Indholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2018 i Popular Science

HUMAN BABIES ARE BORN HALF-baked and vulnerable, and around 303,000 women died giving birth in 2015. No other primate has such a brutal labor or an infancy so long and helpless. Some scientists blame our precarious reproductive state on 6 million years of evolutionary pressure—and the resulting biomechanical compromises. It all started with armfuls of fruit. As humanity’s African homeland became a mix of forest and savanna, our predecessors had to go vast distances to gather grub. Walking in long strides—without chimplike swagger or knuckle dragging—made it easier to carry food. Over thousands of generations, the pelvis shifted to make our new method of locomotion more efficient. The tops of the hip bones flared, and the pubic bone moved toward the bottom of the spine, shifting the shape of the…

Back in 1988, Red Delicious made up 70 to 80 percent of the domestic apple market. Over the years, farmers sold a lot of them because they looked great. But they had a mealy texture, and people want an apple that’s firm, crisp, and juicy. I started lobbying for one. By 1994, threatened by varieties from Japan and New Zealand, the U.S. industry and Washington State University agreed that we had to grow our own. First, we cross-pollinated existing apples: Collect pollen from one flower, put it on the tip of a pencil eraser, and rub it into another. We crossed dozens of crisp, flavorful varieties such as Gala, Fuji, and Pink Lady. But the best offspring came out of Honeycrisp and Enterprise parents. We grew the crossbred seeds into…

FLIP THROUGH THE PHOTOS YOU’VE TAKEN OVER THE COURSE OF YOUR life, and you can watch yourself (and your waistline) grow. For most of us, it’s a tale spun through strings of same-looking selfies on smartphone camera rolls. Bor-ing! A stand-alone camera—from any generation—can capture distinctive memories worth keeping. 1 Past The Polaroid Originals OneStep 2 works like its predecessors, so your photos will have the same vintage flare your elders’ snapshots did. One pack of color film gets you eight 3.1-inch shots that instantly develop with the soft look that inspired your favorite Insta filters. Each snap costs roughly $2, so choose your shots with care. 2 Present Pros still gravitate to bulky DSLRs, but the Panasonic ZS200 will do for the rest of us. Its 15x zoom lens…

I’ve been running my own worm business for 40 years. My farm’s specialty is the red worm, which multiplies quickly—at any given time, we probably have 10 million to 15 million. They stay in clumps, so if you stick your hand in the soil where they grow, you can grab 100 or so at once. Raising crawlers is hard work. You’re unbelievably dirty. The mud and slime gets into your house, under your nails—just everywhere. The invertebrates grow in this muck, in 55-gallon drums cut lengthwise and laid on their sides. When they get old enough, these hermaphrodites mate and produce golden-colored cocoons, from which three to 10 babies emerge. After three months, we sell the new worms. I’ve seen trends come and go. My customers used to be fishermen…

FROM HERE ON EARTH, WE COULD swear that the moon gets larger as it dips near the horizon. One thousand years ago, Arab astronomer Ibn al-Haytham offered an answer that still holds true today: The bloating of the lunar body is all in our heads. Neuroscientists’ running theory goes like this: Our brains perceive the sky around us as a kind of flattened dome. As such, the horizon seems much farther away than the sky that is directly above our heads. (It’s not.) So, when the moon hits the horizon, our brains make an assumption: It must be huge in order for us to still see it at such a far distance. Our noggins adjust what we see accordingly. We tell our retina’s snapshot, Nah, can’t be, and reset it.…

Beverly Boyer knows bodies—the registered massage therapist soothes living muscles every day. But when Boyer describes the first time she peered inside a corpse, her voice lowers as if she’s recalling the start of a great romance. “Everything clicked,” she says. “Everything I had learned through my education—the anatomy, the physiology—I could see it right there.” ¶It’s a Tuesday night in February, and Boyer, standing in the basement of a funeral parlor, is doing her best to share her macabre love interest with others. In 2014, she founded what’s now called the Colorado Learning Center of Human Anatomy, which rents space in a Longmont mortuary, to give other flesh professionals—massage therapists, yoga teachers, acupuncturists, and energy workers, among others—access to deceased and donated bodies. Each week, dozens of Boyer’s students…

I study insects trapped in amber—the only remains of long-dead creatures that lived up to 100 million years ago. One of the few places where you’ll find amber fossils from the Late Cretaceous epoch, around 78 million years ago, is an abandoned pit mine in Alberta, Canada. Every rainstorm washes away more coal to reveal chunks of amber. It fluoresces green if the sun hits it, making it easy to spot, but usually all the dust covers it and makes everything on the ground look like coal. You’re crawling across the surface trying to pick out these little spherical masses less than 1 centimeter across, dark lumps sitting on a dark gray background. You want to work fast—you have only a few days to collect thousands of samples, and if…

CAREER PLANNING Successive generations need to fill all the vital crew roles—such as medics and mechanics—which doesn’t leave much room for freedom of choice. A version of modern career tests would assign occupations based on aptitude, passions, and available jobs. PROPULSION We’re gonna need a mighty push. So far, no one’s had any better ideas than Freeman Dyson: Slap A-bombs on the back of a ship and physically shove ourselves forward with constant nuclear explosions. It’s not safe or healthy, but it’s all we’ve got. WASTE MANAGEMENT A healthy human needs almost 300 gallons of water a year, and there won’t be any pit stops. We’ll need to reclaim every drop we use. The ISS already packs a system to recycle astronaut pee, which we’ll scale up to avoid surges…

When I moved to Norway from Italy in 2003, I discovered this incredible dog breed, the Norwegian lundehund. Locals had bred it to hunt puffins, which nest in deep crevices along the rocky shoreline. Breeders helped the dogs develop six toes on each paw to grip the sides of mountains, and necks that bend backward to make it easier to navigate narrow caves. This history fascinated me so much that I persuaded my boyfriend to get a lundehund, which we named Aiko. It also inspired me to look into their genetic diversity. I learned that the dogs nearly died off in the 1940s and again in the 1960s, when hunters started using nets to catch puffins and lost interest in the breed. Later, many of the animals caught canine distemper,…

THERE’S AN IMAGE HIDDEN IN THESE black-and-white blotches. Once you spot the figure, that’s it: The shape will emerge, and then, try as you might, you’ll never unsee it. Consider yourself warned. It’s a Dalmatian, bending down to drink water. See it now? That’s because the images we “see” are really our mind’s own creations. In the early 1900s, the German psychologists behind Gestalt theory first introduced the Dalmatian scene with this reasoning: Humans aren’t passive recipients of incoming images, rather we impose a structure on what we see. Today, we’re still piecing together how our brains do this, but here’s our best guess: Light lands on our eyes’ retinal cells, which send a signal to the visual cortex, the area of the brain that heads up sight. Simultaneously, other…

“SPACE GARDENS WILL BE ESSENTIAL SOMEDAY IF ASTRONAUTS ARE TO GO BEYOND LOW-EARTH ORBIT OR MAKE MORE THAN A QUICK TRIP TO THE MOON. THEY CAN’T CARRY ALL THE FOOD THEY NEED. “Our plants aren’t looking too good,” astronaut Scott Kelly tweeted from the International Space Station on December 27, 2015. He was right: The attached picture showed four baby zinnias bathed in magenta light. Three of the four leafy stalks were discolored and curling in on themselves. ¶The station’s garden was struggling to recover from a mold problem. ¶It’s an issue familiar to terrestrial gardeners. And while on Earth, the problem means a trip to the local nursery for replacements, in space you can’t do that. The zinnias, brightly colored flowers in the daisy family, were part of an…

EVER TRIED TO RAISE THE roof in a form-fitting rain jacket? Couldn’t get past your ears, could ya? Most shells rely on a water-blocking membrane that expands only about 10 percent. The Outdoor Research Hemispheres jacket can grow to double its size in key spots, like behind the shoulders, eliminating that straight-jacket feeling. Patches of Gore-Tex fabric with stretch technology have an undulating, three-dimensional shape. When you pull the textile, both the water tight layer and the attached fabric expand as the material flattens out—like an accordion. Release and it snaps back into shape. The result is a waterproof jacket that won’t limit your movement but stays close enough to your body that a funky cloud of sweat can’t form inside.…

THE AVERAGE BABY BOOMER WILL LIVE 20 YEARS LONGER THAN THEIR GRANDPARENTS did. Now that modern medicine has a handle on infectious diseases such as the flu in the roader population, illnesses associated with aging, namely cancer and heart failure, will probably do most of us in. The rising percent of people dying from those ailments may seem ominous, but it means we’re living long enough to get them in the first place. Here’s what death looks like in modern America. 0–4 HEART DISEASE (0.5%) Symptoms such as appetite loss and sweating might resemble colic but could signal cardiac failure for infants with birth defects in their tickers. 5–14 SUICIDE (41%) Nearly one-third of all childhood suicides in the U.S. involve a gun, even though the victims are far too…

EARLY ON THE MORNING OF JANUARY 25, 1944, eight young American airmen strode across the gravel of an airfield in Kunming, China, toward a B-24J bomber. Their mission was to fly the 67-foot-long aircraft, its nose bedecked with a picture of a pinup girl and the slogan “Hot as Hell,” over the Himalayas to pick up supplies from British-held India. It was a routine run but still plenty dangerous. The weather over the mountain route, known as the Hump, was fearsomely unpredictable and severe. Some 600 American planes would crash in the area by the war’s end. The men settled into their positions: two pilots, a navigator, a bombardier, a radio operator, a flight engineer, and two gunners. At 7:40 a.m., the plane roared up into the sky. Smooth sailing…

TECHNOLOGY DOESN’T AGE GRACEFULLY. BRICKED phones and crapped-out hard drives retire to your junk drawer only a few years after emerging from their shrink wrap. A precious few of our worldly wants, however, do improve with time and use. Objects like the ones here satisfy the Japanese tenet of wabi-sabi, which values well-worn imperfection over what’s shiny and new. They’ll only work better as you drag them along the rough road of life. 1 Jeans Levi’s suggests you buy the 1976 501 jeans two sizes larger than normal. Getting them to the right fit is your job. Wet ’em down, and the cotton will shrink as it dries around you. 2 Ukuleles The vibrations caused by strumming wood instruments, such as the Fender Zuma Concert Uke, make the timber resonate…

TIE YOUR SHOES A LITTLE TOO SNUG IN THE morning, and, by lunchtime, that uncomfortable feeling will be nearly gone. Sensations—smells, sights, feelings—that stay stagnant for too long tend to fade away. The same goes for this blue dot fixed in its green milieu. Stare it down for 15 seconds and it vanishes. Blink and it comes back. The dot’s Achilles’ heel is its consistency. Our brain conserves energy whenever possible, says Frans W. Cornelissen, a neuroscientist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. If nothing changes, we stop registering. To generate images, neurons constantly relay signals from our retinas to the brain. The longer we stare, the more the cells tire of sending along the same messages. Eventually those signals decay in strength. Instead of working hard to…

A food replicator TONY CHRISTENSEN VIA FACEBOOK DELIVERY IS THE CLOSEST WE WILL GET TO AN insta-meal. But we can now grow any vegetable anywhere with one small box. Caleb Harper—director of the Open Agriculture Initiative, MIT’s food-of-the-future lab—cooked up a veggie computer. It programs an ideal climate (temperature, carbon dioxide levels, humidity) for a particular plant to flourish. By expanding the system to even bigger boxes like warehouse buildings, Harper wants to make fresh, foolproof food more accessible. The big hurdle will be ensuring the computer can grow that perfectly delicious tomato every time. His next taste testers? The astronauts living aboard the International Space Station. A greener burial POPSCI STAFF VIA SLACK The greenest burial is an unadorned body in a shallow grave. But bioethicist Philip Olson says…

In 2015, I went to Australia to collect koala poo, which can teach us about their complex microbiome. Bacteria in their guts break down toxic tannins in the eucalyptus leaves they eat. We think one reason the babies eat their moms’ poo is to acquire microbes that will give their own system toxin-degrading powers. But I wanted to know for sure. An animal strain of chlamydia infects many Australian koalas. When I got to the wildlife hospital, veterinarians were treating them with antibiotics, but they were still sick. Some had stopped eating and were wasting away. Their poo, which is normally the size and shape of chocolate-covered almonds, looked really dry, like the stuff at the bottom of a Cheetos bag. We guessed the drugs might be damaging their gut…

VEGGIE Lights Grow lights in the top of the unit can be preset to mimic a Terran day/night cycle, or can be left on for 24 hours. Growth Chinese cabbage, green lettuce, mustard, red romaine lettuce, and zinnias all sprouted in space thanks to Veggie. Plant Pillows The garden sprouts from pouches callled “plant pillows,” which cradle seeds, baked clay, and a time-release fertilizer. Fan A fan pulls in air from the space station and circulates it around the vegetation, helping to regulate humidity. Plastic Covering The clear covering keeps humidity levels constant inside Veggie, and keeps any detritus from escaping into the rest of the station. Water Injection The astronauts tend the plants nearly every day. One of their tasks is to carefully inject water into the plant pillows…

In 1996, I was running my own 3D-animation company, Unreal Pictures. Autodesk, which creates design software for engineers and architects, hired us to develop a program that would let people animate digital models. We included several demonstration models to which users could apply a dancing motion: a dinosaur, a woman, and our favorite, a baby. When people bought our software, instead of using that baby to practice animation techniques, they exported the dancing version, which they called “Baby Cha-Cha.” People began sharing it through email, then adding it to websites and selling it on clothing. In 1998, it even appeared on the television show Ally McBeal. We didn’t know it at the time, but we had created the first-ever digital meme. I think it spread because the file was a…

OUR FIVE SENSES—TASTE, TOUCH, smell, hearing, and sight—don’t function in vacuums. They work together in intricate ways. Consider this: With our eyes covered and our nose plugged, we probably can’t distinguish an apple from an onion. Without our eyes to see, an apple is an apple and an onion an onion because of its taste, odor, and texture. Together, these attributes create what we call flavor, differentiating one food from another. When we eat, receptors on our tongues decipher two things: texture and taste. To identify taste, these receptors pick up odorless substances known as nonvolatile chemical compounds. These molecular mixtures tell us the five characteristics commonly associated with flavor (bitter, salty, sweet, sour, and umami—or savory). The problem is that those attributes are similar in apples and onions, says…

All Downhill from Here How wheat might change by 2050 ANY MIDDLE-SCHOOLER GROKS THE FUNDAMENTALS OF PHOTOSYNTHESIS: Fueled by sunlight, plants turn carbon dioxide and water into sugar and oxygen, which they use to grow stems, roots, leaves, and other tasty bits. As CO2 levels continue to rise—we’re on track to double pre-Industrial levels in the next few decades—it might sound like we’re in for a vegetational boom. But any greenery growth spurt will come with a downside. CO2-charged sprouts contain more starches and sugars, and fewer minerals and proteins. You can try to avoid junk food, but our plants are getting junkier too. See, plants also require proteins in order to grow, which they synthesize using elements they draw from the soil, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. In…

OUR SOLAR SYSTEM FORMED 4.5 BILLION YEARS AGO IN MUCH THE SAME WAY dust bunnies amass and assemble beneath bed frames: A few errant bits stick together, eventually building up to form sizable clumps. Below the mattress, static cling is the glue; in the cosmos, gravity is. The first of these celestial scraps came from the big bang, which sent the five lightest elements careening into space to make early stars. Through those sparklers’ lives and explosive demises came enough stellar dust to create the heavier elements that comprise almost everything we run into in our day-to-day existence. Understanding this series of events has allowed scientists to trace the origins of atoms in our solar system to one or more cosmological phenomena. a guide to our stars Stars with less…

On a Thursday evening in late January, the faithful gather. They trickle into the Church of Perpetual Life, about an hour’s drive north of Miami, until a throng of around 100 people cram around tables lining the first-floor hall of this renovated house of worship. Along one wall is a display of reading material: pamphlets on heart disease, flyers itemizing the additives in Cheez-Its and their detrimental health effects, a handbill about the Ms. Senior Florida pageant. On the other side of the room, there’s a snack buffet with beans, broccoli, carrots, cubed cheese, sliced meats, and olives. It’s easy to pick out the regulars, who mingle clutching biology textbooks or readily shaking hands. “WE PROMOTED WAYS TO “SLOW AGING THAT HADN’T MADE IT INTO THE MAINSTREAM YET.”—BILL FALOON Many…

Thirty years ago, I was sculpting hyperrealistic masks for theatrical productions. Then I met these scientists who asked me to create models of Paleolithic hunters for museum exhibits. When I visited their lab, I saw 20 ancient skulls on a shelf, and I was fascinated by all the different shapes early humans took. I wanted to get my hands on those skulls. Since then, it’s been my job to bring ancient people back to life, a field called paleo-reconstruction. We convey science’s best guess about how these human relatives looked. I start with a plaster cast of the skull and lay clay “muscles” over it, building thin layers to mimic flesh. The tricky parts are the features. Right now I’m working on a Homo naledi—a 300,000-year-old relative of ours that…