Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2015 i Popular Science

As editor in chief of Popular Science, I get asked a lot of questions. Some of them are reasonable: Why is the sky blue? (Air molecules scatter blue light more effectively than red.) Some of them are not: Why can’t I communicate with my cat? (Try listening.) But the most persistent question is, What does it take to become a great inventor? My typical response: If I had that kind of lightning in a bottle, I’d be drinking it myself. Besides good timing and even better luck, it’s hard to pinpoint what makes certain inventors successful. They tend to be creative, exceptionally persistent, and tolerant of risk. But beyond that, they are just people, and people come in all stripes. Tesla and da Vinci were ingenious. Steve Jobs was fastidious…

Portable music players are everywhere you turn: smartphones, tablets, iPods, and laptops. But to the true audiophile, it’s all junk. That’s because most play compressed sound files—great for jam-packing your hard drive with music, bad for sound quality. The new Sony Walkman ZX2 aims to fix that. This portable hi-fimusic player is a far cry from the original Walkman that launched a million mixtapes when it debuted in 1979. The ZX2 plays just about every file type on the planet, and when it’s paired with a headphone amplifier, there aren’t many products that can match it for quality and tone—even Neil Young’s Ponos Player. If you’ve already committed your iTunes money to a monster digital collection, don’t start hitting the delete key. Sony’s DSEE HX technology upgrades those compressed files…

Begun in 1851, the World’s Fair once served as an open showroom for technical oddities, scientific breakthroughs, and cultural mashups. Although it still draws millions of visitors every five years, upstarts like the Consumer Electronics Show and Apple’s special media events have long since eclipsed its role in breaking tech news. Today, the fair focuses on global challenges: This year’s Expo 2015, which starts May 1, in Milan, Italy, will explore world hunger. Yet, it’s the World’s Fairs past that define our lives now; they exposed people to technologies that at the time seemed bizarre and futuristic—but today seem quite familiar A.M. Tuck into a carbheavy breakfast of Shredded Wheat, created by inventor Henry Perky, or, if there’s a chill in the air, Cream of Wheat, invented by miller Tom…

Spider silk had a good run as nature’s strongest material. But recently, limpet teeth—made of mineral nanofibers—were found to be up to five times stronger. Asa Barber, an engineering professor at the University of Portsmouth in England, measured the stretching force needed to break the aquatic snail’s teeth and says they’re comparable to manmade carbon fiber, only more flexible. “We can take these features we see in nature into the lab,” he says, “to help drive better designs for planes and cars.”…

By the Numbers Even the diviest bar’ tap list will tell you: The craft beer boom is upon us. In 2014, the U.S. was home to 3,200 craft breweries; this year, a new one will open every 16 hours. The trend is a boon for adventurous drinkers, but it’s stretching the hop supply dangerously thin. “The demand is unprecedented,” says Steve Miller, hop specialist at Cornell University. Hop consumption has nearly quadrupled in the past decade, thanks in part to the popularity of super-hoppy India Pale Ales, which now account for more than a fifth of the craft beer market. Washington’s Yakima Valley, a hotspot for domestic hop producers, can’t keep up, so single-acre hop operations are popping up on other types of farms across the country. Growers in New…

After Czechoslovakia’ communist regime fell, in 1989, designer Štefan Klein began working on a concept for a flying car. Inspired by his newfound freedom, he aimed to translate that personal liberty to the skies. In 2010, he shared his work with his friend Juraj Vaculík, an entrepreneur. They joined forces to found AeroMobil and develop a viable commercial product. “We wanted to create a car and airplane without compromises,” Vaculík says, “to provide individuals with a new, interesting option for door-todoor personal transportation.” Others have attempted and failed to build flying cars. But AeroMobil isn’t a car that can fly; it’s an airplane that can drive. Its light weight, collapsible wings, and efficient design make it precisiontuned for flight. On the ground, it provides roadster-like handling. Last October, Klein drove…

Inventors: Kevin R. Hart and Laura Moe Company: TZOA Wearables Invention: TZOA Development cost to date: Undisclosed Maturity: 3/0 Journeyman electrician Kevin R. Hart and nurse Laura Moe are the type of people who attend Environmental Protection Agency events for fun. They’re also the type who leave an event, as they did in 2013, determined to help solve the planet’s single largest environmental health risk: air pollution. Most cities rely on just a handful of expensive air monitors to detect hazardous pollution levels. Hart and Moe decided to build a wearable device that collects data everywhere a person goes. After planning out how the sensor would work, the pair turned to the resources at MakerLabs, a community workspace in their native Vancouver, British Columbia, for further development. “We used basically…

During a 2011 trip to Miami, Alex Goad went scuba diving and explored the artificial coral reefs off the Atlantic coast. Such reefs, he realized, are large, heavy, and expensive to fabricate and install. But they serve an important purpose. Natural coral reefs are some of the most biodiverse places on Earth, and they’ve begun to disappear, leaving thousands of species essentially homeless. Building up artificial reefs where real ones have been lost is one stopgap solution. So for his final project as an industrial-design student at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, Goad created the Modular Artificial Reef Structure (MARS). Locking and clamping mechanisms on the arms of each MARS unit allow them to snap together easily, like LEGOs. The modular structure makes MARS more flexible than other artificial reefs.…

Instead of eating at dining halls in college, Humberto Evans cooked his own meals. His best friend, Mike Robbins, on the other hand, could barely fry an egg. Robbins would forego the lure of takeout only when Evans gave him step-by-step cooking instructions. The two realized that others probably needed some culinary hand-holding as well. With help from two other MIT engineering alumni, Kyle Moss and Yuan Wei, they created the world’s first smart frying pan: Pantelligent. The pan measures its temperature with heat sensors and transmits the data via Bluetooth technology in its handle. A smartphone app uses this information to decide when it’s time for a recipe’s next step and then tells the user. “To cook amazing food the way chefs do, you have to build intuition for…

Sure, we’ve heard a lot about smart homes and how they’re the wave of the future. Yet that future has always seemed just over the horizon. But now several homeautomation platforms have emerged that give Internetconnected devices—gizmos like lightbulbs, outlets, thermostats, and motion sensors—something they lacked: the ability to communicate with one another. With that, devices can take coordinated action to save you time, money, and labor. So what are you waiting for? Here’s how anyone can make a dumb house into a truly intelligent home. STEP 1 PICK YOUR PLATFORM Different products can cause chaos when they don’t communicate. So choose a platform that uses a networking hub or an app (or both) to marry disparate devices and give your house a centralized brain from the get go. For…

STATS Time 8 hours Cost $70 (hand), $400 (control board) Difficulty Some of the materials and skills Harvard recommends may be beyond the reach of a typical garage roboticist. But with a little ingenuity, you can substitute cheaper parts and simpler techniques. This project makes actuated “fingers” out of ribbed hose from a cheap foot pump, long thin balloons (the type you can twist and fold into animals), and other basic items. By attaching five fingers to a limb—in this case, a plastic gauntlet from a set of toy armor—you can form a robot hand. Once you’ve assembled your appendage, it’s time for phase two of the project: building a fluidic control board. The Arduino brain controls and coordinates air valves to make the hand flash the peace sign, hang…

As most drivers know, “infotainment” generally means “in-dash navigation system with limited function and old maps.” Soup up your car’s outdated software with an upgrade module and a powerful computer you already own—your smartphone. WARNING: Disconnect the car battery before installation, negative (black) terminal first. If you start sizzling, you’ve grabbed the wrong one. STATS Time 4 hours Cost $250+ Difficulty WARNING: Disconnect the car battery before installation, negative (black) terminal first. If you start sizzling, you’ve grabbed the wrong one. MATERIALS • Car • VAIS Tech or Parrot kit • Adhesive-backed Velcro • Plastic or Velcro zip ties • Smartphone INSTRUCTIONS 1 The VAIS Tech kit (for Toyota and Lexus) uses the factory touchscreen, while Parrot’s universal kit includes a separate screen. Both require you to remove the car’s…

In April 1956,Popular Science told readers how to modernize homes with bleeding-edge technology. The mark of a great home, we noted, “is not its size or shape or color, but how much up-to-date machinery it has to make living easier.” At the time, that meant retractable electrical cords, smokeless ovens, and countertop blenders. Today, that means something entirely different: app-based security systems, voice-controlled lighting, and cloud-based intelligence that learns your daily routine and adjusts the heat or AC to your liking —before you even walk in the door. To learn how to set up today’s smart home, turn to page 58. 359 Billions of dollars Americans spent on home improvements between 2009 and 2011 THE SMART HOME, CIRCA 1990 In 1990, Dutch astronomer Chriet Titulaer built his House of the…

Alan Lightman As a scientist, Alan Lightman has made fundamental contributions to the field of astrophysics. As a writer, he has published dozens of celebrated novels and essays. “Science and arts reflect the full range of the human mind,” Lightman says. “We are both rational and intuitive, deliberate and spontaneous.” He reflects on the human nature of scientific research in “Nothing but the Truth” (page 50). Andrew Terranova “I enjoy working on projects that entertain me and my kids,” says engineer and tinkerer Andrew Terranova. He’s built a toy airplane from a hot water heater, a steampunk bank that eats money, and several exhibits for a children’s museum. Robots are a special favorite. This month, he dabbles in soft robotics for “Wave Hello to a Soft Robot Hand” (page 65)…

1 THE INGENIOUS MR. PYKE Writer Henry Hemming brings to life the genius of Geoff rey Pyke, an inventor and war reporter (among other things), who once convinced Winston Churchill to build an aircraft carrier out of ice. That’s just one odd turn in the adventurous tale. $27 2 OSPREY ATMOS AG Osprey’s new pack shoulders some of a backpacker’s burden with its new 3-D suspension: a layer of seamless mesh, a hip belt, a tensioned peripheral frame, and a load-balancing harness. The fit will tempt you to pack a few extra luxuries. From $230 3 WIHA BI-CUT SUPER CUT The power button on Wiha’s wire and chain cutter doubles the tool’s leverage by changing its pivot point. It’s great for when you need to make an extra tough cut.…

Long before Apple dove into the smartwatch business this spring, a little company called Pebble made a big splash—and set a $10-million Kickstarter record—by debuting an intelligent timepiece that provides emails, texts, and music controls. Pebble Time, its newest iteration, ships this month and builds on the original with a color e-paper display and a built-in mic. But after Apple’s gorilla-size entry into the market, can Pebble stand its ground? Eric Migicovsky, the company’s founder and CEO, gives us his view— and advice for his new competitors. 49 Number of hours it took Pebble Time to raise its f irst $1 million on Kickstarter Popular Science: First things first. Why did you make crowdfunding and open source part of your strategy? Eric Migicovsky: We were a small company—only five people.…

Restoring environments after human intrusion or natural disasters is complicated: There’s still much we don’t know about the interplay of microbes and mammals, aquifers and air pollution. But geologist Jess Peláez thinks the solution is as simple (and as complex) as cataloging our ecosystems, one at a time. “We want to hand off this project to the next generation—like a seed bank for environments.” When humans extract resources like trees and coal, repairing the damage is often limited to ‘Let’s throw some dirt in a hole.’ That’s partly what inspired me to start the nonprofit Blueprint Earth. We want to lay the groundwork for a much higher standard. Even though we understand that everything in nature is interconnected, science has become so specialized that no one really knows how to…

In our search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), we humans have mostly just waited, and listened, for aliens to contact us. But in February, policymakers, philosophers, futurists, and astronomers convened to debate a new approach: contacting aliens directly. Initiating active SETI is no small decision. Sure, we’ve tacked messages onto the occasional space probe, but transmitting detectable signals to habitable zones hundreds of light-years away requires commitment. Operating the Arecibo telescope’s radar for a year would run up a bill of some $2 million; future, more powerful broadcasters will suck up even more energy. Plus, we may signal for thousands of years before we reach anyone, and it could take just as long to get a response. Some astronomers fear announcing our existence may attract the attention of civilizations bent on…

Vaccines save lives, but most of them are delivered by needle. That’s a problem for people without access to refrigerated solution, clean syringes, and safe ways to dispose of medical waste. Biomedical engineer Kasia Sawicka invented a painless alternative: a patch, called ImmunoMatrix, that can vaccinate patients without breaking the skin. “This technology can aff ect how vaccines are delivered, especially during pandemics,” Sawicka says. The skin doesn’t absorb large molecules easily, which meant Sawick had to find another way to get vaccines across that barrier. As an undergraduate at Stony Brook University, she worked in a lab that stocked an extremely waterabsorbent material called polyvinylpyrrolidone. She found that this polymer (used in hairspray during the era of beehive hairdos) could pull water out of the skin. When moisture returned,…

When peering through a virtualreality headset, players can’t see their hands—or use them to interact with their digital surroundings. To solve VR’s interaction problem, software developers Robert Wang, Chris Twigg, Kenrick Kin, and Shangchen Han formed a start-up, courted investors, and got to work. The four had spent years working with motion-tracking camera systems and developing algorithms that monitor and analyze skeletal structure. With their experience, it didn’t take long to craft software that tracks joint angles and knuckle placement to create realistic virtual hands. But they couldn’t find a camera sensitive enough to pick up such data. “We played with them all,” Wang says. “There was no depth-sensing camera good enough for VR hand tracking.” Existing videogame motion trackers, such as Microsoft’s Kinect, are designed to detect large objects,…

One night in 2011, as Manu Prakash turned the handle on a music box, he realized the simple mechanism— a crank rotating gears— could also run a programmable chemistry set. Most “lab-on-a-chip” devices require computers, technicians, and expensive laboratories to pump precise amounts of liquid through a microfluidic chip. But a hand-cranked mechanism could eliminate all that; Prakash’s idea wouldn’t even need power. “What we’re doing here is steampunk chemistry,” he says. Prakash, who heads a Stanford University research lab, recruited graduate student George Korir to help create a sophisticated scientific device that works like a music box. First, the duo had to figure out how paper punched with patterns of holes—each keyed to a different chemical reaction—could activate tiny mechanical pumps and valves to generate nanoliter droplets. Twenty-some prototypes…

DURING THE LAST WEEKS of winter, in an airy kitchen at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, two design students set about making cocktail bitters. A long wooden table holds mason jars and gleaming bottles of bourbon, vodka, and neutral grain spirits. The fragrance of ingredients that will macerate over the next few weeks, until they surrender their flavor to the alcohol, hangs in the air. There are white bowls of toasted coconut and raw cacao, as well as a jar of cinnamon sticks. Then, there are the crickets. Lucy Knops rolls up the sleeves of her loose black shirt and carefully pours each ingredient into a small, clear measuring cup sitting on a digital kitchen scale. Her classmate Julia Plevin records the weights in a spreadsheet.…

A few years ago, George Church was peer-reviewing a paper for the journal Science when he got an idea. The paper’s authors had encoded their names and a string of famous quotes into a bacterial genome to demonstrate the power and possibility of synthetic biology, the design and manufacture of DNA in a lab. Their encoding method was good. But Church, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School, thought he could do better. Sitting at his desk, in the space of a few minutes he wrote a computer program that translated his review from Roman letters into binary code and then into genetic code. He submitted the review to the journal’s editor, who couldn’t read it. The document contained only As, Ts, Cs, and Gs, shorthand for the nucleotides in…

For 25 years, inventor Keahi Seymour has dreamed of running with the speed and loping gait of an animal. His inspiration struck at age 12, while he was watching a program about kangaroos. “The announcer said it moves at such an efficient gait by using its Achilles tendons as springs,” Seymour says. “I thought, ‘Why not replicate that in a device that could propel a human?’ ” He began sketching footwear using ostriches, which, he discovered, run more like humans, as his model. By the age of 17, he had built his first prototype using old Rollerblade boots, steel tubing, and bungee cords. Then, he built some 200 more. Today, Seymour’s Bionic Boot can propel him forward at 25 miles per hour. “You really feel superhuman,” he says. Eventually, Seymour…

How do you begin creating a new roller coaster? I’m always thinking about what will make a coaster the most fun, which starts at the setup. In the X Games, they build 10 jumps in a row, but they’re not all the same— they avoid repetition. That’s the same thing you do when designing a roller coaster. How does it feel to ride one of your own creations? Back in the old days, I was always amazed. But today, we make simulations of everything. There are very few surprises anymore, because I’ve done it all virtually. What are you working on now? This year, we’re converting two wooden roller coasters. We take an old, decrepit coaster that has outlived its life and put a steel I-box track on top of…

I worked in cotton production back in the “bad old days” of weekly insecticide applications. So Grushkin’s statement that “cotton farming typically uses intensive pesticides” stood out to me as stunningly out-of-date in an otherwise fascinating piece. American cotton farmers still use insecticides but nothing like in the early 1990s. Now, they spend money on the latest insect-resistant GMO seed. Ben Barstow, Palouse, Wash. Editors’ note: According to the USDA, the combined use of insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and other pesticides on cotton fields has, in fact, remained constant since the late 1980s. Although it is true that genetically engineered cotton now enables farmers to use less insecticide, it has led to the increased application of the herbicide glyphosate. I was particularly intrigued by the possibility of clothes that adapt to…

When it comes to maneuvering a 200-mile-per-hour racecar, auto engineers tend to hew to a long-held belief: Rear-wheel drive is better than front-wheel drive for handling and weight distribution. Nissan’s new GT-R LM Nismo may turn that notion on its head. It’s the only front-wheel-drive racer in the elite LM P1 prototype class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans World Endurance Championship, which starts June 13, in Le Mans, France. Nissan engineers placed the GT-R’s twin-turbo V6 engine up front to shift the weight there. It’s a counterintuitive approach: Engineers typically distribute weight evenly for balanced handling. But behind the GT-R’s engine sits a kinetic energy recovery system (ERS), which captures energy during braking and stores it for later use. Most teams in the LM P1 class employ ERS…

First intended for BASE jumpers, mountain bikers, and skateboarders seeking YouTube glory in crisp HD video, action cameras have grown way beyond their original purpose. Compact and lightweight, they have become an unexpected favorite among daily commuters, casual hikers, and even parents feeding their kids, all looking to capture modest—but, to them, memorable—moments. As the usage range has broadened, so have the cameras’ functions. Sony recently upped its game with a 4K cam. Polaroid put new durable mounts on its most inexpensive model. And GoPro, the category leader with about 13.7 million cameras sold in six years, installed a faster processor and increased shooting speed from 15 frames per second to 30. Whether you’re a daredevil looking for hi-res glory and crash-proof durability or a lifelogger demonstrating winetasting skills, there’s…

With the debut of passenger elevators some 150 years ago, cities were forever changed. Freed from the tyranny of stairwells, architects built as high as they liked. That is, until they ran into another barrier: the weight of steel cables. A new elevator design from German company Thyssen-Krupp may solve that problem by trading cables for tracks that employ magnetic levitation, or maglev. Unconstrained by a linear pulley system, the cars—to be tested in Germany next year—will travel higher and in new directions, moving horizontally and even diagonally. The system, called Multi, may help make possible buildings of unprecedented size and energy efficiency, like this conceptual Edison Tower. Patrick Bass, CEO of ThyssenKrupp North America, says supertall, power-producing skyscrapers could help accommodate booming urbanization. 1 LOFTY DESIGN The Edison Tower,…

It took a whole team to build a 3-D portrait of Bre Pettis. Artist Sophie Kahn scanned his head. Then, MakerBot designers Nathan Worth, Lane Feuer, and Anne Miner cleaned up the scans and digitally modeled a mechanical brain. Finally, they printed the parts on a MakerBot Replicator Z18, painted them, and assembled Pettis’s plastic double. Why? Because they could. How to Be a (Brilliant) Inventor W I T H B R E P E T T I S As the co-founder of MakerBot Industries, Bre Pettis launched the first aff ordable 3-D printer, bringing the power of rapid prototyping and micro-manufacture into homes and workshops around the globe. While the rest of us catch up, Pettis has already moved on. At Bold Machines, the skunkworks he founded, he helps…

The world’s cheapest Braille printer got its start with a single piece of mail. Upon seeing a letter soliciting donations for the blind, Shubham Banerjee, then 12 years old, asked his parents how blind people read. They suggested he Google it. Banerjee’s Internet search turned up Braille printers, all of which cost more than $1,800. So he set out to make a cheaper alternative using his favorite toy—LEGOs. Banerjee finished building his first prototype, Braigo, in February 2014. But the device was limited to printing on narrow rolls of paper. “I still love LEGO, but I had to move on to something that would be released into the market,” he says. In summer 2014, Banerjee formed Braigo Labs with the help of his parents. That fall, he released the prototype…

Daniel Kim thinks most commuters drive around in way too much car. For single-passenger trips, motorcycles are much mor e fuelefficient—a critical feature in an era of climate change—but they are also more dangerous, expose riders to the elements, and require skill to keep upright. Kim’s solution? Cut the car in half. His all-electric C-1 prototype has two wheels, like a motorcycle, but a steel, aluminum, and composite outer body, like a car. It can even drive backward. If you sit inside the C-1 and sway from side to side, a gyroscopic control system keeps the vehicle upright. “When was the last time you balanced on a motorcycle at zero miles an hour?” Kim asks rhetorically. “Never.” A two-time college dropout, Kim hatched his idea in 2004, while running a…

While studying mechatronics at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Alroy Almeida, Jesus Zozaya, and James Pickard became frustrated by the inefficiency of designing circuit boards. “We’d spend a couple hundred dollars to get prototypes made at a factory and wait a few weeks, and they would come in and be wrong,” Almeida says. After they revamped the design, the agonizing process would begin again, sometimes through multiple prototypes. Meanwhile, they watched as 3-D printers rapidly prototyped other kinds of products. An inkjet printer that deposited circuits would speed up electronics design—but conductive material was too thick to squeeze through existing print heads. So when the friends graduated in 2013, they teamed up with nanoscientist Katarina Ilic to build their own device. Two years of R&D later, the team is…

Alan Lightman is a physicist, novelist, essayist, and educator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a finalist for the National Book Award. Forty years ago, the legendary physicist Richard Feynman gave the commencement address at my graduation from the California Institute of Technology. It was a boiling day in June, and we graduates—all budding biologists and chemists and physicists—sprawled in folding chairs on the lawn, sweltering in our black gowns. Feynman told us that before we went public with new scientific results, we should consider every conceivable way we might be wrong. It was a tall order. A recent case in point was the discovery, in March 2014, of evidence that purportedly confirmed the theory of inflation. According to the theory, proposed by physicists Alan Guth, Andrei Linde, and…

A tool called CRISPR could herald the start of a revolution in genetic engineering. But to understand why takes some doing. Bear with us. Modifying genes used to require a painstaking process: Scientists would kill a cell, extract the DNA, manipulate it, and then reinsert it. Several tools now provide a shortcut, and CRISPR is the most efficient. Its protein complex swaps a targeted genetic sequence with another, allowing scientists to engineer DNA in living cells with unprecedented speed. Using CRISPR, scientists could modify genes to prevent disease, slow aging, bring back extinct species, even develop new fuels. The possibilities are almost limitless. 1 INSERT CRISPR DNA INTO A HOST CELL 2 CELLULAR MACHINERY TRANSCRIBES THAT DNA INTO A NUCLEASE (PROTEIN AND RNA) 3 NUCLEASE SCANS HOST DNA FOR A…

In Rebuild, columnist Hackett prepares for life after the apocalypse After the apocalypse, your big, fancy television will be dead—no power, no TV. So loot the corpse and use its parts to build the original broadcast entertainment: radio. A radio transmitter sends information across a room, or an ocean, by creating a carrier wave of alternating current. Modulating the amplitude, or height, of that wave with an electrical signal (like the one produced by a microphone) encodes sound. Amplitude modulation (AM) was the first radio broadcast method and is still in wide use. To pick up radio waves, I needed a receiver to isolate the signal representing audio. I built a simple crystal radio from a hulking Zenith television I found on the street. First, the radio required an antenna—the…

Short answer Eventually, yes. ANSWERS BY Daniel Engber ILLUSTRATIONS BY Jason Schneider A: In 1986, psychology professor Linda Camras took a leave of absence from DePaul University to have a baby. For eight weeks, she recorded her daughter’s every expression and what triggered it. “I did a lot of videotaping,” she says. It was the first real-world test of a 1970s theory: that by 2 months old, babies automatically smile, knit their brows, and contort their faces to show positive versus negative emotions, like joy or fear. The idea had made sense to Camras— until she started studying her own baby. “I found a lot of things that didn’t fit into the theory,” she says. For instance, her baby raised her eyebrows in a classic expression of surprise when playing…