popular science 2006 october by Yufei Chang

ÂŠ2006 Visa U.S.A. Inc.

2006. Your company introduces RoboDog. 2010. You get sued by the makers of RoboMailman. Never a dull week. Today’s small businesses are facing challenges that their predecessors couldn’t have imagined. New technologies. New legislation. New insurance issues. That’s why, at Travelers, we’re always working to identify changes in your industry and to help make sure your insurance stays in-synch. Call your independent agent about Travelers. After all, we think small business owners should feel in control—no matter what the future unleashes.

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THE FUTURE NOW

FOUNDED IN 1872

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CONTENTS THIS MONTH’S GUIDE TO INNOVATION AND DISCOVERY

OCTOBER ’06

VOLUME 269 #4

features The brilliant 10

55 POPSCI’S 5TH ANNUAL TRIBUTE TO YOUNG GENIUS Worms, planets, extra dimensions: just a few of the things that inspire the most creative young scientists of the year. HOW IT WORKS

70 YOUR FLAT-SCREEN TV What goes on inside a superthin liquid-crystal display. By Adam M. Bright FUTURE TECH: AVIATION

ON THE COVER: NICK KALOTERAKIS; THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: JOHN MACNEILL (2); GRAHAM MURDOCH; PIXELGARDEN.COM; JOHN B. CARNETT

72 NEW SECRETS OF AREA 51

Stealth jets? Hypersonic bombers? What’s really being developed at the military’s most famous classified hangar? By Bill Sweetman

INSTAnT EXPERT

80 UNVEILING THE FIRST INVISIBILITY SHIELD New materials that bend light around objects are bringing the science-fiction dream closer to reality. By JR Minkel the future of the internet

82 THE INTERNET IS SICK . . . BUT WE CAN MAKE IT BETTER How ideas from biology—evolution, immunity and forensics—will keep your PC safe from hackers. By Dan Tynan

80 82

OCTOBER 2006 POPULAR SCIENCE 07

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CONTENTS

NEW AND

IMPROVED!

p OPsCI on the web

w w w . p o p s c i . c o m

REGULARS MEGAPIXELS

14 THE MUST-SEE PHOTOS OF THE MONTH Sunstorms that cause blackouts; a bullet-shaped bike.

MINI MACHINES . . .

WHAT’S NEW A Formula One–style rig you can drive to the store.

22 THE GOODS

A scope that shoots pictures; the fastest saw in the shed.

26 HOME TECH

Get the purest air possible in your home.

e-EYE CANDY

Can’t get enough Megapixels? Click through photos to your heart’s content at popsci.com/photogallery.

28 GADGETS

GPS phones that promise you’ll never get lost again.

HEADLINES 37 SPACE

Homegrown lunar landers compete in New Mexico.

44 WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?

IVE LUSAGE C X E VER CO

X-PRIZE CUP Live from Las Cruces, New Mexico, it’s rockets, planes and lunar landers. See exclusive videos, photos and more at popsci.com/xcup.

Former Microsoftie Nathan Myhrvold reinvents invention.

51 SHRINKAGE

A stamp-like chip turns everyday objects into hyperlinks.

52 THE ANNOTATED MACHINE

Wall-climbing robots that scale buildings for cracks.

HOW 2.0

93 YOU BUILT WHAT?!

A robo-dinosaur roasts marshmallows with its breath.

94 GEEK GUIDE

Gear up for Halloween with a high-tech haunted house.

98 BUILD IT

Blast MP3s from a vintage radio.

102 GRAY MATTER

Our mad scientist makes salt with fire and smoke.

FYI

104 Hallucinations, killer asteroids and brain freeze.

OTHER STUFF

10 FROM THE EDITOR 12 LETTERS 132 THE FUTURE THEN

08 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

PLUS MORE WEB EXCLUSIVES “BLACK” AIRPLANES

In this issue, we report on topsecret military aircraft. Could our coverage compromise national security? Join the debate at popsci.com/secretplanes.

SCARED OF THE DARK? You will be once you visit our online scream fest.

HOW 2.0’S HOUSE OF HOMEMADE HORRORS

Frighten your friends and freak out your kids with our ghoulish guide to DIY scare tactics at popsci.com/haunted.

THE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING ASTON MARTIN No one stole this $260,000 ride— we just activated its invisibility cloak. See the video at popsci.com/aston.

POPSCI.COM

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: LUIS BRUNO; EYE OF SCIENCE/PHOTO RESEARCHERS; JAMIE SNEDDON; COURTESY MASTEN SPACE SYSTEMS; LUIS BRUNO

and other photo marvels, at popsci.com

21 AUTOMOTIVE

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FROM THE EDITOR THE FUTURE NOW

Editorial Director Scott Mowbray

Editor Mark Jannot Deputy Editor Glenn Coleman Design Director Sam Syed

ONE OF THEM DIAGNOSED A LEAK in the universe through which gravity steadily drains. Another is using hidden currents within our bodies to create custom-built organs. A third, only 26 years old, upended a long-established piece of zoological orthodoxy, endorsed by a guy named Darwin, that held that worms move through earth by eating everything in their path. (Instead, she found, they perform the far less energy-intensive feat of flinging their mouth inside out to wedge open a tunnel.) And these are just three of this year’s Brilliant 10, POPULAR SCIENCE’s fifth annual roster of 10 dazzling young intellects who are rocking their respective scientific fields and gearing up to change the way we look at, and live in, our world. We don’t use any rigid set of criteria when choosing each year’s honorees— basically, we solicit nominations from hundreds of eminent scientists and whittle the candidates down to the ones whose work really blows the tops of our heads off. But close examination of this year’s crop does reveal some common characteristics. For one thing, these researchers tend to be so cross-disciplinarily promiscuous that we had to argue over where on the scientific spectrum to slot them. Some are so ardent in the pursuit of their insights that they’ve mastered entire new subjects looking for tools and solutions. And of course, they’re young. Frankly, there’s no absolute definition of that criterion either, though I couldn’t help noting that this year’s crew tops out at 41, which by sheer coincidence happens to be my age as well—so I’ll bittersweetly embrace it as marking the northern boundary for youthful achievement. (Don’t be surprised if that limit next year slides to 42.) Most important, each one of our Brilliant 10 serves as a powerful advertisement for the fundamental value of pure research. Omar Yaghi has essentially created a new class of materials with outrageous storage capacity—crystals that may one day make hydrogen-powered cars affordable and carbon-dioxide filters effective. But he started out with no aim but to pursue the unknown. “If you do that honestly,” he says, “then usefulness to society will come.”

10 dazzling young intellects who will change our world

MARK JANNOT mark.jannot@time4.com

10 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY Art Director Matthew Cokeley Photo Editor Kristine LaManna Staff Photographer John B.Carnett Contributing Artists Peter Bollinger, Bryan Christie, Stephanie Fehmel, Kevin Hand, Nick Kaloterakis, John MacNeill, Graham Murdoch, Stephen Rountree, Bob Sauls, Nik Schulz, Paul Wootton Photo Intern Susan Sheeran POPSCI.COM Web Editor Megan Miller Assistant Web Editor John Mahoney POPULAR SCIENCE PROPERTIES

Publisher Gregg R. Hano General Manager Robert Novick National Advertising Director Howard S. Mittman 212-779-5112 Northeast Advertising Office: Manager Devon Walsh 212-779-5322, Colleen Kassner 212-779-5007, Peter Romano 212-779-5148, John Campbell 212-779-5108, Ad Assistant Chase Girvin, Executive Assistant Christopher Graves Midwest Advertising Office: Manager John Marquardt 312-8320626, Amy Tinucci 312-832-0624, Ad Assistant Nikki Schneider Los Angeles Advertising Office: Manager Robert Hoeck 310-268-7484, Ad Assistant Mary Infantino Detroit Advertising Office: Manager Edward A. Bartley 248-988-7723, Ad Assistant Diane Pahl San Francisco Advertising Office: Andrew Kramer 415-439-4601, Ad Assistant Patty Tredway 415-439-4607 Southern Regional Advertising Office: Manager Dave Hady 404-364-4090, Ad Assistant Christy Chapman Classified Advertising Sales Joan Orth 212-779-5555 Direct Response Sales Marie Isabelle 800-280-2069 Interactive Sales Manager Andrew Maiorana Business Manager Frank Visone Creative Services Director Christy Chapin Ellinger Sales Development Director Michael Gallic Sales Development Manager Eric Bratten Marketing Art Director Mary McGann Promotions Manager Eshonda Caraway Advertising Coordinator Evelyn Negron Consumer Marketing Director John McCarthy Senior Planning Manager Margerita Catwell Consumer Marketing Managers Adam Feifer, Kristen Shue 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

President Thomas F.X. Beusse Editorial Director Scott Mowbray President, Time4 Entertainment Paul Speaker Senior Vice President, Finance and Operations Victor M. Sauerhoff Senior Vice President, Consumer Marketing Monica Ray Senior Vice President, Time4 Digital Todd Unger Vice President, Time4 Media Solutions Bruce Revman Director of Communications Samara Farber Mormar Directors, Technology Annabelle Soper, David Yu Senior Manager, Technology Larry Corby Technology Support Randy Ip, Joseph Lamothe, Andre Reddy 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.

POPSCI.COM

JOHN B. CARNETT

TODAY’S YOUTH

EDITORIAL Executive Editor Michael Moyer Managing Editor Audra Shanley Military, Aviation & Automotive Editor Eric Adams Senior Editors Nicole Dyer, Mike Haney, Kalee Thompson Copy Chief Rina Bander Associate Editors Joe Brown, Doug Cantor, Martha Harbison Assistant Editors Lauren Aaronson, Bjorn Carey Editorial Assistant Barbara Caraher Editor at Large Dawn Stover Contributing Automotive Editor Stephan Wilkinson Contributing Editors Theodore Gray, Eric Hagerman, Joseph Hooper, Suzanne Kantra Kirschner, Preston Lerner, Gregory Mone, Steve Morgenstern, Jeffrey Rothfeder, Jessica Snyder Sachs, Rebecca Skloot, Bill Sweetman, Phillip Torrone, James Vlahos, Charles Wardell, William Speed Weed Contributing Troubadour Jonathan Coulton Contributing Futurist Andrew Zolli Interns Nicole Price Fasig, Rachel Horn, Carla Thomas

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LETTERS LETTERS@POPSCI.COM

“THE TWO-TIERED INTERNET WOULD BE LIKE A PHONE COMPANY CHARGING MORE FOR CALLING YOUR FAMILY THAN YOUR FRIENDS.” Senior editor Eric Adams replies: Great idea—we’d love to bring all our friends up, too! The problem has to do with the weight of such a vehicle. Launching a modified 737 into suborbit would require multiple large, extremely powerful rocket motors, which would also add enormously to the cost. It’s far more efficient to launch a smaller, lighter aircraft. Also, adapting such a large frame to withstand supersonic flight and a turbulent, high-friction reentry would be nearly impossible.

Lean to Turn

Fly Even Higher

I just read your article on the rocket made from old Learjets [“It’s a Rocket! It’s a Plane! It’s…Rocketplane!”; August]. As promising as this may seem, it looks to me like a lot of trouble to convert a small jet to carry only three people to the edge of space. Why not use a Boeing 737, replace its wings as on the Learjet, and put two rocket engines in the tail? Then up to 24 people could experience a few minutes of zero gravity.

Doug Bruner Via e-mail

12 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

I found “Your Very Own Personal Tank” [Concepts & Prototypes, Aug.] very interesting, but I wanted to point out one commonly made error. The author states that to turn the Hyanide motorbike left, “you’d push the right side of the handlebar forward. . . . It’s the same motion as on a motorcycle.” This might be correct for the Hyanide, but not for a moving motorcycle. The reason is that motorcycles are turned by leaning, not by steering as you would a car. Pushing the right side of the handlebar forward would cause the motorcycle to lean, and thus head, to the right. Phil Hayes Hampton, Va.

Click and Pay In “Coming Soon: The Web Toll” [Headlines, July], a proponent of a two-tiered Internet system compared paying for faster delivery of Internet content to paying more for overnight FedEx delivery. My take is that consumers have already shelled out extra for speed with broadband rather than dial-up. A more accurate analogy would

be FedEx charging more based on the content of a package, or a phone company charging more for calling your family than your friends. If this tiered broadband ever gets passed, it will allow the telecoms to control where their customers surf. Tin Eng New York City There might be another option for Internet companies who want to recoup bandwidth costs. In England, where I studied, my Internet service charged different prices based on how many gigabytes per month you want to upload or download. This seems logical. In the end, people will be more careful about what they download, only those who benefit from the high bandwidth will pay for it, and Internet service in general will go faster for all. Sounds like a promising future to me! R. Priya Mathew St. Louis

THE FUTURE NOW

HOW TO CONTACT US Address: 2 Park Ave., 9th Floor New York, NY 10016 Fax: 212-779-5103 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, or visit us on AOL at keyword “popsci.” QUESTIONS FOR FYI We answer your science

questions in our FYI section. 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 60001 Tampa, FL 33660-0001 Phone: 800-289-9399 Web: popsci.com/manage INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS For inquiries regarding international licensing or syndication, please contact syndication@popsci.com.

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He’ll experience the most challenging training, use the latest technology, and get the strongest support. Before long, he’ll discover that he has become one of tomorrow’s leaders. Encourage him to consider becoming a Soldier – AN ARMY OF ONE.® ©2004. Paid for by the United States Army. All rights reserved. ®

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MEGAPIXELS

COURTESY TRANSITION REGION AND CORONAL EXPLORER/STANFORD-LOCKHEED INSTITUTE FOR SPACE RESEARCH/NASA

THE MUST-SEE PHOTOS OF THE MONTH

14 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

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SUN BURN

Solar storms can knock out power on Earth. New satellites will help us predict where and when Spewing billions of tons of plasma millions of miles into space, the sun’s eruptions, like this explosion captured by NASA’s SOHO probe, can be strikingly beautiful. But when they result in what scientists call coronal mass ejections—think seething bubbles of flung-off plasma—they can short-circuit satellites and trigger powerful magnetic shock waves that result in electrical power failures on Earth. NASA’s $540-million STEREO mission, whose two satellites were scheduled to launch in late August, is designed to capture 3-D images that identify Earth-bound solar storms days before their effects reach us. Positioned at points ahead of and behind the Earth in its orbit, the satellites will work like a pair of eyes to more precisely measure a storm’s size and location—and let us identify it in time to take action and prevent damage.—Rachel Horn

POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 15

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MEGAPIXELS

LOW RIDER

One day. One bullet-shaped bike. One crazy world record

BEN EADIE (4)

In late July, Canadian triathlete Greg Kolodziejzyk pedaled his recumbent bicycle 650 miles around a California track to break the human-powered 24-hour distance record. Equipped with food, water and waste bags, the 70-pound carbon-fiber machine is capable of hitting 60 mph on a flat straightaway. “Once you get over 12 or 15 mph, 90 percent of your pedaling effort goes to pushing air,” Kolodziejzyk says. “The key to going fast under human power is to minimize the hole you punch” in the atmosphere. To build a bike that did just that, Kolodziejzyk teamed up with fairing designer Ben Eadie, who used flow-dynamics software to test dozens of designs in a virtual wind tunnel. See more details at adventuresofgreg.com. by Tom clynes photograph by Jennifer Armand

16 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

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RACE DAY Kolodziejzyk circled the Eureka, California, track 1,800 times. Left: with his wife, Helen, and designer Ben Eadie before the attempt.

p OPsCI ON THE WEB

See more amazing photos at popsci.com/gallery.

POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 17

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MEGAPIXELS

UNEASY BREATHING

In a disastrous year, the mining industry looks more closely at its survival gear

PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE/WPN

This picture was taken outside Pennsylvania’s Twin Rocks coal mine last spring. But it could easily have been taken 25 years ago, mining technology has evolved so little since then. Miner Joe Tenerowicz is demonstrating a self-rescuer, a chemical-based oxygen-production system that provides an hour of backup air. The device, which has been the standard emergency breather for a quarter century, was the only technology available to coal workers in West Virginia’s Sago Mine tragedy, which left 13 dead last January. This year has proved particularly fatal for U.S. miners; to date, 37 have died in 21 incidents, a 30 percent higher rate than in recent years. For the industry, it’s been a wake-up call. Under the federal Miner Act, which went into effect in June, better devices—including replacement cartridges that increase the breathing time of existing self-rescuers and new “hybrid” units that rely on filters to deal with poor air quality—will be developed in the next two years. by NICOLE PRICE FASIG photograph by ANDY STARNES

18 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

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POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 19

Create a room with color.

Benjamin Moore and

For years, Benjamin Moore has been Pottery Barn’s favorite source for beautiful wall colors. Now, Benjamin Moore is proud to offer the Pottery Barn Seasonal Color Collection, a complete palette of stylish colors that coordinate perfectly. Now it’s easier than ever to decorate with confidence.

Buy 4 gallons of

Regal® Interior Paint and receive a $25 Pottery Barn Gift Card

1-800-6-PAINT-6 (1-800-672-4686) benjaminmoore.com

Benjamin Moore and Pottery Barn Fall 2006 Color shown: AC-36 Shenandoah Taupe. Color accuracy is ensured only when tinted in quality Benjamin Moore® paints. Color representations may differ slightly from actual paint. Mail-in offer. Allow 4 – 6 weeks for delivery of gift card. See store associate for details and mail-in form. Offer valid on purchases between 9/15/06 and 11/15/06 at participating independent Benjamin Moore® retailers. Proof of purchase required. Gift card request must be received by 11/30/06. ©2006 Benjamin Moore & Co. Benjamin Moore, Regal and the triangle “M” symbol are registered trademarks, licensed to Benjamin Moore & Co. Pottery Barn is a registered trademark of Williams-Sonoma, Inc.

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WHAT’S NEW TECH THAT PUTS THE FUTURE IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND

THIS MONTH

A new twist on the hammer

Your own HD homemovie library

Cellphones that guide the way

LUCKY BRITS Caparo’s T1 is street-legal only in the U.K. To be sold in the U.S., it needs crashtesting and airbags.

COURTESY DAVID KIMBER; BACKGROUND ILLUSTRATION: GRAHAM MURDOCH

GO, STREET RACER, GO A racecar you could drive to the grocery store … if it had a trunk

WANNA BUY A RACECAR? No problem, I know a guy. Two, actually—veteran engineers from the renowned McLaren supercar shop. Their new company, Caparo Vehicle Technologies, has designed the first affordable, street-legal racecar: the $300,000 Caparo T1. Sounds steep, until you consider that a used F1 pro racecar goes for about a million bucks—a transmission that can handle the engine’s 900-plus horsepower costs $70,000 by itself. Caparo avoids the expense of generating massive amounts of power by focusing on making the T1 light instead. Its 480hp engine (using a $13,000 gearbox) can blast

POPSCI.COM

sunday driver

the car to 60 mph in less than 2.5 seconds and top out at 205 mph. Getting the T1 street-ready required only proper lights and noise and emission controls. Safety wasn’t a problem because, like most racecars, the T1’s carbon-fiber body is designed to protect the riders in 200mph crashes. But that doesn’t mean you’ll want to run errands in it. Controlling the ultrasensitive steering and speed-eager engine is physically draining at neighborhood speeds. “It’s so powerful,” says co-creator Ben Scott-Geddes, “that it’s pretty grueling under 100 mph.” Better hold on to the minivan.—Joe Brown

amateur andretti

best for

CAPARO T1 HORSEPOWER: 480 hp WEIGHT: 1,036 lbs. ENGINE: 2.4-liter V8 0–60: Less than 2.5 sec. TOP SPEED: 205 mph SEATING CAPACITY: Two PRICE: $300,000 (est.) AVAILABILITY: October (U.K. only; U.S. to follow in 2007)

OCTOBER 2006 POPULAR SCIENCE 21

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HOT JAVA What’s the point of brewing a whole pot of coffee if every cup after the first is tepid? This French press insulates your brew with a double layer of heat-resistant borosilicate glass. Bodum Chambord Double-Wall Coffee Press

$80; bodum.com

LIGHT IT UP This bedside tray will glow until your kids are no longer afraid of the dark—in tests, 12 years and counting. Its phosphorescent particles are hermetically sealed in, impervious to the elements that would otherwise break them down. Firefly Light Tray $47; fireflylightinginnovations.com

A PRO PROJECTOR Get a big white screen, a dark room and this projector, the first to shine an image in 1080p, the highest resolution possible. Its video processor can handle 500 million calculations per second. Marantz VP-11S1 $20,000; marantz.com

SUPERSAWNIC For builders cutting dozens of 2x4s a day, every second saved helps. This circular saw’s 6.5-inch blade whirrs around at 6,100 rpm to rip through boards faster than any other framing saw. Ridgid Fuego Compact Framing Saw $140; ridgid.com

CRYSTAL BLUE PERSUASION Why is this GSM phone so insanely expensive? Its sapphire-crystal screen and laser-perforated ceramic keypad won’t scratch, and its 18-karat-gold case won’t fail to impress … well, some people, at least. Vertu Constellation $18,000; vertu.com

20 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

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WHAT’S NEW GRANNY’S INBOX

ROCK ’N’ RIDE

This connected printer uses a phone line to periodically dial into an e-mail account that only certain people can send to. Then it automatically prints new messages, even ones with photos.

Cycling with earbuds is downright dangerous, but if you need music for motivation, try these. The ‘buds mount in helmet-attached cups, which sit just outside your ears and won’t block the sounds of traffic. SlipStreamz $13; slipstreamz.com

HP Printing Mailbox with Presto $150; presto.com

SHOOTING SCOPE Line up your subject—bird, sunset, celeb—and snap a picture with the built-in three-megapixel digicam. It’s the first spotting scope to take pictures through its primary, 14x viewing lens, so the images look as good as what you see. Celestron VistaPix IS70 $480; celestron.com

TRAINER ON HAND

IT GETS YOUR LINGO

This is not a watch. OK, it is, but it’s also your coach. It sets a weekly regimen and monitors your heart rate to determine how well you stick to it. Overachieve today, and it’ll let you go easy tomorrow. Slack off, and get ready to sweat. Suunto t4 $200; suunto.com

Finally, a gizmo that makes an effort to understand you. This in-dash navigation system employs IBM speechrecognition software to accept more natural commands. Instead of “Enter address…New York…Two Park Ave.,” you can say “Go to Two Park Avenue, New York.” Pioneer AVIC-Z1 $2,250; pioneerelectronics.com

SOUND SUCKER Not sure if you got that floor completely clean? Ask the vac. It bounces sound waves around inside its filter to sense dirt and alerts you when the incoming air is clean. Hoover

THE GOODS 12 MUST-HAVE PRODUCTS BY JOE BROWN

WindTunnel 2

$380; hoover.com

IS THAT THE WEB IN YOUR POCKET? This dinner-roll-size gadget lets you instant message, make VoIP calls, or surf the Web wherever there’s Wi-Fi. It has a gigabyte of memory built in; add more with a Memory Stick. Sony Mylo $350; sonystyle.com

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WHAT’S NEW | HOME TECH

CLEAN AIR ACT HOW IT WORKS

Aluminum mesh filter

Ozone scrubber

The most thorough living-room air filter catches diseases so you don’t FILTERING YOUR AIR is one thing; purifying it is another— and one you don’t think about until flu season hits. But Oreck’s XL Professional AirT Purifier ($700; oreck.com) is the first to do just that in a living-roomfriendly package, using viruszapping technology previously seen only in nuclear submarines. The XL catches and destroys

particles down to .009 micron, putting the kibosh on 98 percent of airborne allergens (dust, pollen, smoke), along with bacteria, viruses and mold. So when your co-workers start calling in sick, you can breathe easy. You won’t even have to sweat the power bill: The XL costs as much to run as a 70-watt lightbulb.

AIR FLOW

Truman cell

—Sarah Z. Wexler

MAKING THE CLEANEST AIR The bottom fan sucks air through a basket filter that catches large gunk like hair. Then the air enters the Truman cell, where an electromagnetic field positively charges particles so that negatively charged

plates inside the cell can collect them. Nonliving things stick, but biological bits, such as viruses, get zapped by the plates’ 8,000 volts. Next, an aluminum mesh filter with a metal-oxide coating removes odors. An

ozone scrubber splits ozone into safer oxygen, and fans blow the clean air out at a 45-degree angle so that the purifier doesn’t reprocess it. The air in a 10-by-15-foot room is recycled every eight minutes.

Bottom fan

Basket filter

GET IT: $20; stanleyworks.com

HITTING A NAIL

26 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

even a little offINSIDE center twists a hammer slightly, forcing your arm to take the torque, which can damage muscles and tendons over time. So Stanley created the AVX to absorb the twists without sacrificing durability. An inner layer of soft rubber [A] soaks up the hammer’s rotation,

LOOK

while a harder outer layer [B] stays still in your hand. Twenty-four superstiff thermoplastic stabilizer bars [C] molded between the two layers run the entire length of the handle to snap the hammer back after it’s done twisting. Finally, the AVX’s heavier head means that gravity helps you swing straight. Delivering 30 percent less torque to your arm, it’s a hammer that won’t give you tennis elbow.—Chuck Cage

POPSCI.COM

DAVID ARKY

HAMMER DON’T HURT ’EM

HDTV Head down to your local HDTV retailer and ask them to tune all the screens to an action movie. You may see how some rear-projection DLP screens can sometimes create color separation on fast-moving objects, a weakness the industry refers to as the “rainbow effect.” This is because they project each color, one at a time, using a mechanical color wheel. Sony® SXRD™ technology projects all-at-once color to give you HD as it was meant to be. See the world’s most powerful HD experience yourself. Learn more at sony.com/HDTV

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WHAT’S NEW | GADGETS

TESTED

CAN YOU GUIDE ME NOW? We try the latest cellphone-based GPS navigation systems to find out

DID YOU KNOW you’re probably carrying a GPS device in your pocket? Since last year, cellphones have had a legally mandated tracking function so that 911 calls can be traced. Now carriers are letting you in on the navigation action, packing in more-powerful GPS receivers enhanced with triangulation from cell towers to do what a stand-alone GPS unit does: tell you where you are, guide you somewhere else, and find you a burger along the way.

I tested three of the newest mobile navigators, hitting the highways through the New Jersey ‘burbs and strolling Manhattan on foot. Each had periodic connection problems—GPS, cellular or both—and made minor routing mistakes, and I missed the occasional turn. But they all handled Jersey’s tricky traffic circles better than most drivers do. Just be sure to buy a dash mount: Navigating from your lap isn’t so easy, or safe.—Michael Myser

SPECS

MAPQUEST NAVIGATOR Sprint/Nextel; $10/month; mapquest.com ALK TECHNOLOGIES COPILOT LIVE Any Pocket PC 6 phone; $400; alk.com VZ NAVIGATOR Verizon; $10/month or $3/day; verizon wireless.com

EDITOR’S

CHOICE BB TESTED ON: Treo 700w

CA TESTED ON: Samsung A990

USABILITY

Navigator works like Verizon’s service [right], only not as well. Every screen took ages to load, and entering addresses was clunky. The phone didn’t actively track me in “pedestrian” mode, so I had to manually scroll through the directions to figure out where I was going.

The CoPilot is the most featurerich—edit mid-route, detour around traffic—but it uses a separate Bluetooth GPS receiver instead of the one in your phone. Maps come preloaded on an SD card. The Treo’s keypad made for rapid address entry, but the app froze frequently.

Ever use a phone? Look at a map? You can use VZ Navigator. Entering a destination is a breeze. Hit “navigate” to get a route, and it will download maps over your phone’s data connection. You can also search for points of interest such as restaurants, parks and gas stations.

NAVIGATION

Staid, basic maps with tiny directional arrows got the job done, and there were no routing mistakes. The voice direction was helpful, but it called out only turn instructions, not road names. Icons directly on the maps let me know when I was near food or fuel.

The 3-D map views helped me get my bearings. Since the app supports touchscreens, I could click directly on icons to quickly reroute for lunch. Too bad the maps were missing my two-year-old house, and the CoPilot struggled with connections indoors and in the city.

Simple maps with large, bright yellow arrows worked nicely on the small screen. Voice guidance from “Michelle” was soothing and helpful, pronouncing street names surprisingly well. Since VZ can also find your location with triangulation, I almost never lost the signal.

BEST FOR

Loyal Sprint customers desperate for directions or who are just getting to know a new area.

Road warriors, not walkers. Pedestrian routes were as-the-crow-flies, not directional.

Firing up for a quick road trip or when your tank—or your car’s— is about to hit empty.

RATING

28 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

POPSCI.COM

STUART TYSON

AC TESTED ON: Sanyo MM-9000

YOU WON’T WANT TO MISS

HOME SHOW, SEPTEMBER 7-24,

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T HAT O PEN

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WNH_HIWBackPack_FINAL 8/11/06 2:53 PM Page 2

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WHAT’S NEW | RECREATION

IT’S ABOUT

TIME

This hydration pack senses temperature to keep the water inside it from turning to ice IT MAY BE FREEZING cold on the slopes, but you can still work up quite a sweat. A backpack with a bladder and a hose to sip from will keep you hydrated, but wear one outside your jacket on a superchilly day, and that hose is a Popsicle by your second run. So the engineers at The North Face cranked their cold room down to 15°F and started experimenting. Merely insulating the hose prevented freezing for only 20 minutes. They needed an Heated electric heater inside the tube, wires but they didn’t want to serve up boiling water. So they added a temperature sensor inside the hose that can turn on the juice just long enough to keep the fluid from freezing, a trick that also maximizes battery life. The HTR heated hydration packs start at a pricey $120. Of course, you could always stick with a non-heated model . . . if you like Popsicles.

Sensor

HOW IT WORKS When the hose’s surface temperature dips below 34°F, a sensor nestled against the hose wall activates the AA-battery-driven power pack to activate the nickel cadmium wires just long enough to prevent the water in the hose from freezing.

Battery pack

The North Face HTR Snowday CAPACITY: 100 oz. GET IT: $150; thenorthface.com

—Joe Brown

FOUR MORE WINTER TOYS ARC’TERYX MATADOR Down jackets have to be quilted to keep the fill in place, but quilting reduces Gore-Tex’s ability to shed water. This jacket’s synthetic down insulation is laminated to the Gore-Tex shell, keeping you dry and warm.

$450; arcteryx.com

SMITH PRODIGY TURBO FAN Because constantly stopping to wipe your foggy goggles is a buzz kill, Smith integrated a battery-powered fan into the Prodigy to blow mist out the top and keep your view clear.

$180; smithoptics.com

K2 ELDORADO

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Maximize your time on the slopes with a board that minimizes fatigue. The synthetic material in this one’s core eliminates up to 83 percent of high-speed vibration, so your legs don’t have to soak it up.

Like to get airborne on your skis or snowboard? Strap this sensor on your leg, and it uses an accelerometer to measure how much hang time you clock. It remembers your last 15 jumps and tells the time and temperature. $100; silvausa.com

$460; k2snowboards.com

ILLUSTRATION: GRAHAM MURDOCH; PHOTOGRAPHS, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: STUART TYSON (2); COURTESY JOHNSON OUTDOORS; COURTESY K2 SNOWBOARDS; COURTESY SMITH OPTICS; COURTESY ARC’TERYX

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WNC_BluRayTVs_REV8/9

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WHAT’S NEW | HOME ENTERTAINMENT

HOMEMADE HIGH-DEF STEP STEP BY

Grab a high-definition camcorder and the first Blu-ray-burnin’ laptop to create a catalogue of home movies worthy of that HDTV in the den

THE HANDFUL of affordable highdefinition camcorders now available has given backyard Spielbergs the ability to shoot their soccer highlights and Cannes contenders in HD. With the introduction of Blu-ray-burning computers, amateur auteurs can finally create home-movie discs that deliver the full HD resolution on a Blu-ray player hooked up to a highdefinition TV. Sure, there are some little glitches common to any new technology. But just like their Hollywood counterparts, home movies are eventually headed for high-def. Record and store in HD now, and your biographer will thank you later.—Steve Morgenstern

1: SHOOT IT

2: EDIT AND BURN IT

3: ADD IT TO YOUR LIBRARY

At about the size of a fat sandwich and under a pound, Canon’s HV10 ($1,300; canonusa.com) is remarkably compact for a camcorder that shoots in 1080i resolution (the best current cams can do), and it doesn’t skimp on the features, with 10x optical zoom, image stabilization and a 2.7-inch widescreen display. You’ll get about an hour of HD footage on a standard Mini DV tape.

Sony’s VAIO VGN-AR190G ($3,500; sonyusa.com) is the first laptop ready to burn high-def discs. The 8.4-pound desktop replacement includes software for editing HD video and saving it to Blu-ray discs, and its 17-inch screen displays every pixel with stunning clarity. The VAIO also comes with an HDMI cable, in case you want to connect the machine directly to an HDTV.

Blank media for new formats is always expensive, and Blu-ray is no exception. TDK, the first to ship Blu-ray blanks, offers 25-gigabyte write-once discs ($20; tdk.com) that hold up to two and a half hours of HD video. Or get twice the storage on dual-layer discs, starting at $48. TDK has shown a prototype 100-gig version—enough space for your nine-hour documentary.

32 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

p OPsCI ON THE WEB

Find reviews of the first high-def disc players at popsci.com/hd.

JEFF HARRIS; INSETS: PETER CADE/GETTY IMAGES

MILDEW-RESISTANT PAINTS; AND EVEN A REMOTE CONTROL MEAT THERMOMETER FOR GRILLING (one burger coming up) –TO NAME A FEW.

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GE CleanSteel ™ refrigerator that holds magnets.

Kohler Forté stainless faucet with pull-out feature. ®

GE CleanSteel ™ dishwasher that resists ﬁngerprints.

Watts FloodSafe™ valve that helps prevent flood damage.

Innovative storage solutions by Thomasville Cabinetry. ®

Silestone Microban countertops that inhibit the spread of bacteria. ®

Thomasville Jatoba wood-plank ﬂooring. ®

AT YO U R N E I G H B ORH O OD H O M E DEP OT • S E PTE MBE R 7-2 4 When you’re done oohing and aahing over everything you see in-store, be sure to check out our special innovation demonstrations and our interactive virtual home online at homedepot.com/homeshow

You can do it. We can help. SM

See store for details. © 2006, HOMER TLC, Inc. All rights reserved. © 2006 Joe Gibbs Racing. NASCAR is a registered trademark of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, Inc. © 2006 NFL Properties LLC. Team names/logos are trademarks of the teams indicated. All other NFL-related trademarks are trademarks of the National Football League. Major League Baseball trademarks and copyrights are used with permission of Major League Baseball Properties, Inc. ®

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11:30 PM

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WHAT’S NEW | HOME ENTERTAINMENT

TECH

TREND

BRIGHTEST SETS YET LEDs are taking over your living-room TV to give you even more vivid video

THE TREND LED backlights are replacing traditional bulbs in TVs, including the fluorescents in flat-screen LCDs and the mercury arc lamps in rear-projection sets. The first wave of products is trickling out now, but expect a flood in the next year or two.

WHY NOW LEDs are finally as bright as existing TV bulbs, and colored LEDs—which combine to form white light with a broader spectrum—are nearing fluorescents in power efficiency. LEDs also contain no mercury, which may soon face legal restrictions.

SCREEN SIZE: 52 in. RESOLUTION: 1080p CONTRAST RATIO: 5000:1

HOW YOU’LL BENEFIT DLP

Hewlett-Packard ID5286n TV $2,500; hp.com All digital light-processing (DLP) TVs project an image onto the screen by bouncing light off a series of different-sized mirrors. But here the light comes from red, green and blue LEDs instead of a white lamp filtered through a spinning colored wheel. That eliminates any trailing “rainbow effect” created by the wheel changing direction. The LEDs, from Luminus, match the size of the mirrors, so they cast uniform light onto the screen.

SCREEN SIZE: 32 to 42 in. RESOLUTION: 1080p CONTRAST RATIO: 1,200:1

SCREEN SIZE: 20 in. and up RESOLUTION: 800 x 600 CONTRAST RATIO: 550:1

PROJECTOR

LCD

LEDs are much smaller than normal projector bulbs, enabling models, like the palm-size PK-20, that weigh in at less than a pound. And although LED setups are designed for giving presentations in dark rooms, you can use them to watch movies. You’ll just get smaller images, since LEDs aren’t as bright as the lamps in bigger home-theater projectors—25 lumens versus 1,000.

Several companies are developing LCD sets with improved LEDs. This one, from Taiwanese maker Proton, will probably be the first in stores, early next year. Beyond delivering better color and contrast, superfast LEDs also wipe out an LCD’s motion blur. This model quickly turns off the bulbs in between frames, hiding the fuzzy transition while the pixels change.

Mitsubishi PK-20 Pocket Projector $800; mitsubishi.com

Proton LED BLU LCD TV Price not set; proton-usa.com

SEE HOW AN LCD TV WORKS ON PAGE 70 34 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

POPSCI.COM

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY HEWLETT-PACKARD; COURTESY PROTON; COURTESY MITSUBISHI DIGITAL ELECTRONICS

Your eyes will widen at the color range— about a third more than most TVs—and improved contrast. You won’t need to replace rear-projection bulbs, since LEDs have a 20,000-hour life span (a mercury lamp has 6,000). And you won’t have to wait to watch: Other projectors need to warm up, but LED sets turn on instantly.

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HEADLINES D I S C O V E R I E S , A D VA N C E S & D E B AT E S I N S C I E N C E

THIS MONTH

Nathan Myhrvold reinvents invention

Stickers that make photographs talk

A wall-scaling ’bot invades New York

SPACE MOONBOUND? An illustration of the MSS Endurance, an entry in the 2006 Lunar Lander Challenge

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: COURTESY MASTEN SPACE SYSTEMS; NASA; COURTESY ARMADILLO AEROSPACE

LUNAR LANDER 1.0 Buzz Aldrin outside an original moon craft, 1969

SPACE BALLS The fuel tanks of the Quad, another entry in the Challenge

ONE MORE GIANT STEP, PLEASE We can’t send astronauts to other worlds without a vehicle that lets them hop around various kinds of terrain. Sounds simple, right? Wrong. The hunt is on for a modern lunar lander IT SEEMS AN EASY enough mission for a rocket ship: Lift off, hover, fly a few hundred feet, land—repeat. But NASA hasn’t had a craft that can pull it off since its last lunar module lifted the crew of Apollo 17 from the moon back in 1972. Now, with a presidential mandate to ship people back to that pockmarked satellite by 2020, NASA needs a 21st-century lunar lander. Enter the inaugural Lunar Lander Challenge, set to take place this month in

p OPsCI on the web

Las Cruces, New Mexico. The NASAfunded contest will dish out $1 million to the winner as part of a broader space exposition called the X Prize Cup, hosted by the X Prize Foundation, which in 2004 awarded the $10-million Ansari X Prize for the first private space shot. On October 20 and 21, teams of rocket builders are expected to meet for a showdown in the desert, each with its own ungainlylooking collection of welded-together tanks, aluminum frames, rocket engines,

Catch our exclusive event coverage starting October 20 at popsci.com/xcup.

electronic control boxes and Wi-Fienabled laptops with attached joysticks— and each at risk of spontaneous explosions, wild takeoffs and botched landings. “There will be crashes,” promises X Prize founder Peter Diamandis. NASA’s Carl Walz, a four-time space shuttle astronaut and head of the division charged with building NASA’s future spaceships, hopes the Challenge, mishaps and all, will inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs, (CONTINUED ON PAGE 39)

OCTOBER 2006 POPULAR SCIENCE 37

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HEADLINES

SPACE

THE

BIG HOP

In a few weeks, two homemade crafts will attempt to navigate a mock moonscape in the desert. One may take home $1 million WHILE MILLIONS WATCH baseball’s best slug it out for the World Series title, a quieter yet no less riveting contest debuts this month on a desolate stretch of desert in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Contestants in NASA’s first-ever Lunar Lander Challenge, hosted by the nonprofit X Prize Foundation, will compete not for rings but cash. The $1-million purse goes to the team whose homemade moon buggy best demonstrates, on a small scale, three basic yet critical operations of a vehicle for future astronauts: launching, flying and landing. The challenge has so far proved intimidating: As of press time, only two teams had registered. The one whose craft flies this course fastest wins.

Thruster

Fuel tank (36 inches)

1 TAKEOFF

Each entrant will launch a rocket-powered vehicle with a 55-pound payload (sandbags, bricks, anything to partially simulate the weight of a moon-jaunting astronaut) about 160 feet straight up. Each team will use a remote control and a joystick connected to a Wi-Fienabled laptop to throttle back the engines and hover.

Engine

WHY IT’S HARD: Rocket

JOHN MACNEILL

engines are by their nature difficult to control. Most just blast away at full thrust until they burn out. The Challenge demands one that can both launch and hover.

38 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

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2 FLY

The craft must then traverse 350 feet to reach a rocky landing circle. Total time aloft: 180 seconds, simulating the time that astronauts would need to scout out the best landing spot.

WHY IT’S HARD:

The real hurdles here are software and steering. A computer needs to fire thrusters and swivel the vehicle’s engines in response not only to joystick commands but also to readings from an onboard inertial measurement unit, the electronic equivalent of the human inner ear.

3 LAND

Contestants will throttle back their vehicles’ rocket engines to gently touch down within a 33-foot-diameter target circle, which includes simulated lunar terrain such as slopes and boulders. Then they’ll shut down the vehicles’ engines and refuel, one luxury that astronauts won’t have.

WHY IT’S HARD: See 1 and 2.

4 RETURN

Finally, contestants will restart their vehicles’ engines, stay aloft another 180 seconds, and return to the first launch point. Actual moon landers will have to restart their engines without fail—or strand their crews on the moon.

(CONTINUED FROM PAGE 37)

inventors, college kids and backyard tinkerers to think about ways we can travel on the moon. The basic parts needed for a lunar lander, such as a reusable rocket engine and computerized flight controls, were first put together in a single vehicle in the 1960s. That’s when the Grumman Corporation built a series of spiderlike spaceships called lunar modules for Apollo, NASA’s first man-on-the-moon program. But with the last of those machines left behind on the moon or enshrined in museums, and their designers retired or scattered into the Great Beyond, NASA needs some ideas

“There will be crashes,” promises X Prize founder Peter Diamandis. for reinventing the wheel, hopefully with a few modern upgrades. That’s one of the main reasons that NASA is sponsoring the Challenge. A homemade contraption probably won’t land on the moon. Still, NASA wants to look beyond major players like Northrop Grumman for original ideas to incorporate into the final design of its new lunar lander. “That’s not to say that the big firms won’t be innovative,” Walz says. “But if we can have other people who are taking a fresh look at the problem, we may be able to find some nugget of technology that we haven’t thought of.” To win the Challenge, rocket builders will have to launch an unmanned machine by remote control to hover some 160 feet in the air and then pilot the machine to a craggy landing site 350 feet away. After refueling, the rocket must again take off, hover, and fly back to the first launch site [see illustration, left]. Each team must complete the Challenge within 150 minutes. Two teams, Armadillo Aerospace in Dallas and Masten Space Systems in Mojave, California, are expected to compete for the $1-million Lunar Lander Challenge proper, which requires vehicles to remain aloft for at least

POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 39

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10:40 AM

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HEADLINES

Among the race’s many challenges: navigating fake lunar craters. ing to upgrade ours next year and go for the lunar lander.” That won’t happen if 33-year-old Armadillo chief John Carmack wins. In 2000 he formed a team of dedicated amateurs to build increasingly more advanced vertical-takeoff-and-landing rockets, exactly like those required of the Lunar Lander Challenge. He expects to recoup much of his personal investment of $2 million to $3 million with a Challenge win and someday turn a profit with high-altitude flights for tourists and, eventually, orbital spaceships. As far as Walz is concerned, though, it doesn’t really matter who wins the Challenge. “One of the things we found with these challenges is that it’s a great leveraging opportunity,” he says. “For every dollar that we put up in a purse, we get at least two to three times that in investment by people who are trying to win the prize.” And with NASA expected to spend more than $100 billion on Apollo 2.0, the $1-million Lunar Lander Challenge seems like a small price to pay for some applied brainstorming on how best to go boldly where another generation has gone before.—Michael Belfiore

XX POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

INNOVATION

THE SECRET TO BETTER TECH? Cash, and lots of it. New competitions dangle big bucks for solutions to some of the world’s thorniest problems

THE LUNAR LANDER CHALLENGE is just one of the latest in a rash of potentially lucrative competitions designed to inspire world-changing technologies. Create a water filter for the masses, and win $1 million. Build a car that gets 100 miles per gallon, and you stand to rake in $25 million. Figure out a faster, cheaper way to sequence DNA, and untold millions could be yours. So, think you’re ready to change the world and get rich doing it (or go broke trying)? Here’s your guide to four of the biggest cash-prize contests out there.

CONTEST

CHALLENGE

PURSE

HURDLE

Automotive X Prize

Mass-produce super-high-mileage cars

Up to $25 million to build and bring to market a car in the 100-to-250mile-per-gallon range

Selling it. Making a car that gets great gas mileage is one thing. Making one that people will actually buy is quite another.

Genome X Prize

Decode the human genome in days rather than years. Famous people, such as Lance Armstrong, may be tapped to donate their DNA.

The prize, to be announced this fall, will be in the multimillion-dollar range.

Economizing. The current cost of decoding a single human genome (about $15 million) far exceeds the purse.

Grainger Challenge

Create cheap, easyto-use treatments for removing toxins from drinking water

The National Academy of Engineering will award $1 million to the first-place winner in February.

Keeping it simple. The best device will require no maintenance or electricity.

H-Prize

Develop hydrogen cars and a distribution system to support them

Uncle Sam will pony up more than $10 million for winning technologies.

Getting over the chicken-and-egg problem. Build which first, the infrastructure or the vehicles?

POPSCI.COM

FROM TOP: COURTESY LOREMO AG; PIERRE ANDRIEU/GETTY IMAGES; DAVID MITCHENER/GETTY IMAGES; SCOTT CAMAZINE/PHOTO RESEARCHERS

three minutes and will entail some fancy remote piloting to avoid tripping on simulated craters and moon rocks as they touch down. At press time, at least one additional team, Micro-Space in Denver, planned to enter the fray at the X Prize Cup to compete with the other two for a somewhat less difficult NASAsponsored contest called the Vertical Lander Challenge. That contest, worth $350,000, requires vehicles to remain aloft for 90 seconds and includes no simulated lunar terrain. If a vehicle doesn’t win the big prize this year, says Micro-Space president and amateur rocketeer Richard Speck, “we’re hop-

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Headlines Q&A.FIN.rev

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HEADLINES

“The world doesn’t focus enough attention on invention.” Q: You say invention is broken. Why? A: The world doesn’t focus enough attention on it. In the 19th century, we had inventors like Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla whose only output would be inventions. The U.S. census actually had a job classification called “inventor” until 1940. Now most companies have R&D departments with a little “r” and a big “d.”Only a tiny effort is about inventing something really new. But invention is different than either research or development.

WHAT’S THE BIG

IDEA?

REINVENTING INVENTING

Nathan Myhrvold is arguably the most influential inventor in America. So how come he doesn’t actually make anything? NATHAN MYHRVOLD, former chief technology officer for Microsoft, onetime postdoctoral fellow under Stephen Hawking, fly-fishing fanatic and paleontology buff, left Bill Gates’s fold in 1999 with a ninefigure nest egg. That might explain his shopping sprees for antique microscopes, supercomputers, slide rules and other classic inventions. And now he’s collecting ideas. The 47-year-old Renaissance man has been snapping up thousands of

44 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

patents from inventors who don’t have the resources to bring their innovations to market. Even more tantalizing is his collection of all-star inventors whom he regularly taps for ideas. His monthly brainstorming sessions have already produced some 500 patent applications for Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures. Though not as prolific as, say, IBM, Myhrvold is already a major force in the field of invention. And he’s only just begun.—Amy Feldman

Q: You’ve tapped some of the world’s biggest inventors—people like biotechnologist Leroy Hood, who created the DNA sequencer—for new ideas. Why wouldn’t an inventor just go it alone? A: Most inventors know how difficult the process is and how expensive it is to get patents. The reason they have a relationship with us is that without a way to capture their ideas, most of their best ideas will go nowhere. Some of our inventors, like Dr. Hood, are superstars, and they don’t really need us. But it is both fun and more productive for them to work with us. We can increase the productivity of even the most productive inventors. An all-day session with five or 10 people can generate 50 to 100 ideas. We generate ideas faster than we know what to do with them. (CONTINUED ON PAGE 46)

POPSCI.COM

GREGG SEGAL FOR FORTUNE MAGAZINE

PATENTLY ADDICTED Myhrvold at home with his vast collection of collections, from slide rules to seashells

Q: How so? A: Unlike a development engineer, Intellectual Ventures is not trying to create any specific product in a specific period of time. A typical researcher might work their whole career on one problem, and if they’re successful, they’ll make a little bit of progress. A development engineer, from the other perspective, wants to make a product, usually within a few years. This might make you rich with stock options, but it’s a mistake to place all your efforts on short-term things.

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Q: So you lock a bunch of geniuses in a room together and see what happens? A: A diverse group of smart people can come up with a solution that no one of them could have on their own—each one has a piece of the puzzle. That’s one area where we think we have a competitive advantage. The world has lots of medical-device companies and engineers and physicists. It’s less common that you get the medical guy, the engineer and the physicist in the same room. Normally, the only time a surgeon sees a physicist or computer scientist is if he’s cutting one open.

lenses for digital cameras that could allow you to have cameras that were the size of a pin and cost a penny. We’ve got patents on ways to make vaccines faster and for limited-use e-mail accounts, which are handy if you want to do things anonymously. And in solid-state physics, we have a patent on a way to focus light that could be used for making silicon chips, even invisibility cloaks [see “Unveiling the First Invisibility Shield,” page 80]. We’re not nuts enough to think we have the cloaking device from Star Trek, but there are things you can do in that direction.

Q: What sorts of inventions are you working on? A: We have a patent on micro-

Q: Could all those patents stifle invention? A: We have no desire to stop

“Normally, the only time a surgeon sees a physicist or computer scientist is if he’s cutting one open.” people from making our inventions. If people don’t make them, we don’t get paid. Yes, we’ll charge reasonable royalties for the use of them, and if our fees aren’t reasonable, people won’t pay them. I think that if inventors had more financial leverage, we would get more inventions. Q: Should the average garage tinkerer approach you? A: Garage inventors do approach us, and most of the

time, it doesn’t work out because we’re not a patentlaw firm that says, “You tell us the invention, and we’ll do it.” Our core fields are solid-state physics, electronics, computing, biotechnology and medical devices. I’m a sucker for mechanical inventions—my kitchen is full of every gadget anyone has ever invented, and when I go fly-fishing, I’ve got every damn fly-fishing gadget known to man. But that’s not what we focus on.

+ FRUIT FLY

WORLD TRAVEL

READY TO GO

A CURE FOR JET LAG

Groggy fruit flies could lead to the perfect sleeping pill for time-zone hoppers GENETICIST AMITA SEHGAL of the University of Pennsylvania was recently studying fruit flies in her lab when she noticed something peculiar. The insects slept normally when bathed in light for 24 hours a day but tossed and turned when shifted from one day/night cycle, or “time zone,” to another. It turns out they were suffering from something akin to serious jet lag. The flies, Sehgal discovered, lacked a protein she’s dubbed “Jet” that plays a key role in regulating their body clocks. No

Jet, and the flies lose their ability to adapt to changes in the duration of lightness and darkness. If a similar protein is at work in humans—a likely scenario, she believes—it could be possible to banish jet lag altogether. The allure of such a pharmaceutical would be hard to resist: A traveler could simply pop a pill to increase his light sensitivity, essentially resetting his biological clock and allowing him to adapt instantly to a new time zone.—gregory mone

FROM LEFT: DAVID SCHARF/GETTY IMAGES; GEORGE HALL/CORBIS; MIKE POWELL/GETTY IMAGES

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CREATE YOUR DREAM RIDE WITH TIPS FROM MASTER CUSTOM BIKE BUILDERS ARLEN AND CORY NESS AND THE VICTORY ® CUSTOM ORDER PROGRAM. Last month, Arlen and Cory showed you how to design your own custom motorcycle. Last Month’s Tips:

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Popular Science and Sunset magazines are combining the most exciting trends in technology and home design to create the House of Innovation — Ideas for Today and the Future. Opening this fall in the East Bay, this Idea House will showcase forwardthinking innovations in appliances, building materials, home automation, interior furnishings, landscape design and more. Popular Science will present a future-focused “Tech - Loft” with prototypes of building and home products that will affect the way homes are built in years to come. Go to popsci.com for details

Special thanks to our charity partner The Volunteer Center of the East Bay.

- SHRINKAGE WHEN PHOTOS TALK The Quest To Make Really Tiny Things

VACATION SNAPSHOTS ARE NICE, but wouldn’t they be nicer if you could swipe your cellphone over them to retrieve video, sound files and captions? That’s the idea behind the Memory Spot, an adhesive chip in development at Hewlett-Packard’s Bristol, England, facility. The stamp-like memory device comes in two sizes, 1.4 or 2 millimeters square. Affixed to a photo or document, it can store and transfer up to four megabytes of data, enough for a short video or a couple songs. Howard Taub, associate director of HP Labs, likens the Memory Spot to radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags but notes some key differences. Both use radio waves to transfer data, but the Memory Spot works at a higher frequency. As a result, the antenna embedded in the chip—and the chip itself—can be thinner. The tradeoff is transmission distance: Whereas RFID can work from across a room, the Memory Spot requires nearly direct contact with a reader to transfer data.

SHARP MEMORY A smart sticker stores and transmits songs, video and other data.

Ideally, the reader would be built into your phone or some other handheld device. Wave it over the Memory Spot, and in less than a second you’d have your file. Aside from photos, Taub says, the stamps could be used to store medical records on patient wristbands or to authenticate prescription-pill bottles. Expect it on store shelves in the next two years.—gregory mone

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HEADLINES

THE ANNOTATED MACHINE NAVIGATION Sensors tell the robot whether it’s upside down, flat or sideways. A video camera records close-ups of the wall.

CONTROL For now, the robot is remote-controlled. Future versions will work autonomously.

SPEED Two wheels drive the robot forward, while one helps it turn.

THE CITY CLIMBER: STICKING TO IT To cling to any vertical surface, a rotor blade inside the City Climber draws air out between itself and the wall, creating a vacuum effect.

Vacuum motor

Safety line

Rotor blade

Air out

Air in

INSPECTOR GADGET THE CITY CLIMBER is a 2.2-pound wheeled robot that can speed across ceilings, scale brick walls, even spy into open windows. But inventor Jizhong Xiao of the City College of New York says that its immediate job will be much more practical: to scour urban facades for cracks, loose bricks and other trouble spots. Inspections of high-rise buildings require scaffolding machinery, technicians and engineers, to the tune of roughly $5,000 a day for a 10-story building. Xiao’s robotic stand-in, which will perform a test inspection this fall in New York City, can do the

52 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

job in about half the time and for less than half the cost. The battery-powered City Climber combines two suction techniques to hug a wall tightly. One works like a vacuum and another like a tornado, spinning air to create a low-pressure zone in the center of the vortex. The resulting sticking power enables the robot to lug inspection gear like cameras and sensors. A safety tether keeps it from plummeting to the sidewalk should it lose its grip. Future models, Xiao says, will work in teams, using sensors to track one another’s position as they crawl.—GREGORY MONE

POPSCI.COM

ROB KELLY

Spider-Man’s robotic twin takes the hassle and expense out of building inspections

Popular Science Client:

GSK

Publication(s):

What can we do about AMERICA’S DIABETES EPIDEMIC besides treating it?

“I’M NOT just a scientist; I’m a diabetic, too,” says Bill. “You might not think a drug company would want to prevent disease. But GSK wants to help people from ever developing diabetes. That’s why we support programs that reward schools for replacing junk food with healthier food choices – all because childhood obesity can lead to adult diabetes.” Fi nd i n g a w ay fo rwa rd .

KAREN LACKEY THE FACE OF GSK RESEARCH Wife. Mother. Gardener. Dedicated scientist on today’s front lines of cancer research. Her inspiration: “My children, through their intelligence, humor, love – and the challenges they bring.” Her favorite hobbies: “Training for and running marathons with my husband. Also, ballroom dancing lessons – which can sometimes be as physically demanding as running!” Her mission: Nothing less than developing new treatments for cancer. On Saturdays, Karen Lackey could easily be mistaken for any soccer mom in the supermarket parking lot. But during the workday – and through many long work nights – Karen dons her lab coat and leads an international medicinal chemistry team of equally dedicated GSK scientists. Although ‘developing’ may be the wrong word. ‘Creating’ new cancer treatments is closer to what Karen and her team do in oncology research. “I began doing synthetic chemistry twentyone years ago. I was hooked on the synthetic part because of the sheer fascination of stitching atoms together and realizing that we could create something that had never been made before – along with the possibility that these new compounds could make a difference in people’s lives.” Today at GSK, researchers like Karen are exploring the frontiers of known science, seeking to understand the most basic mechanisms of life itself. “We are working in an exciting, emerging area – learning how to block the activity of kinases, or biological signals, that tell cells how to grow and differentiate. There are over 500 different kinases in human cells that are used in every biological process, and sometimes genetic instabilities can lead to ‘renegade’ signal events. In the case of tumor cells, a renegade or mutated kinase can cause the cells to grow or divide out of control. We are making considerable progress in designing selective inhibitors to block specific kinases.” Designing drugs to fight cancer? It only sounds easy. “Ninety-five percent of what we do in research fails. Much of our work is just to build

a knowledge base that provides us with confidence to take the next step in the drug discovery process. Sometimes our experimental designs are based on reliable facts or solid theory. However, in many cases we have never been ‘there’ before, so innovation takes over and further experiments are needed to validate our approach.” Research takes years. Miracles don’t happen overnight. Staying focused on the goal – making medicines that hold real promise for the people who need them – takes persistence, and a very special kind of leader. “This is a long process. And until a drug works in a patient, there is no way to know if you will achieve the desired outcome. What keeps scientific teams positive is the drive to make a difference – and the fact that every key lesson learned, or every successful compound made, gets us closer to our goal.” Scientists all hope for that “Eureka!” moment. For Karen, it came during a last-chance review of a promising, but initially unsuccessful, program. “The discovery of drugs happens when scientists recognize and understand patterns of activity that attempt to mimic disease conditions. We had one program, based overseas, which spent seven years synthesizing and testing compounds and had even identified two viable drug candidates. For different reasons, both failed when they progressed into development. But before

the project was terminated, I was asked to review the data. As I flew back to the U.S., with more than 1,000 color-coded pages of information spread all over the adjacent seats on the plane, I looked for a potential way forward. And then I saw it! The pieces came together and I could see a combination of features we could synthesize to make an effective drug. I could hardly contain my excitement and couldn’t wait to get back to the lab to share the data with the US team and get started.” Creativity. Persistence. Truly heroic commitment. This is the face of modern medical science – people like Karen Lackey who are working to make a difference. “I am passionate about the science of drug discovery and will continue to focus my efforts on creating effective medicines to fight debilitating diseases. Studies continue to be done – at GSK and in the laboratories of the scientific community around the world – and I really believe we will get there.”

This article was funded and edited by GSK.

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10 P

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C I

’s

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Annual

BRILLIANT

y “brilliant,” we don’t mean smart. Or at least not just smart. Brilliance is marked by insight, creativity and tenacity. It’s the confidence to eschew established wisdom in order to develop your own. It’s the foolishness needed to set out for the edge of understanding and sail right past it, ignoring the signs reading “Thar be monsters” (not to mention “Turn back lest ye never be awarded a decent research grant again”). That’s why, when we started the six-month-long process of selecting our Brilliant 10 awardees, we asked hundreds of respected scientists, university department heads and journal editors to name not the most established or wellknown scientists in their fields. We asked for the mavericks. The young guns. The individuals who are changing not just what we know but the limits of what we think it’s possible to know. The eventual winners are young (average age: 34), and each is just beginning to be noticed in the world outside their respective fields. But among their peers, our winners’ oft-radical ideas are generating a rare degree of respect and admiration. Among us, as well. And for that, they deserve to be part of our Brilliant 10.

Nima Arkani-Hamed Theoretical Physics

Jerry Goldstein Planetary science

David Thompson Climatology

Melody Swartz Bioengineering

Kelly Dorgan Zoology

Omar Yaghi Materials Science

Terry Tao Mathematics

Erich Jarvis Animal Linguistics

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN B. CARNETT

Sara Seager astro-geology

Luis Von Ahn Computer Science

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BRILLIANT 10 theoretical physics

INVENTOR, FIFTH DIMENSION nima arkani-hamed, 34

Explaining gravity was just the start—now he thinks our universe might be one in a near-infinite sea HOW CAN GRAVITY be so strong that it

can move planets yet so weak that a simple refrigerator magnet can resist its pull? The question eats at the core of physics; our best theories don’t come close to explaining why gravity is so much weaker than the other fundamental forces (electromagnetism, for example). Hard problems, though, often demand unorthodox solutions, and the one Nima Arkani-Hamed and his collaborators came up with is a doozy. Gravity, they hypothesized, is seeping out of our three-dimensional universe and into two exceedingly large extra dimensions that are diluting its force. In other words, our universe has a leak. One year and three papers later,

brand-new fields of research had sprouted up around the idea. Just a year after he got his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, Arkani-Hamed had become a household name (well, in the households of theoretical and particle physicists). “It was obvious to me that Nima was going to be a star, even as an undergrad,” says Harvard University theoretical physicist Howard Georgi, who tried unsuccessfully to woo Arkani-Hamed to New England for grad school. “Now he is so far ahead of everyone else in his generation that it’s a little embarrassing.” Arkani-Hamed did eventually end up at Harvard—at 30, he was made a full professor of physics—and it’s there

that he’s following his latest hunch. But this time, it’s not extra dimensions he’s betting on. It’s extra universes—some 10500 of them. He and a growing minority of maverick scientists suspect that our universe is just one of untold billions of universes that exist side by side in a cosmic landscape, each with its own laws of physics and its own constants of nature. His first piece of evidence, albeit indirect, for this multiverse could be collected as soon as next year, when physicists in Geneva turn on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. If Arkani-Hamed’s calculations are correct, the LHC will reveal a hidden

planetary science

SPACE WEATHERMAN jerry goldstein, 35

He showed why Earth’s natural plasma shield isn’t as stable as we hoped AS A STUDENT at Brooklyn College, the only “B” Jerry Goldstein received was in a physics class, so he did what no other right-thinking college student would: He decided to go into physics precisely because, in his words, “it’s the only thing that keeps me on my toes.” Today he studies the magnetoBEFORE STORM

sphere, an invisible magnetic shield that wraps around the Earth. Although scientists knew that the outer layer of this shield is buffeted by solar winds that come tearing off the sun at a million miles an hour, most of them thought that the inner layer, the plasmasphere, was a relatively after STORM

PLASMA PUNCH The IMAGE satellite launched in 2000 with cameras specially built to observe the extreme ultraviolet glow of the plasmasphere. Jerry Goldstein put together the first models that showed how solar storms knock the plasmasphere away. 56 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

placid blanket of electrified gas. Goldstein changed all that. Using readings from NASA’s IMAGE satellite, he demonstrated that during the most severe solar storms, that supposedly calm blanket of plasma almost completely erodes into outer space. This exposes astronauts to intense electromagnetic radiation, fries circuit boards on defense and communications satellites, and creates 250-foot errors in GPS readings. Goldstein went on to rebuild the models of how the Earth interacts with the sun so that they matched the new data. In the process, he showed the plasmasphere to be a more volatile environment than anyone had predicted. Jim Burch, a colleague of Goldstein’s at the Southwest Research Institute, notes that if it weren’t for Goldstein, “we’d still be trying to figure it all out 10 years from now.”—Adam M. Bright

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MULTIPLICITY Nima Arkani-Hamed’s provocative theories will be put to the test next year.

FACING PAGE: ILLUSTRATIONS: BOB SAULS; PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY LARRY WALTHER/SOUTHWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE

feature of the universe called split supersymmetry, or split susy (pronounced “SOO-see”), a theory that half of all particles in the universe have partner particles that the LHC will be able to see. (Not incidentally, the LHC may instead turn up Arkani-Hamed’s extra dimensions.) If it works, and the LHC finds these partner particles, “it will be a mammoth hint that the multiverse is real,” Arkani-Hamed says. So what does this mean? Remember 500-odd years ago when a heretic named Copernicus broke the news that our little planet Earth was not, in fact, the center of the universe? Well, brace yourself. If Arkani-Hamed and his cohorts are correct, our existence is about to be denigrated again. As he explains, “The significance of our world within the multiverse will be no greater than one atom relative to all the matter in our universe.”—rena Marie Pacella

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WEATHER MAN David Thompson and his dog, George, watch the clouds come in at Colorado’s Lory State Park.

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FACING PAGE: COURTESY ALAIN HERZOG/SWISS FEDERAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY OF LAUSANNE

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BRILLIANT 10 bioengineering

BODY-PART BUILDER melody swartz, 37

She’s showing how a mysterious current inside the body could help us grow organs EVERY PAPER CUT is a reminder of the blood pulsing through our arteries, but Melody Swartz is about to demonstrate the importance of a lesser-known kind of flow, the slow currents of intercellular fluid pulsing through our tissues. With any luck, that flow will prove to be the long-sought-after key to growing organs in the lab. At the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne, she points to the web of tubes on her monitor. “See those thin, spindly things?” asks Swartz, who is also a bioengineer at Northwestern University. “Those are the beginnings of a functional network”—the first biological system that she’s grown by exploiting the intercellular currents. Previously, the processes driving organ growth were so poorly under-

stood that bioengineers were able to create only a few simple tissue types, such as skin and heart muscle. Last year, however, Swartz’s experiments with human cells showed that during development, these currents redistribute proteins called morphogens, which then signal cells to create networks of capillaries that support growing tissue. She was the first to show that these slow streams are so crucial to development that when they are absent, specialized tissues degenerate into something of a biological casserole gone wrong. Swartz’s driving force has always been her mechanical mind. As an undergraduate, she majored in engineering, not biology, and even today, she likens her discoveries to “taking apart a car and seeing how it works.”

Her research is so novel that she sometimes has had trouble nailing down grants; her studies tend to defy predesignated award categories. According to her colleagues, this difficulty shows how revolutionary her approach is. Her work suggests, for instance, that creating transplantable organs in the lab will require reproducing the currents of intercellular flow. Understanding these currents could also help researchers invent new cancerfighting drugs, since tumor cells use them to spread to the rest of the body. “She’s showing how sensitive cells are to small changes in flow,” says Linda Griffith, a bioengineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “These are phenomena that will endure as foundational ideas.”—Elizabeth Svoboda

climatology

˜ DISCOVERER ARCTIC EL NINO

david thompson, 36

His identification of a key northern weather pattern pulled climate science into the stratosphere DAVID THOMPSON was still in his 20s, a graduate student at the University of Washington, when he helped discover a phenomenon that would radically alter the way climatologists understand northern weather patterns. Thompson and his adviser, atmospheric scientist John M. Wallace, were the first to identify the extent of a climate system that engulfs the top third of the planet. This Arctic Oscillation (AO), as they called it, changes weather patterns all over the hemisphere, from blizzards in Cleveland, to rainfall in Spain, to the frequency of the Eastern seaboard’s dreaded Nor’easters. Call it El Niño of the North. Swirling counterclockwise from a latitude of 55 degrees north—about parallel with Moscow and Ketchikan, Alaska—the AO can shift from its nega-

tive phase (when its ring of wind blows more slowly and is easily thrown off course, causing cold Arctic air to spill out into the midlatitudes) to its positive phase (when winds are strong, holding in the cold air) as frequently as every few days. But over time, trends emerge. The positive cycles associated with warmer winters, for instance, dominated much of the 1980s and 1990s. The discovery of the AO had a nearimmediate influence on many fields of climate study, notably among climatechange experts who suspect that emissions may be responsible for pushing the AO to remain in the positive phase for longer periods of time. Meanwhile Thompson, now a professor at Colorado State University, turned his focus south, where cooling over parts of

Antarctica has been held up by globalwarming skeptics as evidence that the world is not, in fact, heating up. In 2001 Thompson and Susan Solomon of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offered a more likely explanation for the temperature aberration: the ozone hole. That huge void in the atmosphere, they found, shifted wind patterns over Antarctic in a way that cooled its surface—except, tellingly, over the Antarctic peninsula, the glaciers of which have been calving into the Southern Ocean at alarming rates. What ties Thompson’s global work together is an obsession with the importance of the upper atmosphere. “What happens down here comes back down,” he says. “The tail does wag the dog.”—kalee Thompson

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BRILLIANT 10 zoology

WORM WHISPERER kelly dorgan, 26

Her engineering tricks turned the underground world inside out “I’VE ALWAYS KIND of liked worms,” says Kelly Dorgan as she tries to coax one to begin burrowing through a tank of gelatin. This particular specimen, a six-inch-long sandworm provided by a local bait shop, isn’t cooperating, and Dorgan, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maine, gently prods it while she readies her video equipment. She needs good footage for an upcoming paper. Dorgan turns on a backlight. The worm writhes on the surface of the gelatin. Dorgan adjusts her monitor. The worm noses around. Dorgan nudges. The worm wriggles. Nothing happens. Finally, our little star acquiesces, and with a sudden display of resolve one doesn’t expect from an invertebrate, plunges its head into the gelatin and executes a swift, surprisingly elegant descent. Working mostly in this chilly lab, Dorgan has challenged a century-old theory, endorsed by none other than Charles Darwin, about how worms move. The work has quickly established her as an authority on the world underground. Steven Vogel, a professor of biomechanics at Duke University, says “Anyone who’s working in her area is going to start by checking her papers or writing her an e-mail.” Worms are notoriously difficult to observe, and biologists have never been able to say definitively how they move. Darwin, who always liked worms himself, was one of the first scientists to seriously investigate the question. He didn’t believe “that the ground could yield on all sides” to a worm nosing through soil. When push came to shove, he thought, worms swallowed a path through the earth. His theory held for more than 120 years but led later scientists to wonder why burrowing should be so popular. Compared with other ways of getting around (walking, swimming, flying), eating through mud seems extraordinarily inefficient.

60 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

Dorgan thought worms must use some kind of trick to help them through the mud, but to investigate the forces involved would require the equivalent of a degree in engineering. “My background was pretty much straight biology,” she says. “I didn’t know any of the physics I needed.” To remedy that, she took engineering classes by day and Googled shop tricks by night. She eventually came across a method known as photoelastic stress analysis, which employs an elaborate setup of polarized light and camera filters to measure the stress placed on an object. She found a seawater-gelatin mixture that had the physical properties of marine sediment and let it set in a tank. Then she added a worm and filmed it burrowing. By studying the stress fields around the worms, Dorgan discovered that they actually launch their mouths inside out like a wedge to pry open the mud. Then they ease into the space opened by the crack. To keep moving, they just keep leveraging the crack. In engineering terms, this is known as crack propagation, and Dorgan’s studies suggest that it costs the worms much less energy than having to ingest every inch of mud in their path. Her finding has changed scientists’ understanding of the entire underground ecosystem. Everywhere biologists look now, they’re realizing that burrowers such as clams, sea urchins and even growing root tips are really living levers. Next, Dorgan plans to study the large-scale effects of burrowing in coastal areas, where worms can mix up the top four inches of the mud, releasing buried nutrients and churning up pollutants like DDT. Scientists have studied the phenomenon, known as bioturbation, since at least 1881, when Charles Darwin made the first serious attempt to describe it.—Adam M. Bright

DIRTY WORK Kelly Dorgan goes worm hunting at the Darling Marine Center in Walpole, Maine.

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Discovering chemistry on human terms. The Human Element has always

been there. We just put it on the Periodic Table. A simple thing that changes everything.

Suddenly, we see the whole world of science turning on the issue of solving human

problems. From addressing the challenges of climate change to providing

a glass of clean water. Anything is possible when you empower the Human Element.

速Trademark of The Dow Chemical Company www.dow.com

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materials science

HYDROGEN NANO-ARCHITECT omar yaghi, 41

He’s building the minuscule scaffolds that could one day hold the hydrogen in your gas tank OMAR YAGHI walks out of his chemistry lab at the University of California at Los Angeles, closes the door, and looks over his shoulder. “I’ve had a terrible secret for most of my career,” he says with a sly grin. “I’m afraid of chemicals.” It’s an unlikely phobia for a chemist whose research papers rank among the most influential in his field. But Yaghi chose his field for its intellectual puzzles, not its explosive ingredients. Fill a jug with one of the materials he’s invented (it looks like baby powder), and, as paradoxical as it seems, it will

hold more natural gas than an empty room. Many chemists believe that Yaghi’s creations, if suitably tailored to store hydrogen, could lead to the first workable fuel tank for a hydrogen car. If you zoomed in a billion times, his substances would look like enormous scaffolds. Materials scientists had seen similar frameworks before, but they couldn’t custom-build them for specific purposes. “It was a dream” to engineer these frameworks to chemists’ specs, says University of South Florida professor Mike Zaworotko. “Yaghi was

the person who turned it into reality.” To build the frameworks, Yaghi used tiny metal supports, which, because they form stable joints, allowed him to create nearly any pattern. His tight-knit honeycombs, for instance, are great at storing gases—as gas molecules stick to the crossbeams, they draw close together, becoming compressed without high pressures or low temperatures. “We [humans] like to control our surroundings,” Yaghi says. “I’m no exception.” Even as a child in Jordan, Yaghi wanted to manage his life on his

mathematics

MATH’S GREAT UNITER terry tao, 31

He searches the mathematical universe for his next big trick THE CODE BREAKERS who are about to employ a powerful new method to piece together broken messages have UCLA day care to thank. While waiting to pick up their kids, Terry Tao, a UCLA mathematician, and Emmanuel Candes, a mathematician from the nearby California Institute of Technology, wondered if it was possible to reconstruct a garbled message even if you intercepted only bits and pieces of it. Using ideas from fields as diverse as geometry, statistics and calculus, they not only proved it possible (in special cases), they showed how to do it. Their technique is being adopted by anyone trying to clean up a jumbled signal, be they CIA agents tapping phone lines or doctors restoring spotty brain scans. The work is quintessential Tao: a breakthrough in a new field that requires a mastery of techniques from across the mathematical spectrum. It’s this kind of ingenuity that won Tao this year’s Fields Medal (announced as this issue went to press), the Nobel Prize equiva64 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

TAO’S INFINITE PRIMES Terry Tao and Ben Green at the University of Bristol in England found a surprising pattern among prime numbers. Here’s the condensed version of their 35-page proof. FIRST, FIND A PRIME A prime is a number divisible only by 1 and itself, such as 3, 11 and 421. THEN, CREATE A PRIME ARITHMETIC PROGRESSION (PAP) That’s a sequence of prime numbers in which each number is separated from the next by the same difference. The PAP “5,11, 17, 23” is four numbers long, and each number differs from the next by six. WHAT DID TAO AND GREEN PROVE? There are infinitely many PAPs of every length. So “5, 11, 17, 23” is just one of an infinite number of PAPs with four numbers in it. There’s also an infinite number of progressions that are five, 10 or even 1,936,046 numbers long.

lent in mathematics. He’s the youngest person to receive the Fields since 1986, which was two years before the then13-year-old Tao became the youngest person ever to win the International Math Olympiad. In the decade since he earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University at age 21, “he’s really taken the math world by storm,” says Tony Chan, the dean of physical sciences at UCLA. Tao has made major discoveries in at least five branches of mathematics, and, Chan says, “the senior people in these fields are scratching their heads in awe.” Tao’s most famous result brought an end to a mathematical search that had lasted for centuries [see box, left], in which he used techniques from several fields to uncover an astonishing pattern among primes. But to Tao, the traditional boundaries between different mathematical fields don’t seem to exist. “They’re interconnected in some way,” agrees John Garnett, his colleague at UCLA. “You have to be Terry Tao to see all this, but they are.”—lauren Aaronson

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BRILLIANT 10

own; he felt offended whenever his parents checked up on him by asking for his report card. He moved to the U.S. to start college at age 16 and has organized his days around science ever since. “I find that shaving in the morning, taking a shower, is an impediment to me getting to the lab,” he admits. Within the next few years, Yaghi’s devotion could pay off in real-world applications such as filters that capture the carbon-dioxide emissions from smokestacks. But to Yaghi, such uses are a secondary concern. “I didn’t start out to solve some big societal problem,” he says. Rather, he’s always simply chased the unknown. “If you do that honestly, then usefulness to society will come.”—lauren Aaronson

FACING PAGE: COURTESY UCLA

BOLD STORAGE Omar Yaghi holds up a model of a metal-organic framework (MOF) at UCLA’s botanical garden.

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BIRD BRAIN Erich Jarvis’s finches are hardwired for language in the same way humans are.

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BETH PERKINS; FACING PAGE: COURTESY SARA SEAGER

BRILLIANT 10

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BRILLIANT 10 astro-geology

SEEKER, DISTANT EARTHS sara seager, 35

Her simulations tell astronomers what fingerprints life may leave on other planets IN THE PAST DECADE, astronomers have found 200 new planets orbiting distant stars, and not one of them looks like Earth. Sara Seager, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, thinks that’s set to change. Having devised a way to figure out what kind of atmosphere, if any, a far-off planet has, she’s trying to prove that planets like our own dot the Milky Way. Since information about what distant planets are made of is scarce, Seager created her early models of extrasolar planets by considering what Earth must look like from thousands of lightyears away. She then altered her “Earth” in a thousand different ways—doubling its size, or adding strange gases to the atmosphere—and recalculated its appearance each time. Her library of

worlds not only reveals what newly discovered planets might be made of, it also gives astronomers ideas for what to look for. “She is predicting things for which we have little or no experimental data,” says San Francisco State University astronomer Debra Fischer, a member of the renowned team credited with discovering most of the known planets outside our solar system. “And those predictions drive all our observations.” In fact, Seager’s models helped in finding the first atmosphere around a distant planet. In 1999, just one month after Seager earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University, astronomers discovered a planet that passes in front of its parent star during every orbit as seen from Earth, blocking a small but detectable amount of starlight. Seager plugged what

was known about the planet into her models and predicted that this Jupiterlike “gas giant” would have sodium and potassium in its atmosphere. Two years later, astronomers searched for and found these chemical “signatures.” Seager has since used her technique to chart the atmospheres around 12 worlds, and now she’s looking for chemical signatures like ozone, which could indicate Earth-like conditions and maybe even extraterrestrial life. She’s cataloguing every potential chemical that might be released by alien life and modeling what biosignatures each compound might leave in a planet’s atmosphere. That way, when a telescope brings back those first signs of a living world, we’ll recognize it for what it is: another Earth.—Rena Marie Pacella

animal linguistics

BIRD-HUMAN TRANSLATOR erich jarvis, 41

His studies of songbirds are upending much of what we thought we knew about human language IF YOU THINK being surrounded by a

chorus of songbirds would be a delightful experience, think again. Stepping into the middle of Erich Jarvis’s zebra finch breeding colony at Duke University is like entering an auditorium filled with 200 tiny, screeching car alarms. The only pleasant sound in the room comes from Jarvis himself, as the star neurobiologist sings a surprisingly faithful version of a song made by the courting male zebra finch. Jarvis learned the song the same way finches do: by listening to other finches and imitating the tune. This makes humans and finches both “vocal learners,” a rare trait in the animal kingdom (only humans, songbirds, hummingbirds, parrots, bats, dolphins, whales and elephants are known to do

it). Jarvis’s groundbreaking work suggests that this shared ability is rooted in a fundamentally parallel brain structure. It also may provide proof that “language” is an innate ability encoded into all vertebrate brains. Jarvis first investigated how songbirds learn new songs by freezing, slicing, and dyeing the birds’ brains immediately after their final serenade. That process confirmed that birds use two distinct neural pathways to learn a song, one in front of the brain and one in back. He then discovered that on the neurological level, humans (and parrots and hummingbirds) learn to speak (and sing) in the same way. But if each group evolved the ability to “speak” independently, how could our brains all employ the same neural

arrangement? Jarvis believes the answer lies in evolution—when we shared a common ancestor 300 million years ago, brains were hardwired for language. If he’s correct, even sophisticated human language grew out of the brain’s ancient networks, the same networks out of which “language” arises in finches. Once neuroscientists better understand this genetic blueprint, they can in theory alter it, perhaps to repair brain damage or simply to enhance our ability to learn new languages. Until then, Jarvis is expanding his studies. He’d like to do more work on mammals, especially humans (though he finds it difficult to find subjects). “I see myself working with humans, but not just with humans,” he says. After all, there’s so much to learn from the birds.—Adam M. Bright

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BRILLIANT 10 computer science

PLAYER 1

PLAYER 2

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY JUSTIN MERRIMAN/CARNEGIE MELLON; THOM LANG/CORBIS; COURTESY GOOGLE; COURTESY JUSTIN MERRIMAN/CARNEGIE MELLON

TIRED COMPUTER GLOW YAWN

THE MATRIX BUILDER

BLUE WORK YAWN THINK OF THE ESP GAME as a slideshow in which you provide the captions. Random images pop up from the Web, and you furiously type possible one-word descriptions. If one of your words matches one guessed by your partner, it becomes a label for that image. It’s fast, addictive and competitive, like a good Web game should be.

DATABASE LABELS

GOOGLE IMAGES LABELS

luis von ahn, 27

If something’s too hard for computers, he tricks human processing units into solving the problem

THE STRATEGY WORKS because people spend more man-hours every day playing games on the Web than it took to build the Empire State Building. “If 5,000 people were playing the game simultaneously, they could label all the images in Google’s directory in a few months,” Luis von Ahn says. Google is interested in the software, but as of press time it had made no formal commitment.

MOST ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE

researchers face the gargantuan task of making computers think like humans. Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn works the other way around. He harnesses tens of thousands of people’s reasoning skills for those rare yet important jobs that are too hard for computers. His strategy is to make the work seem like a game. Von Ahn’s most popular application tackles one of the most difficult tasks in computer science: labeling every image on the Internet. Computers can’t make fine distinctions in visual information, so in the ESP Game (espgame.org), randomly paired online participants compete to label photos from the Web. If it’s successful, your next Google Images search might turn up exactly what you’re looking for.—Elizabeth Svoboda

68 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

MAN WALL VON AHN

FACE MIRROR VON AHN

BORN IN GUATEMALA, von Ahn got his first computer at age eight and taught himself to program the same year. He pursued math-oriented computer science before realizing his true calling: using brain power to make computers smarter. When you come up against a problem that takes more nuance than a computer can muster, he says, “human intelligence comes in handy.”

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HOW IT WORKS Because it’s good to know what’s inside

YOUR FLAT-SCREEN TV An LCD TV uses a million crystal switches firing several times a second to create video from a panel barely as thick as this magazine

BY ADAM M. BRIGHT • ILLUSTRATIONS BY GRAHAM MURDOCH

LED BULBS provide the backlight DIFFUSER spreads the light out CIRCUITRY translates the TV signal into instructions for the LCD

FOR TIPS ON HOW TO HANG YOUR LCD TV, SEE PAGE 101 70 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

왔 THE BIG PICTURE: Liquid-crystal displays (LCDs), whether in your TV, phone or laptop, all create an image the same way: Tiny squares of light—pixels—glow with a particular color and intensity, controlled by liquid crystals sandwiched in between layers of glass a sixteenth of an inch thick. The best sets change pixels so fast that the image never blurs, even in fast action.

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BACKLIGHT

LIQUID CRYSTALS

TFT ARRAY

COLOR FILTER

POLARIZER

왘 A MILLION POINTS

OF LIGHT A standarddefinition TV has 640 pixels horizontally and 480 vertically—307,200 total. HD sets cram more than two million pixels into a similar-size space for much greater detail.

X SUBPIXELS

INSIDE AN LCD: IT’S ALL ABOUT THE LIGHT 1. make light 2. direct it

3. Twist it

4. filter it

A backlight created by fluorescent bulbs—or, A in the next generation of LCDs, an array of LEDs—shines through a diffuser to cast a uniform white glow behind the screen. Since light waves naturally orient themselves in all directions, the light first travels through a vertical polarizer to line up all the waves vertically [A].

The TFT does this by controlling a layer b of liquid crystals. In their natural state, these rod-shaped molecules arrange themselves in a twisted pattern [B], so they turn those vertical light waves horizontal. But when a transistor in the TFT array applies a voltage to the crystals, they line up straight to keep the light vertical.

The light passes through a color filter printed on a piece of glass to tint it the proper shade before it hits a horizontal polarizer. The twisted light waves get through to make a pixel glow; those that stay vertical don’t, leaving that pixel dimmer or dark. A white pixel means all three subpixels are completely lit. This process happens 30 times a second; 60 in a high-def set.

The light waves hit the TFT (thin-film transistor) array, a sheet of glass with three transistors etched on it for each pixel. Why three? Every pixel on the screen is made up of three smaller blue, red and green subpixels. To make a pixel appear, say, purple, only the blue and red subpixels should glow. The TFT controls how much light gets to each subpixel, using information in the TV signal as a guide.

BUYING A TV: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

AP PHOTO/LG.PHILIPS LCD

1. LCD OR PLASMA?

Just a couple years ago, LCD TVs were only cost-effective below 37 inches, and plasma displays were the better bargain for anything larger. But LCD manufacturers can now make bigger sheets of glass more efficiently, enabling not only monsters like the 100incher at right, but cheaper living-room-size sets as well. Today, you can get a good deal on an LCD up to 50 inches.

2. KNOW THY SIZE

That said, if your set is too large for your living room, you’ll not only lose sight of the outer edges, you’ll notice every little picture flaw because your eyes will see more of the individual pixels. To figure out the optimum screen height for your space, divide the distance from your couch to the TV by 3.3. Find additional calculators at myhometheater.homestead.com.

3. FIX THY COLOR

Out of the box, LCD TVs have blaring, unnatural colors, meant to look good on a bright showroom floor. To fix them, adjust the brightness until dark areas become as black as possible without losing detail. Then finetune the contrast to do the same for white. Set the“temperature” to 6,500 degrees. Finally, adjust the saturation until reds look rich but not too intense.

왖 RECORD SET The world’s largest LCD TV is 100 inches, made by LG.Philips. Put away your wallet: It’s not for sale.

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TESTING GROUND Satellite imagery taken on January 17, 2006, of Area 51 reveals little. Base security personnel know when satellites are passing overhead, and test aircraft remain indoors at those times. Personnel work in windowless offices and are locked inside when anything other than their own project is outdoors.

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FUTURE TECH: AVIATION

AREA 51 NEW SECRETS OF

Three key facts

Mysterious commuters, unexplained sonic booms, and big spending at this top-secret desert outpost suggest a surge in classified military aircraft— and hint of one long-rumored speed demon’s steady progress toward reality

Classified, or “black,” programs produced the U-2 and SR-71 spyplanes.

Studying vague budget allocations and gaps in military forces can uncover black projects.

Programs can linger for years until key technologies are developed.

BY BILL SWEETMAN

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FUTURE TECH: AVIATION

Cut to April 4 this year. San Diego is hit by a rumbling shock that isn’t an earthquake. It is ruled out by the media as a sonic boom after military operators claim it is not one of their aircraft. San Diego Union-Tribune reporter Alex Roth does some digging and comes up with six puzzlingly similar incidents around the country since 2003. Fast-forward to July, at the Farnborough International Airshow in southeastern England. Frank Cappuccio, the avuncular vice president of Lockheed Martin’s secretive Skunk Works division, opens a press conference by introducing what he calls a promotional video, “something to show the kids and families about what we do.” Two minutes into the show, a gray, cockpit-less airplane that nobody has seen before—it looks like a B-2 bomber’s chick—soars over a backdrop of stony, barren hills and mountains. All these events are linked. They are the visible signs of an invisible, parallel world within the universe of aerospace

and defense: the classified, or “black,” world of secret military programs. Those unmarked 737s were ferrying employees to the flight-test center near Groom Lake, Nevada, known to the public as Area 51. The gray airplane is Polecat, a next-generation stealth unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)— Cappuccio’s video was his sly way of unveiling the program. Those earthquakes? Quite possibly sonic booms from a long-suspected hypersonic attack vehicle, a sleek aircraft that has consumed the imaginations of blackproject enthusiasts and military analysts, including me, for two decades. Though seemingly dormant in recent years, the program appears to be on the move again, and with a renewed vigor that has me feeling, somewhat unsettlingly, a bit like the aerospace industry’s own Ahab. The black airplane world has, without question, produced the most significant advances in aviation technology. In the 1950s, it spawned the U-2

SPECIAL-OPS INFILTRATOR THE VEHICLE: Vertical-takeoff-andlanding aircraft for transporting special-ops forces to hostile areas THE TECHNOLOGY: Blended-wingbody design with six jet engines powering lift fans and providing forward thrust THE EVIDENCE: Patent filings, obvious gap in current arsenal, recent development of key technology

spyplane, which flew higher and farther than anyone had thought possible. It gave birth a decade later to the SR-71 Blackbird, the exotic, revered speed king. It also produced the slow but stealthy, origami-like F-117 fighter.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE . . .

Passing through town? Don’t get your hopes up—this ain’t no Roswell Area 51 is often mentioned in the same breath as Roswell, New Mexico. The two are actually 800 miles apart. Lore has it that aliens crash-landed near Roswell in 1947 and the military whisked their vehicles and bodily remains to Area 51 for study. Although Roswell has capitalized on the myth, Area 51’s tiny local residential base—nearby Rachel,

74 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

Nevada, population 100—is more, well, discreet. But should you pass through Rachel, stop for a bite at the Little A’Le’Inn restaurant, shown here with its late owner, Joe Travis. Want to snoop around? The only vantage point for observers is Tikaboo Peak, unreachable in winter and 26 miles from the tightly secured base. Good luck!

PRECEDING PAGES: DIGITALGLOBE; THIS PAGE: JON FREEMAN/GETTY IMAGES; FACING PAGE: JOHN MACNEILL

ON A TRIP TO LAS VEGAS in 2004, observing from my eastfacing hotel room in the pyramidal Luxor Hotel at daybreak, I watched a fleet of six unmarked 737s make commuter flights to nowhere. These aircraft depart every weekday morning from a tidy, anonymous terminal on the western side of McCarran International Airport. A long line of cars pours into a 1,600-spot parking lot as the jets pull away from the terminal, taxi to the runways, and head out into the desert sky. At the end of the day, the shuttle flights return and the lot empties. The passengers go home and tell their families nothing about what happened at work that day.

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But for aerospace sleuths, there’s been little activity recently in the form of declassified vehicles that might hint at current efforts. (Classified programs can be unveiled to aid in broad combat deployment or when the technology appears in other programs.) The F-117 came out of the black world during the first Iraq war 15 years ago, and only three aircraft have been introduced since. One was Polecat. Another was Northrop Grumman’s ungainly reconnaissance aircraft Tacit Blue, nicknamed “the Whale.” The third was Boeing’s Bird of Prey, which tested visual stealth strategies, including shaping that minimizes shadows and contrast and, rumor has it, body illumination that allows it to blend into its background.

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ANALYSIS OF THE EVIDENCE REVEALS TANTALIZING DESIGNS BEING COOKED UP ON THE SLY AT AREA 51. This dearth of unveiled prototypes does not mean, however, that the blackaircraft community is dormant. In fact, all signs point to steadily increasing activity. Google Earth reveals a newly constructed additional runway and multiple new hangars and buildings at the base. The usual vague, untraceable allocations in congressional budgets that often signal classified programs are on the rise, and modern technological innovations are now enabling aircraft designs that might have floundered in the black world for years. Further, there

are significant gaps in the military’s known aviation arsenal—gaps that the Pentagon can reasonably be assumed to be actively, if quietly, trying to fill. The need for such secrecy is simple: It is essential to preserving technological surprise. The Pentagon wishes to prevent enemies from developing strategies to counter the technology. The challenge is to figure out what precisely is happening—without betraying national security—because the bigger the black world gets, the better it conceals its activities. What follows is

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THE FUTURE OF MILITARY TRAINING

RECON PLATFORM THE VEHICLE: Unmanned flying-wing capable of long-duration surveillance flights, measured in days and weeks instead of hours THE TECHNOLOGY: Autonomous flight controls and ultra-efficient electric motors powered by solar panels or fuel cells THE EVIDENCE: Patent filing, clear current need, recent development of key technology

DELIVERING SPECIAL FORCES BEHIND ENEMY LINES One of the best pointers to a secret program is an obvious gap in the “white world” force, and one of these gaps is a stealthy, short-runway transport airplane. The U.S. Air Force’s specialoperations community has talked for many years about stealthy transports that could take off and land vertically or on a few hundred feet of level ground (a soccer field is the classic example). The new V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor transport is a partial answer to that problem, but the military would really

like something faster, so it can fly farther into and out of enemy territory, and the Osprey’s big rotors quickly betray it to radar. So far, there is no sign of unclassified, white-world money developing such a vehicle. In 1992, however, Skunk Works engineers filed a patent application for such an aircraft. (New aircraft can take years to develop. A 14-year-old patent filing could easily represent a current program.) Tailless, with a blended wing and body, the aircraft is powered by six jet engines driving rotor-like lifting fans ensconced in wide, round bays in the wings. For takeoff and landing, doors and Venetian-blind vanes cascade open, and the fans lift the airplane vertically. While cruising, the engines drive smaller, forward-thrusting fans. Why six engines? The engines and fans are interconnected by an elaborate system of cross-shafts so that any engine can deliver power to either side of the airplane. With six engines, the airplane

THE NEED FOR ABSOLUTE SECRECY IS SIMPLE: IT IS ESSENTIAL TO PRESERVING TECHNOLOGICAL SURPRISE. 76 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

can complete a mission if one fails. Is something like that out there today? The job of a vertical-takeoffand-landing aircraft still needs doing, perhaps now more than ever before, and, barring antigravity solutions from the friendly aliens at Area 51, an aircraft like this is one of the few ways to get it done. Technologically, it is probably benefiting from the innovations behind the Osprey’s power-sharing engines—in that aircraft, if one engine fails, the second still drives both propellers—and the development of the shaft-driven vertical-lift fan in the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, or JSF.

NEW UAVS: UNMANNED, INVISIBLE, UNLIMITED Although manned fighter jets and bombers have long dominated classified programs, unmanned vehicles are rising as quickly in the black as in the white world, particularly because the Air Force lacks any kind of stealth-reconnaissance aircraft. It plans to replace the U-2 spyplane with the Global Hawk UAV, but even though the Global Hawk has the advantage of being robotic—that is, capable of longer flights and expend-

THIS PAGE AND FACING PAGE: JOHN MACNEILL

inescapably an educated guess, arrived at by analysis of the available evidence, at the tantalizing designs being cooked up on the sly at Area 51, including a radical special-forces transport, a stealthy UAV, an agile new bomber, and my own white whale—the mythical, hypersonic dragster and presumed source of those faux earthquakes: Aurora.

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FUTURE TECH: AVIATION able, since there’s no human on board—it doesn’t fly as high and can’t carry the same hefty high-performance cameras as the U-2. Nor does it carry a jammer to spoof enemy missiles. Polecat, just outed from the black world, is part of the answer. Lockheed Martin representatives talk about an operational version with U-2-like altitude and payload, along with technology to avoid visual detection (including features seen on the Bird of Prey) and, perhaps, an automated system that detects a contrail behind the airplane and tells the flight-control system to change altitude. Other stealthy UAVs have probably been tested—among them, possibly, armed UAVs. It is known, for example, that engine maker Williams International delivered the first dozen or so of its new FJ33 small jet engines to the U.S. government four or five years ago, but no known project uses that engine. A recent report in Jane’s International Defence Review described another, larger vehicle that uses different engines from Polecat, apparently recycled from a 1960s UAV program. The article speculated that the engines are probably General Electric J97s, built for a UAV called Compass Arrow.

Why reuse old jet engines? There is only one good reason. The J97 was unusual in that it was designed to operate at up to 80,000 feet, an altitude at which most jet engines cough, stall, and quit. The Air Force does not send the stealthy B-2 and F-117 over hostile territory in daylight, because those planes could be easily spotted. But at 80,000 feet, six miles above a fighter’s cruising altitude, the sky is almost as black as night, and a UAV could survive at high noon. I suspect that both Polecat and the second, larger stealth UAV are currently undergoing high-altitude flight-testing at Area 51. Some UAV projects may be much slower than even the stealth birds. A Boeing patent filed in 2004 describes a vehicle that is a cross between an airship and an airplane—employing both buoyant lift from helium gas and wing lift generated by forward speed, and capitalizing on recent developments in on-board solar power generation and autonomous flight control. What would be the advantage of such a vehicle? For one thing, it would have long flight endurance, measured in days or weeks rather than hours. For another, airships can easily be made to accommodate very large and sensitive

antennas. If you want to locate weak or sporadic radio transmissions—such as cellphones or scattered satellite phones used by insurgent groups—the airship is an ideal platform.

REVIVED AVENGER OFFERS STEALTHY GROUND ATTACKS Another surprising gap in U.S. capabilities is the lack of an all-weather, stealthy ground-attack aircraft. The Joint Strike Fighter is supposed to do that, but not until 2014. The new F-22 Raptor, mostly an air-to-air fighter, will be able to do some of it eventually, but that jet carries a relatively modest 2,000-pound bomb load. The F-117 Stealth fighter can be flown only in clear nighttime weather —it has no radar to bomb accurately through clouds, and its black coating easily betrays it to ground spotters. Fellow black-project sleuth Jeffrey Richelson, author of the 2001 book The Wizards of Langley and one of the leading historians of U.S. intelligence efforts, guessed in a recent conversation that a behind-the-scenes tour of Groom Lake might reveal a revived program to plug that gap sooner than 2014, when the JSF flies. A hint about possible all-weather attack vehicles now in testing—ones

INVISIBLE FIGHTER THE VEHICLE: Stealthy, unmanned combat aerial vehicle THE TECHNOLOGY: Visual stealth, including active fuselage lighting that blends into background THE EVIDENCE: Patent filing, development of key technology, obvious gap in current arsenal

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FUTURE TECH: AVIATION

ON-TIME DELIVERY THE VEHICLE: Aurora Mach 6-plus attack aircraft THE TECHNOLOGY: Ramjet-powered delta wing

AURORA WOULD BE AS FLEETING AS ITS NAMESAKE, LEAVING MORE OF AN IMPRESSION THAN AN ACTUAL SIGHTING. available sooner than 2014 and capable of carrying significant bomb loads— could reside, aerospace historian Peter Merlin pointed out, in a test pilot’s unclassified biography. Daniel Vanderhorst, who flew Northrop’s Whale and six other secret aircraft in a 20-year career, evidently “tested modified landing gear and conducted initial tests of internal weapons bays and weapon separation tests.” What’s unusual about this is that most prototypes are simple aircraft without weapon bays, which suggests that this airplane was closer to an operational type. Specifically, I’m guessing, it could be an extension of the heavy-payload, all-weather attack jet A-12 Avenger II, which then–Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney canceled in 1991 because it was overbudget and not meeting its technological goals. The flying-wing, carrier-based stealth-strike airplane was being developed under a tightly classified but not-quite-black program. The jet was only 11 months from first flight, and

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nobody has ever disclosed what happened to the partly built prototypes. If one of them had been completed and tested in a revived black program, most likely in the early 1990s, it could have pointed the way toward the F-117 replacement that Richelson suspects is flying now. Unlike the other stealth aircraft, an operational A-12 descendant would combine stealth ground-attack capability with the ability to shoot back at enemy fighters, packing a pair of anti-radar missiles and two AIM-120 air-to-air missiles.

PROVIDING ON-DEMAND WORLDWIDE ATTACK Lastly, there’s Aurora. The name itself is mysterious, evoking something you may or may not have seen. This code name leaked out of an unclassified budget document back in 1985. Such a vehicle—a ramjet-powered reconaissance and strike aircraft capable of flying at least five times the speed of sound and deploying anywhere in the

world in a matter of hours—has been high on the government’s wish list. Aurora is certainly possible. The basic propulsion unit, the ramjet, is no more than a tapered tube with a fuel injector and burner in the middle and a thrust nozzle at the end. Basic ramjet-powered missiles have topped Mach 6. A wealth of aerodynamic data and test flights suggest that a wedge-shaped aircraft would work at these speeds. I first heard about this kind of program in the mid-1980s, and the first public hint of the project popped up in 1988, when the New York Times reported that the Air Force was developing a spyplane capable of better than Mach 5—nearly twice as fast as the SR-71, then the world’s fastest airplane. Two years later, the Blackbird was retired. In June 1991, the first in a series of unexplained shock waves rolled across the Los Angeles basin, rattling doors and windows and making people think of earthquakes. But they were not earthquakes, and the military adamantly denied that any of its vehicles caused the booms. In May of this year, I consulted with Dom Maglieri, an ex-NASA sonic-boom expert who has played a key (CONTINUED ON PAGE 115)

NICK KALOTERAKIS

THE EVIDENCE: Telltale sonic booms; unconfirmed sightings; unresolved history of long-rumored program; recent development of key technology; large, unexplained current budget allocation

AS REAL AS IT GETS

CONGRATULATIONS. YOU’VE RIGHTED YOUR PLANE. NEXT UP: EMERGENCY LANDING IN THE JUNGLES OF THE CONGO.

After that, let’s see you rescue an injured climber on Mt. Kilimanjaro. Or take on the world’s best pilots in the Red Bull Air Races. With 23 aircraft and over 50 real-world missions, it’s the most realistic version yet. Whole cities and airports have been faithfully recreated, with a 16X overall improvement in terrain graphics. Suddenly, calling it a “simulator” just doesn’t seem right.

(ACTUAL GAME SCREEN SHOT) © 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Windows, and the Microsoft Games Studios logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Intel, the Intel Inside logo, Intel Centrino, and the Intel Centrino logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. Take ﬂight with Intel Technology.

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INSTANT EXPERT EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW, NOTHING YOU DON’T

UNVEILING THE FIRST

INVISIBILITY SHIELD

Invisibility is a staple of science fiction, from H.G. Wells to Romulans. Now scientists see a way to make objects disappear BY JR MINKEL WHAT: A way to make objects invisible. The trick is to use metamaterial, a complex hybrid structure of metal and insulator that makes light move around an object like air flowing over an airplane wing. In a process called refraction, these materials interact with light in such a way that it travels faster through the metamaterial than it does through a vacuum, the famed c in Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Properly tuned, the light emerges from the shield as if there were no object present. But unfortunately for would-be spies, it’s very difficult to make cloaking devices that work on more than one wavelength of light at a time.

WHY: Military stealth. A B-2 bomber isn’t truly invisible to radar. It just absorbs and redirects the radar waves, making the plane much harder to spot (its radar signature is the size of a pigeon rather than an aircraft). A bomber, tank or building covered in a radarsensitive metamaterial shield would literally disappear from radar screens.

work on visible light—which isn’t a single frequency but a spectrum of frequencies—are at a more primitive state. A specific metamaterial design would be required to redirect each frequency in the visible range, and integrating that many components into a device might take 10 years for the initial lab demonstration alone.

WHEN: For certain applications, commercial deployment could be within a decade. The best-studied metamaterials work only on microwaves. Duke University physicist David R. Smith hopes to shield a toaster-size object from microwave frequencies within the next six months. Metamaterials that

WHO: The mathematical models were developed independently by two groups, the first led by Ulf Leonhardt at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and the second by Smith with John Pendry of Imperial College London. Smith could soon prove the concept experimentally.

A History of invisibility 1897

In The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells introduces the idea, then fictional, of a scientific route to invisibility. The protagonist uses bleach and mysterious rays to make himself invisible.

1968

Ukrainian theorist Victor Veselago predicts the possibility of building metamaterials that act as light accelerators. It will be 30 years before anyone can craft them in the lab.

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1987

The movie Predator features invisibility in the camouflage of an alien hunter. Guess what? It was a fairly realistic fictional presentation of the phenomenon, says physicist David R. Smith.

2000

Smith and his colleagues at Duke University construct the first metamaterial, a thicket of metal wires capable of refracting microwaves.

2003

Engineer Susumu Tachi of Tokyo University demonstrates an “invisibility” cloak. Instead of bending light, it projects an image of a background onto the wearer’s front.

2005

British and Russian researchers deposit rodshaped gold pieces onto a surface, creating a metamaterial that interacts with near-visible light.

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GONE IN 60 SECONDS Here, our interpretation of a car mid-cloaking.

Light reflected off an object makes it visible to observers.

The invisibility shield [broken red line] wraps light around the object.

HOW IT WORKS 1. Surround an object with a shell of metamaterial—a conductor and insulator hybrid that acts as an accelerator for incoming light rays.

JOHN MACNEILL

faqS

2. Incoming light hits the metamaterial shell. Instead of reflecting off the shell, the light is piped through the shell, curving around the cloaked object.

3. Light emerges from the shell on the same path it would have been traveling had nothing happened to it, making the cloaked object appear transparent.

For those who wish to hide in plain sight

HAS ANYONE MADE A METAMATERIAL?

CAN THE CLOAKING BE PERFECT?

Yes. Scientists in the U.S. and the U.K. have made metamaterials with what’s called a negative index of refraction. Generally, these metamaterials are coiled metal wires surrounded by air or another insulator and affect only microwave radiation.

Almost. Any metamaterial absorbs a little bit of light and therefore casts a slight shadow.

COULD AN ACTUAL CLOAK EVER HIDE A PERSON? Yes, but current designs would work only if you painted your-

self all one color. A cloak, which for comfort’s sake needs to be pretty thin, could bend radiation of just a single frequency, so it could only hide an object of one color. There’s a possibility, though, that a thick shell could include a wider variety of metamaterials and broaden the invisibility to multiple frequencies.

WHAT WOULD THE INSIDE OF THE CLOAK LOOK LIKE? If a cloak worked over the entire spectrum, the lack of light would make the inside black, and you wouldn’t be able to see outside. No one knows exactly what would happen if you turned on a flashlight inside the cloak.

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THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET

THE INTERNET IS

SICK

Overrun by crooks we can’t find, much less convict, the Web is under siege. The only way to save it is to rebuild it—and this time, give it an immune system

...BUT WE CAN MAKE IT

BETTER by Dan Tynan • ILLUSTRATIONS BY PIXELGARDEN.COM

WHAT DO YOU THINK HAPPENS when you connect your

ating system. According to the FBI, $67.2 billion was lost last computer to the Internet? In less than an hour, it may not be year to online crime. Sure, there are ways to fight back [see yours anymore. While you’re Googling your name and check- “Five Things You Can Do Today to Protect Yourself,” page ing e-mail, a hacker, perhaps in Eastern Europe—let’s call 88], shutting down “zombies” (PCs surreptitiously controlled him Ivan—quietly takes over your machine. There are a by hackers) and prosecuting the handful of Ivans the police dozen ways Ivan could do it, but he probably found you with have managed to catch. But it’s like playing a huge game of a program he didn’t get at Best Buy called a port scanner, whack-a-mole. Knock the criminals over the head in one spot, which roams the Internet like a clumsy cat burglar, trying and they pop up someplace else. “No matter what solution every doorknob until it locates one left unlocked. Then he you come up with, it takes the bad guys about five minutes makes a connection to your computer—sort of like to get around it,” says Lance Spitzner, president of the starting a chat session, only invisible to you—and nonprofit volunteer Honeynet Project, which sets out uses it to deliver a “backdoor,” a small piece of code vulnerable computers as bait so researchers can that lets him take control of your PC whenever he study attackers’ behavior. “The creativity of cyberwants. You won’t know it, but you’ve just become criminals is amazing.” part of a “botnet,” a small army of computers that Fact is, the system is easy to game because it Number, Ivan will rent to international organized-crime rings, was never designed to be secure. The Internet was in thouwhich will use it to spew spam, steal identities, or created 40 years ago so university geeks could share sands, of hold corporate Web sites hostage (not to mention research, not so you could buy baubles on eBay. As PCs overslow down your PC). companies developed ingenious ways to build secutaken by Sound like a scare story? It happens to more rity into things like online credit-card transactions, cyberthan 300,000 computers each day—PCs connected hackers came up with equally ingenious ways to get criminals to the Internet without security precautions such as around it, launching a security arms race that Ivan every day a firewall, anti-virus software or an up-to-date operand his comrades are so far winning.

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Three key facts

1 2

Unprotected computers can quickly become “zombie” PCs, remotely con-

trolled by hackers for criminal purposes. Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab is look-

ing to biological principles like evolution for ways to better secure the Internet.

3 crime in other countries stems from organized Much of the fraud and identity theft on the Internet today .

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171

If we want to fight back, we need a new remedy 1: Number, approach, something that fundamentally changes in billions, the way computers interact with the Internet and of e-mail how the Internet functions. Companies and organimessages zations all over the world are working on these Make software and operating systems that sent kinds of long-term solutions, but one of the most evolve when attacked, so the same trick every day radical ideas is being developed at Carnegie Mellon doesn’t work on so many computers University’s CyLab, the world’s largest Internet-security In June 2004, Internet-security researchers discovered a research hub. Launched in 2003, CyLab has 70 faculty vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6 that could let attackers researchers and 140 graduate students at its Pittsburgh cam- take over your computer when you visited an infected Web pus, with satellite facilities in Korea and Japan. Its approach site. The attack exploited a flaw in how IE 6 managed security, fooling the browser into thinking that malicious code is to make the Internet function like a biological entity that was running in a so-called “trusted zone” on your local wards off attacks the way a healthy body fights off a cold— machine instead of on the Internet. Once a machine was in other words, to build a network with an immune system. “Unless we move toward that goal, we’ll just spend all our infected, the attackers could do anything they pleased—erase files, install a key-logger to steal bank-account information, or time solving new problems,” says Pradeep Khosla, dean of turn the computer into a zombie. The problem was so bad Carnegie Mellon’s college of engineering and co-director of that the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, a diviCyLab. You can’t build something that’s perfectly secure, so sion of the Department of Homeland Security, advised Web you make something that can survive the attacks you can surfers to stop using IE until Microsoft issued a patch, which anticipate, making it harder and more expensive for crimiit did in August of that year. The worst part? Because every nals to do their thing. Even Fort Knox could be taken, but it single copy of IE 6 contained the same flaw, the attackers had would require a small army to do it, which would cut heavily tens of millions of potential targets. into the bad guys’ profits. CyLab has dozens of projects at “The reason the human race is so robust is that there’s various stages of development; many are years from implediversity in the gene pool,” Khosla says. “The problem with mentation and would cost billions of dollars to put in place. [software] is that every version has the same damned bugs.” But the following remedies—creating resistance to attacks Researchers at CyLab are studying how plants and animals and finding their sources—are necessary medicine for an evolve in response to disease, hoping to emulate those Internet that’s getting sicker by the minute. processes by building software that adapts when attacked. If some copies of Explorer “evolved” to resist the attack, hackers would soon give up and go looking for easier targets. Taking the idea one step further, CyLab imagines creating programs or entire operating systems that would randomly change the way they functioned as they operated or that would execute instructions in a different order every time. For example, each copy of IE might use a slightly different method of determining security zones. The difficulty lies in replicating enough of the code so that every application does the same thing, without replicating its vulnerabilities, says CyLab’s technical director, Mike Reiter, who thinks we might begin to see programs like this in three to five years. “Why do we have epidemics?” Khosla says. “Not because there are germs out there. It’s because we can’t control their propagation. You can’t stop the dissemination of viruses and worms, but you can reduce their speed of propagation.”

CREATE DIVERSITY ON YOUR DESKTOP

remedy 2:

BOOST DATA IMMUNE SYSTEMS

Protect corporate databases so they can’t be stolen from, and the networks around them so they can’t be brought down for ransom remedy 1: Build software and operating systems in such a way that they don’t all have the same vulnerabilities. 84 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

Eran Reshef thought he’d figured out a clever way to combat spam. The CEO of Israeli company Blue Security

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WHO ARE THESE CRIMINALS? MEET THE Inter-

turn may be linked net’s new bad guys. to criminal groups Where once “script in Eastern Europe, kiddies”—young West Africa and amateur hackers— South America, wrote viruses just Larkin adds. And Cost, in to cause havoc and although internacents, per show off their tional cooperation week to rent one skills, they’re now is steadily improvzombie PC building “zombie ing, he says, farms”—armies of pursuing and proPCs controlled from afar— secuting cyber-criminals and renting them out to the thousands of miles away highest bidder on underremains an enormous ground forums you’d never challenge. find with a Google search. If a criminal lives in Increasingly, they’re being Eastern Europe and the hired by organized crime local authorities have more syndicates to steal identities important crimes to deal and hold corporate Web with, there’s not much that sites hostage. can be done, admits Jody “Ten years ago we Westby, CEO of Global Cyber talked about the Internet as Risk, a Washington, D.C.– the Wild West,” says Peter based security consultancy. Swire, a law professor at And what might be illegal in Ohio State University and a the U.S. isn’t necessarily former top privacy official in outlawed overseas. “Cyberthe Clinton administration. space has no borders, but “Now it’s more like ganglaw-enforcement agencies land Chicago in the 1920s. and diplomats do,” she says. The threats come from Worse, international organized crime, not lone crime outfits are beginning cowboys.” to pool their efforts, making These cyber-crooks them even more of a threat, may be dispersed across Westby says. “The Nigerithe globe, each with his own ans, who are expert at specialty. “This is not your taking over accounts, are traditional La Cosa Nostra cooperating with the Chitype of organized nese, who are expert at crime,” says Dan counterfeiting. We’re Larkin, unit chief facing a more for the FBI’s Cyber sophisticated Initiative and criminal operating Resource Fusion environment, yet Unit in Pittsburgh. we’ve not gotten Price, in “In many cases, more sophistidollars, they don’t know cated in our ability to buy a each other personto catch them. stolen ally, just by trade They have an credit-card and screen name.” advantage, there’s number These gangs in no question.”

remedy 2: Create ways of storing information that are so complex and redundant, hackers can’t steal enough to hurt.

Attackers can take down a corporate Web site and keep it down until the company pays a ransom. created a method of flooding junk e-mailers and their clients with opt-out requests—essentially, spamming the spammers. Within a few months, Reshef claimed, six of the world’s biggest junk e-mailers had agreed to stop spamming his customers. Then, this past May, a Russian spammer known as PharmaMaster fought back. Using a botnet, he launched what’s called a distributed denial of service, or DDOS, attack. If too many computers try to access a Web site at the same time, it overwhelms the servers that host the site and shuts it down. DDOS attacks do this relentlessly, keeping a company’s site offline until it agrees to pay a ransom. And PharmaMaster didn’t stop there. He took down Blue Security’s blog service, its Internet service provider, and the security firm it hired to repel the original attack. Then he sent Blue Security’s customers e-mails infected with a virus. After two weeks of relentless attacks, Blue Security just gave up. At press time, Bluesecurity.com was still offline. (Reshef declined to be interviewed for this article.) Nobody knows how many of these attacks occur every year, because few companies admit to being attacked for fear of revealing their weaknesses. Today DDOS attacks are largely fought by redirecting the enormous amount of traffic to servers that can handle it. Percent of Often companies hire firms that specialize in all e-mail such defense. classified Someday, these attacks could be solved as spam by self-healing networks that can continue

100

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THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET to function while under attack—the electronic equivalent of a head cold. But such systems are still years away from being built in the lab, let alone deployed on the Internet. CyLab isn’t even working on them yet. But if they can’t yet protect a network from being attacked, they can at least protect the large databases of information—say, a bank’s customer records—behind those networks. A version of these so-called survivable data-storage systems is in place at CyLab today. One way to think about CyLab’s system is to imagine a database as a sheet of paper. If you tear the paper into 1,000 differently shaped pieces and store them in 1,000 different places, you make it harder to steal. But if an attacker finds and destroys just one piece, you can’t reconstruct the paper. If you make four copies of the paper, though, cut each copy into 1,000 different pieces, and store all the pieces on 1,000 different computers, you’ve made the target so big and elusive that an attacker can’t possibly take down enough of it to cause you problems. And because there are copies of every bit of data, the system itself can replace any compromised pieces. “An attacker would have to take down 80 percent of your computers to bring the system down,” Khosla says. “Even if you’re under a massive attack, it won’t totally die.”

remedy 3: Figure out the origin of viruses and other attacks so we can better hunt down the people behind them.

Do you really want Uncle Sam—or your boss—to see exactly where you go on the Internet every day?

THREE MORE SECURITY SOLUTIONS

Promising weapons in the fight against identity thieves and computer-killing viruses GREY

VIGILANTE

WHO: Carnegie Mellon CyLab PROBLEMS ADDRESSED: Identify theft, fraud, unauthorized access HOW IT WORKS: Before you can log on to, say, your online bank account, the computer sends a message to your phone to verify that you should have access to that account. You type a PIN into the phone and use the phone’s camera to take a facial-recognition scan. The phone delivers the information to a server, which gives the goahead to your bank’s Web site to let you log in. An early version of this system opens doors at CyLab today. The technology, named for telekinetic “X-Men” character Jean Grey, could ultimately replace passwords, security badges and the keys in your pocket, says Mike Reiter, CyLab’s technical director. WHEN: A few years MORE INFO: www.cylab.cmu.edu

WHO: Microsoft Research WHO: Internet2 consortium PROBLEM ADDRESSED: Rapidly PROBLEMS SOLVED: Identity theft and spreading viruses protecting online privacy HOW IT WORKS: Vigilante is a small pro- HOW IT WORKS: Shibboleth passes on gram that sits in a computer’s memory only the barest minimum of personal and constantly scans for suspicious information needed to sign on to a site behavior. Once the program recognizes or to complete a transaction without an attack, it generates a security your having to disclose your identity. Penn State University alert to other machines on the students use it to log on to a network. They then create a free legal music download filter so they can identify any site. Shibboleth ascertains mutations of the attack and that they’re enrolled students stop them from executing— without matching their names no human intervention needed. Average to the music they’ve down“If you want to contain fastnumber of hours it loaded. By giving out less spreading attacks, humans takes a information, you reduce your simply can’t be involved,” says person to risk of identity theft, says Ken lead researcher Manuel Costa. fix damage Klingenstein, director of Inter“It takes them too much time to caused by net2’s Middleware Initiative. look at things.” having his WHEN: Now WHEN: Unknown identity MORE INFO: MORE INFO: stolen shibboleth.internet2.edu research.microsoft.com/vigilante

A way to use biometric security in your cellphone to verify your identity

86 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

Software that can recognize and stop never-before-seen viruses

SHIBBOLETH

A system that confirms users without revealing personal data

600

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THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET

FIND THE SOURCE OF INFECTIONS

Fix the backbone of the Internet so criminals can’t hide their tracks Diagnosing anthrax or another infectious disease is easy; the hard part is finding where it came from. Today’s Internet has a similar problem: Malware is easy to spot, but its origin is often a mystery. Information travels around the Internet in data packets, each one with an Internet Protocol (IP) address, a 12-digit number that indicates from which machine it originated. Unfortunately, it’s easy to “spoof,” or fake, the IP address to hide the data’s actual source. (There are even legal tools you can use to hide your computer’s IP address so that you can surf the Web anonymously.) CyLab’s Fast Internet Traceback (FIT) technology can follow each packet as it moves across the Internet, “like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs,” says Adrian Perrig, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon. With FIT, each packet would get a small marker added to it as it passed through a router, a machine that directs and relays Internet traffic. These markers would allow computer-forensics experts to identify the routers through which a packet had passed, ultimatel tracing it back to the computer that originally sent the data—whether it belonged to Ivan, a botnet or a teenager just causing trouble—and choke it off. But for FIT to work, Perrig estimates, at least a third of the Internet’s roughly 100,000 routers must be upgraded, a process that would take many years and cost billions of dollars. Even then, tracing packets would get you only so far, says Bruce Schneier, founder of California-based consultancy Counterpane Internet Security. “It’s easy to prove that your computer did something, but it’s hard to get from your computer to you,” he explains. That is, the chain of evidence breaks once you try to prove that it was Ivan’s fingers on the keyboard. You need some way to absolutely verify his identity, such as authentication and biometrics. But this, in turn, raises serious privacy concerns. Do you really want Uncle Sam or your boss to be able to pinpoint where you go on the Internet? What if you’re a political dissident in Iran or China? CyLab has policy experts who deal with these types of issues, which may prove harder to solve than the technical ones, given the international nature of the Internet. Achieving a survivable, self-healing Internet will be difficult—but not impossible. “If you want to eradicate disease from this earth, the problem is insurmountable,” Khosla says. “But if you want to eradicate smallpox, polio, measles or malaria, each Percent problem is very difficult, but on their own, of PCs innone are insurmountable.” fested with

Dan Tynan is author of Computer Privacy Annoyances (O’Reilly Media; 2005). 88 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

spyware or adware

FIVE THINGS YOU CAN DO TODAY TO PROTECT YOURSELF Know how to access and change your Wi-Fi router’s settings page, and pick a new administrator name and password for logging on to it. Then change the network name (also known as the SSID), turn on the firewall, and enable encryption (you’ll probably have two choices: WEP is good; WPA is better).

Check your router’s settings to see if it has a network address translator (NAT), and if not, upgrade to one that does (most routers sold today do), and use that to connect to the Internet. The NAT makes your PC invisible to port scans, the most common way to find unprotected machines.

FROM TOP: MATTIAS KULKA/CORBIS; RICHARD PAGE/GETTY IMAGES; CORBIS; SARAH LAWLESS/GETTY IMAGES; ED HONOWITZ/GETTY IMAGES

remedy 3:

Accept the system updates Microsoft sends. As new vulnerabilities to Windows XP are found, Microsoft creates patches, but you need to turn on automatic updating (or download them manually) to install them. Although there are fewer threats to Macs, the same rule applies: Keep your system updated. Get a security-software suite such as Computer Associates’s eTrust, which combines a firewall with protection against viruses, spyware, spam and other threats. Your Internet service provider may offer one. If it doesn’t, buy one yourself and keep it updated. It will cost you $50 to $80 a year, but it’s worth it.

Know what’s happening with your accounts. Order a free credit report at annualcreditreport .com. If you see errors, follow up right away. Or sign up with a creditmonitoring service like equifax.com. For around $130 a year, it will alert you anytime a new credit account is requested in your name.

POPSCI.COM

Please read this summary of information about LUNESTA before you talk to your doctor or start using LUNESTA. It is not meant to take the place of your doctor’s instructions. If you have any questions about LUNESTA tablets, be sure to ask your doctor or pharmacist. LUNESTA is used to treat different types of sleep problems, such as difficulty in falling asleep, difficulty in maintaining sleep during the night, and waking up too early in the morning. Most people with insomnia have more than one of these problems. You should take LUNESTA immediately before going to bed because of the risk of falling. LUNESTA belongs to a group of medicines known as “hypnotics” or, simply, sleep medicines. There are many different sleep medicines available to help people sleep better. Insomnia is often transient and intermittent. It usually requires treatment for only a short time, usually 7 to 10 days up to 2 weeks. If your insomnia does not improve after 7 to 10 days of treatment, see your doctor, because it may be a sign of an underlying condition. Some people have chronic sleep problems that may require more prolonged use of sleep medicine. However, you should not use these medicines for long periods without talking with your doctor about the risks and benefits of prolonged use. Side Effects All medicines have side effects. The most common side effects of sleep medicines are: • • • •

Drowsiness Dizziness Lightheadedness Difficulty with coordination

Sleep medicines can make you sleepy during the day. How drowsy you feel depends upon how your body reacts to the medicine, which sleep medicine you are taking, and how large a dose your doctor has prescribed. Daytime drowsiness is best avoided by taking the lowest dose possible that will still help you sleep at night. Your doctor will work with you to find the dose of LUNESTA that is best for you. Some people taking LUNESTA have reported next-day sleepiness. To manage these side effects while you are taking this medicine: • When you first start taking LUNESTA or any other sleep medicine, until you know whether the medicine will still have some effect on you the next day, use extreme care while doing anything that requires complete alertness, such as driving a car, operating machinery, or piloting an aircraft. • Do not drink alcohol when you are taking LUNESTA or any sleep medicine. Alcohol can increase the side effects of LUNESTA or any other sleep medicine. • Do not take any other medicines without asking your doctor first. This includes medicines you can buy without a prescription. Some medicines can cause drowsiness and are best avoided while taking LUNESTA. • Always take the exact dose of LUNESTA prescribed by your doctor. Never change your dose without talking to your doctor first. Special Concerns There are some special problems that may occur while taking sleep medicines.

Memory Problems Sleep medicines may cause a special type of memory loss or “amnesia.” When this occurs, a person may not remember what has happened for several hours after taking the medicine. This is usually not a problem since most people fall asleep after taking the medicine. Memory loss can be a problem, however, when sleep medicines are taken while traveling, such as during an airplane flight and the person wakes up before the effect of the medicine is gone. This has been called “traveler’s amnesia.” Memory problems have been reported rarely by patients taking LUNESTA in clinical studies. In most cases, memory problems can be avoided if

you take LUNESTA only when you are able to get a full night of sleep before you need to be active again. Be sure to talk to your doctor if you think you are having memory problems.

any changes in your behavior, or if you have any unusual or disturbing thoughts, call your doctor immediately.

Tolerance

Sleep medicines may cause sedation or other potential effects in the unborn baby when used during the last weeks of pregnancy. Be sure to tell your doctor if you are pregnant, if you are planning to become pregnant, or if you become pregnant while taking LUNESTA.

When sleep medicines are used every night for more than a few weeks, they may lose their effectiveness in helping you sleep. This is known as “tolerance.” Development of tolerance to LUNESTA was not observed in a clinical study of 6 months’ duration. Insomnia is often transient and intermittent, and prolonged use of sleep medicines is generally not necessary. Some people, though, have chronic sleep problems that may require more prolonged use of sleep medicine. If your sleep problems continue, consult your doctor, who will determine whether other measures are needed to overcome your sleep problems.

Dependence Sleep medicines can cause dependence in some people, especially when these medicines are used regularly for longer than a few weeks or at high doses. Dependence is the need to continue taking a medicine because stopping it is unpleasant. When people develop dependence, stopping the medicine suddenly may cause unpleasant symptoms (see Withdrawal below). They may find they have to keep taking the medicine either at the prescribed dose or at increasing doses just to avoid withdrawal symptoms. All people taking sleep medicines have some risk of becoming dependent on the medicine. However, people who have been dependent on alcohol or other drugs in the past may have a higher chance of becoming addicted to sleep medicines. This possibility must be considered before using these medicines for more than a few weeks. If you have been addicted to alcohol or drugs in the past, it is important to tell your doctor before starting LUNESTA or any sleep medicine.

Withdrawal Withdrawal symptoms may occur when sleep medicines are stopped suddenly after being used daily for a long time. In some cases, these symptoms can occur even if the medicine has been used for only a week or two. In mild cases, withdrawal symptoms may include unpleasant feelings. In more severe cases, abdominal and muscle cramps, vomiting, sweating, shakiness, and, rarely, seizures may occur. These more severe withdrawal symptoms are very uncommon. Although withdrawal symptoms have not been observed in the relatively limited controlled trials experience with LUNESTA, there is, nevertheless, the risk of such events in association with the use of any sleep medicine. Another problem that may occur when sleep medicines are stopped is known as “rebound insomnia.” This means that a person may have more trouble sleeping the first few nights after the medicine is stopped than before starting the medicine. If you should experience rebound insomnia, do not get discouraged. This problem usually goes away on its own after 1 or 2 nights. If you have been taking LUNESTA or any other sleep medicine for more than 1 or 2 weeks, do not stop taking it on your own. Always follow your doctor’s directions.

Changes In Behavior And Thinking Some people using sleep medicines have experienced unusual changes in their thinking and/or behavior. These effects are not common. However, they have included: • • • • • • •

More outgoing or aggressive behavior than normal Confusion Strange behavior Agitation Hallucinations Worsening of depression Suicidal thoughts

Pregnancy And Breastfeeding

In addition, a very small amount of LUNESTA may be present in breast milk after use of the medication. The effects of very small amounts of LUNESTA on an infant are not known; therefore, as with all other prescription sleep medicines, it is recommended that you not take LUNESTA if you are breastfeeding a baby. Safe Use Of Sleep Medicines To ensure the safe and effective use of LUNESTA or any other sleep medicine, you should observe the following cautions: 1. LUNESTA is a prescription medicine and should be used ONLY as directed by your doctor. Follow your doctor’s instructions about how to take, when to take, and how long to take LUNESTA. 2. Never use LUNESTA or any other sleep medicine for longer than directed by your doctor. 3. If you notice any unusual and/or disturbing thoughts or behavior during treatment with LUNESTA or any other sleep medicine, contact your doctor. 4. Tell your doctor about any medicines you may be taking, including medicines you may buy without a prescription and herbal preparations. You should also tell your doctor if you drink alcohol. DO NOT use alcohol while taking LUNESTA or any other sleep medicine. 5. Do not take LUNESTA unless you are able to get 8 or more hours of sleep before you must be active again. 6. Do not increase the prescribed dose of LUNESTA or any other sleep medicine unless instructed by your doctor. 7. When you first start taking LUNESTA or any other sleep medicine, until you know whether the medicine will still have some effect on you the next day, use extreme care while doing anything that requires complete alertness, such as driving a car, operating machinery, or piloting an aircraft. 8. Be aware that you may have more sleeping problems the first night or two after stopping any sleep medicine. 9. Be sure to tell your doctor if you are pregnant, if you are planning to become pregnant, if you become pregnant, or if you are breastfeeding a baby while taking LUNESTA. 10. As with all prescription medicines, never share LUNESTA or any other sleep medicine with anyone else. Always store LUNESTA or any other sleep medicine in the original container and out of reach of children. 11. Be sure to tell your doctor if you suffer from depression. 12. LUNESTA works very quickly. You should only take LUNESTA immediately before going to bed. 13. For LUNESTA to work best, you should not take it with or immediately after a high-fat, heavy meal. 14. Some people, such as older adults (i.e., ages 65 and over) and people with liver disease, should start with the lower dose (1 mg) of LUNESTA. Your doctor may choose to start therapy at 2 mg. In general, adults under age 65 should be treated with 2 or 3 mg. 15. Each tablet is a single dose; do not crush or break the tablet. Note: This summary provides important information about LUNESTA. If you would like more information, ask your doctor or pharmacist to let you read the Prescribing Information and then discuss it with him or her. Rx only

How often these effects occur depends on several factors, such as a person’s general health, the use of other medicines, and which sleep medicine is being used. Clinical experience with LUNESTA suggests that it is rarely associated with these behavior changes. It is also important to realize it is rarely clear whether these behavior changes are caused by the medicine, are caused by an illness, or have occurred on their own. In fact, sleep problems that do not improve may be due to illnesses that were present before the medicine was used. If you or your family notice

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HOW 2.O

TIPS, TRICKS, HACKS AND DO-IT-YOURSELF PROJECTS

THIS MONTH

YOU BUILT what ?!

Build bulletproof file storage

102

Make a retroradio iPod amp

Salt popcorn the (really) hard way

A FIRE-BREATHING ’BOT

The best-selling Robosapien toy robots are made to be hacked, so we asked the guy who wrote the book on modding them to create a flame-throwing Robozilla

LET’S FACE IT—until they’re cooking us breakfast and doing our laundry, the most fun you can have with storebought robots is the fun you make yourself. Sure, robots like WowWee’s Roboraptor (and its companions, Robopet and Robosapien) are surprisingly capable for $60-to-$200 toys, with wide ranges of motion, touch sensors and powerful software. But it’s those same out-of-the-box skills that make the ’bots such prime fodder for hackers. Within weeks of the Robosapien’s introduction in February 2004, tinkerers flooded the Web with new tricks: programmed dance routines, crazy voices, infrared vision. Some companies threaten legal action against such amateur upgrades ([cough] Sony [cough]), but not WowWee. Its

designer, Mark Tilden, intentionally gave his ‘bots tinkerer-friendly features such as easy accessibility (each comes apart with a single Philips screwdriver), a painstakingly labeled circuit board so you can see exactly what each bit does, and a cavernous crust of exoplastic that can accommodate additions like an extra micro-processor brain, an MP3 player or a butane flamethrower. Say, there’s an idea. . . . —Dave Prochnow

HOW IT WORKS 23 hours easy

$181 hard

See popsci.com/robozilla to learn how to make your own fire-breathing, musicplaying Robozilla. For more Robo tricks, pick up Prochnow’s book The Official Robosapien Hacker’s Guide (O’Reilly; 2007).

A. FLAME ON

Trigger the internal butane fuel tank by tugging the wire inside the Robozilla’s right arm socket. Snap a spark with the piezoelectric mechanism hanging around its neck.

B. ROCK OUT

Start the MP3 player embedded in the Robozilla’s tail to hear—what else— “Godzilla,” by Blue Öyster Cult.

S’MORES ANYONE? The Robozilla’s flame goes about three inches—just enough for close-range roasting.

LUIS BRUNO

POPSCI.COM

OCTOBER 2006 POPULAR SCIENCE 93

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HOW 2.0

GEEK GUIDE

SCARE TACTICS

Motion-triggered monster heads, a witches’ brew of liquid nitrogen, a projector rigged for fright: Here are four high-tech haunting tricks made easy

A SCREAMING HEAD 1 hour

FREE–$25

easy

hard

Laptop

Music streamer

THE SCARE: An evil laugh, scream or other spooky effect blares automatically when your victims pass by a particular spot. THE GEAR: Mac, wireless music streamer such as AirPort Express, webcam, small set of powered computer speakers 1. Record or download scary sound effects (try a1.freesoundeffects.com) to your laptop. Stash it out of sight, and turn off the screen. 2. If your webcam doesn’t already have motion-detection software, download EvoCam ($25; evological.com). Mount the cam in a corner near the ceiling, pointing at the spot you want to trigger the sound. 3. Hide your speakers on a shelf or inside a mask and connect them either to a music streamer or directly to the computer. 4. Download a script at popsci.com/haunted that will tell iTunes to play a song or playlist when the camera senses motion. Make a playlist from a series of sounds, and space them out with silent tracks. Use multiple sets of speakers and webcams to extend the scare to other rooms.—Paul Wallich

Speakers

3 MORE. . . HAUNTED HACKS A. THE BUBBLING CAULDRON Want a real witches’ brew? Mix soap-bubble solution with dry ice, or use liquid nitrogen for bubbles that release fog when they pop.

C. THE EVIL-EYED MONSTER Rip the face off the animatronic Alive Chimpanzee (wowwee.com) for a Terminator-style head that can talk and follow you with its eyes. 94 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

p OPsCI ON THE WEB

Find instructions for these and more spooky tech tricks at popsci.com/haunted.

JAMIE SNEDDON

B. THE GRUESOME SCENE Turn an old laptop into a projector to cast a movie loop onto a wall or a curtain of dry-ice fog. Just replace the screen’s backlight with a pinpoint halogen bulb and trigger it with a pressure switch on the floor.

INTRODUCING AN AMAZING

NEW TECHNOLOGY FOR TURNING BAD AIR GOOD.

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The XL Tabletop is 16.6" wide and purifies a 150 sq. ft. room 6 times an hour. Available in Silver/Marble and Black/Burl Wood.

fumes such as paint smells and off gases from new rugs, which can contain formaldehyde, a carcinogen.

HERE’S WHAT IT DOES: Oreck has spent years developing the Truman Cell. This breakthrough technology seeks and destroys the bad stuff you might be breathing right now in your home. Could it improve the quality of your life? Without question, it’s what makes the Oreck XL Air Purifier the best defense against bad air on the market today.

It also removes allergens, including those which can cause or worsen asthma attacks. The XL will keep the air in your living room or play room or any other large space clean, fresh and circulating at all times. It will do it quietly, thanks to Oreck’s own Silence Technology®, while using as little energy as an ordinary light bulb. Plus, unlike other purifiers, the Oreck XL doesn’t require costly replacement filters. It has a permanent filter that is washable. Simply rinse the filter as often as you like and it’s as good as new. So try a new Oreck XL Professional Air Purifier risk-free. If you don’t love it, you don’t keep it ™.

The new XL Tower Air Purifier with its 6-stage purification system is designed to handle the spacious areas of your home, where the family spends a lot of time together. It can clean, freshen and circulate every cubic inch of air in an area as large as 1125 sq. ft. every single hour, capturing bacteria, molds, viruses, fungi, even cigarette smoke and other odors you don’t want to live with. Including those caused by pets, cooking and toxic chemical

CALL NOW TO RECEIVE THIS $100 GIFT FREE!!! The XL Tower is 30" high and purifies an 1125 sq. ft. room every hour.

Stage 6

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Stage 1

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Just for trying the new Oreck Air Purifier risk-free for 90 days, we’ll send you our $100 Oreck Cord-Free ElectrikBroom® absolutely free. Just mail in the voucher enclosed with the Air Purifier to receive your gift. If you don’t feel the difference simply send the Air Purifier back. But keep the ElectrikBroom. There’s no obligation. The shipping is free.

Call 1-800-364-0409 ext. CZ795 or visit www.oreck.com/septair

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HOW 2.0

REPURPOSED

TECH

SAVE FILES FOREVER ON A DIY MEGA-SERVER

Turn an old desktop computer into a 1.2-terabyte server, and never worry about your data again

BUILD A MONSTER SERVER IN FOUR STEPS 2 hours

easy

$850

hard

INSTALL THE RAID CARD

Open your computer and install a RAID controller card in a spare expansion slot (it only fits in one way). You can use any card with at least three ports, or as many as 16.

HighPoint RocketRAID card $200; newegg.com

ADD THE HARD DRIVES

If your computer doesn’t have enough empty drive bays, you can buy or create more. You can keep the original drive or swap it out for a bigger one. Screw the hard drives in place, ports out.

Five 300GB SATA hard drives $116 each; newegg.com

PLUG IN THE CABLES

Add enough power splitters to connect all the drives to your computer’s spare power plugs. Then attach the drives to the RAID card with the included [blue] data cables.

FIRE IT UP

Load the driver and software that came with your RAID card, and instruct it to use all of the drives attached to the controller for the array. Format your RAID, and it will show up as a single drive on the desktop. Right-click it to turn on File Sharing, and start moving files into your new virtual vault.

96 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

Power splitters/adapters $6.50 each; usb-ware.com Any Mac, PC or Linux machine free (salvaged)

1.2 terabytes 1,200 gigabytes 400,000 high-res photos 250,000 songs 200 full-length DVDs

JOHN B. CARNETT

YOUR WHOLE LIFE is on a hard drive: music, e-mail, family photos, tax returns. If that drive dies, then what? Businesses that need to keep their data safe use a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) server, a stack of connected hard drives that functions as one disk. The servers simultaneously write multiple copies of data, so if one drive fails, nothing is lost. Retail home-RAID arrays start at around $700 for 750 gigabytes, but if you’ve got an unused desktop computer lying around (or want to pick one up on eBay), it’s easy to build your own RAID with as much storage as you want. There are four main types of RAID, each of which makes tradeoffs between total storage size and redundancy. I used a RAID 5 array, which gave me 1.2 terabytes of storage from five 300-gigabyte disks. At that size, I saved about $550 over an off-the-shelf version. Just plug the drives into a RAID controller, a card that slips into an expansion slot inside your computer, and you’re done. Your Mac, PC or Linux operating system will treat the RAID as a single disk. The machine plugs into your home network, so you can save to it—and pull files off it—from any computer in the house. And you can upgrade it with bigger drives down the road so that your digital safehouse never runs out of room.—Paul Wallich

HOW 2.0

ANTIQUE GEEK CHIC

BUILDIT

Retrofit a vintage radio with new innards to make an amplified speaker for your iPod WITH A LOCAL radio station that broadcasts “old-time radio” late at night, I’ve developed an addiction to the great crime and sci-fi programs of the 1940s and ’50s, like Dragnet and Buck Rogers. I’ve also found online archives that offer thousands of episodes of these shows as downloadable MP3s (try rusc.com and radiolovers.com). Rather than listen to them on my iPod, I wanted to use a radio that was around when they first played. There are plenty of gadgets available for transmitting audio from a portable MP3 player to an FM receiver. The radios I had in mind, however, were built in the AM era. I considered modifying the original circuitry so that I could plug my iPod directly into one, but this conjured visions of blown fuses and burning wires. So I decided to simply remove the antique innards completely and put in their place the guts from a set of desktop PC speakers, which are self-powered and make great iPod amplifiers. I even wired the original volume knob to work. Now if I could just figure out how to add in some static.—Ken Murphy

Speakers

Amplifier

5 THINGS . . . REVIVE A RETRO RADIO

BACKGROUND ILLUSTRATION: STEVE CROSS; PHOTOGRAPH: LUIS BRUNO

10 hours easy

$38 hard

1. FIND A RADIO. Try flea markets or eBay. For $25, I picked up a 1947 Art Deco–style mahogany tabletop set with a grille wide enough to fit two PC speakers. 2. REMOVE THE CHASSIS. The inner workings of these radios are usually a single assembly you can pull out at once. 3. RESTORE THE CABINET. I did some light sanding and used a single coat of oilbased stain. If the grille cloth is falling apart, visit grillecloth.com to find replacement fabric, searchable by radio model. 4. INSTALL SPEAKERS. Remove the drivers and circuitry from a set of PC speakers, and mount both on a piece of particle board. Affix the board inside the radio with wood screws. Use spray adhesive to glue the new grille cloth to the other side. Plug the speakers’ power supply and audio cable into the circuit board. 5. LISTEN UP. Connect the audio cable to your MP3 player’s headphone jack, and cue up some Flash Gordon.

YOU CAN DO WITH YOUR CAMERAPHONE

1 LOSE WEIGHT

Curb your diet-cheating ways by sending pictures of all your meals to nutrax.com, which will track them in an online food log. For $8 a week, a Nutrax dietitian will analyze your gastronomic habits and offer advice.

2 MAIL

POSTCARDS

Download Pictavision Postcards, and turn your phonecam pics into physical postcards for $3 to $6 each. Add a message, enter a recipient, and your greeting will be on its way. Record a voice message, and you can

send a special “talking” postcard that uses a speaker embedded in the paper.

3 SHOOT IN 3-D

One-up your fellow eBayers with a 3-D image from Picture Cloud. Take 10 to 35 shots of an item, capturing it from every angle, upload the pics to picturecloud.com, and the site will create a 360degree photo you can rotate to see the trinket from all sides.

DECODE YOUR WORLD Next time you’re trekking through a big city, look for Semapedia tags—

”2-D bar-code” stickers generated by visitors to semapedia.org as part of this grassroots project. Take a photo of the tags, and if your phone has the Semapedia software and a Web browser, it will jump to the Wikipedia page describing the thing or place.

5 ESPIONAGE

Snap a shot of a topsecret document (or the whiteboard at work), and send the photo from your phone to docs@scanR .com or wb@scanR.com. Right away, you’ll get a free PDF of the image sent to your e-mail inbox. —Nicole Price Fasig

How can you help protect

the prairie and the penguin?

Simple. Visit www.earthshare.org and learn how the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s leading environmental groups are working together under one name. And how easy it is for you to help protect the prairies and the penguins and the planet.

One environment. One simple way to care for it.

ÂŽ

www.earthshare.org

HOW 2.0

ASK A

GEEK

Be sure to check out hundreds of the latest, most exciting innovations in home improvement at The Home Depot

PIXELGARDEN.COM

HOW DO I HANG MY FLAT-SCREEN TV? MAYBE YOU DON’T. Ask yourself if you trust your handyman skills enough to wager your new $2,000 LCD on them. Not sure? Hire a pro. It will cost $150 or more, but that satisfaction you get from a DIY job fades quickly when the set is in pieces on the floor. If you do decide to proceed on your own, check your TV for the words “VESA compatible,” which means it’s designed to work with standard mounting hardware. I stick with two bracket brands: OmniMount (omnimount.com) for sets smaller than 37 inches, and Peerless (peerlessindustries.com) for anything bigger; prices start at around $60. Spring for one with tilt to reduce glare. When deciding where the TV will go, know what you’re getting into—literally.

Find a spot on an interior wall, out of direct sunlight, with at least one stud to anchor an LCD, or two for a plasma. Use a stud finder to check for obstructions in the wall. That’s important, because the secret to a clean, “floating” installation is to run your audio and video cables behind the wall and pull them out down by the floor, nearer your receiver. Include an extra set of cables so that you can add components later without taking down the TV. Mount the wall bracket with heavyduty anchor bolts (don’t forget to use a level). Get help hanging the set, no matter how small it is. Close the safety tabs around the rails, and you’re done. Except, of course, for explaining to your friends how you made it look so good.

Home Show, September 7-24. We’ve singled out the smartest, most practical, most stylish products to help make your home hassle-free and more comfortable. The future is here. And it’s here to stay.

POPSCI.COM

OCTOBER 2006 POPULAR SCIENCE 101

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HOW 2.0

MAKING SALT THE HARD WAY GRAY

MATTER

The unlikely love story of two of the periodic table’s most unstable characters

each other, both elements have scratched their itch. As a way of salting popcorn, though, this kind of salt synthesis is pretty out there. The salt is very fresh, but the hazards of blowing pure chlorine into a bowl of liquid sodium are very real. Seconds after this picture was taken, the net melted, dropping popcorn into the bowl and sending a shower of flaming liquid sodium balls in all directions. No one was hurt because I’d made safety preparations for even the worst-case scenario, which this nearly was—only an uncontrolled chlorine leak would have been worse, in which case I had a clear path to run like hell. —Theodore Gray

RAW INGREDIENTS Sodium stored under inert gas in a canning jar, a cylinder of liquefied chlorine gas, and a bowl of popcorn

Creating a Salt Cloud 2 hours safe

$500 crazy

SO MUCH FOR THE POPCORN When the net holding the popcorn broke, kernels fell into the bowl and sent flaming liquid sodium flying everywhere.

ACHTUNG! Theodore Gray is trained in

lab safety. Don’t try this at home. Find more on Gray’s experiments at periodictabletable.com.

102 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

Sodium 11 Discovered: 1807, by English chemist Humphry Davy Melting point: 208°F Uses: Street lighting, flavor

Chlorine 17 Discovered: 1774, by Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele Melting point: –150°F Uses: Purifying water, plastics

MIKE WALKER

SODIUM IS A SOFT, silvery metal that explodes violently on contact with water and burns skin by reacting with even the slightest moisture. Chlorine is a choking yellow gas, used with mixed success in the trenches of World War I (it was known to have killed about equal numbers on both sides of the trench). When these chemicals meet, they react in a fierce ball of spitting fire and clouds of white smoke. The smoke is sodium chloride (NaCl), or table salt, which I used to season a basket of popcorn I hung over the reaction. In the periodic table, as in politics, the unstable elements tend to hang out at the far left and the far right. Sodium is a loose-electron element from the first column (left side) of the table; its extra electron makes it unstable. On the other side of the table is chlorine, an equally volatile oneelectron-short-of-a-full-deck element from the far-right 17th column. By transferring sodium’s excess electron to chorine’s nearly full shell, the elements reach a stable configuration in NaCl. Salt doesn’t burn your skin or choke your lungs because, by combining with

HOW 2.0 THE

MINUTE PROJECT

EASY DESIGNER LED LAMPS WHY: For LED lights that emulate designer lamps

DIY: 1. Order a lamp kit from emulationkit.com ($29), and snap together the parts. 2. Add a nine-volt battery. 3. Shine on. HAVE AN IDEA FOR A 5-MINUTE PROJECT? Send it to us at h20@time4.com.

THIS IS BROKEN No, that’s definitely not OK.

Find more things broken at thisisbroken.com.

PHOTOGRAPHY TRICK OF THE MONTH

DON’T MISS THE SHOT! Life Happens! Be Ready With eneloop! Life Happens! Be Ready With eneloop!

eneloop is ready right-out-of-the-pack! Even better, with eneloop's breakthrough technology, once fully charged, eneloop will retain up to 85%* capacity after 1-year. So even if eneloop is lying around in your drawer, it's ready. * @ 68o F Recycle @ 800-8-BATTERY

eneloop: energy + loop

WANT A CHEAP wide-angle lens?

POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 103

Longer Storage Life* Rechargeable Batteries after 1 year

Available at: Fry’s Electronics and Amazon.com

85%

other

Take a look at your front door. Peepholes typically have a 160-degree or wider viewing area. Available at any hardware store for around $5, they come in a variety of sizes, so look for one that’s about the same diameter as your camera’s lens. Hold it in place for a quick snap, or tape it down for a hands-free solution. We found it works best when your camera’s zoom is fully extended.—h2.0 staff

eneloop

PHOTOGRAPHS, FROM TOP: JOHN B. CARNETT (3); LUIS BRUNO; INSET: JOE MCBRIDE/GETTY IMAGES

FAST FISH-EYE PHOTOS

www.sanyobatteries.com

Enter to win a trip to Japan! www.eneloopcontest.com/popscience

*Compared to regular rechargeable batteries with full initial charge in 68º conditions.

FYI

106

Why does ice cream give me a headache?

FOR THOSE NAGGING QUESTIONS

Try a PENTAX K100D, and be eligible to win a Toyota FJ Cruiser. You’ll find that a new Toyota FJ Cruiser could take you to some pretty picturesque settings. And all you have to do to win one is demo a PENTAX K100D camera, be wowed by it, then register online before December 31, 2006 for a chance to drive away this coveted, four-wheel prize. For more information go to:

pentaxslr.com/testdrive

TEST DRIVE

A PENTAX

What happens when we hallucinate?

Although most of us immediately think of a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas experience, or perhaps that weird guy muttering to himself on the street corner, recreational drugs and psychiatric disorders are not the only causes of hallucination. Stress, fever, illness or sleep deprivation can also trigger an episode. Hallucination, also called sensory deception, happens when a person sees, hears, feels, smells, or tastes something that is not there. The general cause is abnormal chemical reactions, triggered by a drug or by misfiring neurons, that activate certain parts of the brain and disrupt their usual functions. The exact nature of hallucinations is poorly understood, but here’s what we know: With visual hallucinations, foreign chemicals (drugs or stray neurotransmitters) enter the synapses between the optic nerve and the occipital lobe, the part of the brain that processes visual information, triggering a signal on that neural pathway. Once the false signal reaches the brain, the occipital lobe is activated, and visual hallucination occurs. The same

104 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

process occurs with hallucinations related to hearing, smell, taste (in the temporal lobes) and touch (in the parietal lobe). If you wish to experiment (legally, mind you) with some hallucination of your own, try sleep deprivation. According to Michael Golder, a professor of psychiatry at George Washington University, “a person who has been sleep-deprived for 72 hours is as susceptible to hallucinations as someone taking LSD.”—Rachel Horn

Q A

Does a bland diet really help alleviate heartburn?

Anecdotally, yes. Scientifically, no. Lauren Gerson, an assistant professor of medicine at the Stanford University Medical Center, says that none of the common dietary restrictions recommended to lessen heartburn—including limiting coffee, chocolate, caffeinated beverages, wine and citrus fruits—have stood up to scientific scrutiny. Heartburn occurs when the ring

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of muscle between the esophagus and the stomach that regulates food traffic fails to close properly. This can allow stomach contents, including stomach acid, to leak back into the esophagus, causing a burning sensation. Before the 1980s, when prescription “proton-pump inhibitors” such as Prilosec and, later, Nexium were introduced, patients had to rely on feeble antacids or even surgery. Diet restriction seemed to be the best noninvasive alternative to lessen the symptoms. When Gerson’s patients complained to her about their bland diets, she decided to go straight to the source—the original studies that implicated diet in the first place—to see if there was any support for the strict limitations imposed on heartburn sufferers. After slogging through more than 2,000 peerreviewed journal articles, she concluded that there was not. Although some foods (like carbonated beverages) were shown to cause the muscle between the esophagus and stomach to relax—a potential cause of heartburn—Gerson says, researchers never demonstrated whether consuming them would create the symptoms or if eliminating them from one’s diet would lessen discomfort. Blanket recommendations to cut out large classes of food may not

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Q A

Why do I get a headache when I eat ice cream too quickly?

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Brain freezeâ&#x20AC;? or an â&#x20AC;&#x153;ice cream headacheâ&#x20AC;? hits when a cold substance makes contact with nerve endings in the roof of your mouth. A particular nerve in the back of your throat (impress your friends by calling

SLOW DOWN, TEX The only way to avoid brain freeze is moderation.

it the sphenopalatine ganglion) stimulates the trigeminal nerve, the largest of the sensory nerves that lead from your face to your brain. The result is that characteristic stabbing pain, centered in the midfrontal part of the brain. Migraine sufferers are typically susceptible to cold-induced head-aches, and a 10- or 20-second brain freeze can often be a trigger for a longer, more severe migraine attack. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s really no way to avoid such headaches if you insist on wolfing down your icy dessert, says Seymour Diamond, founder and director of the Diamond Headache Clinic in Chicago. Next time you sip a Slurpee, just remember to take it slow.

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Can someone use my GPS receiver to track me?

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be the answer to curing heartburn, but old ideas about diet are not completely obsolete, says Kenneth R. DeVault, chair of the gastroenterology division at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. â&#x20AC;&#x153;If something gives you symptoms,â&#x20AC;? he says, â&#x20AC;&#x153;then you should probably avoid it.â&#x20AC;? Chalk one up for anecdotal evidence.â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Nicole Price Fasig

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FYI

knowledge, it could cross into uncharted legal territory. “The idea that someone is able to gather a really nicely aggregated picture of your daily routine is something most people would see as an invasion of privacy,” says Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital-rights group. “It’s not much different from having someone following you around and keeping track of where you are at all times.” If you’re concerned, there’s an easy solution: Just disable the GPS features on your cellphone when you’re not using them. —Nicole Price Fasig

Can I make snow with just my garden hose?

Sorry, Jack Frost, but setting your puny garden hose to “mist” when it’s cold outside isn’t going to turn your frozen lawn into a sledding hill. Why not? The problem, in a word, is dirt.

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Natural snow forms in the upper atmosphere when tiny water droplets adhere to ice crystals or a small speck of dust and then change from supercooled liquid water to solid ice. These crucial dust and ice â&#x20AC;&#x153;nucleationâ&#x20AC;? points are missing from your DIY snow venture, says Matthew Pittman, co-founder of snow-machine manufacturer SnowatHome in Connecticut. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Just spraying water in a freezing environment wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t make snow,â&#x20AC;? he explains. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The water will not freeze until it makes contact with the ground.â&#x20AC;? Professional snow-making

machines, which use a proprietary blend of nucleation particles, suck up 150 gallons of water a minute to keep the slopes of your favorite ski resort covered with the white stuff. A typical garden hose spews out a paltry six gallons a minute. So even if you did manage to get your water droplets to form snowflakes before they hit the ground, all you could hope for is a very slow accumulation, and the smallest snowman ever.â&#x20AC;&#x201D;CARLA THOMAS GOT A SCIENCE-RELATED QUESTION FOR FYI? Send it to us at fyi@popsci.com.

books KIDS TO SPACE: A SPACE TRAVELERâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S GUIDE

Sometimes it takes a kid to ask the important questions. Like,â&#x20AC;&#x153;Can we drink beer in space?â&#x20AC;? (Answer: Yes, although booze is strictly verboten to todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s astronauts while theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re in orbit.) Kids to Space: A Space Travelerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Guide is a gigantic Q&A on space exploration between North American schoolchildren and 80 experts in such fields as astrophysics, dentistry, and survival in extreme environments. The questions and answers are surprising and gratifying: Nationality of kids born in orbit? (Same as the parentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.) Will my cat survive liftoff? (Yes.)â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Martha Harbison

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A trip to Broome. We took the long trip to Australia to study the famous white lipped oysters that produced magnificent pearls that are often 11-14mm—about 8 times the size of a standard cultured pearl. Not only did these oysters produce the rare South Sea pearl but they also produced tremendous amounts of mother of pearl or nacre. Nacre is the lustrous iridescent substance which is secreted by the oyster to form the shiny inside of their shells. When nacre secretions are deposited around the seed they build up to form a full sized pearl. Our bioscientists went to work to see if we could help Mother

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ost of the differences in the way we experience life now and the way we experienced it at the beginning of the 17th century emerged because of technical advances that rely on calculus. Calculus is a beautiful idea exposing the rational workings of the world; it is part of our intellectual heritage. Calculus is the exploration of only two ideas, both of which arise from a clear, commonsense analysis of our everyday experience of motion. Calculus, separately invented by Newton and Leibniz, has become one of the most fruitful and influential strategies for analyzing our world that has ever been devised. Yet many of us regard ourselves as excluded from the profound insights of calculus because we didn’t enjoy or continue in mathematics. This enormous portion of the human achievement is a closed door to us. But Professor Michael Starbird can open it and he is on a mission to make calculus accessible to us all. What You’ll Learn—and Why Professor Starbird is passionately committed to correcting the bewildering way that the essential beauty and power of calculus was hidden from many of us in school. He begins the course by holding up a college calculus textbook, all 1,200 dense pages of it. He points out that the book consists of “two ideas and 1,198 pages of examples and applications.” This course is crafted to make the key concepts and triumphs of calculus accessible to nonmathematicians. It is not designed as a college calculus course; rather, it will help you see calculus around you in the everyday world. Every step is in English rather than “mathese.” Formulas are important, cer-

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role in the development of lowsonic-boom aircraft. We studied 15year-old seismograph data from the California Institute of Technology, whose uniquely sensitive sensors could actually track the booms. “The data showed something at 90,000 feet, Mach 4 to Mach 5,” Maglieri says now. The booms did not look like refracted, “over the top” booms, as other reports had indicated— booms from aircraft miles away that had traveled up through the atmosphere and bent down toward Los Angeles. The booms looked like direct overflights by a supersonic airplane that no one admitted to owning. “The signatures are awfully different,” Maglieri says. Shortly after the first set of waves appeared, Chris Gibson, an oil engineer and well-known aircraftrecognition expert, contacted me. In August 1989, Gibson said, he had been working on a North Sea rig when a colleague called him outside to see a formation of airplanes overhead. Clearly silhouetted against the sky were two F-111 bombers, a KC-135 tanker and—in refueling position behind the tanker—an unidentifiable delta-shaped airplane, about 90 feet long, a near-perfect match for unclassified studies of high-supersonic cruise airplanes. This evidence helps establish the program’s initial existence. My investigations continue to turn up evidence that suggests current activity. For example, having spent years sifting through military budgets, tracking untraceable dollars and code names, I learned how to sort out where money was going. This year, when I looked at the Air Force operations budget in detail, I found a $9-billion black hole that seems a perfect fit for a project like Aurora. Over the years, I’ve learned that few people investigate budget holes seriously. Analysts such as Steven

POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 115

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Kosiak of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank that pushes innovation in defense, doubt that Congress even knows what’s going on. “A fair amount of classified spending goes through in supplemental requests,” he told me. “It’s seen as must-pass legislation, and people don’t look at it closely.” This $9-billion gap and the most recent booms felt in San Diego and elsewhere are the most compelling evidence for the program’s resurgence. (We can’t analyze the new booms because seismic sensors of the same type were not present.) But if Aurora has been active for years, why would it be surging forward now? The main hold-up has probably been fuel. The way to make a hypersonic cruiser work is to use circulating fuel to soak up the engine’s heat, but conventional jet fuel can’t absorb enough heat to do the job. In the 1980s, Aurora would have been designed to use fuels such as hydrogen or methane, which are gaseous at normal temperatures and had to be supercooled and densified to fuel the aircraft. Although that strategy is possible, it’s not operationally easy, and complicated refueling would be counterproductive for a jet intended to provide prompt overflight when the military needed it. Better fuels and engine technologies exist now. The question, finally, is does Aurora exist? Years of pursuit have led me to believe that, yes, Aurora is most likely in active development, spurred on by recent advances that have allowed technology to catch up with the ambition that launched the program a generation ago.

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116 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

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For the past few weeks, I've been having some difficulty performing. I am 32 and for the first time in my life, I have a “drop dead gorgeous” 24 year old girlfriend, so every time we have sex, it’s really important to me that I “perform like a champ”. Basically, I’m not sure if it’s nerves, but my erection just isn’t as firm as I would like it to be. I don’t think I need a prescription, and “Herbal pills” never live up, I know, I’ve tried them! Is there anything out there that can get me “over the hump” faster or more effectively? I need something fast before she starts looking at younger men!

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128 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

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Popular Science reserves the right to refuse any advertising order. Only publication of an advertisement shall constitute final acceptance of an order. Publication does not constitute an agreement for continued publication. All orders are subject to the applicable rate card, copies of which are available upon written request sent to the address provided. Popular Science, 2 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10016 POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 129

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POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 131

Future Then.7/27.final 7/28/06 7:57 AM Page 2

1194312616 p.2

THE FUTURE THEN

FROM THE POPULAR SCIENCE ARCHIVES FEBRUARY 1949

Tube Tutorial

OTHER STORIES FROM THE FEBRUARY 1949 ISSUE

Our TV guide helped families choose their first television set “Pronged antennas, the proud badge of TV ownership, sprout like antlers from all kinds of roofs,” POPSCI reported in 1949. Televisions were becoming a must-have for middle-class Americans but were still expensive, with 12-inch sets running $400—a quarter of the cost of a new car. We advised readers to stick with familiar brands and their tried-and-true service facilities. “Just because you were a hot-shot with a soldering iron in your radio days, don’t think TV is easy meat,” we warned would-be do-it-yourself repairmen. “Television is a lot more than visible radio. It is more like radar—which was the maintenance terror of the Army and Navy.” For a look inside today’s most advanced sets, see page 70.—Carla Thomas

THE FIRST PORT-A-POTTY “To put in this new bathroom just attach the entire room to your house and hook up the plumbing,” we wrote of the Ad-a-Bath, which was factory-assembled complete with an electric heater, cabinets, fixtures and wiring. The price: $1,095, plus $150 for the one-day installation.

COPIES BY CAMERA

The Flofilm was the first microfilm camera capable of copying maps, charts and other large documents. Able to record 60 feet of printed material per minute, the device captured the information little by little as pages were pulled past a narrow slit and recorded onto a negative. Photocopy Permission: Permission is granted by POPULAR SCIENCE® for libraries and others registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) to photocopy articles in this issue for the flat fee of $1 per copy of each article or any part of an article. Send correspondence and payment to CCC (21 Congress St., Salem, MA 01970); specify CCC code 01617370/85/$1.00–0.00. Copying done for other than personal or reference use without the written permission of POPULAR SCIENCE® is prohibited. Address requests for permission on bulk orders to Time4 Media, Inc., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016 for foreign requests. For domestic requests (article reprints only), write, call, or e-mail PARS International Corp., 102 West 38th St., New York, NY 10018; 212-221-9595 x105; greg@parsintl.com. POPULAR SCIENCE® is a registered trademark of Time4 Media, Inc. Occasionally we make our subscriber list available to carefully screened companies that offer products and services we believe would interest our readers. If you do not want to receive such offers and information, please advise us at P.O. Box 51286, Boulder, CO 80322-1286. POPULAR SCIENCE Business and Executive Offices: 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. Editorial Offices: Address contributions to POPULAR SCIENCE, Editorial Dept., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. We are not responsible for loss of unsolicited materials; they will not be returned unless accompanied by return postage. Microfilm editions are available from Xerox University Microfilms Serial Bid Coordinator, 300 N. Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48106. Subscription Inquiries: Send new or renewal subscriptions or changes of address (send both new and old addresses) to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 62456, Tampa, FL 33662-4568. Allow six to eight weeks for change of address. If you have a subscription problem, please write to the above address. Subscriptions, U.S. and its possessions: 1 year, $19.95; 2 years, $26.95; 3 years, $32.95. For Canada, add $10 per year (includes GST). For foreign destinations, add $30 per year. Subscriptions processed electronically. Subscribers: If the post office alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within two years. Postmaster: Send changeof-address notices to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 60001, Tampa, FL 336600001. POPULAR SCIENCE entered as periodical postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. POPULAR SCIENCE new Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement No. 40110178. Return undeliverable Canada addresses to Postal Stn. A, P.O. Box 4015, Toronto, ON, M5W 2T2 GST #R-122988066. POPULAR SCIENCE (ISSN 0161-7370) is published monthly by Time4 Media, 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. Printed in U.S.A. © 2006 Time4 Media, Inc.

132 POPULAR SCIENCE OCTOBER 2006

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