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FOR THE NEW ENERGY FUTURE,WE NEED TO TURN MORE IDEAS INTO ACTION.
The world needs more energy and less CO2. To meet that challenge, we need to turn bright ideas into workable solutions – and then make those solutions a reality.
We’re working on a range of innovative projects. Some are still on the drawing board – like developing ways to produce fuel from algae and straw. Others are already being delivered to our customers in many parts of the world – like cleaner-coal technology.
At the same time, we are making our existing fuels cleaner and more efficient, and working on technology to manage CO2 emissions.
To find out how Shell is helping prepare for the new energy future, visit www.shell.us/energytalk
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THE TREBUCHET A catapult with attitude. Falling weights or a
pivoting arm supply the extra oomph. Combine it with
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november ’09
POPSCI.COM
contentsthis month’s guide to innovation and discovery
FEATURES
VOLUME 275 #5
POPULAR SCIENCE 05
#�the future of space
42 DEEP-SPACE BOOT CAMPHow do you prepare someone for a
grueling journey beyond low-Earth
orbit? Take a look inside NASA’s new
training program, with the first cohort
of astronauts being groomed for long-
haul space missions. By Dawn Stover
#�POPSCI lab rat
62 PERSONAL CHEMISTRYEvery day, we’re exposed to thousands of man-made molecules, some of which stay in our bodies for decades. How are contaminants in your kitchen affecting you? The new science of biomonitoring tracks these chemicals and what they mean for your health. By Arianne Cohen
#�The Green Dream
68 CLEARLY EFFICIENTLearn from POPULAR SCIENCE’s staff photographer as he constructs a home packed with affordable, environmentally friendly innovations. This month: installing custom, energy-efficient windows. By John B. Carnett
#�POPSCI INNOVATORS
49 BRILLIANT 10Meet POPSCI’s annual selection of the brightest young researchers in the country. They’re helping to keep us healthy, prevent disasters, and make green
energy cheaper than coal. Lucky for us, our future is in their capable hands.
49
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68
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OLLIN
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; IS
TO
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NASA’s Lunar
Electric Rover during
tests in Arizona
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$�MEGAPIXELS
14 Turkeys stuck at the U.S. border; brain electrodes.
$�WHAT’S NEW
19 RECREATIONVenture into the wild with an air-shock snowmobile.
20 THE GOODSA wrench that ratchets; a cellphone made from corn.
22 AUTOThe futuristic cars that could reinvent GM.
24 COMPUTINGMultitouch screens on PCs of every size and shape.
$�HEADLINES
33 MEDICINEA medical-isotope shortage delays millions of health tests.
34 DISASTER TECHProtecting skyscrapers from earthquakes.
36 THE CHECKLISTHow to fix the Large Hadron Collider.
39 EXPERIMENTSSee what survives the Mars torture chamber.
$�HOW 2.0
71 YOU BUILT WHAT?!A real-life replica of the videogame Lunar Lander.
74 REPURPOSED TECHCreate your own e-book reader from an old tablet PC.
76 GRAY MATTERGrinding a mix of metals to make showers of sparks.
78 ASK A GEEKWhat to look for in a host for your Web site.
$�FYI
80 Could Stallone beat a T. rex in arm wrestling?
$�OTHER STUFF
08 FROM THE EDITOR
11 THE INBOX
100 THE FUTURE THEN
CONTENTS
06 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
CLO
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; R
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Look at the Stars Inspired by our fully loaded backyard observatory [What’s New, page 26]? See a gallery of the finest amateur astrophotographers’ work and more info on setting up your own camera, at popsci.com/astrophoto.
Gear of the Year It’s almost that time again—time for POPSCI’s annual Best of What’s New list, cataloging the year’s most impressive new tech. We want to hear about your favorite innovations this year in the realm of science and technology. Tell us at popsci.com/bown2009readers.
DIY Kindle Get step-by-step photo instructions for building our DIY Kindle project, at popsci.com/DIYkindle.
REGULARS
NEW SLIDESHOWS AND FEATURES
NASA’S NEW SUIT The Constellation Program isn’t just rockets. After reading about Constellation astronaut training in this issue, take a closer look at their new-and-improved space duds: popsci.com/spacesuit.
POPSCI.COM
Windows 7 Is Here At long last, Microsoft’s successor to Windows Vista was just released, and with it a slew of fresh hardware taking advantage of its new features. Take a tour of the computing gear bringing about the bright future of the Windows PC, at popsci.com/windows7.
14
34
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GOT QUESTIONS? Send them to [email protected]. We’ve got answers!
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TALK ABOUT MAN AND
MACHINE BECOMING ONE.
INTRODUCING THE NEW 2010 MUSTANG.
THERE ARE THOSE WHO CUSTOMIZE THEIR MUSTANGS AND MAKE THEM THEIR OWN.
THEN THERE’S DANIEL VERLARDE. SEE HOW HE UNLEASHES HIS MUSTANG SIDE
BY TAKING CUSTOMIZATION TO A WHOLE NEW LEVEL AT THE2010MUSTANG.COM.
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From Here to There
08 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
WHEN THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION announced its vision for space explo-ration in January 2004, NASA’s budget was clearly insufficient to the task. Yet NASA continued to pursue the hardware necessary for a base on the moon and a human voyage to Mars, even in the face of mounting evidence that (for instance) the International Space Station will pass its
2016 retire-by date before Ares I, NASA’s ferry to the station, enters service. The rhetoric/reality gap has become a chronic credibility problem for NASA.
In September, the White House received the Augustine Committee’s long-awaited report on the country’s options for human spaceflight, which concluded that within NASA’s $18-billion annual budget, “no plan . . . permits human exploration to continue in any meaningful way.” The panel came up with scenarios for travel
beyond low-Earth orbit that would require the Obama administration to pony up an additional $3 billion or so a year. In this economy, that’s hard to imagine.
So where does that leave us? I think we’ll extend the functioning life of the International Space Station to at least 2020. We’ll keep the space shuttle flying well beyond next year, to bridge the gap in our ability to fly humans to low-Earth orbit and to serve as a platform for the development of the agency’s next heavy-lift rocket. NASA will help foster private space companies’ ability to get astronauts to the ISS, so that the agency can set its sights on more-distant targets. It will begin planning human rendez-vous with asteroids and other interim destinations, building to the big kahuna several decades hence: human bootprints on Mars.
The astronauts in this year’s class will spend months on the ISS, and they might make one of those interim asteroid-hops leading up to the main event—but it’s highly unlikely that any will make the giant leap to Mars. And yet nine young Americans—including POPSCI Bril-liant 10 honoree Kate Rubins [see page 49]—are eagerly embarking on the gruel-ing training regimen we detail in our cover story [page 42]. Amid all the uncertainty about NASA, it’s inspiring to see some of the nation’s most accomplished young scientists still chasing the stars. MARK JANNOT
THE RHETORIC/
REALITY GAP
HAS BECOME
A CHRONIC
PROBLEM
FOR NASA.
FROM THE EDITOR
JOH
N B
. C
ARN
ETT
Editor-in-Chief Mark JannotDeputy Editor Jacob WardCreative Director Sam Syed
EDITORIALExecutive Editor Mike HaneyFeatures Editor Nicole DyerEditorial Production Manager Felicia PardoCopy and Research Director Rina BanderSenior Associate Editors Lauren Aaronson, Doug Cantor, Bjorn Carey, Seth Fletcher, Martha HarbisonAssociate Editor Corinne IozzioAssistant Editor Susannah F. LockeEditorial Assistant Amy GeppertEditor at Large Dawn StoverContributing Technology Editor Steve MorgensternContributing Editors Eric Adams, Theodore Gray, Eric Hagerman, Joseph Hooper, Preston Lerner, Gregory Mone, Rena Marie Pacella, Catherine Price, Dave Prochnow, Jessica Snyder Sachs, Rebecca Skloot, Mike Spinelli, Elizabeth Svoboda, Kalee Thompson, Phillip Torrone, James Vlahos, Speed WeedContributing Troubadour Jonathan CoultonEditorial Intern Carina Storrs
ART AND PHOTOGRAPHYArt Director Matthew CokeleyPhoto Editor Kristine LaMannaStaff Photographer John B. CarnettSenior Designer Stephanie O’Hara Contributing Artists Kevin Hand, Nick Kaloterakis, Graham Murdoch, Bob Sauls, Paul Wootton Photo Intern Jack ForbesProduction Intern Jodi Tong
POPSCI.COMDigital Content Director John MahoneyDigital Content Manager Taylor HengenAssociate Web Editor Paul Adams
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Chairman Jonas BonnierChief Executive Officer Terry SnowChief Operating Officer Dan AltmanChief Financial Officer Randall KoubekVice President, Consumer Marketing Bruce MillerVice President, Production Lisa EarlywineVice President, E-Media Bill AllmanVice President, Digital Sales & Marketing John HaskinVice President, Enterprise Systems Shawn LarsonVice President, Human Resources Cathy HertzVice President, Corporate Communications Dean TurcolBrand Director John MillerPublishing Consultant Martin S. WalkerCorporate Counsel Jeremy Thompson For service anytime, please use our Web site: popsci.com/ customerservice. You can also call 800-289-9399; for Canadian and foreign, please call 386-597-4279. Or you may write to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235.
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iii�Get the electrifying answer and challenge your friends at sciencechannel.com/headgames.
WHAT’S THE AVERAGE LENGTH OF A LIGHTNING BOLT?
Surprising video. Tricky questions. Cold hard cash. Hosted by Greg Proops.HEAD GAMES
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The paper used for this magazine comes from certi-fied forests that are managed in a sustainable way to meet the social, economic and environ-mental needs of present and future generations.
HACK ATTACKSThe technology, cost and stand-off safety of unmanned warfare is seductive—but I worry that a clever software attack on our communications and positioning software could bring down our Air Force in one keystroke. Ronald A. BarkerMishawaka, Ind.
WAR ON WORDSI’ve enjoyed your magazine for many years but found your last issue distasteful. “Point. Click. Kill” is a horrific headline. You are promoting the notion that we can kill anyone, anywhere, as we please. That is not a step forward but 100 steps backward. I prefer to read publications that explore innovations in saving lives, not killing them.David G. HuebnerVia e-mail
CorrectionsIn The Future Then [Sept.], we referred to Hellcats as the fastest jets of their time. Hellcats were propeller-driven, and not the fastest aircraft.
In “The Next Grid” [July], we wrote that Southern California Edison supplies power to Los Angeles and San Diego. According to a
spokesperson, the company services “most of Southern California’s coastal, inland, desert and metro communities,” but not those cities.
The “water-walking shoes” mentioned in FYI [Sept.] are a concept, not a product. Wavewalk does, however, sell a kayak for stand-up paddling (wavewalk.com).
Our September back-to-school
issue scouted the country’s most
talented college-bound inventors,
explored the best ways to score
a free education online, and
discovered hands-on science
courses for adventurous students.
Eric Hagerman’s cover story “Point.
Click. Kill” earned both praise and
criticism for its reporting on the
future of unmanned fighter planes
and the shortage of pilots to fly
them. Want to join the conversation?
E-mail us at [email protected].
THE INBOX [email protected]
NOVEMBER 2009 POPULAR SCIENCE 11
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POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
RO
Y T
OFT
A trio of turkeys peacefully gobbles corn-
meal on a cattle ranch in northern Mex-
ico. But a fence may cut off the chuck-
wagon. Last February, Roy Toft, a fellow
at the International League of Conserva-
tion Photographers, photographed these
turkeys for an ILCP project documenting
wildlife around the first few hundred
miles of the 18-foot metal wall that the
U.S. Department of Homeland Security is
building along the border. Defenders of
Wildlife, a Washington, D.C.–based non-
profit partnering with ILCP, predicts that
the wall could interfere with the habitat
or migration (and therefore the feed-
ing and mating opportunities) of some
40 endangered and threatened species,
including jaguars and ocelots. “I started
the project in hopes of broadening our
discussion of [the wall’s] environmental
factors,” says ILCP member Krista Schlyer,
who recruited Toft for the project. This
month, Toft’s work will be exhibited for
the U.S. Senate. BY CARINA STORRS
FOWL LINETHE U.S.-MEXICO FENCE PROTECTS THE BORDER BUT COULD ENDANGER ANIMALS
BORDER PATROL The U.S.-
Mexico border fence could
affect turkey populations if
the birds cannot fly over an
18-foot enclosure to find addi-
tional food sources.
the must-see photos of the month
14
A trio of turkeys peacefully gobbles corn-
meal on a cattle ranch in northern Mex-
ico. But a fence may cut off the chuck-
wagon. Last February, Roy Toft, a fellow
at the International League of Conserva-
tion Photographers, photographed these
turkeys for an ILCP project documenting
wildlife around the first few hundred
miles of the 18-foot metal wall that the
U.S. Department of Homeland Security is
building along the border. Defenders of
Wildlife, a Washington, D.C.–based non-
profit partnering with ILCP, predicts that
the wall could interfere with the habitat
or migration (and therefore the feed-
ing and mating opportunities) of some
40 endangered and threatened species,
including jaguars and ocelots. “I started
the project in hopes of broadening our
discussion of [the wall’s] environmental
factors,” says ILCP member Krista Schlyer,
who recruited Toft for the project. This
month, Toft’s work will be exhibited for
the U.S. Senate. BY CARINA STORRS
THE U.S.-MEXICO FENCE PROTECTS THE BORDER BUT COULDENDANGER ANIMALS
BORDER PATROL The U.S.-
Mexico border fence could
affect turkey populations if
the birds cannot fly over an
18-foot enclosure to find addi-
tional food sources.
the must-see photos
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POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE
See more amazing photos at popsci.com/gallery.
15
See more amazing photos at popsci.com/gallery.
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16 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
THINKING CAPTINY SURFACE ELECTRODES COULD HELP PARALYZED PEOPLE MOVE
Bundles of microelectrode wires fan
out over a small area of a human brain.
These electrodes were placed by neuro-
surgeons at the University of Utah to see
if they could detect precise brain activity
associated with motor movements. To
their surprise, the hair’s-width micro-
electrodes, originally designed to study
epilepsy, picked up the firings of small
groups of neurons despite being merely
set on the surface of the brain. Previ-
ously, this fine tracking was possible only
by inserting wire probes directly into
brain tissue, a potentially risky maneuver
because, though thin, the probes can
still damage nerve cells during insertion.
Now the researchers are testing designs
that cover more of the brain’s surface.
“Our goal is to develop something [that
sends signals to a robotic arm] that will
be implanted into paralyzed patients and
give them some control to interact with
their environment,” says Bradley Greger,
a professor of bioengineering who over-
saw the work. BY CARINA STORRS
CO
UR
TESY
KELLY
JO
HN
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N/U
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ER
SIT
Y O
F U
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POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 17
See more amazing images at popsci.com/gallery.
ON YOUR MIND Doctors placed these 40-
micron-wide electrodes onto the brains of
patients who were already having part of
their skulls removed to study epilepsy.
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Whether you’re hauling hardware or hockey gear, the Ridgeline’s powerful 250-horsepower VTEC®
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POPSCI.COM
tech that puts the future in the palm of your hand
26The ultimate setup
for stargazers
NOVEMBER 2009 POPULAR SCIENCE 19
24iPhone-like laptops
—from Microsoft
30Clean your clothes
with plastic
SHOCK OF WINTERThe 2010 snowmobile season, which begins this month, will
see daredevils in places they couldn’t reach before: in deeper
powder, on remote cliffs, squeezing between trees. That’s
because the first full air-suspension sled swaps the usual
heavy steel coils for air-filled shock absorbers, creating a
smoother, 20-pounds-lighter machine. Riders can easily
steer the FX Nytro MTX SE 162 with their weight, glide it
nearly drag-free through powder, and unstick it from drifts.
Engineers from Yamaha and Fox Racing Shox
developed a rear shock that holds enough air to support a
snowmobile’s force yet still fits into the tight quarters near the
tracks. They took a skinny air cylinder and tacked on a small
external tank, boosting the volume by 30 percent but increasing
the shock’s girth at only one end. Users can adjust the pressure
inside with a simple bicycle-like pump, injecting more air for
heavier riders or a stiffer, faster ride, and releasing air for
lighter riders or a cushier ride. The result is more fun for more
people, on trails or off.–Mark Anders
YAMAHA FX NYTRO MTX SE 162
ENGINE: 4-stroke, 1049cc
HORSEPOWER: 130
SHOCKS: up to 14 in. travel
PRICE: $12,600
GET IT: yamaha-motor.com
AN AIR-SHOCK SNOWMOBILE LETS ADVENTURERS EXPLORE MORE TERRITORY
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20 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
THE
By Corinne Iozzio
GOODS12 MUST-HAVE PRODUCTS
WHAT’S NEW
ALL IN YOUR HEAD
Even when it’s noisy, this
Bluetooth headset will only
pick up your voice. In loud
conditions, its mics can turn
off, and a vibration sensor
on the earbud re-creates
your voice from sound waves
transmitted through your jaw.
Motorola Endeavor HX1 $130;
motorola.com
PLAY IT COOL
This desktop
gaming PC shape-
shifts to keep from
overheating. Five
vents on top of the
Aurora ALX open when
its internal fans speed
up, helping air circulate to its
core. Alienware Aurora ALX
From $1,000; alienware.com
TRICK GRIP
This wrench combines the best of
open-ended designs and closed
ratchets. It fits into tight spots
like an open wrench does, and a
spring-loaded button inside the
head allows it to swivel back and
forth without letting go of the
bolt, like a ratchet. Craftsman
Dual Ratcheting Wrench (set of
eight) $100; craftsman.com
WEB VIDEO
WONDER
Watch Web videos on your
TV without a PC. This mini-
computer connects to your
network and TV to let you
browse and stream 300,000 free
videos—including 6,000 in high
definition—from ABC, CNN and
more, all from the comfort of
your couch. WebTVPlug
$100; webtview.com
ROLL WITH IT The Transroller handles skinny
loads better than ordinary dollies
do. A clamp inside tightly grips
boards of up to 1,000 pounds,
and its wheels separate to
stay balanced as weight
increases. Transroller
$300; transroller.ca
SNAKE EYES
Find and document leaks inside
walls or under the floor. The
Spector snaking monitor takes
photos and video in tight spots
using a 1.3-megapixel camera
and LED light on a three-foot
bendable arm. Milwaukee
Tool M12 M-Spector AV
$400; milwaukeetool.com
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POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 21
POPS
CI PI C
K O
F T
HE M
ON
TH
FRAME SHIFT
The 10.4-inch touchscreen
Vizit is the first digital
frame to receive and
send photos over a
cellular network. You
can also use VizitMe.com
to send shots to friends’
frames. Vizit $280 plus
monthly subscription;
isabellaproducts.com
APPS GO WIDE
Archos’s 500-gigabyte tablet is
among the first nonphone Android
devices. Apps designed for its
larger, five-inch screen, like the
ebuddy chat client, can have
wider layouts and larger buttons
than on Android smartphones.
It also has an HDMI port to send
HD video to your TV. Archos 5
Internet Tablet $500; archos.com
LIGHT ENTERTAINMENT
The trim new PlayStation 3 has shed
nearly three pounds. And thanks to
an update to its powerful processor
and more-efficient fans, the 120-
gigabyte Slim also uses 10 percent
less power and runs cooler than its
bulky 80-gigabyte predecessor, without
sacrificing any of its performance.
Sony PlayStation 3 Slim $300; us.playstation.com
MEASURE UP
This cup ensures exact
measurements. An internal scale
and computer chip convert the
weight of five ingredients—water,
milk, flour, sugar and oil—to
cups, fluid ounces or milliliters.
Taylor Digital Measuring Cup
and Scale $35; taylorusa.com
CORN-FED CALLING
Forty percent of the Reclaim is
made from corn instead of the
petroleum used in most plastics.
Its bioplastic begins as corn sugar,
which becomes a resin that's
molded into the back and battery
cover. Samsung Reclaim
$130; sprint.com
PERSONAL PAPARAZZO
Meet your new event photographer. The Party-
shot cradle pivots 360 degrees around and
24 up or down while a docked Sony camera
scans the room for faces. When it sees one,
the cradle stops, the camera snaps, and then
it starts searching again. Sony Party-shot
$150; sonystyle.com
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WHAT’S NEW AUTO
GM’S COMEBACK TRAILSNEAK
PEEK
FOUR MORE GM HOPEFULS
WHAT A LEANER, GREENER GENERAL MOTORS WILL LOOK LIKE
We the people already own 61 percent of General Motors.
Now GM has to convince us to buy another stake in it: a new
car. Fresh from bankruptcy, the company’s survival hinges on
cranking out appealing designs that Americans want today.
That means fewer supersized pickups and SUVs and more
efficient cars and crossovers—a fleet for an age of volatile gas
prices and a federal requirement that cars get 35 miles per
gallon by 2016. Here are the key models GM will offer in the
next few years.—Lawrence Ulrich
CADILLAC CTS COUPE
On Sale: summer 2010
With GM down to four brands—Chevy, GMC, Buick and
Cadillac—it’s up to Caddy to win some battles in the brutal
luxury arena. GM’s contender is the two-door CTS, which
adopts nearly all the good stuff from the acclaimed CTS
sedan: a direct-injection 3.6-liter V6 with 304 horsepower,
edge-of-seat handling and Lexus-like interior refinement.
Since some luxury buyers still care more about rpm than
mpg, a forthcoming CTS-V version will strike fear into Benzes
and BMWs with its 556-horsepower supercharged V8.
CHEVROLET CRUZE
On Sale: spring 2010
GM has struggled to deliver
a small car that can go toe-
to-toe with affordable city
cars like the Honda Civics and
Toyota Corollas of the world.
The 2011 Cruze should put up
a fight. This five-passenger
sedan features an optional
turbocharged 1.4-liter, 140-
horsepower engine that could
top 40 miles per gallon.
BUICK REGAL
On Sale: 2010
Less generic, less geriatric—
that’s GM’s plan for the Buick
brand. The second half of
2010 marks the return of the
Regal name. The midsize
sedan will closely mimic the
Regal now sold in China,
itself a reworked version
of Europe’s sleekly modern
Opel Insignia. Expect a frugal
four-cylinder engine and the
optional turbocharged 2.8-
liter V6 that currently drives
the Cadillac SRX. After the
Regal, Buick is expected to
unveil a midsize crossover.
CHEVROLET SPARK
On Sale: Late 2011
With wedgy styling and
a motorcycle-inspired
instrument cluster, the Spark,
a little hatchback that’s the
antithesis of the “old” GM, is
aimed at the younger set. Yet
anyone may be intrigued by
the price—roughly $12,000 to
start—and the fuel economy:
better than 40 mpg in
combined city/highway driving.
CHEVROLET
ORLANDO On Sale: 2011
In a post-SUV age,
maximizing interior space
while minimizing fuel
consumption is paramount.
The Chevy Orlando takes its
design cues from compact,
European-market minivans
like GM’s popular Opel Zafira.
Built on the Cruze platform,
the Orlando carves out
space for seven adults, with
second- and third-row seats
that fold flat. It will probably
be available with 1.8-liter and
turbo 1.4-liter gas engines.
CO
UR
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POPSCI.COM22 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
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WHAT’S NEW COMPUTING
CLO
CK
WIS
E F
RO
M T
OP: C
OU
RTESY
FU
JITSU
; C
OU
RTESY
MSI; C
OU
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REEN
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OU
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MIC
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FT
THE TREND
Multitouch screens, which
can register more than
one finger-press at a
time, will let computers
trade keyboards and
mice for simple strokes
and pinches. The models
shown here are just the
start. Nearly every major
PC maker will introduce
touch-y designs of various
shapes and sizes in the
coming months.
WHY NOW
Microsoft Windows 7, which
launches October 22, is
the first major computer
operating system designed
to work with multitouch
displays. Because it
incorporates the software
code needed to understand
your gestures,
manufacturers can now
include these screens more
easily than ever before.
HOW YOU’LL
BENEFIT
Use your fingers instead
of a mouse in almost any
program; for instance,
pinch to zoom out in Google
Earth, or drag a finger to
scroll through a Web page
in Firefox. Developers are
also beginning to build
applications that use touch
in new and more-creative
ways—such as in 3-D
design programs that let
you morph virtual products
with a twist—so that
formerly complicated tasks
will become as easy as a
tap.—Amanda Schupak
TECH
TREND
PCS GET HANDYMICROSOFT’S NEW OS BRINGS IPHONE-LIKE MULTITOUCH TECH TO COMPUTERS
� THE TABLETLose the keyboard entirely with a laptop whose display spins
and folds to hide the keys. You can use a stylus to write or draw
precisely, since the 13.3-inch screen includes both a flesh-
sensing capacitive layer and the same electronic-pen-based
layer used by graphic artists. Don’t worry about penmanship:
Windows 7 boasts better handwriting recognition. Fujitsu Life-
Book T5010 with Multitouch Option From $1,860; fujitsu.com
��THE DESKTOPA 21.5-inch widescreen display makes it easy for even
big fingers to hit their mark. Tap where you want to enter
text, and up pops Windows 7’s virtual keyboard, which
you can enlarge to take advantage of the big screen.
Poke at letters using either your fingers or the end of
a pencil, since the camera-based optical touchscreen
can detect when any opaque object comes in contact.
MSI Wind Top All-in-One PC From $730; us.msi.com
��THE LAPTOPThe T400s looks like an ordinary 14.1-inch
laptop, but a touchscreen frees you from
the tiny cursor. For instance,
you can rearrange
two photos at once by
dragging them, or party-
goers can point at a song they want to
hear. Its capacitive screen senses the electrical con-
ductivity of fingers and even recognizes up to four touches at a time.
Lenovo T400S with Multitouch Option From $2,000; lenovo.com
POPSCI.COM24 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
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5",&����53"$,4�'3&& �7*4*5�@ 888�&.64*$�$0.�1014$*
Get up to 25 music downloads free with a 7-day eMusic trial subscription. Offer available to first-time eMusic customers only located in the USA. Your free trial expires 7 days after registration. Certain songs will not be available during free your trial. Internet access, registration, and credit or debit card required. Limited time offer. Your subscription remains free until you exceed your free trial credits or your free trial expires. Offer and eMusic's prices are subject to change without notice and are subject to eMusic's terms of use. eMusic and the eMusic logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of eMusic.com Inc in the USA and other countries. All Right Reserved. eMusic is not responsible for products, services, or claims made by Popular Science.
*1/2 price claim is based on (1) eMusic’s most popular Monthly Basic Plan (24 songs for $11.99) and assuming that all monthly downloads are utilized, and (2) other download stores’ price of $0.99 a track.
.64*$�5)"5μ4�0''�5)&$)"354�"5�13*$&4
5)"5�"3&�0''�5)&�8"--Music downloads from eMusic: guilty pleasures, killer classics and
overlooked gems at half the price of those other download stores.*
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WHAT’S NEW RECREATION
MY SPACE
What a heavenly year for stargazers. We’ve had a spectacular solar eclipse in
Asia, a clutch rescue of the Hubble Space Telescope, and the surprising crash
of a comet into Jupiter—discovered, no less, by an amateur astronomer. Try
the gear below to find the next marvel yourself.—Eric Adams
FULLY
LOADED THIS BACKYARD OBSERVATORY LETS YOU SEE MORE STARS THAN EVER BEFORE
EYEPIECE
Add this eyepiece to
your scope to see
an entire galaxy at
once. Its steeply
curved lenses offer a
100-degree apparent
field of view, double
the norm. It’s also the
first eyepiece that’s
waterproof and filled
with nitrogen, so it
won’t fog up or develop
mold inside. Explore
Scientific 14mm
100° Eyepiece $500;
explorescientific.com
MOUNT Keep your scope steady anywhere. The MiniTower Pro,
at five inches wide, is the most portable mount that can secure a
35-pound scope atop a tripod. The handheld controller lets you turn
it precisely, or the motor, GPS and computer chip can direct the
scope themselves. iOptron MiniTower Pro $1,300; ioptron.com
SOFTWARE This app turns your iPhone or iPod into a celestial
tour guide. Browse through its database of 2.5 million stars, or
let it identify constellations as you hold the latest iPhone up to the
sky—it uses the 3GS’s built-in GPS, accelerometer and compass to
determine what it’s pointing at. Starmap Pro $19; star-map.fr
CAMERA Track star movement or meteor flybys
even when not at your scope. This weatherproof fish-eye
camera sits outside to constantly save photos and video
of the entire sky. The image sensor, tuned to the stars’ dim
glow, snaps sub-megapixel shots to store hundreds for time-
lapse photography. It beams pics to the Web over a Bluetooth or
wired link to a computer. SBIG AllSky-340C $2,200; sbig.com
TELESCOPE
The design first used
by Galileo 400
years ago this
year—which
bends light with
lenses, not
simpler mirrors
—still produces
the sharpest images
available to amateurs.
This modern version
uses a six-inch lens for
wide views, but costs
half as much as others,
thanks to efficient
glass manufacturing.
AstroTelescopes 152-
mm Giant Wide Field
Refractor From $800;
handsonoptics.com
BR
IAN
KLU
TC
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POPSCI.COM26 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
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71%
89%
VGU00565A ©2009 Pfi zer Inc. All rights reserved.
Doctor portrayal.
You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit www.FDA.gov/medwatch or call 1-800-FDA-1088.
The hardest part about having ‘the talk’ is getting those first few words out. Here are some ideas to help you break the ice when your doctor asks how everything’s going:
The Direct Approach: “I have trouble sometimes in bed. Could it be ED?”
The Indirect Approach: “Is it true age affects sexual performance?”
The Silent Approach: Just hand this ad to yourdoctor, he’ll take it from there.
Need Some Ideas on How to Open Up to Your Doctor?
Your Doctor Talks to Men About ED Every Day Your doctor will tell you that there is something you can do about your erectile dysfunction (ED). In fact, millions of men over 40 have already taken the first step and talked to their doctor about ED. And so can you.
Important Safety Information
I thought at my age therewas nothing I could do about it, then I had
‘the talk’ with my doctor.
We know that no medicine is for everyone. Don’t take VIAGRA if you take nitrates, often prescribed for chest pain, as this may cause a sudden unsafe drop in blood pressure.
Talk with your doctor first. Make sure your heart is healthy enough to have sex. If you have chest pain, nausea, or other discomforts during sex, seek medical help right away.
As with any ED tablet, in the rare event of an erection lasting more than four hours, seek immediate medical help to avoid long-term injury.
In rare instances, men who take PDE5 inhibitors (oral erectile dysfunction medicines, including VIAGRA) reported a sudden decrease or loss of vision, or sudden decrease or loss of hearing. It is not possible to determine whether these events are related directly to these medicines or to other factors. If you experience any of these symptoms, stop taking PDE5 inhibitors, including VIAGRA, and call a doctor right away.
The most common side effects of VIAGRA are headache, facial f lushing, and upset stomach. Less common are bluish or blurred vision, or being sensitive to light. These may occur for a brief time.
VIAGRA does not protect against sexually transmitted diseases including HIV.
Please see Important Facts for VIAGRA on the following page or visit viagra.com for full prescribing information.
For free information, including questions to ask your doctor, call 1-888-4VIAGRA (1-888-484-2472).
Did you know half of all guys over 40 have some form of ED? Here are some numbers to keep in mind from a recent survey of men with ED:
Running the Numbers
To learn more about VIAGRA for the treatment of ED, and ED in general, visit viagra.com today. You’ll find an online sexual health quiz, videos of guys with ED who’ve had the VIAGRA Talk and other helpful information.
Over 20 million men have already had their VIAGRA Talk. Isn’t it time you had yours?
Tell Me More
of men were anxious about talking to their doctor about ED.
of men felt relieved after talking to their doctor.
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���������IMPORTANT FACTS
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Uninsured? Need help paying for Pfizer medicine? Pfizerhas programs that can help. Call 1-866-706-2400 or visit www.PfizerHelpfulAnswers.com.
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®
TRAVEL.
Philadelphia, Oct. 30 – Nov. 1, 2009��s��4UCSON��Nov. 13 – 15, 2009��s��#OSTA�2ICA��Jan. 28 – Feb. 5, 2010
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&OR�THE�PAST����YEARS� the Mentor Series program has taken photo enthusiasts to destinations across the country and around the world. With top Nikon professional photographers accompanying participants every day and teaching them how and what to shoot, there’s nothing like a Mentor Series trek. You and your photography will never be the same!
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WHAT’S NEW HOME TECH
DRY CLEANINGWHAT’S
NEXT
IN RELATED NEWS: APPLIANCES THAT KNOW WHEN TO RUN
Soon your washer could make financial decisions.
GE’s upcoming Demand Response appliances
communicate with the electric company, so they
can choose to run at lower wattage when energy
demand is high. That can reduce the need for more
power plants and, as utilities begin to charge more
during peak hours, save consumers cash.
The appliances depend on new home electric
meters, in development by some local utilities, that
contain a cellphone chip or other long-distance
transceiver to download citywide energy-use infor-
mation. The meters route this info to home refrig-
erators, washers and microwaves outfitted with
shorter-range transceivers, such as low-power radio
chips. The appliances can then run at full blast
during the cheapest periods and ramp down, or
even turn off, during expensive periods; customers
can override the settings if they really need to nuke
dinner. GE is now conducting trials with Louisville
Gas and Electric. Look for Demand Response
appliances, as well as widespread time-of-use
pricing, in 2011 or 2012.—Sarah Parsons
A WASHING MACHINE THAT SWAPS WATER
FOR DIRT-BUSTING PLASTIC
COOL MONEY A Demand Response fridge can
delay a defrost cycle until electricity is cheap.
How to Clean
Your Clothes
with Plastic
Nylon beads sit in the outer of two nested
drums. When both drums rotate, the absorbent
beads fall through the mesh of the inner
drum to tumble with your laundry, where
they dislodge and trap dirt. After the wash
cycle finishes, the outer drum stops moving
and centripetal force pushes the beads back
through the mesh into the outer drum, where
they await your next mess.
FR
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UL W
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GE
Clean your clothes without putting
them—or your utility bills—through
the wringer. Xeros’s prototype washing
machine uses 90 percent less water
than ordinary models, which also
eliminates energy-intensive spin cycles
and dryer blasts.
The machine replaces all but one
tenth of the usual water and about one
third of the usual detergent with 0.1-inch
plastic beads, reusable for hundreds of
washes. The beads are made of the same
nylon as many carpets, because the pro-
perties that make nylon easy to stain also
make it a great scrubber: Its polarized
molecules attract soil, and in the humidity
created by a little water, the polymer
chains separate slightly to absorb grime
and lock it into the beads’ cores.
Xeros aims to put machines in
commercial laundries next year,
where they will use eight gallons
of water instead of 80 for each
45-pound load. They
may be cleaning your
favorite T-shirts
at home within
several years.
—Jill Singer
POPSCI.COM30 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
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headlinesdiscoveries, advances and debates in science
An earthquake-proof
skyscraper
34The Martian torture
chamber
39
POPSCI.COM NOVEMBER 2009 POPULAR SCIENCE 33
FR
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The Chalk River nuclear reactor in Ontario
doesn’t sell a watt of electricity. Never has.
But when it sprang a leak and shut down
this spring, it threw a multibillion-dollar
industry into crisis. Before it broke, the reactor
produced nearly two thirds of the U.S. supply
of molybdenum-99, or Mo-99, the isotope
behind 16 million critical diagnostic medical
tests each year. In July, things got worse: The
Dutch reactor that supplied the remaining
third shut down for a month of repair work.
Nuclear imaging is used on tens of
thousands of patients every day to take pictures
of their hearts, lungs, kidneys, bones, brains
and other organs. Doctors inject isotopes
into a patient and use a radiation-sensitive
camera to locate blood clots and tumors or to
diagnose seizures, among other things. Mo-99
is critical for about 80 percent of all nuclear-
medicine tests because as it decays, it releases
a daughter isotope called technetium-99m,
which is energetic enough for the camera to
see, but its short, six-hour half-life means
it conveniently decays to practically nothing
after 24 hours. Unfortunately, Mo-99 can’t be
stockpiled for more than a few days.
With the two main reactors down, Mo-99
became scarce. “We were getting 10 percent
of what we normally get,” says Michael
NUCLEAR DROUGHT
MEDICINE
A DWINDLING SUPPLY OF MEDICAL ISOTOPES MEANS PATIENTS MIGHT NOT GET THE TESTS THEY NEED
!!! !!!AUGUST 2 Scientists confirm the first case of a person infected with HIV from gorillas, proving that new strains of the virus can jump to humans.
Graham, president of the Society of
Nuclear Medicine. “We had to cancel and
postpone tests throughout the country.”
Doctors resorted to procedures that were
less effective or that exposed patients to
higher radiation levels. Some tests, such as
one that tracks the spread of cancer from
breasts to lymph nodes, have no substitute,
forcing patients to wait in line or do without.
Just five reactors supply 95 percent
of the world’s Mo-99, and they’re all past
their prime. A nuclear reactor’s average
life span is 40 to 50 years. Chalk River is
52 years old. The Dutch reactor—which
came back online in August—is 47. The
other three, in France, South Africa and
Belgium, are 42, 43 and 47, respectively. In
1996, Canada boldly tried to replace them
all with its own two-reactor facility, called
MAPLE, that would pump out enough
Mo-99 to supply the whole world. Other
reactor-builders, figuring they would be
The LHC’s restart
repair list
36
LEFT IN THE DARK Without
Mo-99 isotopes, doctors can’t
perform lifesaving diagnostic
tests, such as SPECT scans
[left], which help locate
tumors. One plan is to retrofit
the University of Missouri
Research Reactor [below] to
make Mo-99, but that won’t be
completed until 2012.
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34 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
HEADLINES
DISASTER TECH
PARTING THE WAVESBURIED RINGS PROTECT BUILDINGS FROM EARTHQUAKES
crushed by MAPLE’s massive output, stayed
out of the isotope-making business. But
MAPLE engineers found a set of flaws in
the reactors, and last spring, after spending
$600 million—several times the project’s
budget—Canada officially killed it. “That
was our big ‘oh, sh-t’ moment,” says Steve
Mattmuller, chief nuclear pharmacist at
Kettering Medical Center in Ohio. “We were
right back where we were 20 years ago, but
now our reactors were 20 years older.”
Since the MAPLE debacle, two long-
term solutions have been put into motion.
The nuclear-power firm Babcock &
Wilcox plans to build a facility to supply
half the U.S. Mo-99 market. And this
summer, Congressman Edward Markey of
Massachusetts introduced a $163-million
bill for domestic Mo-99 production, some of
which could be used to retrofit a reactor at
the University of Missouri that could fill the
other half. But neither project are likely to
be done before 2012.
The Mo-99 supply is back to 70
percent, but not for long. The Dutch
pushed January’s six-month maintenance
shutdown back to the spring in hopes that
the Chalk River reactor will be back up
by then, but the repairs are so extensive
that the Canadian government might shut
!!! AUGUST 6 Obese people have 8 percent less brain tissue, neurologists find, increasing their risk of Alzheimer’s. AUGUST 16 NASA confirms the comet Wild 2 contains glycine.
The earliest known attempt at earthquake-proofing dates
to the sixth century B.C., when builders in modern-day
Iran inserted stone blocks between a structure and its
foundation to reduce vibrations. Today’s engineers buffer
buildings with metal springs, ball bearings and rubber
pads, all designed to sop up the energy from seismic
waves. This summer, a team of physicists at the University
of Liverpool in England and the French National Centre for
Scientific Research tested a different strategy: redirect the
waves altogether. Instead of absorbing tremors, a shield
buried around a skyscraper simply reroutes them, like
water running around a boulder.
The design consists of a concrete-and-plastic plate
of concentric rings that encircles the foundation. The
materials are arranged from stiffest to most flexible from
the outer ring to the innermost. Waves follow the path of
least resistance toward stiffer rings and bend away from
the foundation as they pass through the plate. Computer
simulations show that it could protect against the most
destructive 70 percent of waves that travel horizontally in
the soil from the epicenter. In theory, “this could protect
any structure,” says Michael Tantala, a civil engineer and
earthquake expert at Tantala Associates in Philadelphia.
Engineers will probably combine traditional dampeners
with the plate because it doesn’t protect against all types
of waves, yet it could be particularly useful in areas where
waves traveling horizontally are more destructive, such as
parts of Seattle and San Francisco. “Everything around the
building will be devastated,” says Sebastien Guenneau, one
of the plate’s developers, “but the building itself will stay
still.” Next year, engineers will test a two-foot-wide model
of the design, and the tech could be on both new and old
buildings as early as 2014.
—CARINA STORRSG
RA
HA
M M
UR
DO
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HOW TO HIDE A BUILDING
FROM SEISMIC WAVES
INSTALLATION Workers
bury the plate [A] within at
least the top three feet of
soil—where most horizontal
quake waves travel—around
the foundation, leaving a
three-foot gap between the
underlying bedrock [B] and the
plate so the plate can vibrate
as waves pass through.
DETOUR During an earth-
quake, waves in the soil [C]
move through the concrete
and plastic plate, the rings
of which become stiffer
farther out from the core.
Waves travel more easily
through hard materials,
much as it’s easier for a
person to run on a road
than on mud. Each
time the wave hits a softer
layer, a bending force deflects
it from its path toward a stiffer
ring away from the building.
EXIT About halfway around
the plate, the bending force
weakens, and the waves’
forward momentum propels
them on their original
path [D].
C
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WITHOUT MO-99, MEDICINE MAY AGAIN BECOME A DANGEROUS GUESSING GAME.
POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 35
Chalk River down for good. With the two
largest suppliers out, the world will again
be forced to scrape by.
As Mo-99 production trickles, certain
procedures may once more become the
high-stakes guessing games that they
were before radioactive diagnostics.
During this summer’s drought, Jim Ponto,
chief nuclear pharmacist at the University
of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, had to put
patients on a weeks-long waiting list. One
of his patients opted to skip a Tech-99m
procedure that would measure the spread
of her cancer and minimize the extent of
surgery. She couldn’t bear waiting a week
for the test and instead went straight to
the operating room. Cases like hers make
Ponto nervous. “The cancer could spread,”
he says, “and the doctor would never
know it.”—PAT WALTERS
!!! The amino acid is the first ingredient for proteins found in a comet. AUGUST 18 Mathematical models suggest that the best way to thwart a zombie attack is a swift offense.
A
B
D
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POPSCI.COM36 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
CO
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HEADLINES
THE CHECKLIST
Before scientists can put the Large
Hadron Collider back to work this
month solving the mysteries of
particle physics, the LHC’s engi-
neers face critical repairs to the
$5-billion device. First up: Fix the 53
superconducting magnets trashed
in September 2008 when a power
cable broke, causing the magnets to
warm above their –458˚F operating
temperature and lose conductivity,
or “quench.” Then pipes for helium
coolant melted, further damaging
the magnets. Here, the other key
upgrades and a few of the thousand
chores still to go.—CARINA STORRS
FIXER UPPER
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LHC engineers
install new
superconduct-
ing magnets to
bend protons
around the
17-mile
collider.
!!! OCTOBER Japan’s Cyberdyne plans to finish delivery of 100 HAL robotic exoskeletons for disabled people.
Drill eight-inch relief valves into half of the 1,232 dipole magnets
that steer the proton beam around the track, to allow for a con-
trolled pressure release in case of another leak.
Install a new quench-protection system, which is 1,000 times
as sensitive as its predecessor and shuts off the accelerator if it
detects an abnormal voltage increase—an indicator of a heat spike.
Search for and eliminate electrical faults between the magnets
—especially where the cables join—which could increase elec-
trical resistance, causing the cables to overheat and melt.
Cool the entire 17-mile track back down to –458˚F with liquid
helium. (Engineers brought the sections up to room temperature
so they could work inside the tunnel.)
Ramp up the current in the magnets from a couple hundred amps
to 6,000 over a few weeks. During this time, test the quench-
protection system by intentionally overheating the magnets.
Perform the final machine check, covering some 10,000 items,
such as the systems that inject the proton beam into the collider
and extract it within 1/5,000 of a second if a magnet fails.
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HEADLINES
KEV
IN P
IEPER
/AP P
HO
TO
Tired of Jack Frost knocking out your
power? Victor Petrenko, an engineering
professor at Dartmouth College, has
developed de-icing technology that could
save power lines from ice storms.
Until now, the only answer to fro-
zen lines has been to hope that they
don’t break or pull down poles under
the weight of the ice. A single ice storm
in early December left more than 1.25
million people in Pennsylvania, New Eng-
land and New York shivering in the dark
after ice storms snapped power lines.
Petrenko’s trick is to increase the
electrical resistance in cables, some-
thing engineers usually avoid because
it causes lines to lose energy as heat.
Attached to each end of a line, his device
switches the wires inside from a stan-
ICE BREAKERA POWER LINE THAT SHEDS HEAVY ICE
dard parallel
layout to a series
circuit. In nor-
mal conditions,
the cable works
like a standard
power line, but
flipping the line to series increases
resistance, and the wires generate
enough heat to shed the ice. The pro-
cess takes 30 seconds to three minutes
and saps less than 1 percent of the
electricity running through the lines.
Utility companies could switch the
lines remotely, and Petrenko says
swapping in his cables would cost
less than repairing ice damage.
This summer he tested the technol-
ogy between two transmission towers
near Orenburg, Russia; China is
considering the device to protect its
$170-billion investment in expanding
its energy grid. This fall, Petrenko will
test a modified version of the tech on
an Audi A8 that he expects will de-ice
its windshield in two to four seconds.
Later, he’ll apply the tech to airplane
wings, which could reduce delays
and crashes. “A plane that could shed
ice in seconds,” he says, “would be a
much safer way to fly.”—JEREMY HSU
COLD SNAP Using electric-
ity to melt the ice off power
lines could save millions of
dollars in damages.
INVENTION OF THE MONTH
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FR
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2)
HEADLINES
SAVING SKINA MATERIAL BASED ON SHARKSKIN
STOPS BACTERIAL BREAKOUTS
INSPIRED BY NATURE
A whale’s skin is easily glommed up with barnacles, algae,
bacteria and other sea creatures, but sharks stay squeaky-
clean. Although these parasites can pile onto a shark’s rippled
skin too, they can’t take hold and thus simply wash away. Now
scientists have printed that pattern on an adhesive film that will
repel bacteria pathogens from hospitals and public restrooms.
Patented by Sharklet Technologies, a Florida-based biotech
company, the film, which is covered with microscopic diamond-
shaped bumps, is the first “surface topography” proven to
keep the bugs at bay. In tests in a California hospital, for three
weeks the plastic sheeting’s surface prevented dangerous
microorganisms, such as E. coli and Staphylococcus A, from
establishing colonies large enough to infect humans. Bacteria
have an easier time spreading out on smooth surfaces, says
CEO Joe Bagan: “We think they come across this surface and
make an energy-based decision that this is not the right place
to form a colony.” Because it doesn’t kill the bacteria, there’s
also little chance of the microbes evolving resistance to it. Hey,
it’s worked for sharks for 400 million years.
That’s good news for hospitals, where infections from drug-
resistant superbacteria like MRSA, a potentially fatal strain of
staph, are becoming commonplace. Bagan hopes to stick the skin
on nursing call buttons, bed rails, tray tables and other surfaces
by next year. Pending FDA approval, the shark pattern could be
manufactured directly onto bacteria hotbeds like catheters and
water containers by 2012. First, though, look for Sharklet on high-
touch surfaces like door handles in restaurant restrooms around
the U.S. later this year—a welcome extra line of defense against
those who forget to wash their hands.—ARNIE COOPER
SLIPPERY WHEN WET Similar to
the texture of sharkskin [top],
Sharklet’s three-micrometer-wide
diamond-shaped pattern [bottom]
prevents bacteria from taking root.
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CO
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DLR B
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RESEA
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In a Berlin basement sits a small torture chamber. The air
inside the hermetically sealed steel chest consists of a choking
95 percent carbon dioxide, some nitrogen, and traces of oxygen
and argon. The pressure within is 1/170 that on Earth, and the
thermostat is set to –50˚F—in other words, a nice afternoon
on Mars. Experiments at the facility regularly subject some of
Earth’s hardiest creatures to this hell, and they do just fine.
This August, several dozen scientific institutes combined
forces to test a variety of Earth species in Mars-like conditions.
Identifying life-forms that can survive on another planet, what
mechanisms they use to do so, and what by-products they leave
behind will give scientists a more specific idea of what to look for
when searching for E.T., says Jean-Pierre de Vera, a biologist at
the German Center for Aeronautics and Space Research (DLR),
where most of the experiments are carried out.
At press time, the scientists had tested Deinococcus
radiodurans, a bacterium known for its radiation tolerance,
Xanthoria elegans, a lichen that thrives in Antarctica and low-oxygen
conditions, and Bacillus subtilis, a comparatively ordinary bacteria
LIFE IN A BOXEARTHLY ORGANISMS UNDERGO TESTS IN
MARS-LIKE CONDITIONS
HEADLINES
found in soil around the planet. “I was astonished that organized,
symbiotic communities such as lichens [which consist of fungi
and photosynthetic algae or bacteria] can survive,” de Vera
says. After 22 days, 80 to 90 percent of the lichens were not only
alive but active—it seems that complex life-giving processes
can happen off-planet. For one thing, de Vera says, “this is the
first evidence that organisms might conduct photosynthesis on
Mars.” Next he plans to investigate whether methane-producing
bacteria, which could account for Mars’s methane clouds, can
make it on the planet.—REINHARD KARGL
DEEP FREEZE Bacteria
survive despite cold
temperatures inside
this Mars simulator.
EXPERIMENTS
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POPSCI.COM 40 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
HEADLINES
FAST LANE TO MARSA NEW ION ENGINE COULD SLICE THE TIME IT TAKES TO GET TO THE RED PLANET
SPACE TECH
CR
AIG
BEN
JAM
IN
Six Europeans recently wrapped up
105 days in an isolation chamber with
no TV, no showers, and lots of pre-
cooked food, to test the stresses of a
journey to Mars. Real Marstronauts
might not have to suffer through all
that. A new ion engine, which shoots
charged particles to create thrust,
could get them to the Red Planet in
just 39 days.
In theory, there’s no better way of
getting between planets than an ion
engine. The engine in NASA’s asteroid
probe Dawn fires electrons at xenon
gas to convert those atoms into posi-
tive ions, which fall onto a positively
charged screen that repels the ions
out of the engine.
The problem is power. For exam-
ple, Dawn runs on three ion engines,
each of which puts out a steady, but mea-
sly, one third of an ounce of thrust. (Each
engine on a Boeing 777 churns out about
100,000 pounds of thrust.) This is great
for long, unmanned missions—it took
16 months to propel the probe to Mars—
but it’s not ideal for humans looking to
spend as little time in transit as possible.
NASA is retooling its engine for triple the
thrust, which could get a probe to Mars
faster, but it’s still too slow for a large
spaceship heavy with crew and gear. If a
little more thrust is good, a lot more is
better. The Texas-based aerospace com-
pany Ad Astra’s VASIMR engine creates
a thicker ion stream by shooting radio
waves, rather than electrons, at argon
gas. Then, the engine’s superconducting
magnets fling the ions to generate 50
times as much thrust.
In July the company demonstrated
the ion-making step, and next month it
will fire up the 200-kilowatt machine at
full power—almost strong enough that
four such engines could drive a manned
moon voyage. Running on solar power,
that trip would take six months, but Ad
Astra has a plan for speeding the engine
up for Mars: nukes. Unlike NASA’s cur-
rent engine designs, which cannot handle
megawatts of power, Ad Astra could scale
up VASIMR to run on a 200-megawatt
nuclear reactor. That, says Tim Glover,
the company’s director of development,
gives VASIMR an edge: “Would you rather
pull a trailer with a couple of bicycles, or
with a car?”—CARINA STORRS
FIRED UP The VASIMR ion engine [right and bottom left] ejects charged particles for thrust. This summer, tests [upper left] showed
that the engine could generate ions. Nuclear-powered ion engines could bring astronauts to Mars in just 39 days.
!!! NOVEMBER A FedEx hub in New Jersey plans to begin drawing 30 percent of its electricity needs from its rooftop solar array, the largest in the U.S.
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42 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
THE FUTURE OF SPACE
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POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 43
THAT SINKING FEELING Astronaut Peggy A.
Whitson [background] prepares for the
weightlessness and claustrophobia of space
in the Hydrolab water tank at the Gagarin
Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia.
DEEP-
CAMPBOOt
WHAT DOES IT TAKE
TO PREP HUMANS FOR
A TRIP TO AN ASTEROID
OR A MARTIAN
MOON? STARVATION?
ISOLATION?
RECYCLING FECES
FOR FOOD? NASA’S
NEWEST ASTRONAUTS
BEGIN A GRUELING
TRAINING REGIMEN
THIS FALL TO FIND OUT
BY DAWN STOVER
SPACE
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44 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
is a crucial time for the agency to fundamentally reevaluate how it prepares its new recruits for the rigors of deep space. Plans call for the construction of a new crew capsule called Orion to replace the space shuttle in 2015, plus two rockets and a lunar lander. This suite of hardware, known as Constellation, is billed as the Swiss Army knife of space exploration, capable of flying to multiple destinations and performing multiple missions. And that’s what NASA expects of these future astronauts, too. They will be trained as jacks-of-all-trades who can do experiments on the ISS, erect an outpost on the moon, or collect samples from an asteroid that’s hurtling through space. They are NASA’s first new astronaut class in five years, the first chosen since the Constellation development program began, and the first ever to be chosen
Three test pilots. Two flight surgeons. One molecular biologist. A flight controller, a Pentagon staffer and a CIA intelligence officer. These are the nine people chosen by NASA to be America’s next astronauts. Late this summer they reported to Houston along with two Japanese pilots, a Japanese doctor, a Canadian pilot and a Canadian physicist who will train alongside NASA’s class of 2009. Call them the lucky 14.
Selected from more than 3,500 applicants, NASA’s new astronaut candidates arrive at a pivotal moment in the history of human space exploration. The agency’s bold ambition is to rocket humans beyond the International Space Station for the first time in more than 40 years. The question is when. In September, a panel of space experts and former astronauts chaired by former Lockheed Martin chief Norman Augustine told the White House that a budgetary boost of an estimated $3 billion annually would allow NASA to develop the necessary spacecraft to take astronauts to the moon, near-Earth asteroids and ultimately to Mars. Anything less, the committee concluded, would delay a moon landing until at least the late 2030s.
Whether NASA gets extra financial support from Congress or not, now
THE OBSESSIVES
“IF YOU LOSE YOUR SENSE OF HUMOR ON THE WAY TO MARS, YOU’RE FINISHED.”
solely for long-duration missions in space. NASA isn’t just tasked with reinventing its hardware; to get beyond low-Earth orbit, it must reinvent its astronauts.
tough and cheerful
Like the astronauts before them, recruits will take an outdoor survival course in Maine, spend up to two weeks living in an underwater lab, endure altitude chambers, and struggle through flight mechanics. But for deep space, astronauts will need new training entirely, perhaps including spending weeks, even months, in confinement and isolation.
A trip to Mars will take humans so far from home that Earth will look no bigger than a star. The distance is so great that in a September New York Times op-ed, Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, went so far as to propose that, to save fuel, astronauts
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THE FUTURE OF SPACE
POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 45
perhaps shouldn’t come home at all. Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, an ardent believer in the colonization of Mars, has also floated this idea. For a trip that long, intense psychological preparation is critical.
The Mars Society, a space-advocacy group, has conducted a series of simulated Mars missions involving 80 crews at a
desert station and a dozen crews at an even more remote Arctic base. Robert Zubrin, the society’s president and author of The Case for Mars, recommends that NASA conduct experiments to see which astronaut teams work well together when tasked with field exploration in adverse conditions for N
ASA
(3);
PR
EC
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PA
GES: N
ASA
months on end. “You put them through missions, and you see who is tough and cheerful and team-spirited,” Zubrin says. “If you lose your sense of humor on the way to Mars, you’re finished.” One of the most important lessons learned during the field missions is that some people perform well on one team but not on another. “It’s because of the mix,” he explains.
Jason Kring, an assistant professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University who studies the human factors of spaceflight, agrees with Zubrin that intensive training here on Earth is a must. He also suggests that NASA include a clinical psychologist on the crew to help mitigate potential conflicts. “What to us would be a minor problem in an office environment can become a big deal after six to eight months with the same people,” he says.
NASA is already making efforts to screen more carefully for psychological flaws, after the meltdown of Lisa Nowak, the shuttle astronaut who goes on trial next month for attempting to kidnap a fellow astronaut’s girlfriend. It’s not hard to imagine how such instability could sink a space mission.
While everyone in the class of 2009 has an advanced degree in engineering, science or math (“extensive experience flying high-
DOCK AND ROLL An artist’s
rendering of NASA’s Altair lunar
lander approaching the Orion crew
capsule after a lunar mission
FLYING HOME A cutaway view of the proposed 16.5-foot-wide Orion crew capsule. It will carry up to six astronauts.
Docking hatch
Cargo bay
Window
Display and controls
RIGHT RIDE? An expert White
House panel recommends that
NASA seek cheaper alternatives
to the Ares I rocket [illustrated
here], designed to carry astro-
nauts to low-Earth orbit.
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46 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
THE FUTURE OF SPACE
performance jet aircraft” was also a plus), the most sought-after quality was the ability to play well with others. Today, an astronaut with the right stuff is someone who does not get frazzled or grumpy when he spends seven months trapped in a flying office with co-workers who may not even speak his language—an office in which his and his companions’ recycled sweat and urine is a beverage, the toilet clogs, and a serious mistake means they all could die.
Of course, astronauts will need extra preparation for the physical challenges too. During the trip itself, they will be subjected to high doses of radiation, raising their odds of getting cancer later in life, and they will lose bone density. “The worst-case scenario would be a Mars crew that steps off the vehicle and their bones are too brittle to hold their weight,” Kring says. He suggests that NASA may eventually need to create
With its sights set on deep space, NASA has
tasked Oceaneering International to develop
the first new space suit since the shuttle “jet
pack” of the 1980s. For lunar missions, the
Constellation Space Suit System, or CSSS,
will come in two configurations: one that the
astronauts will wear aboard the spaceship
during launch, landing and spacewalks; and a
second configuration designed to be worn on
the moon’s surface. The two suits will share
many components, such as boots, legs, gloves,
and cooling and communications systems.
The big challenge is designing a system for
handling solid waste in the event that the crew
capsule loses cabin pressure and the astronauts
have to spend an extended period, even days, in
their suits while the problem is repaired.
For long missions in deep space, astronauts
must maintain their own suits, learning
beforehand how to fix every port and sensor on
them. “When you strap in for the real mission,
you should feel like you’re home,” says Jim
Buchli, the program manager for the CSSS at
Oceaneering. “There should be no surprises.”
—Dawn Stover, with additional
reporting by Carina Storrs
What Do You Wear in deep space?
a new category of astronauts trained for “ultra-long-duration” missions. “Thirty-six months in space is a lot different than six months,” he says.
new school
Preparing for even a space-station or lunar mission takes several years. The 2009 class won’t be full-fledged astronauts until 2011, and they won’t fly their first space missions until at least 2014. “The intent of basic training is to get folks up to the proficiency they need to begin mission-specific training,” says Duane Ross, NASA’s manager for astronaut candidate selection and training.
Unlike the 12 astronaut classes selected in the past three decades, which were divided into a caste system of pilots and mission specialists, NASA’s newest class will be known simply as
“astronauts.” Flying Orion is expected to be much less complicated than flying the shuttle. Many of the ship’s functions will be automated, recalling the days when Chuck Yeager called the astronauts “spam in a can.” Although the Orion missions will involve a crew of up to six instead of Apollo’s three, for long periods they will just be along for the ride. The glass cockpit interface, for instance, will have one tenth as many switches as Apollo.
Learning to pilot the space shuttle was in many ways the centerpiece of past astronauts’ training. The shuttle is “an incredibly complicated beast,” says Pam Melroy, a former shuttle commander who recently became director and deputy program manager of the Space Exploration Initiatives program at Lockheed Martin, the contractor building Orion. Recruits spent 54 weeks on shuttle systems during their two-
Think of the new astronaut suit as a wearable spaceship, complete with a toilet
JOINTS
Reinforced
carbon fiber
locks out debris
and dust
HELMETS
Padded for
rough landings;
equipped with a
microphone to
allow for wireless
communication
with crew
and ground
control
OUTER LAYER
Insulates against
temperatures
250ºF above
or below zero;
protects against
micrometeoroids
NI C
K K
ALO
TER
AK
IS
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POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 47
year basic training, Ross says. Astronauts flying Orion won’t have to land on a runway, so the class of 2009 will instead spend more time learning things like Russian (since Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft will temporarily be the only ride to the ISS after the shuttle retires) and practicing extravehicular tasks in the world’s largest swimming pool. On the other hand, Orion will be a much smaller vehicle than the shuttle, so it will have less built-in redundancy. That means astronauts may have to spend more time training for equipment failures, Melroy says.
As with the shuttle, Orion astronauts will practice ascents in a full-motion simulator that forces them to make quick decisions about whether or not to abort a mission. They will also use simulators to learn how to dock with the ISS and how to fly the new lunar lander, Altair, down to the moon’s surface. The lunar-lander simulators
for the Apollo missions looked like flying bed frames, Melroy says, and all of them crashed during training. “I think we’re going to have to do a little better than that,” she says.
Engineers are still working on the designs for Orion and Altair but, as in the Apollo days, astronauts are involved in the process at every step. Already astronauts have been invited into mock-ups of the crew capsule to see whether they can fit comfortably in the seats and reach the controls. “By the time astronauts actually get in and start using the mock-up, they’re already very familiar with it,” says Olivia Fuentes, the exploration-development laboratory section manager for Lockheed Martin.
Further down the road, astronauts will begin preparing for surface operations on the moon and, potentially, N
ASA
[continued ON page 83]
asteroids. A swimming pool can simulate the weightlessness of the ISS but not the moon’s gravity—one sixth of Earth’s. “We’re going to have to mix the water training with
training on how to walk on the moon again, as well as on the Martian surface,” Kring says. The Apollo astronauts practiced their moonwalks in the Partial Gravity Simulator, an adult-size Johnny Jump Up suspended from the ceiling, and future astronauts may use an improved version of a gravity simulator called the “pogo.” Asteroids and Martian moons may require still more training facilities, and both destinations will demand a revamped space suit that can be worn for days [see “What Do You Wear in Deep Space?” facing page].
Mind the Gap
NASA’s tentative plan is to retire the shuttle in 2010, but the Augustine committee estimates that Orion won’t fly until at least 2017, leaving a seven-year gap during which time no NASA manned spacecraft will take to the skies.
BUGGING OUT Astronauts
test a prototype of a six-legged
lunar buggy at Moses Lake
in Washington.
“A MARS CREW COULD STEP OFF A VEHICLE WITH BONES TOO BRITTLE TO SUPPORT THEIR OWN WEIGHT.”
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Zeo then powerfully portrays how your lifestyle choices and environmental
factors affect your sleep.
Finally, Zeo teaches, guides and
motivates you with our highly
personalized sleep coaching
program to help you get a better
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POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 49
WE HAVE A CREDO AROUND HERE: The future will
be better. It may sound optimistic in light of our wheez-
ing environment and limping economy, but then you
haven’t met the Brilliant 10, POPSCI’s annual selection of
the nation’s most promising young researchers. They’re
10 powerful reasons to look on the bright side. Take
materials scientist Ting Xu. She’s using nanotechnol-
ogy to craft solar cells that are more energy-efficient
and eco-friendly than oil or coal. John Rinn is unlock-
ing the secrets of RNA to keep us healthier, a vital step
toward solving our health-care woes. Jerome Lynch
is making smart sensors for bridges that spot struc-
tural flaws before disaster strikes. And not one of these
geniuses is over 40. The world is facing some pretty
big problems, we admit, but with these talented minds
tackling them, can you blame us for feeling hopeful?
NOVEMBER 2009 POPULAR SCIENCE 49POPSCI.COM
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BRILLIANT 10 Astronomy
Marla Geha has different job titles depending on who’s asking.
“If I’m on a plane, I tend to be a physicist,” she says. “Then
nobody wants to talk to me.” When she feels the need to impress
someone, she’s an astrophysicist. And when she doesn’t mind a
two-hour conversation, she tells them she’s an astronomer.
Geha is, in fact, all three. Now a professor at Yale, Geha
spends her days (and, of course, nights) trying to identify faint
galaxies that probably formed earlier than the Milky Way.
Simulations of the Milky Way’s evolution predict that there are
about 1,000 such formations. When Geha came on the scene five
years ago, astronomers had found just 11 of them. She and others
believed that more existed, hidden from view because the galaxies
THE STAR CHASERBrilliant because: She’s discovering nearly invisible galaxies circling our own, and the mysterious dark matter that dominates them
THE ENERGIZERBrilliant because: She transforms molecules into mini hard drives with massive storage capacity
Name: Ting Xu Age: 35
Affiliation: University of California, Berkeley
Biomaterials
Last fall, Ting Xu, a professor of
materials science at the University of
California at Berkeley, was suffering
from headaches so severe that doctors
worried she might have a brain tumor.
But one neurologist suggested a simpler
cause. How about cutting back on the
16-hour days in the lab, sleeping, and
maybe even eating at normal times?
Xu has since eased her work
schedule, but she’s no less productive.
Earlier this year she co-authored a paper
describing a new technique for coaxing
tiny polymer strands to self-assemble
into 10 trillion cylinders with precise
patterns. The method could lead to
discs the size of a quarter that store 175
DVDs’—7 terabits—worth of data. Then
she tweaked the technique so it could be
used to build a range of nanoparticle-
based devices—super-efficient
photovoltaic cells and energy storage
systems, and higher-resolution flexible
displays. Xu is smart, diligent and
knowledgeable, says polymer physicist
Thomas Russell of the University of
Massachusetts, but more important,
“she has imagination.”
And a youthful one at that. She loves
the Transformers. She’s a devotee of
Tom and Jerry—watching the warring
cat-and-mouse duo helps her think. Like
her cartoon heroes, Xu, a native of China,
has always been restless. She played
volleyball and ran track growing up, but
neither wore her out. Her father would
offer to boost her allowance if she could
sit for more than 15 minutes at a time.
He never had to pay, and that energy
continues to drive her today.
After reporting on the self-assembly
method, which she created with Russell,
Xu immediately
saw greater
potential.
The strands,
she realized,
could serve
as minuscule
cranes to
arrange
even smaller building materials and
manufacture things like ultrasmall
electronic devices and paper-thin,
printable solar cells. In her most recent
work, Xu combined the self-assembling
polymers with nanoscopic particles. By
forcing these particles to assume the
underlying order of the polymers, she
managed to get trillions of them to line up
exactly as she wanted.
Xu hopes the work will give solar cells
a competitive advantage over fossil fuels,
for one thing, but she won’t be resting in
the meantime. She’s constantly hunting
for new ideas and designing experiments
with the hope of surprising herself, not
just confirming existing theories. “It’s
important to think about science in a
perpendicular way, not a parallel way,”
she says. “Otherwise you end up painting
other people’s houses.”—Gregory Mone
50 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
Name: Marla Geha Age: 35
affiliation: Yale university
were made mostly of dark matter, the term for whatever it is
out there that emits no light but somehow accounts for 90 to 95
percent of the universe’s entire mass.
In the quest to solve the so-called missing-satellite problem,
Geha pored over digital maps of the sky, looking for areas with
unexpected concentrations of stars. Then she painstakingly
measured the velocity of each star. To her amazement, she
found that the stars were moving too quickly for their size—
tantalizing evidence that dark matter might be tugging on them.
So far, Geha and her team have discovered 14 galaxies. She
hopes to find enough to verify the reigning theory of how the
universe formed, and perhaps along the way help other fields
fully define dark matter. “Astronomers and particle physicists
don’t talk to each other much,” she says. In the future, she’ll be
the one starting the conversation.—Doug Cantor
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RISING STAR A few of Marla
Geha’s galaxy-hunting tricks:
velocity calculations, 3 a.m.
e-mails, and superstitious rou-
tines to ensure clear skies.
AMONG GEHA’S BIG FINDS: MANY DWARF GALAXIES ARE MADE ALMOST ENTIRELY OF DARK MATTER.
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52 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
“IN MY LAB THERE’S NO CRITICISM, ONLY REFINEMENT.”
HELPING HANDS Dennis
Hong created the humanoid
CHARLI to better study our own
biomechanics.
52 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
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POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 53
BRILLIANT 10 robotics
In 1977, a six-year-old boy visiting Los Angeles from South
Korea saw Star Wars for the first time. He gaped at the curious
locomotion of R2-D2 and the human-robot interactions of C-3PO,
and as he flew back home, Dennis Hong remembers, “I knew I was
going to build robots for the rest of my life.”
Hong was born in California, but when he was three, his
father, an aerospace engineer, moved the family to Seoul for a
job. Hong lived there until his sophomore year of college, when
he transferred to the University of Wisconsin, and went on to grad
school at Purdue University. “All of it was mechanical engineering,
focused on robotics,” he says.
Today, Hong runs Virginia Tech’s Robotics and Mechanisms
Laboratory, which has produced a robotic hand that’s dexterous
enough to handle an egg, a pole-climbing snake ’bot for
construction inspections, and a momentum-propelled, three-
legged robot, among other projects.
“When I joined VT, people thought robotics should be all about
intelligence,” Hong says. Instead, he chose to focus on mechanical
systems found in nature. “We’re not copying nature; we’re using
its principles,” he explains. The design of the three-legged robot,
THE ROBOT MAKERBrilliant because: He builds sophisticated robots that don’t just copy biology—they improve on its most elegant and efficient principles
THE MENTAL MESSENGERBrilliant because: His engineering achievements will let people with disabilities control machines
Name: Adam Wilson Age: 28
affiliation: Wadsworth Center,
New York State Department of Health
Biomedical Engineering
Last April, Adam Wilson became the first
person to send a telepathic message—on
the social-networking site Twitter. “USING
EEG TO SEND TWEET,” he wrote, referring
to the electroencephalograph he used
to record electrical signals in his brain.
Wearing a red skullcap embedded with
electrodes wired to a computer, he
spelled out his missive by focusing on
letters flashing before him on a screen.
Beyond extrasensory tweets, Wilson’s
deeper ambition for the technology is to
help people who have lost the ability to
communicate, whether from a stroke or
a spinal-cord injury. He’s now developing
powerful brain-machine interfaces that
attach electrodes to the cerebral cortex,
the wrinkled tissue just beneath the
skull, where they pick up stronger brain
signals than the EEG technique he used
in the Twitter experiment. Partly inspired
by his fascination with music—Wilson
has played the guitar since the seventh
grade—his new system taps a brain region
that controls
response
to auditory
stimuli,
allowing
people with
neurological
disorders
to control a
computer cursor simply by thinking
about the sound of a cellphone ringing.
His next challenge is to engineer
seamless wireless systems that could
one day decipher complex thoughts—
perhaps well enough to help his idol,
physicist Stephen Hawking, whose
struggle with muscular dystrophy has
left him almost fully paralyzed, open
doors or steer his wheelchair with
thoughts alone. Says Wilson, “I would
love to work with him.”
—melinda wenner
Name: Dennis Hong Age: 38
affiliation: Virginia tech
for instance, looks unnatural, yet it mimics the momentum of
the human gait. To move forward, its hub flips over, causing
one leg to swing between the other two. The robotic hand is
controlled by compressed air, varying the strength of its grip
without the use of other motors, in the same way human grip
relies on elastic ligaments to help the fingers curl.
His lab’s latest effort is a humanoid called CHARLI,
for Cognitive Humanoid Autonomous Robot with Learning
Intelligence. It serves as a research platform for the study
of human locomotion and a contender in Robocup 2010, a
tournament in which robots compete in soccer matches.
Ultimately, Hong hopes to engineer robots that move with
the grace and adaptability of humans. The key, he believes, is
uninhibited research. In Korea, Hong recalls, “I grew up in an
environment of people being afraid or ashamed to speak up. In
my lab there’s no criticism, only refinement. You want to put a
nuclear reactor in your robot? Fine, let’s pursue that.”
Leading by example, Hong has an organized way of putting
his own least-inhibited ideas to use. “Next to my bed, I have a
notebook and a pen,” he says. “Every night, I see lines, colorful
things in my head. I wake up at 4 a.m., jot down everything. In
the morning, I type it into my database of ideas. When funders
want this or that, I look for a match.”—Jacob Ward
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54 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
Genetics
John Rinn has a long history of bucking convention. Growing up,
skateboarding and snowboarding took precedence over school—
he attended four high schools in four years, only graduating
because his mother promised him a car. He went to college at
the University of Minnesota because it seemed like an excuse
to party and hit the slopes. But bedridden with a snowboarding
injury after his sophomore year, Rinn had a revelation, inspired by
the uncompromising architect Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The
Fountainhead. “What could I do that I cared that much about?” he
asked himself. He began immersing himself in biology classes and
realized that he not only had an aptitude for science, but he actually
enjoyed it. He pulled mostly A’s and soon discovered the thing that
would inspire his future career: RNA.
Science hasn’t dimmed Rinn’s rebellious side. He’s already
upending the way biologists think about the human genome.
Though similar to DNA, RNA has always been considered DNA’s
helper; its best-known job is turning genes into proteins. Some
of it was even thought to have no function at all, the equivalent
of cellular junk. But in 2003, as a graduate student at Yale, Rinn
discovered thousands of new types of RNA, called large intervening
THE RULE SHREDDERBrilliant because: A dropout skate rat turned ace biologist, he’s proving that “junk” RNA is a potential linchpin of human health
Every now and then, an innovation so vital
comes along that it’s hard to imagine how
we got along without it. Think seatbelts,
antibiotics, fire hoses. Now add André
Platzer’s KeYmaera, software that helps
computer-controlled safety systems avoid
catastrophic errors.
Now a computer scientist at Carnegie
Mellon, Platzer grew up in Germany,
where he became, of all things, an
accomplished ballroom dancer. “I won
a few tournaments,” he says. “But I was
fascinated with computers, and that
began to take up my time.” In 2006, as a
professor at the University of Oldenburg
in Germany, he began investigating how
autopilot systems could fail. When he
discovered that there were no models
that could test more than a handful of
conditions, he built KeYmaera. Prior to
it, a collision-avoidance proposal for
the Federal Aviation Administration
would have told two close planes with
intersecting flight paths to each hang a
right turn, fly
a half circle,
and make
another right
turn to avoid a
collision. When
KeYmaera tested
what would
happen to the
planes at varying airspeeds, altitudes and
trajectories, it found that, in rare cases,
the protocol could actually put planes on
a collision course. Platzer fed alternative
scenarios into KeYmaera until it verified a
safer fly-around maneuver. His software
has also made potentially lifesaving
corrections to models of Europe’s high-
speed train systems and adaptive cruise
control in cars. “Before you spend $1
billion on a system,” he notes, “it’s good
to make sure that it works.”—Bjorn Carey
CRASH TEST ANTI-DUMMYBrilliant because: His software makes travel on planes, trains and automobiles safer
Name: André Platzer Age: 30
affiliation: Carnegie Mellon University
Mathematics
Name: John Rinn Age: 33
affiliation: Harvard university/Beth
Israel Deaconess Medical Center
non-coding RNAs, or LINCs, and later proved that they play more
than just a supporting role in regulating genes—they appear to
direct the entire show. At the time, the notion was considered
contentious, even ridiculous. “It was the same thing again—‘what
you’re passionate about is stupid,’ ” Rinn says. “Classic science
was not ready for this. Almost nobody was ready for this.”
He silenced his critics in 2007 when he showed that one of
the LINCs serves a vital function in human cells. He dubbed it
HOTAIR, a wry nod to the fact that so many scientists thought his
field of research was full of it. The molecule delivers proteins to
a crucial cluster of genes and helps regulate immune response,
cancer growth, and fat and stem-cell production, among other
things. “If we can unravel their code, we can engineer these
molecules to bend the genome to our will,” Rinn says. “That
would be a totally new facet for therapeutics and human health.”
High-functioning RNA isn’t his only discovery. In 2006, he
answered a long-standing biological question: How do cells
know where to go and how to behave? By comparing the genes
expressed in cells around the body, he uncovered a kind of
genetic ZIP code that orients and redirects cells.
He’s still hunting for LINCs, hopeful that they will reveal
cellular secrets. Ultimately, Rinn loves genetics for the same
reason he loves snowboarding: “I want to take something old,
twist it, and get something new out of it.”—m.w.
BRILLIANT 10
CO
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“CLASSIC SCIENCE WAS NOT READY FOR THIS.”
COLORING OUTSIDE THE LINES
John Rinn at his laboratory in
Boston, sketching the
mysterious workings of RNA
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56 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
MULTIFLASKER When she’s not
doing research or training for
NASA, Kate Rubins manages her
nonprofit, Congo Medical Relief,
which she created to deliver
medical supplies to Africa.
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POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 57
Virology
As a kid, Kate Rubins dreamed of being an astronaut and
figured flying fighter jets would be the best way to get to NASA.
She even went to space camp at age 12 to get a head start on
her training. Then she learned the disappointing news that, at
the time, the pilot job was off-limits to women.
Secretly, her parents hoped their daughter would choose
a safer career, but by high school Rubins had already set
her sights on another perilous profession: hunting killer
viruses. And this time, there was no glass ceiling to hold her
back. Rubins published her first paper on HIV in 1999 as an
undergraduate at the University of California at San Diego. In
2001, while a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University, she helped
the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
create the first animal model for testing smallpox, a scourge
that killed millions before its eradication in 1980. Rubins’s work
has made it possible to study how the virus evades the immune
system in living tissue, a major step toward new medicine and
vaccines should terrorists somehow get their hands on one
of the two known smallpox samples. It’s this ability to make
positive changes in the world that motivates Rubins. “We have a
responsibility as researchers to help people,” she says.
After smallpox, Rubins quickly shifted her attention to
another scourge, monkeypox, which is now reaching epidemic
proportions in Africa. A cousin to smallpox, the virus is
endemic to monkeys and rodents, but it can jump to humans
during the slaughter or consumption of bush meat, causing
facial boils, blindness and even death. During her tenure as a
Whitehead fellow at MIT, Rubins spent months in the remote
jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo, eating the
THE FLYING VIRUS HUNTERBrilliant because: She uncovers the genetic secrets of deadly viruses, and now she’s taking her science smarts to space as an astronaut
Name: Kate Rubins Age: 31
affiliation: Whitehead
Institute, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
“WE HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY AS RESEARCHERS TO HELP PEOPLE.”
occasional meal of grubs (her motto: “If people serve it, I eat
it”), trying to figure out why the disease appears to be spreading
so quickly. The region’s underdeveloped health infrastructure
makes infection rates hard to pin down, but an uptick in the
number of cases suggests the virus is gaining strength.
To track the genetic evolution of monkeypox, Rubins and her
team collect and analyze DNA samples from volunteer patients.
Because traditional genetic-sequencing techniques can take
weeks and often churn out incomplete results, she helped develop
a faster, more accurate method. Typically, scientists extract
monkeypox from patient samples and grow the virus on human or
monkey cells. The problem is that the virus can evolve in response
to its growth medium, so the final population of viruses may bear
little resemblance to the ones that are infecting people in Africa.
Rubins’s idea was to skip the tissue-culture step and instead rely
on a new high-powered DNA sequencer to amplify all the genetic
material. She then devised laboratory protocols and algorithms
to sort the monkeypox from the human cells. The entire process
takes less than five days and generates what Rubins calls an
“obscene” amount of genetic data on the virus.
Today, the Air Force no longer bars female fighter pilots. The
policy changed in 1993, but by then Rubins had already moved
on. She’s never been the type to sit around waiting for the tide
to turn. This fall, while her team continues its work in Africa,
Rubins will finally get the chance to live out that childhood dream
when she joins NASA’s 20th astronaut class, training to becoming
one of the first people to fly the shuttle’s successor, the Orion
[see page 42]. Selected from thousands of candidates, she says
her full-throttle hobbies of skydiving and scuba diving, not to
mention her ability to thrive in dangerous places, set her apart.
When asked if she’s nervous about the prospect of flying a new
spaceship to the moon, Rubins smiles calmly. “Not at all. I want
to be the first person to fly it, right? I’m just thrilled.”
—Nicole Dyer
BRILLIANT 10
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58 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
BRILLIANT 10 Anthropology
Nate Dominy found his calling on a college research trip to
Costa Rica with his anatomy professors. A football player for
Johns Hopkins University, Dominy was assigned the physically
demanding task of catching small, drugged monkeys as they fell
out of trees. “You have this moving target, completely unconscious,
and you have a net in your hand,” he explains. When he went back
again the next summer, he found himself thinking about more
than just how the monkeys fell, and began helping to decipher the
monkeys’ eating habits by studying their teeth. “I got this quick
introduction to the importance of food and diet in thinking about
the adaptation and behaviors of primates and humans,” he says. “I
just loved every minute.”
Ten years after his transformative experience studying food
and teeth, Dominy is now a trailblazer. As an associate professor
of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, he
works to answer one of anthropology’s biggest questions: How did
modern humans evolve from our ape-like ancestors?
Dominy argues that food played a crucial role, and he recently
helped solve a decade-long mystery about its role in evolution. In
1999, scientists analyzed the tooth fossils of our three-million-
THE TOOTH SLEUTH Brilliant because: His exploration of ancient eating habits is helping to crack the mystery of human evolution
Name: Nathaniel Dominy
Age: 33 affiliation: University
of California, Santa Cruz
MASTER OF THE SMALLBrilliant because: He’s tapping the strange powers of nanotechnology to detect cancer
Name: Michael Strano Age: 33 affiliation:
massachusetts Institute of Technology
When Michael Strano was a postdoctoral
fellow at Rice University, his mentor
gave him some simple advice. “He told
me, ‘Look at areas where disciplines
intersect,’ ” Strano says. Eight years later,
he is a tenured professor at MIT and one
of the world’s leading researchers of
quantum-confined materials, a field of
nanotechnology that has the potential to
transform cancer medicine, solar power,
electronics and more.
Quantum-confined materials derive
their power from their small size. For
example, a single layer of carbon atoms,
known as graphene, behaves nothing
like normal carbon. In a conductor such
as a copper wire, electrons simply inch
along. In graphene, however, electrons
move at nearly the speed of light. “It’s like
a little particle accelerator,” Strano says.
Graphene could make the ultimate solar-
panel conductor; it’s highly conductive,
highly affordable, and so thin that it’s
transparent to light. “It’s the thinnest
conductor we can
ever imagine,”
he says.
He is
particularly
fascinated by the
medical potential
of carbon
nanotubes. The
tiny structures emit near-infrared light
that passes harmlessly through human
tissue. Injected into cells, they could be
used as biological sensors so sensitive
they could detect a single molecule of a
potentially harmful chemical.
Considering Strano’s big to-do list, it’s
a little shocking to learn that he also has
three kids under the age of five. Doesn’t he
need downtime? “Science pretty much is
my hobby,” he says.
—Seth Fletcher
year-old primate ancestors, Australopithecus africanus, for
chemical patterns that reveal dietary habits. Their findings
suggested that grass, and the animals that ate grass, were
a staple meal. But the size and shape of the fossils indicated
something quite different—that our ancestors spent more time
munching hard, brittle foods, such as highly starchy grass bulbs.
Dominy believes that these caloric veggies may have been
the fuel of evolution, delivering enough energy to let us outwit
carnivores, invent smarter ways to endure the elements and,
eventually, populate the planet. In 2007 he uncovered additional
evidence in support of this theory, showing that the teeth of
ancient and modern African mole rats that survive entirely on
bulbs have identical chemical profiles to our ancestors.
This year, Dominy hopes to crack another mystery: Why
are some human populations taller than others? In October he
traveled to Uganda to collect DNA from two pygmy tribes, the
Twa and the Sua, who are on average less than five feet tall. He
believes that short stature could help people navigate dense
jungle and stay cooler. No one has ever tested this idea, and
when he talks of it, Dominy sounds both excited and slightly
incredulous that no one’s jumped on it before. “Body size is
central to survival. It affects the kinds of things we eat, how we
reproduce, our metabolism,” he says. “Here we are in 2009, and
we still don’t know why it varies so much.”—m.w.
Chemical Engineering
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“BODY SIZE IS CENTRAL TO SURVIVAL, YET WE DON’T KNOW WHY IT VARIES.”
NO BONES ABOUT IT
Nate Dominy’s research is
shining light on the role
of food in human evolution.
POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 59
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60 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
BRILLIANT 10 ENGINEERING
Jerry Lynch is proud of his profession. He likes to point
out, for instance, that the U.S. has more than 600,000
bridges, and that failures are extremely rare. “We have a
very, very good track record,” he says. “We’re a diligent
bunch, civil engineers.” But when something does fail,
seriously bad things happen—like when the I-35W bridge
collapsed in Minneapolis in 2007 and killed 13 people
due to faulty gusset plates used to join load-bearing
beams. It’s these catastrophic failures that motivate
Lynch, an engineering professor at the University of
Michigan, to think incessantly about how things come
together and how to keep them from coming apart.
THE BRIDGE WHISPERERBrilliant because: His bridge sensors can catch structural flaws invisible to human eyes
NAME: Jerome Lynch AGE: 34
affiliation: University of Michigan
intervals or on
command from an
inspector, a small
microprocessor can
send an electric
current through
the conductive
carbon nanotubes embedded in the sheets, while electrodes
gauge electrical resistance to detect strain, corrosion, load and
dozens of other indications of stress. Hotspots are displayed on
a computerized map of the bridge. Lynch doesn’t know yet how
much each sensor will cost, but just the fact that they’re wireless
“WOULDN’T IT BE GREAT IF WE COULD SEE BRIDGE FAILURES AHEAD OF TIME?”
His solution to structural failures like the one that befell
I-35W bridge is a “sensor skin” that continuously monitors
weak spots and alerts inspectors to problems before they
become dangerous. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could see big
structural failures coming ahead of time?” he says.
Today, the few bridges in the U.S. that have any kind
of sensors usually only track seismic activity, largely
because it’s so expensive to wire a bridge with enough
equipment to monitor multiple threats. “The Golden
Gate Bridge is over a mile long,” Lynch says. “The
special conduit needed can be $10 a foot, and one sensor
can cost thousands.” So instead, engineers typically
rely on visual inspections at two-year intervals.
Lynch’s sensors attach to wireless nodes that
communicate with other nodes on the bridge, process the
data on their own, and relay potential problems back to the
local inspector’s office using a cellular data connection. Each
sensor consists of polymer sheets up to a foot square and just
a few microns thick that cover key structural elements, like the
gusset plates that gave way in Minneapolis. At programmed
will make them cheaper to deploy than today’s sensors and will
eliminate the costs associated with unnecessary inspections.
Lynch knows about using time wisely. The Queens, New
York, native earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in civil
engineering from Stanford University and then went back
and got another master’s, in electrical engineering. After
9/11, he launched a company to build wireless infrastructure
sensors and left it to teach at Michigan, where he was
named Professor of the Year his second year on the job.
“Dr. Lynch is probably the most regarded scholar among
his peers in such an early stage of a career,” says Kincho
Law, a professor of structural engineering at Stanford.
Lynch’s sensing skin will leave the lab next year for testing
on three highway bridges in Michigan and three bridges in Korea.
And he is already working on a paint-based version that could
be applied to anything that needs monitoring, from airplanes to
pipelines, as well as a version that would make its own power
from the vibrations of whatever it’s painted on. “There’s an
inherent uncertainty in visual inspections,” Lynch says. “We need
better tools to keep an eye on things.”—Mike Haney
POPSCI.COM
CO
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DIN
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HI K
AM
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62 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
POPSCI LAB RAT
personal
1-Hydroxypyrene
2-Hydroxybenzo[c]phenanthrene
1-Hydroxychrysene
9-Hydroxyfluorene
di-n-butyl phthalate
ortho-xylene
cyclohexane
butyl benzyl phthalatemeta-xylene
monobenzyl phthalate
deca bde
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POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 63
Every day we’re exposed to thousands of man-made chemicals, some of which seep into our bodies and remain there for decades. What that means for our health, we don’t fully understand—but our writer subjected herself to a battery of new tests in search of answers BY ARIANNE COHEN
Chemistry
methyl isobutyl carbinol
ethyl benzene
triclosan
diethyl phthalate
naphthalene
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LOTIONSPHTHALATES
Often listed on
labels as “fra-
grance,” phthalates
may cause repro-
ductive disorders.
64 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
longer in aggregate, so we must be doing something right,” says Brian Buckley, the laboratory director at the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute at Rutgers University. Still, we do know a few unnerving things. One, all American adults carry around hundreds of synthetic chemicals in their bodies. Two, as a study published in the British Medical Journal in 2004 put it, “many synthetic chemicals have intrinsic hormonal activity,” and hormonal disruptions carry a high likelihood of causing disease. And three, according to the same study, “it is clear that environmental and lifestyle factors are key determinants of human disease—accounting for perhaps 75 percent of most cancers.”
In response to these concerns, in recent years scientists have begun testing the population’s chemical loads in the same rigorous manner that they’ve been testing the environment for decades. This science—called biomonitoring—is slowly helping us understand what our chemical-filled world is doing to us.
I am a paranoid and curious person, and I’ve been following environmental-exposure studies for years. Over time, I developed
Let’s start with the bad news: You are saturated with man-made chemicals, some of them toxic. Today’s exposure began when compounds in your shampoo and shaving cream seeped into your skin cells, and during your morning coffee, when you drank chemicals that were released into your brew as hot water ran against the plastic walls of your coffeemaker. It continued all day as you touched industrial chemicals in packaging, or walked through pesticide-sprayed lawns, or cooked dinner on nonstick pans. This very minute, your skin is probably touching a piece of clothing or furniture that was doused in protective chemicals to make it resistant to microbes, fungus or water. Tonight, there’s a good chance you’ll curl up in sheets treated with flame retardants.
Some of these chemicals can stay in the body for decades, and in numerous studies over the past eight or so years, environmental toxins have been linked to everything from early puberty to cancer. David Servan-Schreiber, a founding member of Doctors Without Borders in the U.S. and a cancer researcher who survived the disease himself, summarized our predicament in the New York
Times last year. “Since 1940, we have seen in Western societies a marked and rapid increase in common types of cancer,” he wrote. Since 1974, leukemia and brain cancer rates in children have risen by 28 percent. The federal government began regulating environmental toxins with the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, but in a way, that’s when the real trouble began. The act established a weak system for chemical testing and regulation, but it also grandfathered in any previously produced chemicals, to the tune of more than 60,000 free passes. To Servan-Schreiber, surveying the situation 32 years later, the culprit was clear: “Reducing exposure to many of the well-characterized chemical carcinogens abundant in our modern environments (pesticides, estrogens, benzene, PCBs, PVCs and bisphenol-A from heating liquids in plastic containers; alkylphenols in cleaning products; parabenes and phthalates in cosmetics and shampoos, etc.) would contribute to lessen the cancer risk.”
Of the 85,000-plus industrial chemicals now registered with the federal government, most are completely unstudied. That doesn’t mean they’re all going to kill us, of course. “We’re living
a morbid curiosity about how many chemicals were lodged in my body. Would I learn how to detoxify? Would I learn that I’m screwed? Would the information be useful at all? In any case, I decided to undergo the most comprehensive testing available to find out.
Last december, I lay on a clinic bed in Buckley’s laboratory at Rutgers. A nurse named Rosalind swabbed my arm in preparation for the Ironman of blood testing. My presence had caused a stir in the lab. They had agreed to take the blood samples I needed for my experiment, but it was far from standard procedure. To get a sense of what I was asking for, think of a lab as a restaurant. I was ordering 150 different dishes—one of everything on the menu—and each would require 10 to 30 complex steps to make. In addition to Rosalind, two other nurses stood by, studying pages of instructions from Quest Diagnostics and Axys Analytical, the labs that would later be analyzing my blood for chemicals including flame retardants, pesticides, plastics and metals.
where Toxins
come fromNot all brands contain the chemicals listed here, but enough do that informed shopping is important.
[See more tips on page 66.]
PAINT
AND
VARNISHVOLATILE
ORGANIC
COMPOUNDS
VOCs, as they’re
known, cause eye,
nose and throat
irritation, and
chronic exposure
may damage the
central nervous
system, kidney
and liver. Look
for low- or zero-
VOC paint.
FR
OM
LEFT:
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CK
; G
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TY
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AG
ES; PR
EC
ED
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PA
GES:
ISTO
CK
POPSCI LAB RAT
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OLDER
NONSTICK
COATINGSPFOA
Associated with
testicular, liver
and pancreatic
cancers.
FR
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LEFT:
ISTO
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; G
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AG
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ISTO
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POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 65
Rosalind picked up a needle, and the two nurses positioned themselves to grab vials as quickly as my arm could fill them. As I wondered what all that blood would reveal, my mind wandered to memories of a summer childhood ritual: standing in the bathroom in my bathing suit as my mother slathered me with thick layers of sunblock, pausing to let the greasy lotion soak in. Then she’d reach for another canister. “Shut your eyes.” This was my signal to clamp my eyes tight, stop breathing, and turn in a circle while my mother hosed me down with bug spray.
Rosalind read aloud: “OK, ladies. Now we are going to ‘Remove 14 size-large vials of blood from the patient, or as much
as is safe.’ ” She looked up. “OK?” It was the beginning of my experiment,
designed to mimic research conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s primary source for information on exposure to industrial chemicals in the population. In the late 1970s, the agency began searching for
That’s only a fraction of the few thousand chemicals produced in large quantities, but it’s also a major leap from several decades ago, when there was lead in the gas, asbestos in the walls, and no official effort to figure out whether these things were causing harm. To choose the chemicals it will test for, the CDC publishes a notice in the Federal Register soliciting recommendations from scientists. After the suggestions flood in, it gradually narrows the list, choosing chemicals that are widely distributed and suspected of causing harm. Practical concerns rule out searching for more than a few hundred chemicals. “There’s a limit if you’re getting just a few tubes of blood,” says Jim Pirkle, deputy director of
science for the CDC.The NHANES survey begins when
the CDC uses a computer algorithm to select 15 counties nationwide. Surveyors appear on the doorsteps of 800 to 1,600 people in each county and interview them, and around a third of the finalists—5,000 or so
exposure to heavy metals like lead and cadmium. Since then, the CDC has periodically conducted a census of American bodies called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). The agency uses the data for many things, ranging from children’s growth charts to obesity statistics—and, since 2001, to produce a study called the National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals. The next such report, due out late this year, will include data on the prevalence of 228 of the most common environmental toxins.
people nationwide—are ultimately screened. The agency takes measurements on height, weight, body-fat levels, blood pressure and heart rate, among other things. It does an oral-health exam, a bone scan and a vision test. The study participants fill out questionnaires on diet, sexual behavior and drug use. And yes, they also give copious amounts of urine and blood. The results are anonymous, although participants get a copy, along with a toll-free number to call for help understanding them.
Unless the CDC shows up at your house, it’s just about impossible to get this kind of testing. Until the past few years, chemical-exposure testing was available only in research labs, where academics focused on specific families of chemicals, using expensive techniques like gas chromatography and mass spectroscopy. “It really wasn’t available to the public-health community, or to groups of people who figured they might be exposed to pesticides or other agents, because no one had the hundreds of thousands of dollars to open labs and do the testing,” says environmental-exposure researcher Michael McCally, a senior scientist at Physicians for Social Responsibility in Washington, D.C. The technology has slowly moved into specialized commercial labs, but it’s still wildly expensive to access it. My
MOST OF THE CHEMICALS IN USE TODAY ARE UNTESTED AND UNREGULATED.
COSMETICS PARABENS, PHTHALATES, LEAD
A variety of chemicals found in certain cosmet-
ics have been linked to maladies ranging from
hormonal disruptions and infertility to heart
disease and various cancers.
COFFEE-
MAKERSDECA BDE
A toxic flame
retardant in
plastic can leach
into your brew.
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SUNSCREEN
OXYBENZONE
Absorbed through the
skin, this compound
may cause hormonal
disruptions.
66 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
surrogates for other chemical exposures or lifestyle practices.” “There are almost no smoking guns,” Buckley says. “True
smoking guns usually happen in occupational contamination, where a high percentage of people in a factory come down with, say, lung cancer. Everything else is just estimate or conjecture.”
As for product safety testing, it’s far rarer than you might think. The Food and Drug Administration requires pharmaceuticals to be rigorously tested before entering the marketplace, but although the cosmetic industry conducts tests on animals for skin rashes and allergic reactions, those tests, overseen by an industry organization called the Cosmetic Ingredient Review, aren’t mandatory.
Cosmetics and general products are rarely, if ever, tested for long-term health effects, let alone potential effects on a fetus. All those air fresheners and cleaning products and perfumes that are sprayed liberally in the air you breathe? Never tested.
If evidence appears that a chemical might be harmful, it’s still tough to get
testing would cost me more than $4,000, and that was with Quest agreeing to do much of the blood analysis for free.
The CDC’s Report on Environmental Exposure doesn’t declare any chemicals harmful or safe. “It’s not their job,” Buckley says. “There are people at the National Institutes of Health who do that stuff, and the ATSDR”—the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, created by Congress with the Superfund act of 1980—“and there are epidemiologists, and all of us academics who spend our whole lives interpreting what the CDC puts out.”
Studies on the connection between environmental disease and chemicals have proliferated since the CDC published its first exposure report. Still, the field is young, and such is the state of the art that my makeshift test would give me only raw data about the chemicals in my body; it wouldn’t tell me anything about the likelihood that a particular chemical would give me cancer. I’d have to assemble a personal posse of experts—
those people who spend their lives interpreting CDC data— to help me understand the results.
as i arranged the follow-up to my bloodwork, the inherent difficulty of biomonitoring research became clear. Researchers have uncovered plenty of associations between toxins and diseases, and they’re uncovering more all the time. But it’s nearly impossible to quickly and definitively link an individual chemical to a specific disease without knowingly poisoning test subjects. It’s staggeringly hard to prove causation in a system as complicated as the body, particularly when a fetus exposed to a chemical might not show any sign of harm until it becomes an adult. In one study, men who lived in an agricultural area of Missouri were 40 percent less fertile than city-dwellers. Knockout punch for pesticides, right? Wrong. The British Medical Journal study cites this research as a classic example of the difficulty of linking chemicals to disease. “Although these new findings are suggestive, for none [of the findings] is the mechanism of the chemical’s effect self evident,” the researchers wrote. “This leaves doubts as to whether the measured chemicals are the real culprits or are
SOAPPHTHALATES, TRICLOCARBANS
(IN ANTIBACTERIAL SOAP)
Certain chemicals found in bar soap are asso-
ciated with hormonal disruptions that may
increase the risk of reproductive
problems and cancers.
SHAMPOO PHTHALATES,
PARABENS,
1,4-DIOXANE
These additives are
linked to hormonal
disruptions.
Q�Vent your gas stove outside to avoid releasing polycyclic hydrocarbons,
created by incomplete combustion, into your home, says Shelly Miller, an
air-pollution researcher at the University of Colorado.
Q�Use minimal carpet and drapery. “Carpets can be a reservoir
for all sorts of particles,” Miller says.
Q�Use a HEPA filter on your vacuum to keep captured particles from
escaping back into the air.
Q�Look up cosmetic and cleaning products on the Environmental
Working Group’s “Skin Deep” database (www.ewg.com), which
rates more than 50,000 products on a scale of 0 (safe) to 10 (haz-
ardous). A “data gap” rating lets you know whether the conclusion
is based on comprehensive safety data or industry research.
what you can doWe actually do have a lot of control over the chemicals we’re exposed to in our homes, where they are 1,000 times as likely to be inhaled as outdoors. Here’s how to start purifying your environment.
FR
OM
LEFT:
I STO
CK
; G
ET
TY
IM
AG
ES;
I STO
CK
POPSCI LAB RAT
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CHARRED
MEAT
POLYCYCLIC
AROMATIC
HYDRO-
CARBONS
Caused by incom-
plete combustion,
some of these
chemicals are prob-
able carcinogens.
POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 67
it off the market. Our regulatory system treats chemicals the same way our judicial system treats people, maintaining that they are innocent until proven guilty and trying them one by one. “Chemical-regulation policy deals with individual chemicals, not families of chemicals,” McCally says. That makes banning potentially harmful chemicals inefficient, because typically, if a single molecule has health effects, all its very similar cousins,
known as congeners, may as well. “Each congener is a different chemical, so you spend 10 years in court for each,” he says.
My test results may be the most confusing things I’ve ever received in the mail. I expected to rip them open and find a variant of the routine bloodwork I get from my doctor, complete with a little thumbs-up icon next to good cholesterol results. Instead, over four months I received six individual spreadsheets that said things like “2,3,7,8-TCDD UN 3373 L12090-1 WG27842 30.8g (wet) pg/g (wet weight basis) <.0065 spiked matrix WG27842-102 % Recov 78.3.” Gibberish to me.
My interpretation team was made up of three experts: McCally, Buckley, and Leo Trasande, director of the Mt. Sinai Center for Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research in New York and a lead investigator on the federally funded National Children’s Study, which will ultimately set benchmarks for toxic exposures among our most chemical-sensitive population.
chemicals are classified by the EPA as probable carcinogens, and they can stay in the body for 25 years, but scientists still don’t understand how potency and length of exposure relate to illness.
I’m carrying above-typical levels of residue from nonstick coatings like Teflon, specifically one called PFOA that
is associated with cancer. “Preliminary studies suggest that even low-level exposures can be problematic,” Trasande says.
I’m loaded with nitrate. “This is principally from processed foods, and there’s a cancer risk associated,” Buckley says.
I also have typical levels of exposure to plastics and plasticizers like phthalates, which add flexibility to soft plastics and vinyl and stability to creams and washes. “They’re ubiquitous,” McCally says. Phthalates are linked to reproductive disorders, and it’s unclear what exposure level could be considered safe.
Lastly, my levels of the notorious bisphenol-A, or BPA, an estrogenic compound found in plastic and plastered all over the news for the past two years, are typical. BPA has entered my system every time I’ve ever taken a swig
I started by calling Trasande. When I read him the first incomprehensible line from my results, he laughed. “I don’t know what that means,” he said. “Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin is nasty stuff. But I would need to also see the benchmarks.” I found the latest NHANES benchmarks and called him back. After going through the rest of the results with my panel, we arrived at a verdict: I am full of chemicals.
My levels of dioxins and furans, older chlorinated chemicals that are usually released into the air by manufacturing and garbage incineration, are above population averages. Industrial releases have decreased 80 percent since the 1980s, yet I’m still full of them because dioxin exposure is the gift that keeps on giving. The body stores dioxin in fat cells and occasionally releases it into the blood, recirculating the same chemicals throughout the body. These have been linked to reproductive disorders, cancer and other maladies.
My levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons—the result of incomplete combustion, these are commonly emitted by stoves and charred meat—are typical for the population. Some of these
FISH
MERCURY
Fish can soak up
mercury from
environmental
pollution, and
when you eat
them, you get it
too. Mercury can
be highly toxic,
damaging the ner-
vous system and
possibly causing
birth and develop-
mental defects.
PLASTIC
BOTTLESBISPHENOL-A
(BPA)
BPA may cause
hormonal and
reproductive
problems.
[continued on page 84]
THE VERDICT FROM MY EXTENSIVE BLOOD TESTING: I AM FULL OF CHEMICALS.
FR
OM
LEFT:
ISTO
CK
; G
ET
TY
IM
AG
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2)
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68 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
the green dreamone man’s mission to build an eco-friendly, affordable home
CLEARLY EFFICIENT
WITH THE EFFICIENT pre-fab panels that make up the walls of my home, it’s vital
that I don’t let all the heat—and my budget—escape out my 47 windows. So the fact that I had my heart set on sleek aluminum frames instead of wood or vinyl posed some challenges.
Residential aluminum windows tend to be inefficient because metal is far more conductive than wood, al-lowing significant heat loss, so they’re mostly used in warmer climates. Com-mercial models use thicker frames with a strip of insulating resin as a thermal break between the interior and exterior. But the extra materi-als and complicated design raise the price, and commercial makers aren’t
Biltite Evolution—for the past two years. His frames use four insulating tech-
niques: two types of plastic thermal breaks, air pockets to help prevent con-densation and three panes of glass with argon trapped between them. Since these don’t need to be as robust as commercial windows, Gordon uses thinner-walled alu-minum, which keeps the price down, and dealing directly with the manufacturer (Gordon) cuts out the standard distributor markup. My total bill is around $55,000.
A simulation of the window design run by an independent testing lab showed that it would be 50 percent more efficient than a vinyl window, with a U-value (a measure of how well it conducts heat) of 0.21, low enough to qualify for an energy tax credit.—John B. Carnett
set up for small residential orders. I got an astonishing quote of $137,000 for a mix of casement, fixed and slider models.
Then my architect found Tom Gordon, who runs a 16-person custom window-making shop in Rhode Island. Gordon has been designing an affordable, efficient residential aluminum model—the
CUSTOM-MADE ALUMINUM WINDOWS SAVE MONEY AND ENERGY
STAGE #4:
HOUSE: 3,500-square-foot,
four-bedroom contemporary
LOCATION: Greenwich, N.Y.
PROJECT: Install energy-efficient
aluminum windows
COST: About $55,000
TIME TO INSTALL: About a week
ECO-ADVANTAGE: Less heat loss than
standard aluminum or vinyl windows
THE SPECS
PETER B
OLLIN
GER
JOHN B. CARNETT,
POPSCI’s staff photogra-
pher, is using the latest
green technology to
build his dream home.
Follow his progress in
every issue, and visit
popsci.com/greendream
for tips, videos of the
build, and John’s blog.
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AIR POCKETS A type of weather-stripping known as a fin seal,
made of a synthetic material called wool pile, lines the perimeter
of the sash and creates air pockets that stop cool air from reach-
ing the inside and causing condensation in the winter.
POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 69
Four More Green Windows and DoorsGreenest glass
Soon your windows could
double as solar panels. RSi’s
60-percent-transparent
photovoltaic-embedded
glass can produce about 36
watts from a typical three-
by-four-foot window in
direct sunlight and can be
electronically frosted. It’s
being tested on commercial
buildings in California and
could trickle down to homes
as early as 2011. solar.tm
next: turning the roof into a living garden
Already Have a Home?
Clean Caulk
Sealing air leaks with
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Eco-Door
Champion’s steel-and-
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product’s manufacturing
and life cycle. The company
ensures that its materials
have no lead or mercury,
coats the door with low-
VOC paint, and recycles its
own scrap metal and water
during production. From
$1,500; championwindow.com
UV-Free Window
Huper Optik’s Ceramic 30
window film deflects up to
70 percent of the sun’s heat,
helping to cool the home
while blocking nearly all ul-
traviolet rays, which can fade
furniture. The film is embed-
ded with NASA-developed
titanium nitride beads that
block UV and infrared light,
but let visible light through.
From $7 per square foot;
huperoptikusa.com
what’s inside?Biltite Evolution
Windows
GLASS Three panels sepa-
rated by pockets of argon, a
common window insulator,
add up to 1.5-inch-thick
panes, twice as thick as stan-
dard residential windows.
THERMAL DEBRIDGING
Two narrow channels in the
interior frame are filled with
urethane, which cures in
place. Then the aluminum in
the bottom of the channel is
cut away, leaving a urethane
bridge that’s less conductive.
THERMAL STRUTS
Pairs of ¾-inch strips made of
a strong glass-fiber-reinforced
plastic called polyamide
bridge the interior and exte-
rior aluminum frames to keep
heat from traveling through
the aluminum.
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High Definition Built into Sunglasses HDVision Ultras
Call1-800-490-2421 or visit tryhdvision.com/SCI
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JON
ATH
AN
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(2)
NOVEMBER 2009 POPULAR SCIENCE 71
how 2.0tips, tricks, hacks and do-it-yourself projECTS
76The metals that make
the most sparks
GAME PLANNING
Iain Sharp spent
months gathering
parts from the Web,
garage sales and
his own collection of
junked electronics.
74Make an e-book reader
out of an old tablet PC
After hearing about preparations for the 40th
anniversary of the moon landing at Kennedy Space
Center last year, British engineer Iain Sharp decided
to develop a tribute of his own. His offering, a remake
of the 1979 Atari game Lunar Lander, in which players
try to settle a module onto the moon’s surface, is
a complex mix of scrapped PCs, fishing line, inkjet
printer motors and miniature space vehicles.
To enhance the retro look, Sharp suspended the
lander from a moving carriage with the fishing line.
As the line unspools and the lander descends, the
player turns a modified car steering wheel to rotate
the module and then hits a button to fire the “rockets”
and push the craft in the direction it’s pointing. The line
spools up, and printer motors shift the carriage along
a track, carrying the lander across the moonscape.
Sharp tested magnets as a means of measuring
successful touchdowns but found that they pulled the
lander right to the target, making the game too
easy. Instead he installed touch sensors to
measure when the craft hit the ground and
wrote software that estimates its exact
position based on how far the motors
moved in the course of the game.
Still, the game, which is installed at
the Southwold Pier in Suffolk, England,
doesn’t demand perfection from its
players. “You can get away with a few
little mistakes,” Sharp says, “which is kind
of like the real thing.”—Gregory Mone
THE CLASSIC VIDEOGAME LUNAR
LANDER IS TRANSFORMED INTO THREE DIMENSIONS
OVER THE MOON
We review all our projects before publishing them, but ultimately your safety is your responsibility. Always wear protective gear, take proper safety precautions, and follow all laws and regulations. THE H2WHOA CREDO: DIY CAN BE DANGEROUS.!
[turn the page to see how it works]
YOU
BUILT what
?!
What to look for before
choosing a Web host
78
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HOW IT WORKS
YOU BUILT WHAT ?! [continued from preceding page]
WARNING Apollo-style electrical gauges
display speed and fuel levels, and turn
red if you take too long or drop too fast.
TOUCHDOWN Powered by a cable con-
nected to the carriage above, a servo motor
housed in the gray box rotates the lander.
#�MISSION CONTROL
A science-fiction-sounding mission opera-
tor delivers flight directives, such as “Land
more slowly!” Sharp provided the narra-
tion at first but then recruited British radio
personality Emma Freud to do it instead.
In exchange, Sharp promised to build her a
version of his first “real” arcade game—a
mash-up of the classic game Pong and exer-
cise bikes, called Cyclepong.
#�BRAINS
A pair of old PCs, bought for about $30,
translates the input from the controllers—a
button that controls thrust and a steering
wheel—into the lander’s movements. Sharp
wrote the software and, despite its school-
science-project appearance, the game is J O
NA
TH
AN
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72 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
#�TIME: One year #�COST: $800
very responsive: The main PC sends instruc-
tions to the motors 50 times per second.
#�GAMEPLAY
The computer measures success by the land-
er’s descent rate and its final position relative
to the targets. Three successful landings earn
players one of a variety of vintage-looking
pin-on buttons featuring Apollo-themed
images. But neglect to fire the rockets in a
timely fashion to slow the lander down at a
safe pace, and you’ll drop too fast and crash.
Crooked landings, measured by how much
the servo motor that rotates the lander has
moved, are also considered failures. Red
LEDs flash and the game’s speakers blare
sounds of explosion, letting everyone around
you know that you’ve disappointed the nation.
HAPPY LANDINGS Fishing lines
spool down from a wooden
frame on the track above the
moonscape, controlling the
lander’s ascent and descent.
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HOW 2.0
POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 73
1 YOUR COMPUTER
Access your desktop from wherever you
take your iPhone, with Jaadu ($25; jaadu
vnc.com). Or control your computer from
across the room with Mobile Air Mouse
Pro ($6; mobileairmouse.com), which
uses the accelerometer in the iPhone to
turn it into a mouse you wave in the air
like a wand.
2 YOUR HOME
Turn on lights, set the thermostat, shut
off the sprinklers, and monitor motion
sensors in your house even when you’re
away, with Indigo Touch (perceptive
automation.com), an application that’s
compatible with Insteon and X10 home-
automation components.
3 YOUR CAMERA
See through your Canon DSLR’s lens
even when it’s pointed at you. For an
easier self-portrait or to shoot from
awkward angles, DSLR Camera Remote
($25; ononesoftware.com) puts shutter
control, shooting settings and a live view
of the frame on your iPhone’s screen.
4 YOUR CAR
Check out geekmyride.org for details
on how one hacker hooked his Mazda
RX-8’s computer to a Linux computer
he installed in his trunk and created an
iPhone-optimized Web interface to con-
trol the door locks, windows and ignition.
A cellular modem keeps the ride online
all the time.
5 YOUR MOOD
Try daily affirmation projects, like making
a “savoring album” by snapping iPhone
pictures of uplifting moments, with Live
Happy ($7; livehappyapp.com). Based on
psychological research, the activities are
designed to boost happiness. If that fails,
the Insult-O-Matic ($1; insultapp.com) can
raise your spirits by slinging disses at any-
one within earshot.—Amanda Schupak
THINGS5
YOU CAN CONTROL WITH YOUR IPHONE
An easy-to-install station
from the company that sets
the standard in quality.
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HOW 2.0
LU
IS B
RU
NO
POPSCI.COM
I tried to love Amazon’s amazing e-ink
electronic book reader, the Kindle, I
really did. But I wanted a device that
had full color and a higher-resolution
display and that didn’t limit the con-
tent you can view on it. So instead of
shelling out $300, I decided to make
my own version using a tablet PC
—basically a computer with a stowable
keyboard (or no keyboard at all) that
you mainly control with a stylus and
touchscreen. It doesn’t have the long
battery life or always-on connection
for downloading books and magazines
that the Kindle offers, but with a few
system tweaks and the addition of
some free software, it does everything
else the Kindle does. Plus, unlike
Amazon’s gadget, it lets me read any
comic book or magazine in color, and
doesn’t require an extra fee to read
blogs and download PDFs. And since
tablets never quite caught on with
consumers, they’re available by the
truckload on eBay for about half the
cost of a Kindle.—Phillip Torrone
A DIY KINDLETURN A SECONDHAND TABLET PC INTO A
FULLY FUNCTIONAL E-BOOK READER
#�time: 1 HOUR #�cost: about $200
#�easy hard
3. LOAD
Install reader software like
Calibre (calibre.kovidgoyal
.net), Adobe’s PDF reader
(get.adobe.com/reader)
and ComicRack (comicrack
.cyolito.com). Also try Zinio
(zinio.com) so you can view
digital editions of magazines
like POPSCI. Install RSS read-
ers such as FeedDemon (newsgator.com)
to download news with the tablet’s Wi-Fi
connection. (If your tablet has Bluetooth, you
can also connect through your cellphone.)
And bookmark newspaper sites like the
New York Times Article Skimmer version
(prototype.nytimes.com/gst/articleSkimmer)
and sites like Project Gutenberg (gutenberg
.org) for no-fee, copyright-free books.
2. FORMAT
Strip down Windows XP
by removing programs
you don’t need (check out
extremetech.com or
lifehacker.com for help).
Next, go to Control Panel
and then Display to change
the look of the system.
Choose “high contrast/
white” for the background, and increase
the size of the icons so you can tap things
easily with the pen. You can even make
the interface black and white to look more
Kindle-like. Use the D-pad mapping software
included with the tablet or the reader apps
to change button functions—for example,
I mapped Page Up and Page Down to be
“next page” and “previous page.”
1. BUY
Hit eBay to find cheap tablet PCs. Look
for older models like the Motion M1400
or Fujitsu Stylistic. Expect to pay around
$200 for a fully functional one, or a little
less if you’re willing to fix it or get missing
parts elsewhere.
BUILD AN E-READER
REPURPOSED
TECH
4. READ
Sit back and enjoy. I’ve read
more classics and PDFs
lately than I ever expected.
Now my girlfriend and I
sit around for hours with-
out talking to each other,
transfixed by electronic
text. Perhaps this wasn’t
the best idea after all.
MEDIA DARLING With a tablet
PC, you can take full-color
digital editions of magazines
like POPSCI everywhere you go.
74 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
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MIK
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FOR CREATING GREAT
SHOWERS OF SPARKS
HOW 2.0GRAYMATTER
Anything that creates sparks is shooting fine particles of burning metal that could damage your eyes. Always wear eye protection when grinding.
POPSCI.COM76 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
Metals can be classified by hardness,
malleability and conductivity. One qual-
ity you won’t find listed in the reference
books is sparkiness.
A delicate balance between flam-
mability and hardness determines which
metals spark. For example, magnesium
is a famously flammable metal, but
grinding it produces no sparks because
the energy needed to cut chips from the
soft metal is not enough to heat them to
their ignition point.
Although iron is much less flamma-
ble, it’s so hard that separating chips of
it heats them to the point that they catch
fire and burn brightly as they fly off. The
true champions of sparkiness, however,
are the lanthanides—the elements from
lanthanum (57) to lutetium (71). They are
even more flammable than magnesium
yet also hard enough to generate large
amounts of heat when they are ground.
Lighter “flints” aren’t made of flint
but rather a mix of lanthanides, with iron
added to tame the excessive sparkiness
of the other elements. Lose the iron,
and you have the pinnacle of sparkiness:
Mischmetal (German for “mixed metal”)
contains lanthanum and cerium, with
smaller amounts of other lanthanides.
Blocks of it are often used in movie
special effects. For example, a scene in
which a car blows a tire and drags on its
rims needs a stream of sparks coming
off the wheel, so a block of mischmetal
is strapped on for spectacular effect.
Ironically, modern aluminum wheels
are nonsparking, so the only place this
still happens at all is Hollywood.
—Theodore Gray
HOT SHOWER When a
grinder is applied to
mischmetal—a com-
bination of various
elements—it produces
copious quantities of
big sparks.
ACHTUNG!
TAILGATERS BEWARE The author
tows a block of mischmetal along
the road, turning his minivan
into a fire-shooting menace.
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JAKE LUDINGTON answers many more tech questions at jakeludington.com.
GOT A QUESTION FOR OUR GEEK CHORUS? SEND IT TO US AT [email protected].
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PROJECT OF THE MONTH
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sometimes you just need to know
FYI
“First, we’re assuming that the T. rex won’t just eat the person, right?” asks Jack Conrad, a vertebrate
paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Right. This is
a sanctioned match, and killing your opponent is strictly against the rules. “Doesn’t matter,” Conrad says. “There’s no chance that any human alive could win.”
The T. rex’s arms might have looked wimpy, but they were extremely strong. Each was about three feet long and, based on the size of the arm bones and analysis of the spots where muscle attached to the bone, they were jacked. “The bicep alone—and this is a conservative estimate—could curl 430 pounds,” Conrad says. Even the beefiest humans max out at around an embarrassing 260 pounds.
Surely an Over the Top–era Sylvester Stallone would put
QTyrannosaurus rex
had puny arms. Could
a human beat one in an
arm-wrestling match?
80 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
Lucas Saladin, via e-mail
WA
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POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 81
up a good fight? “Not even Lou Ferrigno in his prime would stand a chance,” Conrad says. “They didn’t just have big biceps. Their chest and shoulder muscles were huge too. They had huge arms and shoulders—bigger than my leg. They had the strength to rip a human’s arm right out of its socket.”
There is a chance, however, that your competition might not be able to put all that beefy muscle to use. There are dozens of hypotheses about what the T. rex used its arms for, Conrad explains, but the ones taken most seriously involve pushing itself up if it was lying on its belly, tossing big chunks of meat into its mouth, or holding onto females during what scientists suspect was a very vigorous mating routine. These ideas are favored because such actions required Barbie doll–like up-and-down motions of the arm, and fossil evidence indicates that the dino king was incapable of rotating or twisting its arms. “The T. rex probably couldn’t have done the arm-wrestling move,” Conrad says. “So maybe you could get him on a technicality.”—BJORN CAREY
What would happen if I ate a teaspoonful ofwhite dwarf star?Robert Schulzetenberg, via e-mail
“Everything about it would be bad,” says Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at Adler Planetarium in Chicago, beginning with your attempt to scoop it up. Despite the fact that white dwarfs are fairly common throughout the universe, the nearest is 8.6 light-years away. Let’s assume, though, that you’ve spent 8.6 years in your light-speed car and that the radiation and heat emanating from the star didn’t kill you on your approach. White dwarfs are extremely dense stars, and their surface gravity is about 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. “You’d have to get your sample—which would be very hard to carve out—without falling onto the star and getting flattened into a plasma,” Hammergren says. “And even then, the high pressure would cause the hydrogen atoms in your body to fuse into helium.” (This type of reaction, by the way, is what triggers a hydrogen bomb.)
Then you’d have to worry about confinement. Freeing the sample from its superdense, high-pressure home and bringing it to Earth’s relatively low-pressure environment would cause it to expand explosively without proper containment. But if it didn’t blow up in your face—or vaporize your face, since the stuff’s temperature ranges between 10,000˚ and 100,000˚F—and you somehow got it to your kitchen table, you’d be hard-pressed to feed yourself: A single teaspoon would weigh in excess of five tons. “You’d pop it into your mouth and it would fall unimpeded through your body, carve a channel through your gut, come out through your nether regions, and burrow a hole toward the center of the Earth,” Hammergren says. “The good news is that it’s not quite dense enough to have a strong enough gravitational field to rip you apart from the inside out.”
It probably wouldn’t be worth the trouble anyway, Hammergren laments. White dwarfs are mostly helium or carbon, so your teaspoonful would taste like a whiff of flavorless helium gas or a lick of coal. But if you’re desperate for a taste of star, you don’t really need to travel 8.6 light-years—your fridge is full of the stuff. Most of the elements that make up our bodies and everything around us were formed in the cores of stars and then belched out into the universe over billions of years. Basically everything you eat was once part of a star. Might we recommend some star fruit?—B.C.
ISTO
CK
LIGHT MEAL A teaspoon of
super-dense white dwarf star
would rip through your stomach.
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[continued FROM page 47]
And that leaves the agency trying to predict the future.
You don’t pick astronauts for today’s needs, Ross says. “You make your best guess about what’s going to be happening five years from now.” The class of 2009 is one of NASA’s smallest, and that’s a reflection of limited chances to fly in the future. Shuttle astronauts could expect to make several missions during their careers, but with a smaller vehicle, NASA will have fewer astronauts in space. Like many of the Apollo astronauts, the new recruits might make only one or two flights in their entire career.
So why become an astronaut at all? Astronaut recruit Kate Rubins [also a 2009 Brilliant 10 honoree; see page 57] has heard that question before. When she told her peers about her new career path, some of them questioned it, wondering why anyone would want to become an astronaut now. NASA’s future is so uncertain and everything in space seems to be in constant need of repair. Who wants to rocket 255 miles into space to fix a toilet? Aren’t you a tenure-track molecular biologist at MIT? Naturally, Rubins sees things differently. Through her eyes, NASA has an unprecedented
opportunity. Many experts consider the ISS a training ground for more-ambitious adventures in space, and now that the facility is nearly complete, NASA may soon be free to turn its resources toward the next big chapter in its history: manned exploration beyond the ISS. The agency is already building a new ship for the job, rocket technology has never been more affordable, thanks to epic strides made by the private space industry, and increasing environmental threats to the planet make human outposts in space sound more and more like wise investments.
Today’s astronauts may take fewer flights, but the ones they do take could make history. It’s possible that someone in the 2009 class will be the next to set foot on the moon, or the first woman to ever do so. Some of them could even become the first to visit an asteroid.
Now is the perfect time to start preparing them for the trip.
Editor-at-large Dawn Stover has been
writing about NASA since 1987.
DEEp-SPACE BOOT CAMP
THE FUTURE OF SPACE
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POPSCI.COMPOPSCI.COM
from a water bottle—which I did a lot of as a teenager, training five hours a day as a swimmer.
The overall takeaway is not soothing. “The core message is that we are all exposed to a wide array of chemicals in the environment, as you have been,” Trasande says. “And what little we know suggests cause for concern. And equally concerning is what we don’t know.”
As I spent days decoding spreadsheets, one uplifting fact became clear: I tested notably clear of the majority of pesticides, fungicides and metals that I would most likely ingest outdoors. In fact, with the exception of the dioxins and furans that I and the rest of the country picked up decades ago, I was probably exposed to most of the chemicals in my body indoors—which means more of this is under my control than I thought.
“It doesn’t take a lot of something released indoors to cause exposure,” says Kirk Smith, a professor of global environmental health at the University of California at Berkeley, who taught me the Rule of 1,000: Anything released indoors is about 1,000 times as likely to be inhaled as something released outdoors.
Over the next decade, as the cost of chemical-exposure testing continues to drop, it will probably become more widely available for consumers. But is it worth it? Not according to Trasande, who suggests lifestyle changes over testing. “I wouldn’t advise routine body-burden testing for people,” he says. It’s expensive and invasive, and so far there’s not much that can be done with the knowledge such testing produces. “It’s important to understand that right now, what people can do is proactively reduce their exposure.” That means changing
your lifestyle to avoid as many suspect chemicals as possible.
There is, however, only so much you or I can do. Approximately 1,000 new chemicals are added every year to the 85,000 already on the federal registry. As Jane Houlihan, the senior vice president for research at the nonprofit watchdog organization Environmental Working Group, testified in Congress last year, “Companies are free to use almost any ingredient they choose in personal-care products, with no proof of safety required.” Houlihan argues that the FDA should claim the authority to oversee cosmetic safety, by requiring registration and testing of products and ingredients, making public-health-injury reports mandatory, and enforcing safety requirements—which is the way the agency oversees pesticides and food additives.
There are movements afoot to reform the Toxic Substances Control Act to look more like European Union regulations, which allow the banning of families of chemicals. Most notable is the Kids-Safe Chemical Act, which would empower the EPA to require safety testing of baby products before their release.
Still, any attempt at regulation has to reckon with the fact that there’s no going back to a chemical-free world—we’re far beyond that point. “The presence of these industrial chemicals in your bloodstream or tissues is not normal,” McCally says. “Your grandfather didn’t have these.” He pauses to recalibrate. “It’s a consequence of the chemical environment that we live in, and it’s a new normal. We’re just trying to figure out what that is.”
Arianne Cohen, author of The Tall Book,
wrote about high-tech triathlete Andy
Potts in the August 2008 issue.
84 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
[continued from page 67]
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REG. PRICE $19.99
$999
4-1/2" ANGLE GRINDER
SUPER
COUPON!
SAVE $50
Coupons valid in Retail Store Only. Coupon not valid on prior purchases. Coupon cannot be bought, sold, or transferred. This coupon cannot be duplicated in any manner including photocopies and computer printouts. Original coupon must be presented in order to receive the discount.
HARBOR FREIGHT TOOLS - LIMIT 1These valuable coupons are only good when presented at your nearest Harbor Freight Tools store. Offer Ends 2/13/10.
$4999
LOT NO. 90428
REG. PRICE $99 .99
LARGE STEEL SERVICE CART
WITH LOCKING DRAWER
350 LBS. CAPACITY
HIGH SPEED METAL
SAW Item 113 shown
12" RATCHET BAR
CLAMP/SPREADER
LOT NO. 46807
SUPER
COUPON!
SAVE 43%
Coupons valid in Retail Store Only. Coupon not valid on prior purchases. Coupon cannot be bought, sold, or transferred. This coupon cannot be duplicated in any manner including photocopies and computer printouts. Original coupon must be presented in order to receive the discount.
HARBOR FREIGHT TOOLS - LIMIT 1These valuable coupons are only good when presented at your nearest Harbor Freight Tools store. Offer Ends 2/13/10.
$1699
LOT NO. 2745
REG. PRICE $29 .99
40"
19"
Tools sold separately.
300 LB.CAPACITY
LOW-PROFILE CREEPER
LOT NO. 94696
SAVE 41%
$3499
REG. PRICE
$59 .99
Item 38082 shown
Grinding wheel sold separately.
LOT NO. 95578
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The Fifth C?
The laboratories at DiamondAura®
were created with one mission inmind: Create brilliant cut jewelry thatallows everyone to experience more clarity, more scintillation and largercarat weights than they have ever experienced. So, we’ve taken 2 ½ carats of our scientifically-grownDiamondAuras and set them in the most classicsetting—theresult is ourmost stunning,fiery, faceteddesign yet! Inpurely scientificmeasurementterms, therefractory index of theDiamondAura® is very high, and thecolor dispersion is actually superiorto mined diamonds.
Perfection from the laboratory.The scientific process involves the use ofrare minerals heated to an incrediblyhigh temperature of nearly 5000˚F.According to the book Jewelry andGems–the Buying Guide, the techniqueused in DiamondAura offers, “The bestdiamond simulation to date, and evensome jewelers have mistaken these stonesfor mined diamonds.”
The 4 C’s. Our DiamondAura3-Stone Classique Ring retains everyjeweler’s specification: color, clarity, cut,and carat weight. The transparent colorand clarity of DiamondAura emulate
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Cut, Color, Carat, Clarity…Chemistry?
COMPARE FOR YOURSELF AT 2 ½ CARATS
Mined Flawless DiamondAuraDiamond Compares to:
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Clarity “IF” Clear
Dispersion/Fire 0.044 0.066
2 ½ c.t.w. ring $60,000+ $145
14101 Southcross Drive W.,Dept. DAR641-02, Burnsville, Minnesota 55337
www.stauer.com
Not Available in StoresDiamondAura® 3-Stone Classique Ring(2 ½ c.t.w) ��$145 + S&H
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POPSCI.COM100 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
REACHING FOR THE MOONAPRIL 1968
With the Gemini-Agena Docking Simulator
[above], trainees in the Apollo program
practiced joining the lunar lander and the rocket
that would power them back to Earth. Using
joysticks, astronauts aligned mock thrusters
that pivoted on supports.
DESERT DRIVINGJULY 1971
Apollo 16 astronauts John Young and Charlie Duke
used the moonlike desert near Flagstaff, Arizona,
to hone their rover-driving skills. But the Earth
buggy wasn’t a perfect simulator: Because of the
reduced gravity, hitting a small rock on the moon
would bounce the ride a distance of up to 20 feet.
GROUNDED FLIGHTAUGUST 1979
Still in use today, the Shuttle Mission Simulator
featured computer-generated images and
vibrations that captured the feel of spaceflight—
as well as hundreds of potential malfunctions.
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Beginning in 1978, NASA started choosing astronauts based on Earth-bound
skills, such as engineering and medicine, that qualified them to perform
experiments and to work outside the shuttle. Many of the students were
strictly mission specialists, with duties that included overseeing the emer-
gency medical supplies or operating a robotic arm that moved satellites in
orbit. They all shared a few unusual bits of training, however. They had the
unnerving experience of practicing repairs using nitrogen-jet propulsion, a
program in 1984 that was determined to be too risky and retired that same
year. Astronauts also curled up inside a “rescue ball,” an escape pod piloted
by a jetpack-wearing compatriot. The ball was deemed impractical but is now
used to evaluate astronauts (presumably by terrifying them). Read about the
training of tomorrow’s astronauts on page 42.—Carina Storrs
FEBRUARY 1982
FUTURE THENfrom the popular science archivesTHE
FLOATING THROUGH: MORE ASTRONAUT-TRAINING STORIES THROUGH THE YEARS
Space Specialists
See allof POPSCI’s
137 years
at popsci.com/archives
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