Innehållsförteckning för Fall 2019 från Popular Science

I’LL BE REAL HONEST WITH you; we cooked up this issue as an excuse to talk about UFOs. Here are some names we considered: The UFO Issue. Invasions. Aliens. Weird Science. We soon hit some snags. Or one big snag, really. PopSci writes about things that exist, and it got really clear really quick that we couldn’t fill 100 pages with verifiable stories of unidentified flying objects and alien incursions. We drifted toward Invasions, but that quickly skewed biological and pushed out a lot of the cool space stuff we wanted to cover. Aliens gave us the same problem (ironic!), and Weird Science seemed too judgmental. Eventually, we settled on what you have in front of you: Out There. And whoa, was that ever a good choice. Keep reading, and…

IN 1911,FAMED NORWEGIAN explorer Roald Amundsen’s team of trekkers became the first humans to reach the South Pole. They stayed for less than a week. But today, one of the most isolated spots on Earth hosts residents year-round. The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station’s position at the bottom of the globe and seclusion from society enables scientists to study seismology, air quality, and even the birth of the universe in ways that are impossible elsewhere. Here’s how they withstand harsh climes to conduct some of the world’s most advanced research.…

AUGUST 2007 WAS A SPECIAL TIME ON THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION. A SHUTTLE CREW—NEW BLOOD, FRESH SUPPLIES—WOULD SOON ARRIVE. ASTRONAUT CLAYTON ANDERSON, THE ONLY AMERICAN ABOARD SINCE THAT JUNE, WAS READY FOR NEW PEOPLE TO TALK TO. First, though, he had to deal with Mission Control. Anderson had come aboard the ISS with the explicit goal of improving procedures for future crews; his work on the ground had included astronaut support and communications. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that he regularly felt annoyed by the tedious processes Houston demanded he follow. In preparation for the shuttle’s arrival, for instance, they had instructed him to remove a special spacewalk bag (storage for equipment like gloves and eyeglasses) from the airlock, place it in a second bag, take a new spacewalk bag…

THE FUTURE MIGHT ALREADY BE WRITTEN. Cheer, shudder, or eye-roll in disgust, but history shows that what awaits us is often spelled out in the pages of science fiction. The genre’s predictive track record stretches millennia: Authors mused about the lunar landing as far back as 175 A.D., when Syrian satirist Lucian of Samosata imagined flying ships to the moon, a tale that tapped the seafaring culture’s desire to ascend to the heavens. Fiction isn’t always pure fantasy. “Some of our greatest authors are not making up stuff whole cloth, but sampling from the zeitgeist—scientific or otherwise,” says Dan Rockmore, director of Dartmouth College’s Neukom Institute for Computational Science, which hands out annual prizes for visionary speculative writing. Of course, scribes do have blind spots. They never quite nailed the…

Astronomers who peer through the Giant Magellan Telescope might one day photograph exo-planets, or look back through time to see our universe in its youth. Gazing farther into space than ever before requires building the largest reflector yet, one far too big to send into orbit. The instrument slowly rising on a Chilean mountaintop will contain seven mirrors, each 27.6 feet across and arrayed like a daisy. They’re being cast at the Richard F. Caris Mirror Laboratory at the University of Arizona, and each requires 18 tons of glass and more than a year of polishing to attain its spoonlike shape. When the last of them is installed (the goal is 2028), scientists will view the cosmos with 10 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope.…

STACE BEAULIEU, BIOLOGICAL OCEANOGRAPHER AT THE WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC I NSTI TUTION My specialty is deep-sea biodiversity. I study invertebrates that live in hydrothermal vents near the ocean floor. These are unique habitats associated with hot springs, which tend to be found near volcanic activity. Many of the creatures that thrive there are not found anywhere else on Earth. Almost every time we discover another of these springs, we find new species. Accessing the habitat is quite challenging. With current technology, you need to be in a deep-diving submarine or use a nimble sea robot. For the latter, you’re on a small ship, dangling a cable 2 miles down, then dropping and guiding the robot to an exact spot on the bottom. It’s like trying to fish for something on…

THIS IMAGE OF THE CARINA NEBULA shows only dust, ionized gases, and stars. But there’s a chance a dog on its hind legs looks back at you. Neuroscientists dubbed such recognition “pareidolia”—the human tendency to interpret random stimuli as familiar objects. It’s why people sometimes perceive a smile in a passing cloud or the man in the moon. Two parts of the brain cause facial par-eidolia, says Kang Lee, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Toronto. The fusiform face area, a region of the brain’s visual system, activates specifically in response to a visage. Simultaneously, the inferior frontal gyrus tells the visual system how strange an object can look and still be recognized. The result can be a freakish tendency to see human expressions where none exist. Researchers still…

SOME 5,000 SATELLITES CURRENTLY orbit Earth, beaming back data about our little blue planet from the vantage point of space. The results can be surprising, altering human perception of the ground beneath our feet. Here are six satellite images of some of the globe’s most famous natural features. Can you identify them all, or do these far-out photos leave you seeing stars?…

Josh Dean “I like interesting people taking big swings in worlds we don’t know about,” writer Josh Dean says. The subject of his PopSci feature is certainly swinging big: a man on a quest to be the first person to reach the deepest points in each of Earth’s five oceans. This type of story drives Dean as a journalist. In books like The Taking of K-129 and magazine articles, he takes readers along to esoteric settings such as a deep-sea wreck in the Pacific, or an elephant polo field in Nepal. But he’s most intrigued by the determined humans he finds in those places. Tom McNamara How should we communicate with civilizations living as far off as 10,000 years from now? Tom McNamara’s feature explores the answers to that question;…

THE HUMAN BODY IS MALLEABLE—just ask any athlete or astronaut. But the pace at which we can naturally reshape our physiology is sluggish compared with the quick fixes technology can off er. Why bother with years of memory training when you can carry a search engine on your wrist? As augmentation improves, our species may increasingly rely on much more invasive and permanent devices. Here’s what happens when our gadgets get under our skin—and make us reexamine what it means to be human.…

AFTER VICTOR VESCOVO CLIMBED THE SEVEN Summits—the highest mountain on each continent—he skied to both the North and South poles. Only 66 people have accomplished this dual feat of human performance, dubbed the Explorers’ Grand Slam. When Vescovo finished, in 2017, he certainly could have hung up his gear and felt pretty good about his place in the annals of adventure. But the 53-year-old private equity investor from Texas was not done. Vescovo had been considering what, after Everest and Antarctica, he could possibly tackle that would feel big enough. Outer space wasn’t really an option yet. Then he came up with the perfect quest. It would be, in a sense, the inverse of the Seven Summits. He called it the Five Deeps. No human has ever reached the bottommost…

The mood of the crowd gathered alongside a highway just outside Denver is euphoric. Around 75 people stand in the brush beneath a roadside billboard with their phones out, filming one another and tossing around a beach ball that looks like a globe. Several of them are livestreaming the event, part of the kickoff for the Flat Earth International Conference, the largest ever summit of its kind. A drone buzzes overhead, collecting footage. Every few minutes, a passing car slows down to honk, and the crowd erupts into cheers. The billboard reads: “google flat earth clues.” This stretch of road has few landmarks beyond a Best Buy distribution center, so to direct attendees here, conference organizers gave them the coordinates on Google Earth. People seem unbothered by the apparent contradiction.…

JEFFREY MONTES STANDS HIGH ON A LADDER IN DIRT-FLOORED ARENA, SQUINTING HIS KHAKIS AND BLACK T-SHIRT ARE REMARKABLY TIDY FOR SOMEONE DEPLOYING RED GOO to build a one-third scale model of what might someday be a home on Mars. Cleanliness happens when you outsource the dirty work to a robot. Montes and his colleagues at architecture firm AI SpaceFactory are in a cavernous exhibition hall near Peoria, Illinois, to show NASA how astronauts could use 3D printing and Martian materials to make houses on the Red Planet. After spending the better part of 30 hours watching their custom-built printer squirt out a chocolate-colored domicile called “Marsha,” they have just minutes before the agency calls time in its 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge. The company’s only competition for the $500,000 prize, a team…

For millions battling daily discomfort, this news couldn’t be more exciting. A new relief extract found in hemp is available across the nation and can be purchased without a prescription. And the best part, it comes to users in the form of a tasty gummy bear. So you can say goodbye to pills, needles, and creams! Hemp Gummies, contains pure concentrated doses of hemp extract, which can help relieve joint discomfort along with general muscle aches and soreness. It also calms, relaxes, and eases tension all over the body. Exciting new scientific research shows that hemp extract contains special relief molecules called cannabinoids which bind to receptor cites in the brain and body. When taken orally, hemp extract activates these receptors, and soothing comfort begins to take form. Available Across…

LINDA BARTOSHUK, DIRECTOR OF PSYCHOPHYSICAL RESEARCH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA Growing up in the 1940s, I wanted to be an astronomer. But the field wasn’t very welcoming to women, so I pivoted to the study of human sensory experiences instead. I accidentally opened up a whole new realm of research. It started with my interest in taste blindness, a condition where people with fewer taste buds have trouble perceiving certain flavors. I devised an experiment to test subjects’ ability to discern bitterness. I expected to find two groups: those who would sense the acridity, and those who would not. To my surprise, I found a third group who experienced such flavors two to three times more intensely than anyone else. We now know these “supertasters” have extra taste buds.…

SOMETIMES THE FARTHER AWAY YOU are from something, the clearer it is. At a distance, you can tell that the pattern in the center of this image differs slightly from the design around it. But bring the page close to your face, and one pattern appears to overtake the other, making the once-disparate motifs suddenly match. Known as the uniformity illusion, which University of Amsterdam assistant profes-sor Yair Pinto first described in 2016, this sleight takes advantage of the way we gather information through our eyeballs. In the center of the eye sits a tiny pit known as the fovea. It contains a high density of retinal cones, which provide a detailed and colorful impression of the objects directly in front of us. By contrast, images at the edge of…

BASE READING One data-analytics researcher found that 61 percent of NUFORC sighting reports occurred within 24 miles of a military installation, suggesting government aircraft as likely culprits. But the concentration may have more to do with population density than topsecret jets. Many sites are mostly bases for outfits like the Air and Army national guards, which tend to be near human-dense areas and which probably aren’t hosting futuristic flight testing (and are likely not of particular interest to alien visitors). THEY COME AT NIGHT Nearly three-quarters of saucer reports with a timestamp happen in the dark, but not necessarily because aliens hide in shadows. Humans are simply more likely to stare at the sky between 5 p.m. and 11 p.m. Temperate weather, leisure time, longer nights, and higher populations are…

THE INTERNET LOVES TO CREATE words, but it can also bring aged terms back from the fringes—with a twist. Take “whomst’d’ve” (that’s whom+did+have). It sounds like a joke (and it is), but it’s also an example of how language is living and growing before our screen-gazing eyes. Originally, “whom” indicated when “who” was an object (“they saw whom?”) instead of a subject (“who saw them?”). But we don’t use such “-m” forms elsewhere—youm and whichm, anyone?—so people use “whom” less and less. Now it often just serves to make a phrase sound fancier, which the net is stretching to new extremes. Where will it all end? Whomst knows! “Whom” has played a smaller and smaller role in literature, as shown here. But any grumbling about the shift is liable to…

IN THE 58 YEARS SINCE ALAN Shepard became the first American to orbit Earth, NASA has deemed just one watch tough enough to wear in open space. The Omega Speedmaster Professional remains the only timepiece to meet the agency’s call, in 1965, for a mechanical chronograph that could endure 12 G’s of acceleration and temperatures up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. It was standard issue during the Gemini and Apollo programs, and Buzz Aldrin wore one as he strode across the moon. (Neil Armstrong’s watch remained aboard the lander, filling in for a malfunctioning timer.) Shuttle crews donned updated versions into the 1990s. Like the original, the modern iteration resists shocks and magnetism, and winds manually—no gravity or external power source required to keep it running. It even retains the plastic…

URBAN RUINS LINE A QUIET thoroughfare in the northern reaches of Pompeii. Tall grass and sunflowers push through formerly tiled atrium floors, and murals, once brightly painted with scenes from Roman mythology, have faded to a few streaks of red on gray-and-brown bricks. Time and exposure have worn them down, but archaeology itself has been somewhat cruel to these relics. Eager treasure hunters of the 18th and 19th centuries often dug into the earth without much concern for what they destroyed as long as they found statues, gold, or other booty. Upper stories of buildings that hadn’t been demolished by Mount Vesuvius’ hail of volcanic debris in 79 A.D. were wrecked by picks and shovels. Folks searching for loot in the wealthier southern neighborhoods of this city piled loose dirt…

GUL DOLEN, NEUROSCIENTI ST AT JOHNS HOPKI NS UNIVERSI TY Octopuses seem nothing like us. Their brains are physiologically different. Yet they interact with one another and do complex tasks the way we do—they even solve puzzles. One species we work with is typically reclusive. However, they become quite the party animals during their mating seasons. In humans, a neurotransmitter called serotonin promotes this kind of social functioning. But that molecule has been around far longer than we have—so it could be a driving force behind these behaviors in other species too, including octopuses. To test out this idea, we gave two octopuses MDMA, a psychoactive drug that binds to a protein that transports serotonin. It’s known to boost empathy in humans. We dunked each creature in a tank of…

ROBERT COKER, EXERCI SE PHYSIOLOGIST AT THE UNIVERSI TY OF ALASKA AT FAI RBANKS The Montane Yukon Arctic Ultramarathon is no ordinary foot race. The 430-mile winter trek across Canada’s Yukon Territory can last up to two weeks, with temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. I’ve been studying how participants’ bodies respond to this extreme haul since 2015. You can’t go into this unprepared—even if you’re just collecting data. I pack additional warm clothes, sleeping bags, and food because lots of things can go wrong in such an extreme environment. In 2017, as I made my way from my home base in Fairbanks, Alaska, to the race 600 miles south in Whitehorse, the temperature was so low that the oil cap seal on my SUV burst, and I…

HALLIE ABARCA, HEAD OF IMAGE PROCESSING FOR NASA’S I NSIGHT MARS LANDER Snapshots from space don’t arrive looking anything like the ones we’re used to. They come to Earthas raw data packets, and someone must reassemble that info into all kinds of finished images: infrared shots, stereo maps, and mosaics. I processed the first picture for the InSight lander’s Mars touchdown in 2018. We had practiced before launch but hadn’t fully tested the process until we were on live TV. Once the revor reached Mars, everyone in the control room gathered around me. That include the engineer Who designed the camera.l coulde't let him down. The initial download converted into a blurry mess: The image was dark, and both the transparent lens protector and the lens itself were caked in…

A Secret Any Man Can Use… This month I got a letter from a reader in Texas about a “little secret” that has renewed her sex life with her husband! Tina writes: Dear Karen, For years my husband and I had a wonderful love life, but when he reached his 50s, he lost some of his old spark, especially in the bedroom. He tried every product available, but nothing worked. For the past few years, it’s felt like we were roommates, not husband and wife. Well, last month he came home from a business trip in Europe and shocked me with more energy and passion than he’s had in years. He took me in the bedroom like we were newlyweds and gave me a night I’ll never forget. It was…