Popular Science September 2013

IHAD LUNCH in Los Angeles recently with a friend who hosts science videos on the Web. She interviews scientists, explains fundamental scientific principles, tours amazing labs—but she doesn't publicly attach the word “science” to what she does. “People just won't watch the video if the word ‘science’ is in the title,” she lamented. The same is true, I've discovered over the years, with the word “education.” Slap that term onto an article and no one will read it. It's therefore doubly difficult, as a magazine entitled Popular Science, to pull off an issue committed to education. And yet here we are, banging away on the theme, because it's absolutely essential to the country's future. The prevailing wisdom is that if you don't get kids interested in science before middle school,…

“The sheer violence with which these pieces hit the water … the most robust superalloys were crushed like an aluminum can.” —Jim Remar, president of Cosmosphere During NASA's Apollo missions, the famously powerful Saturn V launch rockets hurled astronauts into space, many toward their lunar destination. After falling back to Earth, the spent F-1 engines sat at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean for nearly five decades. Last March, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos led a recovery: With remotely operated vehicles, the expedition crew brought more than 25,000 pounds' worth of F-1 remnants back to the surface. The restoration arm of Cosmosphere, a space museum in Kansas, is now salvaging the components. Technicians flush each piece with water to rinse away corrosive chlorides, then clean out sediment with chemicals, paintbrushes, and…

HO HASN'T sat on the couch at the end of a marathon gaming session and wondered what it would be like to make a game rather than just play one? With Pixel Press, anyone can do both—no coding required. The app, which debuts on iOS later this year, converts simple marks on paper into a playable videogame. The Pixel Press team invented a sketchable language for game design. Armed with custom graph paper and a small glossary of shorthand—lines, Xs, slashes—users draw games, which the app then scans and converts into an actual, playable videogame level. For example, the app reads a blacked-out square as a power-up marker, and Xs on a platform as spikes. It takes less than 30 seconds for the app to convert the marks; once that's…

1 Is that a fish nibbling at the line or a change in the current? The SmartRod is the first fishing rod that automatically detects a bite. An accelerometer on the handle records vibrations from the pole and sends the data to a microcontroller, which differentiates between a promising catch and background jiggling. Tackobox Poletap SmartRod $46 2 The Stealth hammer has a supersized striking face: 1.5 inches. Because it's so big, a user can swing harder but still hit a nail squarely, so the 17-ounce solid-steel head strikes with as much force as a 32-ounce one. Vaughan Stealth $24 3 The Satechi bottle top converts any water bottle into a humidifier. Powered via USB, the 2.5-ounce device contains a transducer that vibrates at an ultrasonic frequency to turn water…

In 2010, the U.S. Army went to textile manufacturer Polartec with a problem: Troops needed a jacket that would breathe when they worked up a sweat but would also hold onto warmth when they sat still. Down and synthetic insulations don't allow this to happen. They require quilting and tightly knit, less-breathable fabrics to hold them in place and keep them dry. Polartec worked for more than a year to develop an insulation without those constraints. Last year, it gave the Army Polartec Alpha. An Alpha-based jacket consists of a sheet of insulation sandwiched between loosely knit, breathable fabrics. When it's hot, sweat evaporates; when it's cold, Alpha traps warmth in its thousands of tiny air pockets. This fall, a dozen companies, including Marmot and The North Face, will release…

Since their debut 13 years ago, in-car night-vision systems, which identify pedestrians approaching a roadway, have arguably made driving safer. But they come with a pretty big blind spot: animals. Each year, drivers in the U.S. strike about a million deer, causing 27,000 human injuries and $3.5 billion in damage. This fall, Swedish safety-system company Autoliv and Mercedes-Benz will roll out Night View Assist Plus on the 2014 S-Class. The system identifies people but also picks out cows, moose, horses, deer, camels, and even wild boar. One reason the upgrade took five years is that recognizing animals is much more difficult than recognizing people. Species vary widely in size and shape, have profiles that change drastically when they turn, and move differently. (Humans, by comparison, have more or less the…