Popular Science 2007 June by Yufei Chang

THE EDGE IS NEVER DULL.

FORD EDGE

Where the spirit of a sports car meets the versatility of an SUV. Where style, performance and innovation come

together in a totally new way. The Edge. The definitive crossover utility vehicle. Its 265-horsepower V6 makes it quicker than a BMW X5. Its available panoramic Vista Roof ™ opens three times larger than a traditional moonroof. And because you never know what’s ahead on the twisty road that is life, every Edge has AdvanceTrac® with Roll Stability Control (RSC®). The Edge. Always sharp. Starting at $25,995 MSRP.* *SE $25,995; as shown, SEL $30,135. Taxes, title and license fees extra. **Standard messaging, data and other rates may apply. Available on participating carriers with an Internet-enabled mobile phone only. Verizon and AllTel subscribers can go to the following URL in their mobile browser: ford.enpocket.com.

Text “Sharp” to 4EDGE(43343)** to experience the Edge on your mobile phone or visit fordvehicles.com/edge.

It’s silicon that thinks.

It’s a digital home that automatically monitors security, adjusts temperature and adapts lighting. It’s a car that responds to the driving situation hundreds of times faster than its human driver. It’s a wireless network that speeds video from laptops to mobile phones. It’s innovations, like MRAM, a radically new way of managing memory that completely redefines what an inanimate object can know and do. It’s silicon in the hands of engineers at Freescale. 25,000 people dedicated to making the world a smarter, better connected place. Now that’s thinking. freescale.com

Freescale™ and the Freescale logo are trademarks of Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners. ©Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. 2007.

THE FUTURE NOW

FOUNDED IN 1872

CONTENTS TH IS MONTH’ S GUIDE TO I NNOVAT I ON A ND DI SC OV ER Y

VOLUME 270 #6

june ’07

features the 2007

POPSCI invention awards

51 From wall-scaling belts to electriﬁed swords, meet 10 of POP SCI’S favorite homebuilt inventions—and the garage geniuses behind them. 52 THE FLYING BELT

A student-designed device carries you up cliffs.

54 A CHOPPER SHIELD

A bestseller inspired a net that catches rockets.

56 A NEW BREED OF MOUSE

Controlling PCs with an ultrasonic ring.

60 THE NEW VELCRO

Quick-snap plastic straps replace the classic.

62 A LEVITATING ARROW REST

Hunting big game with a noiseless weapon.

64 A BIG BALL OF CONNECTIVITY

For emergencies, a blow-up satellite antenna.

66 SIX STROKES OF GENIUS

Reviving the steam engine for better mileage.

68 A SHOCKING NEW WEAPON

A dad turns a toy into a stunning defensive tool.

70 A GLOVE THAT SAVES LIVES

A handful of sensors help deliver perfect CPR.

72 A GREEN BRICK

Using transformed waste to build houses. instant expert

74 ANATOMY OF A SOLAR STORM

invention

THE FLYING BELT 54

The most dangerous ﬂares in half a century strike this year. Here’s how they happen and how Earth can be protected. By Rena Marie Pacella

ON THE COVER: MOUSETRAP: NICK KALOTERAKIS; MOUSE: G. BADEN/ZEFA/CORBIS; THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: JOHN B. CARNETT (4); BOB SAULS; JOHN B. CARNETT

the future of assassination

76 THE FIRST ASSASSINATION OF THE 21ST CENTURY

The radioactive hit on former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko means political murders will now be more heinous—and high-tech. By James Geary

POPSCI.COM

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JUNE 2007 POPULAR SCIENCE 05

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CONTENTS THE

FUTURE EVERY DAY

p OP s CI on the web

W W W . P O P S C I . C O M

NEW STU DAILFF Y!

REGULARS MEGAPIXELS

16 THE MUST-SEE PHOTOS OF THE MONTH Houses swallowed by earth; species spawned by ice.

WHAT’S NEW 21 GADGETS

22 THE GOODS

The sharpest camcorder; fake snow soothes real aches.

30 AUTO TECH

This obstacle-spotting Lexus practically drives itself.

36 HOME TECH

Turn a steering wheel to turn this lawn mower in place.

HEADLINES 39 HEALTH

Can a cosmetics company save body-tissue science?

40 PHYSICS

Proton therapy creates anti-cancer antimatter.

42 WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?

Print Legos at home with Hod Lipson’s magic make-it box.

45 30-SECOND SCIENCE

Caffeinated doughnuts and other delicious designs.

HOW 2.0 85 YOU BUILT WHAT?!

A robot that out-bats the Babe.

88 BUILD IT

SPEED SKATE Be the ﬁrst kid on your block with a drill-powered scooter.

HOW 2.0 WEEKLY PROJECT

Dave Prochnow, POPSCI’s hacker extraordinaire, teaches you a new DIY trick every week. (Motorize a skateboard! Control a robot with a keychain!) Follow along, and join a discussion of the projects with other readers, at popsci.com/h20blog.

THE BREAKDOWN Ever wonder why wipeouts are so funny? Hint: It’s the physics. Each week, our inhouse experts analyze the science behind the outrageous stunts and stumbles seen in Web videos, at popsci.com/breakdown.

POPSCI PODCASTS FROM THE MOON Tune in as our intrepid contributing troubadour, Jonathan Coulton, digs up the stories behind this issue’s stories and beams them down from his lunar outpost. After a fresh supply drop from the mother ship (more Doritos!), Jonathan now has the ability to take your calls and comments. Drop by and say hello at popsci.com/podcast.

The paper airplane grows up, courtesy of a mini motor.

90 USE IT BETTER

GADGETS GALORE

91 ASK A GEEK

Need new tech? On Mondays we scour the Web to bring you our picks of the coolest gizmos on the market. Get your fix at popsci.com/goods.

Got a PC? Then you don’t need TiVo. Can free Wi-Fi hotspots cost you your privacy?

FYI

GREEN SMACKDOWN

94 Dreaming dogs; moving the moon.

Two feisty POPSCI editors face off to see who will be crowned the office ecoqueen. Grab some organically grown popcorn and watch the catfight at popsci.com/greenqueens.

OTHER STUFF 8 FROM THE EDITOR 12 LETTERS 114 THE FUTURE THEN 06 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2007

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY CUB CADET; COURTESY DAVE PROCHNOW; EVERETT COLLECTION (CHAPLIN); GETTY IMAGES (BANANA PEEL); EVERETT COLLECTION; TREVORJOHNSTON.COM; ELAINA JORGENSEN/UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

It’s finally here: the world’s first device with a flexible display.

ECO EGOS No, my compost smells the freshest!

4/12/07 5:10:16 AM

WITH VISA, YOU’RE PROTECTED. Whether it’s a VisaR credit or check card, Visa’s multiple layers of security protect you from fraud, online and off. And if fraudulent charges do occur, rest assured that you won’t be liable z. No matter what you want to do in life, life takes Visa.

*Visa’s Zero Liability Policy covers U.S.-issued cards only and does not apply to commercial credit cards, ATM transactions, or PIN transactions not processed by Visa. Cardholder must notify card issuer promptly of any unauthorized use. Consult issuer for additional details or visit visa.com/security. ©2007 Visa U.S.A. Inc.

FROM THE EDITOR THE FUTURE NOW

Editor Mark Jannot Deputy Editor Jacob Ward Design Director Sam Syed

A RECENT ARTICLE BY REENA JANA on BusinessWeek.com noted that Bill Ford, then Ford Motor Chairman and CEO, used the word innovation once every eight seconds in a TV commercial that aired during late 2005 and 2006—about a year before the company announced its unprecedented $12.7 billion annual loss. Now, I’ve got nothing against innovation—just the opposite: This magazine celebrates technological innovation every month, and we go gaga over it with our annual Best of What’s New Awards in December. I don’t even have a problem with innovation, the word, as long as it’s used to describe a clearly valuable improvement on an existing product or process. But corporate soothsayers beware: Keep using innovation as a sort of talismanic special sauce to spice up unpalatable fare and you’ll devalue it to the point of meaninglessness. What particularly bothers me, though, is that this glorification of innovation seems to have cast a deep shadow over its older sibling, invention. Personally, I have no desire to make value judgments between the two, but I certainly think that creating something entirely new (invention) deserves at least as much respect as improving on something that already exists (innovation). But somehow innovation is flashy, cutting edge, new millennium, while invention appears fusty and old-school— Alexander Graham Bell to innovation’s Steve Jobs. Part of the reason for this image problem, I think, is that invention is more daunting. We can all fool ourselves into believing that we have what it takes to be innovators—improving this, streamlining that—but invention requires a rarer blend of inspiration, insight and determination. That said, the biggest reason for the greater popularity of innovation is that everybody likes a winner. Most inventions are doomed to fail, but an improvement doesn’t really earn innovation status until it succeeds in the marketplace. And that’s why we’ve launched the PopSci Invention Awards, which you’ll find starting on page 51. We wanted to shine a spotlight on 10 ingenious new inventions and to recognize the dogged, inspired (and inspiring) people who’ve come up with them—and to do so at that most perilous stage of an invention’s life, when the market has yet to anoint them. And, for that matter, before the innovators have had a chance to improve them. MARK JANNOT

Why is “innovation” cutting edge while “invention” is fusty and old-school?

mark.jannot@time4.com

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ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY Art Director Matthew Cokeley Photo Editor Kristine LaManna Staff Photographer John B. Carnett Senior Designer Stephanie Fehmel Contributing Artists Peter Bollinger, Kevin Hand, Nick Kaloterakis, John MacNeill, Graham Murdoch, Bob Sauls Photo Intern Susan Sheeran POPSCI.COM Web Editor Megan Miller Associate Web Editor John Mahoney Editorial Assistant Abby Seiff Web Production Intern Fred Koschmann

POPULAR SCIENCE PROPERTIES Publisher Gregg R. Hano Advertising Director Jay Adams Marketing Director Pete Michalsky Northeast Advertising Office: Colleen Kassner 212-779-5007, John Campbell 212-779-5030, Chris Young 212-779-5148 Ad Assistant Chase Girvin Executive Assistant Christopher Graves Midwest Advertising Office: Manager John Marquardt 312-832-0626, Ad Assistant Krissy Van Rossum Los Angeles Advertising Office: Manager Robert Hoeck 310-268-7484, Ad Assistant Kate Gregory Detroit Advertising Office: Manager Edward A. Bartley 248-988-7723, Ad Assistant Diane Pahl San Francisco Advertising Office: Matt Bouyea 415-925-6600, ext. 108 Southern Regional Advertising Office: Manager Dave Hady 404-364-4090, Ad Assistant Christy Chapman Classified Advertising Sales Taryn Young 212-779-5555 Direct Response Sales Marie Isabelle 800-280-2069 Interactive Sales Manager Andrew Maiorana Business Manager Frank Visone Sales Development Director Michael Gallic Sales Development Manager Eric Bratten Promotions Manager Eshonda Caraway Advertising Coordinator Evelyn Negron Consumer Marketing Director Bob Cohn Senior Planning Manager Marguerita Catwell Consumer Marketing Managers Adam Feifer, Brian Fichtel Director of Communications Samara Farber Mormar Publicity Manager Kendra Romagnola Senior Production Director Laurel Kurnides Production Assistant Yolanda Tribble Prepress Manager José Medina Vice President, Production and Technology Sylvia Mueller Manufacturing Business Manager John Conboy Prepress Director Robyn Koeppel

Chairman Jonas Bonnier Chief Executive Ofﬁcer Terry Snow Chief Operating Ofﬁcer Dan Altman Treasurer Nancy Coalter Vice President, Consumer Marketing Bruce Miller Vice President, Production Lisa Earlywine Vice President, Corporate Communications Dean Turcol Senior Director, Human Resources Sheri Bass Corporate Counsel Jeremy Thompson Business Director, Consumer Marketing Dean Psarakis Director, Newsstand Sales Vicki Weston Director, Subscription Marketing Leigh Bingham Director, Account Services Dinah Peterson Director, Network and Computer Operations Mike Stea CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SUBSCRIPTIONS For service anytime, please use our Web site: popsci.com/ customerservice. You can also call 800-289-9399 or write to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 62456, Tampa, FL 33662-4568.

JOHN B. CARNETT

The Thought That Counts

EDITORIAL Executive Editor Michael Moyer Editorial Production Manager Felicia Pardo Military, Aviation & Automotive Editor Eric Adams Senior Editors Nicole Dyer, Mike Haney, Kalee Thompson Copy Chief Rina Bander Senior Associate Editors Seán Captain, Martha Harbison Associate Editor Doug Cantor Assistant Editors Lauren Aaronson, Bjorn Carey Editorial Assistant Damali Campbell Editor at Large Dawn Stover Contributing Automotive Editor Stephan Wilkinson Contributing Technology Editor Steve Morgenstern Contributing Editors Theodore Gray, Eric Hagerman, Joseph Hooper, Suzanne Kantra Kirschner, Preston Lerner, Gregory Mone, Rena Marie Pacella, Jeffrey Rothfeder, Jessica Snyder Sachs, Rebecca Skloot, Elizabeth Svoboda, Phillip Torrone, James Vlahos, Speed Weed Contributing Troubadour Jonathan Coulton Contributing Futurist Andrew Zolli Intern Katherine Ryder

POPSCI.COM

4/16/07 10:59:13 AM

THE MOST IMPORTANT DECISIONS START WITH THE MOST IMPORTANT PEOPLE.

There’s strong. And then there’s Army Strong. You taught them right from wrong. You told them they could do anything. Now they want the discipline, leadership training and college beneﬁts that come from being in the U.S. Army. If your son or daughter wants to talk about joining, listen. You just might be proud of what they have to say. Find out more at goarmy.com/for_parents. Private Matthew Bryan

The all-new 7-passenger Hyundai Veracruz. Is there such a thing as safe math? Because the Veracruz offers a top-notch standard safety ensemble combining Electronic Stability Control, Traction Control, six airbags, Electronic Brake-force Distribution, ABS, and active front head restraints, just for starters. Consider, too, that the Veracruz gives you roomy interior comfort with a third-row seat, XM Satellite Radio,* and America’s Best Warranty,** all starting at $26,995.*** It ﬁgures to be one amazing deal. Or is that one very smart deal? Learn more at HyundaiUSA.com.

Safety belts should always be worn. *XM Satellite Radio requires XM subscription; add separately after ﬁrst three trial months. See your dealer for details. All fees and programming subject to change. XM service available only in the 48 contiguous United States. © 2007 XM Satellite Radio Inc. All rights reserved. **Hyundai Advantage.™ See dealer for LIMITED WARRANTY details. Limited model shown, $32,995. ***MSRP for GLS model. MSRPs include freight; exclude taxes, title, license, and options. Dealer price may vary. Hyundai and Hyundai model names are registered trademarks of Hyundai Motor America. All rights reserved. © 2007 Hyundai Motor America.

All-new Veracruz

LETTERS letters@popsci.com

An Idea That Will Fly Regarding “The Most Advanced Jet Fighter” [“How It Works,” April]: Previous attempts at multi-role fighters (such as the F-111) haven’t worked well, and your article makes it clear why. The lift engine, drive shaft and roll posts are all complexity and dead weight, except for during takeoff and landing. Weight adds drag, which compromises flying missions. Lockheed Martin has made a heroic effort here, building a nifty airplane. Let’s hope they finally beat the odds and the F-35B works as well as intended. Bill Paulin San Diego

Healthy Skepticism Thanks a million for “Studies Suggest Headlines Are Bad for You” [Apr.]. I’m going to college this fall to study exercise science. I’ve heard these stories many times, and they drive me up the wall. Science is always at the mercy of journalism, and hopefully, when the media turns my own scientific findings into fluff, POPSCI will be around to save the day. Sean Nealon Florence, Ky.

Office Space The office cubicle’s successor, shown with an “open, organic design” [“Employee Lounge,” “The Future of Work,” March], would most likely exasperate rather than support workers. The open space above the monitor and through the mesh wall would make every passerby a distraction, and the loose, open floor plan would encourage traffic. My husband is a programmer and, back in his cubefarm days, hated to have his train of thought interrupted by co-workers strolling by and impulsively trying to hook him into chatting about last night’s football game. Collaboration is great, but most of the time office workers need to have physical and mental privacy to be individually productive.

12 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2007

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Designers of ofﬁce workspaces should study the failure of “open” classrooms and “open-space” schools in the 1970s. I’m no fan of the cubicle, but surely we can do better than pretty them up, space them out at odd angles, and remove any advantages they do have. Brenda Mallett Boulder Creek, Calif.

Unfair Share In “Is the Music Industry Still Suing People?” [How 2.0, Mar.], the only

advice offered is to be sneakier (such as by turning off uploading). This encourages people to steal content instead of properly acquiring it. In addition, the spyware/adware industry would ﬂourish much less if people kept Kazaa and other ﬁle-sharing software off their computers. The proper thing to suggest would be to keep your computer free of those programs and purchase copyrighted material legitimately. Jeff Solin u Chicago

FROM THE BLOGS Ed. note: In “Hardware Trick of the Month” [“How It Works,” April], we highlighted a computer program that helps you retrieve misplaced USB ﬂash drives. After you install the program on your drive, it automatically displays an “I’m lost” message when plugged in. One reader took the idea a step further, to great success. Before our family went to Disneyland, we bought three 32-megabyte drives, one for each of our sons and one for us, all with the same program, phone numbers and “secret phrase” on them. We labeled the USB drives “I’m Lost,” tied them to lanyards, and tucked them into our boys’ shirts. We told the boys to give the drive to someone if they got lost. At Disneyland, our three-year-old did just what we thought he would do—he disappeared. Within 13 minutes of his being lost, though, my cellphone rang. Security had plugged the USB drive into a computer and seen the automatic message. When we went to retrieve our boy, the guard asked for our USB drive with the matching secret phrase on it. Thank you! Erik via dailycupoftech.com

POPSCI.COM

4/11/07 1:24:14 AM

Your pictures are stable. Our competition is shaking.

Sony®

(alpha) DSLR camera with built-in

Super SteadyShot® image stabilization The Super SteadyShot® system’s motion and speed sensors automatically compensate for subtle hand and body movements to reduce the effect of camera shake. This allows you to shoot sharper pictures in lower light at slower shutter speeds, and get steadier, sharper photos overall. Unlike most digital SLRs, Sony

(alpha) DSLR cameras have image

stabilization built into the body, so that any lens you choose will beneﬁt—including most of the 16 million Minolta Maxxum lenses dating back to 1985. For sharper, clearer pictures every time you push the shutter, trust Sony

(alpha) DSLR cameras.

sony.com/dslr

©2007 Sony Electronics Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in part or whole is prohibited without prior written consent by Sony. Sony, the Sony logo, alpha, alpha symbol, Super SteadyShot and “like.no.other” are trademarks of Sony.

100 yearS under the hood.™

LETTERS letters@popsci.com

“I DETEST THE IDEA THAT I WILL HAVE TO BE UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF DRUGS JUST TO KEEP UP IN THE CORPORATE WORLD.”

1866: Dr. John Ellis invents the world’s ﬁrst motor oil. He names it Valvoline.

1895: J. Frank Duryea wins the ﬁrst American auto race using Valvoline.

Losing Sleep I’ve been reading POPSCI for about 10 years, and in that time, “You Snooze, You Lose” [“The Future of Work,” Mar.] has been the only prediction that has truly scared me. As a graduate student in mechanical engineering, I am fully aware of the “need” to stay awake for longer and longer durations. I yearn for the day, though, when I can resume a normal sleep schedule again. These (supposedly) consequence-free stimulants may sound great to someone trying to get an edge in a company, but I detest the idea that I will have to be under the inﬂuence of drugs at all times to be competitive, or even just keep up, in the corporate world. Stephen Snider Corvallis, Ore.

His average speed: 7.3 mph.

1970: Al Unser wins the ﬁrst of his four Indy 500® titles running Valvoline.

2006: For the 12th straight year, Valvoline is chosen as the top choice of ASE mechanics for use in their own cars and trucks.

Lighting the Way In “Overachievers We Love” [Headlines, Mar.], you mention that scientists at the University of Sydney have slowed the speed of light by 16 percent. But Lene Hau here at Harvard University has not only slowed light from 186,000 miles per second to a near standstill, she has moved it and then restored it to its original speed. That’s way cooler than what the Aussies accomplished, as well as a signiﬁcant step closer to the next great information system. Joe Zarro Cambridge, Mass.

The most important place that Valvoline has been found through the years is in the garages of do-it-yourselfers like you, your father, and probably his father before him.

VALVOLINE.COM

©,2007, Ashland

Assistant editor Lauren Aaronson replies: Hau’s achievement is indeed cooler—literally. She stops light when it travels through an unusual kind of superﬂuid matter, called BoseEinstein condensate, that occurs only in cold atom clouds at extremely low

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14 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2007

temperatures. This is very impressive, but it’s different from the research we described. Sydney professor Benjamin Eggleton works with actual ﬁberoptic systems, demonstrating that it’s possible to slow light in more common, practical situations. Ultimately, both kinds of research are important to bringing about an all-optical Internet.

Corrections

The biogenerators described in “Tuna Power” [Headlines, Apr.] produce electricity for 5 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour, not 8 to 15 cents. In “The Wii’s Wild Controller” [“How It Works,” Apr.], we mistakenly wrote that the controller beams infrared light to a bar above your TV. In fact, the light travels in the opposite direction, from the bar to the controller.

THE FUTURE NOW

HOW TO CONTACT US Address: 2 Park Ave., 9th Floor New York, NY 10016 Fax: 212-779-5108 LETTERS Comments may be edited for length and clarity. Please include your address and a daytime phone number. We regret that we cannot answer unpublished letters. E-mail: letters@popsci.com POPULAR SCIENCE ONLINE Check out our Web site at popsci.com. QUESTIONS FOR FYI We answer your science questions in our FYI sec-

tion. We regret that only letters considered for publication can be answered. E-mail FYI questions to fyi@popsci.com. NEW SUBSCRIPTIONS To subscribe to POPULAR SCIENCE, please contact: Phone: 800-289-9399 Web: popsci.com/subscribe SUBSCRIPTION INQUIRIES For subscription or delivery problems, or to report a change of address, contact: POPULAR SCIENCE P.O. Box 62456 Tampa, FL 33662-4568 Phone: 800-289-9399 Web: popsci.com/manage INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS For inquiries regarding international licensing or syndication, please contact: syndication@popsci.com.

POPSCI.COM

4/11/07 1:25:11 AM

©,2007, Ashland

100 YEARS UNDER THE HOOD.

MEGAPIXELS

INSET: REUTERS

THE MUST-SEE PHOTOS OF THE MONTH

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p OPsCI ON THE WEB

See more amazing photos at popsci.com/gallery.

UNSTABLE GROUND Aging sewers bring danger to the surface

Residents of the Guatemala City barrio of San Antonio were getting ready for bed on the evening of February 22 when this gigantic hole suddenly opened up. Approximately 100 feet wide and 160 feet deep, the chasm swallowed five homes, killing a father and two teenagers (217 others, warned by the rumbling, escaped). It formed when sewage seeping from a ruptured, deeply buried pipeline washed away ash and pumice deposited by ancient volcanic eruptions. The resulting collapse shaft is not technically a â&#x20AC;&#x153;sinkhole,â&#x20AC;? a term reserved for a cavity that is created when limestone or another soluble rock slowly dissolves in water rather than simply washing away. Both are becoming increasingly common in the Americas because of aging infrastructure and excessive groundwater withdrawals. Fortunately, several studies have suggested that ground-penetrating radar can detect a developing collapse shaft or sinkhole before it gives way. BY DAWN STOVER PHOTOGRAPH BY Daniel LEClair

MONEY PIT This collapse shaft in Guatemala City caused $4 million in damage and left 83 people homeless.

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COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON; INSETS, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JULIAN GUTT/ALFRED WEGENER INSTITUTE FOR POLAR AND MARINE RESEARCH; GAUTHIER CHAPELLE/ALFRED WEGENER INSTITUTE FOR POLAR AND MARINE RESEARCH; CÉDRIC D’UDEKEM D’ACOZ/ROYAL BELGIAN INSTITUTE FOR NATURAL SCIENCES; JULIAN GUTT/ALFRED WEGENER INSTITUTE FOR POLAR AND MARINE RESEARCH

MEGAPIXELS

ICE FISHING

A trip to Antarctica reveals some completely new life under the ice The icebreaker Polarstern arrived in Antarctica last December packed with 52 scientists and a remotely operated submersible called Cherokee. The mission: to survey the ocean life under the former Larsen B ice shelf, the 720-billion-ton mass of ice that disintegrated in 2002. After 17 dives as deep as 2,800 feet by Cherokee, the scientists had observed approximately 1,000 marine species, many of them recent arrivals to the newly uncovered ecosystem and some completely new to science. “The only species that were able to make a living under that much ice were those typically found in the deep sea,” says Terry Collins of the Census of Antarctic Marine Life. “They’re still there, but you can see the signs of colonizing species as well.” The trip was the first of 14 Antarctic voyages aiming to document how climate change is affecting the poles. BY KALEE THOMPSON PHOTOGRAPH BY Elaina Jorgensen

SEA SQUIRT Some species [center] are recent colonists.

GIANT BARNACLES Scientists suspect that these barnacles may represent a new species.

AMPHIPOD This newly discovered crustacean is four inches long.

OCTOPUS A total of 51 inches long, Pareledone turqueti lives along the ocean floor.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

ANTARCTIC ICE FISH This species’ blood has no hemoglobin, an adaptation to life in oxygenrich Antarctic waters.

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what’s neW t e c h t h at p u t s t h e f u t u r e in t h e p a l m o f y o u r h a n d

The fastest—and stealthiest—camera

GPS devices that keep you out of gridlock

A car that won’t let you crash

WIDESCREEN The ﬂexible display rolls out to twice the width of its case.

ROCK ’N’ ROLL When not in use, the screen folds around the reader.

WORD WRAP

The days of diminutive displays are over: The ﬂexible screen is here

HANS PIETERSE

WHEN YOU’RE FINISHED reading your e-mail or the newspaper on that big, five-inch screen, wrap it up and stow it in your pocket. Polymer Vision’s Readius, a cellular-connected, PDA-size gadget, is the first device available with a roll-up display. Instead of glass, it’s made from a plastic sheet. The company (a spin-off of Philips) concocted transistors out of durable polymers, layered with gold wires, to minimize stress when the display bends, so it can survive tens of thousands of flexes. The screen uses a technology called E Ink, which floats pigment to

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the surface of tiny capsules to produce black-and-white text or images in 14 shades of gray. Adding red, green and blue capsules will give the device a color screen by 2009. And Polymer Vision expects to have a display that can refresh fast enough to handle Webpage scrolling and basic video by 2010. The Readius can store hundreds of books, magazines and songs in its four gigabytes of memory. It will debut by the end of the year in Italy, and Polymer Vision is talking with U.S. wireless companies about rolling out the Readius here.—Seán Captain

backpack

back pocket

best for

POLYMER VISION READIUS DISPLAY: 5-inch grayscale DIMENSIONS: 4 x 2.2 x 0.9 in. BATTERY LIFE: Up to 10 days WIRELESS: GSM/EDGE (data only) PRICE: Not available

JUNE 2007 POPULAR SCIENCE 21

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WHAT ’S NEW

BRUSH WITH FREQUENCY

FAST PACK Transform this jacket into a backpack by ﬂipping straps out from a pocket in the liner and folding the body inside. Zippered compartments provide the same amount of space in either mode—up to 760 cubic inches, equivalent to a small daypack. Core Gear Xip3 $450 (est.); xip3.com

COOL AID Instead of an ice pack, try this sack of ﬂuffy fake snow that forms when water crystallizes around thousands of tiny polymer beads. It won’t freezerburn skin because its outer layer melts to a soothing 40°F when you touch it. FirstIce First Pack $10; ﬁrstice.com

THE GOODS 12 MUST-HAVE PRODUCTS BY LAUREN AARONSON

Clean your teeth with the same technology that scrubs surgeons’ scalpels. A transducer in this device emits ultrasound waves, whipping your toothpaste into a pulsating froth of microscopic bubbles that penetrate under the gumline and between teeth. Ultreo $150; ultreo.com

MUSIC MIND READER The perfect, no-fuss playlist: This two-gigabyte MP3 player chooses music based on your tastes and then grabs songs using Wi-Fi or in-car satellite docks. Slacker Portable Player $150; slacker.com

SEA MORE Spot underwater features, whether trout or sunken treasure, in greater detail. An 800-kilohertz sonar wave— a higher frequency than in other consumer devices— creates near-photo-like images. Humminbird 997c SI Combo $2,000; humminbird.com

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pOPsCI ON THE WEB

See more hot products every week at popsci.com.

FULL COVERAGE Most high-def camcorders waste precious pixels—their image sensors register 1920x1080 resolution, but they record only 1440x1080. The ﬁrst full-HD consumer camcorder stores ﬁve hours of ultra-sharp video on its 60-gigabyte hard drive. JVC HD Everio GZ-HD7 $1,800; jvc.com

BOUNDLESS WIRELESS Stretch your Wi-Fi to cover the whole house—or even the whole neighborhood—by having it leapfrog between these low-cost routers. Each has a range of up to 750 feet, and they link together to form a “mesh” network. Meraki Mini $50 each; meraki.net

GREEN RAY To wow audiences in even the largest auditoriums, this presentation pointer’s green laser beam shines farther (two miles) and brighter than red ones. It sends radio signals about 30 yards to control your laptop. Jasper Keynote $170; jasperlaser.com

WATER WORD

PERFECT STORMCASTER One glance tells you whether to take an umbrella—or take cover. This is the ﬁrst home weather station (complete with wireless vane and rain gauge) to show federal alerts for tornadoes and more. Honeywell TN924W $350; honeywellweatherstations.com

TAPE IT TO THE LIMIT

Crumbs, coffee, bacteria— what lurks between your keys? The ﬁrst waterproof, submersible keyboard can withstand both spills and cleanup in the dishwasher. A silicone seal protects its circuits from dunks in 10 feet of water. SEAL Shield $50; sealshield.com

TRAY MAGNIFIQUE Keep kebabs toasty or salad crisp with the ﬁrst platter that can heat and chill. Reversing an electric current turns metal ﬁns inside hot or cold. Temps range from 44° to 134°F. Urbina Design Stanza $160; urbinadesign.com

With just a smidgen of this double-sided tape, we stuck a brick to the wall. Made of solid acrylic adhesive, rather than foam coated in glue, it’s superstrong and withstands even the roughest weather. A six-inch strip permanently holds up to 11 pounds, for tasks like hanging signs or molding. Loctite Power Grab on a Roll $7; loctiteproducts.com

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4/11/07 3:28:11 AM

White lenses are cooler. Why is there always a virtual â&#x20AC;&#x153;sea of white Canon lensesâ&#x20AC;? being used by professional photographers on the sidelines of every major sporting event? For starters, white lenses are cooler. Literally. When the hot sun is beating down on our lenses, the white color helps them stay cooler. One of the many details Canon engineers consider when developing high-performance lenses. That attention to detail and product design is why the majority of all professional photographers shoot with Canon lenses. Those professionals (and all photographers) can choose from over 50 EF lenses, including ÂŠ2007 Canon U.S.A., Inc. Canon and EOS are registered trademarks of Canon Inc. in the United States and may also be registered trademarks or trademarks in other countries. IMAGEANYWARE is a trademark of Canon.

16 with Image Stabilizer built into the lens rather than the camera body, because we know that allows for more responsive, effective and efficient correction. At Canon we put the same quality and innovation into every EOS camera and EF lens we make. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s no wonder Canon is not just the choice of professionals, but of photographers just about everywhere. Pretty cool, huh? All rights reserved. For more information, visit us at www.canoneos.com or call 1-800-OK-CANON.

WHAT ’S NEW | RECRE ATION

IT’S ABOUT

TIME

A SHOW OF HANDS

Merging motors and microchips, Tag Heuer creates the ﬁrst digital analog watch TO MAKE ITS Aquaracer Calibre S chronograph both elegant and easy to read, Tag Heuer tore out the antique gearing that limits a watch’s hands to one function each and replaced it with a programmable microprocessor that controls ﬁve independent electric motors, one for each hand. That allows it to do things analog watches never could. A traditional chronograph uses a main dial

to display the time of day and three squinty-small dials to record elapsed time in a race. On the Aquaracer, the main dial does both—switching between standard clock and stopwatch at the push of a button. The hands can even run backward during the 10-minute countdown before a regatta. All timekeeping happens in the chip, which can instruct the hands to move to any position, anytime. Many other computer-controlled watches are possible, such as a travel model that, at the turn of a dial, displays the time and date in any of 24 cities—one for every time zone. So now, instead of having to machine new gears whenever they want to revise the design of a timepiece, Tag Heuer engineers simply write a few lines of code. Finally, a watch that satisﬁes both your inner geek and your stylist.—Jonathon Keats

왗 TWO-FACED The main dial can show either the time of day or the elapsed time in a race. Smaller dials indicate the mode and count off tenths of seconds.

TAG HEUER AQUARACER CALIBRE S

왗 BACK AND FORTH A motor controls each hand, based on commands from a microprocessor. With electromagnetic coils on both sides, the motors can turn in either direction.

SATOSHI; INSET: COURTESY TAG HEUER

BATTERY LIFE: 2.5 yrs. ACCURATE TO: 1/10 sec. WATER RESISTANCE: 984 ft. PRICE: $2,000

26 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2007

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4/6/07 11:54:44 PM

ITEM: 4123 7237 407 NO IRON MERCERIZED POLO

Super soft and no iron. Proof that great things happen when you put your fabric engineer in a full nelson. How did we create a super-soft polo that doesn’t look like a wrinkled sack of holy hell after its first go in

Make one right. One that lives at the crossroads of soft and no iron. One that’s guaranteed for life.* One with a non-roll Damn Straight Collar that keeps

the dryer? Well, its design was fueled

its shape. A couple months later, he emerged from his

by frustration. Fed up with polos that were either soft

design studio victorious. And The No Iron Mercerized

but always wrinkled, or never wrinkled but felt like

Polo was a reality. Now, did we really threaten him

cardboard, we put the task to our fabric engineer.

with bodily harm? Absolutely not. As far as you know.

*Applies to Haggar® Q clothing sold under the Quality For Life™ label. By “life” we mean your entire life. Q-Guarantee details are available on haggar.com. Thanks for reading this. © 2007 Haggar Clothing Co.

WHAT ’S NEW | GADGETS

EXTREME

CLOSE-UP

DOUBLE EXPOSURE

Canon’s new SLR packs two brains for superfast shooting, even in the dark

MANY PRIZE PHOTO SUBJECTS —racecars, wildlife, starlets—move fast. To catch them, Canon built the ﬁrst digital SLR with dual image processors, allowing it to snap an unprecedented 10 frames per second (most point-

and-shoots average 2.5). The EOS 1D Mark III is also sly, thanks to a new ultra-quiet mode and a redesigned sensor that captures images in near-total darkness. Shy celebrities don’t stand a chance.—Dan Havlik

SPEEDY SHOOTING

A pair of Digic III processors converts data from the image sensor into photos 1.5 times as fast as one of them could alone. The Mark III also doubles up mechanical components. SLRs use a mirror behind the lens that reflects images into a viewfinder for composing shots and then swings out of the way when you click the shutter. To get the faster shooting speed, the Mark III has a dedicated motor just to flip the mirror and another to open the shutter.

With its light sensitivity of ISO 6400—twice that of most professional digital cameras—the Mark III can capture bright, crisp photos even in dark clubs. To boost sensitivity, Canon enlarged the tiny lenses that funnel light into the millions of photo diodes in the image sensor and narrowed the gaps between the diodes.

REMOTE SURVEILLANCE

For surreptitious snaps, you can control the Mark III wirelessly from nearly 500 feet away. The camera lifts its mirror to capture a “live” preview of what you’re shooting and, using a Wi-Fi attachment, beams the image to a laptop. Adding stealth, a hook mechanism snares the mirror for a soft, quiet landing after each shot.

CANON EOS 1D MARK III RESOLUTION: 10.1 megapixels SCREEN: 3-in. LCD LIGHT SENSITIVITY: ISO 50–6400 WEIGHT: 2 lbs., 8.4 oz. GET IT: $4,000; canonusa.com

FOUR MORE CLEVER COMpACT CAMERAS HP PHOTOSMART R837 The R837 removes the green or yellow glow in your pet’s eyes when you capture Fido with a ﬂash. $230; hp.com

POPSCI.COM 28 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2007

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KODAK Z885

The Z885 can deliver ISO 8000 sensitivity, but to do so, it cuts resolution from eight megapixels to three. $200; kodak.com

SIGMA DP1

A sensor 10 times the size of those in most compact models captures extra detail and better color. $1,000; sigmaphoto.com

SONY DSC-G1

Built-in software sorts photos based on color, composition or whose face is in the picture.

$600; sony.com

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: SATOSHI; COURTESY SONY; COURTESY SIGMA; COURTESY KODAK; COURTESY HP

LOW-LIGHT PRECISION

MONTH 2007 POPULAR POPSCI.COM SCIENCE 28

4/6/07 11:59:34 PM

Why buy middle of the road when you can buy middle of nowhere? The new, more rugged Subaru Outback with road-gripping All-Wheel Drive. It can take you just about anywhere. It also has an available navigation system and the government’s ﬁve-star crash test rating*

to make sure you can get back. Ready for adventure. It’s what makes a Subaru, a Subaru.

The new Outback® at subaru.com Starting at $21,995†

*Government frontal and side crash tests are part of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) New Car Assessment Program. See safercar.gov for more detail. †MSRP excludes destination and delivery charges, tax, title and registration fees. Dealer sets actual price. 2008 Subaru Outback 2.5 i Limited pictured above has an MSRP of $27,395.

WHAT ’S NEW | AUTO TECH

DOES IT

왖 EAGLE-EYED The LS 600h L watches both you and the road ahead.

WORK?

A CAR WITH STREET SMARTS To prevent crashes, the Lexus LS 600h L does everything short of grabbing the steering wheel from your hands

SENSE OBSTACLES AHEAD

THE CLAIM: Radar warns if you’re about to hit a solid obstacle, such as another car, and infrared cameras scan the road for objects like people and animals. THE TEST: Lacking a live volunteer, I couldn’t test the infrared, but I tried the radar on foil-wrapped trafﬁc cones. THE REAL DEAL: I charged ahead at 50 mph, letting off the gas when an alert beeped but not hitting the brakes. With a crash looming, the car tightened the seatbelts and applied the brakes at about 40 percent force—enough to ease my smack into the cone but not enough to risk a rear-ender.

WITH IPODS, GPS systems

LEXUS LS 600h L ENGINE: 5-liter V8 gasoline/electric hybrid HORSEPOWER: 438 FUEL ECONOMY: 20 mpg city/22 mpg highway (est.) PRICE: Not available (limited edition) 30 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2007

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KEEP AN EYE ON YOU

THE CLAIM: A camera in the steering column watches to see if you’re facing forward. If the infrared or radar sensors detect an impending obstacle while your head is turned, the car ﬂashes a light, sounds a buzzer, and taps the brakes. THE TEST: Approaching the cones again at 50 mph, I turned to chat with my passenger. THE REAL DEAL: The collision alert sounded sooner than it had when I was facing ahead. Even better, I got no false alarms while turning my head to scan the stop-and-go trafﬁc on the drive back from the test track.

HELP YOU CRANK THE WHEEL

THE CLAIM: The car will help you swerve away from danger. If the computer sees a hazard ahead, it engages a different set of gears in the steering rack to swing the car around with fewer turns of the wheel. THE TEST: I drove a slalom course at 50 mph both with and without foil-wrapped cones placed in my path. THE REAL DEAL: The car became hyper-nimble when an obstacle loomed on the slalom but steered normally on an unobstructed course, and it held rock-steady while zooming on an open track at 130 mph.

ILLUSTRATIONS: PAUL WOOTTON; PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY LEXUS

and actual humans vying for your attention, it’s easy to get distracted while driving. The 2008 Lexus LS 600h L keeps you focused by spotting obstacles ahead, making sure your gaze doesn’t wander, and even helping you maneuver around hazards. To see if it works, I tried repeatedly to crash the V8 hybrid luxury sedan—into trafﬁc cones. Here are the three techniques it used to thwart me.—Dan Carney

POPSCI.COM

4/11/07 3:49:01 PM

p OPsCI ON THE WEB

WHAT ’S NEW | HOME ENTERTAINMENT

TESTED

HIGH-DEF DVD, THE SEQUEL

ONE GLANCE at the images from highdefinition discs, and regular DVDs don’t look so great. The first Blu-ray and HD-DVD play-

ers were expensive and kludgy. But prices are creeping down. And after obsessively watching Mission Impossible III and Super-

See more reviews of HD players at popsci.com/DVD.

The second generation of HD DVD and Blu-ray players offers gorgeous video—and a potential way out of the format war

man Returns on a bunch of new players, we found several polished models with great video quality.—Steve Morgenstern

TOSHIBA’S HD DVD: The HD-XA2 powers on quickly (unlike its predecessor), looks and sounds excellent, and scales up standard DVDs for your HD set better than any other player we tested. Its Ethernet jack will soon let you access online extras, such as additional commentary tracks, and an HDMI 1.3 port will deliver even better color and sound when compatible TVs and discs arrive next year. Or skip HDMI 1.3 and buy the $500 HD-A2. $1,000 tacp.toshiba.com 9

PIONEER’S BLU-RAY: The BDPHD1‘s pinpoint sharpness and rich, film-like color surpassed even that of Toshiba’s HDXA2. Its Ethernet jack won’t support online extras, but it lets you download firmware updates and pull audio, video and photos from networked PCs. Too bad the HD1 can’t play audio CDs, lacks HDMI 1.3, and has a no-frills remote control. Sony’s similar BDP-S1 sells for $1,000 but doesn’t have network features. $1,500 pioneerelectronics.com 7 32 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2007

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ELECTRIC BLUE Toshiba’s HD-DVD and Pioneer’s Blu-ray players perform well, but each is limited to one high-def format. LG’s universal model is a work in progress.

game consoles: high-def, lower cost SONY’S PLAYSTATION 3, starting at $500, is one pricey game console. But it’s a bargain Blu-ray player, with ﬁne performance and Internet connectivity. What’s missing? Support for most advanced audio formats.

MICROSOFT’S $200 HD DVD add-on turns the new Xbox 360 Elite into a fullfeatured high-def disc player. But if you only have a regular Xbox 360, you’ll get mediocre playback of standard DVDs and no HDMI port for 1080p output.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: SATOSHI; COURTESY MICROSOFT; COURTESY SONY COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT AMERICA

LG’S COMBO PLAYER: The BH100 was greeted as the format war’s great uniter, and it does provide top-notch audio and video for HD-DVD, Blu-ray and standardDVD movies. But the player doesn’t support animated menus or picture-in-picture windows that let you access extra HD-DVD disc features, such as overlaid GPS maps of chase scenes in Miami Vice. We applaud the effort but suggest you wait for a more refined peace broker. $1,200 lgusa.com

POPSCI.COM

4/7/07 2:35:28 AM

WHAT ’S NEW | GADGETS

TIME

LINE

WHERE WILL GPS GO? Navigation devices move beyond mere maps to keep you connected

MORE THAN TWO MILLION people bought GPS units in the U.S. last year, but using one still seems like a solitary experience: You show up as a lone speck on an impersonal grid. Upcoming units add more context to your surroundings. With social-networking features, 3-D images and car-to-car communication, you’ll never be lost (or lonely) again.—Adam M. Bright

NOW FIND YOUR FRIENDS TELENAV GPS NAVIGATOR Many cellphones now have built-in GPS. And with new software on Sprint phones, you can share your whereabouts with buddies. Select their names, and your location automatically appears on maps on their TeleNav-equipped phones. If they don’t have a GPS-capable model, they’ll receive a text message with a Web link to a customized map where they can enter their address to get turn-by-turn directions to ﬁnd you. $10/month; telenav.com

SOON: 2008 SEE REAL CITIES NAVIGON 3-D MAPS To make it easier to relate your map to the real world, 8,000 of America’s diciest intersections will appear in 3-D on Navigon’s 5100 and 7100 in July. Next year, it’s 3-D landmarks and rugged terrain—plunging cliffs, say, or a recognizable Empire State Building. Planes are now conducting radar sweeps of the country to capture realistic cityscapes. Price not set; navigon.com

LATER: 2009 and beyond A

B D

TEAM UP AGAINST TRAFFIC DASH EXPRESS To monitor trafﬁc on side streets—not just sensor- or helicopter-watched highways—cars will soon gather intel. Dash units transmit their speed and location to a server, which sends back updated trafﬁc maps. By 2009, when Dash expects a critical mass of 2,000 users in each big city, units will beam real-time info directly to each other. Dash’s car-to-car communication method could someday enable route-coordinating, crash-averting robotic cars. $600 plus $15/month; dash.net 34 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2007

PS0607WN_Timeline.indd 34

Dash GPS units help one another avoid delays by instantly sharing trafﬁc data. Before you leave, Dash logs onto your home Wi-Fi or the cellphone network [A] to download the latest citywide trafﬁc report, which it then passes on to nearby cars [B]. Using a wireless system similar to Wi-Fi, cars can swap info from up to half a mile away. If one car slows as it detours around an accident [C], it tells the next car so it can choose another route [D].

ILLUSTRATION: PAUL WOOTTON; PHOTOGRAPHS, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY NAVIGON; COURTESY DASH; COURTESY TELENAV

HOW IT WORKS

POPSCI.COM

4/12/07 5:52:43 AM

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Full flavored yet uncommonly smooth. A beer that defies category. A beer of its own. Relax Responsibly

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WHAT ’S NEW | HOME TECH

HOW IT WORKS

A TURNING POINT FOR LAWN MOWERS

Replacing clunky levers with a simple steering wheel, this zero-turn mower makes a perfect lawn as easy as a Sunday drive

steer, instead of wobbling around like shopping-cart casters, the i1000 won’t slip on steep hills, and it can support attachments like snow plows.—Chuck Cage

GET IT: $3,800; cubcadet.com

Accelerator

Mechanical brain

HOW IT WORKS TO TURN ON A DIME, the i1000 relies on oddly shaped gears that can set its back wheels spinning independently. 1. Pressing the accelerator pedal engages levers that control the two rear-wheel transmissions, just like pushing the levers on an old-fashioned zero-turn mower. 2. These same levers are connected to pins that sit in slots on each side of a ﬁgure-eight-shaped device that Cub Cadet calls the “mechanical brain.”

Levers A

IN GEAR Inside the i1000, gears link the front steering to two transmissions in the back.

Transmissions Pins

3. With a minor turn of the wheel, the C-shaped slots slide over the pins without pulling on them [A]. 4. But as you turn the wheel farther, the pins slide into sections of the slots that yank them and the levers in opposite directions [B], just as if you had manually shifted the levers. 36 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2007

PS0607WN_HIWMower.indd 36

ILLUSTRATIONS: GRAHAM MURDOCH; PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY CUB CADET

ZERO-TURN riding mowers—which pivot in a perfect circle, leaving no grass uncut— are favorites of lawn-care pros, but their tank-like steering levers are intimidating for amateurs. Thanks to some clever gearing, though, anyone with a learner’s permit can pilot the Cub Cadet i1000, the ﬁrst zero-turn mower with conventional front-wheel steering. To spin in place, one back wheel of a zero-turn mower rotates forward while the other goes in reverse. On traditional models, you control the rear wheels directly by pushing and pulling two levers. With the i1000, a steering wheel turns the front wheels, and at the same time it automatically shifts internal levers that regulate the back wheels. Another plus: Since the front wheels

POPSCI.COM

4/10/07 1:26:46 AM

We care about you. Ride safely, respectfully and within the limits of the law and your abilities. Always wear an approved helmet, proper eyewear and protective clothing, and insist your passenger does too. Never ride while under the inﬂuence of alcohol or drugs. Know your Harley ® motorcycle and read and understand your owner’s manual from cover to cover. © 2006 H-D. Harley, Harley-Davidson, and the Bar & Shield logo are among the trademarks of H-D Michigan, Inc.

Fists forward and boot heels to the wind. Exposed metal slathered with chrome. Fat rubber steamrolling an endless slab of highway. A V-Twin motor feeding your ears. Any questions? Didn’t think so. www.harley-davidson.com.

Live by it.

HEADLINES disco v er ie s , a d va nce s & deb at e s in science

Atomic physicists tackle cancer

A search engine for the universe

The cable guy’s robot friend

HEALTH

THE BODY BANK

A skin-care company builds a futuristic facility to stockpile human tissue. Should you donate? is a hot commodity. It’s bought and sold and used for everything from anthrax vaccines to penis-enlargement products. If you donate tissue for research or leave some behind at a doctor’s ofﬁce after, say, a routine mole removal, those samples are sometimes stored to be used in research or turned into proﬁtable products. For the most part, this is good; it leads to new drugs and disease cures. But for decades, patients’-rights groups, bioethicists and lawyers have argued that patients should have control over what happens to their tissue once they’ve parted with it. “Those samples contain genetic information that could cause you to lose your insurance,” says Lori Andrews, director of the Institute for Science, Law and Technology at the Illinois Institute of Technology. “Or they may be used in research that violates your personal or religious beliefs.” But scientists have long argued that tracking the desires of each donor would be a logistical nightmare. Now a California-based maker of skin-care products,

POPSCI.COM

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SAFE DEPOSIT? A fully automated “biobank” will make it easy to track millions of DNA donations, but ethical concerns linger.

Dermacia, has developed technology that it claims will give donors an unprecedented degree of control over their cells. Dermacia, through its subsidiary company National

Genecular Institute (NGI), recently sealed a deal with the University of Iowa to create a $76-million “biobank” called BioTrust and other research laboratories. NGI will use the

bank’s samples for developing its own products but will also sell samples to researchers worldwide. The company hopes that its 100-acre, partially underground facility, due to open in 2009, will be a model for future biobanks. “It’s being built to withstand bomb blasts and tornadoes,” says Tannin Fuja, NGI’s chief scientific officer. Plans include a fully automated storage and retrieval system coordinated by a small army of robotic arms. The machines will inscribe bar codes onto samples, spin them in centrifuges, transfer them into vials, transform them into immortal cell lines that grow and divide indefinitely, and file them away in massive computerized freezers. Experts applaud NGI’s high-tech ambitions, but some worry that the company may be misleading donors about what they’ll get in exchange for their tissues. According to Fuja, BioTrust’s automated process will enable donors to control how their tissue is used and to reap greater benefits from donation. During the consent process, donors will select the studies that they do or do not

OLIVER BURSTON/DEBUTART

DISCARDED BODY TISSUE

JUNE 2007 POPULAR SCIENCE 39

4/11/07 3:38:44 AM

HE ADLINES PHYSICS

TUMOR GRENADES

Cyclotron

In the ﬁght against cancer, atomic physicists call in the big guns

PARTICLE ACCELERATORS, the giant machines that create highly energetic beams of subatomic particles, are designed to solve the universe’s grand mysteries. Now they’re battling cancer. Since 1992, more than 50,000 patients have undergone proton therapy, which uses particle accelerators to precisely blast tumors with high-speed protons. Now physicists at CERN, the European particle-physics center in Switzerland, have begun experimenting with antimatter made of rare, negatively charged twins of protons, and the results are promising. In studies involving hamster tissue, antimatter therapy has even proved to be four times as powerful as protons. X-rays, which deliver conventional radiation therapy, burn through the body, increasing the cancer risk in healthy tissue. Protons and antimatter, by comparison, can be tuned to release most of their energy right at the tumor site, thus damaging fewer of the surrounding cells. “I didn’t experience any nausea or radiation burn,” says Florida state congressman Stan Jordan, who received proton therapy for advanced prostate cancer earlier this year at the University of Florida Proton Therapy Institute in Jacksonville. Jordan,

who likened the treatment chamber to the Starship Enterprise, says the actual “beam-me-up-Scotty” part of the therapy lasted less than two minutes. Unfortunately, each facility costs more than $100 million, so there are just ﬁve in the U.S., limiting treatment to only the toughest cases. But plans for two more facilities are under way.—Gregory Mone

One patient likened the treatment chamber to the deck of the Starship Enterprise.

want done on their tissues, and the computer system will store that data along with the details of their samples. If a scientist wants to purchase samples from, say, African-American males under 40 for a study on alcoholism, a computer will generate a list of samples ﬁtting the criteria of race, age and willingness to participate in alcoholism research.

BioTrust also plans on an unusual, interactive donor-bank relationship: Donors will be asked to log onto a Web site to update their medical information, which will be linked to their tissue sample through a code number. Tissues often aren’t connected to medical records in this way because of concerns over privacy and genetic discrimination. But per-

sonalized samples are much more valuable than anonymous ones. If scientists know that you have a family history of, for example, Parkinson’s disease, they can compare your samples with those of others with a similar history to help ﬁnd a genetic cause and, hopefully, a treatment. In return for their time and tissues, Fuja

KEVIN HAND

Treatment facility

40 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2007

PS0607HL_Photon R2.indd 40

4/14/07 1:43:02 AM

Treatment chamber

Conventional radiation [red] kills healthy cells [brown] beyond the tumors [maroon].

A beam of tightly focused protons strikes only tumor cells and spares healthy tissue.

Proton-ﬁring nozzle

Magnetic beamline

The accelerator, which is housed in a 25,000-squarefoot facility, funnels protons into a 40-footwide circular track known as a cyclotron. The cyclotron speeds up protons to higher energy levels.

The patient enters one of three chambers, depending on the type of treatment, and lies on a gurney-like bed. A computer-controlled proton-ﬁring nozzle positions itself over the target area.

“Donors can choose to be notiﬁed about how their tissue samples are used in research,” says Fuja.

Meanwhile, magnets guide a beam of protons along the center of a long, narrow tube. The beam races toward a gantry, which rotates around the patient as its nozzle ﬁres protons at the tumor.

By changing the protons’ speed, doctors can control when they release their energy. Faster protons “detonate” farther inside a patient; slower ones attack tumors just below the skin.

says, “donors can ask to be notiﬁed about how their samples are used in research” and whether that research leads to advances that might beneﬁt them. But NGI makes no guarantees. Its consent form states that the company is under no obligation to share medical information with donors or to alert them of new products or clinical trials that

The energy released by a proton beam, though not necessarily greater than that of an x-ray, is much more targeted. The key is that most of it zaps the tumor, not surrounding tissue.

might help them. Andrews takes issue with this arrangement. “BioTrust is a for-profit venture,” she says. “NGI will benefit tremendously from these tissues. Why shouldn’t the donors be treated like partners?” If NGI fulfills its promise of giving donors control over their tissues, however, it may be a step in the right direction.—Rebecca Skloot

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4/14/07 2:35:57 AM

HE ADLINES

WHAT’S THE BIG

IDEA?

THE DESKTOP FACTORY Roboticist Hod Lipson wants you to stop shopping and use his portable invention box to make your own stuff

AS A CHILD, Hod Lipson lost Lego pieces constantly. Now the 39-year-old director of Cornell University’s Computational Synthesis Lab can build replacement parts on the spot. Completed last year, Lipson’s fabrication machine, called a “fabber,” can print thousands of threedimensional objects, everything from toy parts to artiﬁcial muscles, using dozens of materials, including PlayDoh, peanut butter and silicone, by following simple directions sent to it by a PC. About the size of a microwave, the fabber costs $2,300 to assemble—roughly one tenth the cost of commercial 3-D printers. Lipson and his graduate student Evan Malone recently launched a Web site called Fab@Home (fabathome.org) to teach people how to build their own fabbers and encourage them to share their blueprints online. As a result, amateur inventors worldwide are now manufacturing their creations from the comfort of their own homes. The duo’s next step is to make a desktop machine that prints other machines, such as robots, complete with circuit boards. As soon as a robot walks out of the printer, Lipson says, Malone can walk out of the lab with his Ph.D.—Corey Binns

Q: Wouldn’t it be cheaper, faster and easier to just go buy a new piece? A: The only way to make something cheaply today is to have it massproduced. For example, you wear the same shoes as everyone else. If you had a fabber, you could custom-make shoes that perfectly ﬁt your feet. Threedimensional printing will help us move away from the mass consumption that is so deeply ingrained in our culture. Q: You’ve said you’re taking a lesson from the Altair 8800, a do-it-yourself computer kit that inspired the PC. Why? A: Similar to computer technology in the ’60s, 3-D printing is a universal technology that has the potential to revolutionize our life by enabling individuals to design and manufacture things. Worrying about how you’re going to make something is a huge constraint— most people can’t make anything at home because it’s too expensive. We want as many people as possible to get their hands on this technology, experiment 씰

Q: What sort of things are people printing with your fabber? A: Watchbands, squirt bottles, batteries, artiﬁcial muscles, even fancy chocolates. What you print is really up to you.

NATHAN ELLIS PERKEL

Q: How long does it take to print something like a Lego piece? A: About two hours. The printer isn’t fast or efﬁcient, but you don’t need to know a thing about manufacturing to use it.

GOT IT MADE Lipson hopes that one day his custom-built fabber will be able to make another fabber. POPSCI.COM

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HE ADLINES

with it, improve it, and develop new applications for it. Q: With all of the programs and product designs posted on Fab@Home, are you making a profit? A: We’ve put everything out in a completely free way, no limitations.

of product designs on the site. Maybe someday they’ll earn 99 cents every time their blueprint is printed. Q: That sounds like an intellectualproperty nightmare. A: Oh yeah. This is going to make MP3 copyrights look like a piece of cake.

“I WANT IT TO MAKE A ROBOT THAT COULD WALK OUT OF THE PRINTER, BATTERIES INCLUDED.” The Altair people never became rich, but they made history. We’re after that kind of impact. We just want people to use the technology to free their design creativity. Similar to sharing MP3s, people can exchange blueprints

Q: Noy Schaal, a high-schooler in Kentucky, won first prize at a science fair for using a fabber to build a chocolate map of the Bluegrass State. Is she the kind of everyday user you have in mind? A: Noy is an excellent example of how you

can explore the fabber without much training. I’m really hoping this will pass the geek barrier. I want the technology to reach people who want to make cool stuff out of exotic materials but have no way of doing it. For example, you can put cheese in the fabber but not in a conventional manufacturing machine because you’ll void its warranty. The fabber is more about allowing designers to experiment with ideas than making anything in particular. Q: What’s the most extreme use you have in mind for this technology? A: I want a printer to be all we need to send on long-term space explorations. After landing, it would print a robot that could walk out of the printer, batteries included. If the robot discovers a cave that requires a special tool to explore with, it could head back to the printer to make the right gadget. And if the robot breaks, just print another one.

IF ONLY WE HAD A MAGIC BIN THAT WE COULD THROW STUFF IN AND MAKE IT DISAPPEAR FOREVER. WHAT WE CAN DO IS FIND CREATIVE WAYS TO RECYCLE. GREENHOUSES USE OUR WASTE CO2 TO GROW FLOWERS. AND OUR WASTE SULPHUR TO MAKE SUPER-STRONG CONCRETE. REAL ENERGY SOLUTIONS FOR THE REAL WORLD. WWW.SHELL.COM/US/REALENERGY

HE ADLINES 30-SECOND SCIENCE

HACKING YOUR SNACKS

Science serves up caffeinated doughnuts and juicy bacteria

TREVORJOHNSTON.COM

PEP UP YOUR PASTRY

Now you can one-hand that coffee-and-doughnut breakfast. Robert Bohannon of Environostics, an R&D ﬁrm in North Carolina, has concocted a caffeine-laced doughnut that packs a jolt equal to two cups of coffee. Normally, caffeine in baked goods imparts a bitter taste. Bohannon has concealed the drug in tiny, edible capsules that dissolve in your stomach, not in your mouth. Look for caffeinated snacks within six months.

FLAVOR FACTORIES

Bacteria could soon add “freshly squeezed” taste to processed juice. Scientists at HortResearch in New Zealand have identified the genes in apples, kiwis and berries that encode for flavor and spliced them into microbial DNA. The modified bacteria churn out concentrated flavor chemicals identical to the natural versions. These can be added to drinks to replace the real fruit flavors that evaporate in the juicing process.

SAFER PEANUTS

Roughly three million Americans suffer from peanut allergies. Now University of Florida researchers have taken the ﬁrst major step toward creating a risk-free peanut. They’ve identiﬁed a key mutation that renders one of the worst peanutprotein allergens harmless. The goal is to selectively breed the mutant peanut or engineer a hypoallergenic nut that won’t turn your face into a big red balloon. –Michelle Bryner

NUTTY SURGERY Removing key proteins could yield allergy-free peanuts.

Family trees are like ever y other tree. They need water.

See how easy it is to get started boating with your free DVD at DiscoverBoating.com.

HE ADLINES

Rediscover your family

Asteroid

and friends.

Spiral galaxy

Supernova

NIGHT WATCH The LSST will wield a 27.5foot-wide mirror and a three-gigapixel camera to image cosmic marvels [left].

ILLUSTRATION: KEVIN HAND; PHOTOGRAPHS, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: MORITZ/STEIGER/GETTY IMAGES; STCI/CORBIS; IAN MCKINNELL/GETTY IMAGES

SPACE TECH

SURFING THE STARS Google and NASA build a search engine for the universe WITHIN A DECADE, a dream team of astronomers and computer geeks vows to bring a world-class observatory to every desktop, giving anyone with a PC access to remote galaxies and exploding supernovae. The pledge is the result of a partnership announced last winter between a network of 19 national research institutions and engineers from the search-engine giant Google. Their collective objective is to develop potent software to process the estimated 30 terabytes of astronomy imagery (think 12 billion five-megapixel photos) that will stream nightly from the newly built Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST, slated to go online in 2013. Set atop Cerro Pachón Mountain in Chile, the LSST will be the largest survey scope of its kind, sequentially imaging nearly 20 billion astronomical objects in the night sky twice a week at least 2,000 times over the scope’s 10-year lifetime. Google’s role in this $350-million project (beyond the modest $25,000 annual dues payment)

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is still largely undefined, but Rob Pike, Google’s principal engineer for the LSST, envisions a tool set akin to Google Earth, which combines a search tool with satellite imagery. So instead of killing time flying over your ideal vacation spot onscreen, you can opt for more productive surfing, such as scanning the skies for hazardous nearEarth asteroids.—Jonathon Keats

HOW IT WORKS One thousand times as powerful as previous telescopes, the LSST will survey the entire sky every three nights using a wide-angle mirror and a three-billion-pixel digital camera. As the telescope rotates on its base, the camera’s 15-second exposures take in an area 50 times as large as the full moon. Software will compile three-dimensional imagery to produce time-lapse digital “movies” of the universe.

It’s affordable. The fun of boating starts at less than $10,000, and boats bought from a dealership can be easily financed. It’s the ultimate getaway. Whether you’ve got two hours or an entire weekend, there’s no better place to spend your time. It’s convenient. Most people live within an hour of accessible water. Stay close to home or explore. Visit DiscoverBoating.com to get your free How to Get Started in Boating DVD.

DiscoverBoating.com

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HE ADLINES THE ANNOTATED MACHINE

A ROBOTIC CABLE CRAWLER This snake-like ’bot detects damage to underground power cables so people don’t BURYING POWER CABLES underground has uncluttered the streets and kept lights on through storms, but water seepage, natural disasters, and general wear and tear can still cut power. As a result, a large utility company typically employs 4,000 workers and spends up to $200 million annually to monitor and maintain tens of thousands of miles of subterranean cables. Soon, instead of sending a crew to put a cable through high-voltage stress tests every time there’s a mishap, compa-

Infrared sensor

nies could deploy a robot to pinpoint the problem. Researchers at the University of Washington have invented the Robotic Cable Inspection System, or Cruiser, a fourfoot-long, train-like ’bot that crawls along power cables buried in utility tunnels, sniffing out trouble spots along the way. Cruiser coasts along on hourglassshaped wheels, and adjustable stabilizer arms keep it upright. The segmented design snakes around curves and allows for modular expansion of the robot, making

it possible to add extra sensors or battery packs without a major overhaul. Human operators can upload a basic mission plan, which the robot’s circuit-board brain finetunes as it encounters damaged cable. Last December, Cruiser aced its first field test, inspecting segments of cable for post-hurricane water damage in New Orleans. Several large utility companies have already expressed interest in the robot, and a commercial version could roll out as soon as 2012.—Eric Mika

HOW IT WORKS

Wheels

1. ACOUSTICS An acoustic sensor listens for electrical sparks inside the cable bundle, a sure sign of failing insulation.

Stabilizer arms Camera

Acoustic sensor

Processor

2. HEAT SENSING Hotspots indicate that the conductors or insulators are decaying. An infrared thermal sensor sends real-time temperature data back to the command computer.

HANDS OFF As the robot chugs along the cable, it sends a Wi-Fi report of what it ﬁnds to the operator.

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4. VISION The ’bot beams the view from a front-mounted video camera to the command computer, where human eyes can look out for obstructions and sharp turns that could overwhelm its programming.

GRAHAM MURDOCH

3. MOBILITY Electric motors drive hourglass-shaped wheels that straddle the cable crest to help the ’bot keep its balance, and stabilizer arms prevent it from rolling over.

POPSCI.COM

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Just think what a life with fewer seizures could mean for you. Your FREE Info Kit includes the Epilepsy Control Self-Evaluator (ECSE™) — a guide for talking to your doctor.

Learn about a treatment option that could give you more control over your seizures. What would more control mean for you? More time with family and friends? Working? Driving? Even holding a baby? A life with fewer seizures means something different for everyone. Fortunately, there is a medicine that may help. This medicine is designed to work with other seizure drugs to help adults with partial seizures. For many patients, taking more than one medicine helps control their seizures. Will adding a seizure medicine be right for you? Call for your FREE Info Kit to learn more. And talk with your doctor. Your Info Kit features a tool you and your doctor can use to assess your level of control. Plus helpful tips on living with epilepsy. Just think. With fewer seizures and more control, you could have more time for your loved ones. And for the other things in life that matter to you.

Want more control? Get your FREE Info Kit now. Mail the attached card. Call 1-866-712-6400. Or visit www.FewerSeizuresNow.com PB280599B

March 2007

nü look in navigation. Arrive in style with the cool and compact nüvi® 200. Small enough to slip in your pocket or purse, nüvi is perfect for business or dayto-day travel. It comes ready to go with preloaded maps, simple touchscreen display and clear, voice-prompted directions to millions of destinations. So you can be fashionably early. Come on – let’s nüvi®.

www.garmin.com NASDAQ GRMN

story

T H E

P O P S C I

2 0 0 7

INVENTION AWARDS

description

How do you prevent insurgents from shooting down choppers? How do you keep a cast from itching? How do you reinvent the brick? You sketch. And then you work: nights, weekends—for years, if you have to. You blow all your money, then beg for more. You build prototypes, and when they fail, you build more. Why? Because inventing is about solving problems, and not stopping until your solution becomes real. Here are 10 stunning examples of that spirit at work, along with tips from the world’s most successful inventors on how to get your own ideas out there.

winning inventions

Total time invested

39.7 years

Total money spent

$2,254,900

photographer

John B. Carnett

62 THE LEVITATING ARROW invention: air-rest inventor: stuart minica

64 A BALL OF CONNECTIVITY

60 THE NEW VELCRO

invention: gatr-com inventor: paul gierow

invention: slidingly engaging fastener inventor: leonard duffy

52 THE FLYING BELT invention: atlas inventors: nate ball, tim fofonoff, bryan schmid, dan walker

70 A GLOVE THAT SAVES LIVES invention: cpr glove inventors: corey centen, nilesh patel

72 A GREEN BRICK

66 SIX STROKES OF GENIUS

invention: fly-ash brick inventor: henry liu

invention: steam-o-lenE engine inventor: bruce crower

54 A CHOPPER SHIELD invention: rpg net inventor: richard glasson

68 A SHOCKING NEW WEAPON invention: stunstick neuroscrambler inventor: fred pearson POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 51

56 A NEW BREED OF MOUSE invention: magic mouse inventors: chris banker, mike cretella, jeff dImaria, jamie mitchell, jeff tucker

Turn the page

TO SEE THE DEVICE THAT HELPS SOLDIERS FLY UP WALLS

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inventors: Nate Ball, tim fofonoff, Bryan Schmid, Dan invention

THE FLYING BELT

how it works: inventor’s sketch

description

Pulls you skyward with a portable device, just like in the movies

name

Atlas

cost to develop

$700

time

3 months

horizon

Prototype

Product

Wheels guide rope down axis

In this design, the rider wraps the rope around a motor-driven spindle. As the spindle turns, the rope pulls tight around it, preventing the rope from slipping, while small wheels guide it through.

im Fofonoff, a 31-year-old grad student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stands at the base of a 50-foot-tall, graffiti-covered rock wall just south of Boston. He’s clipped into the Atlas Powered Rope Ascender, a toaster-size battery-driven device that he and his three co-inventors built themselves. With it, he’s about to do something no one outside of a Hollywood script has done before: rappel up a wall at an astonishing 10 feet per second. He stares hesitantly for a moment at the craggy rock face, presses a small button, and darts off the ground as if he were wearing a cape. Halfway up, he lets go of the button and stops, dangling, a little out of breath—it’s been awhile since his last test, and he’s forgotten what it’s like to fly. Until now, no one has been able to build a machine that’s powerful enough to whisk a man up a rope and small enough to throw in a backpack. But the Atlas is real, and real people are begging Fofonoff’s team for one of their own. An avalanche-rescue company wants to pluck stranded skiers out of the snow. A botanist imagines speeding to the tops of old-growth redwoods. The U.S. Army has placed several orders as well. Major Rex Blair, a former company commander for a tank battalion in Iraq who has come to watch the test, talks about using the Atlas to zip in and out of terrorist-harboring caves or evacuate casualties from city streets by yanking them to rooftops. “If you give this to soldiers, they’re going to find uses for it that no one’s thought of,” Blair says. The inventors came together to build the first Atlas in 2004 as part of an annual military-gear-invention contest at MIT called the Soldier Design Competition. Fofonoff and 24-year-old Nate Ball are the design leaders; Dan Walker, also 24, brings climbing expertise; and Bryan Schmid, 25, is the machining pro. They built the model Fofonoff holds, their latest and lightest, in just a few days. The heart of the 20-pound device is a motorized rope-winding mechanism—a wheel with a V-shaped, grooved channel that holds the rope snugly. But what makes it possible is the smart selection of compact and powerful parts. “Until recently, it just wouldn’t have been small enough,” Fofonoff says. The team tracked down an MIT professor who founded a company that produces high-capacity lithium-ion batteries, and Ball, the gearhead, scrounged up superstrong electric motors. “It has a greater power-to-weight ratio than a Dodge Viper,” he boasts. The group’s first two customers—the Army and a company that will use it for building maintenance—will get an ingenious device that’s also incredibly easy to master. After a few more turns, Fofonoff is rocketing up the wall with ease, looking as confident as secret agent Ethan Hunt—disguised as an engineer.—Gregory Mone

ON THE RISE Tim Fofonoff ﬂies up a wall with his group’s Atlas Powered Rope Ascender [inset, facing page], for which team member Nate Ball [far right] won the 2007 $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize.

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walker

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inventor: richard glasson NOTHING BUT NET Richard Glasson holds the rocket that could keep soldiers safe from copter-killing RPGs by snagging them in a Kevlar net.

A CHOPPER SHIELD

description

Catches helicopter-bound grenades with a net made of Kevlar and steel cost to develop

name

RPG Net

$10,000

time

2 years

horizon

Prototype

how it works

When sensors on the helicopter detect an incoming rocket-propelled grenade (RPG), tubes on the chopper fire between one and eight rockets toward the incoming RPG. Each rocket deploys a Kevlar-and-steel net, which infl ates like a parachute as it flies, forming an impenetrable barrier between the helicopter and the grenade.

Incoming RPG

Kevlar-and-steel nets

Product

ILLUSTRATION: BROWN BIRD DESIGN; PHOTOGRAPHS, FACING PAGE: INSET: COURTESY KURZWEIL TECHNOLOGIES; PAPER BACKGROUND: LUIS BRUNO

invention

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ast January, a Black Hawk helicopter flying in rural Iraq burst into flames, killing all 13 soldiers on board. A few days later, a helicopter owned by a private security company crashed in Baghdad, killing five civilian contractors. Over the next few weeks, six more aircraft were shot down, leaving 11 more dead— one of the worst series of chopper disasters since the war began. Although the Army won’t attribute any crash solely to an RPG—insurgents typically fire guns at the craft as well—the simple, unguided, shoulder-launched projectiles are widely believed to be the primary anti-chopper ordnance of the insurgency. New Jersey inventor Richard Glasson thinks he can stop the attacks. He’s designed the first-ever anti-RPG system for aircraft: a volley of nets that catch the grenades before they hit. Glasson was inspired by Mark Bowden’s best seller Black Hawk Down, which recounts the 1993 killing of 18 U.S. soldiers in Somalia after an RPG brought down their chopper. “I couldn’t believe that such a low-tech weapon could take down a several-million-dollar aircraft,” he says. “That’s a spectacular outcome for a 40-year-old technology.” Fourteen years later, still the only defense helicopters have against RPGs is avoidance: “either flying too high or too unpredictably to be targeted,” explains John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity .org, a military think tank in Alexandria, Virginia. Other countermeasures, such as radar jammers and flares, are worthless against unguided weapons like RPGs. Defense companies are working on systems that would fire projectiles at the grenades to destroy them. But that’s “like hitting a bullet with a bullet,” says Glasson, who is the chief engineer at Control Products, a company that designs sensors for aerospace and defense. (He’s worked on sensors that protect gearboxes from overheating on the president’s Marine One choppers and in jet engines on most commercial airliners.) So he devised a defense that, like its target, is surprisingly simple. Since RPGs are far slower than heatseeking missiles and are easily knocked off course, he set out to build a system that would block or at least deflect the grenades before they reached the chopper. The key is launching that barrier in time. An RPG will detonate four to six seconds after being fired (unless it hits a solid object— then it detonates on impact). In Glasson’s system, the chopper’s radar calculates the speed and trajectory of an incoming grenade within milliseconds. Half a second later, pods of launch tubes on the helicopter aim and fire between one and eight unguided yard-long rockets on an intercept course with the grenade. The rocket’s aim doesn’t have to be precise because each drags a braided steel-cable parachute woven with Kevlar. In the next second, these fastopening chutes inflate to form a series of six-foot-wide bombproof nets, catching the grenade and dragging it to the ground. “He might really be on to something here,” Pike says. Glasson won’t know for sure until he can test the nets on a real helicopter, and for that he needs the backing of the Pentagon or one of its big contractors. Two years ago, Pentagon officials told him that the agency was more interested in pursuing a laser-based defense system, which is years from realization, but Glasson hopes the recent spate of crashes will convince them to take another look at his idea. Retired chopper pilot Lt. Col. James Bullinger, an editor at Army Aviation magazine, thinks they will. “When it comes to saving lives,” Bullinger says, “they will spend the money on it.”—Rena Marie Pacella

KNOW WHAT’S NEXT Ray Kurzweil, 59, Futurist, author Member, National Inventors Hall of Fame; 15 honorary doctorates Become an ardent student of technology trends—timing is everything. By gathering data and using mathematical formulas, I can make hundreds of very reliable predictions. Know that progress is exponential, not linear. People think progress in a ﬁeld will continue at the current pace, but it actually accelerates in exponential growth, which means things can be completely transformed within a decade. Keep a list of inventions you’d like to try as the technology gets closer to making those ideas feasible. Listen to people around you for ideas. Several years ago, I was on a ﬂight sitting next to a blind man. He said he wished he could read text like signs and ATMs. It got me thinking about how we could solve that problem, and I started working with the National Federation of the Blind on a pocket-sized reading machine. [Kurzweil released the device last year.] Inventing is inherently interdisciplinary. Bring a team together to bridge gaps in your knowledge, cross-fertilize, and get creative. The common wisdom is that you can’t predict the future, but that’s just not true. —as told to Sarah Z. Wexler

HOT FIELDS FOR INVENTION KITCHEN GADGETS

Saul Palder, 80, has sold $150 million worth of Smart Spins, essentially a plastic lazy susan for Tupperware. Need we say more?

TOOLS AND HARDWARE

Since handymen often create prototypes on the ﬂy to make their jobs easier, companies pay attention to them, knowing their creations arise from a genuine need.

SPORTS GEAR

Guys will buy anything that could make them the next Tiger or LeBron. Experts say the demand is greatest for golf-related items.

KID STUFF

People shelled out some $22 billion last year on toys, with spending in the “youth electronics” category increasing 22 percent over 2005. Sources: Louis Foreman, publisher of Inventors’ Digest, and Nicole Hait, manager of corporate communications at InventHelp, a help service for inventors

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inventors: chris banker, mike cretella, jeff dImaria, jamie invention

A NEW BREED OF MOUSE

description

Controls your computer in three dimensions by giving your mouse the ﬁnger

name

Magic Mouse

cost to develop

$700

time

21 weeks

horizon

Prototype

Product

how it works

Receivers The mouse ring emits ultrasonic pulses that are picked up by ﬁ ve receivers mounted on (eventually, in) a monitor. Based on the time each receiver hears the pulse, a processor calculates its position in three dimensions relative to the ﬁve spots and translates it to a cursor position onscreen.

ROUGH CUT The prototype system, made from plywood and pipe

here are plenty of reasons to criticize the computer mouse. It looks the same as it always has. It twists the wrist and clutters the desk, taking the coffee cup’s rightful place. But for Mike Cretella, a 21year-old senior at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, the real problem is that it is, on his timescale, ancient. “The mouse is 40 years old,” he scoffs. “And it’s time for a change.” Cretella and his partners— fellow students Jamie Mitchell, Jeff Tucker, Chris Banker and

Jeff DiMaria, and their professor, Brian King—hope to transform the mouse into a snugly ﬁtting ring that would enable you to speed a cursor around a screen as if it’s an extension of your ﬁnger. Their prototype, designed and constructed as a senior project, resembles a futuristic Cracker Jack prize. But it acts like a magic wand. “You move [your hand] up and to the right in space,” Mitchell says, “and your cursor will move up and to the right.” The mouse detects all three dimensions, so you can click by jabbing your

WITH THIS RING It took the team of college seniors three academic quarters to build the mouse and receiver system.

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mitchell, jeff tucker

MAKE IT PRACTICAL Woody Norris, 66, Chairman, American Technology Corp. Inventor, AirScooter gyrocopter and HyperSonicSound directed-acoustic device; winner, $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, 2005 Almost nothing has been invented yet. OK, all the easy stuff has been invented, like the lightbulb—what’s that: a coil, wire and a vacuum? You don’t need to stick to one ﬁeld, but the inventions where you don’t have to possess a great deal of knowledge—the hula hoop, the Frisbee—those are all gone. Find a niche where big corporate groups don’t dominate. A new solid rocket fuel or a hadron collider—those are multimillion-dollar investments. Ask yourself, is it realistic for me to invent this? Then ask: Is it commercially plausible? If you invent a novel ballpoint pen that’s going to cost $100,000, nobody’s going to care. Find an analogy, something well established in one area of science—acoustics, physics, optics, electronics —and apply it to a different area. You know it works in one ﬁeld, so it’s worth your time to test it in another.

ILLUSTRATION, PRECEDING PAGE: BROWN BIRD DESIGN; PHOTOGRAPHS: INSET: COURTESY WOODYNORRIS.COM; PAPER BACKGROUND: LUIS BRUNO

MIGHTY MOUSE Mike Cretella navigates Google Earth in 3-D with an acoustic ring that his team hopes will be the next generation of computer-input device.

finger ahead, or maneuver your way through 3-D applications like Google Earth. Although the system looks a bit rough, it works flawlessly. A small speaker on the ring pumps out ultrasonic pulses, picked up by five microphones arrayed on a piece of plywood. A central processor calculates the ring’s position in space based on when each microphone receives each blast of sound and then correlates this to the cursor onscreen. The ring and sensors communicate 100 times a second, so the translation of hand movement

PS0607WL_INVENTORS.indd 57

to cursor is instantaneous. The students aren’t shopping the invention around yet, but they’re not without upgrade ideas. Cretella would like to add gesture recognition, and King says they could probably shrink the ring by replacing its speaker with a tiny, vibrating device. Cretella perks up and offers that, ideally, the mouse would look like a normal ring. He pauses, as if hesitant to mention the godhead of computer design aloud, and adds, “Maybe even something Apple would be interested in.”—Gregory Mone

Call a professor who works in the field your invention falls under. Offer to buy him lunch and then pick his brain. Same goes for a patent lawyer, who will usually talk to you for half an hour for free. Read everything. Pay attention to problems that need to be solved, whether you’re in a restaurant or working on your car. One of my favorite quotes I heard somewhere is “Most inventions are accidents observed.” Make a prototype, even if you have to fashion it out of clay or carve it out of paraffin wax with a paring knife. Once you have your invention, check to make sure nothing like it has been patented yet. I like to use delphion.com, uspto.gov and patentcafe.com. Patent everything. You don’t want someone to tweak one thing on your invention, patent it, and negate all your effort. Someone could find a cheaper—even if it’s a worse—way to do it, so I patent even the terrible versions of my idea. Don’t be secretive. Worrying about someone stealing your invention can stifle you. You need to talk to other people to expand your knowledge base. I talk about all my ideas, and in more than 30 years of inventing, I’ve never had anyone steal one. —as told to Sarah Z. Wexler POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 57

4/10/07 2:28:24 AM

inventor: leonard duffy invention

THE NEW VELCRO

description

Eliminates smelly casts and that incessant ripping sound by offering a better, stronger grip

name

Slidingly Engaging Fastener

time

8 years

cost to develop

$40,000

horizon

Prototype

Product

how it works: inventor’s sketch

n a wooden shed in the Vermont foothills, 66-year-old architect Leonard Duffy has reinvented Velcro. No one has offered a viable alternative to the ubiquitous hook-and-loop closure in 50 years. But Duffy’s “slidingly engaging fasteners” link up easily and silently, don’t wear down over time, and support eight times the weight that the stuff on your jacket can with plastic straps that bind together through matching, interlocking grids of little hexagonal or triangular islands. Duffy has used them to replace the laces on sneakers and the straps on ski gloves and wristwatches and to seal a breathable, waterproof cast he calls the Unitary Wrap. “I started out trying to reinvent the zipper,” Duffy says. A decade ago, while he was hurriedly trying to close his carry-on at the airport, the zipper broke. “I got mad, and I said, ‘There’s got to be a better way to do this.’ ” His sketchbooks are ﬁlled with his ambitions—a redesigned torque wrench, critical improvements to the drywall screw holder, new buildings. He skips work every Thursday to ski, yet when he’s at his desk, he gets so immersed that his wife has to remind him to eat. In 2003 he created an under-the-cabinet cookbook holder that now sells on QVC, but he’s probably forgotten more inventions than he’s ﬁnished. While recounting the airport story, an architecture client calls to check on a project. Duffy assures her that he’s on the job. When he hangs up, he confesses, “That’s one I forgot all about.” After the zipper incident, he spent the next few years pencil-

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THE FASTENER KING Leonard Duffy has used his snapping straps to bind everything from snowshoes to a radical new plastic cast.

Plastic islands Each plastic strap consists of an alternating series of 1/8-inch-wide perforations and small islands that can be almost any geometric shape. To bind two together, you line up the islands on one with the gaps on the other and snap them tight.

ing out designs and building models, experimenting with foam, cardboard and wood. After a failed presentation to a major manufacturer he won’t name, he realized that his homemade prototypes were too simple, so he plunked down several thousand dollars to switch to injection-molded plastic. Eventually he arrived at the design that exists today and began fastening everything he could with it. Then his sister-in-law broke her arm. She wore a removable cast held in place by Velcro straps and complained constantly. The Velcro pulled at her clothes and hair and smelled bad as it absorbed moisture and perspiration. Inspired, Duffy created a wraparound cast made from a single plastic sheet sealed with his fasteners. He entered his Unitary Wrap into a NASA-sponsored invention contest called “Create the Future”—he says he did it for the free riveter promised every entrant—and won. Joe Pramberger, who oversaw the contest, says the Unitary Wrap prevailed because it was so practical. “It’s a nice solution to a simple but perplexing problem.” Now a prosthetics company envisions using the plastic straps to attach artiﬁcial limbs, and nearly 150 product designers have contacted Duffy after a clearinghouse called Material ConneXion added the item to its library last year. With all the recent inquiries, this might seem like a good time to come up with a catchier moniker for his innovation, but not to Duffy. “It’s slidingly engaging,” he says, insisting that the name is just ﬁne. “It’s the slidingly engaging fastener.”—Gregory Mone

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LEVITATION MAN Stuart Minica’s Air-Rest uses magnets to ﬂoat an arrow in the air, allowing it to leave the bow silently and straight.

ILLUSTRATION: BROWN BIRD DESIGN; PHOTOGRAPHS: INSET: COURTESY DEAN KAMEN; PAPER BACKGROUND: LUIS BRUNO

inventor: stuart minica

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invention

A LEVITATING ARROW REST

description

Makes archers stealthier and more accurate with some well-placed magnets

name

Air-Rest

cost to develop

time

how it works

horizon

$50,000

6 years

Prototype

Magnets

Product Strong magnets in the Air-Rest react with a magnetic insert glued into the arrow body to ﬂoat the arrow precisely in the center of the rest until released.

tuart Minica spies a white-tailed buck 30 yards away, silently raises his bow, takes aim, and illustrates a problem that’s plagued archers since the bow was invented. As the arrow slides along the rest, leaving the bow with a noisy thwack, the deer starts and instantly disappears into the underbrush. An arrow rest, which keeps the arrow level until its release, creates noisy friction that slows the arrow and spooks the game. Fed up, Minica, a 31-year-old mechanical engineer who lives near San Antonio, Texas, devised a way to simply float the arrow in midair instead. His Air-Rest uses a powerful but light wraparound neodymium magnet, which reacts with a magnetic insert that can be glued into the hollow of a standard arrow. As the arrow is drawn, it slides noiselessly on a piece of felt until the magnets interact, levitating the arrow. “I’ve been using the Air-Rest for several months,” says Kelly Garmon, the owner of HawgLite, an online archery-accessory company. “When I go hog-hunting now, I don’t miss a shot.” It may not create bull’s-eye shooters overnight, says Anthony Licata, deputy editor of Field & Stream magazine, but “it’s a very clever device, and one of those ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ products.” Minica, whose wife calls him a “missing person” during bow season, struggled through at least 10 prototypes—“pulling allnighters at my friend’s machine shop,” he recalls—before he perfected the triangular shape, which places the magnets closer together than its circular predecessor did, creating a stronger magnetic field. The design nailed, Minica last year became a semifinalist in the History Channel’s Modern Marvels Invent Now Challenge. Now he’s tweaking an upgrade, which has a slot on the top for quick loading. It took nearly three years to adjust for the magnetic-field distortion caused by the small opening. But Minica doesn’t mind. “Someone a long time ago realized that you could store energy in a curved limb of a tree and launch a projectile,” he says. “Five thousand years later, it’s neat to be a part of its improvement.”—melissa a. calderone

GET NOTICED Dean Kamen, 56, founder of DEKA Research & Development Corp. Inventor, Segway; member, National Inventors Hall of Fame Reputation is one of your most valuable assets; it’s what makes us believe Google or Apple when they say they have an innovative new product. Build your reputation by winning contests, getting in publications, and aligning yourself with a university or organization, and get credible third-party testing to corroborate your claims. Look for a reputable company to partner with. They’ve got global reach and expertise in marketing, sales, distribution and financing. You don’t have to build your own. Be careful with inventor-advice companies—most take advantage of enthusiastic inventors and aren’t much different from get-rich-quick schemes. It’s slower and more difficult to find a good business partner, but worth it. Go to trade shows as closely aligned to your field as possible. The more specific your focus, the more likely you are to succeed, because you can target real potential partners. Don’t rely on marketing spin to generate interest in your product. Never promise that your invention can do something it can’t.—as told to Sarah Z. Wexler

CONTESTS AND SHOWS COLLEGIATE INVENTORS COMPETITION

Prize: $25,000 Deadline: June 15 Bring your A game to compete against the most brilliant graduate and undergraduate student inventors. invent.org/collegiate

THE LEMELSON-MIT PRIZE

Prize: $500,000 Deadline: Oct 12, 2008 Sometimes called the Oscars for inventors, this award typically goes to experienced inventors for patented products or processes “of signiﬁcant value to society.” web.mit.edu/invent

INPEX TRADE SHOW

Prize: a chance to get your idea noticed Deadline: show is held June 6–9; entry deadline is June 1 America’s largest trade show for inventors draws dozens of companies interested in licensing or manufacturing new ideas —and, in the past, camera crews from The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. inventhelp.com/inpex-invention-show.asp

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invention

A BIG BALL OF CONNECTIVITY

description

how it works

Inside the inﬂ atable fabric shell lies a collapsible plastic parabolic antenna that collects and relays satellite signals.

Parabolic antenna

Brings satellite communications anywhere, anytime, via a blow-up antenna

name

GATR-Com

cost to develop

$1.5 million

time

5 years

horizon

Product

o, it’s not a giant beach ball. It’s an ultralight, ultraportable antenna tucked inside an inflatable shell that can pull down a superfast broadband satellite connection at any location. The GATR-Com is designed for disaster-relief responders, far-flung video producers and front-line troops—anyone whose job (or life) depends on getting digital information—video, Internet, calls—in and out of remote places. “You just can’t do effective disaster relief without decent satellite communications,” says Eric Rasmussen, a U.S. Navy physician and commander whose relief experience includes the Indonesian tsunami of 2004 and the aftermath of battles in Bosnia and Iraq. “But when the mud is two feet deep, if you can’t pack a dish on your back or drop it out of a plane, it’s not going to get there.” The GATR-Com (an acronym for “ground antenna transmit and receive”) system, complete with electronics and tethering gear, weighs less than 70 pounds and fits easily into two backpacks. It can be powered by a car’s cigarette lighter or a small

generator. There’s nothing else like it that’s this small or rugged. The GATR-Com is the brainchild of engineer Paul Gierow, who spent 20 years developing large deployable space antennas for NASA. Gierow realized that the need for a highly portable antenna is just as relevant on Earth as it is in space—especially considering the earthly inevitabilities of gravity, mud and sky-high air-freight costs. The antenna is made of a flexible, high-strength plastic lined with conductive mesh inside a large (six- or eight-foot) sphere constructed of a material similar to that used for racing sails. A valve from a small compressor directs slightly more air pressure to one side of the antenna, giving it a parabolic shape. At first, Gierow and his business partner, William R. Clayton, worried that an inflatable sphere might just blow away. But the GATR-Com’s spherical shape actually deflects air twice as efficiently as rigid disks do and protects the internal antenna’s shape from being distorted by gusts. “The idea itself is actually fairly simple,” Gierow says. “The trick was to come up with a way to tie it down, target it [to a satellite] to

ILLUSTRATION: BROWN BIRD DESIGN

Prototype

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inventor: Paul gIErow

FIELD ARRAY Paul Gierow stands among his inﬂatable satellite antennas, which can be used alone or in groups for a stronger signal.

one tenth of a degree, and keep it stable.” Backed by research grants from the Air Force and Darpa, the Pentagon’s R&D branch, Gierow reﬁned his invention for nearly three years before he got up the nerve to quit his job as vice president of NASA contractor SRS Technologies and bet his livelihood on his creation. The next day, Hurricane Katrina gave him a perfect opportunity to prove the device worked in the real world. Gierow drove from where he lives near Decatur, Alabama, to Biloxi, Mississippi, and set up his prototype at a Red Cross shelter. For two weeks, the system served as an electronic lifeline to the outside world. “One lady had just had an organ transplant, and she didn’t have her anti-rejection medication,” Gierow recalls. “We were able to get in touch with a pharmacist [about four hours north of Biloxi], and he drove it to us.” Gierow’s improvised effort caught the attention of the organizers of Strong Angel III, a disaster-relief simulation led by Rasmussen. Held last August in San Diego, the six-day event brought together teams from the Pentagon, relief agencies and high-tech companies.

The mission: to field-test new technologies and tools that could be used to respond to natural disasters, epidemics or terrorist attacks. “They were the only ones who walked in carrying their gear,” Rasmussen says of Gierow’s team. “At first look, the device incited snickers. But they pulled it out of the backpack, inflated it, and tethered it—and in 15 minutes, we had a rock-solid satellite signal. This is a technology that could give us a huge increase in our capabilities.” The GATR-Com’s $50,000 price tag makes it an unlikely accessory for most solo travelers. But its cost is far less than that of other remote-deployable satellite antennas, not to mention the savings it provides in transportation costs. With inquiries from a wide range of potential clients, Gierow regularly puts in 70-hour workweeks in his warehouse office/lab. But last summer he managed to take a week off to bring his family to the beach. Not surprisingly, the antenna came too. “I was the nerd on the beach with the really big ball,” Gierow says, “and the T1 connection.”—Tom Clynes

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invention

SIX STROKES OF GENIUS

description

Uses steam to squeeze more miles from gas cost to develop

name

Steam-o-Lene Engine $1,000

time

1.5 years

horizon

Prototype

Product

how it Works: inventor’s sketch

Water injects and turns to steam

After the ﬁrst four conventional strokes, water is injected into the cylinder, creating steam to drive a ﬁfth stroke for extra power. The last stroke recycles the steam water.

ruce Crower’s Southern California auto-racing parts shop is a temple for racecar mechanics. Here’s the flat eight-cylinder Indycar engine that won him the 1977 Louis Schwitzer Award for racecar design. There’s the Mercedes five-cylinder engine he converted into a squealing supercharged two-stroke, just “to see what it would sound like,” says the now half-deaf 77-year-old self-taught engineer. Crower has spent a lifetime eking more power out of every drop of fuel to make cars go faster. Now he’s using the same approach to make them go farther, with a radical six-stroke engine that tops off the familiar four-stroke internal-combustion process with two extra strokes of old-fashioned steam power. A typical engine wastes three quarters of its energy as heat. Crower’s prototype, the single-cylinder diesel eight-horsepower Steam-o-Lene engine, uses that heat to make steam and recapture some of the lost energy. It runs like a conventional four-stroke combustion engine through each of the typical up-and-down movements of the piston (intake, compression, power or combustion, exhaust). But just as the engine finishes its fourth stroke,

water squirts into the cylinder, hitting surfaces as hot as 1,500°F. The water immediately evaporates into steam, generating a 1,600fold expansion in volume and driving the piston down to create an additional power stroke. The upward sixth stroke exhausts the steam to a condenser, where it is recycled into injection water. Crower calculates that the Steam-o-Lene boosts the work it gets from a gallon of gas by 40 percent over conventional engines. Diesels, which are already more efﬁcient, might get another 5 percent. And his engine does it with hardware that already exists, so there’s no waiting for technologies to mature, as with electric cars or fuel cells. “Crower is an innovator who tries new ideas based on his experience and gut instincts,” says John Coletti, the retired head of Ford’s SVT high-performance group. “Most people won’t try something new for fear of failure, but he is driven by a need to succeed.” And he just might. Crower has been keeping the details of his system quiet, waiting for a response to his patent application. When he gets it, he’ll pass off the development process to a larger company that can run with it, full-steam.—Dan Carney

FIND THE MONEY Elon Musk, 35, Chairman, Musk Foundation Founder, PayPal; founder and CEO of SpaceX civilian-spaceﬂight company; venture capitalist; worth an estimated $328 million

Don’t show a PowerPoint presentation. Everything works in PowerPoint, even a magic wand. Demonstrate how it actually works with a prototype. Solve an important problem. If you’re solving a small, silly problem, like a new way to dispense toilet paper, you’re going to get a lot less attention than something that will fundamentally change things. If you’re solving a problem with social value, it’s better to approach foundations.

INSET: COURTESY SPACEX; PAPER BACKGROUND: LUIS BRUNO

Make sure your invention matches the interests of who you’re approaching for funding. My ﬁelds are rocketry and electric cars, but I still get people trying to sell me on the world’s biggest zipper.

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inventor: bruce crower OLD-SCHOOL POWER When racecar builder Bruce Crower ﬁred up his prototype six-stroke steam engine, it was so powerful that the exhaust blasted paint chips off the ceiling.

Demonstrate that the cost of making your invention will be affordable for the likely buyer. The market is quite efficient. If you have a working product with economic value, venture-capital firms or high-net-worth individuals will be interested. Don’t worry about credentials. If you have 10 Ph.D.s but you invent something that doesn’t work, people don’t care; if you haven’t finished high school but invent a product that works and matters, people do care.—as told to Sarah Z. Wexler

THREE WAYS TO MAKE A PROTOTYPE 3-D PRINTING

The Fab@Home rapid-prototyping machine can print just about any object in three dimensions using a wide variety of materials, from chocolate to silicone. Kits sell for around $2,500. Learn more at fabathome.org, and see page 42 for an interview with the company’s founder.

CNC MACHINING

CNC (computer numerical control) machines take instructions from a computer and cut pieces from a larger block. Commercial models can cost thousands of dollars, but you can ﬁnd plans for making your own at engadget.com.

ORDERING ONLINE

Not ready to invest in your own equipment? Head to emachineshop.com, where you can pick a material, draw a part, and have it delivered to your door.

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FUTURE TECH: MILITARY inventor: fred pearson invention

A SHOCKING NEW WEAPON

’m in a dark garage in the desolate woods of a small mountain town, and Fred Pearson is about to send 50,000 volts of electricity through me. To stop him, I dodge the sparking claw of electrodes at the tip of his yard-long rod and grab hold of the device, hoping to take it away from him. A shock surges through my hand, leaving me weak and trembling from fingertips to elbow. “You asked for it,” Pearson says. He’s right. I’m playing guinea pig for a prototype of the Tennessee inventor’s Stunstick Neuroscrambler, a new nonlethal weapon that causes enough pain to make any mugger reconsider his career choice. Pearson dreamed up the weapon six years ago while watching his 10-year-old son slash the air with a toy light saber. He noticed the ease and speed with which the boy’s sword could telescope to three times its length. If electrified for real, it would enable the person wielding it to remain beyond arm’s reach of an attacker —something no handheld stun weapon can do. “That could be a game-changing advantage in a real-life scenario,” says New York–based martial artist Allain Atienza, who trains civilians, FBI agents and Army Special Forces in close-combat fighting. The problem with most such devices is that you have to be in contact with your attacker to use them, notes Sid Heal, the commander and technology-procurement specialist at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. “I don’t know a single police officer who has purchased [a stun gun] for his wife or daughters.”

description

A muscle-numbing magic wand that protects cops and citizens, Jedi-style

name

Stunstick Neuroscrambler

time

6 years

cost to develop

$50,000

horizon

Prototype

Product

Despite the fact that Pearson, a 51-year-old drywall contractor, had never invented anything, he knew he could solve this problem. He took apart his son’s toy, wound fiberglass tape around the shaft, lined it with wire, and augmented the electronics. Two weeks later, the three-milliamp, 50,000-volt Neuroscrambler was done. Press a button, and the entire shaft becomes electrically charged, making it virtually impossible to disarm the operator. “You can’t take what you can’t touch,” Pearson says. Like other stun devices, the stick works by delivering a high-voltage, low-amperage electrical charge that overrides messages from the brain to the muscles, leaving the victim unable to control that part of his body. But, unlike any other weapon, it can also act like a Taser, the weapon most often used by police. A Taser delivers higher voltages and, by making contact in two points, contracts muscles throughout the body, causing the subject to collapse. That versatility is a boon for cops, who don’t always want to Taser an attacker into submission, Heal says. “Sometimes we just want to get a person to stop doing whatever it is he’s doing.” Heal is eager for Pearson to begin human-effects testing—a first step to LASD adoption—which should happen later this year at the Army’s Target Behavioral Response Laboratory in New Jersey. As I shake my dead arm, trying to restore sensation, I don’t envy the test subjects. “That wasn’t so bad,” I lie. “Next time,” Pearson tells me, “I’ll put in fresh batteries.”—Rena Marie Pacella WALK SOFTLY. . . Fred Pearson’s electrified telescoping Neuroscrambler can drop a person to the fetal position from three feet away.

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inventors: Corey Centen, Nilesh Patel invention

A GLOVE THAT SAVES LIVES

f the 300,000 people in the U.S. who suffer cardiac arrest every year, only 5 to 10 percent survive. Researchers think that number could quadruple if CPR was performed more often and correctly. The problem is that the procedure is almost never done right: Nearly 60 percent of the time, compressions don’t reach the required 100 per minute. And 37 percent of the time, compressions don’t go deep enough into the chest. Corey Centen and Nilesh Patel, classmates at McMaster University in Ontario, stumbled across these statistics while brainstorming an idea for their engineering class’s final project. Realizing how little of their own high-school CPR training had actually stuck, the two came up with a glove that shows people how to correctly perform CPR while they are actually doing it. The glove could solve one of the most challenging problems in cardiac care. “They have a really nifty idea,” says Benjamin Abella, associate director of the Center for Resuscitation Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He describes the current state of CPR as “like trying to fly a fighter jet without air-speed monitors.”

description

Delivers effective CPR every time

name

CPR Glove

cost to develop

$2,500

time

6 months

horizon

Prototype

Product

Although the prototype glove is made of a cheap nylonspandex composite (sewn by Centen’s aunt), it’s loaded with circuits and sensors. When it’s placed on a person’s chest, an electrocardiograph measures heart rate to indicate whether CPR is actually needed. A metronome beeps to signal proper compression timing. Accelerometers and piezoelectric sensors trigger video feedback about whether the compressions are deep enough and cue the rescuer to lean over and blow air into the victim’s mouth. The glove hasn’t been tested on humans, but the students say that it works on the sophisticated simulator mannequins used in cardiac testing, and it recently won ﬁrst place in the Ontario Engineering Competition for innovative design. With their ramen-level budget depleted, Centen and Patel are looking to hook up with a medical-device company that how it works can help them develop the glove further and take it through FDA trials. They estimate that a mass-produced version could be made for as little as $60. The project earned them an A+ from their professor, but good grades aren’t the goal anymore. “We want to get this out there as fast as possible—and make it as accessible as possible—to save lives,” Centen says. How’s that for senioritis? —Mike Rosenwald

A HELPING HAND Nilesh Patel isn’t really in trouble, but if he was, the CPR glove he and classmate Corey Centen built would give him as much as a 50 percent better chance of living by making sure Centen performed the CPR right.

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inventor: henry liu invention

A GREEN BRICK

description

A block that rose from the ashes cuts costs and pollution

name

Fly-Ash Brick

time

20,000 hours

cost to develop

$600,000

(from the National Science Foundation)

horizon

Prototype

Product

BUILDING BLOCKS Henry Liu cures his ﬂyash bricks in an energy-efﬁcient steam bath.

ing the shape, adding nylon fiber—nothing worked. Finally, he blended in a type of chemical known as an air-entrainment agent. Sometimes used to toughen concrete bricks, it produces millions of microscopic bubbles in the hardened block, giving water less room to sneak in and extending the lifetime of fly-ash bricks to more than 100 freeze-thaw cycles. Liu aims to license the bricks to manufacturers next year. Will they form America’s new foundation? “The people who buy bricks will definitely be interested,” says Pat Schaefer, a sales manager for Jefferson City, Missouri, manufacturer Midwest Block & Brick. “But I don’t see the brick companies liking it at all.”—Lauren A aronson

INSET: COURTESY MARK ZUCKERBERG; PAPER BACKGROUND: LUIS BRUNO

he U.S. churns out nine billion clay bricks a year—every one of them an expensive environmental nightmare. They require costly mining and bake in 2,000°F kilns that guzzle fuel and spit out pollutants. And making cement for concrete bricks spews thousands of pounds of poisonous mercury into the air annually. So Henry Liu built a better brick, one that lasts just as long and puts to use a waste product of coal-power plants—fly ash—that would otherwise fester in a landfill. His bricks solidify under pressure, not extreme heat, so manufacturing them saves energy and costs at least 20 percent less. And because the bricks are molded, they’re smoother and more uniform, slashing bricklaying time and labor. Liu, a 70-year-old retired civil engineer with a sober, matter-offact demeanor, spent most of his career using hydraulic presses to make industrial freight easier and cheaper to move by squashing it into compact blocks. In 1999 a power plant he was working with gave him some free fly ash, and Liu decided to run it through his hydraulic rig “just to see what would come out.” Liu took the whitish powder, mixed it with water, and stamped it with 4,000 psi of pressure. Within two weeks (or, he later discovered, one day in a 150°F steam bath), the mixture set into blocks as strong as concrete. It’s no coincidence: Concrete sticks together because of cement, the calcium oxide of which binds with surrounding materials like crushed rock when it reacts with water. Liu’s bricks can be pure fly ash, which has calcium oxide levels of “between 20 and 30 percent,” says David Goss of the American Coal Ash Association. “It’s self-cementing in nature.” Meeting federal safety standards, however, took Liu another eight years and $600,000 from the National Science Foundation. Bricks are required to survive 50 cycles of freezing and thawing. Liu’s cracked after just eight. He tried chang-

Focus on something you think is important. Rather than trying to start a company just to make money, come up with things that would make an impact and be valuable to the world.

GET INTERNET-RICH mark zuckerberg, 23, Founder and CEO, Facebook.com, a social-networking site with more than 20 million users that’s been estimated to be worth $1 billion 72 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTH 2007

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Making mistakes online is relatively cheap. You’re not physically shipping a product, you’re just changing code. You don’t have to get everything right the ﬁrst time. Give people granular control over their privacy. People are willing to share more information if they have complete control over it. Hire technical people. Everyone in our company has to know how to code. It helps keep us on the same page. I think the billion-dollar thing is a rumor.

—as told to Sarah Z. Wexler

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INSTANT EXPERT

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW, NOTHING YOU DON’T

ANATOMY OF A

By Rena marie Pacella Illustration by Bob Sauls

SOLAR STORM

The worst solar-storm season in half a century starts this year. These fiery explosions— which unleash as much energy as a billion hydrogen bombs—could, under the right conditions, black out cities and fry satellites. But new solar scopes can give us advance warning 1 SUNSPOTS

Sunspots form where intense magnetic field lines twist and poke up through the surface. These knotted fields shut down the normal flow, or convection, of hot plasma from the sun’s interior to the surface, making the region cooler and darker than its surroundings.

Sunspots explode when the field lines twist to the point of snapping, like a rubber band wound too tightly. They link up again to form a new shape, but not before releasing enormous amounts of stored energy and hot gas into the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona.

3 SOLAR FLARE

The resulting eruption, called a solar flare, heats the surrounding gas to 180 million degrees Fahrenheit. The explosion accelerates subatomic particles to near lightspeed and spews radiation (mostly ultraviolet and gamma rays and x-rays) into space.

Solar Tsunami

Last December, a colossal wave swept across the entire solar surface within minutes, bulldozing everything in its path. The rare tsunami-like shockwave formed on the heels of a major flare that erupted from an Earth-size sunspot 15 minutes earlier.

AURORA BOREALIS: DANIEL J. COX/CORBIS; SOLAR TSUNAMI: COURTESY NSO/AURA/NSF/USAF RESEARCH LAB

2 FIELD LINES

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WHO’s WATCHING SOHO

Launch date: 1995 The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory’s spectrographs and cameras have provided much of what we know about space weather and solar physics today.

STEREO

Launch date: 2006 A pair of satellites, the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, will generate the first 3-D views of solar flares and coronal mass ejections and will predict which events threaten Earth.

SDO

faqS

Launch date: 2008 NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory will observe processes like convection and sunspot formation, with the goal of predicting solar storms weeks before they erupt.

SOLAR SENTINEL

Launch date: 2015 Four satellites in Solar Sentinel [above] will fly in varying orbits around the sun, monitoring a solar storm’s path all the way to Earth. A fifth orbiter will watch the far side of the sun.

How space weather affects life on terra firma HOW OFTEN DO SOLAR STORMS OCCUR? The frequency and intensity of storms varies depending on the solar season, which waxes and wanes in 11-year cycles. We will soon be entering into a new season of high solar activity, and experts predict—by crunching data on the longterm behavior of the sun’s convection currents—that it will be the stormiest in half a century.

ARE THEY DANGEROUS?

5 earth impact

4 PLASMA BURST

Flares are sometimes followed by coronal mass ejections (CMEs), in which billions of tons of the sun’s plasma are flung into space en masse. These huge bubbles of matter travel relatively slowly (1,000 miles a second); even the fastest ones take a day or so to reach Earth.

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Eight minutes after a flare erupts, Earth’s atmosphere absorbs the radiation pulse. This pulse produces extra ions and electrons, causing the atmosphere to puff out. The expanded atmosphere increases drag on satellites and degrades radio and GPS signals. But the worst is yet to come. Potentially more destructive than a flare’s radiation pulse, CMEs boost the speed of the solar wind and create a shockwave of energetic protons. That shockwave distorts Earth’s magnetic shield, and the protons stream down on the poles creating geomagnetic disturbances like the Northern Lights. The shockwave can also destroy the electronics in satellites. AURORA BOREALIS

The Earth’s magnetic shield protects us from the worst effects of solar storms, and astronauts on the International Space Station can take cover in a heavily shielded module. It’s technology that suffers the most. The atmospheric and magnetic fluctuations that the storms cause can disable satellites, burn out transformers, and take down power grids. One CME in 1989 left all of Quebec without power for nine hours.

CAN WE PREDICT THEM? Not now but soon. Spaceweather forecasters use satellites and ground-based scopes to monitor sunspots for flares and CMEs but can’t tell with certainty if or when they will hit Earth. The STEREO satellites will help scientists determine whether a particular storm is headed for us and, hopefully, will give satellite and energy-grid minders enough warning to prepare for a hit.

4/10/07 9:13:49 AM

THE FIRST

N ASSASSI OFTHE 21STCENTURY A former spy’s excruciating death by radiation poisoning marks the beginning of an era of high-tech hit men who can kill from anywhere BY JAMES GEARY, WITH REPORTING FROM MOSCOW BY VICTOR AKUNOV PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN B. CARNETT

three key facts

1 2 3

Alexander Litvinenko’s murderers used polonium-210, a radioactive toxin deadly in even tiny doses. Inside the body, the alpha radiation emitted by polonium-210 kills every living cell it touches. Litvinenko died in 22 days. Similarly dangerous nuclear and biological materials go missing every year in the former Soviet Union. Its arsenal included 44,000 tons of chemical weapon agents at the end of the Cold War.

It began as a standard admission. When he arrived in the critical-care unit at University College Hospital (UCH) in central London last November 17, the patient in Room 9 was weak but alert. For just over two weeks he had been suffering from severe dehydration and vomiting. Comforted by a clutch of family and friends, he struggled to beat back an illness that was remorselessly attacking all his major organs. Physicians methodically disqualiﬁed the usual suspects—no food poisoning, no gastrointestinal infection. Then the patient’s white-bloodcell count dropped to practically nothing and his hair began to fall out. He showed all the symptoms of acute radiation syndrome, but no radiation had been detected. “The Geiger-counter readings were negative,” recalls Geoff Bellingan, the clinical director of the department of critical care at UCH. “There was no clarity on the diagnosis.” While the doctors struggled to identify his condition, the patient in Room 9—Alexander Litvinenko, a vocal opponent of Russian president Vladimir Putin and an ex-ofﬁcer in Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB—had already reached his own conclusions. He was sure that he had been poisoned, and that the Kremlin had ordered his assassination. What started as an ordinary ER case quickly blossomed into something larger: British researchers began to worry that this lone case might signify a health threat to the rest of the country. Litvinenko accused the Kremlin of seeking not

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THE FUTURE OF ASSASSINATION

ATION

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LITVINENKO OPENLY WORRIED THAT HIS LIFE WAS IN DANGER.

During the late 1990s, Alexander Litvinenko was assigned to the FSB’s organized-crime unit. His job was to combat corruption in the aftermath of the country’s chaotic transition to a free-market economy. But he became disillusioned with the security agency, and in 1998, he held a strange press conference at which he and several other disgruntled ofﬁcers (some of whom wore ski masks to hide their identity) accused their bosses of seeking to line their own pockets and

was brought up on Soviet law,” Gusak told the BBC’s Newsnight television program. “That provides for the death penalty for treason. I think if in Soviet times he had come back to the USSR, [Litvinenko] would have been sentenced to death.” A new law, adopted by the Russian parliament last year, authorizes the elimination outside Russia of individuals the Kremlin accuses of terrorism or extremism. Litvinenko openly worried that his life was in danger. He was right. His death began on November 1, 2006, when he met FSB-agents-turnedbusinessmen Dmitry Kovtun, Andrei Lugovoi and, possibly, Vyacheslav

still, doctors did not know what was killing him. “We tried to examine his bone marrow, but it was so ﬂat we couldn’t get a sample,” Bellingan says. “Something had poisoned all his dividing cells, but it wasn’t clear which of many possible agents was involved.” Geiger counters failed to pick up any telltale gamma radiation—the easiest kind to detect—and radioactive thallium poisoning, an early hypothesis, had already been ruled out. “Once gamma was eliminated,” Bellingan says, “we were looking at all comers. But the list of possible agents was very, very long.” Litvinenko’s case

Litvinenko with a masked colleague from the FSB in 1998, accusing the Kremlin of corruption and murder

Investigators at the German home of Dmitry Kovtun, who met with Litvinenko around the time he was poisoned

Seizing radioactive evidence in Germany

“settle accounts with undesirable persons.” In 2000, after falling out with Putin, Litvinenko fled Russia for London, the destination of choice for Russia’s restive dissidents and disaffected oligarchs, where he continued to antagonize his former colleagues. Litvinenko claimed in a book, for instance, that the FSB was responsible for a series of apartment bombings in Russia in 1999. (The attacks were officially blamed on Chechen separatists, and Putin had used the incident to help justify a fresh invasion of Chechnya in that same year.) He investigated the 2006 murder of journalist and Putin critic Anna Politkovskaya. In February of this year, Alexander Gusak, Litvinenko’s old commanding officer at the FSB, accused him of having revealed to British authorities the identities of Russian agents. “I

Sokolenko for tea at London’s Millennium Hotel. Later that night, he complained of vomiting, diarrhea and fatigue. He checked into Barnet General Hospital in north London on November 3, but doctors couldn’t ﬁnd anything wrong. After exhausting the possibilities, and with Litvinenko’s condition deteriorating, they transferred him to UCH on November 17. Litvinenko’s condition became progressively worse. Pictures of the former spy in his hospital bed show him looking paler than the crisp white walls in the UCH critical-care unit. On November 22, he was intubated and placed on mechanical ventilation. One by one, his vital organs—liver, kidneys, spleen—began to fail. His immune system collapsed as his whiteblood-cell count plummeted. And

had distinguished itself as something new, something more complicated than the British medical establishment could handle. To pinpoint the poison, a sample of Litvinenko’s urine went to Britain’s Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE). Researchers there detected signs of alpha radiation. One of the strongest emitters of alpha radiation is an isotope called polonium-210, generally manufactured for industrial use in anti-static devices. The isotope quickly became the focus of the AWE investigation, but it was too late to do the patient any good. Back at UCH, Litvinenko was fading fast. “His heart was getting weaker and weaker,” says Jim Down, the intensive-care consultant on duty the day Litvinenko died. “His blood pressure dropped inexorably to nothing.”

DEATH OF A DISSIDENT

Litvinenko in 2002, after relocating to London

FROM LEFT: SERGEI KAPTIKIN/REUTERS; ANDREAS RENTZ/GETTY IMAGES; SEBASTIAN WIDMANN/CORBIS; ALISTAIR FULLER/AP PHOTO; PRECEDING PAGE: GETTY IMAGES

only to kill him, but to systematically wipe out its critics. And in the end, one man’s murder became a glimpse into the future of assassination, a new world where high-tech hit men have access to terrible weapons.

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THE FUTURE OF ASSASSINATION The AWE conﬁrmed the polonium diagnosis at about 6 p.m. on November 23, but the news took several hours to reach the hospital. Before it did, at 9:21 p.m., the patient’s heart gave out. He never knew the name of his poison.

TOP AND BOTTOM ROWS: JONATHAN WORTH; MIDDLE ROW, FROM LEFT: CATHAL MCNAUGHTON/CORBIS; VINCENT BRUNO/GETTY IMAGES; ALEXANDER ZEMLIANCHENKO/AP PHOTO (2); SERGEI CHIRIKOV/CORBIS

INTERNAL DECAY Nuclear physicists call polonium “the Terminator”—not because of its efﬁcacy as a poison but because it’s the ﬁnal element created in the process known as slow neutron capture. As an element, polonium occurs naturally in the Earth’s crust as a by-product of the decay of uranium-238, and it accounts for about 1 percent of the total annual dose humans get from normal background radiation. In appearance, it resembles a silvery-gray dust—that is, if you can get enough of the stuff

The Millennium Hotel, where the spy met three men and was presumably poisoned

Radiation led investigators to this stadium, where Vyacheslav Sokolenko saw a game.

After an autopsy—conducted in hazmat suits—the body was interred in Highgate Cemetery, London.

Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, at the funeral service

Andrei Lugovoi was also at the London meeting.

together to actually be able to see it. (Litvinenko received an amount that would have ﬁt on the head of a pin with room to spare.) Polonium-210, created by bombarding bismuth-209 with neutrons inside a nuclear reactor, is hard to ﬁnd in high concentrations. Only about 100 grams are produced every year, most of it in Russia. Unlike many other radioactive substances, polonium-210 is harmless as long as it remains outside the body. Once inside the body, though, the alpha radiation emitted by the isotope is about 20 times as damaging to cells as the gamma radiation emitted by elements like thallium. Gamma rays can penetrate steel, concrete, human tissue. Alpha particles can’t penetrate even a single sheet of paper, or your epidermis. But when you

The restaurant, still quarantined, where Litvinenko ate just before collapsing

Ex-FSB agent Kovtun met with the victim in London.

Sokolenko may have been the third participant.

London’s University College Hospital, where he died of radiation poisoning

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Russian hits have always tended toward the exotic

In 1978 GEORGI MARKOV, a Bulgarian dissident, was waiting for a bus near London’s Waterloo Bridge when a man jabbed him with an umbrella and disappeared in a taxi. Within days, Markov was dead. Doctors discovered a tiny metal pellet lodged in the dead man’s thigh. The pellet, injected through the tip of the umbrella, contained the poison ricin. During the free-market 1990s, businessmen were targeted. IVAN KIVELIDI, a Moscow entrepreneur, died mysteriously in 1995. Police later found poison, allegedly from a chemical weapon, dusted over his phone receiver. Since Putin came to power in 2000, dissidents have reentered the line of fire. In 2003, YURI SHCHEKOCHIKHIN, a journalist and parliament member investigating corruption, was hospitalized with a high fever and severe vomiting. Two weeks later, he was dead. “His skin started to come off,” recalls Alexander Gurov, a fellow parliamentarian and a friend of Shchekochikhin. Poisoning was suspected but never proved—Russian authorities sealed his medical records. In September 2004, journalist ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA , a fierce Putin critic (and acquaintance of Litvinenko), boarded a flight to Beslan, where she hoped to help persuade Chechen terrorists to release 1,200 hostages from a primary school. After drinking a cup of tea on the flight, she fell unconscious. She recovered, only to be shot to death in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building two years later.

swallow an alpha emitter—or inhale it, or it enters the bloodstream through an open wound—all molecular hell breaks loose. “It’s like firing a missile at a bag of ping-pong balls,” says Paddy Regan, a lecturer in nuclear physics at the University of Surrey outside London. “If you coat the inside of a person’s gut with alpha particles, the particles will kill every cell they come into contact with.” Police suspect that Litvinenko was poisoned at the Millennium Hotel on November 1 and that the polonium, most likely dissolved in some kind of tasteless liquid solution, was slipped into his tea before or during his meeting with the Russian businessmen. The polonium-210 lined Litvinenko’s gastrointestinal tract. From there, it seeped into his bloodstream and spread throughout his body, first targeting rapidly dividing cells—hair, skin, stomach, bone marrow. He probably received a much larger dose than was strictly needed to kill him, somewhere between one and 10 gigabecquerels. (A becquerel is a measure of radioactivity amounting to one alpha-particle emission per second. Ten gigabecquerels, the maximum suspected dose, would have delivered 10 billion alpha emissions per second.) The amount was so great, he had no hope of survival. Litvinenko is the first person known to have died of polonium-210 exposure, and the first murdered with it. The businessmen from the Millennium meeting deny any involvement in his death, although traces of radiation were found along the paths they took in the days prior to the meeting. The trail of alpha radiation across London suggests that whoever poisoned Litvinenko did so at great personal risk. Inhaling it by accident, for instance, would have meant certain death. Sites within the hotel, as well as several items of tableware, showed extremely high levels of polonium-210. The door to the men’s room was so contaminated that public-health offi-

cials removed it and disposed of it as nuclear waste. Litvinenko’s home and office were tainted by polonium-210, as were seats in airplanes, taxis and parts of a soccer stadium. You still can’t book certain hotel rooms in London because they’re buzzing with traces of polonium-210. “We’re not dealing with scientists here who would have realized the hazards of the material,” says one source familiar with the investigation. If the purpose of the assassination was to send a warning to other dissidents, the assassins chose their weapon wisely: Polonium-210 creates all the terror of a nuclear strike without the risk of massive fatalities. Since polonium210 was first identified in the case on November 23, the British Health Protection Agency has monitored about 40 sites; at least 20 of them had significant levels of polonium-210 contamination. The health agency has also tested the urine of about 700 people, earning it the nickname “the piss palace” among the staff. To date, 17 individuals have shown elevated levels of polonium-210. Despite widespread fear of contamination, there was never any threat to the general public. “Polonium is useless as a weapon of mass destruction,” Regan says. If it had been poured into London’s water supply instead of Litvinenko’s tea, for example, it would have dispersed so quickly that no one would have received a dangerous dose. And although they may not have understood the risks they were taking, whoever masterminded the killing had clearly researched their weapon to some extent. Nick Priest, a professor of radiobiology at Middlesex University in England, estimates that it would have taken a few days in a reactor to produce the amount of polonium-210 delivered to Litvinenko. Polonium-210 has a half-life of 138 days, meaning half of it will decay in about four and a half months. So the assassins must have planned the operation well in advance and then acted promptly. Also,

ILLUSTRATIONS: MEDIMATION; PHOTOGRAPHS, FROM TOP: DIMITAR DEINOV/AP PHOTO; GEORGES DE KEERLE/CORBIS; SERGEI GUNEYEV/GETTY IMAGES; NOVAYA GAZETA/EPSILON/GETTY IMAGES

101

WAYS TO DIE

WHOEVER POISONED HIM DID SO AT GREAT PERSONAL RISK.

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THE FUTURE OF ASSASSINATION

HOW POLONIUM-210 KILLED LITVINENKO

The ex-spy’s ﬁnal days were an agonizing process of cellular damage throughout the body HAIR AND SKIN Once the ingested polonium-210 entered Litvinenko’s bloodstream, it ﬁrst affected rapidly dividing cells, like those in skin, by bombarding them with alpha particles. Hair follicles in particular tend to absorb the radiation extremely readily. Litvinenko suffered hair loss, itching and painful breakdown of the epidermis.

KIDNEY By simultaneously passing polonium-210 to the bloodstream and the bladder, the kidneys distributed radiation before failing themselves.

LIVER The irradiated liver also helped spread deadly particles. In bile, it passed them on to the intestines.

BONE MARROW Thought to be the earliest and most important contributing factor in a radiation victim’s death, irradiated bone-marrow failure is compounded by organ failure elsewhere in the body. Damaged stem cells die off, driving down blood-cell counts and leading to infection and hemorrhaging.

INTESTINES The mucosal lining of the intestines is made up of protruding villi, which absorb nutrients. Some villi are sloughed off during normal digestion, and these cells are replaced. Radiation damages the villi’s regenerative abilities, and digestion begins to painfully wear away the intestinal wall. POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 81

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THE FUTURE OF ASSASSINATION the choice of polonium itself suggests a certain sophistication. “They knew they could move it across borders because there is no gamma radiation,” Priest says. “They knew that it would be taken up by gut. And they knew it was obscure. Even when doctors knew it was radiation [that was killing Litvinenko], they still didn’t think of polonium.” Now, of course, scientists and police think of little else. Why, given all the methods available, did Litvinenko’s killers choose polonium, rather than a knife across the throat, or a bullet to the head? “I think they supposed Litvinenko would die quickly,” says Vladimir Ryzhkov, an independent member of the Russian parliament, “and that specialists wouldn’t ﬁnd out what substance was used. Polonium decays rapidly, so they may have expected no traces would be left behind and the British would say the cause of death was unknown.” In Russian political life, assassins who wish to remain anonymous often hide behind obscure methods [see “101

MAKE ROOM FOR THE THREAT OF TARGETED NUCLEAR TERRORISM. Ways to Die,” page 80]. “You only need exotic ways of killing people when you don’t want the truth to be revealed,” says Alexei Kondaurov, a former KGB general who is now a parliamentarian critical of Putin’s government. “But science has come a long way, and with modern methods of analysis, it’s almost impossible to hide the truth.” Concern about contamination delayed Litvinenko’s autopsy for a week, as ofﬁcials discussed the precautions that had to be taken in cutting the dead man open. When the postmortem ﬁnally did take place, ventilation in the operating theater was switched off to prevent any wayward polonium210 becoming airborne, according to someone familiar with the procedure. Everyone stripped to their underwear before donning two separate impervious plastic suits, as well as a cylindrical

shawl and helmet combination that slipped over their heads and shoulders like a beekeeper’s outﬁt. Filtration units slung on their belts pumped scrubbed air into the suits. Tissue samples were passed through an airlock to a waiting pathologist, while a radiation-protection ofﬁcial continually monitored the room for alpha particles.

WET WORK The former Soviet Union has always been one of the world’s premiere think tanks for exotic assassination methods. In the 1930s, Stalin established a secret branch of the KGB with the fearsome name “The Administration for Special Tasks.” The Administration had a medical section called Kamera solely devoted to the development of exotic poisons and toxins. The “special tasks” (CONTINUED ON PAGE 98)

TROUBLE IS BREWING

Litvinenko was killed by a speck of radioactive material. Whole warheads’ worth are stolen in Russia every year

DISMANTLED Uneven control of its arsenal makes the former USSR a prime source of nuclear- and chemical-weapon materials.

2006

2005

2004

2003

Russian citizen Oleg Khintsagov and three accomplices are arrested attempting to sell 100 grams of highly enriched uranium (HEU)—more than enough to build a functional nuclear weapon—to undercover security agents in the Republic of Georgia.

Moscow’s internal security commander estimates that only seven of its critical nuclear facilities have adequate security, while 39 had “serious shortcomings.” Russia’s nuclear agency says its budget is a third of what’s needed to secure nuclear facilities.

The security chief at Russia’s largest facility for processing plutonium and highly enriched uranium warns that its guards regularly fail tests of their ability to protect nuclear material against attack and theft, frequently patrol without ammunition, and are often corrupt.

Russian courts try a man for offering $750,000 for weapons-grade plutonium. An Armenian with 170 grams of stolen HEU is arrested at the Georgian border. Two teenagers reportedly die of poisoning after stealing materials from a Chechen nuclear facility.

GEORGES DE KEERLE/CORBIS

OF THE ROUGHLY 250 THEFTS reported to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Illicit Trafﬁcking Database since 2004 (and those are only the reported thefts), 14 involved polonium-210. Dozens of anecdotes like the following show that dangerous materials in Russia are readily available to the brazen and the enterprising.

Sources: Matthew Bunn, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; Nuclear Threat Initiative; International Atomic Energy Agency

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how 2.0

t ip s , t r i c k s , h a c k s a n d d o - i t-y o u r s e l f p r o j E C T S

Build a turbocharged paper airplane

Use Media Center tricks to outdo TiVo

YOU BUILT what ?!

Make your own laser level

BATTER UP A remote-control, baseball-hitting robot made from a mishmash of junked parts steps up to the plate

TRUE, IT WAS BUILT in Germany—and by an English-

PLAY BALL! A composite photo of the Headless Batsman taking a swing on a diamond in Berlin

man. Yet the Headless Batsman could not be a more American invention: a 265-pound quasi-human-shaped robot made from a jumble of salvaged auto parts, steel piping and pneumatic hoses for the sole purpose of belting every fastball thrown its way. Frank Barnes, a 30-year-old industrial artist, built the Batsman, as well as a complementary pitching machine, on a whim. He spent a day taking cuts with a bat to work out the swing mechanics, ultimately electing to focus on the robot’s hips, shoulders and arms. A junked disc brake acts as its hips, enabling the torso to rotate as the bat swings through, and Barnes machined the arms from steel pipes. To give it a solid stance, in lieu of legs, he used a stand originally intended to hold cable spools. Barnes holds batting practice all by himself. Standing behind the robot, he uses a homemade controller to fire a ball out of the pitching machine. Then it’s time to hit. On the same controller, one button rotates the robot’s hips, another activates the arms, and a third lifts or drops its inside shoulder, changing the trajectory of its swing. After much practice, Barnes can now get it to hit most pitches. The Batsman won’t make the majors, but Barnes suggests another career option: “Put some wheels on it, drive it around—I figure I can use it for security.” —gregory Mone

HOW IT WORKS

JONATHAN WORTH

PITCH For the pitching

ON THE MOUND The inventor built a second machine to throw the pitches.

machine [left], Barnes sawed off the ends of a fire extinguisher and rigged up an air compressor with the power to launch balls 60 feet, at up to 60 mph.

POWER A button on the remote opens a valve on the Batsman, sending a jolt of air to the robot from a compressor that drives a piston that forces the arms forward.

! THE H2WHOA CREDO: DIY CAN BE DANGEROUS. We test all projects before publishing them, but ultimately your safety is your responsibility. Always wear protective gear, take proper safety precautions, and follow all applicable laws and regulations.

PS0607H20_Opener.indd

$10

7 days SWING Tiny springs inside the robot’s wrists allow it to follow through; the momentum generated by its hip and shoulder rotation transfers through the bat to the ball.

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HOW 2.0

GRAY

MATTER

ATOMS AND EVES

Before lava lamps and laser light, all you needed for romance was some radioactivity IN 1903 THERE WAS NOTHING to watch on TV

RADIOACTIVE GADGETS THROUGH THE YEARS The author’s collection, including a modern version of a spinthariscope [far left], a toy spinthariscope ring and, at far right, a brass spinthariscope, probably made in the 1910s

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safe

crazy

You can pick up a spinthariscope for $30 from unitednuclear.com. Or make your own with a zinc sulﬁde screen ($10 on eBay) and commonly available radioactive items. Hold an antistatic brush behind the screen [right]. It sends out alpha radiation strong enough to produce a visible glow. Look at vintage orange Fiestaware plates in a totally dark room with a magnifying glass to see ﬂashes one at a time.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: MIKE WALKER (2); THEODORE GRAY

because there was no TV, and meeting girls was no easier than it is today. But one device solved both problems . . . sort of. The Crookes spinthariscope, invented that year, is a small tube with a lens at one end and a zinc sulfide screen at the other. Just above the screen is a tiny speck of radium mounted on a needle. If you look into one, you’ll witness a seething, swirling light show of individual atoms going out in a blaze of glory (more entertaining than most things on TV today, I’d say). Each decaying radium atom sends out a high-energy alpha particle, which slams into zinc sulfide crystals. This triggers a process that eventually releases photons, creating visible flashes. These atoms are so small, it would take the energy from four trillion of them to raise the temperature of a teaspoon of water by one degree. The fact that you can see the flash from a single atom decaying is nothing short of amazing. Your eyes must be totally dark-adapted, which means sitting in a pitch-black room for at least 10 minutes. If you were a dashing young man of science in 1903 and you brought one of these scopes to a dinner party, you would have been rude not to invite the ladies to sit next to you in a dark room. This might account for some of the early popularity of the device. In 1947 you could get a Lone Ranger Atomic Bomb spinthariscope ring for 15 cents and a Kix cereal box top; the same toy recently A THOUSAND POINTS cost me $200 on eBay. But OF LIGHT A computer simulation of modern spinthariscopes what you see inside a (made with safe radioacspinthariscope. The tive ores) are available, phenomenon is so faint, and they really do work— it’s nearly impossible to provided, of course, that photograph. Check out you sit in a dark room for the video at popsci.com/ 10 minutes first. Do with graymatter to see this that opportunity what simulation come alive. you will.—Theodore Gray

ACHTUNG! Always use proper lab-safety procedures and equipment when trying any experiment. Find more on Gray’s scientiﬁc pursuits at periodictabletable.com.

PS0607H20_GrayMatter.indd 86

POPSCI.COM

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New Advanced Air Cooler Uses 75% - 95% Less Electricity Than Air Conditioners SAVE MONEY - RUNS ON ONLY PENNIES A DAY Now You Can Cool Your Air 12-20 Degrees and Purify Your Air AT THE SAME TIME

Uses Patented Cyclonic Water Vaporization System By: B. Inboden Believe it or not, there are people who can look forward to the heat of summer because they know they can: • stay cool • have their air purified • and save money on their electric bill... ...all at the same time! What do they know that you don’t? They are using the new CoolAir 4000 Air Cooler, an evaporative cooler with a built-in carbon filter. With energy costs skyrocketing, smart consumers everywhere are looking for reliable ways to stay cool, bypassing air conditioners which are expensive to buy and use a great deal of electricity. That’s why the Cool Air 4000 is so revolutionary. It is based on a basic technology that has been updated for 21st century living. To understand the many benefits of the CoolAir 4000 we’ve compiled the most asked questions so you will know exactly how it works and how it can keep you cool, clean your air and save you money. Q.What is the technology behind the CoolAir 4000? A. The CoolAir 4000 is an evaporative cooler which produces effective cooling by combining the natural process of water evaporation with a simple reliable air moving system, like a fan or a blower. Q. How does evaporative cooling work? A. If you wet your arm and blow air on it your skin feels cooler. That’s evaporative cooling. In a standard evaporative cooler, outside air is pulled through moist pads where it is cooled by evaporation. Evaporation is an endo-thermic reaction; it absorbs heat. So the air that goes through the pads has had heat absorbed out of it. This cooler air is then circulated through the room by a blower. The pads are kept moist by the water you pour into the water cartridge. In the new CoolAir 4000, the tank has been replaced by the new patented Cyclonic Water Vaporization System which uses an atomization process to break up the large water molecules. This process absorbs heat from the air and then the blower sends out the cold air. Q. How effective is the evaporative cooling? A. On the average, the CoolAir 4000 can lower the temperature 12-20 degrees. A great deal depends on the humidity in the air. Evaporative coolers work best when outside humidity is below 50%. Q. Why does an evaporativecooler saveso much electricity? A. Because the technology is so efficient, the electricity is used mainly to run the blower and atomizer. This takes about the same amount of electricity as using a light bulb. In air conditioning for instance, the electricity must power a compressor which is much more complex and involves high energy usage. Q. How does the Cool Air 4000 clean the air?

You can watch the temperature go down!

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Air Cooler - Air Conditioner Comparisons

TESTIMONIALS REPRESENTING SATISFIED COOLAIR 4000 USERS...

The CoolAir 4000 is not an air conditioner, but it does have benefits when compared to air conditioning.

“Words cannot express how pleasant it is to sit near the CoolAir 4000. The one I use in my office blows out 53.6 degree cold air in a matter of a few minutes. The CoolAir 4000 provides benefits far beyond the price you pay to own it, and it is one of those rare products that pleasantly surprises you, calming you, reducing stress, and giving you more than you expect. Plus, it costs less than a 75 watt light bulb to operate. It even works along with your air conditioner, lowering your demand for electricity during the highest and most expensive peak load times of the day, perhaps even lowering your total electric bill. It’s very easy to to use and you can actually watch the temperature go down.” - Paul Klingaman Jr. Managing Director

A. This is where new technology meets tried and true technology. All evaporature coolers by their very nature help in cleaning the air, but with the CoolAir 4000 we have added a carbon filter to help trap dust, pollen, odors and pet dander. This is in contrast to most portable air conditioners which just recycle the same air over and over and over. You have probably heard that in-house air pollution is worse than outdoor air pollution. And closed-door/ window air conditioning is one of the reasons for this discouraging phenomenon. Air purifiers alone can cost hundreds of dollars but with one CoolAir 4000, you get an air purifier as part of the package. Q. Why would a person choose a CoolAir 4000 over a portable air conditioner? A. The biggest reason is cost. The CoolAir 4000 costs under $300 while portable air conditioners run between $450.00 and $800.00. As mentioned, air conditioners can also use up to 16 times as much electricity as air coolers. In recent years people have become much more conscious of health enhancing features, so the addition of the carbon filter is a major benefit for everyone who is trying to improve the quality of the air he or she breathes safely and inexpensively. The other big benefit of the CoolAir 4000 is that even though it can cool a large area, 200 square feet, it does not need a vent. All air conditioners, portable or not, must have a way to vent off hot air. You can put the CoolAir 4000 anywhere there is an outlet since

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there is no hot air to vent away. You can move it from room to room on its easy glide casters to fit your schedule and needs. Q. Can I use the CoolAir 4000 in conjunction with other cooling devices? A. That is the way many people are using the CoolAir 4000. People who have whole house air conditioning use the CoolAir 4000 in places where the air conditioning does not reach. Air coolers are perfect for the sun room where you can have the windows open and stay cool with the CoolAir 4000. It is also great for the office, condo, RV and dorm room. Q. Is the CoolAir 4000 easy to use? A. Absolutely. All you do is insert the water cartridge and turn it on. A full cartridge can last 6-8 hours with continuous use. There is a handy water level indicator so you know exactly where and when to refill. We will supply an extra water cartridge so you can always have one as a ready replacement. Includes a water filter too so you are breathing the cleanest air you can breathe. You also receive a remote control so you can use all the functions from the comfort of your easy chair or even from bed. Q. How can consumers get a CoolAir 4000? A. You can only get the CoolAir 4000 exclusively from International Home Shopping, by returning your Authorized Discount Claim Form in the enclosed envelope. Or by calling 1-800-466-9973.

•

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* Air Coolers in general help freshen the air, but the CoolAir 4000 has a carbon filter to magnify this ability. The CoolAir 4000 is an IHS exclusive item!

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The regular price to stay cool and get the CoolAir 4000 is only $299.00 plus $19 shipping and handling for a total of $318.00 delivered. Readers of this publication get a $75.00 discount with this coupon and pay only $224 plus, receive FREE Shipping and Handling if you order within 10 days. Additional CoolAir 4000 air coolers are only $204 each, saving you $20.00 more. There is a strict limit of 3 CoolAir 4000 at the discount price - no exceptions please. After 10 days, we reserve the right to accept order requests at the discounted price. • To order by phone, call TOLL FREE 1-800-466-9973 and give the operator your Authorization Code: CLA126. Place your order by using your credit card. Operators are on duty Monday - Friday 6am - 3am, Saturday 7am - Midnight and Sunday 7am - 11pm, EST. • To order by mail, check or credit card, fill out and mail in this coupon to the address below. • To order online go to www.ihsmall.com This product carries a complete satisfaction guarantee. If you are not totally satisfied, your purchase price will be refunded. No questions asked. ____________________________________________________________________________

NAME ____________________________________________________________________________________________ ADDRESS ____________________________________________________________________________________________ CITY STATE ZIP CODE

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HOW 2.0

buildIT

SUPERCHARGE A PAPER AIRPLANE

How to send a folded ﬂyer screaming 100 feet or more: Just add a motor—and a lot of juice THE SINGLE-SHEET paper airplanes you made when you were a kid (or perhaps last week in your cubicle) were, well, kid stuff compared to this beefed-up paper craft, which uses an electric motor from an old pager or toy powered by a big electrolytic capacitor. Known as a “Gold Cap” and made by Panasonic, the capacitor charges from a battery pack and then metes out a steady ﬂow of power to keep your propel-

ler whirring for about 10 seconds—just long enough to send the ﬂyer airborne and carry it between 30 and 100 feet. (You can also add a gearing system to squeeze out even more ﬂight time.) We’ve created plans for an eAT-6 “Texan” airplane and put them on popsci.com to get you started. Just think twice before blindly launching this one soaring over the wall of your cube.—Dave Prochnow

TRY OUT A PREBUILT MODEL Spin Master makes a similar capacitor-powered craft called the ECharger ($10; spinmaster.com). You can just buy and fly, or pull out the toy’s power system and modify it to work with the eAT-6 by using the instructions in step 3 [right].

LUIS BRUNO; BACKGROUND: DAVID TOASE/GETTY IMAGES; FACING PAGE: LUIS BRUNO

FLEXIBLE FLYER Equipped with a capacitor-powered motor, the eAT-6 is the paper airplane you wish you’d built as a kid.

88 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2007

PS0607H20_Build It.indd 88

4/7/07 12:24:01 AM

HOW 2.0

BUILD a motorized paper airplane 3 hours

$14.29

PARTS Paper eAT-6 plan (free; popsci.com) Two 9x12-in. sheets smooth Bienfang Bristol Board (19 cents ea.; dickblick.com) T-6 Texan Vacu Canopy ($2.96; squadron.com; #SQ9523) Panasonic 2.5-volt 3.3F Gold Cap ($5.22; digikey.com; #P6966-ND)

easy

hard

Small electric motor (free; salvaged) Plastic propeller (57 cents; tower

hobbies.com; #LXHHV9)

Two header pins (27 cents;

jameco.com; #103185-3)

AA four-battery holder (90 cents;

digikey.com; #BH24AAW-ND)

Four AA batteries ($3.99)

5 THINGS . . . YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOU COULD MAP

1 CELL RECEPTION

Rather than curse the heavens the next time your carrier drops a call, head to cellreception.com to find the location of more than 124,000 FCCregistered towers. Equipped with the map, you can avoid dead zones and find out which carrier in your area offers the most reliable service.

2 CRIMINAL ACTIVITY 1. PRINT THE PARTS Download the eAT-6 plan PDF from popsci.com and print each sheet on a separate piece of Bristol Board, or any thick paper that works in your printer.

2. ASSEMBLE THE BODY Carefully bend and glue the fuselage and wings into shape. Add the cowling and elevator, and glue the wings in place. Decorate it with decals or markers.

3. MOTORIZE IT Solder the Gold Cap to the motor, and solder two threeinch wires to the Gold Cap terminals on one end and header pins on the other. Slide the power system into the plane, and route the header pins out of the tail. (The capacitor should sit near the rear of the cockpit.) Glue the engine-nose disk to the front of the cowling, and add the cowling trim ring. Afﬁx the plastic propeller to the electric motor’s shaft.

Header pins

Gold Cap capacitor

Motor

Want to know which streets are prone to robberies or where you’re likely to find a fistfight? Just plug the crime into incidentlog.com, and the site will return a felony-filled map. You can also use it to view clusters of crime to scope out a city or neighborhood before moving in.

3 YOUR JOGGING ROUTE Plot your run and plan your pace on walkjogrun.net, and the site will calculate the time it will take, the total distance of the trek and the calories you’ll burn on the way. Peruse other runners’ favorite loops, and pin up your own for public viewing.

4 YOUR NEXT HOUSE

Putting the “location, location, location” maxim to good use, housingmaps.com offers a god’s-eye view of the unruly heaps of real-estate listings on Craigslist. The map lets you quickly sort through apartments, condos or houses in your price range, all without losing sight of the neighborhood you want.

5 PIRATE ATTACKS 4. FUEL UP Carefully bend each wing so it’s angled up slightly. Install the AA batteries into a battery holder, and connect it to the header pins sticking out of the plane to juice the capacitor. Charge the plane until the motor is spinning at its maximum rpm, and disconnect it.

5. FLY AWAY Hold the plane and point it into the wind. Launch using a flinging motion with your arm, not your wrist. The plane will fly in a left-hand circle, the diameter of which depends on the amount of deflection that you bend into the rudder [see plans]. Bend the elevator slightly upward to make it climb.

Yarrr! Explore a year’s worth of maritime piracy—the real skull-andcrossbones variety—at Icc-ccs .org/extra/display.php. The map marks oceans with details on every high-seas attack, like last year’s armed theft on a fishing vessel in the Strait of Malacca.—Eric Mika

POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 89

PS0607H20_Build It.indd 89

4/7/07 1:06:39 AM

HOW 2.0

BETTER

TOSS OUT THE TiVo

Microsoft’s Media Center software is more hackable and powerful—and it’s free

THERE’S ONE OFT-OVERLOOKED reason to upgrade to Microsoft’s new operating system, Vista: the chance to get Media Center software bundled free. Media Center, which comes with the Premium and Ultimate versions of Vista, lets your computer display and record live TV and corral your music, photos and video. And since it’s running on a PC, you can install add-ons for more functionality, like auto-

CLIP THE COMMERCIALS An advertiser’s nightmare, the ShowAnalyzer add-on for DVRSToolbox (both free; babgvant.com) strips commercials from recorded TV shows and can convert programs for viewing on portable devices like iPods and smartphones. 90 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2007

PS0607H20_UseItBetter.indd 90

matically cutting out commercials, converting recordings to an iPod format, or even controlling your home. Connect a set-top-box-style media-center PC such as the Sony Vaio XL3 [above] to your TV and get rid of your DVR and DVD player, or just slip a TV card into a regular MC-enabled computer and connect it to your cable line. Below, our favorite tricks. Find more at thegreenbutton.com.—Rick Broida

POINT. CLICK. RECORD

eBAY ON DEMAND

RUN YOUR HOUSE

No! You forgot to set your PC to record Battlestar Galactica! Just ﬁnd any other Internet-connected computer, log into the MSN Remote Record service (free; tinyurl.com/24ml52), and schedule the recording using an online TV guide.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if you got outbid in an auction for that Fonzie lunchbox while watching a Happy Days rerun? MceAuction (free; scendix.com) pops up an alert over the show that’s playing and lets you up your price with your remote control.

Is the living room too cold? No, don’t get up—mControl ($75; embeddedautomation .com) lets you operate homeautomation systems from Insteon or X10, giving you couch-based command over lights, thermostats, security cameras and more.

LUIS BRUNO; FACING PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: LUIS BRUNO (4); VAN MARDIAN (2)

USE IT

POPSCI.COM

4/7/07 12:32:46 AM

HOW 2.0

THE

MINUTE PROJECT

POOR MAN’S LASER LEVEL WHY: To hang pictures straight, cheaply

DIY: 1. Mount a laser pointer on a carpenter’s level at a right angle. 2. Suction-cup the apparatus to a wall, and tilt the laser to make a line. 3. Make sure it’s level, and hang your Picasso. HAVE AN IDEA FOR A 5-MINUTE PROJECT? Send it to us at h20@time4.com.

OFFICE TRICK OF THE MONTH

KILL THE CLUTTER

UNDERNEATH IT ALL Neatening

EVERY DRIVE, hub and USB-powered doohickey that you plug into your

up your desk doesn’t have to be expensive— altogether, the materials necessary to do this trick cost less than 30 bucks.

computer eats up another patch of your already-crowded desk and thickens the cable jungle slowly taking it over. Fed up with the growing mess, entrepreneur Van Mardian came up with an ingenious solution: He attached a pegboard to the underside of his Ikea desk using shackles and wooden dowels and mounted his equipment on it with 18-gauge wire. Now his desktop is clear of all but the bare essentials, and everything else is neatly out of the way yet still easily accessible. Learn how to do this with your own desk at decluttered.com.—Doug Cantor

SURVIVES UP TO 15-FOOT DROP TEST

RUGGED ABS PLASTIC WITH STEEL PLATES

BRIGHT WHITE LIFETIME LED

WATER-RESISTANT

4AA HANDHELD

2D HANDHELD

4AA SWIVEL HEAD

4D LANTERN

HANDHELD SPOTLIGHT

MULTI-NEEDS

OUTDOOR WORK

WORKBENCH PROJECTS

BIG JOBS

LONG DISTANCE

Energizer, Energizer Bunny design and other marks are trademarks of Energizer.

HOW 2.0

ASK A

GEEK

IS IT SAFE TO SURF ON AN OPEN NETWORK? GLENN FLEISHMAN is the editor of Wi-Fi Networking News (wifinetnews.com).

card or Social Security number, but when you use the Internet through a Wi-Fi hotspot that isn’t passwordprotected, you may be doing just that. On open networks like those in coffee shops and parks, snoopers can use software to see all your data as it passes to and from your computer through the hotspot’s Wi-Fi access point, allowing them to read your e-mail, redirect you to bogus Web pages to fool you into entering private data, and even stick viruses on your machine. There are ways, though, to protect your privacy without giving up free Wi-Fi altogether. First, keep your anti-virus and anti-spyware software updated, and enter personal info only on secured Web sites (look for “https” and a lock icon in your browser window). For a higher level of security, pay for a service like Secure-Tunnel (from $30/year; www.secure-tunnel.com) to encrypt your data before it leaves your computer. Or add a virtual private network (VPN) connection, which uses encryption and other means to secure all the data entering and leaving your computer, producing the equivalent of static for eavesdroppers. Subscribe to an inexpensive VPN service like the easy-to-use Hotspot Helper ($25/year; jiwire.com) or personalVPN ($40/year; witopia.net), which offers both Windows and Mac support.

GOT A QUESTION FOR OUR GEEK CHORUS? Send it to us at h20@time4.com.

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WHAT DO ANIMALS DREAM ABOUT?

J U S T

N E E D

When Spot pedals his legs in a futile sprint to nowhere during a nap, he’s probably reliving the morning’s game of fetch or his latest attempt to catch a squirrel. Scientists have found that, as with humans, what goes on in animals’ brains while they’re sleeping is inﬂuenced by what they did that day. In his lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, neuroscientist Matthew Wilson and his colleagues implanted electrodes in rats’ brains to record just what goes on in there while the critters are catching some

T O

K N O W

shut-eye. Wilson observed the rodents’ brain activity ﬁrst as they ran through a maze and then when they were sleeping afterward. The activity in the sleeping rats’ hippocampus—the area most responsible for forming autobiographical memories—matched patterns detected while they had been in the maze. At the same time, the visual cortex replayed corresponding sequences too, suggesting that the sleeping rats were not only remembering how they scurried through the maze but also what they had seen—all in the order that it had actually occurred. u

GARY RANDALL/GETTY IMAGES; INSET: GEORGETTE DOUWMA/GETTY IMAGES

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But mazes aren’t the only thing rats dream about. Wilson’s team has recorded many unidentiﬁed brain-activity patterns, which they hypothesize are memories of the rodents’ “free time” spent sitting in their cages or hanging out with other rats. The relatively simple daily life of rats and other animals makes for what appear to be unimaginative dreams. “People’s dreams tend to be more complicated, with bizarre content,” Wilson says, “because our life experience is more complex than many animals’.” Replaying the day’s events, he says, might be a way for animals and humans to learn from the past in order to make better choices in the future. For example, dreaming about the maze might help a rat take a more direct route to the cheese on its next attempt. “That,” Wilson says, “is the kind of learning you don’t have time for when you’re awake.”—Corey Binns

Q A

Is it true that I use only 10 percent of my brain?

Historians have traced the earliest reference of this rumor back to the beginning of the 20th century, when it was perpetuated by self-help gurus promising to expand people’s mental abilities. But just as a few sips of a tonic made from herbs and roots will fail to improve one’s physique, the brain claim is resoundingly false. “There’s no ques-

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BRAIN DRAIN Your brain burns a lot of energy, even if you’re not using it much.

tion,” says Marcus Raichle, a neurologist and professor of radiology at Washington University in St. Louis, “you’re using every little bit of this thing.” Even when you’re sleeping or just sitting around watching TV, your brain is burning a disproportionate amount of energy for its size. At 2 percent of an individual’s body weight, the brain accounts for 20 percent of the total energy the body consumes. Most of that energy, however, is used for tasks other than thinking. Scientists know that the remaining energy is largely used for the organ’s regular upkeep and communication among neurons. The rest, they speculate, might go toward preparing the brain to receive information by making predictions based on past experiences. For example, instead of scanning your entire fridge each time you go to grab some milk, you reach directly for the shelf where you last left it. This preprocessing strategy helps us deal with the enormous amount of detail we encounter on a regular basis. Regardless, you can be certain that all of your brain is working hard, even when you’re not thinking hard. “One needs to back away from the notion that the only thing the brain is doing is sitting around waiting for something to happen,” Raichle says. “Every piece of it is running full-tilt all the time.” —Todd Neale

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THE FIRST ASSASSINATION OF THE 21ST CENTURY this group administered consisted of what was known in the espionage jargon of the day as wet work: abducting and/or assassinating perceived â&#x20AC;&#x153;enemies of the people,â&#x20AC;? wherever in the world they might be. One KGB memo stated, â&#x20AC;&#x153;As these traitors . . . have been sentenced to death in their absence, this sentence will be carried out abroad.â&#x20AC;? Radiation soon entered the arsenal for high-priority assassinations. In 1957, for instance, Nikolai Khokhlovâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;like Litvinenko, a former-agent-turnedcritic who ďŹ&#x201A;ed Russia to live in the Westâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;took part in an anti-Soviet conference in Frankfurt, Germany. Shortly after sipping a cup of coffee that somebody handed him, he felt ill and fainted. Food poisoning was initially suspected, until strange lesions began appearing on Khokhlovâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face and his hair started coming out in clumps. Doctors at an American military hospital eventually identiďŹ ed radioactive thallium and managed to save his life. Khokhlov felt conďŹ dent that the Kremlin was behind the hit. Now some regard last yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s legislation authorizing killings outside Russiaâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and a rash of recent assassinationsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;as a bit too reminiscent of the bad old days. â&#x20AC;&#x153;This is not a retreat to Soviet times,â&#x20AC;? Kondaurov says, â&#x20AC;&#x153;but to one period of it, around 1937. [These killings show that] weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re arriving at some violent authoritarian regime, a new quality of the Russian authorities thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s similar to the worst examples of the past.â&#x20AC;? Kremlin ofďŹ cials have strenuously denied any involvement in Litvinenkoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s murder. And just because the polonium probably came from a Russian reactor doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t mean that the assassination was ofďŹ cially sanctioned. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Reactors are making grams and grams of the (CONTINUED ON PAGE 100)

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THE FIRST ASSASSINATION OF THE 21ST CENTURY material,” says Middlesex University’s Priest. “It would not necessarily be noticed if a few micrograms went missing.” Gennady Gudkov, a member of the Russian parliament and a former FSB ofﬁcer, agrees. “There is no doubt that the people who killed Litvinenko are from Russia,” he says. “There are no other leads in the Litvinenko case except Russian leads. But trying to connect the Russian leads with the state—these are very different things.” We may never know who orchestrated the Litvinenko murder, but, like the radiation it left behind, the event has raised a frightening spectre. The prospect of an increasingly authoritarian Russian regime, one that tucks vials of radioactive material into the breast pockets of hit men before dispatching

them abroad to silence its critics, is certainly alarming. But even scarier, says Oksana Antonenko, the program director for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, is the prospect that the Kremlin had nothing to do with it.

MURDER, GLOBALIZED Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world has rightly feared what would happen if terrorists intent on mass murder managed to make a dirty bomb from one of the caches of nuclear material scattered across the region. The Litvinenko murder has created another anxiety entirely. In the pantheon of collective paranoia, weapons of mass destruction are now going to have to make room for the

threat of targeted nuclear terrorism. Putin’s predilection for state control has one potentially positive effect in this regard: It suggests that he has a grip on nuclear safety and security. If, however, a rogue group in Russia obtained and deployed the polonium210 on its own, it suggests that Putin’s vaunted authority has limited reach. “Litvinenko’s killing may be a sign that Putin is not as in control as the West believes he is,” Antonenko says. “It may mean that nuclear material can still be acquired, and that elements with access to it can still act independently.” The breakup of the Soviet Union and its massive military and nuclear infrastructure loosened control over a vast and frightening arsenal. Security has improved enormously since the chaos of the early 1990s, but there are still a large number of alarming sites—ex-biological-warfare laboratories, chemical-weapon facilities—throughout the country. Russia (CONTINUED ON PAGE 103)

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THE FUTURE OF ASSASSINATION (CONTINUED FROM PAGE 100)

THE FIRST ASSASSINATION OF THE 21ST CENTURY had an estimated 44,000 tons of chemical agents (including plague, tularemia, anthrax and smallpox) at the end of the Cold War. Just 20 percent are due to be eliminated by the end of this year. “The concern is that [these materials] might be susceptible to rogue elements who

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THESE THREATS ARE NOW PART OF THE LANDSCAPE. could use them in pursuit of ﬁnancial or other interests,” Antonenko says. It’s hard to see what security services can do to stop trafﬁc in substances that are dangerous even in microscopic doses, apart from installing ever more sophisticated detection technology and carrying out ever more invasive searches

to sell the material to an undercover police ofﬁcer posing as a representative of a terrorist organization. At the moment, of course, former Russian spies and current Russian dissidents—not everyday citizens—are the most likely targets for exotic assassinations using polonium or other

unconventional weapons. But these threats are now part of the landscape, and someone will always be prepared to spend the time and money necessary to use them. Litvinenko’s murder is more than just a bizarre true-crime thriller. It’s the ﬁrst assassination of the 21st century, the ﬁrst strike in a new world of high-tech murder. Walter Litvinenko was in the room when his son passed away. “My son died,” he said later, “and he was killed by a little nuclear bomb.” The aftershocks from that explosion are still rippling through the world’s security and intelligence communities. And perhaps that’s just what the assassins intended. Maybe they wanted to send a message: This is a new and horrible way to die, and, in the end, no one is safe from us. James Geary is the former Europe editor for Time magazine. He is the author of The Body Electric: An Anatomy of the New Bionic Senses and The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism.

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THE FUTURE THEN

POPULAR SCIENCE FROM THE POPULAR SCIENCE ARCHIVES FEBRUARY 1964

Gentlemen, Start Your Engines

OTHER STORIES FROM THE FEBRUARY 1964 ISSUE

One inventor put his own spin on the traditional four-cylinder design

We were a fan of Austin Mercer’s ultra-efficient rotary-radial car engine, but we didn’t quite know what to make of it. Our final evaluation: “This could be the weirdest piston engine yet.” Despite the engine’s unconventional looks, Mercer, a habitual inventor, had a promising machine. The design (four cylinders that opened and closed as they spun inside a stationary rim) improved fuel efficiency by creating four times as many strokes per revolution as a typical piston engine. It never took Detroit by storm, but the dream of a better engine motivates tinkerers to this day. For present-day tales of innovation, including an inventor who has boosted fuel efficiency by 40 percent with an equally odd engine, turn to page 51.—Abby Seiff

COLD RUSH

“Your life may be saved one day by a new Air Force system of fighting plane-crash fires with helicopters,” we declared of the first whirlybirds designed to quench remote fires. The choppers, which carried fire-suppression kits on their bellies, flew over crashes and dumped water and foam on blazes faster than firetrucks could. Today, this same basic technology is used to fight the most dangerous forest fires.

LIGHT CONVERSATION

During the Vietnam War, POPULAR SCIENCE highlighted an innovation designed to give U.S. troops an edge. The newest walkie-talkie had receivers that clipped to a helmet and a handheld transmitter. But it was the improved range of one mile and reduced weight—“under two pounds”—that made it revolutionary.

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Precision machined exact fit tips, natural finish. Bits of modified S2 tool steel 36 industrial quality production bits, bit holding soft grip handle, 1/4" bit holding soft grip handle. Packed in a durable molded storage box. • Toll Free: 800/494.6104

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www.WHOLEHOUSEFAN.com

Free Expert Advice: 888-845-6597

www.wihatools.com/ps.htm POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 115

BIGGER. BADDER. AND THAT’S JUST THE COOLING SYSTEM.

PART# 8C34-8C403-A

THE NEW 2008 F-SERIES SUPER DUTY® WITH A SIX-RADIATOR COOLING SYSTEM. The frontal area of the main radiator on the 6.4L Power Stroke® diesel engine is 19% bigger. Of course, there are the five other radiators on the engine, including a separate fuel-cooling system. Why? Because when you’re towing over 12 tons* up a steep grade, you need to keep your cool.

*Maximum towing of F-450 pickup is 24,500 lbs. when properly equipped.

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