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S U M M E R 2022 Vol. 294, No. 2 Editor-in-Chief Corinne Iozzio Design Director Russ Smith Executive Editor Rachel Feltman Managing Editor, PopSci+ Jean McKenna Deputy Editor Purbita Saha Managing Editor, PopSci.com Marina Galperina DIY Editor John Kennedy Technology Editor Rob Verger Features Editor Susan Murcko Social Media Editor Chelsey Coombs COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY THE VOORHES PROP FABRICATION BY RICH SCHILLER
Engagement Editor Ryan Perry Digital Edition Editor Ben Guarino Associate Editors Jessica Boddy, Sandra Gutierrez G., Lauren J. Young Staff Writer Philip Kiefer Assistant Editors Charlotte Hu, Sara Kiley Watson Copy Editor S.B. Kleinman Researchers Stephanie Abramson, Cadence Bambenek, Jake Bittle, Diane Kelly, Alex Schwartz, Carolyn Shea Interns Maggie Galloway, Shi En Kim Executive Editor, Gear & Reviews Stan Horaczek Reviews Editor Mike Epstein Associate Managing Editor Tony Ware
ART AND PRODUCTION Photography Director John Toolan Production Manager Glenn Orzepowski
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Brooke Borel, Kat Eschner, Tom Foster, William Gurstelle, Gregory Mone, Sarah Scoles, P.W. Singer, Nick Stockton, James Vlahos OPERATIONS General Manager Adam Morath
Chief Executive Officer Lance Johnson Chief Operating Officer Alex Vargas Chief Revenue Officer Matt Young SVP, Strategic Partnerships Julie Smartz VP of Finance Garrett Hesley VP, Head of Advertising Sales Daniel Horowitz VP of Sales John Graney Head of Brand Alessandra De Benedetti Head of Consumer Revenue Kristen Ong Head of Client Success Olivia Utton Communications Director Cathy Hebert POPULAR SCIENCE magazine (ISSN 161-7370) is published quarterly by Recurrent Ventures, 701 Brickell Ave, Ste 1550, Miami, FL 33131. Copyright ©2022 by Recurrent Ventures. All rights reserved. Reprinting in whole or part is forbidden except by permission of Recurrent Ventures. FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SUBSCRIPTION QUESTIONS, such as renewals, address changes, email preferences, billing, and account status, go to popsci.com/cs. You can also call 800-289-9399 or 515-237-3697, or write to Popular Science, P.O. Box 6364, Harlan, IA 51593-1864. Occasionally, we make portions of our subscriber list available to carefully screened companies that offer products and services we think might be of interest to you. If you do not want to receive these offers, please advise us at 515-237-3697.
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STAN HORACZEK
FROM THE EDITOR
The story of us BY CORINNE IOZZIO
I’VE BEEN somewhat dreading picking a theme for this issue, the 150th-anniversary edition of PopSci, almost since the day I took the chair as editor-in-chief a little more than two years ago. How could one hope to encapsulate a history so deep and broad as to be punctuated by the earliest telephones, the development of the polio vaccine, and the rollout of WiFi? Sure, all these things—and the literal thousands of other inventions that have appeared in our pages—have common threads in research and innovation, but words like that are the low-hanging fruit. They’re our DNA, as opposed to a discrete thought. What could possibly bring all this to a head in a tangible way? The answer, oddly enough, was a theme the editors have batted around for years: metal. Eras of human technological development have been defined by metals (copper, bronze, then iron). And that relationship has only become more intricate and intimate with time. An early typewriter, for example, contained only a few distinct metals, including steel and zinc. The laptop I’m using right now contains no fewer than 19 of the conductive elements, from everyday substances like aluminum to precious commodities like gold. But this issue isn’t about taking a navel-gazing hike through history— it’s about defining the metallic moment we’re in right now. The crux of our modern tug-of-war with the periodic table is the rush toward electrification. All those turbines, charging stations, and
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batteries put new pressure on natural resources, even as they ease the old burdens of fossil fuel use. So the centerpiece of this issue is a series of stories focusing on the pinch points in our quest to decarbonize: We explore the challenges of environmentally conscious mining by way of Idaho’s first new cobalt extraction operation in 40 years; visit a lab whose process for purifying copper could spell an end to noxious smelting; and check in on a startup aiming to close the loop on EV batteries through novel recycling techniques. Responsibly and carefully mastering metal (perhaps, we posit, even of the Ozzy Osbourne variety) is the key to unlocking our future. And understanding it—as NASA hopes to do by visiting an asteroid that’s a possible analogue of Earth’s own heart—can help us comprehend our own journey. That’s as grand a thought as I could hope for as we celebrate this magazine’s sesquicentennial and look forward to the next 150 years.
NEXT: Could plant-based ‘cyborgs’ help prevent environmental disaster?
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ASK US ANYTHING ROBO-PLANTS // KITCHEN HACKS // TOOTHY TALES // DOLLARS AND CENTS // POISONED PIPES // BEST IN SHOW // PARTICIPATION TROPHIES
MASTER CLASS
Could plant-based ‘cyborgs’ help prevent environmental disaster? BY LAUREN YOUNG ILLUSTRATION BY AUDREY MALO
WHEN ILLUMINATED by magenta and blue grow lights, Harpreet Sareen’s mini greenhouse looks like almost any other indoor gardening setup in New York City. But when the interaction designer switches the bulbs off to pitch the lab into darkness, a soft red glow persists. Nanosensors flow through the veins of a peace lily, allowing its broad leaf to fluoresce. The beacon fades over the course of a couple of hours, but this is by design: The dying light signals that its host is taking in toxic lead. The glowing lily is one of Sareen’s botanical “cyborgs”—vegetation he biohacks to serve as environmental watchdogs. Plants, he explains, are natural sentinels. When they absorb nutrients through their roots, they also sop up low concentrations of pollutants. “They are automatic absorbers or scrubbers of [contaminants] in the environment,” he says. Sareen—a biodesigner and director of the Synthetic Ecosystems Lab at Parsons School of Design, where he’s also an assistant professor—hopes to harness those qualities to sound the alarm on factory spills, tainted soil, and bacteria-infested water. This idea first took root during his childhood in the 1990s in Punjab, where Indian mustard, Brassica juncea, is a staple crop grown for cooking and oilseed production. The yellow-petaled plant is also well known for its usefulness in purifying sullied earth, or phytoremediation. After studying engineering in India, Sareen blended his technical skills with art at the MIT Media Lab in 2015, where he began to think back to the metal-sucking abilities of his local flora. He soon learned that a plethora of plants were capable of drawing up mercury, lead, cadmium, and other potentially toxic compounds. “Many of the things that we call weeds are
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actually phytoremediators,” he says. Sareen also realized that the same suction power that helps them cleanse the soil means these crops can reveal the level of toxicity in it. But, he points out, there isn’t a quick way to read how much of a substance a sprout has taken in. So he decided to try to give the plants a voice—by turning them into cyborgs. In 2018, he created his first bit of bionic flora: a wheeled, motorized plant called Elowan. Sensors attached to the stem, leaves, and soil looked for the cascade of calcium that comes with a surge in sun and signaled the motors to roll the foliage toward nearby light. “You’re not used to seeing a plant on a robot, but I think the intention behind this work is to make people a little bit uncomfortable with such a thing,” Sareen says. “They might pay more attention to the fact that something is indeed happening inside this plant.” Sareen crafted his bionic peace lily (named Argus, Latin for “guardian”) at Parsons in 2020. He and his team fashioned sensors—small enough to flow through the intercellular channels of a leaf—that turn red when hit with a laser. When the plant takes in water contaminated with lead, the metal slowly dims that glow. Inspired by environmental catastrophes like the Flint water crisis in Michigan, Sareen hopes that such a biosensing botanical could one day reveal toxicity in household taps in a more hands-off fashion than current options like dipsticks. “If we had mechanisms that could give us output in real time, as well as tell us how much damage has happened, then we will be able to take rapid actions against these things,” he says.
NEXT: How to master cooking with metal
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ASK US ANYTHING MYTHBUSTING
How to master cooking with metal BY SANDRA GUTIERREZ G. ILLUSTRATION BY AUDREY MALO
WHEN METALS first entered West Asian and Eastern Mediterranean kitchens in the form of bronze knives and copper cauldrons, only the wealthy could afford these tools. Today, such cookware and cutlery are staples—but with widespread use come common misconceptions. Microwaving metal is dangerous: FALSE (in some cases) If you’re wondering why you hear a loud zap when electromagnetic radiation hits a stainless-steel fork, know that it’s the shape, not the material, that’s the problem. Microwaves heat up food by vibrating water molecules, but if you raise the temperature on a knife or fork, the loose electrons on the metal will get stirred up, accumulating on sharp edges and potentially producing sparks. Set a spoon on the turntable instead, and the energy will disperse, resulting in nothing but a scalding utensil. Soap ruins cast-iron skillets: FALSE The nonstick powers of cast iron come from the seasoning process, whereby a thin layer of fat is heated to form a strong, elastic polymer that prevents food from adhering to the cookware. Dishwashing liquid can cut through most types of grease—including these slicks—but since the majority of them no longer contain lye or other abrasive ingredients, they’re not strong enough to strip the coating off properly prepped skillets. Aluminum foil makes silverware shinier: TRUE Tarnish on fancy flatware comes from silver sulfide, which is created when metal molecules combine with sulfur gases from the air. To banish the dullness, place a ball of aluminum foil in the dishwasher. The warm water and the salts in the detergent will coax the sulfur to chemically bond with the foil, resulting in utensils that sparkle again. Using metal utensils on Teflon is unhealthy: FALSE (in some cases) Some nonstick pans have a coating that flakes off when scratched by hard spatulas and tongs. The responsible chemical, Teflon, has been linked to cancer, infertility, and thyroid disorders, among other problems. But
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you don’t need to worry about ingesting it unless you’re still using older cookware, which was made with perfluorooctanoic acid, a cancerous compound. Nonstick kitchen items produced in the US after 2013 aren’t coated with the harmful substance. Stainless steel removes some bad odors from skin: TRUE When you handle garlic and onions with bare fingers, the sulfuric compounds from the juices can make you reek for hours. Soapy lathers won’t help, but rubbing your skin against a stainless-steel utensil or sink under an open faucet will. The wet metal creates chromium oxide, which can bind to sulfur, liberating you from allium fumes. The best meringue comes out of metal bowls: TRUE Beating eggs vigorously will introduce air and rearrange their proteins into a delicate meringue. But the tools you use matter as much as the method. When you mix your sweet white peaks in a plastic vessel, you risk contaminating them with residue from other ingredients. A smooth, scratch-resistant surface like stainless steel won’t present that problem. Copper is even better: The red metal bonds to sulfur in the egg proteins and prevents them from sticking together too tightly, helping the meringue retain its moisture and fluffiness.
NEXT: Why do people still wear braces?
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ASK US ANYTHING POSTCARD
Why do people still wear braces? BY MAGGIE GALLOWAY ILLUSTRATION BY AUDREY MALO
WE’VE BEEN using metal to fine-tune our smiles since ancient times. In Egypt, archaeologists have found evidence of gold wires attached to teeth dating from as early as 2500 BCE. But it wasn’t until the 19th and early 20th centuries that orthodontic innovation picked up speed. In 1928, the American dentist Edward Angle published a series of articles describing what came to be known as the “edgewise appliance.” It had the same fundamentals as the braces used today but was much clunkier, with wide metal bands wrapped around each tooth. Despite newer, gentler options, like plastic aligners, many orthodontists still choose versions of this tough hardware to capitalize on metal’s chomper-pulling power. Modern braces consist of three main parts: brackets, archwires, and ligatures. Orthodontists glue the rectangular brackets, usually metal, to each tooth. These pieces act like sophisticated handles, enabling experts to precisely move teeth, says Hera Kim-Berman, a clinical associate professor of dentistry at the University of Michigan. Archwires, one for top teeth and one for the bottom row, extend from the left side of the jaw to the right and fit through slots in the brackets. By applying force, they guide teeth to straighten out over time. Ligatures—made from a range of materials including stainless steel and colorful plastic ties—bind the archwires to the brackets. Orthodontists earned the nickname “wire benders,” says Kim-Berman, in their quest to select metals with the best mechanical properties—such as formability or stiffness—to align teeth. Gold was the staple for archwires until the 1930s, but it was almost universally abandoned for stainless steel by the 1960s. The silvery substance was stiffer and more resistant to corrosion and could be fashioned into smaller, less noticeable braces. In the second half of the 20th century, the practice shifted toward highly flexible Space Age archwires, which were mostly made of a nickel-titanium alloy that NASA had developed for spacecraft antennas. These days, orthodontists often select these tools when starting a treatment to correct a crooked smile. They might then swap them with stainless steel or beta-titanium alloy archwires to move the teeth and surrounding bone together more quickly, according to Kim-Berman. But as in many other everyday products, metal soon gave way to synthetics. In 1999, Invisalign came out with one of the first clear plastic aligners. 9
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Its approach uses multiple molds to straighten grins in small doses, along with clear attachments that act much like brackets, Kim-Berman says. Plastic aligners provide orthodontists with a more aesthetically pleasing option, especially for minor adjustments. But for complex misalignments, practitioners usually still opt for metal braces because they provide enough control and force to “direct traffic,” Kim-Berman says. With metal, they can adjust chompers in any direction; plastic aligners, which can’t exert as much force, might risk “tipping” them diagonally rather than moving the bony unit as a whole, she explains. Many of the patients who opt for softer materials are adults seeking something removable, Kim-Berman says. Kids, however, frequently want the metal-mouth look—and they’re the ones who most often get orthodontic treatment. So braces, old as they are, are here to stay.
NEXT: Will the US ever ditch coins?
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ASK US ANYTHING FORECAST
Will the US ever ditch coins? BY PURBITA SAHA ILLUSTRATION BY AUDREY MALO
ON ANY GIVEN WEEKDAY, the United States Mint can churn out almost 126.4 million pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, 50-cent pieces, and gold dollars from its presses in Denver and Philadelphia. Giant “cookie cutters” punch blanks out of 1,500-foot-long sheets of copper, nickel, and other metals. The discs are then heated, washed with citric acid and anti-tarnishing agents, and struck with presidential silhouettes. Despite seismic shifts in the very nature of money, the 230-year-old operation will keep on pumping fresh coins into circulation this way. Digital currency is more popular than ever, and countries around the world have unveiled bold plans for centralized electronic banks. But the alternatives won’t make physical cash go extinct, at least in the US. The total volume of hard currency in national circulation, including pennies and nickels (which cost more to produce than they’re worth) swelled by more than 5 percent each year over the past decade. Meanwhile, Americans paid with bills and coins in more than a quarter of transactions in 2019. (That number dropped to 19 percent in 2020 due to concerns over COVID spread.) “People think cash is on the decline, but I expect we will use it for years to come,” says William Luther, an assistant professor of economics at Florida Atlantic University and director of the Sound Money Project, a financial stability and privacy research group. “The US government would have to prohibit banks and retailers from accepting it—or stop producing it altogether—to force everyone to switch to another method.” But that doesn’t mean the country is ignoring technologies that could digitize some of its coffers. In January of this year, the Federal Reserve released a loose proposal for a central bank digital currency (CBDC) that would allow people to instantly send funds to any party through their existing financial accounts, without transaction fees. The plan’s outline, though vague, cites Project Hamilton, a pilot model created by the Federal Reserve of Boston and MIT that combines the accessibility of mobile payment apps with the verification powers of blockchain-like networks. In this system, an encrypted computer code authorizes each monetary exchange,
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allowing simulated dollars and cents to be drawn from a person’s virtual wallet and re-created in the recipient’s. A database then validates and records the activity to create a permanent, transparent ledger that the sender, the recipient, and any authorizers can look back on. The Federal Reserve would stabilize the value of this money, avoiding the type of volatility that’s common with credit and cryptocurrencies. Several countries, including China, India, and Jamaica, are already experimenting with CBDCs. But the lack of anonymity with government-run ledgers could keep the idea from really taking off in the US, Luther says. “With cash you have a lot of privacy, so long as no one sees it trading hands,” he explains. “Digital currencies always link back to your [online] identity.” Still, with President Joe Biden’s recent executive order for more research on a secure CBDC, Luther thinks the technology will probably be a nationwide option soon. “Depending on how quickly Congress and the president want to roll it out, an American digital dollar could be launched in the next two years,” he says. But the mint won’t feel the ripples of a cashless future for many more decades, if ever. “The cost of producing material money is pretty small,” Luther says. The US government also rakes in billions of dollars each year selling gold bullion and other rare novelties to collectors. “It would be hard to justify a complete move into digital currency unless it improved payment technology in a major way,” Luther notes. If the mint has any predictions about what CBDCs mean for coins, it isn’t sharing them. “We do not speculate on the future of money,” a representative from the US Treasury Department said in a statement. The Federal Reserve also writes on its website that while it’s considering a CBDC “as a means to expand safe payment options,” such a system will not replace cash. Even if this technology prompts Americans to empty their pockets of change, there will be no stopping the presses that make new Washingtons, Madisons, Jeffersons, and Lincolns.
NEXT: Why haven’t we gotten rid of lead?
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ASK US ANYTHING THE BIG Q
Why haven’t we gotten rid of lead? A prized industrial product since the birth of America, the heavy metal has created a costly, pervasive, and deadly mess. BY AMAL AHMED ILLUSTRATION BY AUDREY MALO
IN THE 1920S, the National Lead Company released a kids’ coloring book to promote its array of vibrant, metal-filled paints. On the cover, its smiling Dutch Boy mascot sits atop a headless lead horse with a can of the brand’s signature white varnish. This was a common sight in 20th-century America, when lead could be found everywhere: In pipes bringing once-clean water to cities and towns. In paints that produced brighter colors and dried faster. In gas, to help the fuel combust more evenly in car engines. In plastic toys, to make them more flexible and resistant to heat. Even after physicians publicized the harms it posed to workers and children during the Industrial Revolution, the heavy metal was considered a versatile material. The US didn’t clamp down on its use in any way until the 1970s, allowing decades’ worth of toxins to build up in the environment, in the walls of homes, and, overwhelmingly, in marginalized neighborhoods. Today, the country is faced with the gargantuan task of cleaning up paint, pipes, acid batteries, and other common sources of the contaminant site by site. Though lead is a naturally occurring element, the durability that made it appealing to manufacturers also makes it dangerous to most living creatures. Once it’s inhaled or ingested into the bloodstream and deposited into cells and tissues, it blocks beneficial enzymes and minerals—like zinc and calcium—from binding with proteins throughout the body. This, in turn, can disrupt kidney and brain function, cause infertility, and even prevent the creation of oxygen-carrying hemoglobin. Most medical experts agree that there’s no safe level of lead exposure for kids in particular, because the metal keeps their nervous systems from fully developing. It’s also bioaccumulative, meaning it builds up over time, as the body has no mechanism for ridding itself of the toxin. It’s been found in teeth, bones, and other tissues even decades after exposure. Time has shown that the consequences of stashing the element internally can be grave and chronic. In a 2018 study in The Lancet Public Health, medical researchers concluded that lead-based products are still
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responsible for more than 400,000 deaths every year in the US. In 2022, sociologists and neuroscientists estimated in the journal PNAS that 90 percent of Americans born between 1951 and 1980 accrued alarming amounts of the heavy metal in their blood during childhood. The authors correlated those heightened levels with loss of cognitive skills and a significant dip in average adult IQ across millions of individuals. (This population-level analysis helped account for mitigating factors that typically make intelligence scores unreliable and biased.) “Exposures appear to have life-span consequences,” Matt Hauer, an assistant professor at Florida State University, said in a statement about the findings. “The burden of this and that legacy of exposures is going to be with us for decades to come.” In light of the many risks to people of all ages, the Environmental Protection Agency has set the lead standard at 15 parts per billion molecules in water and 0.15 micrograms per cubic meter of air. Other countries have set the legal limit even lower: Canada’s, for example, holds at 5 ppb in water. Those standards are relatively new: In the US, lead wasn’t banned in paint until 1978, new water pipes until 1986, or gasoline until 1996. Countries continue to use the material in manufacturing, while recycled products can dump it back into the supply chain. It’s also highly persistent in the environment, as it fails to react with other common elements and typically takes years to break down. “Lead is malleable, but it doesn’t break and corrode easily,” says Bhawani Venkataraman, a chemistry professor at the New School in New York City. It is, however, susceptible to chemical compounds called oxidizing agents that pull it out, contaminating water or air. That is what makes lead a legacy polluter. In the 19th and 20th centuries, when modern plumbing was first taking shape, leaky wooden and clay pipes had caused outbreaks of waterborne illnesses like cholera. Those public health concerns led to the installation of thousands of miles of metal pipes all over the US. Decades later, cities with aging infrastructure like Flint, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey, have lead pervading their drinking sources. “Minimizing exposure requires a very careful balancing act,” Venkataraman says; small changes in the acidity or mineral content of water can cause undetected contamination over time. Often, the only recourse is to swap out the entire network with new copper piping—an expensive, laborious process that Flint and Newark are now neck-deep in. Depending on the scale of the problem, it can take anywhere from $20 to $1,000 per household to filter lead out of tap water. And it will cost billions of dollars to remove and replace pipes nationwide. At the tail end of 2021, Congress allocated $15 billion through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for purging lead plumbing in schools, homes, playgrounds, and other buildings—along with additional money to mitigate tainted paint and other fixtures. The funding comes with a promised focus on erasing inequities: Up to $3 billion will be made available to tribal governments, as public health experts have historically failed to quantify lead-exposure rates in Indigenous communities. Some advocates say that the bill is long overdue. Even as evidence piled up in the early 1900s that most quantities of lead were noxious, the industry mounted successful campaigns to convince policymakers not to ban their products and consumers to keep buying them. Companies then attempted to shift the blame for the ill effects of their goods onto the public, particularly lower-income households and people of color. “The problem of lead poisoning in children will be with us for as long as there are slums,” one insider said at a lead association conference in 1957, after blaming Black and Puerto Rican families who supposedly chose to live there.
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But that was far from the truth. Cities permitted industries and developers to set up sites that made or recycled lead in low-income communities of color—or the neighborhoods were knowingly built around such facilities. In the 1950s, Dallas, Texas, put a low-income housing complex just a few miles away from a lead smelter that had been in operation for 20 years and would continue to pump pollution into the community for several more decades. Decades of segregation and long-delayed remediation mean that Black and poor Americans continue to face more exposure to sources of lead poisoning than white, affluent residents. Overall, humans have made significant strides to keep the risky substance out of homes and the environment. Between 1976 and 1980, American youth ages 1 to 5 had a median blood lead level of 15 micrograms per deciliter. By 2016, national studies showed that the level had fallen by more than 95 percent, to less than 1 microgram. There’s also nearly 98 percent less lead in the Earth’s atmosphere today than in 1980—a testament to cleaner fuels and better metal processing. But the world still has a long way to go before everyone is protected. The EPA has identified dozens of Superfund sites, many in urban areas, that need to be purged of the heavy metal. Globally, lead manufacturing and recycling are now concentrated in developing nations, where the levels recorded in children’s blood remain dangerously high. “If you think there’s no safe amount of exposure,” Venkataraman says, “then there should be no lead anywhere.”
NEXT: What makes certain metals remarkable?
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ASK US ANYTHING SUPERLATIVES
What makes certain metals remarkable? BY SHI EN KIM ILLUSTRATION BY AUDREY MALO
AS A HARD, shiny, and tough-to-melt bunch, metals are desirable as jewelry, commodities, and occasionally nutrients. Despite their common characteristics, many of them boast unique abilities. Let’s take a tour of some of the most extreme substances on the periodic table. Densest: Osmium Element No. 76 is the heavyweight champion of Earth’s natural materials. It’s twice as dense as lead and has a jam-packed atomic structure and strong bonds that allow it to cram molecules together. Durable and stiffer than diamond, osmium makes for excellent pen nibs and record player needles. Rarest: Rhodium The world’s rarest—and unsurprisingly priciest—nonradioactive metal accounts for less than one part per 200 million of the planet’s crust and can cost up to 18 times as much as platinum. Each year, 66,000 pounds of No. 45 get turned into catalytic converters and coatings for electrical parts. Most malleable: Gold No. 79 sculpts easily without breaking. Estimates hold that a single ounce of gold can be hammered into a sheet thin enough to span 100 square feet. In fact, jewelers often tap an alloy of nickel, silver, and other metals to increase their creations’ sturdiness. Most mysterious: Metallic hydrogen Squeeze No. 1 with more than a million times the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere, and it might transform into quantum matter. The reward for all that toil is something part liquid, part solid that has zero electrical resistance at room temperature—making it a superconductor. Physicists have yet to conclusively create metallic hydrogen, though they predict it exists deep inside gas giants such as Jupiter. Fieriest: Ruthenium In the craggy landscape of southern Turkey’s Mount Chimaera, an underground cache of No. 44 feeds dozens of 2-foot-high fires that have been burning for millennia. Experiments suggest that the metal helps convert carbon dioxide in the rocks into methane gas, creating endless fuel for the flames. 16
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Most transparent: Aluminum Make any material slender enough, and it will be see-through. Without that cheat, metals are generally not transparent—but element No. 13 is a neat exception. Hit it with powerful enough X-rays, and the silvery foil will let ultraviolet radiation pass through it for 40 quadrillionths of a second.
NEXT: Should participation trophies even exist?
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ASK US ANYTHING LITTLE Q
Should participation trophies even exist? BY TYLER SANTORA ILLUSTRATION BY AUDREY MALO
AT THE END of many sports tournaments and spelling bees, all the contestants are honored for their effort—even the kid who sat in the outfield picking dandelions or got tongue-tied at the mic. But in a world where not everyone can be a winner, does getting a consolation prize actually boost a child’s self-esteem? Participation awards have been around for at least 100 years, but lately they have come under fire—perhaps most notably when Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison returned his sons’ trophies in 2015—for creating entitled youth who lack drive. Yet that’s exactly the opposite of what these medals do for little ones, says Illinois-based psychologist and parenting coach Emily Pagone. When toddlers, preschoolers, and kindergartners compete, they don’t know the expectations adults have for them, Pagone says. Offering them a trophy or medal as a form of positive reinforcement can highlight the skills that the losers demonstrated and reinforce the sportsmanship that all the players displayed. But what really makes a participation award worthwhile is the conversation that comes with it. “As the caregivers around the children acknowledge their abilities, talents, and strengths, that’s the compass for how children learn about the expectations of the situation,” Pagone says. Pointing out what kids do well can also build their self-confidence. Still, there is one problem with this system: It creates a feedback loop of external validation and extrinsic motivation, driven by superficial perks and praise. It’s valuable for students to play soccer not only because they’re seeking tokens to decorate their rooms, but also because they enjoy the sport. They won’t always get prizes for doing their best, so it’s crucial to build an inner desire to push through in challenging times. For this reason, Pagone recommends transitioning away from participation awards around kindergarten or first grade. But not all experts agree that’s best. Positive reinforcement can also benefit older kids and adults, keeping them coming back to their hobby even after a tough practice or season, says Kelly LaPorte, clinical director of Naperville
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Counseling Center in Illinois. That lesson of celebrating the effort and not just the outcome remains important throughout a person’s life. Trophies and medals for preteens and teens should also be paired with conversations—particularly to prepare them to deal with loss. Sometimes this means letting them take a five-minute walk to calm down after a match. Other times it just requires allowing them to vent or asking them about their feelings. A “perfect world” would include participation awards for kids, LaPorte says, and postgame reflections with caregivers and coaches.
NEXT: The battery pinch, part I: State of mine
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COURTESY OF ELECTRA BATTERY MATERIALS
THE BATTERY PINCH: PART I
STATE OF MINE After millions of dollars in environmental cleanup, Idaho’s cobalt hotspot is welcoming its first new mining outfit in 40 years. Can it dig up the essential metal responsibly?
A chunk of pyrite from the southeastern portion of Idaho’s Cobalt Belt contains only about 1 percent of
BY ANDREW ZALESKI PHOTOGRAPHS BY TED + CHELSEA DEEP WITHIN the Salmon-Challis National Forest of central Idaho, the remnants of the Blackbird Mine lie among 830 acres of steep-walled canyons thick with soaring conifers. Dirt roads slash through patches of forest, and a 12-acre open pit, roughly the size of nine football fields, remains as a reminder of a bygone era. Abandoned tunnels snake beneath a retaining pool that brims with a watery sludge of metallic deposits. For several decades in the middle of the 20th century, Blackbird was the primary US producer of cobalt, a metal essential in the manufacture of Cold War–era jet engines. After years of on-again, off-again operations, the site closed in 1982, when the price of cobalt dropped too low for the operation to be profitable. Today, the shuttered mine constitutes a 10,000-plus-acre Superfund site, the designation bestowed by the Environmental Protection Agency on areas of extreme contamination. Since 1995, a consortium of past and present owners has worked to remediate the damage, including by treating dirty H2O before it’s discharged into 20
the metal itself.
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nearby Blackbird Creek. Speaking to The Atlantic last fall, a water-quality specialist for the US Geological Survey said the site is much cleaner than in the 1990s, when he first visited. Now the swath of land known as the Idaho Cobalt Belt is about to welcome its first new mine in 40 years. The 37-mile strip of sedimentary rock about 6 hours from Boise contains one of the country’s largest beds of the silver-gray metal. Jervois Global, a nearly 60-year-old Australian outfit that’s also developing a project to dig up the element in the state of New South Wales, expects to begin excavating cobalt from a new site before the end of 2022. Cobalt is one of the metals necessary for the lithium-ion batteries that power electric cars, each vehicle requiring around 30 pounds of the stuff. Global operations dig up more than 180,000 tons annually,
A polished slab of COURTESY OF ART BOOKSTROM, USGS EMERITUS
rock from the Blackbird Mine features shiny gray veins of cobaltite ore.
but as the market for lithium-ion power increases, so too will the need for cobalt. According to a report from the European Union published in 2018, if no new technologies hit the market, yearly demand for the metal will reach nearly 430,000 tons by 2030. By then, some 100 million electric vehicles will be cruising the world’s roadways, according to global research firm Wood Mackenzie. While state geologists say it’s anybody’s guess just how much cobalt is locked away in the belt, Jervois estimates its mine could produce more than 2,000 tons every year—enough for tens of thousands of batteries. Yet new activity is awakening old concerns, especially among local groups leerily watching developments within the state’s cobalt honeypot. The Blackbird Mine’s big sin was “open-pit” digging that allowed noxious byproducts to contaminate the local ecosystem. On the other hand, the new mine that Jervois is nearly done constructing is entirely underground—which helps avoid side effects that can come from exposing fresh earth to the elements—and one of the first buildings erected on-site was a water-treatment plant. Josh Johnson of the Idaho Conservation League, a mining watchdog for almost 50 years, can’t help but point out that the only thing physically separating Jervois Global’s soon-to-open mine from the shuttered Blackbird is a single mountain. “The best we can hope for is responsible mining,” he says. “That’s what we hear a lot from the mining companies. You talk that you can have a modern mine that has minimal impacts? Well, let’s see it.” Mining, however, is part of ushering in an electric future. “We can’t just 21
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put electricity in our pockets,” says Claudio Berti, director of the Idaho Geological Survey. “New technology needs critical minerals. And so, unfortunately, mining is an integral part of a greener future.” But underregulated operations like those in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the globe’s No. 1 cobalt producer, demonstrate the dangers of digging without regard for either employees or locals, who work in and live among claustrophobic shafts and polluted soil. Jervois hopes its operation in Idaho will model a better way—by bringing a more thought-out process to the US and planning for cleanup long before the first hunk of ore ever gets dragged out of the ground.
A sample of COURTESY OF ART BOOKSTROM, USGS EMERITUS
cobaltite-biotite, an ore of cobalt and other minerals, collected from the Blackbird Mine in central Idaho in the 1940s.
PROSPECTING IS nothing new to the American West: There was the search for gold in California, then silver in Nevada. During the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, as cities electrified buildings and streets, deep-pocketed industrialists stormed into Montana, eager to corner the market on the highly conductive copper that was elemental to funneling electrons. They all left behind scarred geographies. The Berkeley Pit in Butte, for one, is so contaminated by heavy metals and sulfuric acid that, in 2016, an unlucky flock of several thousand geese landed on its surface, drank some of the poisoned water, and soon died. Like Blackbird, it is a Superfund site. “We have landscapes that have been turned to moonscapes and contamination left behind that will have to be managed for centuries,” says Aimee Boulanger, executive director of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, an organization that sets standards for the independent auditing of industrial-scale extraction operations. During the heyday of the Blackbird Mine in the 1950s, there were no federal environmental checks. The Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and National Environmental Policy Act—the last of which lays out a process for public notice and public comment before new operations can set up shop—all became law in the early 1970s. Still, Boulanger would argue that no country in the world has laws sufficient to protect the environment from extraction efforts. “The vast majority of money that’s gone into mining is to get smaller grades of ore out of rock,” she says, referring to deposits with lower concentrations of minerals that companies would nonetheless love to get out of the ground before shutting down a mine. “It’s not been ‘How do we put the earth back?’” That tightrope is one that Jervois Global now carefully walks as it creates a key component of a cobalt supply chain in the Western US. The firm has bought refineries in Brazil and Finland in the past year; the mine 22
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in Idaho is the missing link. Extraction with an eye toward preserving the landscape is top of mind for the company, according to Matt Lengerich, executive general manager of mining. He’s an industry veteran of 23 years who was brought on in August 2021 to head up the Idaho operation. Before Jervois, he worked for the Rio Tinto company, where, among other duties, he managed the Bingham Canyon copper mine near Salt Lake City. Other international firms are interested in Idaho’s stash of cobalt, but Jervois has a head start. In 2019, it acquired a 2,500-acre claim in the cobalt belt from previous owners who had gone to the trouble of getting permitted by the US Forest Service back in 2009. Therefore, the area has already undergone an environmental impact study. The assessment recommended ways to reduce water pollution, one of which is backfilling the underground mine workings with a cement made from waste rock—keeping groundwater away from contaminants that could leach into streams and lakes. Even though the Jervois site has yet to open, it is already on a better environmental footing than Blackbird by virtue of being underground. Subterranean mines use tunnels to reach densely packed concentrations of minerals. The shuttered Blackbird Mine had shafts, but it also
The soon-to-open Jervois cobalt mine hopes to reduce its environmental impact, partly by focusing operations
JERVOIS GLOBAL
underground.
used so-called open-pit methods to locate cobalt deposits. Open pits are what they sound like: massive holes—sometimes a mile wide and thousands of feet deep—with large amounts of waste-ridden soil and rock piled up nearby. Reclaiming mine sites that rely on such methods can be far more challenging than reclaiming underground ones, notes state geologist Berti. The process of making the land look as it did pre-mining of course comes after all the material has been extracted. The problem, no surprise, is more complex than simply filling in holes. In the first place, digging kicks off a real-time science experiment: Rock, now exposed to the atmosphere, begins to oxidize, which gives embedded metals a chance to leach into nearby sources of water, killing aquatic life. What’s more, because cobalt ores also contain sulfur, water moving through a mine’s waste piles can carry sulfuric acid into nearby streams. Remediation at Blackbird, which is ongoing, has already cost roughly $100 million. “An underground mine has less visual impact,” Berti says. “You see a portal, you see a building for a mill, a ventilation shaft, and that’s pretty much it.” Federal regulations require Jervois to post a bond—likely 23
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worth around $30 million—to go toward cleanup efforts once the mine closes, which should be around 2030. To minimize environmental trauma, the company also built a water-treatment plant and has a system on the property to capture groundwater and pump it to the plant for cleaning. According to Jim Kuipers, an independent mining industry expert and consulting engineer, these types of safeguards are common features these days. If there’s a sales pitch to be made for responsible mining, it comes from Lengerich. He’s quick to tout his outdoorsy bona fides (he grew up in Colorado, where he became an avid mountain biker and fly fisherman) and his residency in the town of Salmon, inside the Idaho Cobalt Belt. “From the very start, there’s been a real focus to make sure that everything we’re doing is taking into account the impact to water and how we mitigate risks,” he argues. “In 30 years, I’d expect you to stand on this property and have no idea that we were ever here.” AS LENGERICH makes the roughly 90-minute drive from his home to work, craggy canyons and lush green fir trees are in full view. At the Jervois mine, buildings mark the job site, including the water-treatment plant and a set of prefabricated houses to lodge the miners who will travel underground to extract cobalt. There are also facilities to store tailings (aka ore residue) and water. As a show of its commitment, Jervois has made an agreement with the Idaho Conservation League to allocate $150,000 every year to preservation projects in the region. “Mining has had a big environmental impact in a lot of places,” says the league’s Johnson. “This is a way to create an additional conservation benefit.” If all goes according to plan, excavation will start by the fall and scale up through the end of 2022. When fully operational, the site should be able to get as many as 4 million pounds of cobalt out of the ground every year—enough for more than 130,000 electric-car batteries. Still, those figures are paltry relative to the amount of cobalt mined by the world’s leading producers. Jervois’ home turf of Australia ranks third, but the undisputed leader is the Democratic Republic of the Congo at around 70 percent of the worldwide supply. In 2021, mines there produced more than 200 million pounds, most of which was sent to refining and processing plants in China. US manufacturers have therefore had to rely on China and other countries to get the cobalt they need to power not only electric vehicles but the laptops on which so many Americans are dependent. “The biggest reason to mine in Idaho is for strategic purposes,” says mining consultant Kuipers. Sourcing cobalt in the state, even for just a few years, could give the US more control over the metals in its electrification supply chain. Once the cobalt is mined, Jervois will purify it, grind it down into a sandlike material, and ship it to its plant in Brazil, which will refine the metal so it’s ready for practical use—and for sale in US markets. “While it could be sold to other countries,” Lengerich says, “it’s part of our strategy to bring that metal back into the US for US consumption.” There’s another reason to mine cobalt here, though: to avoid participating in nefarious operations elsewhere. Most of the extraction in the DRC is conducted by large-scale industrial mines, which are not circumscribed by the same set of environmental regulations that Jervois contends with in the US. In the DRC, water pollution and soil contamination, which lead to both damaged landscapes and crops, are the casualties in the race toward profitable mining. Then there’s the social impact. More than 2 million DRC residents make their living from small-scale mining. These operations represent about one-third of the country’s total cobalt production, and they are 24
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notorious for human rights and health concerns. Many are poorly ventilated and unsafe. As many as 35,000 child laborers might be employed at any one time, according to a report published by the World Economic Forum in 2020. Mining concerns also displace farmers and poison local sources of drinking water. In the Idaho Cobalt Belt, it’s hard to say if mining truly has been fixed, since it’s yet to restart. But a hopeful blueprint is there for mining companies to follow: Pulling cobalt out of the ground in a responsible way means looking to the long-term health of the environment and the people nearby and making sure the land is returned, as closely as possible, to its original state. “We do have to look for ways and places we can responsibly mine some of these important metals,” the conservation league’s Johnson says. “Again, it comes down to: Can you actually pull it off? We’re never going to feel entirely comfortable about an operation until we see it go all the way through its life cycle.”
NEXT: The battery pinch, part II: Current affair
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THE BATTERY PINCH: PART II
CURRENT AFFAIR Purifying all the copper we need to funnel electricity through everything from vehicles to wind turbines is dirty business. This MIT metallurgist has a plan to clean up production.
To efficiently move electrons through our webs of wiring, copper needs to go from dense, murky ore to perfectly
BY ANDREW ZALESKI PHOTOGRAPH BY TED + CHELSEA ONE OF technology’s greatest inventions began with a dispute between two Italians over frog legs. In 1800, scientists the world over were fascinated by electricity. Practical applications, however, were elusive, mainly because no one could figure out how to generate continuous current. At the time, physicist Alessandro Volta stood athwart Luigi Galvani, a physician-scientist who studied frogs—specifically, dissected legs still attached to their spinal cords and mounted on brass or iron hooks. Galvani noticed that when he touched a probe made of a different metal to the legs, they twitched. Convinced the muscles were generating the sensation, Galvani dubbed his find animal electricity. Volta argued the amphibians’ legs were not generating the buzz but reacting to current produced by opposing metals. To prove it, he built a stack of alternating metal wafers (one early try tapped zinc and copper) separated by brine-soaked cloth to conduct current. When he touched a
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pristine metal.
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wire to each end of the tower, steady electricity flowed, no animal parts required. This Voltaic pile, as it was called, was the first electric battery. After Volta demonstrated the device in Paris, Napoleon was so impressed he even gave Volta a medal—and a pension. Fast-forward to the 21st century, and one of Volta’s core elements, copper, is so much more than a means of disproving froggy hypotheses. The red metal, which is also one of the world’s oldest, has formed the backbone of our lightbulb-loving lives since the Gilded Age. In its conductivity, it’s superior to all its elemental kin except silver. Unlike silver, though, it’s durable—and there’s no electrification without it. A new offshore wind turbine, for example, requires 21,000 pounds of copper. Meanwhile, each battery-powered vehicle uses 183 pounds of it, a full-on mile of the stuff. (Gas-powered cars tap, at most, 49 pounds.) The annual demand for EVs alone will be 3.6 million tons by 2030, according to CRU, a business intelligence firm with an eye on the metals market. “It’s one of the key metals for decarbonization,” says Bernard Respaut, chief executive of the European branch of the International Copper Association, the nonprofit advocate for the global copper industry. “The more we electrify, the more copper we will need.” Getting more of it, though, creates an environmental conundrum. Most of the 22.7 million tons of copper produced every year require roasting ore to purify the metal. Called pyrometallurgy, it’s a high-temperature process carried out in more than 120 smelting plants worldwide, including three in the US. Yet every ton of copper smelted emits 2 tons of carbon. While we need more copper, it’s unlikely additional smelting plants will come online in a more climate-conscious America, according to the Energy Se-
ALLANORE’S LAB AT MIT HAS SHOWN THAT ELECTROLYSIS CAN ALSO EXTRACT NICKEL, COBALT, AND MANGANESE —THREE OTHER MINERALS CRUCIAL FOR LITHIUM-ION BATTERIES. BUT COPPER IS KING.
curity Leadership Council, a Washington, D.C.–based group whose goal is to reduce US oil dependence. “The industry recognizes that we need to decarbonize the process of producing copper,” Respaut adds. This dilemma drew the attention of Antoine Allanore, a metallurgist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Allanore is one of a new wave of inventors trying to clean up metal production. He specializes in extracting materials from rock without burning fossil fuels like coal or gas. In February 2022, he completed work on his latest project, funded by the US Department of Energy: a reactor that employs a process called electrolysis, which uses current to separate copper from ore. In essence, while Volta deployed copper to funnel electricity, Allanore’s system uses electricity to make copper. According to Hal Stillman, who retired as director of technology development and transfer at the International Copper Association in 2020, Allanore’s contraption is a “big step,” as well as a scientific breakthrough. “This had never been done before, the electrolytic refining of copper,” he says. Right now, Allanore’s device makes just a pound or two of copper every 24 hours, but it’s a demonstration of a larger principle. Meanwhile, the 27
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industry is also using other methods of purifying certain ores without the emissions of smelting. To succeed, Allanore will have to persuade producers that his tech is cleaner and more efficient. His next step? A version of the reactor that produces a ton of the element per day. “The electrification of metal production is groundbreaking,” he says. “It not only allows us to avoid certain fuels and carbon emissions, it opens the door to higher productivity.” If the world is going green, metal production can too. ACROSS THE WORLD of metal-making, the idea of employing electricity as something more than what keeps the lights on at smelting plants has been gaining traction. It’s territory with which Allanore is already familiar: He was a research engineer for almost five years at ArcelorMittal, a major global steelmaker. While there, he helped design and construct the world’s largest reactor for refining iron via a technique called electrowinning, in which current separates metal suspended in an electrolyte solution. ArcelorMittal is constructing a pilot facility to put it into practice. Like copper, steel begins as rock. Specifically, as iron ore, which is composed of tight bonds of iron and oxygen atoms. Pyrometallurgy is used to break those bonds, the first step in steel production. Massive blast
Antoine Allanore’s reactor, seen here in his MIT lab, could replace noxious smelting as a means
ANTOINE ALLANORE
of purifying copper.
furnaces burn coke, a processed form of coal, at up to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature at which the heated ore’s iron releases its clutch on oxygen. Carbon dioxide is a major byproduct. Globally the industry produces 2 billion tons of steel every year, but it throws off more than 3 billion tons of CO2—roughly 9 percent of the Earth’s total greenhouse emissions and a number directly in conflict with goals established by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. After leaving ArcelorMittal in 2008, Allanore took a sabbatical at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and then joined MIT in 2010 to continue his work on electric steel. In 2012, he co-founded Boston Metal, a company spun out of MIT that uses current in place of coke to heat iron ore. His colleague and co-founder is Donald Sadoway, an MIT materials engineer whose own work on metal electrolysis dates back to the 1980s. “This is the future,” says Sadoway. “If you want to have zero emissions, you have to redesign all these heavy-duty, chemically intensive, energy-intensive, emissions-intensive processes.” Copper certainly qualifies. More than two-thirds of it is processed through pyrometallurgy, which is most often fueled by gas and coal. According to data from the International Energy Agency, a typical smelting 28
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furnace consumes some 3,830 kilowatt-hours of energy to net 1 ton of copper—about what the average US household uses in four months—and churns out half a million tons a year. But the red metal also comes with its own challenges. Unlike steel, which contains some carbon in its final form, copper must be free of virtually all impurities to move electricity the way modern life demands. Its conductivity is directly proportional to its purity, Allanore points out. The wiring in a smartphone, for instance, is 99.9 percent perfect. Mined copper is nowhere close to that level. Fresh out of the ground, the ore consists of many elements, chief among them sulfur, the atom to which copper directly binds in the rock. At this stage, the raw material is usually less than 1 percent copper. Before it heads to a smelting plant, mining companies pulverize it into sandlike granules that they dump into a liquid froth to begin removing trace elements like lead and zinc. What’s left is called copper concentrate, which is only about 25 percent pure. The concentrate goes to the smelter, which roasts it, using natural gas to generate temperatures as high as 2,300°F. That blast creates two things: slag, a waste product containing iron, silica, and other minerals; and matte, or liquefied copper, which still includes some iron and sulfide and is 60 percent pure. Molten matte travels to another furnace with similarly high temperatures—this one called a converter—where blown oxygen grabs hold of sulfur atoms, making sulfur dioxide. (Smelting plants capture most of the emitted sulfur dioxide and make it into the sulfuric acid they’ll need later in the process.) The setup spits out blister copper, which reaches a purity of 98 percent. The conventional means of production does use electricity to forge the metal, but only at the end: Blister copper is poured into molds, which are then placed into an electrolyte solution partly made up of the captured sulfuric acid. The reaction that happens next is akin to the mechanisms within a battery. The slabs of blister copper, cooled and molded, act as anodes (the part of the cell that gives away electrons), and thin sheets of pure copper serve as cathodes (the part that receives electrons). When current is applied, only positively charged copper ions travel from the anodes over to the cathodes. Any leftover metals, like iron or lead, break loose from the anodes and fall to the bottom of the tank, leaving behind copper cathodes that are almost 100 percent pure. AS EARLY AS 2013, Allanore began wondering if he could use electricity, instead of natural gas, to purify copper. “It’s the number one metal that mankind has been toying with, so it’s important,” he says. The electrolysis method he proposed that year replaced all the steps in traditional smelting with just one, which both separated copper from sulfur and eliminated the iron that can make up as much as half of the ore. On paper, the plan was straightforward: The fundamental concept isn’t all that different from how Boston Metal uses current to liquefy iron ore, which forms into steel blocks as it cools. In 2018, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy inside the US Department of Energy gave Allanore a $1.9 million grant to try it. “The DOE understood this link between more electrification, less energy consumption, and yet the need for more metals,” he recalls. In Allanore’s lab at MIT, the copper-purifying contraption sits inside something resembling an oversize old-school phone booth. A ceramic vat with a cathode at the bottom and an anode at the top is filled with about two pounds of copper concentrate and an electrolyte stew made up in part of lanthanum sulfide, a chemically reactive element good at forming compounds with trace minerals that come bound up with copper ore. The vat is then placed inside a small gas furnace that reaches a 29
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temperature of about 2,372°F. As the copper concentrate heats up and liquefies, current runs through the cathode. In a matter of minutes, copper starts to drop to the cathode while sulfur atoms travel upward to the anode. The metal that falls cools as purified copper, ready for shaping into wiring; the sulfur that emerges is inert, elemental sulfur, not toxic sulfur dioxide. The process still requires energy to produce extreme temperatures, but it takes only a single blast to create pure copper. According to International Copper Association vet Stillman, Allanore’s use of lanthanum is a unique scientific insight. “You could not use an electrolytic reaction with copper to separate it before his step of adding lanthanum,” says Stillman, who now serves as senior adviser for a research group that works on the metals supply chain at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago. “That creates a situation where you can get separation of the copper ions from the other materials.” Allanore’s lab has shown that electrolysis can also extract nickel, cobalt, and manganese—three other minerals crucial for lithium-ion batteries. But copper is king. The Energy Security Leadership Council suggests that we will need to produce the same amount of the metal in the next 25 years that we did in the previous 5,000 to meet the demand for electric vehicles alone. That’s not including their charging stations, which also need wiring. Scaling the technology up so that it continuously produces 1 ton of copper a day (let alone many) is a major obstacle, Stillman allows—one it will take multiple steps to overcome. First there’s the cash Allanore will need to create a large-enough pilot reactor. He’ll have to get an engineering contractor with ties to the mining industry to manufacture an industrialsize reactor. Then he must demonstrate that, at that scale, using the reactor is more economical than the traditional smelting process. “There’s always the question of who’s going to be funding,” Stillman says. “However, there are many copper miners who are interested in this kind of technology and its environmental benefits.” Meanwhile, Respaut of the International Copper Association estimates that about 20 percent of global production already comes from mines that tap a process called hydrometallurgy. In this setup, water-based reagents dissolve copper from ore at ordinary temperatures to make a liquefied metal that can be purified through a method similar to the last step in use at smelting plants. Hydrometallurgy, however, is suited only for oxide copper ore, which is less abundant than the sulfide copper ore that Allanore’s reactor could divert from traditional smelters. Moreover, hydrometallurgical processing still takes multiple steps to generate pure copper. When Allanore talks about the benefits of current-based metal processing, he means that in a single step, he can yield pure, liquid copper, ready to be shaped into wiring for electronics and battery-powered vehicles. Still, his reactor is only a demo device capable of making just a couple of pounds of copper. Allanore wants to get it in front of several companies this year to demonstrate what high-quality, faster, more sustainable production looks like. After that, he hopes to conduct another round of testing, preferably in partnership with a smelting or mining site, to see if a larger reactor can reliably produce 1 ton of copper a day. “We need to accelerate the way we can access high-purity copper,” he says. “And that’s really where novel technology and electrification has a key role.”
NEXT: The battery pinch, part III: In the loop
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THE BATTERY PINCH: PART III
IN THE LOOP
Nickel sulfate,
Companies are racing to find a way to reclaim lithium from dead power cells and put it back on the road.
ode material, lithium
black mass, cathcarbonate, and cobalt sulfate from
BY JAKE BITTLE PHOTOGRAPH BY TED + CHELSEA IN LATE OCTOBER 2019, a fire broke out at a recycling facility in Scottsdale, Arizona. The blaze consumed a 40,000-square-foot site, and 60-mile-per-hour winds blew a massive smoke plume across a nearby highway, forcing local officials to close the road. It took firefighters until the next day to extinguish the flames. In the aftermath, the company that operated the site had to suspend collection in nearby cities; the scorched compound had been equipped to handle 85,000 tons of waste a year, and now that junk had nowhere to go except a landfill. The culprit? A lithium-ion battery like the ones found in phones and laptops. While these hyperefficient cells are generally safe, they continue to store volatile energy even after they die, which means that careless disposal can cause explosions and fires. A 2021 report from the Environmental Protection Agency found public records of such conflagrations in 28 states between 2013 and 2020, and flagged one facility that had had more than a dozen in a single year. The risk will only grow: The global lithium market can be expected to multiply by a factor of 20 by 2030,
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Ascend Elements' recycling process.
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according to an estimate from research firm Rystad Energy. The fact that so many batteries end up in scrap heaps poses an even more profound problem for the transition away from fossil fuels. Their contents are a key component of electric vehicles, but the metals they contain—lithium, cobalt, and nickel—are getting ever harder to obtain and often come from only a few countries. Powering the next generation of EVs will entail mining thousands of tons of lithium and cobalt from salt flats and ore deposits around the world, a process that is as ecologically destructive as it is expensive. “We should try to recycle anything we can, but in the case of batteries,
This machine leaches impurities out of shredded batteries, leaving behind lithium, nickel,
RYAN RODDICK
cobalt, and graphite.
it’s become even more important,” says Fengqi You, an engineering professor at Cornell University who studies the life cycles of elements like lithium within energy systems. You points out that our domestic EV industry depends on lithium that is mined and refined in countries around the world, giving us little domestic control over the production of essential materials. If anything happens to the global supply chain, our access to these precious metals is disrupted, delaying efforts to turn to green technologies. The good news, though, is that the dead can rise again. The key metals contained in old batteries like the one that started the fire in Scottsdale are ripe to be plucked out and pumped back into the supply chain. With the right infrastructure, we could drastically reduce the amount of mining needed to supply metal for new cells—all while cutting down the risk of literal dumpster fires. As EVs take off in the US, a handful of startups are working to do just that. One of the most advanced, Ascend Elements, is opening a massive battery recycling facility in Georgia this summer where it will recover lithium, cobalt, and nickel, and its competitors aren’t far behind. Together these companies are racing to scale up before the first full generation of EVs gets scrapped. Their efforts have the potential to close the loop, creating a system that is less dependent on fossil fuels—and on unnecessary mining. BRITISH-AMERICAN chemist M. Stanley Whittingham outlined the first conceptual framework for a rechargeable lithium-ion battery in the late 1970s, winning a Nobel for his efforts in 2019. Entities from NASA to Oxford University further developed his core technology over the next decade. But the concept didn’t go commercial until 1991, when Sony started using the cells to bump up the life of its camcorders. The energy density such batteries can hold has almost tripled since then, and the price of producing them 32
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has fallen by more than 97 percent within that same period, from around $7,500 in 1991 to less than $200 in 2018. All batteries work by storing chemical energy and converting it to electricity. An ordinary cell contains different conductive metals in two terminals: the anode, or negative side, and the cathode, or positive side. These two components are separated by a chemical medium known as an electrolyte. When you turn on a device, the pent-up electrons in the anode stream out of the cell, through a circuit, and toward the cathode, attracted to its positive charge. The electrons’ movement through the circuit is what generates juice. In an ordinary battery, there’s no way to reverse this process. When
Ascend Elements’ machinery recovers graphite from shredded lithium-ion batteries for sale to
RYAN RODDICK
traditional recyclers.
enough pent-up electrons have left the anode, the whole thing dies. Lithium-ion batteries, on the other hand, have a much longer life thanks to their titular element, which is one of the lightest and most reactive metals on the periodic table. In an uncharged state, a bunch of lithium atoms hang out in the cathode. When you plug your device into a power source, those reactive lithium atoms are quick to surrender their electrons, which move through the external circuit before coming to rest in the anode. The key advantage is that those departing electrons leave behind positively-charged lithium ions, which are then drawn by the negative charge of the power source through the electrolyte toward the anode, where they become trapped. When you disconnect your device from the power source and turn it on, the process reverses. The naturally unstable lithium ions move back through the electrolyte to return to the cathode, while the electrons move to join them, generating electricity along the way. The electrons and the ions now hang out in the cathode until the next time the battery charges. The structure of this metal cathode is key to the battery’s longevity: It functions as an atomic lasagna of metals like nickel and cobalt, with layers thin enough that lithium ions and electrons get trapped between them. As the ions move back and forth across the battery, though, they distort this lasagna, causing the atomic architecture to swell and crack. Every charge cycle causes a number of other uncontrolled chemical reactions that degrade the battery over time, much as our own body degrades in the normal course of aging. You usually can’t see this decay with the naked eye, but over the course of a couple of years, the power cell has a harder time moving energy. The average lithium-ion battery is good for a few thousand charge cycles before it starts to wither away. 33
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(Even then, though, the battery retains charge, which is what makes them so flammable as they molder.) The rapid growth of the EV industry has created a surge in demand for the metals that make this all possible—including the titular lithium. The result has been a mining boom in some of the countries with significant deposits, like China, Chile, and Australia. Worldwide production tripled from 31,000 tons a year in 2010 to 110,000 in 2021. But with the global EV market growing around 20 percent each year, demand is rising much too fast for any producer to keep up. The International Energy Agency predicts annual lithium production could fall short of demand by nearly 2 million tons by 2030. And while at least three or four continents have the potential to mine the metal, almost all the refineries and battery factories are in China, resulting in a classic bottleneck. If capacity does not increase, research firm Rystad Energy has said, the price of the material could triple by the end of the decade. Soaring demand creates higher environmental costs too. Companies use tens of billions of gallons of water per year to pump the metal out of the ground, straining resources in already parched countries like Chile. There have been several reports of fish kills and freshwater depletion or contamination near lithium mines in Tibet, Argentina, and the United States.
Dhiren Mistry, a battery materials engineer at Ascend Elements, tests an aqueous solution containing recov-
RYAN RODDICK
ered metals.
All these factors strengthen the case for recycling. For their first few decades on the market, lithium-ion batteries weren’t valuable enough for anyone to bother turning spent ones into new material, but a few organizations still tried to keep them out of landfills—most notably Call2Recycle, Inc. Founded and funded by major battery manufacturers in the 1990s in the hopes of mitigating the environmental risks (and legal liability) posed by their products, the nonprofit has since spun up a collection program that draws refuse from three main sources: repair centers, municipal waste facilities, and a network of 16,000 public-facing drop boxes across the United States. Last year it collected more than 8 million pounds of discarded cells. “When we first started, the predominant battery chemistry was nickel cadmium,” says Eric Frederickson, the program’s managing director of operations, referring to a type of cell often used in bulky, yet portable power tools. Now, he says, “lithium ion is the single largest chemistry of batteries that we collect.” For a number of years, the US capacity for recycling lithium was so low that Call2Recycle had to ship its spoils abroad. Now, though, there’s a new customer on the scene, one that promises to turn these discards into ingredients for brand-new EV power cells. 34
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ASCEND ELEMENTS’ research and development facility sits in a nondescript office park just outside Worcester, Massachusetts. If you stood outside, you’d likely guess that everyone within spends their days tapping away on computers. The reality is a bit messier: The front office leads back into a warehouse where the company has been fine-tuning its lithium-ion battery recycling process and preparing to scale it up. Ascend’s system is based on the company’s own spin on a process called hydrometallurgy, which involves dissolving crushed-up metals in a chemical solution and leaching them back into solids again. It’s an improvement on an older and less elegant technique known as pyrometallurgy, which requires smelting batteries and separating out the superheated components—creating toxic gases like dioxins and furans. After handing me a pair of safety goggles, Ascend’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Eric Gratz, shows me the works. Shouting over the constant whine of a generator, he ushers me into a high-ceilinged space dominated by a dozen interconnected tanks and machines. There are three steel vats towering over us, a pair of 10-foot-long contraptions that look like accordions, and a set of several smaller tanks connected by pipes and tubes. All together, Gratz says, the machinery functions like a giant French press coffee maker. Ascend buys dead batteries from collectors like Call2Recycle or from EV manufacturers, then grinds them up in a finetoothed shredder. The residue arrives at the Worcester facility as a dark powder—“black mass,” in industry parlance—that takes the place of java beans in this chemical brew. The goal is to liquefy the dead metal, remove impurities like plastic and unwanted metals, alter its chemical structure, then condense it back into powder so it can be used for new manufacturing. First Gratz leads me to the trio of vats, behind which sits a hopper holding the shredded batteries. Step one is to pipe the black mass into the vats, where it dissolves in a proprietary chemical mixture, loosening the atomic structure of the lithium, nickel, and cobalt inside. That part isn’t all that difficult. The trick is turning it back into powder again. Ascend wants to produce material for new cathodes—the positive side of the battery—since that’s the hardest to come by. But because pulverized batteries contain several different metals, some of which aren’t useful, Ascend first has to separate out any it doesn’t need. Tiptoeing around lab techs as they bustle back and forth, we reach the accordion-like machines. These pump the black-mass slurry through a set of filter panels to strain out irrelevant solids—the equivalent of pushing down the grounds in a French press. Fragments of graphite and copper stick to the filters, leaving black and greenish-yellow stains; Ascend later packages and sells these to traditional recyclers. The next step is to separate the remaining mixture into two key components: the lithium and a melange of nickel, cobalt, and manganese. The exact method by which Ascend does this is proprietary—part of what separates the company from its competitors—but Gratz allows that it takes advantage of lithium’s unique chemistry. While most metals are more likely to dissolve when heated, lithium is less soluble at higher temperatures. This means the team can isolate the all-important metal by heating the mixture. The resulting granules look a lot like the salt you’d keep in an ordinary shaker. Then they precipitate the black mass back into powder, another proprietary process, this one taking place in a set of machines that look like older-generation droids from Star Wars—big, boxy trapezoids with little doodads on top. The team at Ascend can adjust the concentrations of nickel and cobalt in each batch to the specifications of buyers: A battery with more nickel, for example, has a shorter shelf life but can hold more energy, making it ideal for vehicles that need to travel hundreds of miles. Once a 35
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mixer recombines the powder with the extracted lithium, the final product looks just like the one that came in, as evidenced by the before-and-after jars Gratz hands me. But the molecular structure of the recycled powder is rejuvenated, ready to again store hyperreactive lithium ions. The process is remarkably efficient: Ascend recovers 98 percent of the most expensive metals, nickel and cobalt. For lithium, Gratz says, that figure is more like 80 percent. The black powder that leaves the factory is quite literally ready to roll. Battery manufacturers usually spray the substance on foil and roll or fold the material into fresh battery cells. COMPLICATED AS Ascend’s operation in Worcester may seem, it’s just a prototype for a 154,000-square-foot battery recycling plant set to open near Atlanta in the summer of 2022. The operation will sit at the nexus of an EV boom in the Southeastern US. Volkswagen will soon start up an electric vehicle division at its plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Ford is building an assembly plant and multiple battery factories, including in Kentucky and Tennessee. Ascend’s facility won’t start up for another few months, but manufacturers like SK Battery America, which helps power heavy hitters like Ford and Volkswagen, have already begun to ship over pallets of manufacturing scrap. It's piling up by the ton, just waiting to hit the road. When it’s up and running, Ascend’s Georgia plant will be able to turn around 33,000 tons of dead batteries and other waste per year, resulting in enough recycled metal to spark up to 70,000 EVs. Auto manufacturers will be able to sign a simple one-way contract to buy the reconstituted material from dead EV cells, vice president of marketing Roger Lin explains, or they could do a two-way deal to provide excess scraps from their factories and get them back in revived form. Ascend could also take the dead batteries from auto manufacturers and then create new material for anyone who wants it. Ascend CEO Mike O’Kronley is confident the old EV batteries his plant will depend on won’t end up like so many forgotten cell phones stashed in drawers. “One EV battery is equivalent to a thousand from cell phones,” he says. “It’s much easier to collect and transport to a recycling center.” Auto shredders and junkyards, he contends, have an incentive to sell them to companies like Ascend. Though Ascend may have the head start in lining up customers, it does face strong competition: Li-Cycle, a Canadian recycler building a plant near Rochester, New York, and Redwood Materials, a company founded by Tesla’s former CTO. Both firms are scaling up their own systems, using hydrometallurgical processes similar to Ascend’s. Right now, not enough EVs have been retired to supply the quantity of batteries needed to meet the demand for reclaimed metals. “If we recycled every battery in the world, the most recycling can provide is maybe 20 to 30 percent of the demand,” says Ascend CTO Gratz. As long as the total number of EVs on the road continues to increase, we’ll need to keep mining significant amounts of lithium, cobalt, and nickel. However, Ascend is banking on the majority of the population eventually driving EVs and turning in their old ones for new models. “Then,” Gratz says, “we can just keep recycling the same nickel and cobalt and lithium atoms over and over again.”
NEXT: A hard place
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A HARD PLACE NASA’s Psyche mission promised to show us the ironnickel core of a dead planet. New research, however, hints that this asteroid is much more mysterious.
No one is certain what the Psyche craft will spy once it takes a closer look at the seemingly
BY MEGAN I. GANNON ILLUSTRATIONS BY RUI RICARDO, FOLIO ART SHORTLY AFTER 1 a.m. on February 8, 1969, a bluish-white fireball streaked across the sky above the Southwestern United States and northern Mexico. A meteor getting sucked into Earth’s gravity had exploded in the atmosphere. Scorched rocks rained over a 200-square-mile area around Pueblito de Allende in Chihuahua, where locals picked up the first bits of debris. A scavenger hunt began immediately. Kids and other residents used plastic candy bags to pick up meteorites on the sides of highways, near houses, in bean fields. Scientists also descended on the cactus-dotted chaparral landscape. NASA even sent researchers; they were preparing for the upcoming Apollo 11 mission to the moon and treated the crash like a dress rehearsal for studying lunar samples. In the first few months after the fall, teams discovered an estimated 2 tons of material, and at least 37 labs in 13 countries received samples. Since long before anyone could dream of sending astronauts and robots to collect rocks in space, looking at meteorites was the best way to see our solar system’s ancient building blocks up close.
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metallic surface of its namesake.
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The Allende meteorite, as it came to be known, was the biggest object of its kind ever found. And, as the poster child for the oldest material in our solar system, it became perhaps the world’s most studied meteorite. Its specimens contained grains of dust that were among the first solids forged in the nebula that swirled around the sun more than 4.5 billion years ago. That dust would condense into pebbles, then rocks, then boulders the size of cities—the size of states. It would eventually form the first mini-planets, or planetesimals, which would either grow into worlds like Earth or get blasted apart in the violent cosmic playground, some of the pieces ending up scattered in a debris field now known as the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Some 40 years later, the Allende meteorite landed at the center of a new mystery. Ben Weiss, a planetary scientist at MIT, found that its samples appeared to have the imprint of an ancient magnetic field. For decades, scientists had assumed the two main types of meteorites—chondrites and achondrites—came from two separate classes of parent bodies. Allende belonged to the chondrites, thought to be pristine, never-melted space rocks that formed from proto-planetary dust. Achondrites—like meteorites made from the moon and Mars—are chunks broken off of planets or relatively wee planetesimals that swell until their insides melt. In that scenario, heavy metals like nickel and iron sink to the core while lighter materials float to the surface. The assumption was that the mechanism that produces a magnetic field inside an achondrite parent body’s core was unique to that class of meteorite. But, Weiss wondered, if Allende had never been part of one of these melted space rocks, how could it be magnetized? In 2009, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, then Weiss’ colleague at MIT, proposed that Allende might be a chunk of a hybrid object, one that had melted on the inside but not the outside, a startling theory at the time. “It caused big waves in the scientific community and made everybody really upset,” she recalls. “It was one of those little tempests in a teapot that happens in academic research.” Naturally, many scientists are loath to change long-held ideas without extensive evidence, but about a decade after sparking that controversy, Elkins-Tanton is leading a mission that could resolve unanswered questions about ancient planetesimal cores floating in space—and go back in time to study Earth’s own formation. In August, a spacecraft will launch on a 41-month journey to visit Psyche, the biggest metallic asteroid in our solar system. The behemoth is suspected to be the iron-nickel core of a growing planet whose outer layers were stripped in cosmic hit-and-runs. We’ll never get a direct look at Earth’s core—at least not until we develop the superhuman technology to drill down 3,100 miles and withstand temperatures of 9,000°F and pressure 3 million times that of the atmosphere. Psyche, however, offers a chance to stare into a planet’s heart, to learn about the early solar system and the source of magnetic fields like the one that protects Earth from cosmic radiation and perhaps allowed complex life to evolve. A team of nearly 800 people are in crunch time ahead of the mission, also called Psyche. But as the launch window approaches, the asteroid is shaping up to be a much stranger target than NASA may have bargained for when it approved the $850 million project five years ago. At the time, Psyche was estimated to be 90 percent metal. Fresh analyses suggest that percentage is too high. So researchers are coming up with wild new hypotheses to explain its properties—hypotheses they’ll actually be able to test after the spacecraft arrives in orbit around the asteroid in 2026. Is Psyche really the exposed core of a planet? Or is it simply a pile of metal-rich rubble? A strange world with remnants of metal-gurgling volcanoes? Something dazzling, like a giant rare glittery class of meteorite? “This is the part that I love about it,” says Elkins-Tanton, now vice 38
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president of Arizona State University’s Interplanetary Initiative as well as Psyche’s principal investigator. “None of those answers that we’re coming up with to explain the existing data are simple, obvious answers. They’re all low-probability events, which maybe makes sense, because it seems like there’s only one Psyche out there.” For now, the team’s primary notion remains that Psyche is the remnant of a shattered core. “Another is that it’s something we’ve never seen before,” says Jim Bell, a mission scientist also at ASU. One idea is that Psyche could be a metal-dominated world that formed very close to the sun and somehow got out to the asteroid belt, he says. “We don’t know what those objects look like because they’re gone. They’ve fallen into the sun, they’ve merged into the terrestrial planets. So even if we’re wrong, we’re gonna learn something pretty cool.”
In its two years orbiting the asteroid, Psyche will map the surface—and peer below it to detect the mysterious body’s composition.
Maybe asteroids could make us rich via space mining, or extinct like the dinosaurs, but they are perhaps most worthy of exploration because they hold the secrets of our solar system’s past. Earth’s most ancient rocks have been melted and mashed up so many times that it’s rare to find traces of its 4.5-billion-year history. If our planet has lost all memory of its infancy, then visiting an asteroid could be like peeking at its baby pictures. THE FIRST asteroids were observed around 220 years ago. Based on a flawed model of the solar system, astronomers had concluded there should be a planet between Mars and Jupiter. To hunt it down, a society known as die Himmelspolizei, “the Celestial Police,” formed in Germany to assign each member a 15-degree slice of sky to scan. Instead of locating a single world, it found several, which we now know to be asteroids. Over the next decades, stargazers would discover bodies like Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta. In March 1852, Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis at the Naples Observatory identified Psyche, the 16th such object, and named it after the Greek goddess of the soul. More advanced techniques have since slightly refined our picture of Psyche. For example, spectrometers can decipher a faraway world’s composition by looking at the different wavelengths of light that minerals reflect. By the 1970s, astronomers found that a small group of asteroids were similar to iron meteorites that had fallen to Earth. By the 1980s, they recognized Psyche as the biggest of these M-class, or metallic, asteroids in the main belt, and they theorized it was the remnant of a dead planetary core. Psyche wasn’t on Elkins-Tanton’s mind when she joined her colleague 39
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Weiss in the fall of 2009 to brainstorm why the Allende meteorite was magnetized. Within a half hour, she had drawn a diagram on his whiteboard showing a strange hybrid object that had begun melting from the inside out under the extreme heat of radioactive isotopes. “She was basically making a really simple point that maybe it doesn’t melt all the way through, which seems so obvious,” Weiss says. “I’ve never done this before or since, but we got our camera and took a picture.” At the time, astronomers were beginning to overturn the textbook wisdom that the early solar system formed in a methodical, stately fashion. Instead they favored a violent infancy in which high-energy processes rapidly formed planetesimals and planets. The theory that Weiss and Elkins-Tanton presented to packed conference rooms in 2010 and then published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters in 2011 contributed to this new view. Bruce Bills and Daniel Wenkert, two researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, were intrigued enough by the idea to invite the MIT scientists out to Pasadena to the lab’s Innovation Foundry, an incubator for mission ideas. Could they design a space voyage that would let them actually see the insides of asteroids and find out if some could indeed be these hybrid bodies? As JPL experts looked at potential targets and calculated trajectories, the group very quickly realized one of its candidates was Psyche—not just any building block, but the one most likely to be an actual core, something scientists have never observed. Elkins-Tanton and her team began working on a proposal to visit. Early one morning in January 2017, Elkins-Tanton’s cell phone lit up while she was spending winter break in the snowy hills of western Massachusetts. It was Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Service was terrible, but before the call got cut off, she heard, “I can tell I just woke you up, but you’re going to be glad I did.” This was the payoff of the grueling competitive process of pitching a mission to NASA’s Discovery program, the agency’s midsize planetary exploration arm, designed to fund cheap, efficient missions every few years. In the course of her career, Elkins-Tanton had been in many unexpected situations as she chased compelling geologic questions. While working on her Ph.D., when she wanted to reconstruct the temperature and composition of rock inside the moon 3.5 billion years ago, she looked at soil that the Apollo astronauts had brought home. Later, when she was investigating a 250-million-year-old volcanic eruption that spurred climate changes that nearly wiped out life on Earth, she traveled by cargo helicopter and small boat to remote corners of Siberia hunting rocks. Despite all this, it never occurred to her that a paper she’d authored would lead to an actual mission to space. It also never occurred to her to get a tattoo, but a few months after that fateful call, she was sitting in a parlor getting her first ink: a cross section of a planetesimal on her hand. The artist had suggested she consider a less conspicuous location, but Elkins-Tanton wasn’t interested. “This tattoo is on my hand because this mission is about doing, building, making, going, not just about sitting still and thinking or being afraid.” THE ANNOUNCEMENT of a new NASA mission can cause a gravitational shift in the world of space research. As the target of a real craft, Psyche began to attract more observation. Coveted telescope time and lab hours were suddenly being devoted to the obscure object. But looking at Psyche—which is only about 172 miles long—is not easy from Earth. (If it were, there’d be no need to go visit.) “You have to remember, with asteroids, when we look at them in most telescopes, you don’t see anything except a dot,” says Michael Shepard, a planetary scientist who specializes in remote sensing and asteroids 40
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at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania but isn’t part of the Psyche team. Researchers like him have had to get creative when they want to determine the size, surface features, and composition of a faraway and relatively small object like Psyche. Shepard has led several projects to measure it and other M-class asteroids, the results of which began to hint that Psyche might not be as metallic as previously thought. Before its collapse in 2020, the huge reflector dish at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico was one of the few places (and by far the best) to scope out bodies’ radar reflectivity, a measure that helps determine composition. Over more than a decade, Shepard saw Psyche’s numbers drop. “That’s primarily because we only see it being bright when it’s pointed in particular directions,” he says. “The averaging effect has brought the estimate down.” What really indicated Psyche might not be so metallic is its density. Calculating that metric requires an object’s mass and size, and with more observation, the once-inconsistent numbers for Psyche have started to converge. In a preflight assessment that Elkins-Tanton and her colleagues published in February 2020, they say the best measurements put the asteroid’s density between about 3.4 and 4.1 grams per cubic centimeter. An intact iron-nickel core should be twice that. (Water has a density of 1 gram per cubic centimeter. Most rocks are around 3. Iron-nickel is around 8.) As a result, estimates now put Psyche at just 30 to 60 percent metal. “That paradigm of a chunk of solid iron floating through space seems like it’s no longer correct,” says Katherine de Kleer, a California Institute of Technology planetary scientist who’s not involved in the mission but has observed and studied Psyche. “So now we’re trying to understand what it is and how it formed.”
“PROBABLY EVERYTHING I SAY TODAY WILL BE FOUND TO BE WRONG ONCE WE’RE THERE. THAT IS THE BEAUTY AND THE EXCITEMENT AND THE COMPULSION OF SPACE EXPLORATION.” —LINDY ELKINS-TANTON
How can one explain Psyche’s missing material? Some scientists wonder if it might be all metal, but porous like a pile of rubble—but it’s unlikely an object that big lost heat quickly enough to stay holey. Because the radar reflectivity seems to be higher in certain regions, some researchers, including Brandon Johnson, a planetary scientist at Purdue University in Indiana, have theorized that iron volcanoes may have erupted through the world’s surface as it cooled from the outside in. “I actually expected quite a bit of pushback because the idea’s kind of wild,” says Johnson, the lead author of one of the papers modeling so-called ferrovolcanism on Psyche. He was pleasantly surprised to find others running with the concept. Since no one has ever seen such a flow on Earth or elsewhere, Arianna Soldati, a volcanologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, tried to make one. Using a furnace at the Syracuse University Lava Project in New York, her team melted metal-rich basalt, poured the lava onto a sand-covered slope, and watched how it flowed. The patterns could help them spot the traces of similar activity on Psyche. On the other side of the globe, equally imaginative experiments probed the apparent mixed geology of Psyche. An ancient asteroid would have 41
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been exposed to countless impacts. Guy Libourel, a cosmochemist at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in France, led tests creating these collisions in miniature. At a lab in Japan, his colleagues shot little basalt beads at steel and iron surfaces at ridiculously high speeds, around a little more than 3 miles per second. (A rifle might shoot a bullet at nearly twothirds of a mile per second.) They found the basalt melted from the heat of impact and flattened like a pancake over the surface of the target. They argue that perhaps Psyche’s metal is camouflaged by a coating of glassy rock imported via impacts. That could explain why there doesn’t seem to be so much metal on the surface—or on those of its M-class cousins, for that matter. Metal asteroids are rare, and as we get additional remote measurements of them, none seem to have densities that would indicate they’re made purely of iron-nickel cores. “We will see in 2026 what the truth is,” Libourel says. LATE THIS SUMMER, some members of the Psyche team will endure Florida’s heat and humidity to watch a fireball streak through the sky. A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket loaded with around 44,000 pounds of propellant will escape Earth’s gravity carrying Psyche, a repurposed Maxar communications satellite the size of a car. Once released from the payload faring, the spacecraft will begin a journey of 1.5 billion miles, whipping around Mars for a gravity assist and then using Maxar’s solar electric propulsion system to chug along into deep space. “We are under the gun,” says Henry Stone, the Psyche project manager at JPL. Because the journey depends on that gravity assist, the team has a strict window for launch that opens in August and closes a few weeks later. If all goes well, the spacecraft will arrive at its destination in January 2026 and operate for almost two years. Its cameras will capture all the asteroid’s craters, crags, and other topographic surprises of the object in high-resolution images. (The instrument is multispectral, meaning it has filters that can detect invisible signatures of minerals like oldhamite, olivine, and pyroxene that would help scientists figure out how the asteroid formed.) More data allows mission scientists to better map Psyche and understand its gravity field, so the spacecraft will descend in a series of progressively lower orbits. All the while, its magnetometer sensors, mounted on a 6-foot boom, should find out if the body has a preserved ancient magnetic field, which would be a big clue that it was once part of a mass with a polar-spinning, partially molten, iron-nickel core. “We’ve never seen an asteroid’s magnetic field, but that thing sure seems like a good bet to look for that,” says MIT’s Weiss, who’s leading the magnetometer investigation. The gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer, propped on another boom, will detect energy signatures created when cosmic rays blast apart atoms in the asteroid. Those measurements will help determine the elemental composition of Psyche up to a meter below the surface, charting the deposits of metals and silicates that may show whether the surface is that of a chondritic or achondritic body. Perhaps most exciting for researchers who aren’t involved in the mission, images captured by the spacecraft will go online publicly within 30 minutes. Sharing fits with the leadership philosophies Elkins-Tanton has been honing as she manages a team of hundreds. It’s gotten her thinking about how huge science projects can be more ambitious and tackle bigger problems. How do you make sure all the participating researchers don’t scurry back to their labs with their slices of data, never to be heard from again? How do you make a project more than the sum of its parts? She’s been evangelizing for her fellow scientists to throw away the hero model that lifts 42
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up only famous and charismatic principal investigators. She doesn’t mind publishing images with glitches that need to be fixed if it means one might be full of surprises that her community can get excited about. Other recent missions to asteroids should have prepared them for some unexpected sights. In the 2010s, when two separate sample-return missions, Japan’s Hayabusa2 and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, approached their respective targets, Ryugu and Bennu, scientists saw that both asteroids were strewn with boulders, not covered in fine-grained regolith as expected. Researchers who have gotten sucked into Psyche’s world are excited that the space for discovery in this mission is wide open, and they’re eager to land on the questions they don’t yet know they should be asking. “Probably everything I say today will be found to be wrong once we’re there,” Elkins-Tanton says. “That is the beauty and the excitement and the compulsion of space exploration.”
NEXT: Under pressure
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UNDER PRESSURE To craft submarines that withstand the crushing deep, New England shipbuilders must become masters of steel.
This Virginia-class submarine will soon be carefully shepherded to the sea
PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRISTOPHER PAYNE TEXT BY ROB VERGER BEFORE SUBMARINES can carry out their stealthy jobs beneath the waves, they begin their lives in pieces on land. The newest group of American nuclear-powered attack submarines is the Virginia class, also known as SSN-774, a collection of underwater ships that stretch 377 feet long. Their mission? To conduct surveillance, fight other vessels, and rarely, if needed, launch conventional cruise missiles at terrestrial targets. Their maximum diving depth? That’s a secret. Their top speed? Ditto. What we do know is that each of these submersibles will protect a complement of sailors from the ocean’s incredible pressure—and from the nuclear reactor contained within, which powers everything from the propulsion system to the lights by heating water into steam. For workers at Electric Boat, an arm of General Dynamics responsible for many of these vessels, craftsmanship is more than a matter of pride. A single mistake in their meticulous metalworking could prove catastrophic in the murky depths. Here’s how these subs—known in the biz as boats—come together at facilities in Quonset Point, Rhode Island, and Groton, Connecticut.
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from Electric Boat’s Connecticut facility with wheeled carts.
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↑ A submarine’s outermost layer of metal skin is its main defense against the drink. It can dive deeper than 800 feet, where the pressure will be more than 300 pounds per square inch. The thick steel (its exact width is a secret) starts in flat sheets, which this massive machine exerts thousands of tons of force to curve. The press bends the material slightly farther than necessary, ensuring it springs back into the exact crescent required.
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↑ Sparks fly as a robot cuts the bent plates. Not only do these need to be a particular length, but the manner in which they’re trimmed matters too: The ends must have a specific bevel shape so each piece can join precisely with its neighbor. Multiple sections will soon come together to form enormous ring-shaped segments of the future submarine.
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↑ These giant blue fixtures receive the curved and cut bits of steel, one of which is seen here suspended by a crane. Inside, robots or humans weld the bent plates into 34-foot-wide rings that will eventually stack into the completed hull. They’ll also fuse I-beams onto the interior to form riblike supports. The more perfectly round the hull, the stronger it is: A circle is the best shape to withstand undersea pressure on all sides.
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↑ A portion of a boat stands vertically, as if perched on its tail. Welders complete their tasks—like attaching brackets, pipe hangers, and other elements—atop scaffolding within the reinforced cylinder. If the section were prone (as it is in its final state), the workers would have to do their job on the floor, perhaps lying down to do so.
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↑ A welder fuses a portion of a submarine’s many mechanical systems. Whether a seam is on the hull or on another component, it’s vital that this work be done perfectly. Electric Boat will use nondestructive techniques— such as X-rays, dye tests, and magnetic tools—to ensure each part can keep its composure under the literal pressure of the sea.
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↑ This green metal structure has been painted and primed, and it could eventually house equipment such as computers. Shipbuilders construct sections like these on the shop floor and slide them into a larger piece of the sub—as if slipping a collapsed ship into a bottle. Electric Boat says this process is three times faster than building within one of the hull cylinders.
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↑ Sailors call their triple-stacked bunk beds “racks.” Like much of the boat’s inner chambers, this module is built on the shop floor, complete with elements like lockers, and then slotted into a section of the sub. During particularly packed missions, seafarers sometimes have to share racks by sleeping in shifts.
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↑ The team at Electric Boat must carefully inspect even mundane objects, such as this ventilation unit, for flaws. This piece of hardware is destined for the submarine’s interior, where a variety of metals abound: The bathrooms and food prep areas employ stainless steel to avoid rust; workers also ensure that there are no imperfections where mold or bacteria might grow. Where strength is not crucial, as with a locker door, aluminum and other materials can do the trick.
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↑ Now that it’s oriented horizontally, as it would be at sea, the decks of this Virginia-class attack sub are visible. When these segments are ready, they will be shipped on a barge from Quonset Point to Groton. By then, each one will be more than 90 percent complete. In Groton, they’ll be mated with other segments. Equipment for the engine room and other large components also has to go in before this step—otherwise that machinery won’t fit.
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↑ This standard access hatch is a portal by which sailors and supplies enter and exit. The gearing you see is part of a so-called dogging mechanism—to dog a hatch is to lock it tight by turning the wheel. The machinery helps give the entryway the same structural integrity as every other portion of the hull.
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↑ With its gargantuan sections now firmly welded, the submarine takes shape, its bow pointed toward the door. The vessel’s signature peak—its “sail”—holds sensor-filled antennas called masts that take the place of oldschool periscopes, among other equipment. In addition to some paint and onboard equipment, the vessel is still waiting on an official name: It’s known as a PCU, or pre-commissioning unit, until the Navy receives the ship.
NEXT: With a rebel yell
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RUSLAN SHAMUKOV/ ALAMY
WITH A REBEL YELL The science is clear: Metal music is good for the soul.
Contrary to popular belief, metalheads don’t all share one
BY MARTHA HARBISON
look—and they
TO THE UNINITIATED, metal music—especially its more extreme forms like death metal and grindcore—sounds like a melody penned by an angry caveman. It’s punishing, chaotic, brutal, aggressive, cacophonous. But as with the concept of “caveman” itself, recent research has built up a much more nuanced picture of the genre. Scholars and fans alike are now exploring its role in emotional regulation—and its potential to help us survive impending doom. A bit ambitious? Perhaps. But metal has always been brash. WHAT MAKES A SONG METAL? Metal emerged as a genre distinct from rock in the early 1970s, as artists pushed to create heavier music. According to Zett, a formally trained musician and the guitarist in black/thrash band Kömmand, “First and foremost, metal has to have distorted guitars. It also usually has riffs— repeating cycles of musical ideas—and it’s usually ‘heavy,’ that is, loud or crunchy.” Beyond that, what makes metal metal is difficult to answer in words. A particular mix of driving drum-and-bass rhythms, distortion, and exaggerated vocal styles—from growls to soaring falsettos—sets it apart
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aren’t all full of rage. In fact, this genre has a lot going for it.
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BRIEN WHITE
THE ANATOMY OF A METAL LOGO
Logos do more than just tell you the name of a band. With subtle (or not-so-subtle) design choices, they can also tell a savvy metalhead what the music will sound like. For black metal insignias (top), illegibility is part of the point. Even if you can’t read “Popular Science,” the chaotic tendrils, left-right symmetry, and black-white color scheme all let you know that distorted tremolo-picked guitars are on offer. The brash attitude of thrash (bottom) carries over into its logo designs: They frequently feature blocky, pointy letters and garish color schemes favoring acid green, purple, red, and yellow.
from punk and other edgy styles. But even those qualities don’t quite get to the heart of the matter, because metal contains multitudes. “For any kind of music that you like, there’s a metal band that you’ll probably like too,” says Kim Kelly, a journalist who spent years covering the subject for publications such as Noisey and MetalSucks. “If someone likes ethereal melodies and clean singing and emotional atmospheric vibes, there’s a metal band for that. If you’re interested in hip-hop, there’s crossovers and connective tissue there as well.” METALHEADS AREN’T WHO YOU THINK THEY ARE Just as the genre is more complex than you might assume, so too are its myriad fans. They’re more diverse—and less angry—than stereotypes 57
DATA VIA ENCYCLOPAEDIA METALLUM + THE METAL MAP
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WHERE THINGS GET HEAVY
Which countries are the most metal? The culture appears to flourish in countries with relatively high wealth and, especially in the time before the internet, in fairly isolated ones—where musicians often play in multiple bands at once.
would have you believe. For starters, they’re everywhere: A full 145 of the world’s nations had at least one active metal band in 2021. And contrary to popular belief, fans don’t all look like burly Vikings. Laina Dawes, an ethnomusicologist and author of What Are You Doing Here? A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal, has seen as much while investigating why young Black Americans tend to gravitate toward intense music. Her interviews with artists and devotees over the last few years suggest that punk, powerviolence, grindcore, and other genres known to be explicitly political may offer a form of catharsis for youths dealing with individual and systemic oppressions. In the ’70s through the early ’90s, rap met that need, pairing raw production with unsparing dissections of police violence and racism, poverty, and life on the economic margins. “Rap was more extreme then than it is now, and that’s where young Black people were getting their ya-yas out and being able to address that internalized anger,” she says. But Dawes’ research suggests that modern tracks, with their slick audio engineering and wider lyrical focus, don’t offer the same release. “These days heavy metal might be a better genre to get involved in,” she adds. OK, METAL IS INTENSE. BUT IS IT BAD FOR YOU? Despite growing evidence, the stereotype of brooding and violent metal fans pervades, which raises the concerns of parents and educators. Because of this, researchers across disciplines have paid plenty of attention to how this music might mold minds. They’ve looked at metalhead personality traits, questioned their propensity for self-harm and violence, and even tutted over the risks of headbanging-related brain injuries. Metalheads do have commonalities, just not those that outsiders might think. According to a 2013 study at University of Westminster and HELP University College in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, they’re more likely to care about being seen as “unique” than the average person; they’re also less religious and have somewhat lower self-esteem. In 2015, Stanford and Cambridge University psychologists reported that folks with 58
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KYLE HILTON
THE RIGHT WAY TO HEADBANG
Decades of thrashing can lead to pinched nerves and bulging disks. But fear not: It is possible to headbang (relatively) safely. A 2008 study in BMJ explained exactly how much punishment your skull and neck can take. If your head moves more than 90 degrees with each bang, you’re in brain injury territory—unless you move at a glacial pace. Speeds below 110 beats per minute help avoid strain, especially with the arc of each movement at 45 degrees or less.
“systemizing” traits—who tend to analyze things and look for patterns— are more likely to enjoy intense music and reject mellow crooners. In 2010, psychologists at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland found that headbangers were drawn to theatricality, a preference they shared with classical aficionados. In fact, the only thing separating the groups was age: Younger folks tend to prefer Metallica to Mozart. And research from Macquarie University in Australia published in 2018 showed that a proclivity for brutal tunes does not a serial killer make; listening does not desensitize fans to violence. But that’s not to say that metal doesn’t affect us. A 2015 study surveyed 377 people who were metalheads in the ’80s. While they often engaged in risky “sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll” habits as youths, they were also significantly happier during that time than their peers—and better adjusted as adults. It could be that being on the cultural fringes can help one develop a strong sense of self, and perhaps even help build supportive friendships. If you ask fans why they listen to metal, they’ll probably tell you that it makes them happy—and some research suggests that heavy tunes can even help us handle our emotions. A 2015 study from the University of Queensland, Brisbane assessed how extreme music affected anger processing. The researchers first subjected 39 metalheads to “anger induction” by strategically prompting them to recall incidents that had made them very mad, then instructed some of them to listen to metal from their own playlists. If commonly held assumptions about intense music actually causing anger were indeed correct, then study subjects would get even more riled up while listening. But that didn’t happen: 59
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KYLE HILTON; DATA FROM SILVERBERG ET AL. 2013
THE MADDING CROWD In 2013, physicists at Cornell studied concert crowd dynamics to better understand how they devolve into full-contact chaos. The mosh pit is but one of several potential outcomes. Here are three of the most common configurations.
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1. MOSH PIT Moshers behave quite a bit like an ideal gas, where each person moves according to their own whim, unaffected by the motions of the people around them.
2. CIRCLE PIT A tendency to stick together—or “flock”—triggers this well-known vortex. Instead of running through the open space at random, participants speed around the perimeter, with a few headbangers in the middle.
3. WALL OF DEATH Cornell’s study didn’t model this phenomenon, but every metalhead knows it. When the song kicks in, members of the crowd, separated in two on opposite ends of the room, run toward one another. You don’t need a simulation to guess the result: absolute carnage.
Participants reported feeling positive and “inspired” during and after the metal sesh. The authors posit that intense music could provide an outlet for tough feelings rather than being their genesis. COULD METAL HELP US SAVE THE WORLD? When you accept that metal builds communities (and frequently functions like a cleansing primal scream), it follows that headbanging could help us survive tough times—including, one scientist argues, the impending climate apocalypse. Bear with us here. Maintaining mental and emotional resilience— that is, processing difficult feelings—will be key to both surviving the upheaval and building a stronger future. That’s why David Angeler, an ecologist and complex systems researcher, published a 2016 paper in SpringerPlus on metal’s potential to keep us afloat. According to Angeler, building resilient societies depends on a complex set of factors affecting both systems and individuals. Anything that helps people cope with their own emotions, including the catharsis many feel while 60
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DATA COURTESY OF EVAN CHABOT, UCF
WHAT’S IN A SONG?
OK, fair: Death is metal’s most common lyrical theme. But this analysis of modern subgenres shows that songs address a huge range of topics, including some of life’s most profound and universal struggles.
listening to metal, also helps keep their communities strong. But Angeler’s ideas go beyond that. What if metalheads could collaborate with the sustainability community? “We need to return to the era of Romanticism, where different fields, such as the arts and sciences, are not mutually exclusive,” he says. If you think about metal and sustainability as complex ecosystems analogous to the ones we see in nature, it’s easy to envision how the two could interact and create change at the systemic level for humans. In some ways, this is already happening. An increasing number of bands—particularly in black metal, thrash, and grindcore—are focusing in their lyrics on topics like climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental collapse. After all, if your brand is gloom and doom and against-the-machine raging, there are few subjects more universally troubling. As acts speak to the issues they see every day, they help inform others about their experiences and let people know they’re not alone in their anguish. Some fans might even become scientists themselves, or run for office. Sustainability specialists, in return, could listen to the challenges and concerns in the music and turn their studies to areas that address those problems. Those kinds of connections and feedback loops, says Angeler, could result in “reduced suffering, reduced costs, and more tolerance.” He adds that metal’s rich sound structures—and the extent to which they vary between subgenres—could prove ideal for creating artistic representations of complex problems. One could elicit harmonic and empowering feelings through symphonic metal, for instance, while conveying chaos with mathcore or despair in doom tracks. Could other kinds of music also provide this benefit? Sure. But metal’s consistent willingness to address ugly truths, its penchant for transforming distress into emotional resilience, and its ability to create community all across the world make it a model for how art can continue to give us meaning and support, even when everything around us is falling apart. “Metal has never gotten the credit it deserves,” says Kelly, the music journalist. “Metal doesn’t want your approval, but f*ck you for not respecting us.” NEXT: It’s in the can
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MODEL BY HILT PROJECTS
IT’S IN THE CAN The surprising link between the James Webb Space Telescope, a next-gen weather satellite, and your favorite frosty beverage
The WSF-M satellite, launching in 2023, isn’t literally built around a soda can, but the pair do share
BY SARAH SCOLES PHOTOGRAPH BY GREGORY REID THE ENGINEERS in bunny suits, hairnets, and masks stand around a vertical white dish about 6 feet tall—their clean-room attire preventing any biological sloughing from contaminating the equipment. From the dish’s edges, articulated black arms extend outward, connecting it to an adjacent metal cylinder. On its own, each part could be mistaken for a UFO. And indeed, they are destined for a life beyond Earth: Next year, they will shoot to orbit as part of a larger satellite called the Weather System Follow-on–Microwave (or WSF-M). The dish—a sophisticated antenna—will catch faint microwaves emitted by Earth, whose undulating characteristics reveal weather conditions below. A yellow crane looms over the team, and photons from fluorescent lights bathe the whole room in white. Preparing to test the mechanical arms’ mobility, the engineers cross their own, nod, move forward, back away. Finally, the active part of the experiment begins. Slowly and smoothly, the limbs lift the antenna in an upward arc. Then the arms fully 62
a common lineage.
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outstretch—V as in victory—positioning the antenna so it hovers above the cylinder. The engineers are obviously happy. One pumps a fist skyward. The United States Space Force, the branch of the military dedicated to defending US interests above Earth and that runs the WSF-M program, was also likely very happy to learn of the successful trial, conducted in fall 2021 and called the main reflector deployment test. Navigating to the nearest 7-Eleven, you might forget that the military, specifically the Space Force, owns America’s GPS spacecraft. And when the forecast says to expect rain en route to your Slurpees, you have Defense Department orbiters to thank for that prediction too. The meteorological hardware that makes it all possible is getting up there, though—in age, not orbital height. And that’s why the engineers were gathered to watch the painstakingly slow deployment of a brand-new antenna: In 2023, once it’s fully assembled, WSF-M will launch and help blow weather observations and predictions into the 21st century. The previous generation of military weather satellites, launched more than two decades ago, can’t tell the wind’s direction over the ocean’s surface, just its speed. WSF-M will do both, and with a bigger antenna—the one engineers watched unfold last autumn—than past spacecraft. It will
The WSF-M satellite undergoes construction at Ball’s aerospace site in
COURTESY OF BALL
Boulder, Colorado.
also reveal storms’ structures (and those of calm days) in high def. These capabilities, and the long-term data record enabled by WSF-M and others that follow, will help humans monitor climate change and perhaps take steps to mitigate its more turbulent effects. Day by day, detailed measurements will enable better predictions, because the most important factor in knowing what the weather will be is being able to pin down precisely what the weather is right now. Even if you’re well aware of the military’s role in your turn-by-turn navigation and forecasting apps, you might not necessarily be wise to who’s building its latest meteorological hardware upgrade: Ball Corporation, more famous for its canning products of yore and the ubiquitous aluminum poptop containers of beverage concocters nationwide. Yet Ball has also wielded its manufacturing expertise to fashion the mirror system for the James Webb Space Telescope, whose power to see distant and dim celestial objects in glorious detail gives astronomers heart palpitations; construct the Kepler space telescope, which discovered thousands of exoplanets; and repair the flawed mirror on Hubble, whose crisp images now evoke awe and delight. WSF-M is one of dozens of high-flying jobs on the company’s current roster. 63
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Ball, with its strangely split personality, works on some of the most advanced spacecraft spinning around Earth while also producing very terrestrial, banal packaging. “I don’t get it,” people tell CEO Dan Fisher all the time. There are commonalities, though. Both ends of the business rely on metal and glass expertise, and soon both may help human life on Earth grow more sustainable. WHEN BALL was founded in 1880, no one—no earthly thing—had ever been to space. A satellite had appeared only in a sci-fi story. There wasn’t a US weather agency, let alone an Air Force. And Ball was more interested in kerosene than the climate. The company’s origin story is well covered, an old-timey version of Apple’s “started in a garage” founding myth: The five Ball brothers of Buffalo, New York, got a $200 loan from their uncle to start a tin-can company. They jacketed the vessels with wood and sold them as containers for liquids like paint and kerosene. Within a few years, they expanded into production of the glass canning jars now holding countless varieties of homemade pickles and sweet teas. Journalist Todd Neff had heard the narrative plenty in his work as a science and environment reporter for Boulder, Colorado’s Daily Camera. Neff often covered Ball’s doings in the Denver metro area, where it had moved its headquarters in 1998. In 2005, as he watched the company shoot a spacecraft called Deep Impact straight toward a distant comet, he thought there might be more to the saga, which he documents in his book From Jars to the Stars. By the 1930s, Neff learned, the company was headquartered in Muncie, Indiana, and making 190 million jars per year—enough to give the entire US population about one and a half per person annually (note: not the distribution strategy). During World War II, Ball diversified its product line to make refrigerator gaskets and rubber and metal parts for cars and planes—and, like many US manufacturers, started working for the military, producing shells and battery casings. Edmund Ball, son of the Ball founder of the same name, took over the company in 1948 with a far bigger vision than providing people with a place to put their jam. He was a pilot who’d also fought in WWII. Both of those things had shown him what technology could do—and how big a business it was. As Neff documents, he aspired to create an R&D organization that would be the Bell Labs of Ball. As a first step, in 1955, Ball acquired a Coloradobased company called Control Cells, which sold weighing machines that measured how heavy trucks, bridges, trains, and even houses were. But Control Cells was plagued by poor production design and iffy finances. The pivotal event for Ed Ball was instead a simple visit with a not-so-simple neighbor: Control Cells’ general manager was a neighbor of physicist David Stacey, who led the space hardware group at the University of Colorado. One afternoon in 1956, Ed Ball and Control Cells’ manager knocked on Stacey’s door, and the boys were soon sipping drinks and talking in Stacey’s yard, with a view of the jutting rock formations of Boulder’s Flatirons. Their conversation may have wound around to electronics, Neff surmises, and toward the idea that Stacey might provide technical help to the struggling Control Cells. While that didn’t exactly happen, Stacey left the university before year’s end and joined Ball to form the Ball Brothers Research Corporation, an aerospace subsidiary. Stacey helmed the spaceship’s technical operations from Boulder, now the home of the company’s high-tech efforts. In 1959, the group’s first big break—developing a NASA system that would use the sun to help satellites orient themselves—led to its second: 64
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creating a series of Orbiting Solar Observatory spacecraft to watch our star’s roughly 11-year solar cycle for the space agency. The program’s first satellite debuted three years later—and at $2.3 million, three times the proposed cost—traveling to Florida’s Cape Canaveral launch site in what Neff calls a “giant can.” Appropriate. Hours before liftoff, engineers dismantled the spacecraft to fix last-minute communication and propulsion problems before it slipped the surly bonds of Earth on March 7. In 1964, a rocket booster attached to a second solar satellite ignited in a Cape Canaveral building, killing three technicians. A fourth craft never made it to orbit. BALL’S AEROSPACE operations have come a long way since then. The company currently holds about $1 billion worth of active government contracts, a number that includes its work on WSF-M. Right now, the team is building, piece by piece, WSF-M’s weather-sensing instruments and the space vehicle that will house them. One big milestone was the “spin test,” in which the antenna successfully twirled like a slow Olympic figure skater, a rotation it will need to do constantly to sweep its gaze across the planet from orbit.
Plant workers tend beverage packaging machinery on the line at a Ball Corporation BENJAMIN FRY/BALL CORPORATION
facility in Goodyear, Arizona.
Cory Springer, Ball’s director of Weather and Environment, wasn’t able to be there in person, but he gives the video five stars. Seeing the spacecraft do what it would need to do in space made the forecasting future feel real. That’s important to Springer. Before coming to Ball, he spent years in the Navy as a METOC (a meteorology and oceanography officer), giving weather and ocean forecasts to the Navy—often using satellite observations. That data may have even saved his life. Springer recalls a time in the ’90s—when the internet was still on the edge of robust connectivity—when he was aboard the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy. The ship had just finished a two-year refurbishment in the Philadelphia shipyards, and its crew took it out for sea trials. Since they weren’t on a deployment, they didn’t have the normal battery of weather equipment that would have allowed them to do things like track the storm over radar. “All we had on board was a satellite receiver,” says Springer. It was enough to let them know that a hurricane was unexpectedly scurrying up from the south. The electromagnetic waves from the sat slid into the receiver, bearing data on their backs. Briefing the captain, Springer looked out on 63-foot swells. “We had to make some decisions on where to run,” he says. The spacecraft behind that data are part of the Defense Meteorological 65
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Satellite Program, which has been around since 1961. The DoD has periodically swapped them out, like parents replacing expired goldfish. Lockheed Martin made the current three, which launched in 2003, 2006, and 2009, respectively. The Space Force wants to trade them—and the program—for modern technology. WSF-M is the first, and major, part of a two-satellite upgrade. Its ability to see microwaves rather than visible light is key. Microwaves shoot straight through clouds, snow, and rain. That’s important, because nobody much needs to know about the near-term forecast on a perfectly sunny day. “They’re all-weather,” says Quinn Remund, WSF-M’s chief engineer. Other kinds of satellites can sense only the “top” of climatic conditions. Much of today’s weather information comes from active microwave systems, like radar, which emit electromagnetic waves that bounce back, revealing what’s in their path. (They’re mostly situated on Earth’s surface.) WSF-M doesn’t cast its own signals. Instead, it passively monitors natural waves coming from the planet. These undulations are very small and so must be picked up by sensitive receivers. “Pull them out of the noise, so to speak,” says Remund. WSF-M also has sensors that can discern the orientation of the microwaves, a quality called polarization. That’s key to another major goal with WSF-M: to measure both the direction and the speed of wind at the surface of the ocean. For the most part, current satellites can tell only how fast the wind is whipping, but not which way. That’s a sticking point in, say, the middle of the ocean, where a tropical storm might be brewing, but where no terrestrial equipment might exist to keep track of what’s going on. WSF-M will also measure how strong such cyclones are, a fact that
IF THERE’S SOMETHING WE CAN DO, IN SOME SMALL WAY, TO IMPROVE WEATHER FORECASTS, FOR THE WAR FIGHTER BUT ALSO FOR PEOPLE IN GENERAL, THAT’S SOMETHING WORTH DOING. —QUINN REMUND, WSF-M CHIEF ENGINEER
hinges on wind speed. Couple that with its general wind and precipitation measurements, and meteorologists will be able to understand precisely where a “weather event” is and better predict where it’s likely to head. WSF-M also checks out the conditions in space—for example, how the sun’s activity is showing up near Earth. The particles and energy from its outbursts (aka solar flares) can mess with satellites’ electronics, communications, and even orbits. Beyond its main goals, WSF-M can also characterize snow depth, soil moisture, and sea ice, all three of which influence weather and inform DoD actions across the globe. Does a plane, for example, require extra fuel to fly around a hailstorm? Should a ship sail sideways to catch a tailwind? Should you gas up a snowcat or slip on mud tires? Obviously, those factors matter to more than, as the lingo goes, war fighters. They’re useful to anyone who needs an accurate forecast—and the Space Force isn’t stingy with the information. “NOAA uses this data,” says Charlotte Gerhart of the Space Force’s Space System Command Production Corps. “NASA uses the data. The information is available to forecasters worldwide.” 66
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The sensors from a new generation of meteorological satellites might someday even help audit government and corporate behavior, Ball CEO Fisher says, revealing whether these entities are fulfilling their climate obligations, like those involving carbon credits, a system in which companies trade the rights to emit certain amounts of greenhouse gases. “You need some pretty rich data to figure out whether what we’re all signing up for is actually happening,” he says. And the more data the better, in chief engineer Remund’s view. Though meteorological utility does strike close to home. In December 2021, a windstorm with gusts reaching 100 miles per hour spun up a grass fire, sending it into suburban Denver neighborhoods and torching more than 1,000 homes—including those of Ball employees. “If there’s something we can do, in some small way, to improve weather forecasts, for the war fighter but also for people in general, that’s something worth doing,” he says. OUT IN an industrial area of the town of Golden, Colorado, Ball’s main can production plant still occupies the same building it did more than 50 years ago—when the company bought a can-maker called Jeffco Manufacturing to get into the business. Not coincidentally, the town is also home to the Coors Brewery and a cowboy aesthetic it strives to maintain even as most people live in condos or suburban mansions. The Ball plant pumps out more pop-tops than Jeffco’s foremen could ever have anticipated. Whether you’d like a squat 12-ounce Miller, a “12 sleek” skinny-can White Claw, a 24-ounce gulper of Monster, or the twist-off aluminum bottle that actor Jason Momoa puts his branded water in, you’ll find it here. Today, Ball is the largest can manufacturer in the world, producing more than 50 billion per year. It hasn’t created the jars that made it famous since the early 1990s, when it spun off and then eventually sold that part of the business. But the can strategy is changing: The company has upped the minimum order size—a move that squeezes out smaller customers like craft brewers. Today, Ball seems interested in the big guys, not the small-batch dudes. In space parlance, the flagship missions over the Discovery-class variety. In a lot of ways, what happens inside the old Jeffco plant is the opposite of Ball’s aerospace processes. Its orbital specialty is bespoke, novel, highly sophisticated, uniquely faceted diamonds. At the plant, meanwhile, 7 million cans that are at least close cousins get made en masse, each day. On the production floor, sheets of aluminum spool out like taffy, pulled into a machine that stamps them into cup-shaped containers. Those “cups” get stretched by a “bodymaker,” then washed. After that, they’re sent for the “decorations,” as the company calls the visual indicator of whatever you’re drinking. Logos print onto the cylinders one color at a time, so the images only gradually reveal themselves. Nozzles spray a coating on the inside so fluids never touch or corrode the metal. The cans get a neck, then a place for the lid to attach. Finally, the tab-making machine, sounding like an automatic weapon, presses another sheet of aluminum 750 times per minute. Near the tabs, mobs of empty cans march along at head height, in their final stages, twitching forward in unison like zombies. They’ll eventually be filled and sealed by those who make the liquids. Throughout the process, high-speed cameras scan for defects and yeaor-nay thousands of cans per minute. Those that fail a robot’s test get tossed into a bin on the side, bound for recycling. “Safety comes in cans,” proclaims one of many don’t-hurt-yourself signs above the factory floor. “I can. You can. We can.” As Ball inches toward its sesquicentennial, it’s in the process of curving its business again, trying to advance a new metal product: the Ball Aluminum Cup, a SOLO-style container. It’s meant to replace both pint glasses 67
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in bars and the tall plastic cups you get in big venues like sports stadiums. It’s good business and good for the planet, goes the financial and philosophical logic. After all, the industry claims, three-quarters of the industrial and commercial aluminum ever produced is still in circulation. “It’s going to come back, and it might come back in the form of an automobile or construction,” says CEO Fisher. “It’s not going to be litter. It’s not going to be in a landfill, and it’s not going to be in the ocean.” Or at least some of it won’t be: The EPA estimates people actually recycle—rather than toss out—less than half of metal beverage cans. The aluminum that makes it to the recycling plant will be reincarnated. It will have pivoted. Beyond that, Fisher speculates, perhaps between the recyclable cans and the climate-monitoring satellites, Ball’s environmentally friendly focus will finally pinch the gap between its odd-couple businesses. A neat, if not tidy, package at last.
NEXT: Facial reconstruction
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GOODS CARBON CLUBS // COOL CONTAINERS // BLUETOOTH BEASTS
ONE PERFECT THING
Facial reconstruction TaylorMade spent two decades working on a carbon-fiber driver face that could stand up to its titanium competition. BY STAN HORACZEK PHOTOGRAPH BY DOMINIC PERRI
BIG-HEADED DRIVERS take more abuse than any other club in a golfer’s bag: Their faces whack the ball at roughly 30,000 G’s. That’s enough force to obliterate even the fanciest carbon fiber, a material that—owing to its strength and lightness—has permeated other parts of driver heads over the last two decades. Faces that self-destruct in testing, however, have been enough to send manufacturers running back to titanium models, which have been the standard since the early ’90s. With its new Stealth driver, TaylorMade, the company that first ditched classic wooden heads for steel ones in 1979, has created a light carbon face durable enough to withstand thousands of strokes while
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delivering more ball speed—and longer drives. Titanium has long been a go-to for very good reasons. It offers one of the highest strength-to-weight ratios of any metal on the planet, which means companies can make massive 460cc drivers that butt up against the PGA’s maximum size without adding weight that can slow down a swing. Like all metals, the material is also flexible, which allows it to bounce back after deforming at impact. The allure of carbon fiber is that it’s even lighter than titanium, but it brings its own complications. By laying wafers of the fabriclike sheets on top of each other in different orientations and bonding them with resin or another polymer, manufacturers can create a substance that’s roughly five times stronger than steel and twice as stiff. The most common problems stem from imperfections and air pockets in the layers. When TaylorMade began researching the possibility of a carbon face in 2000, designers found that scanners used to seek out flaws couldn’t detect voids smaller than a coin. In order to toughen up the club, they needed to find bubbles measuring just a fraction of a millimeter, so they turned to machinery typically reserved for microchip manufacturing, a field in which the tolerances are absurdly tight. Once it had the means to find potential problem spots, TaylorMade still had to tweak its manufacturing process. Elements on the top and sole of the club rely on up to nine carbon-fiber layers. The Stealth’s 4 mm-thick face, though, is made up of 60 sheets of much thinner material and resin to fill in space that might otherwise turn into air bubbles. The company says that as a result its face boasts the same durability golfers would expect from a titanium club while offering a weight reduction of more than 40 percent. The club-maker hasn’t nuked all the titanium in the Stealth driver, however. The head’s internal frame is still made of metal. That also gives the club the satisfying sound golfers crave when it strikes the ball: TaylorMade tweaked the internal armatures to ring with a satisfying thwack similar to what you’ll get out of an all-metal head, instead of the muted clack you might expect from carbon.
NEXT: Bottle battle
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GOODS TESTED
Bottle battle We pitted some of the most popular double-wall steel bottles against each other to find options worthy of your everyday carry. BY STAN HORACZEK PHOTOGRAPH BY DOMINIC PERRI This cross-section view shows off the bottles’ double-wall construction. A layer of air trapped inside keeps liquid hot or cold all day long.
IF YOU need proof that a single-walled container can’t keep a drink cool, just look to the humble aluminum can, which lets your soda get lukewarm before the burgers need flipping. Dual-walled stainless-steel bottles trap a pocket of air between their inner and outer layers to provide the insulation necessary to keep a beverage brain-freeze-level cold even after hours in the hot sun. We tested some of the most popular models to see which ones deserve the honor of holding your Gatorade. METHODOLOGY We tested the 32-ounce variety of six popular bottles. That much liquid is a kind of Goldilocks for hydration: It takes long enough to consume that holding temps steady really matters, but the bottle isn’t so large that carrying it around counts as a workout in and of itself. Each vessel went through a series of three tests. First was temperature: We filled each bottle with 40°F water directly from the fridge and checked it with an instant-read digital thermometer after eight hours (the length of a typical workday). Then we dropped them all three times from a height of 3 feet to simulate a fall from a table to see if they would dent, scratch, or leak. Lastly, we checked the integrity of the seals and caps by leaving them all in a prone position overnight on top of a large sheet of paper.
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BEST OVERALL: HYDROFLASK WIDE MOUTH FLEX CAP BOTTLE Water temperature after eight hours: 44.0 At $45, perhaps the most familiar flask-maker on the list checked in with the second-most-expensive option, but it also offered the best mix of results in a dishwasher-safe package. With the standard lid, it showed no signs of leakage. It handily won the ruggedness test, resisting dents or scrapes of any kind. Its lid also has the most robust handle, which we would feel totally fine attaching via carabiner to a bag before heading out on a hike. It came in a close second in the temperature test, but not far enough behind to knock it off the podium. BEST INSULATION: YETI RAMBLER Water temperature after eight hours: 43.2 Yeti has a reputation for making absurdly tight coolers, and that acumen translates to bottles. This model doesn’t come in a 32-ouncer, so we instead went for 36, which is enough room to add ice along with the full contents of a large bottle of Gatorade. Underneath the screw top, a removable clear cap creates a smaller opening in its wide mouth for easier drinking. Thankfully, this extra piece—and the entire setup—is dishwasher safe. In our trials, it didn’t experience any overnight leakage, and it survived drops with no issues. At $50, this is the priciest option we tested, but it’s worth a splurge if you don’t mind the bulk. BEST VALUE: TAKEYA ACTIVES INSULATED STAINLESS STEEL BOTTLE Water temperature after eight hours: 44.5 For less than half the price of our other picks ($21), the dishwashersafe Takeya put up an impressive performance. Its temperature retention was nearly as good as that of its pricier counterparts. But Takeya’s main strength comes from a flip-open drinking spout in its lid. This narrower opening makes quick sips easier—without the need for a difficult-to-clean straw. Overall, however, it isn’t as durable as our top picks: It suffered a small dent and scuffs to its colored coating, and the integrated handle is so thin and flexible that it’s more difficult to trust than other, more robust designs. RUNNERS-UP SIMPLE MODERN WATER BOTTLE Water temperature after eight hours: 45.0 You’ll find three lids inside the box with this $25 bottle: a straw version, a screw lid, and a flip-up style similar to what you’d find on most travel mugs. We ran the leak test with the screw lid because it’s most similar to the others on our docket, and a few drops did seep out overnight. This bottle can’t handle hot liquids because pressure could build up inside, unlike with all three of our top picks. It also isn’t dishwasher safe, which makes cleaning it more of a chore. All that more than counteracts the convenience that comes with the extra drinking styles.
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IRON FLASK SPORTS WATER BOTTLE Water temperature after eight hours: 45.1 Despite its tough name, the $23 Iron Flask had difficulty enduring our drop test, boasting the most severe dent and scrape we saw after three drops. Like the Simple Modern bottle, the Iron Flask comes with three tops: a straw lid, a flip-up option, and a typical screw style. While we didn’t see any leakage with the screw top, it lacks a robust handle for clipping on to a bag and instead relies on a flat plastic tether that’s intended only to prevent you from losing the lid. This vessel also isn’t dishwasher safe, which makes cleaning annoying. GLINK STAINLESS STEEL WATER BOTTLE Water temperature after eight hours: 45.9 One of the cheapest flasks we tested ($21) comes with a pair of lids: a straw option and a screw-nozzle type that seems, um, inspired by the Takeya. The tops feel cheaper and less robust than those of the competition, and we saw more leakage—though still just a few drops—with this bottle than any other option we tested. It showed middling performance in the drop test, with a ding and scratch, and its insulation results came in dead last. It does offer the most color options, so if you’re just looking for a bottle to sit still and match your desk decor, it may do the job just fine.
NEXT: Doom boxes
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GOODS OVERKILL
Doom boxes These big, burly Bluetooth speakers have enough audio oomph to send sound waves way beyond the bounds of your backyard. BY STAN HORACZEK
WHETHER IT’S relentless thrash metal or brassy jazz, every musical genre deserves to be played loud enough to make your neighbors either join the party or call in a noise complaint.
UE HYPERBOOM At 13 pounds, this 14-inch-tall musical monolith boasts an IPX4 splashproof rating, which means it’s tough enough to survive any cocktail-related mishaps. Its grilles conceal two woofers and a pair of tweeters. Its real power, though, comes from structures called passive radiators, which produce floor-shaking bass. UE clearly wasn’t too concerned with the device’s heft, so there’s enough battery packed inside to provide a full 24 hours of playback on a single charge—as long as you keep the volume at a reasonable level.
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ANKER SOUNDCORE RAVE Two formidable 5.25-inch woofers and a pair of tweeters allow this 21-pound speaker to hit volumes in excess of 105 dB—louder than a jackhammer. An opening in the back of the box called a bass port allows it to achieve deeper, punchier rumbles by allowing air to move through the enclosure. A smartphone app lets you orchestrate an RGB light show—punctuated by a dedicated strobe light in the middle of the front grille. If all of that isn’t loud and flashy enough, a built-in RCA connection allows for daisy-chaining, so you can build an entire wall of audio to bombard guests.
MARSHALL WOBURN II Marshall built its biggest, screamingest Bluetooth speaker to evoke the look of its classic amps, which have been a stage staple with rock musicians since the 1960s. A pair of 5.25-inch woofers and two tweeters pull up to 110 watts from onboard amplifiers pushing a sizable chunk of power for a boombox. Unlike most speakers, which use plastic cases, the Woburn II has a vinylwrapped wooden enclosure that adds warmth to the overall sound. A bass port cut into the back prevents the case from stifling deep tones at any volume.
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SONOS MOVE At 9.4 inches tall and just over 6 pounds, this isn’t the largest Bluetooth noise machine around, but its IP56 ruggedness rating does make it one of the toughest against water and dust. It’s also one of the most adaptable: The Move will automatically match its output to its surroundings thanks to a built-in microphone array that listens to the sound coming from its down-firing tweeter and midwoofer. Put it in a corner, for example, and it’ll tone down the bass to prevent things from getting muddy. Take it out into the open, and it will let those lows thump in a way that’ll do justice to Ja Rule’s entire catalog.
SONY SRS-XG500 Circular woofers can waste space inside a speaker’s housing, so Sony opted for a square format that gives the diaphragms more surface area. That translates into more sound sans extra bulk. It also allows the speaker to blare at max volume without buzzy distortion from excessive driver movement. A burly handle runs most of the length of the nearly 13-pound, 18-inch-long tubular boombox, so it’s simple to lug around. The built-in rechargeable battery can pump out jams for up to 30 hours, which translates into roughly six Phish songs.
NEXT: Cool metal 76
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FROM THE ARCHIVES
COOL METAL
“The Frigid ‘Per-
Half a century after the discovery of superconductive metal, new machines and new futures emerge.
Machines of To-
petual Motion’ morrow” by W. Stevenson Bacon
CURATED BY BILL GOURGEY
appeared in the March 1967 issue of
BEFORE PHYSICISTS began to grok the laws of thermodynamics in the mid-1800s, inventors, lured by the idea of perpetual motion, sought to exploit the movement of heat. Alongside earnest innovators, hucksters filled the scientific void. Such was the case of Charles Redheffer, a self-proclaimed inventor who posted up in Philadelphia and New York City in 1812 to sell tickets to peep his infinitely moving machine, later revealed to be operated by an old man turning a crank in a hidden loft. Even after thermodynamics exposed all the frauds, the notion of free work refused to die. In 1911, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, a Dutch physicist, discovered that electricity would infinitely flow through mercury chilled to −452° Fahrenheit, near absolute zero. Perpetual motion was back! This time cloaked in superconductive metal. It would take another 50-plus years for engineering to make any real progress with such materials, as Popular Science reported in March 1967. And yet another half-century on, the quantum mechanisms that allow electrons to rapidly flow are still being worked
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out, and the hunt for the perfect superconductive substance (i.e., one that works at room temperature) continues. THE FRIGID ‘PERPETUAL MOTION’ MACHINES OF TOMORROW
Far down on the temperature scale near absolute zero (−459°F) lies a strange world of “electrical perpetual motion”—or superconductivity—where electric currents, once set in motion, flow forever. With new developments in materials and the methods for cooling them, truly fantastic devices are taking shape in laboratories across the country: • Superconductive motors that operate with greater efficiency than any rotating machine ever built (the energy used to refrigerate them notwithstanding)—because of both resistance-free windings and frictionless superconductive bearings. • Superconductive generators that put out more power with less weight and volume than anything yet known. • Superconductive bearings and gyroscopes that “float” in vacuums or liquid helium. • “Fast-thinking” computer logic elements known as cryotrons. The newest of these from IBM, never before revealed, is based on a phenomenon called electron tunneling, and operates at speeds of less than a billionth of a second. • Tiny threadlike wires 1/100 inch in diameter, made of exotic materials, that carry currents of 300 amperes—without resistance, without heating. A conventional room-temperature conductor would have to be 600 times larger. • Direct-current transformers, thought to be impossible before supercold techniques. • Devices known as “flux pumps” that convert small voltages, currents, and magnetic fields to large ones. • Superconductive magnets and solenoids, tiny in relation to comparable electromagnets, which form fields many times stronger than that of Earth and operate forever, given a jolt of starting current. They are the first of the new “perpetual motion” machines to come of age, and one manufacturer (RCA) now makes them on an assembly-line basis. SEEKING THE “IMPOSSIBLE.” The search for electrical perpetual motion spans 50 years. It is a fascinating story, one full of accidental discoveries, years of frustration, and then the slow, gradual uncovering of new clues that have today brought us to the threshold of an exciting new technology. Normally, metals have resistance to the flow of electricity, and much of the energy fed into a wire is wasted as heat. Why? The atoms of copper, for example, are bound together to form molecules, and the molecules to form a highly ordered three-dimensional grillwork or lattice. There are plenty of “free’” conduction electrons that can move through the lattice carrying an electrical current. Unfortunately, at any temperature above absolute zero, heat energy causes a great deal of disorder. The lattice structure is in a constant state of vibration, and it scatters the electrons, generating even more heat, more agitation, and more resistance to the flow of current. Around the turn of the [20th] century, Dutch physicist Kamerlingh Onnes determined to find out how much the resistance of a metal could be reduced by extremely low temperatures. He was able to do so, for he was the first to succeed in liquefying helium. At its incredibly low boiling point of −452°F (4.2 Kelvin), it offered the first practical way to cool a metal down close to absolute zero. Working with purified mercury, Onnes measured its resistance as the temperature fell. At first, things went as predicted. Then, suddenly, 78
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inexplicably, at a temperature of 4.15 Kelvin, the resistance disappeared altogether. Once set flowing in the mercury, a current would flow forever. Dumbfounded, Onnes realized that he had stumbled onto an entirely new state of matter, one in which a kind of perpetual motion or superconductivity was possible. It remained for German physicist Walther Meissner in 1933, 22 years later, to discover another astonishing fact. Pure superconductors, placed in a magnetic field, force out the magnetic flux. A few of the possibilities: frictionless superconducting bearings that float in a magnetic field, error-free gyroscopes—even a transit train that floats suspended above its superconducting rails by virtue of its magnetic field has been proposed. SOLVING THE RIDDLE. What was superconductivity and how could it be used? The puzzle vexed scientists for 50 years. The bait—fabulously efficient ways of transmitting and using electricity—was tempting, but the problems were many. Onnes quickly discovered that his superconductors, notably lead wire, had severe limitations. He tried to build a magnet only to find that the lead ceased being superconducting in a magnetic field. A strong flow of current had the same effect. Theory didn’t help much. It’s easy to understand why resistance gets less as temperature drops. Take away heat and you lessen lattice vibrations and electron scattering. But complete absence of any resistance is something else. To make things worse, superconductivity occurs at temperatures well above absolute zero—at above 18°K in recently discovered compounds. Then, in 1957, the first workable theory of superconductivity was evolved by three brilliant scientists: J. Bardeen, L.N. Cooper, and J.R. Schrieffer. Although electrons are of like charge and normally repel each other, in the frigid world close to absolute zero an unprecedented phenomenon called “electron pairing” occurs. Subjected to intense cold, they literally condense—like drops of water on a cold surface—down to a lower energy or quantum level. At this level, tiny attractive forces occur between electrons of opposite spins and equal and opposite momentums. They interact with each other and with the lattice, exchanging with it phonons (quantums of vibrational energy), much like two tuning forks of the same frequency mounted close to each other on the same base. And the electron pairs interact with other pairs in the superconductor in wavelike fashion. What keeps the electrons from colliding with the lattice and giving up their energy as heat? The answer lies in quantum mechanics, said the scientists. A certain binding force holds the electrons together, reducing their potential energy. If one electron of a pair should be scattered, its potential energy would take a quantum jump upward, more than making up for its loss in velocity. In other words, it is impossible for the electrons—at their low energy level—to give up energy to the lattice by colliding with it; they only gain energy. Free from energy losses, the electrons become “frictionless” perpetual-motion carriers of any current impressed on them. THE LAST BARRIER. With a workable theory, the stage was set for the first of the “perpetual motion” machines. The problem remaining: materials that would take an intense magnetic field and stay superconducting. Then, in a breakthrough comparable to the discovery of superconductivity itself, J.E. Kunzler of Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1961 found that certain superconducting alloys—combinations of niobium-tin, vanadium-silicon, vanadium-gallium, molybdenum-rhenium, and niobiumzirconium—would withstand magnetic fields as high as 100,000 gauss, 200,000 times as strong as that of the Earth! The new superconductors were labeled “hard” in contrast to the 79
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pure-element superconductors (lead, tantalum, mercury, tin, aluminum, for example), which are ductile and soft. They are also known as Type II or filamentary superconductors, which explains why they work. In contrast to the pure superconductors, the new alloys permit magnetic flux to enter, turning certain areas of the wire normal. Supercurrents continue to flow, however, in tiny, threadlike filaments throughout the wire—because of the very impure composition of the wire itself. MAGNETS AND MACHINES. Superconductive magnets are often nothing more than a small coil suspended in a gleaming stainless-steel Dewar (insulated container) of liquid helium. Yet their fields compare with those of conventional electromagnets that require the entire output of a small power plant and thousands of gallons of cooling water. What happens when you scale up a superconductive magnet? I saw the world’s largest at Avco in Boston. Under a 40-foot tower, supported
March 1967 cover stories: driving at night, fixing car dents, traveling the world’s racetracks, and making sense of UFOs.
by nonmagnetic aluminum beams at one side of a huge laboratory, sits an enormous Dewar that holds 6,000 liters ($24,000 worth) of liquid helium. For testing, the 10-foot, 8-ton magnet is slowly lowered into the Dewar and helium is added. Its windings, nine strands of niobium-zirconium wire, are embedded in a copper strip to keep the superconductor from developing hot spots and going normal. Thick aluminum cylinders support each layer of windings—to keep the immense forces within the magnet from bursting it with explosive violence. A DC generator (superconductors do rapidly develop resistance to high AC currents) hums in the background as the magnet begins to charge. The process will take 25 minutes and when it is complete the magnet will hold energy of 5 million joules—equal to 9 1/2 sticks of dynamite. FIVE MILLION JOULES—FOR WHAT? I asked my host, Dr. Z.J.J. Stekly, what such huge magnets could be used for. “MHD power generators are one possibility,” he told me. “Avco has already built a prototype that generates electricity from ionized hot gases passing through the magnetic field. Among other applications are magnets for accelerators, bubble chambers, and other research devices. “They may be used to create magnetic ‘bottles’ for containing the plasma in generating power from thermonuclear explosions. It has even been suggested that the magnets be used to shield spaceships from the deadly radiation emitted by the sun. 80
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“Avco is studying superconductivity for ship propulsion. A large superconductive electric motor may prove economical.” How close are we to superconductive transmission lines—nonresistive lines saving millions of watts of power? Dr. John K. Hulm of Westinghouse expresses cautious optimism. “They’re close to being practical,” he told me. “In the near future we’ll reach the point where the economics will be such that we’ll build them.” Dr. Hulm is in the forefront of researchers working to extend the top temperature at which superconductors operate, currently 18°K. “We’ll find materials that exhibit superconductivity in the 20s,” he told me. “And then we’ll be able to use inexpensive hydrogen that boils at 20 degrees for cooling. Insulation will be simpler, cheaper. Who knows what we’ll discover—with superconductivity we’re at the stage where Faraday or Tesla were with electricity.” This text has been edited to match contemporary standards and style.
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