Popular science usa 2013 11

FAKE MEAT IS THE FUTURE OF OUR PLANET

LIFE VIA HYPERLOOP

WA FFL E HOUSE YELLOW

Elon Musk’s plan to connect a nation at 760 mph

ROBOT BOSS 120 Days Working for A Machine Overlord

DARK MATTER Inside the epic search for the fabric of the universe

14

DANGEROUS, DISGUSTING, AND AMAZING JOBS IN SCIENCE

HOW COFFEE AND HASH BROWNS PREDICT DISASTER RECOVERY

TECHNOLOGY MEETS TRADITION IT’S NOT OFTEN you get an assignment from POPULAR SCIENCE to film a whisky distillery in Scotland, especially not one as steeped in tradition as Glenfiddich. The iconic science magazine is usually focused on innovation and more known for covering space, robots, green energy and futuristic gadgets you might mistake for props in a science fiction movie.

A quick glance at the map reveals that, rather than being a big, modern facility near Edinburgh or Glasgow, our location is well off the beaten track, deep in Scotland’s Speyside whisky country, and one of the last familyowned distilleries. Curiosity aroused, we set off on the long journey to Dufftown, Banffshire in the land of thistle and loch.

Bracing for the five hour drive from Edinburgh through steeply rising rocky hills, we rent the largest car our transatlantic cousins have on offer. Predictably, this turns out to be about the size of New York roller skate, which is pretty fortunate since the roads quickly narrow to the width of a sidewalk as soon as we leave the suburbs. Prickly hedges rise intermittently on either side of us, making driving feel like a

game of chicken in Grand Theft Auto.

The further away we move from the city, and the deeper we drive into the heartland of the Scots, the more sense it all makes.

Glancing out the windows at the ruggedly handsome countryside, with its moody, greyclad skies, deep green rolling hills, gnarled and wiry ancient trees, it’s easy to understand the pride, history and pioneering spirit required to endure in this tough countryside.

The distillery, located just outside picturesque Dufftown, sits in the shadow of Balvenie Castle. But as we discover on our first scouting mission, there is far more to its unassuming buildings and warehouses than meets the eye.

Our first stop is the mash house, where malted barley begins its long journey to your whisky glass. Hidden within its innocentlooking stucco walls are gigantic copper domed cylindrical vats called “tuns” inside which barley is mixed with steamy hot water and slowly stirred. It doesn’t feel like a factory: the gleaming copper and polished glass are meticulously maintained. There is a tangible

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sense of craft and quality.

Next we visit is the “still” house, where beery wort is distilled into liquor. Sunlight streaking through high windows washes over a forest of gleaming copper pot stills over ten feet high. There are no simple, straight pipes here. It’s all sexy golden curves, beautifully engineered and tooled to perfection, a steampunk heaven that simultaneously calls to mind the future and the past. Although we get the sense there are computers hidden from view, monitoring and measuring, everything is operated and periodically checked by a few earnest craftsmen in whose skill and experience you just can’t help but trust.

Even in the depths of warehouse 8, lined with aging oak barrels stacked head high, there is innovation amid tradition. The Solera vat—a Glenfiddich first—is a huge pine cask that is filled from the top, drawn from the bottom and never emptied, a technique borrowed from Spanish sherry makers.

Very fitting then, that the reason we are here is to use a cutting edge interactive video technology to make an immersive tour experience for those people who are not lucky enough to visit the distillery themselves—a tour that reveals Glenfiddich’s art and science of whisky making.

The tour app will be available on iTunes November 2013.

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Contents VOLUME 283 NO. 5

DEPARTMENTS

NOVEMBER 2013

06 From the Editor 08 Peer Review 10 Megapixels 72 FYI: How did English become the international language of science?

84 From the Archives

WHAT’S NEW 13 The ultimate home voice-control device 14 The Goods: The most efficient LED bulb and more 18 An inside look at Porsche’s powerful hybrid 22 Open a wine bottle without uncorking it 24 Seriously, can anyone be a photojournalist now?

HEADLINES

BRIAN KLUTCH ; ON THE COVER : TR AVIS R ATHBONE

27 Disaster recovery as demonstrated by Waffle House 30 24 miniature lakes in 66-foot-tall test tubes 31 The future of commuting with Elon Musk’s Hyperloop 32 The best robo frog 34 Why we should make the moon a protected park

HOW 2.0 65 The high-tech tree that makes music in response to motion 68 Build a moon-o-scope from old reading glasses 70 Turn a smartphone into a cheap scanner 71 Hack a soda can into a soldering stencil

FE ATURES 36 THE SHADOW UNIVERSE Dark matter, which makes up 85 percent of cosmic mass, is one of the biggest mysteries in science. Physicists are now on the cusp of determining what it is.

By Corey S. Powell

50 I AM ROBOT BOSS

56 THE MEAT LAB

In which POPSCI’S editor in chief commutes from his home in California to the editorial offices in New York via remote-presence robot.

Over a month, he glimpses the office of tomorrow.

By Jacob Ward

The planet could soon face an acute shortage of meat. Can scientists reimagine one of our most beloved foods?

By Tom Foster

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

44 THE WORST JOBS IN SCIENCE (AND THREE GREAT ONES) There are great science careers, such as ice cream developer, and then there are jobs like bedbug rearer.

Discover eight of the gnarliest jobs that researchers do— and learn why they endure unsanitary, unsightly, and sometimes unsafe conditions in the name of science.

By Doug Cantor

NOVEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 0 3

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From the Editor

THE FUTURE NOW

NOVEMBER 2013 / POPULAR SCIENCE Editor-in-Chief Jacob Ward Creative Director Sam Syed Executive Editor Cliff Ransom Managing Editor Jill C. Shomer EDITORIAL Articles Editor Jennifer Bogo Editorial Production Manager Felicia Pardo Senior Editor Martha Harbison Information Editor Katie Peek, Ph.D. Projects Editor Dave Mosher Senior Associate Editors Corinne Iozzio, Susannah F. Locke Assistant Editor Amber Williams Editorial Assistant Lindsey Kratochwill Copy Editors Joe Mejia, Leah Zibulsky Researchers Kaitlin Bell Barnett, Claire Levenson, 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 Data Intern Jefferson Mok

Technical Problems T

06 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

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

“When you let an engineer throw the party, sometimes it can be a little awkward.” training in amperage and wiring (how stuff is made) to an abstract interest in human interactions (how stuff is used). “I went from doing robotics—an engineering path—to social cues. I started thinking about gaze length, trust, really subtle stuff.”

On page 56, Tom Foster explores another awkward intersection between engineering and human experience: the creation of artificial meat. As the planet outgrows its natural meat supply, engineered meat could act as a substitute. But whether grown in a lab or made of vegetables, the stuff is just plain gross to most of us. That revulsion—Tom calls it the uncanny valley of food—is a culinary version of the same reaction several of my colleagues had to my robot self. The engineers, once again, have a big job to do.

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 Operating Officer Lisa Earlywine Chief Brand Development Officer Sean Holzman Vice President, Consumer Marketing Bruce Miller 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. or you can write to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235

MARIUS BUGGE

HE WORLD belongs to engineers.

I mean no offense to designers. As a journalist, I covered design for several years and developed a high opinion of it. If nothing else, design humanizes research and technology. But for a fundamental task—a suit that will keep astronauts’ blood from boiling in space, a bridge across an impossible chasm—call an engineer.

As any engineer can tell you, though, the profession isn’t known for social graces. And yet engineers now make mobile devices, software, and video compression—they’re building social experiences. And when you let an engineer throw the party, sometimes it can be a little awkward.

I spent the last few months testing a new category of social engineering: remote-presence devices. These are mechanical avatars through which I can haunt Popular Science’s New York office from my home in Oakland, holding meetings, popping in on the staff, and generally freaking everyone out. (I describe the experience on page 50.)

But it turns out face-to-face conversation can’t just be engineered.

In 1994, Eric Paulos, a UC Berkeley electrical engineer and computer scientist, built the first remotepresence device: a blimp that allowed an operator to see and speak through it. This predated breakthroughs like Wi-Fi, tiny monitors, and reliable actuators as well as Gmail, Skype, and other basics of connected society.

And while Paulos managed to create a device, he quickly ran into the problems associated with engineering human interactions.

“It was a big transition point for me,” says Paulos, now director of the Living Environments Lab. He had to make the leap from his fundamental

© Les Voorhis

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Peer Review POPSCI.TUMBLR.COM

T WIT TER @POPSCI

FACEBOOK.COM/POPSCI

PINTER EST.COM /POPU L ARSCIENCE

FROM TWITTER: WE ASKED:

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A N E DU C AT I O N Hands-on teaching [“Lab Is in Session,” September 2013] worked well in my middle-school science class, but I have to pay out of my own pocket for supplies. In many public schools, the science-department budget is the same as other departments, but a microscope is far more expensive than construction paper. New standards are excellent but worthless without the means to apply them.

Travis Ward, Austin, Texas Over the years, science has been taught more and more as an accumulation of technical facts. I hope that soon people will see that learning from direct interaction with primary sources is a good way to learn in all disciplines, that science isn’t a subject but a method.

Barrett Koster, Raleigh, N.C.

I was impressed with Reaction Engines’ concept for SSTO propulsion [“From Runway to Orbit and Back,” September 2013]. Most scramjets suffer high total-pressure losses while trying to mix the fuel with compressed air. The idea of cooling the incoming air using helium appears unique, but the heat rejection issue was not discussed.

G. Burton Northam, Mocksville, N.C.

Sci-Fi DIY Reading about the giant six-legged robot “The Mantis” [September 2013], I thought of Robert Heinlein’s 1953 book, Farmer in the Sky, in which a walker wagon vehicle was powered by 19 legs on each side.

William A. Buchanan, Livermore, Calif.

THE FUTURE NOW

MAIN OFFICE 2 Park Ave., 9th Floor New York, NY 10016 popsci.com NEW SUBSCRIPTIONS popsci.com/subscribe SUBSCRIPTION INQUIRIES Change of address or subscription problems: Popular Science P.O. Box 420235 Palm Coast, FL 32142 386-597-4279 popsci.com/cs INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS Inquiries regarding international licensing or syndication: syndication@popsci.com LETTERS To the editor: letters@popsci.com FYI questions: fyi@popsci.com Ask a Geek: h20@popsci.com Story queries: queries@popsci.com

A VIEW FROM SPACE: At his request, we sent electronic copies of POPULAR SCIENCE to NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy throughout his 166-day stay on the International Space Station. He wrote to thank us:

“With the mesmerizing beauty of our planet beneath me, I look forward to each new edition of the magazine.

I find it inspiring to read about the future of science and technology as I live on its frontier.”

—CHRIS CASSIDY, E XPEDITION 36

08 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

“Good news! We now have a Wi-Fi network exclusively for robots.”

ROBOTS Masked projects editor Dave Mosher alarms co-workers with a telepresence bot.

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.

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POPULAR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

Megapixels STO R Y BY ERIN BRODWIN

10 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

C O U R T ESY WA S HI N GTO N STAT E D E PA R T M E N T O F T R A N S P O R TAT I O N

F UL L B O RE A

fter a 2001 earthquake severely damaged the double-decker section of Seattle’s Route 99 highway, state and city officials decided to move the main thoroughfare underground. In July, they unleashed Bertha, the world’s largest-diameter tunnel-boring machine. Built in Japan and reassembled in the U.S., Bertha is digging the 1.7-mile tunnel by advancing at an average of 35 feet a day. As its 57.5-foot-wide head spins, 4-by-6-inch drill bits tear into the ground, dislodging small rocks and breaking up the soil. A set of spinning gears on the head crumbles large boulders. Scrapers then knock the dirt onto a conveyor belt that brings the haul to the surface. Bertha even has its own electric power source, so its 25,000-horsepower engine won’t disrupt the local grid. Seattle’s new doubledecker highway is scheduled to open in 2015.

NOVEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 1 1

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A hybrid that’s actually fun to drive PAGE 18

Ivee Sleek

WHAT’S NEW

Never Waste Wine Again PAGE 22

POPSCI.COM / @POPSCI

NOVEMBER 2013

EDITED BY CORINNE IOZZIO WHATSNE W@POPSCI.COM

Operating range 10 to 15 feet Understood commands Unlimited Price $230

Master of the House

A hub for whole-home voice control

I

STO R Y BY ERIN BRODWIN PHOTOGR APH BY BRIAN KLUTCH

n 1968, Arthur C. Clarke created HAL 9000, the sentient computer in his Space Odyssey series. Now, more than 60 years later, the company Ivee has launched something similar, albeit less villainous. The Sleek draws individual smart-home devices into a single hub and adds artificial intelligence so that users gain voice control over them all.

In other words, it’s HAL for your home.

Once the Sleek is on the local Wi-Fi, users add devices through a Web dashboard. When the Sleek hears a command, it sends the audio to the WATSON language-processing server, which converts the signal to text. The Sleek scans for keywords to determine its action. (If it hears “make it warmer in here,” it gets that warmer and here mean ticking up the thermostat.) The Sleek is currently compatible with only a handful of devices, but engineers are updating its software all the time, so it’s getting smarter and more versatile with each passing month.

NOVEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 13

WHAT’S NE W

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With the TiVo Roamio DVR, a user can watch recorded shows almost anywhere. Any iOS device can connect to the cable box, which has built-in Wi-Fi and can record six shows at a time. It stores up to 450 hours of media.

The Helios Bars have integrated Bluetooth 4.0 and GPS so they can give cyclists turnby-turn directions.

After a user enters a destination on a connected phone, the handlebars’ rear-facing left or right LEDs will flash to indicate upcoming turns.

The Vaavud turns a smartphone into a wind-speed gauge.

The plastic rotor, which contains four magnets, plugs into a headphone jack. As it spins, the magnetic field around the phone fluctuates.

An associated app translates the readings into wind speed, which are as accurate as those by a standalone meter.

The Victorinox Bike Tool is a Swiss Army knife for cyclists. The 3.5-ounce multitool has an L-wrench for tightening screws, eight bits, and a tire lever.

The casing is made from an impact-proof and oil- and gasolineresistant plastic.

The RBZ is the most maneuverable hockey skate on the market.

The skate comes with customizable arch support and a taller blade holder, which allows players to make turns 10 percent more tightly than players on standard skates.

Victorinox Bike Tool $48

CCM RBZ Ice Hockey Skates $749

The MakerBot Digitizer desktop scanner fast-tracks the 3-D-printing process.

Using a 1.3-megapixel camera and two lasers, it scans objects up to eight inches tall and 6.6 pounds and converts the scan into a 3-D file that can be modified with CAD or sent straight to a 3-D printer.

TiVo Roamio Pro $600

Helios Bars $199 (available December)

Vaavud Wind Meter $50

14 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

MakerBot Digitizer Desktop 3-D Scanner $1,400

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The Black & Decker impact screwdriver can spin at 2,200 rpm—more than 10 times faster than a typical cordless screwdriver. When it meets resistance, the tool’s impact mechanism kicks in, delivering fast pulses that increase the torque delivered to the screw.

MetroNap alerts subway riders when they’ve reached their destination. Because GPS doesn’t work underground, the app makes use of the phone’s accelerometer, which detects when the train is moving.

With info about the typical commute time between stations, the app sets off the ringer upon arrival.

Using only 12 watts, NanoLeaf produces 1,600 lumens, making it the most efficient LED lightbulb. Printed circuit boards provide both the bulb’s circuitry and structure. And because the 33 LEDs draw so little energy, they also produce little heat, eliminating the need for a heat sink, so the bulb is lighter.

The VIRB action camera records up to three hours of 1080p video on one charge, the longest life in its class.

It also has GPS, an accelerometer, and an altimeter, which can track a user’s location, speed, and elevation in sync with the video.

ThermoBall insulation is comparable to 600-fill down, but with two critical differences. It doesn’t lose its warmth when wet (it’s a waterrepellent synthetic), and it doesn’t clump together because the tiny clusters sit within hundreds of isolated sections.

The Nessie is the first USB microphone that adapts to any audio in real time. It automatically smooths and levels incoming vocals, instruments, and voiceovers—streamlining editing so audio clips are ready to go faster.

Black & Decker 8V Max Impact Screwdriver $40

NanoLeaf $45

Garmin VIRB Elite $400

Blue Microphones Nessie $100

The North Face ThermoBall Full Zip Jacket $199

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NOVEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 1 5

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WHAT’S NE W / HOW IT WORKS STO R Y BY L AWRENCE ULRICH

COMPUTER ENGINE

Green Speed

ELECTRIC MOTO R

A powerful hybrid that charges on the go

M

ost hybrid-auto makers have the efficiency thing down, but they still can’t build a high-performance car that’s both fun to drive and efficient. At least, not until now. To create the Porsche Panamera S E-Hybrid engineers married a supercharged V6 with a plug-in hybrid powertrain. The car’s three driving modes—electric, hybrid, and recharge—give drivers the flexibility they need to scream down the highway and then flip to electric power for short-range cruising.

2014 Porsche Panamera S E-Hybrid

TR ANSMIS SION

Price $99,975 Top speed 167 mph hybrid; 83 mph electric Horsepower 416 mph hybrid 95 mph electric

ELECTRIC A 9.4-kilowatt-hour battery powers the 95-horsepower electric motor, which delivers its full 229 foot-pounds of torque the instant the driver hits the throttle. Porsche says the battery will run for 22 miles (we clocked 33 on our test drive) before dipping below a 15 percent charge, at which point the gas engine kicks in. The engine will also fire up if the driver throttles past a certain threshhold, allowing him to blast from 0 to 60 in 5.2 seconds.

PLUG IN It takes only 2.5 hours to fill the battery from a 240-volt charging station.

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The motor and engine connect to the same eight-speed automatic transmission, and a computer determines when to draw power from which source. When the car is coasting, for example, the transmission will decouple from the gas engine to save fuel. As with most hybrids, the Panamera’s brakes recoup energy to keep the battery charged.

RECHARGE When the driver activates E-Charge mode, the 333-horsepower V6 engine engages and turns the electric motor, which then acts as a generator. In our test drive, it took 30 to 40 miles for the motor to fully recharge the depleted battery.

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22 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

Bottle clamp

anting only a glass or two of wine puts drinkers in a tough spot.

Once the bottle’s opened, the wine starts to oxidize and lose its flavor. No rubber stopper will halt the process, leaving partial bottles to go to waste.

Greg Lambrecht, a medical-device entrepreneur, figured out a way to solve the problem. The devices that Lambrecht once built used a special needle to access implants without creating permanent punctures. His Coravin Wine Access System uses the same idea to draw wine from a bottle without uncorking it.

To pour a glass, a user places the Coravin on top of a bottle, pushing its hollow 2mm-thick needle through the cork. A capsule then releases argon, an inert nonpoisonous gas, into the bottle. The pressure forces out the wine. In all, it takes about 20 seconds per pour; when the needle is removed, the cork reseals itself.

Over the past decade, Lambrecht has conducted blind tests with sommeliers to compare wine accessed with Coravin to unopened bottles of the same vintage. Most perceived no taste difference.

Meanwhile, Lambrecht has used Coravin to drink his bottle of inspiration, a 1990 Paul Jaboulet Aine Hermitage la Chapelle, in its entirety—one glass at a time, over three years.

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Can Anyone Do It? How to get good photos from untrained eyes

A

T THE END OF MAY, the Chicago SunTimes laid off all its staff photographers.

The paper would instead use newswires, freelancers, and reporters armed with iPhones. It was not the first time traditional media turned to untrained photojournalists—consider the Instagram photos NBC published after the Boston Marathon bombing or CNN’s iReport—but it was the first time any outlet made a policy of doing so.

As one might expect, the Sun-Times’ decision has met with criticism. It’s been called “shortsighted” and “idiotic.” There’s even a Tumblr of head-to-head comparisons between the Sun-Times and the stillphoto-staffed Chicago Tribune. But the change does have its logic. First, it’s cheap. And, in theory, it will give the Sun-Times even more reach, by leveraging the cameras already in place at news events.

For the strategy to pay off, however, cameraphone technology needs to support it in ways it currently doesn’t. Cameraphones have improved dramatically in the last few years—the Nokia PureView sensor has 41 megapixels, and HTC’s newest sensor has larger pixels that grab more light—but they still suffer from one great shortfall: inadequate lenses.

About a year ago, engineers began to address the issue by putting cellular radios inside cameras, rather than attempting to cram cameras inside phones.

The 16.3-megapixel Samsung Galaxy Camera has a 4G radio and a 21-times zoom lens. And the newer 20.3-megapixel Galaxy NX has an interchangeable lens mount. The Sony QX100, the newest offering in the lot, is the most extreme example. The device is just a lens, sensor, and image processor, and users attach their smartphone as a viewfinder.

Editors will need software that selects the best images— not just the ones from the right place at the right time.

Connected cameras may improve the overall quality of crowdsourced images, but they will do little for the editors whose job it is to sort through them. Current services provide a temporary solution. With Scoopshot, a Helsinki software start-up, publishers can send photo assignments to the service’s network of 300,000-plus mobile users. Stringwire, which NBC acquired in August, lets video producers request an uplink from anyone who has tweeted near an event of interest. But to assure quality, editors will need software that automatically selects the best images— not just the ones taken in the right place at the right time. That type of computer vision already exists on a small scale. A recent update to Google+ analyzes groups of pictures for blurriness, aesthetics, landmarks, and exposure to pick out the most shareable ones. The Sun-Times to benefit from that type of machine vision, the software will need to process larger image batches from multiple sources. In time, those pieces may come together, proving that the Sun-Times decision wasn’t foolish—it was just a bit before its time.

24 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

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

Comfort Food How Waffle House became a disaster indicator for FEMA STO R Y BY CL AY DILLOW

ILLUSTR ATION BY JES SE LENZ

F

OR SHELTER and supplies after a devastating storm, communities turn to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). But for a clear sense of how bad things are, FEMA turns to Waffle House. Nearly a decade ago, Florida’s emergency management chief, W. Craig Fugate, noticed that when information was scarce after a disaster, the status of a 24-hour Waffle House restaurant often indicated whether an area had electricity, gas, and passable roads. So he created a three-color rating: green (fully open), yellow (limited menu), and red (closed). Then he brought it with him to his current post as FEMA’s administrator.

Fugate isn’t the first to extrapolate large trends from unconventional indicators. Economists at Vanderbilt University recently used Big Mac prices to evaluate economic differences among countries that use the euro and those that use their own currency. Investment funds trading on oil reportedly hire aircraft to fly over the Port of Singapore (through which half the world’s crude oil is shipped) to gather anecdotal data on the number of tankers. In China, authorities ILLUSTR ATION BY JES SE LENZ

NOVEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 2 7

HEADLINES

employ an index of the sales of pickled mustard tubers (a food favored by its working class) to track its migrant workers in the country more accurately than official statistics do.

“The shared, underlying idea is that there are good measures, or proxies, for phenomena that might take a long time to measure rigorously,” says David Lazer, a computer and political scientist at Northeastern University.

Lazer and his colleagues work in a field known as network science, which looks at correlated phenomena to find meaning. Network scientists usually work on problems involving large data sets. For example, in much the way that Google Flu Trends analyzes search data (rather than medical data) to try to predict flu outbreaks faster than the CDC, Lazer’s team has developed algorithms that comb through mobile text and voice data (rather than meteorological or seismological data) for patterns generated by real-time emergencies such as earthquakes, bombings, and blackouts, often detecting them before local authorities do. Useful correlations can also be derived from small data sets, Lazer says, provided that each point carries a strong signal. That’s the virtue of the Waffle House Index: Rather than distilling a meaningful signal from a noisy, large data set, it uses a few data points with high-quality signals.

So what makes Waffle Houses so telling? For one, the chain has 500 similar locations throughout hurricane zones on the Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard as well as hundreds more across the flood- and tornado-prone Midwest. More important, Waffle House is a leader in disaster preparedness. It maintains its own fleet of portable generators, operates a mobile command center to assist in disaster recovery, and trains employees in crisis management to ensure that it

can resume operations as quickly as possible—often within hours. And since 2012, it reports all this information directly to FEMA via email.

The Waffle House Index is by no means a scientific indicator (a 2011 tornado destroyed or damaged one third of Joplin, Missouri, yet the area’s two Waffle Houses remained open), but its accuracy continues to improve. Last year, the company began using tropical-storm-tracking software to help it predict—down to the minute—when any Waffle House will be affected and when it’s safe to reopen. This allows the chain to pass its operational status to FEMA sooner, which in turn helps FEMA respond faster. It also helps Waffle House get hot meals and coffee to the victims and weary first responders. “There’s been a real shift in the last few years toward the private sector and public sector working together to get communities back up on their feet after a storm,” says Waffle House vice president of culture Pat Warner. “We’re just glad to play a part.”

CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF WAFFLES The nearly 1,700 Waffle House restaurants nationwide [red] are clustered near the tracks of the Atlantic hurricanes and tropical storms [gray] that have hit the continental U.S. since 1851.

CURIOSITY: ON THE ROAD AGAIN

BY L I L L I A N S T E E N B L I K H WA N G

NOVEMBER 26, 2011 The Mars rover Curiosity launched from Cape Canaveral at 10:02 EST, aboard the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft.

AUGUST 6, 2012 Landed in Mars’s Gale Crater at 1:32 a.m. EDT. It took its first photo soon after.

28 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

AUGUST 19, 2012 Shot a millionwatt laser, designed to plasmify rock. It’s the first laser of its kind used extraterrestrially.

SEPTEMBER 2012 Discovered an ancient streambed. Scientists used the size of the bed’s pebbles to calculate that the stream had been ankle-to-hip deep.

FEBRUARY 8, 2013 Performed the first robotic drilling on another planet. The geological samples will be analyzed for evidence of a once-wet environment.

JULY 4, 2013 Began its journey of about five miles, at a top speed of 450 feet an hour (0.085 mph), to the lower reaches of Mount Sharp.

JULY 2014 Projected to arrive at Mount Sharp, where layers of sedimentary rock are exposed.

Studying them could help explain the history of Mars’s environment.

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Lake Lab

Ecosystems in 66-foot-tall test tubes

T

he outdoors is a horribly inconsistent place to do science. That’s why many ecologists work in laboratories, where they can exactly replicate an experiment many times over, although with the understanding that their results may not fully reflect what would happen in nature. But on Lake Stechlin in Germany, researchers at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries have created a wild environment that they can manipulate as they please in order to run controlled tests. LakeLab is a group of enclosures that delineate 24 miniature lakes. Called “mesocosms,” the plastic cylinders are 30 feet across and 66 feet deep—they reach all the way to the bottom and hold not just water, but algae, plants, and everything else. Scientists are now tweaking the temperature distribution of 12 of the lakes to study the effects of climate change on the freshwater ecosystem.

LOW TECH

W OR L D ’S TOUGHEST FI BER

TESTING THE WATERS Researchers hypothesize that warmer water temperatures in Lake Stechlin will change algae numbers, potentially affecting the food chain and thus the survival of other inhabitants.

An Italian scientist, Nicola Pugno, discovered that tying a slipknot in a length of fiber dramatically increased its toughness, defined as the energy a material can absorb before breaking. That’s it. Tying a knot. As the loop slides, the fiber takes in extra energy before it snaps. After knotting the polymer Endumax, which normally absorbs 40 Joules per gram, Pugno found that it absorbed a record punishment: 1,070 Joules per gram.

BY LILLIAN STEENBLIK HWANG

30 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY PETER CASPER, IGB; ARTIST MODEL OF FOSSIL COUR TESY CK PR EPAR ATIONS ; COUR TESY IGB ; COUR TESY HT W -DRESDEN/OCZIPK A

This month, two fossilized dinosaurs, locked in eternal battle, will be auctioned off at Bonhams in New York City.

Experts expect them to fetch one of the highest ever prices for a fossil, up to $9 million.

The pair’s prehistoric fight was intense. The carnivore, called a Nanotyrannus, sports a cracked skull, and 26 of its teeth are lodged in the body of an herbivorous Triceratopslike dino. But the fossil’s significance goes beyond the action; the find, predicted to be more than 90 percent complete, could yield definitive evidence about whether the Nanotyrannus is actually a new type of dinosaur or just a young T. rex—evidence that other fragmented fossils can’t provide.

Discovered in 2006 on private land in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, the cretaceous-era duo is priced too high for any museum to purchase outright, which is why it’s headed to the block. — S A R A H J A C O B Y

HEADLINES / HYPOTHESIS STORY AND ILLUSTR ATION BY K ATIE PEEK Edmonton Vancouver

Calgary Winnipe innipeg

Seattle

Quebec Cityy Q Montreal Mont Montr re real

Portland Ottawaa Minneapolis apolis

Toronto Tor oront onto ont

mi

Wichita

Las Vegas

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Phoenix hoenix

Little ittle tle R Rock 1 hr 10 m

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Austin ustin in Chihuahua

San an Antonio

r1 1h

0m

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Birmin Birmingham Bir mingham ham mi

Atlanta Atlanta

25 mi n2 20

Jackson Jacksonville Jac son

Baton Ba on Rouge R

Houston Hous

Char Charleston

mi

in 25 mmi 240

Juárez Juáre ez Hermosillo mosillo

i inn 780 m

Norfolk Nor

60 r6

Dallas–Fort allas t Wor Worth orth th

Washin Wa Washington shington on

Ralei Raleigh Charlo Charlotte lot i Char m 15 Columbia olumbia hr

1h

Mexicali xicali T Tucson

ans

Orlando Or lando

Tam ampa pa St.. Petersburg sburgg Peter ersbur

NERD BOX Circles represent an approximate 900-mile driving radius from the 12 largest metro areas in North America. Lines represent Hyperloop connections from them. Travel times were calculated using a top speed of 300 mph within 30 miles of a city and 760 mph between cities.

Columbus olumbus Cincinnati Cincinna Cincinnati LLouisville ouisville ouisville

min

Nashville N shville ville

Tulsa ulsa

Albuquer Albuquerque

Los Angeles les San an Diego Die Tijuana juana

Saint aint Louis Louis

r5 1h

80

Colorado olorado Springs Spring Sprin Spr ggs

New York Ne

Philade P hiladelphia hilade Baltimore Baltimor

mi 86 0m i

3 min

Kansass Cit City

490

40

35

Indianapolis

Fre Fresno

Boston Pr Pro Providence

n

Denver

r6

Chicag Chicag Chica Chicago ago go

Omaha

San Franciscoo

min

m 50 1 hr 10 min 790 mi Cleveeland Clev Cleveland land Harrisbur H risbur isbur isburgg 1 hr 5 min 70 0 Pittsburg Pit Pittsburgh Pittsbur P itittsbur tsburgh tsburg tsbur Dayton Da D ayt yton mi yton

1h

Salt Lak akee City Cit

Sacramento

45

97 n4 mi

Dess Moines Moines

Albanyy Alban

Buffalo Buf 45

Hamilton Hamilt amilton amilton Grand Rapids R mi 20 Milwauk Mil Milwaukee aukee auk Det oit De Detroit in 5

Miami

McAllen Culiacáán Culiac

Saltillo illo

Torreón or eón

Monter Mont errey er reyy

Aguascalient guascalient scalientes scalient ess

Guadalajara ala a

San Luis San Luis P Potosí o osí

35 m

Tampico

Mérid Mérida idaa

León eón Quuerétaro Qu erét réta

in 34 0 mi

Morelia lia

Toluca oluca

Mexicoo City Me Cit Puebla Pue Cuernavaca Cuerna vaca

Veracruz Villaher illaher illahermosa Oaxaca

Acapulco

Tuxtla uxtla Gutiérre Gutiérrez Gut

What would a Hyperloop nation look like?

I

n August, Silicon Valley darling Elon Musk—CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors—unveiled his concept for the Hyperloop, a high-speed system of 28-person pods that would shoot through low-pressure tubes on air bearings. Musk’s published proposal calls for the Hyperloop to link San Francisco and Los Angeles; pods would blast down the I-5 corridor at 760 mph, reducing the journey from five and a half hours by car to just 35 minutes.

Musk envisions the system connecting cities less than 900 miles apart—beyond that, he writes, “I suspect supersonic air travel ends up being faster and cheaper.” Using the 900-mile limit, we calculated other areas that could be connected by the Hyperloop. Theoretically, pairs such as Memphis and Chicago or Salt Lake City and Seattle could bridge the distance of a morning commute, blending economies and cultures, and reshaping the continent.

COST Elon Musk estimates that a Hyperloop from San Francisco to Los Angeles will cost six billion dollars, one tenth the proposed cost of California’s high-speed rail project. Transportation experts, however, say he is underestimating the price tag.

COMFORT Even along the relatively straight California I-5, sideways accelerations in Musk’s proposal are three times higher than typical train limits. As the Hyperloop follows curvier highways in other areas, it may need some tweaks to avoid becoming a vomit comet.

CULTURE A Hyperloop could bridge borders, making San Antonio and Mexico City suburbs of each other, with a journey of 75 minutes. Farther north, New York and Montreal would be only 35 minutes apart.

Sources: Metropolitan area population data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); driving distances from Google Maps

SCALE Each year, people take six million rides from New York to Washington, D.C., on Amtrak and two million rides by plane. Musk estimates a passenger pod departing up to every 30 seconds, which means each Hyperloop could provide 7.4 million commutes a year.

NOVEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 3 1

HEADLINES / TOOL KIT

RoboRibbiter

A faux frog for field research

W

hen a male túngara frog wants to mate, it announces its desire by inflating a vocal sac beneath its chin while making whines and chucks. Biologists Michael Ryan and Ryan Taylor (from the University of Texas at Austin and Salisbury University, respectively) wanted to change the order and timing of those calls to study mating behavior, but there was no way they could train a túngara to perform dependably on cue. So they special-ordered an exceptionally sexy robotic male frog.

Túngara frogs are so small—about 1.5 inches—that some key robotic parts had to be placed outside the body, including the speaker needed to produce its low tones and the pneumatic pump that inflates its vocal sac with

air. The frog’s builders, University of Wisconsin–La Crosse biologist Barrett Klein and Joey Stein of the design studio Moey, improved upon other fakes by replacing a fragile condom-based sac with a thicker balloon catheter. And the sac is pumped via remote control rather than by hand, so the researchers’ proximity doesn’t kill the mood. This summer, Taylor took some of the robots to Panama to test mating calls in the wild. The real female frogs were quite impressed.

AMOROUS AMPHIBIAN Cast in urethane from a mold of a túngara frog, the robot [above] was finished with a glossy top coat to mimic wet skin.

It can be used to study either mating rituals or the behavior of predators.

Túngaras, fake and real [inset], are a little longer than an inch.

TAKEOFF

“You’re so focused on what you need to do, it’s not like you really have the chance to appreciate that you’re floating above the ground at three meters.”

32 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

—TODD REICHERT of Aerovelo told the University of Toronto, on winning the Sikorsky Prize for the first sustained flight of a human-powered helicopter on June 13.

The team’s flight took place in an indoor soccer center in Ontario and lasted 65 seconds.

COURTESY BARRETT KLEIN/UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN/MOEY STUDIOS; INSE T: MICHAEL & PATRICIA FOGDEN/GE T T Y IMAGES

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ILLUSTR ATION BY RYAN SNOOK

Humans have a tendency to tromp all over things, even when we’re trying to be careful.

Why the moon should be an international park T

HE THOUGHT OF a robot laying tracks over Neil Armstrong’s and Buzz Aldrin’s footprints just seems wrong. And the risk is greater than you might think. Private spaceflight is flourishing, and even the Google Lunar XPRIZE for moon rovers includes a sub-prize of up to $4 million for “a Mooncast showing the Apollo artifacts in HD.” Humans have a tendency to tromp all over things we haven’t yet assigned a specific value, even when we’re trying to be careful. But an increased sense of conscience about the Apollo sites recently spawned a bill to preserve them. The proposal, put before Congress this past summer, is to eventually nominate 34 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

them as UNESCO World Heritage sites. It’s not perfect. First, under the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, accepted by 101 countries, no nation can claim the moon as sovereign territory, an official prerequisite for nomination. And the bill doesn’t cover the rest of the moon—only where the astronauts landed and worked.

Instead of passing piecemeal bills, let’s go all the way. The moon was part of Earth until about 4.5 billion years ago, according to current models. It could answer key questions about the history of our planet and therefore needs to be protected. The entire moon should be an international history and science preserve—an Off-World Heritage site, if you will.

It will take a treaty among interested nations to manage the moon with an eye for peaceful purposes and scientific investigation. Space buffs may recall that this was one of the goals of the UN Moon Agreement of 1979, which flopped spectacularly, arguably a victim of the Cold War era. Only 15 nations agreed to it—none of which had space-faring capabilities.

But in fact, we’ve already reached global consensus on preserving an otherworldly place in this way: Antarctica. The continent is managed by 50 nations under the 1959 Antarctic Treaty “with the interests of science and the progress of all mankind.” The treaty is short (just 14 articles), and the management duties are light (meetings to discuss updates, procedures, and scientific missions). But it works. For more than half a century, the agreement has allowed science and tourism to flourish in an area that belongs to both no one and everyone.

A preservation treaty for the moon would need a few special clauses. For example, while there’s a voluntary moratorium on mining in Antarctica, it doesn’t make sense to ban the practice on the moon: That’s one of the incentives to get us there. Rare substances, such as helium-3 (a possible fuel for nuclear power), are the sort of rewards that will motivate the development of private spaceflight and off-world habitation. So mining should be allowed, pending environmentalimpact assessments similar to those conducted by the U.S. Forest Service. As for tourism, we don’t need to wrap the moon in no trespassing signs, but let’s keep ATVs away from important craters.

These decisions are important because they won’t affect just the moon. They’ll likely reach well beyond its orbit. There are other moons and other planets, some of which will doubtless be attractive to miners and tourists. Precedents matter. If we can’t treat our own moon with respect, perhaps we’re not fit for any planet at all.

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P R O P S T Y L I N G B Y R E B E C C A D O N N E L LY / B E R S T E I N & A N D R I U L L I

STORY BY COR E Y S . P OW E L L PHOTO G R APH BY TR AV IS R ATHBONE Turn here. Take the dirt road on the right.

You’ve got to see this.” I park my rental car, and Rick Gaitskell directs me to a makeshift wooden observation deck overlooking the Trojan mine in Lead, South Dakota, just a mile down the road from his home. In the thickening twilight, we watch a phalanx of Caterpillar earthmovers scooping up and carting away chunks of a mountain, creating a large terraced pit.

Nearby, a flat-crested ridge rises where the trucks have recently piled up rock from an earlier dig. Their piercing headlights mirror the glow of Venus, hovering just above the horizon.

“It’s incredible,” Gaitskell says. “There’s no stopping it. They are literally moving mountains in search of gold.” I try to read his expression in the dim light. At first, I assume he is expressing camaraderie with the diggers at the Trojan site. Technically

speaking, he is a physics professor at Brown University, but it isn’t much of a stretch to say that he is also a fellow prospector.

Gaitskell leads a team that has just switched on the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment, a hulking particle detector located almost a mile deep in the nearby Homestake Gold Mine. In effect, he is panning for dark matter, the invisible—and, for now, hypothetical—stuff that makes up five sixths of the mass of the cosmos. If he finds it, the Nobel committee will very likely come calling. Discovering just one dozen dark particles would be enough to throw all of modern physics for a loop. Considering the LUX experiment cost about $10 million to build, that puts the effective price of dark matter at, oh, about one million trillion trillion dollars per ounce. This is off-the-charts precious material.

“I’ve been looking for dark matter for 23, no, 24 years now,” NOVEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 3 7

he says. And he is not alone; the search for dark matter has grown into a small industry, albeit one that does not yet have a product to sell. “Every experiment has reported essentially negative results. No one even knows for sure if the damn stuff really exists. Those fellows,” Gaitskell says, nodding to the pit, “know exactly where the gold is.” I realize now he is not feeling empathy for the miners. He is feeling envy.

Then his expression brightens: “This time, the outcome could be different. After about two weeks of operation, we expect LUX to surpass the sensitivity of the current world-leading experiment. After that, it should be sensitive to dark-matter particles in a way that no previous direct detection has been.

Meanwhile, other experiments are closing in on dark matter on multiple fronts.”

Below where we’re standing, the trucks continue their restless maneuvers. Above, the stars of the Big Dipper shimmer into view. All around us, a second reality apparently binds the universe together and gives it order. No one in all of history has seen that invisible fabric. But in the next two years, scientists like Gaitskell may bring it into view.

TOUCHING DARK MATTER If you want to put your hands on something as subtle as dark matter, the first thing you need to do is get away from everything that may be blocking your path.

That’s why my trip to the LUX experiment begins with an ear-popping elevator ride down the old Homestake Mine’s Yates Shaft. The surface world is awash with high-speed atomic fragments emitted by the sun, by

supernovas exploding in deep space, even by distant black holes. With each second of my descent, that chaos fades. After a 10-minute drop, I reach 4,850 feet and walk out into a brightly lit maze of whitewashed tunnels. Until 2002, Homestake was still an active gold mine. Now, it has been repurposed as the Sanford Underground Research Facility. Only here is the surface world remote enough for LUX to do its job.

The history of dark-matter research has followed a similar trajectory, as scientists have stripped away the visible aspects of the universe to determine what else is out there. It began in the 1930s, when Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky measured the motions of galaxies and realized that even after he accounted for all the stars and gas, something seemed to be left over: massive clumps of unseen material yanking galaxies around at high speeds. He called it dunkle Materie.

These days, the evidence for dark matter is everywhere. An invisible factor makes galaxies rotate faster than expected. It makes clusters of galaxies bend and distort passing starlight more than they should. It even seems to explain how those galaxies formed in the first place. Supercomputer simulations show that diffuse clouds of ordinary matter in the early universe did not have enough gravity to pull together into the orderly galaxies and galaxy clusters seen today. Run the same simulations with a dark component stirred in and everything comes together just right.

What dark matter is, nobody knows. But physicists can tell you exactly what it is not: ordinary atoms of the variety that make up you, me, and everything else in the visible world. Some of the most persuasive proof

THE EVIDENCE FOR DARK MATTER No one has ever isolated a particle of dark matter, but that hasn’t shaken physicists’ resolve to confirm its existence. While they chase it using a variety of detectors, the astronomical case for dark matter is extremely strong.

LARGE-SCALE STRUCTURE Computer models, such as the Millennium Simulation, show how dark matter influenced the formation of galaxies after the big bang; without it, there isn’t enough gravitational pull to explain how galaxy clusters, stars, or even humans came to be.

38 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

Photomultiplier tubes inside the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) detector in South Dakota can detect photons emitted when dark-matter particles collide with the nuclei of xenon atoms.

B OT TO M, L E F T TO R I G H T: C O U R T E SY V. S P R I N G E L , T H E V I R G O C O N S O R T I U M, A N D T H E M A X P L A N CK I N S T I T U T E FO R A S T R O P H Y S I C S ; C O U R T E S Y N A S A , E S A , R I CH A R D E L L I S ( C A LT ECH ) A N D J E A N - PA U L KNEIB ; COUR TESY NA SA ; COUR TESY ES A AND THE PL ANCK COLL ABOR ATION

SHADOW UNIVERSE

TOP: COUR TESY LUX DARK MAT TER

comes from measurements of the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the big bang. Right after that moment of birth, the whole universe was ringing like a bell, and just as a bell’s tone reflects its size and shape, so the pattern of cosmic ringing reveals exactly what material was present in the early universe. The humbling answer: 15 percent of the matter was and still is visible, 85 percent dark. (Even more bizarre,

GRAVITATIONAL LENSING Matter in galaxy clusters like Abell 2218, imaged here by the Hubble Telescope, bends and focuses the light of more distant galaxies.

The amount of distortion makes it possible to map the mass of the clusters. The total measured mass far exceeds what is visible, and the unseen matter shows a distribution unlike that of stars or hot gas.

GALAXY ROTATION Galaxies rotate so quickly that they would fly apart unless they were held together by more mass than is present in visible stars and gas.

Modified theories of gravity that attempt to explain away this anomaly do not fit with the other evidence.

COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND The radiation left behind by the big bang traces the pressure waves that reverberated in the early universe, creating areas of low and high density mapped as temperature. These fluctuations reveal the mix of ordinary and dark particles, a ratio that closely matches other estimates.

dark and visible matter together account for only one third of the total mass; the rest seems to be an unknown form of energy embedded in space itself.)

“When I was in college and heard that 85 percent of the universe was missing, I knew that was what I wanted to study,” says Nicole Larsen, a Yale graduate student who works at the Sanford facility. Larsen and I are standing on a metal grate, eyeing the top nine feet of the two-story LUX detector. All the coollooking stuff—the plumbing that keeps equipment clean and chilled, the electronics that collect and process data—is up here on level two.

We walk downstairs, and I take in the slight anticlimax of the detector itself. It looks a lot like a giant water tank. It is, in fact, a giant water tank. It holds 70,000 ultrapure gallons that block natural radioactivity emitted by the surrounding rock. Suspended inside the tank, out of sight, is a 70-inch-tall, two-ton titanium freezer containing 800 pounds of liquid xenon cooled to –170°F. Considering the complexity of the underlying science, the concept behind LUX is strangely simple.

“Whatever dark matter is, it certainly is in particle form,” Gaitskell says. According to the leading physics theory, dark matter is a weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP. Sooner or later, a passing WIMP should randomly smack into an atom of ordinary matter, sending the atom flying. It would be like the invisible man going out for a jog and revealing himself by accidentally running into another jogger. When that happens to a xenon atom inside LUX, it emits a flash of light and gives off a slight electric charge. Detectors inside the tank look for that telltale pair of signals, while software weeds out the noise of everything else.

NOVEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 39

Of the 10 other competing experiments, all rely on the same basic collision principle: Spot a signal, find a WIMP, identify dark matter, bag a Nobel. Will LUX be the one to win the prize?

Gaitskell groans. “The reality is that you’re mostly trying to identify mundane signals that only look like dark matter. You’re out there on the bleeding edge of technology, so often you have to learn how your detector operates as you go,” he says. That is a recipe for errors and controversial claims, of which there have been plenty over the past two decades. Many other dark-matter experiments have reported intriguing but vague sightings. One, called DAMA, based in Italy, claims to have 10 years’ worth of observations tracking dark-matter particles blowing past Earth.

Competing teams have not found a source of error, but neither have they been able to confirm the result.

“Everyone is after them, trying to drive a stake through the heart of DAMA,” says Juan Collar of the University of Chicago, who leads another dark-matter detector called COUPP, now firing up in the Vale Creighton Mine near Sudbury, Ontario.

Gaitskell is eager for more cut-and-dried answers.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me to build an experiment that isn’t going to be better than everything that’s come previously,” he says, “so we planned a detector that was substantially bigger and more sensitive.” The search will begin with a 60-day shakedown test this year, followed by a 300-day run. By then, LUX will be deep into unexplored territory, surpassing the sensitivity of previous searches by about a factor of 10.

CREATING DARK MATTER Experiments designed to detect dark matter directly, such as LUX, are appealing because they are so intuitive: Either something goes bump inside the detector 40 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

or it does not. But their simplicity comes with some serious limitations. If the dark particles are significantly lighter than expected, they may not show up in the detector. Even if they do, the detectors can tell you only a little about their properties.

If you really want to understand the physics of dark matter, you need to create it in the lab so you can study it and figure out what makes it tick. And if you want to start making an exotic new particle that no one has ever seen, you need to book a flight to Geneva, head down into another tunnel, and get to work at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

That’s what physicist Joe Lykken of Fermilab, a U.S. national laboratory for particle physics, has been doing for the past six years. It’s what thousands of his colleagues have been doing too. Despite all the breathless headlines about the Higgs boson, finding it was something of a secondary achievement for the LHC. Peter Higgs predicted the existence of that particle nearly half a century ago to fill in the gaps in the overarching framework of particle physics known as the Standard Model. Most researchers in the field considered the reality of the Higgs boson a foregone conclusion. (One MIT physicist privately confessed he was “depressed a little” that the Higgs fit the model so well.)

The real goal of the LHC is to grapple with some of the big questions that the Standard Model does not address. Atop that list: Why is gravity so weak compared with the other forces? Why is matter arbitrarily divided into two classes of particles—exemplified by photons and electrons—that behave according to different rules? And, yes, what is dark matter?

It turns out all these questions may be related through a theory called supersymmetry. “We’ve all agreed for the last 30 years that supersymmetry was the most obvious thing for nature to do,” Lykken says,

Particles crashing together in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could produce dark matter. The particles would likely escape undetected, so physicists will look for signs of energy they carried away.

SHADOW UNIVERSE

C O U R T ESY M AT E V Z TA D E L /U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A L I FO R N I A AT S A N D I E G O ; O PP O S I T E PAG E: C O U R T ESY C E R N

ALL AROUND US, A SECOND REALITY BINDS THE UNIVERSE AND GIVES IT ORDER. because it restores balance to particle physics and points the way toward a long-sought “theory of everything.” Supersymmetry predicts that there is an as-yet undetected third family of particles that link the two we know. Conveniently, that family includes particles that fit the description of dark matter: massive, stable, and invisible. The process of proving that supersymmetry is correct should therefore have the happy byproduct of creating dark matter and nailing down its exact properties. That is where the LHC comes in.

At the LHC, physicists race beams of protons through a 17-mile-long underground ring, accelerate them to 99.9999991 percent the speed of light, and crash them together. At those speeds, the protons contain a staggering amount of energy: The beam contains the equivalent energy of a Toyota Corolla driving at nearly the speed of sound. After the collision, that energy has to go somewhere. What happens is that it spontaneously turns into matter, creating a spray of particles. (The equivalence of matter and energy—the soul of e=mc2—is everyday reality in the subatomic world.) Any kind of particle that can be created by that much energy could be present in the spray.

ELUSIVE SIGNAL Particle physicists have simulated what a dark-matter event at the Large Hadron Collider might look like. Proton beams colliding within the circled region produce jets of ordinary particles. They may also create dark matter, which eludes direct detection but carries away energy (represented by the red arrow) that can be deduced later.

IMAGE TK

The great hope of researchers like Lykken is that dark-matter particles are in the mix. Finding them is exceedingly difficult, because the particles themselves probably fly through the LHC’s instruments unseen.

“Instead, you look for what we call ‘missing energy signatures,’ ” Lykken says. “That tells you there is one or more particles that we didn’t detect directly.” It is yet another form of chasing shadows.

So far, those experiments, which have been taking place ever since the LHC began smashing protons together in 2010, have turned up nothing. “I think it’s fair to say that people were a tad surprised that an instrument of the scale and audacity of the LHC didn’t see evidence of supersymmetry,” Gaitskell says. Some physicists started grumbling about abandoning the theory, but Lykken is not terribly concerned. Due to a number of technical mishaps—most notably a spill of more than six tons of liquid helium in 2008—the LHC has been operating at about half-power. Last February, engineers shut down the machine for a major upgrade.

In 2015, the LHC will restart at full energy. In technical terms, it will go from 8 trillion electron volts to 14 trillion electron volts, but conceptually, it’s fair to say that physicists plan to turn up the volume to 11.

“The LHC we just ran for two years was the backup plan after we had the accident,” Lykken says. “So it’s not fair to be disappointed that we didn’t find supersymmetry at the LHC, because the real LHC—the one we always advertised—hasn’t actually happened yet.”

Dark-matter searches at the reborn LHC will take many forms. Pauline Gagnon, an Indiana University research scientist who works at CERN, the European physics consortium that built the collider, is exploring speculative “hidden valley” models, wherein an entire parallel world of dark particles would phase in and out of view in the LHC. Another place to look for dark matter, she notes, is in the particles created when a Higgs boson decays. That notion shows just how quickly the discovery process in particle physics is advancing. Last year, the Higgs was the cause célèbre, inspiring hyperbolic news stories and geek revelry.

By 2015, the Higgs will be a familiar part of the landscape. It will be the dirt and sand that needs to be washed away by those panning for dark-matter gold.

NOVEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 4 1

SHADOW UNIVERSE

DARK PHYSICS COULD LEAD TO DARK STARS, DARK PLANETS, EVEN DARK LIFE. HUNTING DARK MATTER While most dark-matter sleuths hunker underground, Samuel Ting focuses his research 200 miles above the planet, at the International Space Station. Ting has no interest in waiting for dark particles to knock into an atom or to shoot out of a detector here on Earth; he wants to track them down in space, on their own turf, by picking up the visible trail they may leave behind.

At first blush, that may sound like a contradiction.

If something is dark, how can it be visible? But just as other particles may be able to create dark matter, dark matter may sometimes give rise to other particles. In particular, current theory suggests that if two WIMPs collide, they destroy each other, producing a burp of gamma rays and detectable particles in the process.

Those particles would have some unusual characteristics. For one thing, they would consist equally of matter and antimatter, most likely electrons and their inverted twins, positrons. For another, those particles could carry any amount of energy up to a certain point but never more, a limit set by the amount of energy contained within the original dark-matter particle.

Since mass and energy are equivalent, that maximum energy could reveal the dark particle’s mass. So the visible signal, if you use the term “visible” loosely, looks like this: an unexpected flux of positrons that obey a very strict energy limit. “You will know it has a dark-matter nature, because that distribution can come only from particle physics,” Ting says.

On Earth, positrons are destroyed the moment they

DARK MAP The distribution of dark matter across the universe, measured by the Planck satellite, is projected onto an oval map of the full sky. Physicists identified dark-matter structures by the way their gravitational pull distorted the cosmic microwave background.

Deep-blue areas are denser than light ones; gray areas indicate where light from our own galaxy was too bright for Planck to map more distant matter.

42 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

touch ordinary matter, so the only way to pick up the dark-matter signal, Ting says, is to search for it in the vacuum of space. Not surprisingly, the idea of launching a giant particle detector above the atmosphere generated a lot of skepticism at first. “Nobody thought this could be done in space,” he says. Ting fought for 17 years, through a space shuttle catastrophe, numerous funding challenges, and several daunting technical setbacks, to make it happen. Finally, in 2011, astronauts installed Ting’s 18,500-pound, $2-billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) on the main truss of the International Space Station.

This past spring, Ting released data from the first 25 billion particle detections. He strikes a tone of stoic optimism about the ambiguous results. The AMS does not see a telltale energy cutoff—what Ting calls “the cliff”—although there is maybe a little hint of the flattening before the cliff. Also encouraging: “Our data are coming from all directions,” Ting says, which is consistent with diffuse dark matter but not with a nearby astronomical object, like a collapsed star, that happens to be spitting out positrons. And he notes that he has only 8 percent of the data that he plans to collect between now and 2028, which will enable him to map cosmic matter and antimatter at energies similar to the collisions in the LHC. “Nobody has ever been there before,” Ting says.

For particle searches, the AMS is by far the best game going—and probably will be for another couple of decades. But other researchers are following

JUNE 2013 / POPULAR SCIENCE

CO U R T ESY N A S A ; O PP O S I T E PAG E: CO U R T ESY ES A A N D T H E PL A N CK CO L L A B O R AT I O N

Dark-matter particles could destroy one another when they collide. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, mounted on the truss of the ISS, looks for antimatter produced by those impacts.

the dark-matter trail through space, seeking out the gamma rays that should also appear when two darkmatter particles collide. The approach requires less heroic measures and a lot less patience: NASA already has a space-based telescope, the Fermi observatory, capable of detecting such high-energy bursts of light.

In fact, the scientific literature is glutted with provocative radiation-signature claims. Over the past few years, several groups have declared that Fermi is picking up at least four different kinds of gamma-ray signals that don’t match any known object or process.

That seems like tantalizing evidence of dark matter, but the reports disagree on many of the details. And many of the purported sightings are so faint that they are difficult to distinguish from instrumental effects or random cosmic noise. Even stranger, some of them should not be detectable at all according to conventional theories of dark matter.

Douglas Finkbeiner of Harvard University, who has spent much of the past year trying to make sense of one of these possible dark-matter signals, doesn’t hide his frustration. “It’s a hard game,” he says. “I would summarize by saying that things are confusing at the moment.” Yet in that confusion, he sees progress toward a deeper truth: The fact that the various experiments do not quite match up may indicate that there is more than one answer to the dark-matter puzzle.

“I don’t see how dark matter can just be one little particle living off on its own, having nothing to do with anything else,” Finkbeiner says. “I think it’s going to open the floodgates to a whole new field of physics.”

TESTING THE SHADOW UNIVERSE Finkbeiner works at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a bastion of scientists who study the universe through observation. Walk 10 minutes down Garden Street, make your way into the red-brick

Jefferson Lab, knock on the door of Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, and you enter the world of theory. This is the place where fragments of the shadow world may begin to come together into a single, coherent picture.

“This is just a big new idea, so it was kind of fun to work on,” Randall says. She’s referring to a novel theory, unveiled this past summer, called “double-disk dark matter.” The name, which sounds like a failed Ben & Jerry’s flavor, doesn’t begin to do it justice.

What Randall and her collaborators have done is rip away many of the assumptions that astronomers and physicists have made about dark matter, primarily out of a desire for simplicity.

Scientists have mostly assumed that dark matter is one particle—but, Randall asks, what if it is two or more mixed together? They have assumed that dark matter is largely inert, because it hardly interacts with visible matter—but what if dark matter can interact with itself in rich and complex ways? Randall describes the possibilities of the second kind of dark matter, and the hairs begin to stand up on the back of my neck.

“There could be atoms, and there could be some sort of dark chemistry. There could be condensed objects, and then it’s possible they’d break into smaller ones,” she says. “It’s dark with respect to our light, but it might not be dark with respect to its own light.”

Randall has moved beyond metaphors. She is describing a literal shadow universe.

In this new view, the predominant dark component is still diffuse and largely formless, accounting for the observed motions of galaxies and all the other evidence that established the existence of dark matter in the first place. The second interactive component is very different. It collapses just like visible matter and so would form a dark disk embedded within the visible disk of the Milky Way—hence double-disk dark matter.

C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 76 That disk could be governed NOVEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 43

SBAYR AM/GE T T Y IMAGES

Bush-Meat Market Data Collector Sure, everyone loves monkeys. But few test that love like Jake Owens. An environmental science Ph.D. candidate at Drexel University, Owens studies the ecology and behavior of drill monkeys. Typically, that involves trips to places like Bioko, an island off Africa’s western coast, where he crawls through snake-infested vegetation to collect monkey dung.

In 2010, Owens had to survey an illegal bush-meat market in Equatorial Guinea, where merchants sell meat from endangered primates. Amid the stench of rotting flesh, he took hundreds of hair and tissue samples from the monkeys for isotope analysis.

Using this data, Owens aims to locate poaching hot zones. “Most people at the market hated me or the effort to stop poaching that I represent, and they didn’t hide it well,” Owens says. The merchants regularly swatted him with brooms, spat at his feet, and waved blowtorches and machetes to keep him away. The reward for Owens’s perseverance? A mysterious monthlong illness that caused his hair to fall out.

I CO N K E Y Sleep deprivation

Olfactory overload

Blood loss

Boredom

Digestive products

Dead things

ICE CREAM FLAVOR DEVELOPER

Inclement weather

Risk of disease

Inspires hatred

Risk of death

Risk of violence

THE BEST JOBS

Inspires ridicule

Chris Rivard has a fancy official title: principal food scientist, R&D global operations.

Around Ben & Jerry’s, though, he’s known as a “flavor guru.” Rivard uses his degree in food sciences and nutrition to develop flavors for the ice cream giant. On an average day, he’ll experiment with prototype versions of classic frozen treats as well as some strange ones—Rivard says the R&D group has tried such flavors as ranch dressing, roasted garlic, and mushroom. Perfecting the combination

of ingredients takes patience and a hearty appetite, but such are the sacrifices required in the ice cream biz.

Once a year, Rivard and the other flavor gurus take a field trip. The agenda, he says, is to “eat our way through a chosen city to find inspiration for new flavors and products.” Upon their return, they strategize with the company’s marketing team on which flavors to develop for foreign markets. “Working on the global team adds an interesting twist,” Rivard says. “With different languages, it can be a unique challenge. We had to explain at one point that we don’t actually put chunks of monkeys into our Chunky Monkey ice cream.”

NOVEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 4 5

JUGGALO RESEARCHER Every summer, thousands of greasepainted fans of the group Insane Clown Posse (ICP) gather in a field outside Cave-in-Rock, Illinois, for the Gathering of the Juggalos. Over the course of five days, the Juggalos, as the fans call themselves, will attend rap concerts, ingest a staggering amount of mind-altering substances, and socialize at events such as “DJ Clay’s Horny Nuts and Big Butts Party.”

And Rahima Schwenkbeck records it all.

Schwenkbeck, a Ph.D. candidate at George Washington University, studies Juggalo culture to learn how ICP has become such a cult-like success despite being considered “the Most Hated Band in the World.” That sometimes means logging hours at merchandise tables to record purchasing habits. At other times, it means dressing like a Juggalo herself. At the gathering, she goes stealth, taking in musical acts, wrestling, and watching “psychopathic karaoke.” But there’s one thing she just won’t do for the sake of science: go for a dip in the local swimming hole, known as Lake Hepatitis.

46 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

“Ever wonder what a threeday-dead, sunburned dolphin smells like? Thanks to a stint with a marine mammal strandings coordinator, I now know—as does everyone on the public ferry where we carried its vital organs in a cooler.”

Jennifer Bogo, POPSCI Articles Editor B.S., Biology and Environmental Science

FARMING E. COLI ON PETRI DISHES. FOR SIX MONTHS, I HUFFED THE ODORS OF INTESTINES AND GROWING MEDIUM, WHICH SMELLED LIKE THE POWDERED DAIRY PRODUCT FOUND IN MAC ’N’ CHEESE. SO NOW I THINK ‘POOP ’N’ CHEESE’ EVERY TIME I SEE A BOX OF MACARONI.” Dave Mosher, POPSCI Projects Editor B.S., Biology; B.A. Journalism

Dead Moose Dissector SUBWAY ENGINEER There are likely few researchers in the world with a stronger stomach than John Vucetich. As associate professor of ecology at Michigan Technological University, Vucetich studies the population dynamics between gray wolves and moose on Isle Royal, a national park just off the northeastern tip of Minnesota in Lake Superior.

Although it sounds romantic, Vucetich’s work often boils down to a pretty grim task—searching for moose carrion. Typically, the hunt starts with a smell: the sickly sweet scent of rotting flesh. Once they find a carcass, Vucetich and his team begin cutting it up with axes and knives. (Helpful tip from Vucetich: “It’s useful to take the jaw off the skull. It’s easier to carry that way.”) To get at the bones they want, Vucetich navigates swarms of maggots and ticks. A carcass can carry more than 50,000 ticks, all of them in search of a new warm-blooded home.

And then there’s the hauling. Researchers lug up to 40 pounds of bones, often through several feet of snow, back to the lab for analysis. They also have to collect nearby wolf scat for genetic and population studies. “You’re like Santa Claus,” Vucetich says. “When you’re done, you’ve got this big garbage bag full of presents.” Once back at their lab in the park, the researchers prepare the bones for permanent storage by throwing them in a giant drum of hot water to boil off the remaining flesh and hair in a giant moose stew. The data Vucetich collects helps ecologists understand how early malnourishment can affect a moose’s ability to evade predators later in life.

THE BEST JOBS

CO R V E T T E PE R FO R M AN CE EN GIN EER Alex MacDonald gets paid to drive Corvettes. As a performance engineer specializing in chassis control for General Motors and a former amateur racecar driver, MacDonald tests cars on extreme surfaces—ice, gravel, and sand—to assess the performance of braking systems and to monitor their software. He typically runs his test on a high-speed track. Software records

thousands of variables, while a calibration engineer riding shotgun time-stamps the data and inputs comments into a laptop. MacDonald gets to test other GM performance cars, such as the Camaro, as well, usually a full two years before they’re ready for production. “Most days, it is the best job in the world,” he says.

“I’d pay to do it.”

The New York City subway system moves 5.4 million people a day across 660 miles of track, much of which lies deep below the city in dank, vermin-infested tunnels. While most commuters whip through the passages unaware, a small army of transportation engineers toils away, testing signals and ensuring that tracks are set properly. Although the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) provides extensive training, nothing can adequately prepare engineers for tunnel work. Temperatures in the summer can soar to well above 100 degrees. Rats are everywhere. Homeless people too. And then there’s the storied third rail, the power source for the subway cars, which transmits 600 volts DC, enough juice to cause serious injury or death.

All the while, 400-ton subway trains barrel by at 30 miles per hour or more. “When you get somebody who’s never been in that kind of environment, it’s an eye-opener,” says Joe Leader, acting senior vice president of New York City Transit’s department of subways. “We’ve had people get down on the track and freeze from fear.”

Amber Williams, POPSCI Assistant Editor B.S., Biology; B.A., English

BEDBUG REARER Bedbugs elicit a predictable response in most people—first horror, then fury, then violence. For Scott Harrison, they inspire a strange kind of love. Harrison is a graduate student at Ohio State University and friend of the bedbug. While his lab mates spend their days trying to eradicate the pests, Harrison’s job is to raise more of them for experiments. The lab houses more than 30 populations of bedbugs—some numbering in the tens of thousands— with varying degrees of pesticide resistance. Each day, Harrison lovingly feeds the bugs rabbit blood, even breathing on them and holding them in his hand, acts that stimulate the bugs’ feeding impulse. There are days, of course, when Harrison winds up as the day’s entrée, but the upside of working with bedbugs, he says, is that his employers recognize the need for a good night’s sleep, so he gets to keep regular office hours.

No one wants Harrison to take his work home at night.

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Winter Season South Pole Astronomer In 2005, Cynthia Chiang, then a physics graduate student at Caltech, had the choice to work on a telescope in Hawaii or Antarctica. “It was a no-brainer,” she says. “You can buy a plane ticket to Hawaii anytime.”

So off to Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station she went for a summer of –40 to –10°F degree weather, restricted menus, and long days studying cosmic background radiation through the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization telescope. The conditions were hard but not terrible. And then, in 2012, she went back for winter.

At the South Pole, the sun sets on March 21—and doesn’t reappear until September. Winter temperatures hang between –70 to –90°F but often drop below –100°F. Scientists still need to go outside regularly to check on the equipment and grease the telescopes’ elevation gears; when they do, their eyelashes often freeze together as they blink. Because the cold air can’t hold much water vapor, the climate, even inside the station, is so dry that Chiang often got nosebleeds and skin dandruff. And because only about 50 researchers and support staff choose to endure an Antarctic winter (compared with 170 residents in summer), the stays are that much lonelier. A nice hot shower could help the privation, but despite the small over-winter population at the station, residents are limited to two two-minute showers a week. Mercifully, there are no restrictions on the use of the station’s sauna.

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I HAD TO CASTRATE 150 SHRIMP. THESE WEREN’T YOUR CUTE, PINK COCKTAIL SHRIMP. THEY HAD BEEN DEAD FOR 10 YEARS, WERE ABOUT THE SIZE OF A HOT DOG, AND FLASH FROZEN IN GNARLY POSITIONS. THE WORST TIME TO WORK IN THE LAB WAS MONDAY MORNINGS. THE CLEANUP CREW DIDN’T COME THROUGH ON FRIDAYS, SO THE DISCARDED PARTS SAT AROUND ROTTING. NOTHING LIKE CENTRIFUGING WITH THE SMELL OF LOW TIDE.”

WORST JOBS IN SCIENCE

DIGESTIVE SYSTEM MODELER

“Mud logging finds people who are willing to do a thankless job well,” says Kurt Vanderyt, who did it for a year after studying geology in college. Of all the jobs on an oil rig, mud loggers are lowest on the food chain. “And nobody lets you forget it.” The job itself is brutally straightforward: collect and examine rock samples that have been forced from a well during drilling and record every sample’s mineral composition and hydrocarbon potential. That’s it, over and over again: 12 hours of looking through a microscope, for weeks on end. Mudloggers often work in pairs, so while one is logging, the other sleeps; typically, they take turns using the same bed.

Drudgery alone might be tolerable. But clogs can require the loggers to lean shoulder deep into the holding tank for the drilling mud, called the possum belly, to clear it up. Vanderyt, now the vice president of exploration at Brigadier Oil & Gas, has seen other occupational hazards as well. “I once found a mud log that was lacking several hundred feet worth of interpretation,” he recalls. “When I checked the comments section, I found the description ‘Cows ate samples.’ ”

EXTREME PRODUCT TESTER THE BEST JOBS

MUD LOGGER

To say that Glenn Gibson’s job stinks is an understatement. Gibson is a microbiology professor at the United Kingdom’s University of Reading, and he studies bacteria found in the human gut to develop treatments for such disorders as irritable bowel syndrome. To conduct his research, Gibson pours a fluid made from volunteers’ fecal samples into models of the human digestive compartments. He then examines bacterial samples using liquid chromatography.

“The smell permeates the lab, the whole building, and the surrounding area,” he says. Gibson does his best to protect himself from contamination, wearing gloves and a mouth mask, but contact is unavoidable. He once got splattered with feces containing blood while opening a package that had been mailed to the lab. Thankfully, not all the deliveries are so unpleasant—at least not for him. “A few years ago, we were expecting a delivery of hundreds of fecal samples from the U.S., but instead, we were sent a box of pork chops,” he says. “I only hope that the person expecting the pork did not get our box.”

On the surface, Mark Gammage’s job sounds a little dull. As the group manager of Amway’s Reliability Lab, Gammage oversees a team of four engineers who design complex product-testing equipment and software. But the group’s real directive is to invent ways to torture and destroy everything the company makes. Tests in the lab, known as “the Room of Doom,” include exposing cookware, medical devices, and other products to extreme

temperatures and zapping them with 8,000 volts of electricity to simulate a lightning strike.

Gammage says his favorite test is to detect weaknesses in water-treatment tanks, which involves pressurizing them until they blow up. “You can hear it and see it as it explodes inside a protective clear case,” he explains.

“Many times, guests do the honors and dial up the pressure. That always brings a smile to their face.”

NOVEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 4 9

STORY BY JACOB WA RD | PH OTOG R A PH S BY TIM SOTER

and immediately crash into a box. Across the hall, three colleagues in a group stop talking and turn to watch me. I feel intensely self-conscious. My appearance, I know, must be off-putting, but I don’t actually know what I look like. I’m a continent away, steering a semi-robotic avatar via my laptop. My instinct is to drive to the restroom and look in the mirror, like a newly unwrapped plastic surgery patient, but I don’t know how I’ll open the door. So I turn and roll away in embarrassment.

Seeking refuge, I steer unsteadily, like a drunk, into the cubicle of the articles editor. Normally, she’d greet me in a friendly, professional way.

Instead, she laughs in terror and defensively turns her monitor toward me to prove that she’s working. I try to say something funny, hoping to retrieve our rapport, but she can’t seem to hear me. As other members of the Popular Science staff gather in her cube, I notice a chat window at the bottom of my screen. “Isn’t there audio?” I type. A pleasant but stilted female voice asks the question for me. There should be, I hear a colleague say. low battery, the screen reads. I’ve evidently been left unplugged too long, and it’s clear that I’m not going to be able to make it back to my charging station. I type a string of expletives and a promise to fire

50 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

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I ROLL OUT OF M Y OFFICE

I AM ROBOT BOS S

everyone. The woman’s polite monotone is halfway through my tirade when the screen freezes. My avatar is now dead, stranded awkwardly in my colleague’s cube. At my desk in California, the screen goes blank.

I’m seized by panic. The projection of myself that’s out there in the world, 3,000 miles away, is burning up my valuable reserves of professional dignity. I am formless, cut off. I am literally out of control.

The proper height makes it possible (or impossible) to project authority.

FOR NEARLY TWO DECADES, telepresence robots, or, more properly, remote-presence devices (RPDs), have been something of a white whale for the tech industry.

Engineers didn’t have the processors, the miniature microphones, cameras and sensors, or the cheap, fast broadband necessary to support them. But now they do, and in the last five years, a number of companies have sprung up to introduce the first truly functional devices. In the last 18 months alone, at least five companies launched new products, which range from tiny remote-controlled cradles for an iPhone to large rolling platforms that cost as much as a car. As the value of skilled labor rises, these companies are beginning to see a way to eliminate the barrier of geography between offices.

As the editor in chief of Popular Science, I am in the unique and somewhat complicated position of leading a magazine based in New York from a remote office in California. Every few weeks, I fly back and forth between my home in the San Francisco Bay Area and the office in Manhattan to get some face time with the magazine’s two dozen editors and designers. The rest of the time I communicate via email and phone.

I’ve also built a makeshift teleconferencing rig in each of my two offices. But running a magazine is a dynamic and constant job that requires a fair amount of improvisation. That’s hard to do via Skype.

After working this way for a year and a half, I was ready to try something new. My wife was about to have our second child, and I needed a way to travel less. I figured that a test of the various RPDs would at least yield a few laughs and at most a new perspective on my job. So when I began calling remote-presence companies to introduce myself, it didn’t occur to me that there was a larger, more important question to explore: Is it possible to work together, to connect as colleagues must, both intellectually and emotionally, without being in the same building?

THE PROJECTION OF M YSELF THAT’S OUT T H E R E I N T H E W O R L D , 3 , 0 0 0 M I L E S AW AY, IS BURNING UP MY VALUABLE RESERVES OF P R O F E S S I O N A L D I G N I T Y. I A M FO R M L E S S , C U T O F F. I A M L I T E R A L LY O U T O F C O N T R O L .

52 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

C LO CK W I S E F R O M TO P L EF T: C O U R T ESY VG O C O M M U N I C AT I O N S ; C O U R T ESY A N Y B OT S ; C O U R T ESY R O M OT I V E; C O U R T ESY S U I TA B L E T ECH N O LO G I ES

I wasn’t the first to consider this issue. In 1995, UC Berkeley engineer and computer scientist Eric Paulos flew a small blimp into a conference and tried to talk to people through it. Designed to take up no more room than a standing human, the blimp carried a 600-gram payload (video camera, microphone, remote-control systems) that provided the flyer a steerable means of speaking with someone in a remote location, although no means of projecting his or her face. In 1997, Paulos and his adviser, professor John Canny, published a paper on “tele-embodiment.” It was one of the first widely recognized papers on remote presence, detailing an “inexpensive, simple, networked, tele-operated mobile robot.” They were way ahead of their time, and they admitted as much in the paper: “Realistically, it will be a long time before the majority of people feel comfortable passing seamlessly between their immediate real world and the reality of tele-embodied worlds.”

Sixteen years later, the comfort they described is still incredibly difficult to engineer.

THOUGH THEY REPRESENT a new category of electronics, RPDs are really a collection of common parts assembled in new and interesting ways. They require a brain, a mode of locomotion (whether wheels or treads or balls), a means to see and steer, and, of course, a screen, a camera, and some microphones.

Among the dozen or so products on the market right now, I wanted to test a range of products, from affordable to expensive, from tricked out to bare bones. I settled on four.

The first to arrive was the VGo, which went on sale in 2011 and made waves last year in a Verizon commercial during the NFL playoffs. Designed in white, with the elegant plastic lines of an early Apple product, the VGo has a sort of evil-robot-emperor styling very much at odds with its somewhat diminutive stature. At four feet tall (an optional 12-inch height extension adds eight pounds and $1,690), it put me, at six-foot-seven, in the unfamiliar position of looking up at everyone, and I took to flashing its LED headlights at people like the laser weaponry of some thwarted Napoleonic alien.

The small dimensions of the screen on which my face appeared also led several people to lean down, hands on their knees, the way they might speak to a toddler.

I did not feel particularly boss-like in those moments.

Next was Anybots’ QB, a very friendly-looking and much taller device in which I felt far more comfortable. It’s dirt-resistant, with large wheels, and carries a cellular transmitter, which makes it ready for the out-of-doors. I briefly considered steering it into one of our elevators and out onto the street, but I was wary of being stopped by security and terrified of being stolen. The QB includes a downward camera that helps it automatically adjust its path to avoid certain obstacles, which is fantastically helpful. But the lackluster audio and video quality meant everyone instinctively leaned in to hear and be heard. Though they occurred eye to

FOUR WAYS TO SCARE YOUR STAFF TO DEATH

VGO VGO Communications

QB 1.0 Anybots

An impressive combination of sensors and motors for under six grand, but the small screen at stomach level is the fatal flaw, as the audience leans in awkwardly to see the operator. (A height extension improves things but raises the price.)

Also, it’s impossible to go anywhere unannounced: Its locomotion is audible from 15 feet away. $5,995 (plus annual subscription fee)

The QB is easy to drive. Its wheels can handle bumps up to 2.5 inches tall, and assisted steering self-guides it through doorways and around obstacles. Its telescoping neck ranges from 3' to 6'5'', and it can handle moisture and dirt. Sadly, poor image quality and mixed audio can stifle conversation, and its somewhat goofy appearance robs it of dignity. $9,700 (plus connection fees)

ROMO Romotive

BE A M Suitable Technologies

A toy rather than an office solution and as much about the software as it is about the mechanical package, the Romo is for entertaining a child or connecting that child with a distant friend or family. That said, it’s impressive at this price. Next, the company is working toward giving it computer vision so it can navigate obstacles on its own. $149 (iPhone not included)

With a monitor big enough to show a lifesize face, dual-band radios for seamless handoffs between Wi-Fi stations, and truly lifelike audio at both ends of the conversation, the Beam is the best (and most expensive) of the bunch. It’s the little things: a quiet, fast motor, an eight-hour battery life, and reminder emails if you park it somewhere off-charger and forget. $16,000 (plus connection fees)

NOVEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 53

I AM ROBOT BOS S

eye, conversations felt like a strain.

To try something entirely different, I visited the offices of Romotive. The company had just launched its first product, a partially Kickstarter-funded rolling iPhone mount that users can drive around. It’s something a grandparent might use with a distant grandchild, chasing him to and fro. It’s cute and packs a lot of features, and the price is right (just $149), but at a height of only a few inches, I wasn’t going to roll around on some conference table, peering up into everyone’s faces.

After three trials, I was starting to feel that although each RPD had its virtues, none imparted the flexibility or dignity I needed as a boss. Then I called Scott Hassan.

HASSAN WAS AN engineer on the original Google technology at Stanford and the founder of seminal robotics maker Willow Garage and is now CEO of Suitable Technologies, whose remote-presence device is called the Beam. When I arrived at his office in Palo Alto, he seemed bewildered as to why I was visiting in meat form, as he called it. Why didn’t I just visit via one of his devices? At first, it sounded like a transparent shtick—the sort of cultish Silicon Valley propaganda CEOs often use to dignify useless cameras, pens, or cars. But as we walked the factory floor, a stream of co-workers rolled past in their own Beams, tossing off casual greetings. I met one young engineer, seated in what looked like a kitchen, who has been traveling the world for a couple of years without missing a day of work. He currently codes from Santa Fe, where he spends his lunch hours skiing. Before that he worked from Hawaii, where he spent his lunch hours surfing.

Hassan uses his product’s name as a verb. He beams to his parent-teacher conferences so he doesn’t have to drive across town. He beams into his kids’ rooms at bedtime when he’s traveling.

He beams into his dad’s house A to say hello.

He won’t tell me how many companies are testing Beam, and he admits that no one has “bitten big” on his product.

But the potential of remote presence devices is, in theory, enormous. New and remarkable efficiencies are possible in almost any industry you can think of. Anybots CEO David Rogan told me that a retail chain was experimenting with a central sales staff that “moves” among different stores via the QB depending on customer flow.

But mastering the social stuff is what’s most prickly, Hassan tells me. And the Beam is engineered to create trust. It shuts down the moment it loses Wi-Fi so no one inadvertently rolls away. (In the VGo, I often had 54 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

C

B

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

I AM ROBOT BOS S

MY MANAGING EDITOR, AN OTHERWISE FEARL E S S P E R S O N , P H Y S I C A L LY R E C O I L S W H E N I APPROACH. “GET IT AWAY FROM ME,” SHE SAYS WITHOUT HUMOR.

A robot boss can replace a physical boss in nearly any office situation. A) Editors often hide from the bot boss as they do from the physical one.

B) A quiet boss can check up on the staff. C) Office drinks are difficult, but not impossible, to enjoy at a distance. D) Employees don’t always immediately show respect for the bot.

D

to reconnect and repeatedly found myself against a wall far from where I lost vision—the remote-presence equivalent of a blackout drinking episode.) The Beam doesn’t offer a way to record what’s going on, so colleagues won’t censor themselves when it’s around.

And it doesn’t include a sensor system to detect and navigate obstacles, the way the QB and VGo do, because Hassan says he believes that to create collegial trust the human operator must be obviously and completely in charge.

Hassan insists that the Beam isn’t a robot. “The word misses the point,” he says. And that’s what helps to make his creation—a vessel for humans—the most functional approximation of remote presence I’ve seen.

MY TIME AS A ROBOT BOSS taught me many things about a successful RPD. First, design and engineering matter. It’s not enough to have a screen and a mic and a speaker and a battery and a motor. The screen must be big and clear and at eye level. The mic must pick up conversation from the most distant person in a meeting. The speaker mustn’t require raising one’s voice.

The battery must last a workday. The motor mustn’t sound like the vacuum of an approaching janitor.

When a device meets all those standards—as I found only the Beam did—it allows users to forget (or at least ignore) that it’s there. And that’s the trick. If the thing forces adjustments on the participants, the conversation is at best a novelty and at worst a nuisance. If the thing offers no obvious reason to speak up or bend down, it begins to blend in. The conversation evens out, and eventually, the exchange becomes something close to normal.

And that’s when the true advantages of remote presence begin to crop up. Rather than wait for my colleagues to teleconference me, I can roll off and join them. When a designer wants to show me the layout he’s put on the wall, I can survey it with him in his office.

When a casual conversation with a guest yields a great story idea, an editor can grab me and make an introduction. I have my trial Beam for only a few months more, and I’m beginning to dread life without it.

The second thing I learned about remote presence is that smart design and engineering won’t make it work for everyone. There are several people in my office who simply cannot handle the Beam. My managing editor, an otherwise fearless person, physically recoils when I approach. “Get it away from me,” she says without humor. (I roll into her cube whenever I can.) One of the Web editors instinctively photographs me when-

ever she sees me rolling past but won’t actually engage.

She’d rather place another screen between us, it seems.

If you ask whether I think remote presence can eliminate physical distance between people, the answer is no. The Beam can’t provide the intimacy of touch, for instance, and you can’t hand anyone a drink. And that’s why remote presence makes sense in a workplace. People who work together are inherently constrained, thank God, by the rules of professional decorum. You shouldn’t be doing any touching at work anyway.

But for most of the Popular Science staff, the Beam provides a tolerable and even useful extension of their boss. Colleagues approach to show me their latest Nerf gun. The high-resolution camera allows me to zoom in on cover sketches. People say hi.

In all-staff meetings, which we typically hold by conference call, it eliminates the awkward anticipatory silences and simultaneous speaking so common with that lower form of communication. Colleagues can see whether I’m about to speak, so conversations flow more naturally. Sure, occasionally our “robot only” Wi-Fi network goes down, but that’s expected. The Beam drops my calls less frequently than AT&T does.

And recently, my job tested the Beam as only an office can. An editor asked whether she could speak with me privately for a few minutes. Normally, she’d have ducked into an office and called me from her cell phone. Instead, I asked whether the Beam was okay.

I followed her down the hall and through an open door and asked her to close it behind us. I quietly rotated to face her and slid forward and back to find a comfortable distance. She sat and began to speak.

I won’t tell you what we discussed, but it was one of the dozens of private conversations a supervisor and an employee might have. Perhaps she was asking for help with a difficult colleague. Maybe she wanted a raise.

Or she’d been offered another job. The point is, she could see my expression of interest and concern and could presumably hear the puff I blew from my cheeks in dismay as she laid things out. We talked for a while.

It was a subtle and complicated conversation, and yet somehow the Beam conveyed the sentiments we each entrusted it to convey. In less than 10 minutes, we had resolved things. She thanked me and rose. “Was this weird, doing this by robot?” I asked.

“Not at all,” she said after a moment. “I guess I’ve gotten used to it.”

Jacob Ward is the magazine’s editor in chief.

NOVEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 5 5

THE

ME AT LAB CAN ENGINEERED BEEF, CHICKEN, A N D P O R K SAV E T H E WO R L D? STORY BY TOM FOSTER PHOTO G R APH BY BRI A N KLU TCH

ON AN ORDINARY spring morning in Columbia, Missouri, Ethan Brown stands in the middle of an ordinary kitchen tearing apart a chicken fajita strip. “Look at this,” he says. “It’s amazing!” Around him, a handful of stout Midwestern food-factory workers lean in and nod approvingly.

“I’m just so proud of it.”

The meat Brown is pulling apart looks normal enough: beige flesh that separates into long strands. It would not be out of place in a chicken salad or Caesar wrap. Bob Prusha, a colleague of Brown’s, stands over a stove sautéing a batch for us to eat. But the meat Brown is fiddling with and Prusha is frying is far from ordinary. It’s actually not meat at all.

Brown is the CEO of Beyond Meat, a four-year-old company that manufactures a meat substitute made mainly from soy and pea proteins and amaranth. Mock meat is not a new idea. Grocery stores are full of plantbased substitutes—the Boca and Gardenburgers of the world, not to mention Asian staples like tofu and seitan.

What sets Beyond Meat apart is how startlingly meatlike its product is. The “chicken” strips have the distinct fibrous structure of poultry, and they deliver a similar nutritional profile. Each serving has about the same amount of protein as an equivalent portion of chicken, 56 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

but with zero cholesterol or saturated and trans fats.

To Brown, there is little difference between his product and the real thing. Factory-farmed chickens aren’t really treated as animals, he says; they’re machines that transform vegetable inputs into chicken breasts.

Beyond Meat simply uses a more efficient production system. Where one pound of cooked boneless chicken requires 7.5 pounds of dry feed and 30 liters of water, the same amount of Beyond Meat requires only 1.1 pound of ingredients and two liters of water.

The ability to efficiently create meat, or something sufficiently meat-like, will become progressively more important in coming years because humanity may be reaching a point when there’s not enough animal protein to go around. The United Nations expects the global population to grow from the current 7.2 billion to 9.6 billion by 2050. Also, as countries such as China and India continue to develop, their populations are adopting more Western diets. Worldwide the amount of meat eaten per person nearly doubled from 1961 to 2007, and the UN projects it will double again by 2050.

In other words, the planet needs to rethink how it gets its meat. Brown is addressing the issue by supplying a near-perfect meat analogue, but he is not alone in reinventing animal products. Just across town, Modern Meadow uses 3-D printers and tissue engi-

PROP STYLING BY JENNIFER GREENE

NOVEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 5 7

THE MEAT LAB

neering to grow meat in a lab. The company already has a refrigerator full of lab-grown beef and pork; in fact, the company’s co-founder, Gabor Forgacs, fried and ate a piece of engineered pork onstage at a 2011 TED talk. Another scientist, Mark Post at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, is also using tissue engineering to produce meat in a lab. In August, he served an entire lab-grown burger to two diners on a London stage as a curious but skeptical crowd looked on.

Revolutions tend to appear revolutionary only from a distance, and as Brown walks me to the production floor, I’m struck by how similar the Beyond Meat factory looks to any other. Nondescript metal machinery churns away. Ingredients sit in plastic bulk-foods bins.

We put on hairnets and white coats and walk over to a small blue conveyor belt, where Brown’s chicken strips emerge from the machinery cooked and in oddly rectilinear form. They are not yet seasoned, he says, but they are ready to eat. At the end of the conveyor belt, the still-steaming strips fall unceremoniously into a steel bucket, where they land with a dull thud.

Staring at the bucketful of precooked strips, it’s hard to imagine a future in which meat is, by necessity, not meat. Or in which meat is grown in a manufacturing facility instead of a field or feedlot. But that future is fast approaching, and here in the heart of Big Ag country, both Beyond Meat and Modern Meadow are confronting it head on.

ACH YEAR, Americans eat more than 200 pounds of meat per person, and mid-Missouri is as good a place as any to see what it takes to satisfy that appetite. Columbia sits dead center in the state, so approaching on I-70 from either direction means driving about two hours past huge tracts of farmland—soy, corn, and wheat fields and herds of grazing cattle. Giant truck stops glow on the horizon, and mile-long trains tug boxcars loaded with grain to places as far away as Mexico and California.

It’s rich country that for nearly 150 years has fed the nation and the world. Yet most of the crops grown around Columbia will never land on dining-room tables but rather in giant feedlot troughs. That’s not unusual. About 80 percent of the world’s farmland is used to support the meat and poultry industries, and much of that goes to growing animal feed. An efficient use of resources this is not. For example, a single pound of cooked beef, a family meal’s worth of hamburgers, requires 298 square feet of land, 27 pounds of feed, and 211 gallons of water.

Supplying meat not only devours resources but also creates waste. That same pound of hamburger requires more than 4,000 Btus of fossil-fuel energy to get to the dinner table; something has to power the tractors, feedlots, slaughterhouses, and trucks.

That process, along with the methane the cows belch

E

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: It took more than two decades to create a vegetable-based meat analogue with a consistency and texture similar to chicken; Whole Foods began selling the packaged Beyond Meat product in spring; at the factory in Columbia, Missouri, food scientists transform a mix of soy and pea proteins and amaranth into “chicken” strips.

58 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

COUR TESY BE YOND ME AT ( 3 )

“We are going to be meat. We’ll just be slaughtering plants instead of animals.”

HUNGRY PLANET

THE TYPICAL DIET: TODAY

DEVELOPED COUNTRIES Poultry 60 lbs.

Poultry 19 lbs.

Pork 64 lbs.

Developed countries consume about 40 percent of meat worldwide. According to the UN, that figure will fall to 30 percent by 2050, driven by population growth and dietary changes in developing countries, even as total global consumption rises from 280 to 500 million tons. The inclusion of more meat in developing-world diets may help feed undernourished populations, but it will also require existing farmland to be far more productive. If current trends continue to 2050, farmland will grow by only 20 percent, but fertilizer and pesticide use will more than double. To feed a hungry growing world, agricultural ecologists need to know who will be eating more meat, and where. —KATIE PEEK

Pork 26 lbs.

Beef 14 lbs.

DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

THE LAND: TODAY

PERCENT OF ICE-FREE LAND Cropland for animal feed 2.9% Pastureland 28% Other agricultural land 10%

Sub-Saharan Africa Beef 50 lbs.

South Asia

THE GROWTH Meat consumption will nearly double by Middle East and 2050, but not equally across the globe.

North Africa Each hexagon here represents about four million people—metro Boston’s population— in six world regions. Bigger hexagons represent higher per capita meat consumption in that region. Today’s population is in the inner ring, and growth by 2050 in the outer.

Developed countries

Latin America and Caribbean

THE TYPICAL DIET: 2050 Poultry 36 lbs.

THE LAND: 2050

DEVELOPED COUNTRIES Poultry 80 lbs.

Pork 67 lbs.

Pork 28 lbs.

East Asia Beef 21 lbs.

DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Beef 49 lbs.

ILLUSTR ATION BY JAN WILLEM TULP

SOURCES: FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS; LAND-USE DATA FROM EMILY CASSIDY, THE INSTITUTE ON THE ENVIRONMENT, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

PERCENT OF ICE-FREE LAND Cropland for animal feed 3% Pastureland 31% Other agricultural land 15%

NOVEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 5 9

THE MEAT LAB

51%

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Amount of greenhouse gases that come from meat

N THE MID-1980S, a food scientist named Fu-hung Hsieh moved to Columbia, Missouri, to start a food-engineering program at the University of Missouri. Hsieh was coming to academia from a successful career in the processedfoods industry, at Quaker Oats, and he convinced the university to buy him a commercial-grade extrusion machine, nearly unheard of in an academic setting.

An extruder is one of the processed-food industry’s most important and versatile pieces of equipment, the invention responsible for Froot Loops and Cheetos and premade cookie dough. Dry and wet ingredients are poured into a hopper on one end of the machine and a rotating auger pushes them through a long barrel, where they are subjected to varying levels of heat and pressure. At the barrel’s end, the ingredients pass through a die that forms them into whatever shape and texture the machine has been programmed to produce. The mixture emerges at the far end as a continuous ribbon of food, which is sliced into the desired portions.

On one level, an extruder is a simple piece of technology—something like a giant sausage maker—but producing the desired result can be devilishly complicated. “Some people say extrusion cooking is an art form,” says Harold Huff, a meat-loving Missouri native who works with Hsieh as a senior research specialist. Around 1989, Hsieh and Huff took an interest in using the extruder to make the first realistic meat analogue. “We didn’t worry about flavor or anything else,” Hsieh tells me. “We wanted it to tear apart like chicken—it was all just about initial appearance.” They knew there wasn’t a single physical or chemical adjustment that would bring about a solution. They just had to experiment. “You have to have the right ingredients, the right temperature, the right hardware,” Huff says. “You try things, make observations, and make adjustments” for years, even decades. And so it went, until Ethan Brown came calling in 2009.

Brown, a vegan environmentalist, had been working for a fuel-cell company and had become frustrated by his colleagues’ ignorance of meat’s role in climate change. “We would go to conferences and sit there wringing our hands over all these [energy] issues, and then we’d go to dinner and people would order huge steaks,” he says. “I was like, ‘This is stupid, I want to go work on that problem.’ ” To the ridicule of old friends, who joked that he was moving to the country to start a tofu factory, he started poring over journal articles and casting around for meat analogues to market—which is how he heard about Hsieh’s work.

Brown licensed the veggie chicken and began finetuning it with the scientists for mass consumption.

“If we used too much soy, it was too firm, and if we reduced it too much, it became soft, like tofu,” Brown remembers. “It took us two years to figure that out, and it’s still not perfect.”

As Brown and Hsieh refined the product, it began

I

FA C I N G PA G E: C O U R T E SY M O D E R N M E A D O W ( 3 )

throughout their lives, contributes as much as 51 percent of all greenhouse gas produced in the world.

To understand how humans developed such a reliance on meat, it’s useful to start at the beginning.

Several million years ago, hominids had large guts and smaller brains. That began to reverse around two million years ago: Brains got bigger as guts got smaller.

The primary reason for the change, according to a seminal 1995 study by evolutionary anthropologist Leslie Aiello, then of the University College London, is that our ancestors started eating meat, a compact, high-energy source of calories. With meat, hominids did not need to maintain a large, energy-intense digestive system. Instead, they could divert energy elsewhere, namely to power big energy-hungry brains.

And with those brains, they changed the world.

As time progressed, meat became culturally important too. Hunting fostered cooperation; cooking and eating the kill brought communities together over shared rituals—as it still does in backyard barbecues.

Neal Barnard, a nutrition author and physician at George Washington University, argues that today the cultural appeal of meat trumps any physiological benefits. “We have known for a long time that people who don’t eat meat are thinner and healthier and live longer than people who do,” he says. Nutritionally, meat is a good source of protein, iron, and vitamin B12, but Barnard says those nutrients are easily available from other sources that aren’t also heavy in saturated fats.

“For the millennia of our sojourn on Earth, we have been getting more than enough protein from entirely plant-based sources. The cow gets its protein that way and simply rearranges it into muscle. People say, ‘Gee if I don’t eat muscle, where will I get protein?’ You get it from the same place the cow got it.”

To Barnard, the simple conclusion is that everyone should stick to eating plants—and he’s right that it would be a far more efficient use of all that cropland.

And yet to most people, meat tastes good. Studies suggest that eating meat activates the brain’s pleasure center in much the same way chocolate does. Even many vegetarians say bacon smells great when it’s cooking. For whatever reason, most people simply love to eat meat—myself included. And that makes re-creating it, whether from vegetables or cells in a lab, exceedingly difficult.

“If we can make living tissues, then we can certainly make food-grade ones.” to gain notice. Bill Gates, who has adopted the meatproduction crisis as one of his signature issues, published a report about the issue on his blog, The Gates Notes, in which he endorsed Beyond Meat as an important innovation. “I couldn’t tell the difference between Beyond Meat and real chicken,” he wrote. Perhaps more impressive, New York Times food correspondent and best-selling cookbook author Mark Bittman tried Beyond Meat in a blind taste test last year (at the behest of Brown, who served Bittman a burrito) and said that it “fooled me badly.” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone invested in the company last year, not long after the powerful Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers bought a stake.

“One of the partners at Kleiner asked me to meet with Ethan and give them feedback, because they knew I was a vegan. I said yes, really as a favor,” Stone says.

“I went into it thinking it’s going to be a boutiquey thing, for well-to-do vegans. Instead, I was introduced to this big-science approach. Ethan was talking about competing in the multibillion-dollar meat business. We are going to be meat, he said, we are just going to be slaughtering plants instead of animals. And here are all the ways it matters, in terms of global health, resource scarcity, number of people in the world. I was like, ‘Oh, my god. They are thinking completely differently.’”

The day I visit, the factory in Columbia is humming because the company is preparing its first shipment of packaged product to Whole Foods, which agreed to sell it nationwide after a successful trial in some California stores. On the production floor, the extruder is roaring away, pumping out strips ready for seasoning, flash-freezing, or quick grilling. A digital readout shows the configuration of the die that gives Beyond Meat its chicken-like structure. It is the company’s secret sauce, the result of all those years of

research, and Brown darts over to block my view of the readout as we approach. It’s the one thing that’s not entirely transparent about the operation.

Brown has set up a taste test: three plates of Beyond Meat in three preseasoned flavors. I pop one of the Southwest-flavored strips into my mouth, and it tastes, well, a bit like soy in the form of chicken, sprinkled with chipotle dust. That’s also how it chews—very chicken-like but somehow just shy of chicken. After all the buildup, I’m a little disappointed. But I also have the distinct impression that I’m eating something more like meat than veggies. And I’m eating it unadorned, as opposed to in Bittman’s burrito.

Over the course of the next month, I replace boneless chicken breasts with the lightly seasoned strips in various meals: an omelet with spinach and feta, a plate of fajitas, a wok-ful of fried rice. I’m never once fooled that it’s chicken. For me, chicken is the whole sensory package—crisp skin, the roasting pan, the juices—and when I want one, I make one. But when I want lean, chewy protein as a flavor medium in some other dish, I find I don’t care whether it comes from an animal or vegetable. But what if it comes from neither?

Modern Meadow grows beef and pork cells in heated incubators [top left]; Karoly Jakab of Modern Meadow pulls a tray of labgrown meat from a refrigerator [bottom left]; Gabor and Andras Forgacs, the father and son co-founders of Modern Meadow [above].

N THE OTHER SIDE of Columbia, at a biotech start-up incubator on the edge of the University of Missouri campus, the scientists at Modern Meadow are working on a very different solution to the meatproduction crisis. When I visit, a 3-D printer about the size of an HP desktop unit streams a line of yellowish goo onto a petri dish. Back and forth, the machine creates a series of narrow rows a hair’s breadth apart.

After covering a few inches of the dish, the printer switches direction and lays new rows atop the first ones in a crosshatch pattern. There’s no noise but an

O

NOVEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 6 1

THE MEAT LAB

Ethan Brown of Beyond Meat [left] and Andras Forgacs of Modern Meadow

Research grant shortly thereafter. It then received a grant from Breakout Labs, an arm of Peter Thiel’s foundation. (Thiel is a co-founder of PayPal and a tech investor and futurist.) With help from the grant, Andras set up a business office at Singularity University on the campus of NASA’s Silicon Valley research park, and Gabor set up his scientific headquarters in Columbia.

Modern Meadow was born.

As ghoulish as growing lab meat sounds, the concept has a long history, and not just in science fiction.

In 1931, Winston Churchill wrote, “Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”

He was wrong about the date, but the same sentiment drives the meat-alternatives community today. If you consider the conditions under which meat is produced—how the animals are treated and how much waste is involved—factory farming, not tissue culture, seems the ghoulish option. By comparison, lab meat looks both humane and sensible; a study for the EU predicted that, if produced on a large scale, lab-grown meat would use 99.7 percent less land and 94 percent less water than factory farming, and it would contribute 98.8 percent fewer greenhouse gases.

Over the past few decades, a handful of scientists have pursued lab-grown meat, most notably Mark Post in the Netherlands. Post created the burger for his London taste test using a different tissue-engineering process that involves growing cells around a cylindrical scaffold. According to Isha Datar, the director of New Harvest, a nonprofit research and advocacy group that focuses on meat alternatives, Post’s process may actually be “more amenable to mass production, theoretically” than Modern Meadow’s 3-D printing.

On the other hand, Datar points to the head start Modern Meadow has: “It’s an actual business. The other groups are all academic, and you never know if they have the power to get out of the lab.”

By August, Modern Meadow was experimenting

There’s an uncanny valley of food. Until engineered meat is perfect, it will be creepy.

62 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

LEF T TO RIGHT: REUTERS/DAVID PARRY/POOL; JENNIFER SMITH/ BE YOND ME AT; COUR TESY MODERN ME ADOWS

In August, Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands served a lab-grown hamburger to two diners. One said it “wasn’t unpleasant.”

electric whir, no smell, nothing to suggest that the goo is an embryonic form of meat that will turn into a little sausage. Once the printer finishes its run, the result looks something like a large Band-Aid. To reach this stage, about 700 million beef cells spent two weeks growing in a cell-growth medium in a wardrobe-size incubator. The cells were then spun free in a centrifuge, and the resulting slurry, which is the consistency of honey, was transferred to a large syringe that acts as the business end of the printer.

The printed cells will now go back into an incubator for a few more days, during which time they will start to develop an extracellular matrix, a naturally occurring scaffold of collagens that gives cells structural support. The result is actual muscle tissue.

The technology in front of me is the work of Gabor Forgacs, a Hungarian-born theoretical physicist who turned to developmental biology mid-career. In 2005, he led a team that developed a process to print multicellular aggregates rather than individual cells. His printer produces physiologically viable tubes of cells that can adhere to create large complex structures.

In 2007, Gabor and his son, Andras, helped found a company called Organovo that uses Gabor’s technology to print human tissue for medical applications (pharmaceutical testing, for instance) and aims one day to print functioning human organs for transplants.

Gabor was the science mind behind the company, and Andras worked in various roles on the business side.

“Fairly early on, people asked us, ‘Hey, could you make meat?’ ” Andras remembers. “And we were pretty dismissive of the idea”—it was simply too far from Organovo’s mission. But by 2011, Organovo had brought on a new management team and laid plans to go public (which it did in early 2012). Gabor began brainstorming new projects with his two closest scientific collaborators—Françoise Marga and Karoly Jakab.

Andras, meanwhile, had moved to Shanghai to work in venture capital. He saw how diets in China were changing and how much of the meat came from places as far away as Latin America and Australia.

That confluence of factors made bio-fabricated meat appear more attractive. Even better, Gabor suspected meat would be simpler to produce than functioning human parts. “If we can make living tissues, then certainly we can make food-grade tissues, which don’t have to be as exacting,” he says. “We do not have to worry about immune compatibility, for instance.”

In late 2011, Andras returned to the U.S., and the team landed a USDA Small Business Innovation

with other bio-assembly techniques that could quickly lay down large cell arrays. And Mark Post revealed his own high-profile Silicon Valley backer: Google co-founder Sergey Brin, whose track record bringing improbable products to market isn’t bad.

But being first to market doesn’t matter if the meat coming out of the labs isn’t appetizing. Post’s burger got tepid reviews from his two tasters. And Modern Meadow’s current product is hardly even recognizable as meat; it lacks blood and fat, which are responsible for most of actual meat’s color, flavor, and juicy texture. Karoly Jakab shows me a couple of the samples he’s storing in the lab refrigerator: They look like tiny beige-gray sausages—fully grown, rolled-up versions of the Band-Aid I saw coming out the printer—about the size of an infant’s pinkie finger.

To make the meat more appealing, Modern Meadow has enlisted the Chicago chef Homaro Cantu, whose restaurant, Moto, has become an icon of molecular gastronomy. For Modern Meadow, he’ll be working on what Andras calls “last-mile issues” like texture, flavor, appearance, and mouthfeel by, for instance, suggesting how much fat to add and what kind. And sometime in the next couple of years, Andras says, with Cantu’s help, Modern Meadow plans to start conducting invitation-only tasting sessions, where friends of the company will sign waivers and sample dishes.

There will be plenty of technical hurdles just to get to that point, but putting lab-grown meat in the hands of the masses could be even trickier because there is no regulatory precedent. Meat falls under the USDA’s jurisdiction, but Andras expects the FDA to be involved too. “They have the sophistication and understanding of how tissue engineering works in medicine,” he says.

Approval could take at least 10 years.

In the meantime, Modern Meadow needs to make money, so the team is focusing heavily on growing leather, which turns out to be easier than meat and won’t face as many regulatory hurdles. Gabor hands me a pepperoni-size disc of dark-brown leather, indistinguishable from the stuff used in one of my favorite pairs of shoes. It even smells like leather. It is leather.

Much as the company is partnering with chef Cantu on perfecting the meat, it’s in talks with fashion brands and automakers to create products with the lab-grown leather.

THAN BROWN FOLDS his lanky frame into one of the metal chairs at the Main Squeeze, an organic juice café in downtown Columbia, and begins talking about how he’ll define success for Beyond Meat in the near term. “I want to be in the meat aisle,” he says.

“You go to the grocery store, and they sell meat in one section and vegetable-based proteins in another section. Why are they penalizing the non-meat?” He points to the rise of soy milk and its eventual inclusion in the dairy aisle—which helped to drive a 500 percent

E

78%

Amount of world’s farmland used to produce meat today

increase in sales since 1997—as his model.

“Our earliest adopters are the vegans and locavore types who prefer tofu and beans and quinoa,” he says.

“But the sweet spot for us is folks who are simply cutting down on their meat consumption. They still eat at Taco Bell, but they know they shouldn’t do it that much.”

Appealing to those people with a near-perfect imitation of meat makes sense on one level. But there’s also a risk, Andras Forgacs says. In the world of animation and robotics, there’s a concept called the “uncanny valley,” which states that if a simulated human too closely resembles the real thing, it will repel people.

“There’s also an uncanny valley of food,” Andras says.

“Until it becomes perfect, it’s going to be creepy.”

I’ve seen the uncanny valley response up close, when I’ve tried to serve my wife Beyond Meat. She has no problem eating processed meats that bear no resemblance to the animal they come from: hot dogs, say, or on the high end, goose liver pâté. And she’ll eat other soy proteins, such as tofu, that don’t pretend to be meat. But she won’t touch Beyond Meat. To her, it imitates the real thing just a little too closely.

Modern Meadow may simply back away from the uncanny valley, rather than try to cross it. “I have an analogy that goes back to Organovo,” Gabor says. “We will never be able to print a heart exactly as it appears in nature—but we don’t have to. What we need is to create an organ that functions as well as your heart, or better, from your own cells so that it works in your body.

That we can do. And the same goes for meat. What we are going to put into your mouth is not what you’d get when you slaughter a cow. But from all other points of view—nutritional value, taste—it will be just like the real thing. You recognize it as meat, but it’s a different kind of meat.” Like a hot dog or goose liver pâté.

And if fake meat doesn’t have to perfectly mimic real meat, it can be made even better than the real thing. The teams at Beyond Meat and Modern Meadow envision super meats enhanced with things like omega-3 fatty acids and extra vitamins. “You could eat a Beyond Meat Philly cheesesteak that lowers your cholesterol and gives you sexual prowess,” Brown says. He is only half joking.

However they move forward, neither company envisions its product entirely replacing meat, nor do they see themselves as being in competition with each other. Isha Datar of New Harvest predicts a portfolio of approaches that would address the meat-production crisis: lab-grown meat and plant-based meats, yes, but also sustainably raised livestock and less meat-intensive diets. A 2012 study at the University of Exeter C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 78 in the U.K. calculated the NOVEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 6 3

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Make a stereoscope with reading glasses PAGE 68

POPSCI.COM

HOW 2.0

PLUS:

Hack a soda can into a soldering stencil PAGE 71

NOVEMBER

2013

H20@POPSCI.COM

TRUNK O’ FUNK Sensors lining the Treequencer allow musicians like Superhuman Happiness (a dance-funk band) to play the instrument by dancing, waving, or just moving around.

@POPSCI

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

EDITED BY DAVE MOSHER

YOU BUILT WHAT?!

The Treequencer COURTESY RED BULL CONTENT POOL

A sculpture that turns movement into music TIME 72 hours COST About $2,500

STO R Y BY LILLIAN STEENBLIK HWANG PHOTOGR APHS BY A A RON ROGOSIN

A

s summer beat down on an outdoor music festival in Brooklyn in June, four men from Portsmouth, Virginia, took shelter beneath a tent. They were one of six teams at McCarren Park hoping to win Red Bull Creation, an annual build-off based on a surprise theme. This year’s challenge was to construct a crowd-friendly, never-before-seen instrument. The catch: Teams had only 72 hours to vie for a $10,000 grand prize.

North Street Labs, as the Virginia team called itself, was taking its third crack at the event in as many years. Last year, the group built a death-defying merry-go-round for a “game of games” contest. This time, Creation’s judges

started the countdown clock by asking each team to make a musical instrument capable of composing and playing live music for, and by, the public. North Street Labs’ programmer, Steve Shaffer, reacted with apprehension.

“Uh-oh,” he thought, “I’m deaf, and I have to make music.”

Despite Shaffer’s disadvantage—he was born with less than 50 percent hearing—and the entire team’s self-professed lack of musical talent, North Street Labs moved forward in high spirits. A few rounds of beer helped the group settle on an idea: The team would build a giant interactive musical tree, later dubbed the Treequencer.

The trunk and branches would be made of steel pipes and outfitted with motion sensors. Dancing around the tree device trigger unique beats and melodies that would

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emanate from a speaker nested in a birdhouse.

The men raced to a nearby homeimprovement store, bought steel conduit, and returned to the park to tape together a mock-up of the tree’s metallic skeleton. “All the other teams freaked out when they saw that,” Shaffer says. Happy with the basic design, they welded the pipes into a 10-foot-tall frame and rush-ordered electronic parts.

A day into the build, North Street Labs decided to split up the work.

Shaffer’s coding background made him the best person to convert sensor data into music, but he couldn’t hear above the din of the festival. “My hearing aids cut off at 120 decibels,” he says. So he retreated to a quiet hotel room and hunkered down. For the next two days, he taped motion sensors to a wall and wrote software to turn sensor output into sound, often dancing around the room to test his work. Meanwhile, his teammates built a birdhouse to contain a speaker, microprocessor, power supply, and music interface. Just before the 72-hour mark, Shaffer rejoined them at the park and hooked up the sensors, finishing the Treequencer with only minutes to spare.

The competition was stiff. One team built a scanner to convert graffiti into sound, another a robotic drum kit, which ultimately won [see “Two More Instruments,” right]. North Street Labs took home only cartloads of Red Bull soft drinks and leftover tools, but the team’s tree did attract musicians: The band Superhuman Happiness recorded a new song and music video with the Treequencer.

Someday, Shaffer and his colleagues hope to waterproof their invention, add solar panels to power it, and permanently install it outdoors. “The Treequencer came out better than we envisioned it,” Shaffer says. “If we can make something like that in 72 hours, it makes me wonder what we could do in a month.”

To become a Tech Spotter go to

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66 / POPUL AR SCIENCE

TOUGH

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

4 1

3

Rugged, Rip it, Stick it, Done

TAPE

2

CLOCKWISE FROM BOT TOM LEF T: COURTESY A ARON ROGOSIN/RED BULL CONTENT POOL ( 3 ) ; COURTESY LILLIAN STEENBLIK HWANG

HOW IT WORKS

1 PROXIMITY Three ultrasonic sensors at the top of the trunk emit inaudible high-frequency sounds and listen to the echoes to determine a person’s proximity. Each sensor triggers a different sound. One elicits piano notes, for example, and tunes them according to distance.

2

MOTION An X-band sensor (similar to those in home alarm systems) measures speed. Shaffer coded the sensor to alter a digital drumbeat based on a dancer’s pace.

3 COMPUTING Inside the birdhouse, an Arduino microprocessor gathers data from all four sensors and converts it into commands for a MIDI interface, which stores a large library of digital sounds.

4 POWER A 120V power strip feeds electricity to the sensors and a 100-watt speaker harvested from a PA system. Red LEDs that illuminate the birdhouse, meanwhile, get energy from a 250-watt computer power supply.

TW O MOR E I N S T R U M E N T S

TIME 72 hours COST $2,000

AU TO LO O P MB Labs, a team from Chicago, built a giant electronic drum sequencer during Creation’s 72-hour build-off. It consisted of a robotic drum kit and two discs outfitted with object-detecting cameras. Users could change the rhythm and melody by moving triangles and marbles around the discs. The intricate musical contraption wowed judges, who awarded MB Labs the $10,000 grand prize.

TIME 72 hours COST $1,600

ER TE -TRONIC DECO DECODER Minneapolis-based 1.21 Jigawatts built a graffiti translator. Players sprayed colorful images onto a roll of paper and pressed a button to feed it through the back of the instrument. Photo sensors scanned the artwork and converted it into data as it moved. Depending on the paint’s color, contrast, and location, the machine triggered differently tuned copper chimes. The device won the People’s Choice Award and earned the team a CubeX 3-D printer as a prize.

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www.gorillatough.com NOVEMBER 2013 / POPUL AR SCIENCE / 67

©2013 The Gorilla Glue Company

H2

HOW 2.0 / BUILD IT STORY BY ERIN BRODWIN

Moon Viewer

A do-it-yourself stereoscope makes lunar photos pop

W

hen viewed from Earth, the moon appears flat.

Stereo vision requires each eye to see an object from slightly different angles, but the intervening 239,000 miles squash the moon’s deep craters and spherical shape into a uniform, luminous pancake. You could build a spaceship to get close enough for a respectable 3-D view—or just trick your brain using the 2.5 inches of space between your pupils as well as photos that reveal the moon’s subtle orbital wobble. (The motion, called libration, creates different lunar perspectives over time). Make this stereoscope for a stellar view of the moon.

RED-AND-BLUE MOON Viewed through red-blue glasses, each eye sees a different image in this anaglyph (created using NASA’s map of the lunar surface).

This fools the brain into constructing a virtual 3-D object.

Louis Ducos du Hauron—inventor of the technology—pined for such a view in 1893, offering to relinquish his patent if anyone could “print and publish an anaglyph image of the moon suspended in space.” Sadly, a British newspaper beat POPULAR SCIENCE to it in 1921.

TIME 20 minutes COST A few dollars

M AT E R I A L S 1. Wire cutters 2. Plastic reading glasses (+3.5 diopter is best) 3. Sandpaper 4. Power drill 5. 1-inch-long bolt 6. Ruler 8. Pencil 9. Computer

View the stereogram of the lunar eclipse below, captured in 2003 and 2008, in full resolution at popsci.com/moonoscope.

INS T RU C T IONS:

A

CUT: Using the wire cutters, snip the reading glasses at the bridge. Cut off the earpieces to create stubs about one inch long protruding from each lens. Sand any rough edges until smooth.

C

GLUE: Superglue the pencil to one of the earpiece stubs for a handle. (Note: Gluing a blackened business card to the side opposite the pencil can help improve the stereoscopic effect.)

B

DRILL: Flip the lenses around so the inside edges are on the outside. Drill a hole through each earpiece stub, and screw the bolt through the holes. Position the centers of the lenses 2.5 inches apart.

D

VIEW: Download and print the moon stereogram [left].

Hold the stereoscope to your eyes, and hover about seven inches above the two moons. When you stop seeing double, a single 3-D moon should appear.

68 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

FROM TOP: JENS MEYER/NOA A -NASA ; SON OF AL AN ; THOMA S MATHESON

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SIMPLE PROJECT / HOW 2.0 STO R Y BY S A R A H JACOBY

Smartphone Scanner Build a stand to rapidly digitize analog notes

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Graphic designer Giovanni Re likes to scribble his many ideas and drawings in paper notebooks. He also wants digital access to them, so Re built an inexpensive scanner using his iPhone. A stand positions the phone’s camera at the precise height and angle to take photos without shadows, which he can then archive using apps like Evernote. Use some foam board, a hot-glue gun, an extra phone case, and a utility knife to build your own.

Download a blueprint of Re’s stand at popsci.com/smartphonescanner.

TIME 30 minutes COST $5 DIFFICULTY ▯○○○○ INSTRUCTIONS 1. Trace Re’s blueprint onto a 24-by-16-inch slab of foam board.

2. Cut out the V-shape bridge and square piece. Carve away foam below the dashed-line blocks on the square piece, and slice a wedge between each of the bridge’s dashed lines (but don’t cut the bottom paper layer).

3. Fold the bridge, hot-glue each of its ends, and insert them into the square piece’s rectangular notches.

4. Glue a smartphone case facedown on the bridge’s platform.

Pop your device into the case, slide a notebook below, and start digitizing doodles.

COURTESY GIOVANNI RE

WE B SI T E OF T H E MON T H

WARNING: Beware of sharp edges, hot metal, and acid. Wear protective goggles and gloves.

GEAR UP / HOW 2.0 STO R Y BY ERIN BRODWIN

Etch-a-Stencil

H2

Use a soda can to solder flawless electronics

COURTESY FELIX RUSU

T

aking an electronics prototype to the next level often means soldering tiny components onto a custom-printed circuit board. Solder paste applied without a stencil, however, can ooze, cause shorts, and end a project in flames. Systems engineer Felix Rusu devised a simple process to make robust soldering stencils from soda cans. Here’s how you too can save yourself from the expensive made-to-order variety.

TIME About 30 minutes COST $20 DIFFICULTY ▯▯▯▯○

For full instructions, visit popsci.com/solderstencil.

INSTRUCTIONS 1. Slice the ends off a soda can and cut the cylinder open. Flatten and warm the metal with a clothing iron for a minute. Rub off the interior and exterior coatings with acetone.

2. On a computer, ensure the holes in the stencil design are white and everything else black. Laser-print it with toner onto a transparency, and cut it to fit the aluminum sheet.

3. Attach the print face-down to the aluminum with sticky notes, and slip it between a folded piece of paper. Iron it for a minute, dunk it in water, and peel off all papers.

4. Fill any gaps in the transfer with permanent marker.

Cover all exposed aluminum—except for the stencil design—with clear tape (that and toner repel acid in the next step).

5. Soak the stencil in one part muriatic acid and three parts hydrogen peroxide for eight minutes. The acid etches holes in the metal stencil; rinse it in water to stop the reaction.

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NOVEMBER 2013 ANSWERS BY DANIEL ENGBER

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Everyone got mad at the Germans.

LONG ANSWER

More than 98 percent of all scientific articles published today are in English, but that hasn’t always been the case. “There used to be one language of science in Europe, and it was Latin,” says Michael Gordin, a historian of science at Princeton University who is writing a book about the selection of scientific languages. But researchers began to move away from Latin in the 17th century. Galileo, Newton, and others started writing papers in their native tongues in part to make their work more accessible and in part as a reaction to the Protestant Reformation and the declining influence of the Catholic Church.

Once Latin was unseated as its lingua franca, scientific discourse splintered into local languages. Researchers worried that the loss of a common tongue would slow scientific progress, so by the middle of the 19th century, they had settled on three primary languages.“If you were a professional scientist,” Gordin says, “you were expected to read French, English, and German.”

German was not to hold its prominent position for long. After World War I, research-

800-437-1304 Ext. 2051 7 2 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013 © 2013 K&N Engineering, Inc.

ers from the U.S., England, France, and Belgium formed major scientific organizations, such as the International Astronomical Union.

Unwilling to embrace their former foes, they left German scientists out. Germany suffered another setback in 1933, when the government dismissed one fifth of the nation’s physics faculty and one eighth of its biology professors for cultural and political reasons (Jews and socialists were banned). Many left the country for the U.S. and England, where they started publishing in English.

Though the trend from that point on was toward English as the universal language of science, the shift took decades. One roadblock was the Cold War. During the 1950s and ’60s, most scientific literature was published in either English or Russian. “Then in the 1970s, everything turns,” Gordin says.

As the Soviet Union fell into decline, the use of Russian declined too. By the mid-1990s, about 96 percent of the world’s scientific articles were written in English, a trend that has only grown since. These days, he says, “publishing in English is almost not a choice.”

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/AL AUMULLER/GETTY IMAGES

TM

SHORT ANSWER

Albert Einstein receiving his U.S. citizenship after emigrating from Nazi Germany

FYI QUESTION

W H Y D O L E AV E S T UR N DIFFEREN T COL ORS? SHORT ANSWER

IMAGEDEPOTPRO/GET T Y IMAGES

Different trees make different pigments.

LONG ANSWER

Leaves are loaded with chlorophyll, which makes them green. But all green plants also carry a set of chemicals called carotenoids. On their own, these look yellow or orange—carotenoids give color to corn and carrots, for example—but they’re invisible beneath the chlorophyllic green of a leaf for most of the year. In the fall, when the leaves are nearing the end of their life cycle, the chlorophyll breaks down, and the yellow-orange is revealed. “The color of a leaf is subtractive, like crayons on a piece of paper,” says David Lee, formerly of Florida International University, who has studied leaf color since 1973.

Most trees have evolved to produce a different set of chemicals, called anthocyanins, when it’s bright and cold in autumn. These have a reddish tint and are responsible for the color of a blueberry. They’re also sometimes made

in newly sprouting leaves, which explains their sometimes reddish tint. Where chlorophyll and anthocyanins coexist, the color of a leaf may run to bronze, as in ash trees. At high enough concentrations, anthocyanins will make a leaf look almost purple, as in Japanese maples.

More drab autumn colors form as leaves really die and complete the breakdown of the chloroplasts. When they’re all dried out, the pigments link up together into what Lee calls a “brownish gunk.”

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SHADOW UNIVERSE CO N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E CO N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E

43 43

by its own interactions and its own forces. In principle, dark physics could lead to dark stars, dark planets, even dark life.

“There are some crazier ideas, and we’re working on them,” Randall says. “It really is a whole new world.”

Randall and her collaborators began by considering whether some dark matter could be denser than expected, as the Fermi gamma-ray detections seem to indicate, while remaining unnoticed by the direct-detection experiments. Their theory would explain both parts: The dark disk would pull together into a concentrated, flattened form, but it would rotate in tandem with Earth and the rest of the galaxy, like neighboring horses on a merry-go-round. Particles in the dark disk would barely be moving relative to us and so would cause nary a peep in an instrument like LUX. In a yet-unpublished elaboration of the double-disk theory, Randall and physicist Matthew McCullough of MIT even explain why some underground detectors pick up dark matter while others do not.

To a resolutely data-oriented guy like Rick Gaitskell, all this theorizing sounds a bit wifty. “If I may paraphrase TV’s Dr. House, there are times when you have two theories if one doesn’t explain it, but it’s something you should resist,” he says.

Juan Collar, Gaitskell’s rival at COUPP, is open to the philosophically opposite view: “If the universe that we can perceive

is so rich, why wouldn’t this dark side of things be as rich or more?” To a particle scientist like Lykken, a universe full of diverse dark particles sounds not only possible but reasonable.

“There is more dark matter than the matter we know about,” he says. “So why shouldn’t dark matter be at least as complicated?”

Fortunately, Randall’s ideas are also testable, and here too the answer could arrive within the next couple of years—possibly even before LUX, the LHC, and the AMS have a chance to weigh in. If there is a dark disk alongside the visible disk of our galaxy, it should have a measurable effect on the motion of surrounding stars. A new European space telescope called Gaia, slated at press time to launch in November 2013, is about to start making those measurements.

Just as Fritz Zwicky first glimpsed the dark universe while following the motions of galaxies 80 years ago, so Gaia may unveil a whole shadow world sitting right in front of us. My mind drifts back to the scene above the Trojan mine. Gaitskell and I were looking down, imagining the gold below. All along, the proof of the shadow universe might have been floating right above us, just waiting for someone to notice it amid the stars.

Corey S. Powell is the editor at large of Discover magazine and the acting editor of American Scientist.

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CO N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E

63

degree to which diets must change in order to feed the world in 2050 and stave off catastrophic climate change.

The researchers found that average global meat consumption would have to decrease from 16.6 percent of average daily calorie intake to 15 percent. That may not sound like much, but it translates to roughly halving the amount of meat in Western diets—a major change, but conceivable with high-quality meat alternatives.

One theme cuts through all those visions of the future: Educated consumers who have the benefit of total transparency into the meat-production process. Brown has considered installing cameras on the Beyond Meat production floor and streaming the video online so people can see for themselves how harmless the process is. The contrast to the secretive policies of industrial slaughterhouses would be stark.

Andras Forgacs imagines something even more dramatic. He pictures Modern Meadow’s production facilities as regional petting zoos. “You’d need to replenish the cell source periodically so all we’d really need is a few animals from which we could take occasional biopsies. They’d be like mascots.

Other than getting poked every month or so, they would lead these perfectly charmed lives.” People could come meet the animals as they grazed and then make their way into a facility to watch a giant 3-D printer stream the cells onto trays, where they would grow into pork chops and steaks.

“Would you rather visit a slaughterhouse and see a cow get killed, skinned, and disemboweled right before you go eat a steak dinner, or would you rather visit a petting zoo and a facility that looks a little Willy Wonka–ish and then go eat the meat right afterward?”

It’s a dream, but Andras insists it’s not outlandish. “Bio-fabrication already exists, and it’s inevitable that in the coming decades there will be applications beyond medicine—consumer applications, like food.” The question is whether the world will be ready for them.

Tom Foster’s last piece for Popular Science, about the Leap Motion interface, appeared in the August issue.

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From the Archives POPULAR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

STO R Y BY LINDSE Y KR ATOCHWILL

Lunar Landscape

“

For thousands of years, man has dreamed of going to the moon,” wrote I.M. Levitt in the POPULAR SCIENCE May 1958 cover story. “Today, that dream is almost a reality.”

Levitt, director of the planetarium at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, predicted that scientists and engineers would have to execute a five-step plan, including a mission to record surface elements using an atomic bomb, before mounting a manned moonwalk by the year 2000. Of course, humans actually strode across the lunar surface just 11 years later.

Nearly a half century after Neil Armstrong’s first small step, humans again dream of lunar travel—this time with help from private industry.

Fearing that new moon landings could sully the historic footprints, some want the Apollo sites protected.

On page 34, we argue for a treaty to preserve the whole moon.

From the October 1978 issue:

“We had libraries of speculation, but the facts changed everything.

Pre-Apollo thinking is absolutely gone.

The old moon is dead.”

—Gerald Wasserburg, Ph.D., then MacArthur professor of geology and geophysics at the California Institute of Technology

POPUL AR SCIENCE M AY 1 9 5 8

POPULAR SCIENCE magazine, Vol. 283, No. 5 (ISSN 161-7370, USPS 577-250), is published monthly by Bonnier Corp., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. Copyright ©2013 by Bonnier Corp. All rights reserved. Reprinting in whole or part is forbidden except by permission of Bonnier Corp. Mailing Lists: We make a portion of our mailing list available to reputable firms. If you would prefer that we not include your name, please write to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. Subscription Rates: $19.95 for 1 year.

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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.

8 4 / POPU L AR SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 2013

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