquitoes can no longer pass along the disease. In lab tests, Dinglasan has shown that the antibodies can indeed make mosquitoes benign—although no less annoying.

Vaccinating Mosquitoes Can Ward Off Malaria I

T’S NOT the mosquito’s fault. Malaria is actually caused by the Plasmodium family of parasites, which is carried unwittingly by mosquitoes. And these parasites are tricky foes.

Come up with a treatment or vaccine and the few that survive will still breed. But Johns Hopkins biologist Rhoel Dinglasan thinks he may have a way around that: vaccinating mosquitoes instead.

BZZZZZ . . .

HOW TO STOP A PLAGUE IN FOUR EASY STEPS D

C

A

A/VACCINATE Give someone the vaccine against the mosquito-gut protein AnAPN1.

B/MANUFACTURE The person’s immune system produces antibodies against AnAPN1 in his blood.

34 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / SEP TEMBER 2013

C/BITE A mosquito ingests the antibodies, which bind to AnAPN1 and block the malariacausing parasite Plasmodium.

D/PREVENT Plasmodium can’t live in the mosquito gut and, therefore, can’t be transmitted to people.

LARRY WEST/GETTY IMAGES

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Since scientists don’t just sit around memorizing stuff, students shouldn’t either.

Lab Is In Session The best way to teach science is not to teach it

I

N 2012, a shocking 69 percent of American high-school graduates failed to meet college-readiness benchmarks in science. And in a 2010 paper about math and science achievement, the U.S. ranked last out of the eight countries studied (including England, South Korea, and Hungary). So not only are we unsuccessfully teaching basic knowledge to our kids, but many other nations have figured out how to do it better than us, too. There is no doubt about it: The way the U.S. teaches science simply doesn’t work.

The good news is that a new approach to education could turn these embarrassing statistics around. For the 36 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / SEP TEMBER 2013

past two years, 26 state governments have collaborated with teachers to develop The Next Generation Science Standards for grades K–12. The standards reflect 20 years of research that show that people learn better through experiences than through memorization.

Educators have known this for a while: A 2005 National Research Council report found that teaching is more successful when students are aware of how they learn. A report the council published two years later, written by a committee of 18 science-education experts, concluded that current science-instruction methods are outdated because they significantly underestimate children’s ability to think in a sophisticated way.

How will the implementation of these standards change the classroom? Students will memorize fewer facts; instead, they’ll work to better understand key concepts by asking questions and designing experiments to find the answers. In other words, since scientists don’t just sit around memorizing stuff, students shouldn’t either. Here’s an example of how the new approach will play out: Today, instructors might teach the phases of the moon by showing students photos and demonstrating with a model of Earth and the moon. Under the new standards, students would be shown pictures and then build their own models and discuss with classmates why the moon seems to change shape in the sky. They might get their models wrong at first, just like real scientists.

But that’s how people learn best.

The new standards will create some challenges—for instance, educators will need to adopt a more flexible teaching style. But the effort will be worth it. The standards will create better scientists and engineers, and—perhaps just as important—they’ll benefit even students who pursue nonscientific careers. Everyone is a science consumer. We must constantly evaluate new information that affects our lives, whether it’s the latest news story on a nutrition study or a report on the psychology behind gun violence. Citizens vote for ballot measures and legislators that influence scientific research and policy, too. Although all 26 states are required to consider the standards, only a handful (including Rhode Island and Kansas) have officially instituted them so far. Those that don’t are doing a disservice to their students and, in the long term, hurting all of us. Every state in the union needs to get on board.

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Thinking about a science degree? Consider a lab where research meets white-knuckled adventure

L AB S STORY BY BROOKE BOREL I L L U ST R AT I O N S BY JOE NEWTON

PAR TIC LE PH YS IC IS T, H ELIOPH YS IC IS T, E L ECTR I CA L E N G I N E E R

BURIED DEEP IN THE ICE below the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, IceCube is the world’s largest and most remote neutrino observatory. Neutrinos are nearly massless particles that rarely interact with matter.

Trillions of them pass through the earth every second, carrying information that may help explain the physics of supernovae and the source of high-energy cosmic rays. Because their signatures are very weak and rare, scientists had to bury vertical strings of the detectors deep in the Antarctic ice, which blocks photons from the sun and cosmic rays. The clear ice in IceCube’s dark

38 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / SEP TEMBER 2013

underground setting allows the detectors to see the faint blue light that appears after a neutrino hits an atom within the ice.

Every year, dozens of undergraduates from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (or one of its 40 or so international collaborators) secure research positions with IceCube. For most, that means monitoring the lab’s detectors from stations in the U.S. and Europe.

But for a lucky few, it can mean a trip to the South Pole.

After passing a physical, students embark on a 72-hour journey, stopping first in New Zealand. From there, they

Go/Do/Learn

S. LIDSTROM/NSF

THE EDUCATION ISSUE

fly to McMurdo research station on Antarctica’s coast and then on to the South Pole, 850 miles away, in a skiequipped propeller plane. Pending funding, the university may send four students to spend three weeks there during the Antarctic summer season.

Once they acclimate to the 9,000-foot altitude at IceCube, students will monitor signals from neutron detectors while braving temperatures of –20 to –30 degrees Fahrenheit. The work may be uncomfortable and the target very, very small, but the students could help answer some of the biggest questions in the universe.

ICECUBE NEUTRINO O B S E RVAT O RY University of Wisconsin-Madison

SEP TEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 3 9

FORENSICS A N T H RO P O L O GY CENTER

FOR EN SIC PAT HO LOG IST, FOR EN SIC SCIE N T IST, FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGIST

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

by monitoring the 100 or so donated cadavers during various stages of decomposition. They might study the life cycles of flesh-eating fauna, such as blowflies and dermestid beetles, to pinpoint time of death. Or they might retrieve DNA from the bodies and test for the presence of microbes or drugs, which authorities could use to determine identity and toxicology in murder cases. Sometimes they even help Steadman re-create, at the request of law enforcement, a crime scene—say, by stuffing dead bodies in car trunks—to test out hypotheses.

Once the insects have cleaned most of the flesh from the bone, the students take the remains back to the lab. They don scrubs, aprons, and gloves and learn to identify bones, skeletal pathologies, and different types of trauma. Then they add the skeleton to the university’s growing collection: more than 1,100, at last count.

TEXTILE PROTECTION A ND COMFORT CENTER

THE MOST IMPORTANT teachers in Roger Barker’s textile lab are mannequins.

Barker studies how textiles respond to extreme conditions by re-creating North Carolina real-world environments State University with three types of models: PyroMan endures conditions that mimic a burning building; it has 122 thermal heat sensors that record heat flux while Barker blasts it with eight propane-gas burners. RadMan, currently under development, has sensors that record the radiant heat of simulated forest fires. An unnamed third kind of mannequin has thermal sensors, articulated joints, and more than 100 sweating pores, so Barker can test the performance of uniforms and outdoor clothing.

Every year, about 10 North Carolina State University undergraduates help Barker on various projects. In 2012, for example, a group tested military garments that had been impregnated with insecticides (to discourage biting pests) to ensure the chemicals were within Environmental Protection Agency limits. Students may even stand in for the dummies: One group volunteered to get misted with wintergreen oil, an ersatz mustard gas, to make sure safety suits wouldn’t leak in a chemical-weapons attack. According to research assistant professor Bryan Ormond, the only job students can’t do is replace PyroMan in the burn chamber.

M AT E R I A L S E N G I N E E R , S P O R T S - CLOT H I N G DE V E LOPER

40 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / SEP TEMBER 2013

TOP DOWN : COURTESY FORENSICS ANTHROPOLOGY CENTER ; COURTESY TEXTILE PROTECTION AND COMFORT CENTER

EVERY SEMESTER, on a threeacre wooded bluff overlooking the Tennessee River in Knoxville, about 75 undergraduates help Dawnie Wolfe Steadman deposit dead bodies.

Steadman, a forensics professor at the University of Tennessee, studies the many ways in which a body decays. Students assist her

AWESOME LABS

JOHN B. CARNETT

NAT IONA L WIND I N ST I T U T E Texas Tech University

STUDENTS AT Texas Tech University are trying to protect against the ravages of hurricanes, tornadoes, and other dangerous storms. By studying how extreme storms form and evolve, along with the damage they cause, engineers can design structures to withstand them. At the center’s

ST R UCT U R A L EN G I N EER , ATM OS PH ER I C S C I EN TI S T

Debris Impact Facility, teams use a custom high-impact gun to fire two-by-fours—the most common storm projectile—at brick walls, shelters, and safes to prove the strength of the targets’ materials and design. Other teams race to deploy sensors at sites where hurricanes are predicted to land, to collect data on wind speed, humidity, and more. This year, two graduate students even got to work on a Federal Emergency Management Agency–funded project to assess how well storm shelters held up in the wake of the tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma, in May. SEP TEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 4 1

AWESOME LABS

E N E RGET I C M AT E R I A LS RE S EA RCH A N D T E ST I N G CENTER New Mexico Tech

VAN ROMERO’S students don’t want to be doctors or lawyers. They want to blow things up for a living. Romero, New Mexico Tech’s vice president of research and economic development, and his staff oversee students as they detonate any number of explosives, whether C4 or TNT, across the school’s 26,000-acre mountaintop blasting range (which includes a quarter-scale urban canyon for modeling an explosion’s shock waves). Last spring, the freshman class was the first to play around in the school’s new interactive lab. The 1,220-square-foot space includes Samsung tabletop computers for sharing project designs, and a 3-D printer for building the trigger mechanisms and launching arms for a small working trebuchet.

N U C L E A R - WE A P O N S D E V E LOPER , CO N S T R U C T I O N B L A S T E R , HOMEL AND SECURIT Y CONTR ACTOR

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AWESOME LABS INDEX REED NUCLEAR REACTOR Reed College Operate a 250-kilowatt nuclear reactor.

J O H N B . C A R N E T T: FA C I N G PA G E: C O U R T E SY A L A N N A S C A C C I A /EC O LO GY A N D C O N S E R VAT I O N C E N T E R ; J O H N B . C A R N E T T

LIGHTNING RESEARCH LAB University of Florida Learn about lightning by creating bolts during storms.

HAWAIIAN VOLCANO OBSERVATORY U.S. Geological Survey Study one of the world’s most active volcanoes.

SASAKAWA INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR SPACE ARCHITECTURE University of Houston Design habitats to support life in space.

WILDLIFE ECOLO GY AND CONSERVATION University of Florida

BEFORE HIS STUDENTS leave for Swaziland every summer, Robert McCleery, a professor of wildlife ecology, imparts a long list of survival tips, which include: Always baboon-proof the campsite; don’t get malaria; don’t float around in the rivers, which teem with hippos, crocs,

W I L D L I F E ECO LO G I S T, PAR K B I O LO G I S T

and the parasite bilharzia. Armed with that knowledge, 15 students from the University of Florida set out for one month of ecology and conservation studies. During their time in the field, students could radio-collar Egyptian slit-faced bats or collect giraffe scat for genetic analysis. They might spot black wildebeest through the mist-covered mountains of the Malolotja Nature Reserve or study impalas and zebras in the lowland savanna.

As part of their curriculum, they will make nighttime game drives in search of bushbaby primates and field trips to Kruger National Park in neighboring South Africa.

For those who crave a bit more time in the bush, McCleery can arrange for a select few to stay on at his permanent camp in Swaziland as interns for the rest of the summer. The camp is run by University of Florida graduate students and staff from All Out Africa, a nongovernmental organization. Any University of Florida student may apply, says McCleery: “I have no set requirements aside from a single ecology course. I take on students with a serious passion for wildlife ecology that are eager to learn and have a tireless work ethic.”

WISCONSIN NATIONAL PRIMATE RESEARCH CENTER University of Wisconsin Contribute to biomedical research with the center’s 1,300 rhesus monkeys.

SUBZERO SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING RESEARCH FACILITY Montana State University Explore the effects of a –80°F environment.

See six years’ worth of incredible places at popsci.com/ awesomelablist

JET PROPULSION LAB ORAT ORY California Institute of Technology

THIS SUMMER, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, is hosting 450 undergraduates from around the country for 10-week-long internships, where they may work on projects in planetary science, astrophysics, astrobiology, or robotics. In the past, students have helped develop instruments on the Marsbound Curiosity rover; analyzed data sent by the Kepler spacecraft, which is looking for potentially habitable exoplanets; and studied life in extreme environments on Earth, getting a glimpse of how life may exist elsewhere in the universe.

The interns “operate at the frontier of human knowledge,” says Adrian Ponce, JPL’s manager of higher education. Once they graduate, approximately 100 former interns are considered for permanent JPL jobs.

A S T R O B I O LO G I S T, A S T R O PH YS I C I S T, EN G I N EER, COMPU TER S CI EN TI S T

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AWESOME LABS

CENTER FOR INTEGRATED BIOSYSTEMS Utah State University Clone animals used in genetic research.

Colorado State University and Colorado College

THE BADLANDS of southern Utah are famously rugged, a maze of sandstone cliffs and canyons that can amplify summer temperatures into furnacelike conditions. But this wasn’t always the case.

Seventy-five million years ago, during the late Cretaceous period, the region was a gigantic coastal forest much like today’s Gulf Coast, filled with frogs, salamanders, and even tyrannosaurs. When the animals died, they sank into the sediment, which preserved them forever. As a result, southern Utah is one of the richest fossil beds in the U.S. Several times a year, Joseph Sertich, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Sci-

ence, leads students on fossil-hunting trips that double as extreme backpacking adventures. Hauling picks, axes, and gas-powered rock saws, students march into the wilderness of the Kaiparowits Plateau, an almost roadless expanse of sand- and mudstone domes that rise as high as 800 feet. “It’s kind of like a badlands on steroids,” Sertich says. On any given trip, students will hike up to seven miles to established digs, then head further into the backcountry to identify new, untapped sites. Some digs are so remote that tools must be airlifted in by helicopter. In the field, students have uncovered fossils such as pea-size lizard skulls and entire duck-billed dinosaur skeletons.

Most undergrads stay in the field for a few weeks, but there is an opportunity to extend the research into a senior thesis. Longer internships lasting a month or two are in the works. “The undergrads have become one of the keys to making the project run,” says Sertich. “We have lots of volunteers at the Denver Museum who are a big PA L EO N TO LO G I S T, G EO LO G I S T, part of running the camp, but the students do a lot of MUSEUM CUR ATOR the difficult parts of the fieldwork.”

SLAC NATIONAL ACCELERATOR LABORATORY Stanford University Use superpowerful x-rays to create 3-D images of molecules.

SPACE SYSTEMS LABORATORY University of Maryland Test astronaut equipment and robots in a 367,000-gallon water-filled tank.

ROBOTICS INSTITUTE Carnegie Mellon University Build the robot of your dreams.

GAME DESIGN INITIATIVE Cornell University Learn how to create your own games.

EXPLOSIVES ENGINEERING Missouri University of Science and Technology

STUDENTS IN Paul Worsey’s explosives program have a new class to add to their schedules: fireworks manufacturing. They grind incendiary chemicals and combine them into professionalgrade fireworks; the final project is to create a five-inch pyrotechnic mortar—and set it off. Students can also take courses in commercialfirework and stage pyrotechnics, in which they learn to design, set up, and fire large public pyrotechnic displays, whether for a Fourth of July celebration, a concert, or a WWE match.

PYROTECHNICS MANUFACTURER, AMMUNITION MAKER, DEMOLITION E X PER T

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TRAUMA MECHANICS RESEARCH INITIATIVE University of Nebraska, Lincoln Simulate IED blasts to make a better body armor.

DAWSON LAB University of California, Merced Swim with jellyfish swarms to find out if they power the ocean’s currents.

PILOT BREWERY University of California, Davis Brew your own barrels of beer.

TOP DOWN : COUR TESY DENVER MUSEUM OF NATUR AL HISTORY; JOHN B. CARNE T T

DENVER MUSEUM OF NATURE AND SCIENCE

BA RT ON LAB The University of Akron

ONLY THE TOUGHEST and most sure-footed students need apply for undergraduate honors thesis work in Hazel Barton’s lab. Barton studies cave microbes, and students will often do their ďŹ eldwork in Brazilian caverns, accessible only by donning snakeproof boots and hacking through the Amazon with a machete. By analyzing rock samples and the microbes that live on them (many eat iron within the rock), they are learning how to better predict the formation of sinkholes and caves. Barton and her students also study the competition between various microbial species, looking for insights that could lead to new forms of antibiotics.

HA ZEL A. BARTON

M I C R O B I O LO G I S T, G EO CH E M I S T, A S T R O B I O LO G I S T

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Go/Do/Learn

THE EDUCATION ISSUE

CIRCUIT A 12-YEAR-OLD ELECTRONICS PRODIGY WANTED TO MAKE EDUCATION MORE FUN. SO HE BECAME A TEACHER. STORY BY SUSAN MORAN PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRIS MCPHERSON

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SHORT CIRCUIT

To make his autonomous FuzzBot, Quin Etnyre started with a robot chassis kit for Arduino that he received last Christmas. “And then one morning, I decided to hook up a Parallax Ping sensor so that it could avoid obstacles,” he says. “From then on, I worked

on the code and perfected it.” Quin also added extra functionality; the FuzzBot can clean floors. He calls it a “hackable mini Roomba” because he attached a duster cloth as a tail that lifts dirt in its wake. Now he’s working on a wireless controller.

For build instructions, go to www.instructables.com/id/FuzzBot

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UIN ETNYRE WALKS to the front of a crowded room at Deezmaker 3D Printers and Hackerspace in Pasadena, California.

He adjusts his laptop on the workbench, then looks up and addresses the class. “Thanks for coming out on a Saturday,” he says, his voice barely audible over the steady hum of servomotors.

The students, 18 middle-aged men and preteen boys, look on as Quin straightens his MIT T-shirt and swipes an index finger across an iPod. The screen behind him flashes “Intro to Arduino Class.”

He explains to the group, which includes a toy maker, an engineer, and a high-school electronics teacher, that he’ll be showing them how to program an Arduino—a $30 microcontroller board that can convert sensory inputs into outputs, making objects interactive. “First I want to demonstrate some cool things I made that you can make too,” he says, reaching into a backpack.

Two men stop whispering and turn toward him. Quin pulls out the FuzzBot, a bug-eyed, four-wheeled robot slightly smaller than a shoebox. Then he holds up a baseball cap with LEDs stitched into the fabric.

“This is a Gas Cap. Well, it’s really a fart sensor,” he says, with a straight face and inscrutable tone. He describes how he programmed the lights to blink when the sensor detects methane. Several boys in the room burst out laughing. The men look confused, uncertain what to make of their instructor. They knew from his reputation that he is a rising star in the DIY-electronics movement; most didn’t realize until they got here today that he is also a 12-year-old.

Quin tells the students to boot up their laptops and install free Arduino software. Then they each open a box containing sensors, a breadboard, a circuit board, and other parts. For the next four hours, Quin guides the group through six hands-on projects, culminating in an electronic meter that measures voltage coming across a potentiometer and displays the values on an LED bar graph. When his meter flashes to life, a wiry boy sitting near the front yelps with delight.

As the class winds down, Deezmaker’s owner, Diego Porqueras, announces that Quin has some products for sale, including custom ArduSensors that can measure flex, force, light, knocks, temperature, magnetism, and, yes, methane. Quin heads to a table in the back where his parents, Ethan Etnyre

Quin regularly instructs electronics classes, like this one at Deezmaker.

“Quin does a better job teaching than most adults,” says Tara Tiger Brown, of LA Makerspace.

FA C I N G PA G E: P H OTO G R A P H BY B R I A N K LU TCH

and Karen Mikuni, have been hovering quietly. As the men and boys line up, Quin morphs from teacher to entrepreneur. “You get a 20-percent discount if you buy three or more products today,” he says.

C

HEAP, OPEN-SOURCE, and userfriendly, Arduino consists of both hardware (circuit boards) and software (a programming language).

The two can be combined in an almost infinite number of ways to make even the most whimsical projects—tweeting coffee pots, automated cat doors—attainable. A team of software engineers and designers released Arduino in 2005 as a teaching tool for graduate students in interactive design, but it quickly caught on in the DIY community.

By 2011, more than 250,000 Arduinos had been sold around the world, and a cottage industry of manufacturers and distributors had sprung up.

That’s also the year Quin Etnyre, bored with the limits of the LEGO Mindstorms robotics kit, got hooked on soldering circuit boards at Maker Faire Bay Area. He soon began ordering components online and taught himself how to code. “When I started, I thought it was all about zeros and ones and that it was going to be really hard,” Quin says. “It was so cool to learn that with just one line of code and almost-plain English, I could make an LED blink.”

MOST DIDN’T REALIZE THEIR INSTRUCTOR, A RISING STAR IN THE DIY-ELECTRONICS MOVEMENT, IS ALSO A 12-YEAR-OLD. For his eleventh birthday, his parents—both family physicians baffled by their son’s new obsession—flew with him from central California to Boulder, Colorado, where he took an Arduino class at the headquarters of online retailer SparkFun Electronics. He was the youngest student by at least a decade, but before long, others were turning to him for help.

In the months that followed, Quin spent hours after school coding, soldering, and brainstorming new projects, including the Gas Cap, which became an instant hit in the online DIY community Instructables. “I was amazed that someone his age built it,” says Randy Sarafan, Instructables’ technology editor. “You have to understand electronics to begin with and then translate them into a fabric environment.”

Quin launched a company, Qtechknow, in the spring of 2012 so he could reach more people with his ArduSensors, and he wrote detailed tutorials explaining how to use them. He also negotiated a deal with SparkFun; the retailer now sells the Qtechknow ArduSensor Learning Kit, which contains several circuit SEP TEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 4 9

SHORT CIRCUIT

boards and eight types of sensors.

Recently, Quin persuaded his parents to let him convert the family garage into a hackerspace where he and his friends could work on projects together. Now devoid of automobiles, it contains a long workbench littered with safety goggles, soldering irons, and a $30 toaster oven that Quin uses to manufacture circuit boards. Nearby, a stack of plastic drawers holds wires, LED lights, and other parts. Quin also uses the space to teach monthly workshops on such topics as how to hack a Wii Nunchuk game controller so that it interfaces with the Google Earth flight simulator. In the spring, he returned to Maker Faire—this time, as a featured speaker.

In an episode of SuperAwesome Mini Maker Show, Sylvia Todd [above] describes a “coppertastic build” for etching copper jewelry or circuit boards; it has nearly

300,000 views on YouTube.

Sylvia started the series with her dad in 2010; she now has 20 episodes that feature entry-level, opensource projects for kids.

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space in California, designed with young hackers in mind. “He’s a bellwether for a whole generation of kids, many who haven’t even been identified yet,” says Jeff Branson, SparkFun’s educational outreach coordinator. “We’re seeing more and more kids like Quin getting together and teaching each other.”

Another young maker at the forefront of this trend, Super-Awesome Sylvia (Sylvia Todd, age 12), has a YouTube show that has more than 1.5 million views. In recent episodes, she taught her audience how to build squishy circuits with LEDs and a heartbeat-sensor pendant using LilyPad, an Arduino microcontroller board designed for textiles. At the White House Science Fair in April, she showed President Obama her WaterColorBot, a robot that paints.

Both SparkFun and Adafruit Industries, another DIY-electronics retailer, have expanded their education teams to reach the next Quin and Sylvia where they study or play. “There is a worldwide demand from young people to learn more, share more, and become the next generation of scientists and engineers,” says Limor Fried, Adafruit’s founder. To encourage them, Adafruit now makes “skill badges”—a geeky nod to traditional Boy Scout and Girl Scout merit badges— awarding proficiency in areas such as soldering, programming, and successfully using Ohm’s law.

Inspired by Adafruit’s badges, a nonprofit organization called the Hacker Scouts formed in Oakland, California, in 2012. It promotes a network of guilds (rather than troops) designed to teach and mentor children ages 8 to 15. New “hackerlings” master basic skills, such as sewing, woodworking, and simple use of the Linux operating system, and then work in crews on more complicated projects. The guilds have spread to 11 cities in the U.S. Another national organization, Maker Corps, has begun training 18- to 22-year-olds to become mentors to kids and young teenagers both online and in physical makerspaces.

FIRST, an organization started by inventor Dean

Quin “acts and functions like both a grownup and a preadolescent male,” Mike Hord, a design engineer at SparkFun Electronics, observes.

C O U R T ESY SY LV I A’ S S U PE R - AW ES O M E M I N I M A K E R S H O W / YO U T U B E

E

VERYONE WHO has met Quin agrees that, both technically and personally, he stands out. “Quin is extremely over-the-top self-motivated and driven,” says Tara Tiger Brown, executive director of LA Makerspace. Quin’s biography on Twitter sums this up as well: “I’m a 12-year-old maker that loves Arduino and electronics. I run my own electronics company selling @ArduSensors and will be going to MIT in 7 years.”

But Quin embodies a groundswell of preteen inventors enabled by cheap hardware, free software, and the proliferation of hackerspaces around the country— some, such as Maker Kids in Toronto and LA Maker-

Kamen, has also rapidly expanded. It uses robotics programs to get students from kindergarten through high school excited about engineering. This year 2,546 teams from around the world competed in its flagship event, the FIRST Robotics Competition—a 300 percent increase from 10 years ago, according to Kevin O’Connor, a robotics engineer who helps design the annual challenge.

A 2011 study published in the journal Science Education showed that high-school seniors who express an interest in pursuing science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) are three times more likely to complete college degrees in those subjects.

The key to getting students to that tipping point, says lead author Adam Maltese, an assistant professor of science education at Indiana University, seems to be exposing them early to a STEM experience that sparks their interest, then providing them with a way to maintain it—a formula that Quin has already mapped out.

T

HE DAY AFTER his Arduino class at Deezmaker, Quin climbs into the backseat of the family car. While his dad steers onto Highway 101 toward their home near San Luis Obispo, California, Quin digs into his backpack and pulls out a Rubik’s cube. He solves it in 16 seconds. Then he turns on his parents’ iPad and starts typing. He explains that he’s been rethinking K–12 education—and that he has come up with a much better system. He calls it the New Qtechknow School.

“School is pretty boring, but it could be a lot more interesting and interactive,” he says. “More hands-on and more mentoring.” According to his plan, three schools—grades K–3, 4–8, and 9–12—would sit side by side on one campus so that older students could mentor younger ones at least once a day. Quin’s been helping other students with math for several years.

“It’s fun to teach other kids, and little kids look up to older kids,” he says thoughtfully. “It helped me learn

“QUIN IS A BELLWETHER FOR A WHOLE GENERATION OF KIDS, MANY WHO HAVEN’T EVEN BEEN IDENTIFIED YET.” when I was young because it was fun.” Plus, he points out, the older kids would get experience teaching, which would help them decide whether to pursue an education degree in college. Not surprisingly, the teachers at the New Qtechknow School would focus heavily on science and engineering.

In the meantime, Quin is making sure his current school system can provide more hands-on education.

In March, he and his father visited Raynee Daley, the assistant superintendent of business services in his school district, and suggested that teachers use electronics kits in their classes. Daley didn’t know anything about Arduino, but Quin impressed her with a demonstration of his FuzzBot and other projects. “I knew this kid was absolutely brilliant,” she says. “And I believe that hands-on learning is critical.”

Daley appealed to the superintendent, and he agreed to let Quin present to a broader group; more than a dozen principals and teachers showed up for his lunchtime electronics lesson. “I looked around the room and saw everybody, except maybe the robotics guy, with their mouths open, amazed,” Daley says. This fall, the school district will bring a SparkFun education team to train some of the teachers. By August 2014, when Quin will enroll as a freshman, Arroyo Grande High School hopes to have a DIY-electronics program.

“Quin has made us all think differently about what the future of education could be like,” Daley says.

A couple hours into the car ride home, Quin is still typing on his iPad, tweaking his plan to overhaul the U.S. education system. But suddenly his dreams turn more immediate and visceral. He fires up the browser and searches for the nearest In-N-Out Burger. Then he makes a plea identical to that of kids everywhere: “Can I get two orders of French fries, Mom?”

Quin experiments with an age-old form of DIY electronics: licking a nine-volt battery to feel a shock.

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Go/Do/Learn THE EDUCATION ISSUE

AFTERMARKET EDUCATION

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON

19 OPEN2STUDY

Introduction to Public Speaking

As the selection of open online courses grows, learning doesn’t end with a degree

Astronomy: Discovering the Universe

Twitter Essentials in Under an Hour

T

he first massive open online course, or MOOC, launched in September 2008 at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Via the Web, anyone could attend the class on learning theory, and 2,300 people signed up. MOOCs quickly took off. In 2011, a Stanford University class on artificial intelligence enrolled 160,000, inspiring one of the instructors to found the MOOC start-up Udacity.

The courses aren’t quite substitutes for traditional education; at Coursera, one of the largest MOOC providers, 80 percent of students already hold a bachelor’s degree, and only 10 percent finish the courses they start, according to co-founder Andrew Ng. But MOOCs can help students build the skills to become almost anything—or anybody.

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Solar Energy

ITUNES U

DRONE-ARMY COMMANDER

Disaster Preparedness

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77

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Machine Learning

Food, Nutrition, and Your Health

CODECADEMY

EDX Flight Vehicle Aerodynamics

What’s the Best Video Camera for You?

Business and Economics Computer Science

Education Health and Medicine

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Humanities Lifestyle

Mathematics Science and Engineering

Social Sciences

STO R Y BY JEFFERSON MOK ILLUSTR ATION BY BEUTLER INK

The clusters represent the number of courses available through early 2014 at nine of the largest MOOC providers. Every course appears as a dot. The clusters for iTunes U and Udemy—where educators create their own classes—include only their most popular courses.

SCI-FI NOVELIST

Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World

Creative Writing: A Master Class

Publish Your Book on Kindle

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1,000+

U DAC I T Y

NATE SILVER

UDEMY

ALIEN HUNTER Model Thinking Create a Yoda Astrobiology Translator in and the Javascript Search for Extraterrestrial Life

Diversity of Exoplanets

207

Campaigns and Elections

Introduction to Statistics: Making Decisions Based on Data

303

INDIANA JONES

S AY L O R K H A N AC A D E M Y

Forces and Newton’s Laws of Motion

Global History of Architecture: Part 1

SOURCES: CODECADEMY, COURSERA, EDX, ITUNES U, KHAN ACADEMY, O P E N 2 S T U D Y , S AY L O R , U D A C I T Y , A N D U D E M Y .

Ancient Civilizations of the World

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FROM RUNW Reaction Engines’ Skylon spacecraft would make short hauls into orbit, come back, and be ready to do it again two days later.

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CONCEPTS & PROTOT YPES

AY TO ORBIT AND BACK

A new type of engine could usher in an era of aямАordable spaceplanes Story by Nicole Dyer

Illustration by Nick Kaloterakis

SEP TEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 5 5

A disembodied jet engine, attached

to a hulking air vent, sits in an outdoor test facility at the Culham Science Center in Oxfordshire, England. When the engine screams to life, columns of steam billow from the vent, giving the impression of an industrial smokestack.

Engineer Alan Bond sees something more futuristic. “We’re looking at a revolution in transportation,” he says. For Bond, the engine represents the beginning of the world’s first fully reusable spaceship, a new kind of craft that promises to do what no space-faring vehicle ever has: offer reliable, affordable, and regular round-trip access to low Earth orbit.

Bond and the engineers at Reaction Engines, the aerospace company he founded with two colleagues in 1989, refer to the future craft as the Skylon. The vehicle would have a fuselage reminiscent of the Concorde and take off like a conventional airliner, accelerate to Mach 5.2, and blast out of the atmosphere like a rocket. On the return trip, Skylon would touch down on the same runway it launched from.

Bond’s Synergistic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (Sabre)— part chemical rocket, part jet engine—will make Skylon possible. Sabre has the unique ability to use oxygen in the air rather than from external liquid-oxygen tanks like those on the space shuttle. Strapped to a spacecraft, engines of this breed would eliminate the need for expendable boosters, which make launching people and things into space slow and expensive. “The Skylon could be ready to head back to space within two days of landing,” says Mark Hempsell, future-programs director at Reaction Engines. By comparison, the space shuttle, which required an external fuel tank and two rocket boosters, took about two months to turn around (due to damage incurred during launch and splashdown) and cost $100 million. Citing Skylon’s simplicity, Hempsell estimates a mission could cost as little as $10 million. That price would even undercut the $50 million sum that private spaceflight company SpaceX plans to charge to launch cargo on its two-stage Falcon 9 rocket.

The engine produces incredible heat as it pushes toward space, and heat is a problem. Hot air is difficult to compress, and poor compression in the combustion chamber yields a weak and inefficient engine. Sabre must be able to cool that air quickly, before it gets to the turbocompressor. In November, Reaction Engines hit a critical milestone when it successfully tested the prototype’s ability to inhale blisteringhot air and then flash-chill it without generating missionending frost. David Willetts, British minister for universities and science, called the achievement “remarkable.”

The Skylon concept has also impressed the European Space Agency (ESA), which audited Reaction Engines’ 56 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / SEP TEMBER 2013

designs last year and found no technical impediments to building the craft. The bigger challenge may be securing funding. While ESA and the British government have invested a combined $92 million in the project, Bond and his crew plan to turn to public and private investors for the remaining $3.6 billion necessary to complete the engine, which they say could be ready for flight tests in the next four years. Building the craft itself would require a much heftier investment: $14 billion.

THE QUEST FOR a single-stage-to-orbit spaceship, or SSTO, has bedeviled aerospace engineers for decades. Bond’s own exploration of the topic began in the early 1980s, when he was a young engineer working with Rolls-Royce as part of a team tasked with developing a reusable spacecraft for British Aerospace. That’s when he came up with the idea of a hybrid engine. But the team struggled to figure out how to cool the engine at supersonic speeds without adding crippling amounts of weight. “By the time the plane hits Mach 2 or so, the air becomes very hot and extremely difficult to compress,” Bond says. Rolls-Royce and the British government, doubtful that an easy and economical solution existed, canceled the program’s funding.

NASA and Lockheed Martin, meanwhile, had their own plans for a fully reusable spacecraft, the VentureStar, intended as an affordable replacement for the partially reusable space shuttle. The VentureStar demonstrator, called X-33 (which graced the cover of this magazine in 1996), was a squat, triangular rocket that would take off vertically and glide back to Earth just as the shuttle did.

Eliminating the expendable rockets needed to boost the shuttle into space could theoretically reduce the cost of launches from $10,000 per pound to $1,000 per pound.

But by 2001, after sinking more than $1 billion into the project, the agency pulled the plug, citing repeated technical setbacks and ballooning costs. “We backed off because we felt it was better to focus our efforts on other, less costly ways to get payloads to orbit,” says Dan Dumbacher, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development, who spent two years working on the X-33.

With the shuttle now retired, and companies such as SpaceX under contract to resupply the International Space Station (ISS), NASA has doubled down on expendable boosters as a means of sending humans and probes well beyond Earth’s orbit. NASA’s new platform for deep-space exploration, the Space Launch System, will be the most powerful rocket ever built. The agency’s focus on space exploration, and the need for big rockets to achieve it, means NASA no longer needs to build its own platforms just to get cargo into orbit. “From a pure technical perspective, we’d all love to go do SSTO,” Dumbacher says. “But we’re focused on making sure we get humans farther into space, and that’s an expensive proposition.”

Expendable rockets make sense for missions beyond lowEarth orbit. They can haul more cargo and more fuel than single-stage craft. Rockets also offer reliability—on average, only one out of 20 launches fail, in part because they suffer no wear and tear from repeated use. Finally, rockets come

CONCEPTS & PROTOT YPES

THE SABRE ENGINE: HOW IT WORKS

Air traveling at Mach 5 enters the engine and passes through a heat exchanger. There, a network of paper-thin metal tubes filled with liquid helium chill the 2,000oF air to –238oF almost instantly. That chilled air flows into the turbocompressor, then into the thrust chambers, where it’s mixed with liquid hydrogen and ignited to produce thrust for the spacecraft.

Heat shield

Hydrogen pump

Helium circulator

Drive turbine regenerators

Air flow

Air flow

Thrust chambers

Liquid-oxygen pump

COURTESY REACTION ENGINES

with fewer R&D costs, as much of the technology has existed since the 1960s.

But for routine missions to the ISS, or to park a small observational satellite in orbit, affordability becomes a critical consideration. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told an audience at the National Press Club in 2011 that private spaceflights would need to follow a model closer to that of airlines. “If planes were not reusable, very few people would fly,” he said. SpaceX plans to make rocket stages reusable, but there are drawbacks to that, too: While it is possible to recover rocket stages, designing bits and pieces to survive reentry in good working order adds a level of complexity and cost.

Hempsell says Skylon could potentially make 100 flights annually—which, if true, could in its first year recoup the money spent in R&D and construction, leaving only expenses like fuel, maintenance, and overhead. And Bond’s engine technology, aside from keeping a launch vehicle intact from start to finish, offers another advantage: supersonic aviation.

“It could enable an aircraft to fly anywhere in the world in under four hours,” says Bond.

WHEN AIR STRIKES an engine at five times the speed of sound, it can heat up to nearly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Bleeding off that heat instantly, before the air reaches the turbocompressor and then the thrust chamber, was the most onerous technical challenge for Reaction Engines engineers.

Bond’s solution is a heat exchanger that works by running cold liquid helium through an array of tubes with paper-thin metal walls. As the scorching-hot air moves through the exchanger, the chilled tubing absorbs the energy, cooling

Turbocompressor

Heat exchanger

the air to minus 238 degrees Fahrenheit in a fraction of a second. Bond says his exchanger could handle about 400 megawatts of heat (equivalent to a medium-size natural-gas plant). “If it were in a power station, it would probably be a 200-ton heat exchanger,” he says. “The one we’ve built is about 1.4 tons.”

For rocket scientists, nothing matters more than weight.

“Each pound you put into orbit requires about 10 pounds or so of fuel to get it there,” says NASA’s Dumbacher. “The challenge with the SSTO has always been to get the craft as light as possible [and generate] as much thrust as possible.”

Bond estimates that Skylon would weigh about 358 tons at takeoff and hold enough hydrogen fuel to carry itself and about 16.5 tons of payload—about the same capacity as most operational rockets—into orbit.

If and when the engine passes flight tests, one of Reaction Engines’ plans is to license the technology to a potential partner in the aerospace industry. Bond hopes the recent success of the heat exchanger will inspire interest. After 30 years of research, it has certainly inspired him. “It represents a fundamental breakthrough in propulsion technology,” he says. “This is the proudest moment of my life.”

Fly anywhere

in the world in

under four hours.

SEP TEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 5 7

DOWNED

WORLD WAR II COMBAT PILOTS HAVE BEEN LOST AT THE BOT TOM OF T H E PA C I F I C O C E A N F O R N E A R LY 7 0 Y E A R S . N O W A U T O N O M O U S ROBOTS HAVE BEEN DEPLOYED TO FIND THEM.

58 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / SEP TEMBER 2013

An engineer uses high-frequency sonar to image the fuselage of a Corsair near Palau. Dozens of World War II aircraft lie in the waters surrounding the island chain.

STORY BY ANDY ISA ACSON SEP TEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 5 9

O

N A BRIGHT morning in midMarch, Pat Scannon stands on the deck of a 40-foot catamaran looking for an airplane hidden in the waters of Palau’s western lagoon. A limestone ridge thick with vegetation juts into the cloudless blue sky behind him. His quick-dry clothing, coupled with a red bandanna knotted around his neck, befits Scannon’s role as an amateur archaeologist. He has spent the past 20 years making annual wreck-hunting trips to Palau, about 500 miles from the Philippines, to find aircraft that had been shot down during one of World War II’s fiercest battles—planes that may still be holding their pilots. His organization, BentProp Project, works to repatriate their remains to the U.S. To guide the search, Scannon ordinarily relies on interviews

Delaware, which received a grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research. The funding enables oceanographers to test new technologies while helping BentProp locate World War II airmen—an effort they named Project Recover.

The lead scientist is Eric Terrill, director of the Scripps Coastal Observing Research and Development Center. Board shorts and sandals make the athletic oceanographer look more surfer than scientist—he even brought a board on the research vessel for what he calls “wave sampling.” For the past few years, Terrill’s team has used a Remus to study the ocean circulation around Palau.

“Historically, on unmanned underwater platforms, you might spend the better part of your experimental time just ensuring the sensors were functioning, tracking the vehicle navigation, and charging batteries,” he says. “The systems now have matured to where we can run them hard, like outboard motors. The oceanographic community is engineering new sensors for them and having them do smarter

With the oceanographers’ help, he hopes, BentProp could find it. “On land our major technology was a machete, and underwater it was scuba tanks,” he says.

“The ability to extend our mission is, like, I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like starting out walking, and suddenly you’re in a supersonic jet.”

with Palauan elders, military records, and maps hand-drawn after the war. But on this trip, he has a new tool at his disposal.

Two technicians in a nearby Boston Whaler cradle a small, torpedo-shaped craft, then lower it into the water. Scannon watches as its nose tilts down and its rear propeller pushes it beneath the surface. Out of sight, the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), an oceanographic workhorse called a Remus, begins gliding through the lagoon in a pattern that resembles the long, linear passes of a mowed lawn. From roughly 10 feet above the seafloor, its side-scan sonar sends out acoustic waves that build a two-dimensional map. The strength of the reflected waves also helps distinguish metal from mud or coral.

For a group like BentProp, the use of advanced oceanographic instruments is a huge technological leap forward and one it couldn’t afford on its own. The vehicles come from the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of

things during their searches.”

When Terrill and Scannon met through a mutual friend on the island, a collaboration seemed natural. BentProp could find planes in a tricky marine environment— with steep terrain, fast currents, and coral heads—while Scripps tested circulation models and advanced imaging systems.

“If we’re able to use those techniques on natural environments, there’s nothing to say we can’t apply it to the man-made objects on the seafloor,” Terrill says.

Scripps and the University of Delaware shipped 60 packages of equipment to Palau, including underwater vehicles, cameras, various types of sonar, and, for aerial surveys, an autonomous hexacopter drone that had been rebuilt to survive sea spray and aquatic landings. The mangroves growing along the shore around Palau are so dense that aluminum wreckage from aircraft has been found sitting on top of the tree canopy about 30 feet up.

This year, Scannon has his eye on a major prize: a B-24 that he believes had been shot down in Palau’s western reef.

That September, the U.S. Marines landed on the island of Peleliu. Although they ultimately won that battle, it came at a terrible cost: 10,000 Japanese and 1,700 Americans were killed in action— the highest casualty rate of World War II’s Pacific Theater. And between the beginning of the air campaign and the end of the war, BentProp estimates, 200 U.S. aircraft were shot down inside Palau’s barrier reef. Some 40 to 50 planes and 70 to 80 airmen have never been recovered.

Scannon, a medical doctor and founder of a biotechnology company, first visited Palau in 1993 as a recreational scuba diver. He came with a group looking for a Japanese naval vessel that had been sunk

by George H.W. Bush, who flew torpedo bombers during the war. After the group found it, Scannon hired a local guide to take him to other wreck sites, where he eventually discovered the wing of a B-24.

When he researched Palau’s history at home, he realized there must be many more planes in ruins around the islands.

“Palauans knew of them but didn’t know

BY THE 1920s, Palau had grown into a thriving Japanese port for goods and services en route across the Pacific. Recognizing the strategic location, Japan established an airfield there, and after World War II broke out, it began to shore up its defenses—building hundreds of bunkers and caves to defend the islands from an American attack. General MacArthur, who wanted to secure islands to the east as he prepared to invade the Philippines, ordered that attack in 1944. The U.S. began with a furious air campaign that was designed to knock out Japanese vessels clustered in Palau’s western lagoon and adjacent harbors, and clear the way for an amphibious assault.

60 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / SEP TEMBER 2013

OPENING PAGE: COURTESY SCRIPPS INSTITUTION OF OCE ANOGR APHY

“THESE PEOPLE DIED DEFENDING US.”

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CLOCKWISE: ANDY ISA ACSON; COURTESY SCRIPPS INSTITUTION OF OCE ANOGR APHY (2); ANDY ISA ACSON (2)

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anything about them,” he says. He was particularly gripped by the thought that many airmen couldn’t have survived the impact. “These people died defending us,” he says. “And they deserve to be honored and, if possible, brought home.”

So began Scannon’s quest. He returned to Palau for the next few years by himself, chasing leads. Then in 1996, he formed BentProp and recruited volunteers, roughly half of whom are retired and active-duty military members, to help him search. Combing the jungle and surrounding waters, they located debris from more than five dozen aircraft.

Last year, local spear fishermen diving on Palau’s western barrier reef stumbled

4

across one of the most impressive finds: an intact plane. They alerted the owner of a dive shop, who passed photos of the wreck along to BentProp. Scannon’s team eventually identified the plane as an American Corsair. It had sustained some damage to its left forward wing root, but the wing flaps were down, and the canopy had been locked open, suggesting that the pilot had ditched. “It had been sitting there unknown for 65 years,” Scannon says. “It gave us great hope that there were other intact airplanes out here that no one has seen.”

BentProp calculates that eight American planes, including a B-24 bomber, remain hidden in Palau’s western lagoon.

5

HIGH-TECH IMAGERS [1] Eric Terrill [left] and Billy Middleton of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography prepare to launch a Remus autonomous underwater vehicle in Palau’s western lagoon.

[2] The team also deploys an Echoscope, a 375kHz multibeam sonar, to image the seafloor under the research vessel.

[3] The sonar produces a real-time display showing the fuselage of a Japanese floatplane.

[4] Equipped with GoPro HD cameras, the Remus surveys the wreck of an American Corsair.

[5] Algorithms developed by Autodesk fuse those images into a 3-D model of the plane’s nose.

SEP TEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 6 1

1

4

6 The B-24, in particular, would be a tremendous discovery. It carried 10 to 11 men, including a pilot and co-pilot, gunners, bombers, a radioman, and a navigator. Of the four B-24s BentProp suspects were shot down near Palau, two were found after the war. BentProp located a third in 2004; the organization notified the Department of Defense’s Joint POW/ MIA Accounting Command, and the remains of the eight men onboard (three had parachuted out, only to be apprehended and executed) were repatriated to Arlington National Cemetery.

Mission photographs from World War II show the fourth, a Consolidated B-24 Liberator, on a path toward the western lagoon. Two of its crew had bailed out midair, landing in Malakal Harbor to the east, where the Japanese took them into custody; the rest presumably went down with the plane. “We have very, very good information about what heading 62 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / SEP TEMBER 2013

5

7

8 EXPEDITION PREP [1] Mark Moline [left] of the University of Delaware pilots a remotely operated vehicle while Eric Terrill of Scripps adjusts sonar and video displays of a sunken Japanese warship.

[2] The team consults historical documents at its command center at the Coral Reef Research Foundation.

[3] The archival information helps the team plan transects for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) .

[4] Scripps engineer Billy Middleton offloads data from the Remus AUV after each mission.

[5] Flip Colmer volunteers in BentProp’s search for downed aircraft and airmen.

[6] Joe Maldangesang [left] and Pat Scannon [right] of BentProp with Scripps’s Shannon Scott [center] study various warplanes flown into battle over Palau.

[7] Scott prepares the handheld Shark Marine Navigator system, which contains sonar, lights, and cameras.

[8] The machine’s Blueview sonar allows divers to find targets in very-low-visibility water.

they were on during the bombing mission, and we have very good information about what heading they took leaving,” Scannon says, on the deck of the research vessel during this year’s expedition. “So bringing the two of those together essentially brings you right here.”

THE OCEANOGRAPHIC team’s official command center in Palau is on the second floor of the Coral Reef Research Foun-

dation, but their unofficial headquarters is an open-air bar called the Drop Off, originally built for the production crew of CBS’s Survivor: Palau. Several days into the expedition, they head there for dinner and order a round of local Red Rooster beers. As they wait for their food, Mark Moline, an oceanographer from the University of Delaware, opens a Toughbook laptop and scrolls through sonar images produced by the Remus.

ANDY ISA ACSON ( 8 )

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COURTESY ROBERT RICHARDS

Grainy and reddish, the sonar images look like transmissions from Mars.

Some show deep scours; others, shadowy trenches. The team have given the features names like Homer Simpson, Crying Baby, and SpongeBob’s Grave. After identifying promising targets in scans, they will have to investigate in person, diving to the various sites to determine if the features are purely biological, like coral heads, or actual wrecks.

Moline pauses on an image with an oblong shape. On closer inspection, it seems to have intact wings and a tail. “We got a plane!” Moline announces. Everyone springs up and huddles around the screen, snapping photos with their phones. Their excitement attracts the attention of a Japanese man dining at the other end of the long communal table, who cranes his neck for a peek at the computer. Moline abruptly shuts the laptop; World War II wrecks attract dive tourists and salvagers.

The next morning, at the coral-reef lab, Terrill debriefs Scannon and the BentProp group. Paul Reuter, a Scripps programmer, projects Google Earth onto a wall. Reuter had used an archival map of observed plane crashes to mark Google Earth layers with known wreck sites; he then added a layer with intriguing objects that had turned up in the sonar images.

Terrill uses a laser pointer to indicate the newest find. “The hard edges provide bright scatter,” he says. “There’s a long shadow here and here.” He then shifts his pointer to a spherical object about 45 meters away and wonders if it could be the pontoon of a floatplane.

“If that’s intact, it tells me it was a lowspeed impact, perhaps ditching,” says Daniel O’Brien, a former skydiver and Hollywood stuntman who now volunteers for BentProp. “My first impression is that’s a Zero”—a long-range fighter aircraft. “There are rounded edges at the tail. But if it is a floatplane, the only U.S. airplane it could be would be amphibious.

The shape looks like a Kingfisher.” Flip Colmer, a former Navy pilot who now flies for Delta, also with BentProp, reaches for the book Floatplanes in Action and begins flipping through color pictures.

The Kingfisher, O’Brien explains, was typically flown for observation and to rescue downed pilots. “If they were in this deep, it would have been on a risky endeavor. There weren’t anti-aircraft along

FIELD TRIP THE VESSELS that typically explore the oceans are professionally engineered. But in Palau, eight students from the Advanced Underwater Robotics team at Michigan’s Stockbridge High School also deployed a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). The 40-pound craft successfully dived to 140 feet towing a video-camera system and sonar that it used to image several unknown shipwrecks and a Corsair plane.

A local BentProp volunteer had read about the team in 2011 and reached out to the students for assistance. They set to work on building a ROV, using 3-D computer-aided-design software and soldering and electronics skills learned in class. Because Stockbridge, located in a rural community, doesn’t have a swimming pool, they tested the craft in a cattle trough. The team also raised $45,000 to pay for the ROV parts and the trip 7,000 miles across the world. “The class is run more like a small business or research team than a traditional classroom,” says teacher Robert Richards, a retired Army sergeant. “We’re focused on building a robot and doing a mission.”

The team represents the last level of a robotics program that starts in elementary school. Stockbridge also integrates the Palau project into the curriculum for grades 3 through 12, so 300 kids learn about subjects like island biology and World War II Pacific Theater history. Next year, the students hope to return to Palau for a third field trip—this time, with an autonomous vehicle and hexacopters.

DOWNED

the ridge. But existing ships that were still moored had anti-aircraft. So for him to come in and land here, it would have been to pick somebody up.”

During World War II, floatplanes in Palau often flew rescue operations. As they scooped airmen from the water, another plane provided cover overhead. BentProp knew that two Kingfishers on reconnaissance missions had disappeared during the war, and the western lagoon seemed the most likely location for them to have ended up. The identification number painted on the plane’s exterior would have degraded by now; to confirm the exact craft, divers would try to recover a stamped metal plate riveted to the inside of the cockpit. “It’s our holy grail,” O’Brien tells me.

Colmer cautions the group about jumping to conclusions. The Japanese also flew seaplanes. “If there’s any primer left on the interior of the cockpit—which will last longer than straight paint—that’s one way to take a peek at it,” he says. U.S. airplanes used lime-green zinc chromate; the Japanese had a red primer. The team will have to get a close look.

GUIDED BY GPS coordinates from the AUV, Pat Colin, director of the Coral Reef Research Foundation, pilots the vessel across the lagoon to the approximate location of the mystery plane. Then Terrill lowers a device called an Echoscope over the side. As we creep along the surface, an onboard computer displays 3-D images of the seafloor in real time.

While side-scan sonar provides a general impression of contours along the bottom, it doesn’t directly measure the elevations of features. The Echoscope, or multibeam volume imaging sonar, does, enabling oceanographers to map topography accurately and in high enough resolution to distinguish man-made objects.

Terrill describes it as “the oceanographic seafloor-mapping equivalent of ultrasound sonar used to look inside the human body.” Using the two technologies in tandem helps to narrow wide-area searches and then pick out targets from clutter on the seafloor, so that human divers maximize their time at the correct site.

With the boat now directly over the plane, the dive teams begin to suit up.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 77

SEP TEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 6 3

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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?!

The Mantis An SUV-size rideable insectoid robot TIME 3 years COST $250,000

STO R Y BY GREGORY MONE PHOTOGR APHS BY MAT T DENTON

I

n 2007, Matt Denton stopped on the side of the road near his home in Hampshire, England, to watch an excavator dig. The machines had fascinated him since childhood, but after years of designing control systems for animatronic Hollywood creatures, Denton saw the shovel-tipped boom through a more imaginative lens. “It was effectively the shape of a leg,” he says. “So I started to wonder: Would it be possible to buy six of them and attach them to a chassis?” Four years later, Denton can lumber around in a

two-ton, nine-foot-tall robo-walker he calls the Mantis.

Denton, who helped engineer the hippogriff (an eagle-headed flying horse) in the Harry Potter films, had also built walking hexapods for the movies and for fun, but they were no bigger than a radio-controlled toy car.

He wanted the Mantis to be the size of an SUV. Unable to afford the project alone, he sketched out a design, used toy excavator arms to construct a scale model, and courted financial backers with the mock-up. No one bit.

A few months later, a friend’s wealthy

CUSTOM KICKS Denton initially shod the Mantis in modified go-kart tires. “They worked out really well,” he notes, “but they weren’t very grippy.” So he fabricated custom rubber feet, modeling the hexagonal pattern after off-road tires.

Now he alternates shoes based on the terrain.

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H2 father heard about Denton’s quixotic mission and, inspired by his vision, agreed to bankroll it.

Denton asked his friend Josh Lee, a mechanical engineer, to help him build the Mantis. The pair spent the first few weeks studying hydraulic actuators—the artificial muscles that would move the robot’s legs.

Meanwhile, Denton adapted software to drive the giant hexapod from code he wrote for his toy-size models. He and Lee then drew up plans for the robot’s central chassis and six legs, built and tested one appendage, and contracted a fabrication company to make the rest. When the aluminumand-steel legs arrived at Denton’s workshop, however, he realized that some of the holes needed to bolt the pieces together were missing and others were poorly machined. Impatient, Denton spent a week correcting the flaws himself. “We had to make it work,” he says.

Although Denton had a working prototype by 2011, the Mantis weighed too much and moved too slowly.

To cut its mass by 400 pounds, he removed one of the four joints in each leg. The joints had enabled better mobility on different terrain, but the Mantis moved well enough without them. Denton also streamlined the chassis, which houses the hydraulic system, diesel engine, electronics, and the pilot’s chair.

When the moment arrived to drive it, Denton wouldn’t climb inside. “I was too scared,” he says. To allay his fears, he performed 100 hours of Wi-Fi–enabled testing over six months.

His first time out was terrifying, but the Mantis operated as expected, and he slowly grew more comfortable in the cockpit. Now Denton shows off his creation at festivals. Some criticize its slow pace—the Mantis hasn’t cracked two miles per hour—and Denton is uncertain if it has a future in movies, construction, or elsewhere. But adolescent spectators understand it instantly. “Kids love it,” he says.

“They want to get in and stick some lasers on it.”

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66 / POPUL AR SCIENCE

H O W 2 . 0 / YO U B U I LT W H AT ?!

HOW IT WORKS

BOT TOM IMAGES, LEF T TO RIGHT: COURTESY SCOT T PARENTE AU ; COURTESY HA JIME SAK AMOTO

CONTROLS A pilot selects one of several gait patterns from a touchscreen control panel. One mode designed for rough terrain instructs the robot to pick each leg up before swinging it forward. Manipulating the joystick can direct the machine to creep forward, backward, or crab-walk to the side. Twisting the joystick forces the Mantis to turn in place.

SENSING Once a foot touches the ground, force sensors alert an onboard computer. Only then can the next leg in a walking sequence swing forward. A ball joint in the ankle allows the foot to pivot and plant itself on uneven ground; if the foot meets a ledge, however, another sensor tells the computer to find a more secure spot. Denton hopes to place ultrasonic sensors in each leg so the robot can scan the ground before stepping down.

TW O M OR E RI D E A B LE R O B O T S

SAFETY Should an emergency arise, Denton says, “we have two big red buttons.” One sits right next to the pilot in the cockpit, the other at the back of the machine (where one of Denton’s friends walks in step with the Mantis, making sure no animal or bystander falls beneath its feet). Both buttons kill the power and freeze the robot where it stands.

TIME Ongoing COST $500,000

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Artist Scott Parenteau designed his geodesic Walking Pod for shelter and transportation at Burning Man, an annual weeklong festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. The 1,800-pound dome crawls on two sets of six legs powered by batteries. Parenteau hopes his “RV art” inspires new mobile-home designs—and perhaps even nomadic colonies on Mars.

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WARNING: Mixing flammable powders with pure oxygen is dangerous, and blowouts occurred with this setup. Do not attempt.

H2

HOW 2.0 / GR AY MAT TER COLUMN BY THEODORE GR AY

PHOTOGR APHS BY MIKE WALKER

Vacuum Power A pump that goes from blow to suck with no moving parts When you blow air across the top of a straw dipped in soda, liquid rises up the tube. This might seem strange, but a Venturi pump—named after the Italian physicist who invented it—takes advantage of the same effect, simply by virtue of its shape.

Any high-velocity, high-pressure jet of liquid or gas creates suction in its wake. As molecules zoom by, nearby material rushes in to fill the void. So if you force a jet through a constricted section of tubing, you can make a pump with no moving parts.

Most Venturi pumps use three openings: one for the jet, one for suction, and the last as an exit.

The devices are great for shallowwater wells in rural areas because they require no electricity, motors, or bearings to work at the bottom of the well. Plus, a metal Venturi pump can last decades in water.

The pumps can also mix dissimilar materials. A jet of gas can suck up liquid, so you can use compressed air, a pump, and a garden hose, for instance, to empty a flooded basement.

Another example: the “Vinturi,” a funnel-like contraption that

mixes air into wine as it’s poured (for anyone who thinks aerating wine makes it taste better).

My favorite trick is to turn a garden-hose-variety Venturi pump into a flamethrower. Instead of using water, I attach a tank of pure oxygen and blow it through. The gas can suck up powdered spices and convert them into sparkling pillars of fire.

Pretty much any fine organic powder burns, thanks to a large flammable surface area; I’ve succeeded with cinnamon, garlic, black pepper, onion, cumin, powdered sugar, and even bread flour. About the only disappointment in my kitchen was chili powder, which makes a pathetic little flame. So much for extra heat.

Flame On A jet of burning cinnamon shows just how flammable fine organic powders can be in a stream of pure oxygen.

INSIDE LOOK

PUMP ACTION Below is a cutaway view of a plastic Venturi pump— designed to suck up water with a garden hose—attached to the end of a cutting torch. Coincidentally, it’s a perfect fit. High-velocity gas (or water, in the original application) rushing out of the small nozzle creates suction that pulls liquid up through the lower hose connection.

68 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / SEP TEMBER 2013

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f you are considering personal sound amplification, you probably know that louder isn’t always better. If it were, you could just get one of those ear horns that were popular back in the 19th Century... as long as you weren’t concerned with your appearance. Fact is, human conversation- the main reason people get amplification, occupies a relatively small range in the overall sound spectrum. Sound quality and speech intelligibility are much more important than sheer volume. That’s why the sound engineers behind the Perfect Choice HD™ focus on optimal listening in challenging situations.

The latest algorithms are running on advanced processors that are super small, yet super powerful.

STO R Y BY Z ACH ZORICH

PHOTOGR APH BY DA N B R ACAG L I A

A bacterial portrait of Edward L. Youmans [left], founder of POPULAR SCIENCE, circa 1886

M AT E R I A L S 1. Agar mixture: • 100 mL luria broth agar • 30 mg S-gal • 50 mg iron ammonium sulfate • 1 g low-melting-point agarose 2. 30 μL Voigt’s bacteria 3. Two sterile, microwave-safe containers with lids: • One to hold 100 mL agar • One to hold 15 mL agar 4. Six 9-cm-diameter petri dishes 5. Plastic wrap 6. Clear tape 7. 9-cm-diameter designs printed onto transparencies (sized to fit the round petri dishes)

TIME 1 to 3 days COST About $50 for six bacterial photos DIFFICULTY ▯▯▯▯○

Note: Most biotech companies ship supplies only to registered laboratories. Fortunately, most do-it-yourself and community biology labs qualify.

Grow a Photo

Use microbes to make black-and-agar still lifes

M

icrobes aren’t known for their artistic merit, but that hasn’t stopped scientists from using bacteria to find their inner Ansel Adams. Bioengineer Chris Voigt and his team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have hacked a harmless strain of Escherichia coli so that it produces black pigment in darkness or, in red light, remains transparent. The result: an organism that behaves like film.

In their basic setup, red light shines through a printed transparency that’s taped to the bottom of an agar-filled petri dish.

Only bacteria growing in the transparency’s shadows produce pigment. Voigt and his team borrowed two proteins from bluegreen algae to give E. coli this new ability. The proteins detect red light and turn off a gene that makes black pigment.

Jeff Tabor, a bioengineer at Rice University who collaborates with Voigt, is now engineering light-sensitive strains of E. coli to produce red and green pigments. If anyone can coax these bacteria to produce blue pigment, he says, the world could see its first bacterial pixel—the foundation of microbial television screens.

HOW IT WORKS

A

Proteins on the bacteria’s surface work together to detect red light. When light is present, the proteins prevent unique signaling molecules from forming within the cells.

B

These signaling molecules normally latch onto DNA inside the bacteria, then turn on a gene that produces the enzyme betagalactosidase.

70 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / SEP TEMBER 2013

C

The enzyme converts an agar additive called S-gal into dark pigment. Without signaling molecules, no pigment forms—so E. coli in darkness turn black and lit-up cells stay clear.

INSTRUCTIONS 1

Melt 15 milliliters of agar mixture in a microwave (about one minute on high) in the smaller container. Let cool until warm to the touch.

2 Add the bacteria. Mix vigorously, but do not create bubbles.

3 Pour the mixture into a petri dish and quickly cover with a lid. Let it cool until solid, about 20 minutes.

4 Remove the lid, cover the petri dish with plastic wrap, and cut three narrow slits in the plastic.

5 Tape the transparency to the bottom of the petri dish, flip it over, and shine red light down onto the transparency for one to three days.

(Make sure the light doesn’t melt the agar, as this will kill the bacteria.)

6 Admire your work. The petri-dish photograph can last for several years in a refrigerator.

FOR FULL INSTRUCTIONS AND BACTERIA-ORDERING DETAILS, VISIT: POPSCI.COM/BACTERIAPHOTOS

B ACT E R I A PH OTO PL AT E: C O U R T ESY N ATA L I E KU L D E L L / MASSACHUSET TS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

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he invisibility cloak Harry Potter brandishes against dark lords and nosy professors is now a reality—at least in microwave light. Duke University engineer Yaroslav Urzhumov has designed a plastic disk that makes a small object placed in its hollow center invisible to frequencies from 9.7 to 10.1 GHz (close to the range used by radar speed guns). Holes in the doughnut-shaped cloak can eliminate an object’s shadow and decrease its ability to scatter light. In effect, the cloak guides the microwave beams around the object so they can’t bounce back—rendering it invisible. Until scientists can scale up, however, it might be useful only for getting toy cars out of a speeding ticket.

TIME 3 to 8 hours COST About $100 DIFFICULTY ▯○○○○

INSTRUCTIONS 1. Find a 3-D printer, preferably one that builds objects in thin layers of plastic (a process called fused deposition modeling). If you don’t own a 3-D printer, can’t borrow one, or lack the funds to buy one—typically $500 or more— you can pay an online company (such as Shapeways or RedEye on Demand) to print a design for you.

2. Download Urzhumov’s design file at popsci.com/microwavecloak and print it out. (The default thickness is 1 centimeter, but it can expand as tall as a 3-D printer allows.)

3. To use the invisibility cloak, line the disk’s inner ring with aluminum foil, lay it on a flat surface, and put an object 5.4 inches long or less inside. Any microwaves shining on the disk’s outer edge won’t reveal your precious property.

COUR TESY YAROSL AV UR ZHUMOV

H2

HOW 2.0 / SIMPLE PROJECT OF THE MONTH

ASK A GEEK / HOW 2.0 STO R Y BY JACK DONOVAN

ILLUSTR ATION BY MICHELLE MRUK

My Friend Gave Me a Bitcoin. Now What?

Use this crypto-currency to fund ambitious projects

S

o you’ve got yourself a bitcoin. Congratulations! Its value was hovering around $100 at press time. But what can you do with your newly acquired digital riches?

Quite a lot, as it turns out—especially if you have a penchant for projects.

More and more vendors who cater to makers accept bitcoin, a digital currency that’s created and maintained by its own extensive virtual network. Bitcoins add little or nothing to overhead because they carry no inherent processing fees and can’t be traced. This translates to savings on tools and materials for projects.

CryptoPrinting.com, for example, will 3-D–print custom designs for prices the company claims are about 20 percent cheaper than its competitors’.

Bitcoinstore.com offers a wide variety of electronic parts, such as Arduino microcontrollers, power supplies, and cameras. Go to Spendbitcoins.com for a list of other sites that take part in the blossoming mini economy, including virtual marketplaces like Coingig.com, where bitcoin owners can independently buy and sell items from one another.

Want a bit more coin? Success isn’t easy, but all you need to mine the currency is a computer that’s properly configured to help anonymously secure and verify others’ bitcoin transactions (for a great guide on mining, see popsci.com/bcmining).

If your computer miner pays for itself, then you can start saving up for all your geekiest workshop desires.

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FOR A FREE WATER SAMPLE CALL (570)-296-0214

LISTEN TO A TOLL FREE RECORDING AT 1-800-433-9553 BUY BOTTLED WATER!!! www.WaterCuresAnything.com Call us for a FREE sample of our water at 570-296-0214 About John Ellis Water®

This is the entrance to our 418-acre estate in Shohola, Pa.…a gorgeous property on top of a mountain we bought overlooking the Delaware River. Most of our business profits go to this property to support 3,000 boy scouts, girl scouts and disadvantaged youngsters.

…The 83 year old inventor is a Choate School, Lafayette College Engineering graduate, Douglas Aerospace and Honeywell Engineer that discovered the “KEY” to a HYDROGEN ECONOMY. In the past, it took too much power to split the water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen. He has found a way to do it using very little power. If you click on the two red “click here” spots at the top of www.johnellis.com, it explains it. Watch a VIDEO adding ONLY 20 DROPS of water from his home water machine to ordinary water that saps your energy! UCLA Med Center M.D. stating the hydrogen bond angle change to 114°: “You can’t argue with measurable results. Nothing is even close to your water for Blood Flow (94% water) to the extremities!” Washington Post investigative article: “10,000 people/day, cures anything!” www.WaterCuresAnything.com

THE CANCER VIRUS ANSWER? Who would know better than the founder of the American Cancer Society?

THE WORLD’S BEST WATER PURIFIER (332 FDA Approved Tests because it REPURIFIES water 100’s of times/gal! NOT ONCE!!).

Ordinary products violate FTC Order C-3220 as a result of tests on our older versions and complaint filed with the FTC in 1987!

Now, after almost 40 years in business, we have developed machines that are the “State of The Art”! PROOF: Watch the Video at www.

WaterCuresAnything.com and you will see that if you add only 20 DROPS of this water to ordinary water it takes less energy to split water into into hydrogen and oxygen (like “The Body Electric”, that also splits water into hydrogen and oxygen providing more energy to keep you alive)! In the past, it took too much energy to split ordinary water (with a Hydrogen Bond Angle of 104.5 degrees) into hydrogen and oxygen to make hydrogen a feasible energy source. However, by using this patented method of heating and cooling, it increases the measurable hydrogen bond angle to 113.8 degrees (tunneling electron microscope) so less energy is required. Trucks require 30 amps of power to split ordinary water by electrolysis. WATCH THE AMMETER in the Video. The power gradually drops from 30 amps to almost ZERO (less than 1 amp) while producing plenty of hydrogen! A revolutionary discovery that will allow the world to “Go Green” without eventually running out of the energy sources that produce pollutants that are destroying the environment and us!

A scientist called from Zurich, Switzerland: “I have had your E5 machine exactly 24 hours. I have elephantitis in my legs. I lost all that water weight and bought the first pair of ordinary shoes I have worn in years. Then, using only 100 watts of power, I couldn’t believe how much hydrogen your water can produce! It violates Faraday’s Law! Why is that?” This discovery is explained in the “Answer to Cold Fusion” by Jon Christian Ryter. READ IT and you will realize if you buy a machine from us, you will be the first in line to buy one of these electrolyis units that can be used to heat your home, produce electricity and (later) power your car for pennies!! Since the electrolysis units are inexpensive and the world wide demand is so great, you won’t have to wait years to buy one if you are already a water machine customer.

An M.D. who was doing blood flow studies at the UCLA MEDICAL SCHOOL: “Nobody can argue with something you can measure. We can measure the ability of blood (94% water) to go through a membrane into the cells to the extremities. Nothing is even close to your water!

Your Hydrogen Bond Angle is 114 degrees!” We knew that it was saving diabetics from amputation and the Washington Post sent reporters to investigate and write an article on our website as far back as 1/27/92 when we were developing these machines. A man in Mexico (our Mexican Patent 239719) was running our water into a well giving it away: “10,000 people/ day, cures anything!” Scientists ranging from the Los Alamos Nuclear Lab to Lawrence Livermore called the Ad Manager at The Washington Times (we have advertised there every week for 17 years) with an apology about the “impossible” results: “We are wrong. He is right. He has changed the properties of water!” Shills for the water industry with no degrees in this field can’t argue with the results because they are MEASURABLE and yet you will see a “Water Scam Report” that violates the FTC Order C-3220.

We filed our complaint with Joel Winston at the FTC and he sent us the final Order that we used in our older literature. Now, we are about ready to file again: Look at the VIRUS & BACTERIA DESTRUCTION CHART on our website. Each one has a different Destruction Time and NONE allow enough time to destroy them and change WATER PROPERTIES! DOLE FOODS tested our water on mold spores for 9 months and sent us a 7 page contract because a Dow Chemical caused serious problems! Go to “JEWISH VIRTUAL LIBRARY/BIOTERRORISM” and you will see that mold spores in small amounts dispersed by airplane could kill 1/3 of the population while also contaminating our water supplies!! Do you see why the DOLE results are important? 7 Muslims, MIT Chemical Engineers ignoring the No Trespassing Signs, were caught at 1 AM at the Boston reservoir! You know they have my machines and have read the Associated Press testing (2/10/08) about 57 drugs in municipal water supplies! Thousands of wells have been returned to purity using only 10 gallons of my water on each well, so you know they can reverse this technology to contaminate our water supplies with deadly consequences! Read the letter on the town letterhead from LaSalle, CO! ONLY 1000 gallons of our “light tap water” treated over 10 million gallons of e-coli in an “untreatable” 5 acre waste lagoon avoiding fines of $10,000/ day from the State! No other water product can do that and our countertop machines produce TWO types of water! Learn more...it may save your life!

Watch an online video of John Ellis, 83 year old Inventor

www.WaterCuresAnything.com Order a machine 845-754-8696

Zoom Binoculars 140x MILITARY

FYI POPSCI.COM

SEPTEMBER 2013 ANSWERS BY DANIEL ENGBER

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

ONE TOUCH

ZOOM

See the color of an eagle’s eye...

QUESTION

HO W F ORCEFUL IS A SNEE ZE ?

SHORT ANSWER

About as strong as a cough

SUPERSTOCK/GET T Y IMAGES

LONG ANSWER

A long-standing estimate pins the velocity of a sneeze at roughly 100 meters per second, or 224 miles per hour, but that appears to be a gross exaggeration. The figure originates from a mid-century researcher named William Firth Wells, who analyzed the size of airborne droplets from a sneeze and then inferred the speed at which air must travel across a liquid surface to form them. Wells’ figure has been repeated for many years but never directly tested in the lab. “I think people have been waiting for someone to come along and debunk it,” says Julian Tang, a medical virologist at the Alberta Provincial Laboratory for Public Health in Edmonton.

For a study published this year, Tang and his colleagues used high-speed cameras to take pictures of pepper-induced sneezes from six volunteers. The team captured each sneeze by positioning the volunteers in front of a concave mirror and then shining an LED beam toward it. The warm air from the

sneeze has a different refractive index than the cooler ambient air, so the reflected LED bends differently. The camera records the changes, and scientists can map the sneeze.

The study found that a sneeze’s maximum velocity is nowhere near 100 meters per second but instead reaches a high of 4.5 meters per second, or 10 miles per hour. That’s comparable to the velocity of air expelled by coughing—and a violent cough can push up a larger volume of air, which requires even more force. “The sneeze is really coming from your upper respiratory tract,” Tang explains.

Tang, who did his study in Singapore, acknowledges that his numbers might have come out differently if he’d chosen different subjects. “All my data is from these rather slim Asian students,” he says. “If somebody did this in the North American setting, with the bigger body frames that they have here, they might find higher velocities.”

SEP TEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 75

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DO INSE C T S H AV E P E R S ON A L I T IE S ?

Yes, and some love to travel.

LONG ANSWER

For the entomophiles who keep insects as pets, this question will seem a little silly. Some bugs appear aggressive, and others, shy; some venture into the open, others hide by the wall. But beyond casual observation, researchers are still learning the dimensions of an insect’s personality and how individuals of the same species might differ in temperament.

Last year, a group based at the University of Illinois looked at “novelty-seeking” tendencies in honeybees. The scientists found that bees that routinely searched for new

nest sites also had a very strong tendency to scout for food. That suggests particular individuals are programmed in such a way, whether through genetic or other factors, that they manifest wanderlust and an inclination to explore.

“Most people think that insects are very similar and behave in the same ways,” says Enikő Gyuris, a biologist at the University of Debrecen in Hungary, but she has found differently. In her studies of fire bugs, Gyuris uses a battery of behavioral tests to measure three distinct personality traits: bold-

ness, activity, and “explorativeness.”

In a recent study, she put each bug into an open vial and then placed it at the center of a two-foot-wide circular arena. The boldest bugs emerged quickly, while the timid ones hid for 10 minutes. Once the bugs left the vial, their tendency to move in different directions and investigate new objects served as an index of their explorativeness. “Our results show that there are personality differences between the individuals of the fire bug,” Gyuris wrote, “as we found that they behave consistently over time.”

DANIEL COOPER/GETT Y IMAGES

SHORT ANSWER

DOWNED CONTINUED FROM PAGE 63

COUR TESY PAT SCANNON/BENTPROP

A B-24 bomber flying over Japanese installations in Koror, Palau, in 1944. The trail of smoke is from another B-24, crashing.

Terrill fills his scuba tank with nitrox to allow himself more time to explore the aircraft 100 feet below. Shannon Scott, an engineer from Scripps, descends with Terrill, Colmer, and O’Brien. He carries a handheld sonar that displays acoustic images on an LCD screen, allowing the divers to zero in on the floatplane even in five-foot visibility. About 20 minutes later, O’Brien surfaces. “Well, it’s not a Kingfisher,” he says.

After descending to the plane, O’Brien noticed that the windscreen on the cockpit was located behind the wing. In Kingfishers, it was situated in front. He’d also detected a subtle distinction in the shape of the fuselage near the tail.

I strap on a scuba tank and jump into the water with Scannon, who wants to see for himself. We follow a rope line, pinching our noses on the way down to equalize pressure, until we arrive at the fuselage. It lays on a bed of thick sediment that our fins kick up into dusty clouds. Long, gangly strands of black coral grow up and through the corroded metal. The front motor and propellers have broken away from the body of the plane, so that it now resembles a chewed-off cigar or the burnt end of a firecracker. Scannon waves me over to the cockpit and places my hand on the gun mount. It held a 7.7mm machine gun, Scannon later explains to me, developed by the Japanese navy.

The next day, BentProp compares the aircraft in the western lagoon with a hundred different vintage planes. Eventually,

the team determines that the wreck has all the characteristics of a Kawanishi E15K1 Shiun, code-named Norm by the Allies. The high-speed reconnaissance floatplane had a single engine, contrarotating propellers, and a center pontoon that could be jettisoned during an attack.

It also had a flattened beaver tail around the vertical stabilizer, an aft cockpit machine gun, and no wing armaments.

According to BentProp, the Japanese manufactured nine prototypes; six were brought to Palau for combat testing, and all were shot down by U.S. forces.

Though it isn’t an American plane, Scannon is pleased with the discovery.

“It’s a very unusual aircraft, one of the rarest archaeological planes you will find,” he says. “And there’s a very high likelihood that the remains are still on it.”

BentProp alerts the Palauan government, which will notify the Japanese embassy.

OF MORE THAN 60 aircraft BentProp has identified in Palau—half of which are Japanese—the team has recovered just one metal plate stamped with a serial number: that of the American Corsair discovered by the spear fishermen. That plate revealed the Corsair’s story.

On November 21, 1944, a young Marine captain named Carroll McCullah set off from the American airfield to finish off a Japanese vessel that had been bombed earlier. On the way back, he and his wingman strafed four Japanese ammunition dumps; an explosion at the last one sent shrapnel into the oil cooler of his plane.

McCullah placed a distress call and made for the island’s western reef. Then he tightened his seat belt, locked the canopy back, and turned off the plane’s engine switch. Placing his left hand on the cockpit coaming, he braced for impact.

“There was no shock,” McCullah later wrote in a mission report. He launched his life raft and swam across the reef, where a rescue aircraft swept down to pick him up. For the rest of his life, McCullah—who, after his rescue, went back to the base, had a brandy, and then flew another mission the next day—retold the story of that landing. “And many other ones,” his son, Patrick, told me by phone from Florida, where McCullah lives (with dementia) at age 92. “His tales were tall, but they were true.”

Today, McCullah’s plane rests intact SEP TEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 77

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DOWNED CONTINUED FROM PAGE 77

on the seabed, with its nose up against the edge of the reef, like a car driven up onto a curb and abandoned. But time has turned the craft into a relic: corrosion has gnawed at the metal, and the reef has crept into the propellers and the engine; a large, bulbous coral head has taken up occupancy in the cockpit. Originally painted blue, with a white star-and-bar symbol, the aircraft has been scoured to bare aluminum.

Scripps wants to use its technology to document this chapter of the Corsair’s story too, before it ends altogether. “We’re not only here to find and detect underwater objects, but to get a snapshot of the state of those objects that may be corroding or eroding away in time,” Terrill says. “There’s a whole new field in trying to baseline-capture all the detail we can about these historic artifacts. I’m calling it digital preservation.”

Suzanne Finney, an American archaeologist working with Palau’s Bureau of Arts and Culture, joins us for the 45-minute boat ride to the site of the Corsair. Marine archeology rarely gets to benefit from such advances, she says. “Most of the work I’ve done, you’ve got a tape measure and some string and a dive slate and a pencil, and you’re taking photographs and measurements by hand. And that’s what you do.” With data from the robotic vehicles, Palau can add downed aircraft to an inventory of the country’s rich underwater sites, something previously unattainable for an office that can barely afford to buy gas for a boat. “There are a lot of wrecks in water that’s inaccessible to diving,” she says, “so you need remote-sensing equipment.” By the time the expedition

ends, the AUV has scanned 18.9 square kilometers of the seafloor at slightly better than 10cm resolution, an area that would have taken scuba divers a decade to explore. The sonar also revealed what Terrill says could be a new species of coral.

When we reach the Corsair, engineers lower the Remus, now equipped with GoPro HERO3 HD cameras, into the water, and it once again begins a methodical sweep. Back in California, Terrill and his team will use the thousands of captured images, plus hundreds of photos taken by human divers, to build a 3-D reconstruction of the plane. Terrill is beta-testing algorithms developed by Autodesk for the company’s new cloud-based, reality-capture software, called ReCap; the software has been designed to model aboveground areas like historic sites and factory floors, and Terrill is evaluating how well it works in an aquatic environment, where light is distorted. “Man-made structures underwater are an ideal testbed for that,” he says. “If it pans out, it’ll be a great archaeological tool to baseline a lot of these wrecks.”

Scientists and naval historians could use such technology to document how wreck sites decay. Oceanographers and biologists studying living structures such as coral reefs could also benefit from it; 3-D models would enable them to detect how ocean acidification and events like typhoons alter reefs over time. And, of course, Scannon hopes that one day AUVs will lead him to his biggest find, the final B-24, so that a perfect replica of it, too, can be recorded for posterity. For now, it still lies somewhere in the lagoons surrounding Palau, concealed by water and time.

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From the Archives POPUL AR SCIENCE / SEP TEMBER 2013

STO R Y BY S A R A H JACOBY

Subsea Explorers W

hen POPULAR SCIENCE published its December 1981 cover story, remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) had just begun to probe dangerous marine environments, like shipwreck sites. Controlled by pilots at the surface, the vessels could descend deeper, explore longer, and ascend faster than human divers. More than 30 years

later, untethered autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are a staple of oceanographers. AUVs like Remus—designed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution—don’t need pilots at all; engineers program them to survey the seafloor on their own. Turn to page 58 to learn how AUVs are finding felled World War II planes off the coast of Palau in the Pacific Ocean.

3

2 1 4

1 Scorpio, used for repair and observation 2 PAP-104, a mine neutralizer 3 RCV-150, installed rigs and supported drills 4 MUT, bottom crawler that laid pipeline

POPULAR SCIENCE magazine, Vol. 283, No. 3 (ISSN 161-7370, USPS 577-250), is published monthly by Bonnier Corp., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. Copyright ©2013 by Bonnier Corp. All rights reserved. Reprinting in whole or part is forbidden except by permission of Bonnier Corp. Mailing Lists: We make a portion of our mailing list available to reputable firms. If you would prefer that we not include your name, please write to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. Subscription Rates: $19.95 for 1 year.

Please add $10 per year for Canadian addresses and $20 per year for all other international addresses. GST #R-122988066. Canada Post Publications agreement #40612608. Canada Return Mail: IMEX Global Solutions, P.O. Box 25542, London, ON N6C 6B2. Printed in the USA. Subscriptions processed electronically. Subscribers: If the post office alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within two years. Photocopy Permission: Permission is granted by POPULAR SCIENCE® for libraries and others registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) to photocopy articles in this issue for the flat fee of $1 per copy of each article or any part of an article. Send correspondence and payment to CCC (21 Congress St., Salem, MA 01970); specify CCC code 0161-7370/85/$1.00–0.00. Copying done for other than personal or reference use without the written permission of POPULAR SCIENCE® is prohibited.

Address requests for permission on bulk orders to POPULAR SCIENCE, 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016 for foreign requests. Editorial Offices: Address contributions to POPULAR SCIENCE, Editorial Dept., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. We are not responsible for loss of unsolicited materials; they will not be returned unless accompanied by return postage. Microfilm editions are available from Xerox University Microfilms Serial Bid Coordinator, 300 N. Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48106.

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