Popular science usa 2013 01 by Science and Technology

CHINA

BULLETS THAT SOLVE

CRIME PG. 24

THE SECRET ARSENAL

2013

PREDICTIONS

Hackers Hit Your Phone A Global Space Race Stem Cells for All

PLUS

Top Stories of 2012

THE HELMET THAT CAN SAVE FOOTBALL

PG. 50

PROMOTION

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JANUARY 2013 Volume 282 No. 1

FEATURES

contents

The Helmet Wars Americans suffer 3.8 million sports-related concussions each year. Can we build a better device to protect the brain? By Tom Foster

The Year in Science The big stories to watch for in 2013, plus a look back at last yearÕs highlights.

China’s Secret Arsenal Inside the Chinese military buildup.

T R AV I S R AT H B O N E ; O N T H E C O V E R : N I C K K A L O T E R A K I S

By Peter W. Singer

Access videos, animations, and more with the POPSCI Interactive app. Hover your smartphone over pages with this icon to launch the extras.

DEPARTM EN TS

04 05 06 73 84

From the Editor Peer Review Megapixels: An explosion on the sun FYI: Can antiperspirant make you hotter? The Future Then

WHAT’S NEW 09 Skis for any slope

10 12 14 16 17 18

The Goods: A quiet keyboard, and more FordÕs practical plug-in hybrid Slimmer speakers with ferrofluid Tools that clean up after themselves A disaster-proof hard drive The death of channel-surfing

HEADLINES 21 Why large predators are invading cities 24 The crime-solving bullet

26 Infographic: The heat records of 2012 28 A tiny sub that swims through veins 30 The future of 3-D printing and copyright HOW 2.0 61 Inside a DIY covered wagon 64 A remote-controlled cyborg cockroach 67 The heat-detecting flashlight 68 When itÕs okay to yank out flash drives 69 Turn a VCR into a computer interface

JANUARY 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

FROM THE EDI TOR THE FUTURE NOW

Editor-in-Chief Jacob Ward Creative Director Sam Syed Executive Editor Cliff Ransom Managing Editor Jill C. Shomer EDITORIAL Articles Editor Jennifer Bogo Senior Editors Seth Fletcher, Martha Harbison Projects Editor Dave Mosher Senior Associate Editor Corinne Iozzio Associate Editor Susannah F. Locke Assistant Editor Amber Williams Editorial Assistant Rose Pastore Editorial Production Manager Felicia Pardo Copy Editor Kelly Borgeson Proofreader Chris Simpson Ideas Editor Luke Mitchell Contributing Editors Lauren Aaronson, Eric Adams, Brooke Borel, Tom Clynes, Theodore Gray, Eric Hagerman, Mike Haney, Joseph Hooper, Preston Lerner, Gregory Mone, Steve Morgenstern, Rena Marie Pacella, Catherine Price, Dave Prochnow, Jessica Snyder Sachs, Rebecca Skloot, Mike Spinelli, Dawn Stover, Elizabeth Svoboda, Kalee Thompson, Phillip Torrone, James Vlahos, Speed Weed Editorial Interns Miriam Kramer, Taylor Kubota, Colleen Park

LUCKY 13

POPULAR SCIENCE

JANUARY 2013

2013 is going to rock because of all the tools and innovations that are about to be available to us. And in 2013, the growing availability of data is going to open business, government, and intelligence to an ever-larger group of citizen-analysts. (I’ll also say that as a new father, I hope this is the year we’ll finally see the adoption of the anti-concussion technology Tom Foster discovered in his exposé of the football helmet industry—an industry that, as he so capably writes, has shown an appalling inability to get on the right side of history.) The financial woes and political rancor of 2012 may have sapped our strength and distracted us from our goals. I’m looking forward to putting all of that behind us. My greatest wish is that 2013 rewards your boldest dreams and brings you endless creative energy. Happy New Year.

ART Art Director Todd Detwiler Photo Editor Thomas Payne Designer, Information Graphics Katie Peek Designer, Motion Graphics Michael Moreno Senior Designer Ashley Smestad Digital Producer Griffin Plonchak Digital Art Director David Quaranta Digital Imaging Hiroki Tada POPSCI.COM Online Content Director Suzanne LaBarre Senior Editor Paul Adams Associate Editor Dan Nosowitz Web Intern Krislyn Placide Contributing Writers Rebecca Boyle, Clay Dillow, Emily Elert, Colin Lecher BONNIER TECHNOLOGY GROUP

Vice President/Group Publisher Steven B. Grune Associate Publisher Anthony Ruotolo Executive Assistant Christopher Graves Associate Publisher, Marketing Mike Gallic Financial Director Tara Bisciello Northeast Advertising Office David Ginsberg, Caitlyn Welch Photo Manager Sara Schiano Ad Assistant Amanda Smyth Northwest Manager Jay Monaghan 415-777-4417 Midwest Manager John Marquardt 312-252-2838 Ad Assistant Kelsie Phillippo West Coast Account Managers Robert Hoeck, Bob Meth 310-227-8963 Ad Assistant Janice Nagel Detroit Manager Edward A. Bartley 248-502-2172 Ad Assistant Diane Pahl Southern Manager Jason A. Albaum jason@afatlanta.com Classified Advertising Sales Chip Parham 212-779-5492 Direct Response Sales Alycia Isabelle 860-542-5180 Advertising Director, Digital Alexis Costa Digital Operations Manager Rochelle Rodriguez Digital Project Coordinator Elizabeth Besada Senior Integrated Sales Development Manager Kat Collins Integrated Sales Development Managers Kate Gregory, Kelly Martin Group Director, Creative Services/Events Mike Iadanza Director of Events Michelle Cast Special Events Manager Erica Johnson Marketing Art Director Jonathan Berger Promotions Manager Eshonda Caraway-Evans Consumer Marketing Director Bob Cohn Associate Directors Lauren Rosenblatt, Andrew Schulman Senior Planning Manager Raymond Ward New-Business Managers Jeff Shafer, Elona Zejnati Retention Manager Hong Truong Fulfillment Manager Hemarie Vazquez Single-Copy Sales Director Vicki Weston Publicity Manager Caroline Andoscia Caroline@andoscia.com Human Resources Director Kim Putman Production Manager Erika Hernandez Group Production Director Laurel Kurnides

JACO B WA R D jacob.ward@popsci.com | @_jacobward_

PS If you happen to receive a tablet for the holidays this year, may I suggest an app? POPULAR SCIENCE’s Evolver makes you the star of the history of human evolution. With new image-mapping technology, we show you what you might have looked like as everything from an early Australopithecus to the last of the Neanderthals. Search for it on the iTunes store.

Chairman Jonas Bonnier Chief Executive Offi cer Terry Snow Chief Financial Offi cer Randall Koubek Vice President, Corporate Sales John Driscoll Chief Brand Development Offi cer Sean Holzman Vice President, Consumer Marketing Bruce Miller Vice President, Production Lisa Earlywine Vice President, Information Technology Shawn Larson Vice President, Corporate Communications Dean Turcol Publishing Consultant Martin S. Walker General Counsel Jeremy Thompson

For reprints e-mail: reprints@bonniercorp.com FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SUBSCRIPTION QUESTIONS, please use our website: www.popsci.com/cs. You may also call 386-597-4279. Or you can write to Popular Science, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235

MARIUS BUGGE

BELIEVE 2013 will be a grand year. Big things are coming. First of all, astronomers expect a cloud of gas roughly three times the mass of Earth to begin falling into a supermassive black hole in September. It’s not just going to be amazing (blasts of x-rays and radio waves!), it will be the first time such a thing happens within range of human instrumentation, which means we get to watch. This is also the first year we expect private spaceflight to begin delivering payloads into orbit at the regularly scheduled intervals with which we move big things around here on Earth. Also, the post-Higgs era begins this year. Like I say, lots to look forward to. But what will make 2013 truly grand is not the big, cosmic stuff. 2013 is going to rock because of all the tools and innovations that are about to be available to us. This year, you and I will gain access to a new investing mechanism. A provision of the JOBS Act that takes effect this year makes it possible for any American to offer an equity stake in an enterprise over the Internet. That sort of activity could democratize investment in the same way that technology has democratized media. Anyone from a fledgling chef to a garage inventor can issue shares in his or her dreams, and receive payment for them from all over the country. (We explain this further on page 39.) The rise of 3-D printing will let inventors and designers prototype their own creations in new materials with new properties.

PEEr rEVI EW

A O F N R

N S I B G

D S N L Y

R I I A B

E A S T E C K O X ‘

I R N E E

ProPheT or frauD? Some readers called us nuts to publish a story about Andrea Rossi’s controversial cold-fusion machine in our November issue. Others cheered us for spotlighting a stigmatized branch of science. Either way, the underdog tale resonated with garage scientists everywhere. THE FUTURE NOW

MAIN OFFICE

A lone Italian inventor says he has built a machine that can power the world. Could the answer to humanity’s energy troubles be so simple?

2 Park Ave., 9th Floor New York, NY 10016 popsci.com

BY S TE V E FE ATHERS TONE

POPULAR SCIENCE

NOVEMBER 2012

NEW SUBSCRIPTIONS

Inﬁnite Energy?

popsci.com/subscribe SUBSCRIPTION INQUIRIES

I applaud Steve Featherstone’s article “Andrea Rossi’s Black Box” [November]. Low-energy nuclear reaction could revolutionize heatusing industries and even propulsion and transportation. This energy breakthrough, combined with the use of advanced materials, could usher in a new era of growth and prosperity. Jim Dunn Millbury, Mass. Everything that Andrea Rossi says or does screams “scam!” The criteria for proving cold fusion should include a reactor that makes dozens or hundreds of watts for days or weeks without fresh fuel, with an output-power-to-input-power ratio of 3:1. Everything should be tested independent of the inventor. None of this has ever been done for Rossi’s machine. maryyugo via popsci.com Dear Mr. Steve Featherstone, I read the article in Popular Science. It is nice and honest. Wonderful photos. Warm Regards, Andrea Rossi Popular Science @PopSci / 16 NOv / If you were to remake a famous building today, what would you do differently? David Hamilton @thatfooldave / 16 NOv / I’d rebuild the Empire State Building as a giant glass vertical farm that gives New York some food security. Shaun Lopez @Slop44 / 16 NOv / Statue of Liberty. I would put her in a biz suit and put an iPad where the book is, but I would leave the torch, of course!

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f rom P oP s c I hq

Our New Year’s Resolutions • No more hashtags • Build an icosahedron with Buckyballs • Learn to make soft electronics • Commandeer Edwin Olson’s [“The Brilliant Ten,” 2012] robot army • Spend more time in zero gravity • Brew a wormwood pale ale

Awesome Abandoned Things on Our Desks • Model of a human lower leg wearing a heavy jackboot • Two pistol bayonets • Catapult that hurls (toy) cats • Jar of 11-month-old, vacuumpreserved mashed potatoes • Nerf machine gun

LETTERS

To the editor: letters@popsci.com FYI questions: fyi@popsci.com Ask a Geek: h20@popsci.com Story queries: queries@popsci.com Comments may be edited for length and clarity. We regret that we cannot answer unpublished letters.

PopSci.com’s Top Stories of 2012 1. “First-Ever Images of Atoms Moving Inside a Molecule” 2. “Is Typophobia a Real Phobia?” 3. “A Working Assault Rifle Made With a 3-D Printer”

4. “German Hackers Are Building a DIY Space Program to Put Their Own Uncensored Internet Into Space” 5. “Meet the Climate Change Denier Who Became the Voice of Hurricane Sandy on Wikipedia”

Senior web editor Paul Adams heated the potatoes to 252°F to test how well he can kill pathogens in canned food. He will eat these on Feb. 1, 2013.

january 2013

This product is from sustainably managed forests and controlled sources.

POPULAR SCIENCE

NASA/GSFC/SDO

MEGAPIXELS

POPULAR SCIENCE

January 2013

Star Burst st ory b y Taylor Kubota

On August 31, 2012, more than one billion tons of plasma exploded from the sun’s surface and began speeding toward Earth at approximately three million mph. Unlike a solar flare, which is a burst of extreme radiation, a coronal mass ejection (CME) is an eruption of million-degree electrified gas. Because the sun spins faster at its equator than at its poles, its magnetic fields twist to the point of breaking as often as three times a day. When they reconnect, the energy involved pushes plasma clouds into space. A camera aboard NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite captured this 200,000foot filament right before it detached; a 304-angstrom-wavelength filter enabled scientists to see the plasma. Three days later, the CME produced a benign effect: auroras over the Northern Hemisphere.

January 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

IF A STOCK FALLS IN THE MARKET AND YOU’RE NOT THERE TO HEAR IT,

DOES IT MAKE A SOUND?

554 552 550 548 546 544 542 540 538 536 3

MACD

2 1 0 -1 -2

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Disaster-proof storage page 17

PLUS: Power tools that clean up their own messes page 16

EDITED B Y Corinne Iozzio wHAT sNEw@PoPscI.coM

Skis for Any Slope With a new core material, skis ride as well in powder as they do on ice sToRY B Y Berne Broudy P HoToG RAP H B Y Claire Benoist

U Wagner Custom 2-4 Ultralight Core Skis WEIGHT

3.8 pounds (70.9-inch ski) PRICE $1,900

ntil now, there hasn’t been an all-mountain ski that rides well in any conditions. Skis must be either sturdy and narrow to chop through icy snow or flexible and wide to glide across powder. The core of a ski determines its weight and strength, and thus the conditions it’s best suited for. Engineers at Wagner Custom have created a core that’s strong yet light, and the first skis to incorporate it, the 2-4 Ultralights, are fit for just about any mountain. To create a core 40 percent lighter and 30 percent stronger than traditional hardwood, Wagner engineers pressure-soak soft, light East Coast timber in a epoxy resin derived from paper mill waste. When hardened, the resin turns the wood into a plasticized block. A double helix of carbon fiber woven around the core adds even more lateral (i.e., turning) strength. The resulting skis are so light they could offer relief from hip-andknee-straining hardwood models, and so versatile they could replace stacks of skis in lodges and garages.

JANUARY 2013

POPU L AR S C I E N C E

WHAT’ S NEW

Under three ounces, the Hero3 is the highest-performing video camera of its size. It shoots in 4K—a resolution normally used in cinematic cameras. Action-seekers can snap the Hero3 to helmets with a special mount or film from afar using a remote. GoPro Hero3 $400 4

A dozen great ideas in gear E D I T E D B Y Amber Williams

Photographers usually carry extra memory cards, but with the SDXC, there’s no need: At a quarter terabyte, it’s the highest-capacity card in the world. To create more space, engineers placed the storage cells on top of one another, rather than alongside. Lexar 256GB SDXC Memory Card $900

The Ouroboros wireless mouse is the fastest responder on the market. A laser and optical sensor detect the tracking surface 10 times quicker than competitors. The resulting one-millisecond response rate puts gamers at a distinct advantage. Razer Ouroboros $130

POPULAR SCIENCE

At less than three pounds, the Sherpa 50 is the lightest solar panel and recharger available. Six hours of sunlight fully charges the 13-volt lithium-ion battery, which can power a USB-connected cellphone for up to 50 hours. Goal Zero Sherpa 50 $250

JANUARY 2013

C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P L E F T : C O U R T E S Y G O P R O ; C O U R T E S Y M AT I A S ; C O U R T E S Y 4 5 N R T H ; C L A I R E B E N O I S T ; C O U R T E S Y W O R X ; C L A I R E B E N O I S T ; C O U R T E S Y P O G O S E AT ; C O U R T E S Y B R O T H E R ; CLAIRE BENOIST; COURTESY GOAL ZERO; COURTESY RAZER; COURTESY LEXAR

Bicyclists don’t always break for cold weather. Wölvhammer biking boots will keep their toes toasty. The fleece-lined inner boot has a two-millimeter layer of Aerogel to insulate against a pedal’s cold metal clip. The outer shoe, made from waterproof Cordura, has a polyurethane-coated mudguard. 45NRTH Wölvhammer $325

Typing on a Quiet Pro Keyboard produces just 45 decibels of sound—the noise level in a library—making it the quietest mechanical keyboard ever built. To reduce clacking, engineers installed 1.5-millimeter rubber dampers underneath each key. Matias Quiet Pro Keyboard $150

At 11 inches deep, the MFC-J4510DW has the smallest footprint of any multifunction inkjet printer. Designers reoriented the paper tray from the traditional portrait to landscape, so it sits entirely inside the printer. And the jets cover more of the page at once, making printing faster. Brother MFC-J4510DW $200

With the Pogoseat app, fans in an arena can upgrade their view of the action mid-game. After picking an empty spot from an overheadseating chart, users pay the difference in ticket price from within the app and move on down. Pogoseat Free

The 73Ci shredder is virtually jam-proof. Paper fed into the mouth encounters a sensor, which measures thickness and signals the motor to run at the appropriate torque—too much paper and it shuts off. Fifty-six pairs of rotating blades cut each sheet into 399 pieces. Fellowes 73Ci $200

Notes taken with a LiveScribe Sky pen automatically sync to Evernote. As a writer scribbles, a sensor on the pen’s tip tracks movement. A Wi-Fi radio then uploads files to the cloud, so users can access their notebooks anywhere. LiveScribe Sky Smartpen From $200

With the Worx SD SemiAutomatic Driver, DIYers will never fumble to change screwdrivers again. A rotating cartridge holds up to six tips; users cock back the top of the driver to spin the cartridge and release a spring, which pushes the next one into place. Worx SD SemiAutomatic Driver $50

With enough spin, a tennis ball that looks like it’s soaring out of bounds will drop right inside the court. A player using the Wilson Steam racket will add more than 200 revolutions per minute to his shot. Engineers decreased the traditional number of horizontal strings by four; with fewer strings to flex, the remaining ones snap back faster on impact. Wilson Steam 99S $220

A D D I T I o NA L R E P o R T I NG B Y Miriam Kramer, Taylor Kubota, and Colleen Park

JA NUA RY 2013

POPU L AR S C I E N CE

Detroit

WHAT ’ S NEW

620 MILES Driving range of a fully fueled C-Max Energi

FI V E FEAT URES

The Ford C-Max Energi is roomy, affordable, and, best of all, gets 108 miles per gallon sT o R Y B Y Lawrence Ulrich

1 Gas-Electric Powertrain The C-Max Energi combines a pair of electric motors and a 2.0-liter four-cylinder Atkinson-cycle gasoline engine (the same ultraeﬃcient design used in the Toyota Prius). Together, they can push the car to a top speed of 102 mph; the C-Max can hit 85 mph on electricity alone.

2 Aﬀordable, Compact Battery Engineers gave the C-Max a relatively small 7.6-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack, which Ford assembles in Michigan. The Chevrolet Volt, by comparison, runs on a 16-kilowatt-hour battery. As a result, the Energi gets 21 miles of all-electric range to the Volt’s 38—but it’s $10,000 cheaper.

3 Custom Power Control Using a button mounted on the center stack, the driver can mix and match electric and gas power with three settings: EV Now (electric-only driving), Auto EV (combined gas and electric power), and EV Later (gas engine only).

TWIN CHARGERS The C-Max is available in conventional hybrid and plug-in versions; Ford expects the plugin to account for 20 percent of U.S. C-Max sales.

4 Breathing Room The ﬁve-passenger hatchback has 10 more cubic feet of interior space than the Chevrolet Volt and nearly double the cargo area.

2013 Ford C-Max Energi POWER TRAIN Gas-electric plug-in hybrid FUEL ECONOMY 108 mpg equivalent ELECTRIC-ONLY RANGE 21 miles PRICE From $29,995

POPULAR SCIENCE

JANUARY 2013

5 Quick Charger Like Ford’s Focus Electric, the C-Max uses a 6.6-kilowatt onboard charger to ﬁll its battery. Plugged into a 240-volt outlet, the charger ﬁlls the battery at a rate twice as fast as the Nissan Leaf, going from empty to full in two and a half hours.

COURTESY FORD MOTOR CO.

The Practical Plug-In

lug-in cars save gas and cut pollution, but at a cost. The Nissan Leaf has a maximum driving range of about 75 miles. The Chevrolet Volt seats just four people. And at nearly $40,000 apiece, neither is cheap. The Ford C-Max Energi plug-in hybrid, by contrast, seats five and combines gas power and a grid-charged lithium-ion battery to reach the EPA-certified equivalent of 108 mpg. It goes 620 miles on a full gas tank and battery. And at $29,995 (after tax credits), it is by far the most affordable plug-in on the market. It’s the kind of car that could, just maybe, take automotive electrification mainstream.

$199 Stunning HD display â&#x20AC;˘ Exclusive Dolby audio â&#x20AC;˘ Ultra-fast Wi-Fi 22 million movies, TV shows, songs, games, apps, magazines, books and more

45 YEARS OF MEMORY FOAM 1966 NASA cushions 1977 football helmets 1991 mattresses 2002 walking shoes 2012 headphone earcups

WHAT ’ S NEW TECH REBORN

LIQUID SEAL Magnetic ﬂuid [inset] holds the speaker’s voice coil and diaphragm steady.

Sony BVD-N790W Blu-ray Home Cinema SPEAKER DIMENSIONS 10 by 3.5 by 3.8 inches

Speakers From Space

FREQUENCY RANGE 87.5–108 MHz PRICE $500

A NASA-developed liquid allows for clearer sound from smaller packages

POPULAR SCIENCE

JANUARY 2013

T H R E E MOR E

ALTERNATIVE SPEAKER DESIGNS UNMONDAY 4.3L No matter which side the hexagonal Unmonday speaker sits on, its ceramic housing will dampen vibrations. Based on how the speaker is positioned, an accelerometer tells it to act as part of a mono, stereo, or surround setup. $890 (import)

ORIGINAL KOOSTIK Inspired by acoustic guitars, the Koostik passive ampliﬁer quadruples an iPhone’s speaker volume. Two hemispherical sound chambers concentrate audio much like a megaphone before sound waves exit through front-facing holes. $95

AUDIOMASONS COMET The Comet produces sound that’s 57 percent less distorted than that of a traditional wood speaker. Designers embedded the two drivers in a solid block of stone, a substance that won’t absorb sound waves. $1,400 (pair) — T A Y L O R K U B O T A

INSETS: COURTESY SONY (2)

t the beginning of the space program, one big problem facing NASA engineers was finding a way to move rocket fuel into engines in space with no gravity to guide the flow. They developed an additive called ferrofluid, a liquid infused with magnetite particles that they could manipulate with a magnetic field. Companies now use the substance to control parts in everything from racecar suspensions to hard drives. This year, designers at Sony found a new use for it: building slim speakers that produce louder, clearer sound than any others their size. Designers replaced a key speaker component, the damper, with a microns-thin ring of ferrofluid. Speakers generate sound waves when a magnet moves a voice coil back and forth to push against a diaphragm; the damper ensures that the spring doesn’t wobble and that the diaphragm doesn’t overextend. But dampers cause friction, which creates sound-distorting vibrations and can lower a speaker’s overall volume. Ferrofluid holds the coil and diaphragm in place, without friction. Without a damper in the way, the s To R Y BY speakers can produce Corinne Iozzio louder—up to three decibels—clearer sounds PH o To GR APH BY Claire Benoist across all frequencies.

You spend hours downloading apps.

Fortunately, it only takes 15 minutes to see how much you could

SAVE WITH GEICO. You’re the Baron of Bandwidth. Te Duke of Downloads. But here’s one more app you need to get: the new GEICO App. Get a quote for auto insurance. See what you could save. Have an entire insurance company at your ﬁngertips. All for free, and available at the Apple® Store and Android Market. It could be the best download since that bird game.

Get a free quote. 1-800-947-AUTO (2886)

or call your local GEICO agent AU TO • H O M E • R E N T E R S • M O TO R C YC L E • RV • B OAT • P WC GEICO App for the Android Market is available for mobile phones only at this time. Some discounts, coverages, payment plans and features are not available in all states or all GEICO companies. Motorcycle coverage is underwritten by GEICO Indemnity Company. Homeowners, renters, boat and PWC coverages are written through non-afﬁliated insurance companies and are secured through the GEICO Insurance Agency, Inc. GEICO is a registered service mark of Government Employees Insurance Company, Washington, D.C. 20076; a Berkshire Hathaway Inc. subsidiary. GEICO Gecko image © 1999-2012. © 2012 GEICO

0.3 The size [in microns] of the smallest airborne particle that a HEPA filter will trap 4 The average diameter of a strand of spider silk 10 The size of a silica particle

WHAT ’ S NEW TECH T REND

Dustless Drilling

THE TREND A rotary hammer, which simultaneously turns and punches a drill bit, is the ideal tool for drilling holes into brick and concrete. But making those holes also creates a huge, powdery mess. Snap-on HEPA vacuums developed by tool manufacturers can now trap dust right at the source.

Tools with attachable vacuums clean up after themselves

s T o R Y B Y Sal Vaglica P HoT o GR A PH B Y Claire Benoist

DeWalt DC233KLDH Despite a huge 36-volt battery pack, the DeWalt DC233KLDH ﬁts into tight spaces. The vacuum canister snaps onto the bottom of the hammer, instead of its side. Both the hammer and vacuum connect to the same power source, so pulling the trigger simultaneously starts the drilling and the suction. $899

POPULAR SCIENCE

JANUARY 2013

THE BENEFIT Pulverized concrete contains silica, a known carcinogen. In the past, DIYers had to tether their tools to freestanding shop vacs to keep the dust contained. They can now attach a compact vacuum directly to the tool. Suction from the vacuum pulls debris through a nozzle near the tip of the bit, into aluminum tubing, and directly into a canister. The only cleanup required is dumping the waste.

Milwaukee M12 HammerVac 2306-22 The M12 is the only vacuum that can attach to any corded or cordless rotary hammer—regardless of brand. Users adjust a metal strap to ﬁt over the drill head, and a jaw on the strap grabs onto the 3.3-pound vacuum, which draws power from its own 12-volt lithium-ion battery. $250

Makita LXRH011 Though one 18-volt battery powers both the vacuum and the hammer in Makita’s system, a single charge lasts 50 percent longer than on the company’s prior vacuum-less hammer. To extend the runtime, engineers swapped the old motor for a brushless model; without brushes, there’s less internal friction for the motor to work against. $539

FREE-FALLEN AND SURVIVED Apple iPad protected by G-Form case 100,000 feet

128,100 feet Felix Baumgartner protected by Stratos pressure suit

W H AT’S NEW Steel shell

HOW I T WOR K S

Insulation

ioSafe N2 MAX CAPACITY 2 drives, 4 terabytes each DIMENSIONS 9.1 by 5.9 by 11.5 inches PRICE From $599

Aluminum barrier Hard drives sToRY B Y Matt Saﬀord

Ventilation system

P HoToG RAP H B Y Sam Kaplan

I C O N I L L U S T R AT I O N S : G U Y S TA U B E R

Coming Soon: Million-Year Archiving Hitachi engineers have developed a method to store data indeﬁnitely on glass. A femtosecond laser carves data as code— 40 megabytes’ worth for every square inch— into heat- and water-resistant quartz glass. A programmed optical microscope is used to decode the data. The system is ideal for government archives and libraries, but a consumer version could be viable too. — M I R I A M KRAMER

The Indestructible Drive Personal data storage built to withstand anything

In normal conditions, a hard drive is the most aﬀordable and eﬃcient way to back up music, video, and photo libraries. Yet most drives—typically made from lightweight materials such as plastic—won’t last through a disaster. The ioSafe N2 will. Designers wrapped the system’s dual hard drives in materials that protect it against the worst.

Failure By default, the dual hard drives mirror each other, so if one drive fails, the other will have a copy of every byte lost. (This of course cuts the max storage from eight terabytes to four.) In the event of a complete meltdown, ioSafe will pay for forensic data recovery.

Drops and Theft A 0.05-inch steel shell surrounds the entire N2 and protects the drive from falls. The shell also helps deter thieves; an accessory allows users to padlock the front door and also bolt the drive to the ﬂoor or a tabletop.

Heat An inch of custom insulation protects the N2 from temperatures up to 1,550°F. Designers embedded water molecules into the layer; when the temperature rises above 160°F, the droplets evaporate and pull damaging heat away from the drives.

Fire The N2’s ventilation system circulates air during everyday use, but prevents flames from passing through. A fan pulls air from the N2’s front through an S-shaped vent, and out the rear exhaust. The angle of the vent makes it hard for flames to infiltrate the system.

JANUARY 2013

Water IoSafe says the N2 will keep data safe for as long as three days in up to 10 feet of corrosive saltwater. Designers wrapped the hard drives in a 0.07-inchthick watertight aluminum barrier. Users can remove a gasketed cap if they need to swap out the drives.

POPULAR SCIENCE

hOUrs viewed per persOn, per mOnTh

100 Television 38 Netflix 23 All other Web video

What ’ s neW

OUTLO OK

Predictive Television TVs will soon tell us exactly what we want to watch— no channel surﬁng required

wenty years ago, Bruce Springsteen lamented “57 channels, and nothin’ on.” Today, 57 channels would be a relief: Between cable, broadcast, and Web services, we have tens of thousands of individual programs to choose from, and no good way to figure out what to watch. In the early days of the Internet, surfers were just as confounded. Then search engines arrived and made it easy to find information. A similar change is now occurring in television—and it promises to deliver viewers from painstaking channel surfing to perfectly tailored programming. Right now, viewers have plenty of help sorting though individual catalogs. Netflix, for instance, uses an algorithm that translates viewers’ ratings into suggestions, which are reportedly accurate within half a star 75 percent of the time. Comcast is also starting to implement recommendations for its cable subscribers. But each video service—be it Netflix or Comcast—is an island; no matter how precise their recommendations get, they still exclude programming from other sources. Some set-top-box companies have taken the first steps toward creating broader recommendation engines. Last fall, Roku and Google TV debuted search functions that index across several sources, including Netflix, HBOGo, and Amazon Instant Video. And a few services, including the Peel remotecontrol tablet app, can make recommendations based on the shows and genres that users flag as their favorites. The trouble is that the searches are limited,

P O P U La R sCIe nC e

January 2013

s to ry by Mark Hachman

illustration b y Michael Cho

right now, each video service—be it netflix or Comcast—is an island. and viewers still have to do all the work— tell an app who they are, what they like, and what they’re looking for. That may not be the case for much longer. Sam Rosen, a technology analyst at ABI Research, says that in the coming years, smart set-top boxes will automatically learn preferences. These services will keep tabs on a viewer’s choices and make recommendations based on them, the same way that Google and Bing use a person’s search history to rank search results. Video recommendations could eventually surpass the sensitivity of Web-based

search engines, and adjust for each person in a household. In the average U.S. home, four people share the same TV screen. Disparate ages, tastes, and interests mean suggestions based on a single set might range from Dinosaur Train to The Grudge. Microsoft Research, for example, has developed Kinect-based facial recognition that will help the console detect who’s just plopped down on the sofa. From there, the system could select movies and shows specifically for that person, providing each viewer with a custom, automatic listing of what he wants to see. No surfing necessary.

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Embry-Riddle is something of a star in the world of ﬂight – we count current and former NASA astronauts among our alumni, for example. Yet much of our research makes life better right here on our home planet. Embry-Riddle is pursuing green automobile technology and looking at ways to transform wind and ocean currents into clean, renewable energy. We also foresee low-cost, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can monitor wildlife habitat and gather hurricane data. Yes, at Embry-Riddle we aim for the stars. But we always keep home close to our hearts.

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E DITE D BY Susannah F. Locke

EVERETT COLLECTION

Wild Among Us Why coyotes, bears, and mountain lions are moving into cities, and what to do about it s To R Y BY John Mahoney

HEADLINEs@ P oP sc I.coM

T’S BEEN a while since he tried to count them all, but Stan Gehrt estimates that more than 2,000 coyotes make a comfortable living in the Chicago metropolitan area today. And in the 12 years he’s spent tracking the animals with radio and GPS collars, Gehrt, a wildlife ecologist at Ohio State University, has witnessed some remarkable adaptations. Suburban coyotes, like the pack in a residential area a few miles from O’Hare airport, have learned to live in much smaller territories than they do in rural places.

Downtown coyotes, which roam among the towers and traffic of the Chicago Loop, thrive in the city by hunting enough small rodents to feed themselves and their young. Some urban coyotes have even been spotted crossing streets in busy traffic—at the light, looking both ways, just like human Chicagoans. What’s happening in Chicago is happening around the world, and not just with coyotes. Gehrt and other researchers in his field are convinced that urban areas should prepare to make room for large carnivores. Coyotes, which live in

JANUARY 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

THE URBAN COYOTE DIET (Most frequently to least frequently found in scats) rodents, plants, fruit, garbage, pets (cats and dogs)

HEADL I NE S THE TR END

POPULAR SCIENCE

JANUARY 2013

BUT I JUST WANTED A SANDWICH! Animal control oﬃcers nab a coyote that was found hanging out in a Chicago Quiznos restaurant in 2007.

As we make our cities greener, they become more attractive to humans and animals alike. Gehrt and two other wildlife ecologists traveled to Broomfield to help officials find out what was causing the attacks, and the report that they wrote serves as a template for other cities dealing with carnivores. Much of the advice is common sense. Taking away easy meals—garbage and outdoor pet food—can help control issues with any species. In Nevada, for example, bear-proofing garbage cans and dumpsters has helped decrease complaints by two thirds since 2008. Ultimately, though, the key to living with urban carnivores might be to return to an older, more natural relationship between humans and wildlife—one in

which they are genuinely scared of us. Gehrt’s report urges anyone who spots a coyote to shout, throw rocks, or even shoot it with a paintball gun. When a large predator loses its instinctive fear of humans, after all, that animal becomes more likely to attack. Gehrt says that culling truly fearless animals is necessary for maintaining a harmonious urban life with coyotes—a life that he sees as inevitable. “The question becomes, to what degree are we going to tolerate the risk, and what kind of adjustments to our lives are we willing to make?” Gehrt says. “Because we can’t get rid of them.”

3-D Reproduction For the first time, scientists have filmed the movements of sperm in 3-D. In addition to swimming forward, the sex cells travel in three defined patterns, shown here.

Helical path

1.1 sec 0.5 sec 0.0 sec

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every state but Hawaii, have appeared in cities from Los Angeles to New York. This spring, biologists in Los Angeles radio-collared the first mountain lion ever found in Griffith Park, the home of the Hollywood sign. Complaints about bears in Nevada around Lake Tahoe increased tenfold between 1997 and 2007. Red foxes have colonized London. These animals are going to great lengths to live in human territory. Two years ago in London, building staff found a fox living on the 72nd floor of the unfinished Shard skyscraper, where it had been living on construction workers’ discarded food scraps. The new territory is changing animals’ behavior, too. Some bears in Lake Tahoe, well fed on garbage year-round, now neglect to hibernate in winter. It’s reasonable to assume that these animals are moving to the city because they’re being displaced by climate change and habitat destruction, but that’s only part of the explanation. One of the biggest factors is that there are more large carnivores than there used to be—primarily, Gehrt says, because of successful conservation efforts. As we make our cities greener, they become more attractive to humans and animals alike. Finally, the relationship between humans and large predators is changing. “We’re now seeing generations of certain carnivores that have had fairly light amounts of persecution by people,” Gehrt says. “They may view cities quite a bit differently than their ancestors did 50 years ago. Then, if they saw a human, there was a good chance they were going to get shot.” While the new inhabitants keep their distance from people most of the time, conflict is inevitable when these animals and humans share space. Sometimes the conflict is between the invading predators and our own domesticated animals. A few years ago in a Chicago suburb, an elderly woman fought off a coyote that tried to attack her leashed poodle in a mall parking lot. More serious clashes are rare but not unheard of. In a two-month span in 2011, a coyote attacked children in the Denver suburb of Broomfield on three separate occasions.

1892 First use of fingerprints to solve a murder

HEADL I NE S THE BIG FI X

T HE S C A L E

Explosivity

Bullet Proof The clue-catching cartridge

The energy released in an explosion is measured in TNT equivalents. 1 lb. gunpowder 0.0000003 kilotons TNT 1 stick dynamite 0.0000005 kt TNT

THE PROBLEM Sherlock Holmes could look at a gun shell and know exactly what went down. The firearm? The shooter’s stance? The culprit? All revealed with a glance. In the real world, using a shell to solve a crime is a painstaking, and often unsuccessful, process. Investigators may be able to match a bullet with a gun type, but that doesn’t necessarily lead to the person who shot it. Useful fingerprints are rare, and the heat of firing a weapon can destroy DNA evidence.

1 gallon gasoline 0.00003 kt TNT Oklahoma City truck bomb (1995) 0.002 kt TNT

THE SOLUTION A team of nanomaterials scientists led by Paul Sermon, of Brunel University in England, has developed a bullet that captures the DNA of anyone who touches it—and leaves a tracer on the person, too.

1 North Korean nuclear test (2009) 2 kt TNT

Scientists dipped a bullet in a formaldehyde-urea resin, creating a microscopic scratchy surface that snags skin cells. When fired in lab tests, the bullet retained 53 percent more analyzable DNA than an untreated one.

“Little Boy,” the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima (1945) 15 kt TNT

2 The team needed a compound that would tag whoever handled a bullet, something both sticky and rare enough to be recognizable. They started with a natural source: pollen. Because of its rough texture, pollen clings to skin and clothing; some grains even remain after a handshake or a run through a washing machine. They’re also invisible to the human eye. Pollen alone, however, isn’t unique enough to pinpoint a criminal. So the team coated Easter lily pollen with a 63-nanometer layer of titanium dioxide—a combination that doesn’t exist in nature. A bullet painted with thousands of the modified pollen grains would mark a shooter’s finger when he loads the bullet. To have any effect on crime, governments would have to require that ammunition manufacturers make modified bullets; Sermon’s team is in talks with U.K. officials.

POPULAR SCIENCE

JANUARY 2013

Soviet nuclear test of “Tsar Bomba”—the largest bomb ever detonated (1961) 50,000 kt TNT

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2012 HIGH-TEMPERATURE RECORDS: 27,631

HEADL I NE S BY THE NUMBERS

The oldest high-temperature record that fell in 2012 was beaten when the mercury hit 87°F at Elko Regional Airport in Nevada on April 22.

The Warmup Dissecting a year of record-breaking heat

s of November, when this issue went to press, 2012 was on track to become the warmest year in the U.S. since 1895, when national record keeping began. From January through October, the 4,451 U.S. weather stations that have been tracking temperatures for at least 30 years measured nearly 28,000 high-temperature records but only 5,200 lows. That’s the largest ratio of high to low records ever. “There is a lot of natural variability in these numbers,” says Claudia Tebaldi, a senior scientist at the independent research organization Climate Central. “But it’s definitely behavior that has the imprint of a warming climate.” Scientists say this trend will continue. An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report published last year predicted that the kind of heat records that fall once every 20 years now will be broken every two years by the end of the century.

The three hottest days were recorded in Death Valley: 128°F on July 12, and 126°F on August 9 and 10.

LOW-TEMPERATURE RECORDS: 5,212 KEY Each circle represents the number of records broken or tied at a weather station from January to October 2012.

sT o RY A ND I LLU s T R AT I o N BY Katie Peek

POPULAR SCIENCE

JANUARY 2013

Sidney Municipal Airport in Nebraska logged 54 record highs, the most of any weather station.

134°F The hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth—Death Valley, California, on July 10, 1913

NINE DECADES OF HIGHS AND LOWS Percentage of high [red] and low [blue] temperature records set from January to October each year. 100% 50% 0% 1922

1952

1982

Wisconsin and 24 other states experienced the warmest March on record.

2012

In March, three Michigan high temperature records were beaten by a margin of 32°F.

A heat wave from June 23 to July 9 produced 324 all-time records, mostly in the Midwest and Southeast. The hottest among them: 118°F in Norton, Kansas, on June 28.

On March 20, some 700 records were tied or broken— the most on a single day in 2012. It was 89°F in Columbia, South Carolina, that day.

A springtime heat wave resulted in the warmest March since record keeping began. July was the single warmest month on record in the U.S.

NUMBER OF DAILY RECORDS 500 250 0 January

February

March

S O U R C E : N AT I O N A L C L I M AT I C D ATA C E N T E R

April

May

June

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September

JANUARY 2013

October

POPULAR SCIENCE

Maximum speed of blood flow through aorta 2.2 MPH Average speed of Amazon River 1.5 MPH

H EADLI N ES BLUEPR INT

Fantastic Voyage A mini sub that could steer through the body

“

A HANDYMAN’S GARAGE SWEEPSTAKES

In the future, tiny vehicles might travel through your body to image your insides, take samples, and deliver drugs. At Stanford University, my colleague Anatoly Yakovlev and I built a prototype of such a device. It’s about the size of Abraham Lincoln’s head on a penny. We power and control the prototype wirelessly by sending radio waves to its twoby-two-millimeter antenna from about two inches away. No battery is required, which is key to miniaturization. Mechanical propulsion is inefficient at this scale. Instead, we use magnetohydrodynamic propulsion, which takes advantage of the fact that an external magnetic field can push an object by creating a Lorentz force on its electrical circuitry. We operate

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the device near a magnet—we imagine the patient lying on a magnetic table—and use radio waves to tell the prototype how to use its electrodes. The electrodes send electrical current through the surrounding fluid, creating a net force that moves the device. With an upward magnetic field, a counterclockwise electrical current pushes the device forward and a clockwise current pushes it backward. By making circuits that create opposing forces on each side, we can also turn the device left or right. With our relatively weak magnet, the prototype moves 0.2 inches per second in a dish of saline. If it were in the blood stream—cleaning out your arteries, for example—you’d need a stronger magnet to overcome the flow of blood. But that is still a ways off. In the near term, we imagine using the device to image the GI tract; there, it wouldn’t need to travel as fast. It could reduce the cost of cancer screenings, and it would be a welcome alternative to at least one traditional method: colonoscopy.” —Daniel Pivonka, an electrical engineer, worked on the tiny vehicle project while a graduate student at Stanford. As told to Flora Lichtman.

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JANUARY 2013

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“Cyberspace, left to itself, will not fulfill the promise of freedom. Left to itself, cyberspace will become a perfect tool of control.” —Lawrence Lessig, from Code 2.0: And Other Laws of Cyberspace

HEADL I NE S F=M A

Clone Wars Music piracy? Who cares. Wait until people start copying iPhones

AST JANUARY, the Swedish BitTorrent tracker Pirate Bay quietly introduced a new category, called Physibles, to its inventory. “We believe that things like three-dimensional printers, scanners, and such are just the first step,” one of the site’s managers wrote at the time. “We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare parts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.” That’s probably an understatement. MakerBot’s $2,199 Replicator 2, which prints small objects from drips of melted bioplastic filament, is generating headlines today. But far sharper home stereolithographic printers, which selectively cure liquid photopolymer resins with lasers, are on the way; Formlabs is set to begin delivery on its $2,299 Form 1 in February. And that’s just the start. The next generation of consumer 3-D printers will be able to generate complex parts of variable elasticity and conductivity, and from far more than plastic or resin. A commercial “bioprinter” from Organovo can already shape human cells into usable tissue, and a Columbia, Missouri, start-up called Modern Meadow is working on a device that prints edible meat. A team at the University of Glasgow has even found a way to print custom chemical compounds, opening the way to home pill-printers. In September, meanwhile, Autodesk released a free 30

POPULAR SCIENCE

JANUARY 2013

s To R Y BY Luke Mitchell

ILLUsTRATIoN B Y Ryan Snook

Digital rights management for 3-D printers is just the beginning. iPhone app, 123D Catch, that scans objects on the fly. And, as CT scanning gets cheaper, you’ll be able to map the interior as well. Forget sneakers. We’re gaining the ability to copy anything: a leaked iPhone 7, a life-saving medicine, a deadly virus. Which means the Physibles section at Pirate Bay, among other places, is about to become the site of some important battles. In October, Intellectual Ventures, a company run by Nathan Myhrvold,

former CTO of Microsoft, patented a scheme “to control object production rights” that would require every 3-D printer to validate every file in a print queue against a database of authorized items. No validation, no copy. The system likely won’t catch on—Apple ditched clunky digital rights management on iTunes years ago—but it’s just the beginning. The intellectual property battles of the last two decades will seem trivial in comparison to the coming war over who, in the most literal sense, controls the means of production. Luke Mitchell (luke.mitchell@popsci.com) covers constraint and creativity each issue.

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a new frontier The year ahead promises some spectacular events in astronomy. Plus, physicists will be looking to space for evidence of dark matter.

POPULAR SCIENCE

january 2013

The Year in

sCienCe WHICH STORIES WILL DOMINaTE THE NEWS IN 2013? HERE’S a gLIMPSE INTO THE FUTURE.

ILLUSTRaTIONS bY JESSE LENZ

january 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

yE ar I n S CIEnCE

Physics Enters New Era By Sean Carroll

cience and technology have utterly transformed human life in the past few generations, and forecasts of the future used to be measured in decades. But big changes arrive faster and faster these days. So here we’ve shifed our forecast to the near-term, because we’re right on the verge of some extraordinary stuf. These are the trends and events to watch out for in 2013. —THE EDITORS

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january 2013

July 4, 2012, a panel of scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva announced the discovery of a new particle, the long-anticipated Higgs boson (or something very much like it). The Higgs is the fnal piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, a theory that accounts for everything we experience in our lives, from rocks to puppies to stars and planets. Afer decades of searching and billions of dollars, the Higgs discovery marked the end of one era and the beginning of another, which scientists will embark upon in 2013. If the previous era was about understanding the physics of everyday stuf, the next will be dominated by the attempt to grasp more elusive realms, including one of the most mysterious of all: dark matter. Astronomers have verifed that the universe has about fve times more matter than we can account for with the “ordinary” particles we’ve discovered here on Earth. The rest is dark matter. Physicists haven’t observed it directly yet, but they’re getting much closer. Several diferent detectors are currently searching for dark matter underground, conducting experiments designed to sense a dark matter particle scattering of the nucleus of an ordinary atom. A couple of them have already yielded tantalizing evidence—not enough to convince most physicists, but enough to get people excited. The LUX detector, recently installed in a South Dakota mine, should prove the most sensitive one yet when it begins collecting data in 2013. Alternatively, dark matter could be found by looking up into space. Scientists analyzing observations of cosmic gamma rays in 2012 discovered an unusual excess at a particular energy emanating from the center of our galaxy. One explanation for the signal is that dark matter particles are colliding and converting into If the previous high-energy radiaera was about tion. This coming understanding year will no doubt the physics of bring new data, everyday stuﬀ, better analysis, and the next will maybe, just maybe, be dominated evidence that pins by the attempt down dark matter to grasp more elusive realms. once and for all.

2013 NEWS BYTES

Black Hole Chows Down A giant blob of gas headed directly for the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy could begin to drop into the abyss mid-year, blasting x-ray radiation into space in a brilliant display of light. Witnessed for the ﬁrst time by scientists, the decades-long process will help answer the question of how black holes grow. —Miriam Kramer

Ocean X PRIZE Launches As ocean water absorbs carbon dioxide, it becomes more acidic and incompatible with life. But pH sensors that can aﬀordably, accurately, and wirelessly measure that change on a global scale don’t yet exist. This year, the X PRIZE Foundation will announce a competition meant to kick-start the invention of those instruments. —Taylor Kubota

Mental Disorders Better Deﬁned For the ﬁrst time in 12 years, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) will update The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental

Disorders, which guides how psychiatrists and psychologists diagnose patients. The APA invited the public to comment on the draft, and its working groups are using the feedback to revise criteria. By clearly deﬁning new disorders, the manual could help patients with previously vague diagnoses ﬁnd new treatments and resources. —M.K.

Planck Dumps New Data For the past three years, the Planck spacecraft has mapped and measured cosmic background radiation left behind from the Big Bang using its highfrequency instrument sensor. In early 2013, the European Space Agency plans to publicly release the craft’s most recent findings, the first data dump since 2011. The information will further reveal what the universe might have looked like as it was first forming. —M.K.

STEM CELLS SIDESTEP CONTROVERSY By Clay Risen

During

2012, two scientifc teams announced, in separate studies, that they had transformed ordinary adult skin cells into neural cells, a breakthrough that could change the course of human stem cell research. Stem cells hold enormous potential for medicine because they can develop from undiferentiated cells into a variety of specialized ones. But their use has been stymied by ethical concerns; most are harvested from human embryos, which are destroyed in the process. In 2006, Shinya Yamanaka of Japan’s Kyoto University fgured out a way to bypass embryonic cells: He generated stem cells from skin cells, a discovery for which he shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in medicine. But his method was slow and inefcient. The new techniques— pioneered by Marius Wernig of Stanford and Bronwen Connor of the University of Auck-

land in New Zealand—involve inserting genes into skin cells that force diferentiation. Both efcient and scalable, the work could stimulate a cascade of follow-up research focused on developing other cell types in 2013. Access to large numbers of specialized cells could change how doctors study disease and how pharmacologists test drugs, which could in turn bring about new treatments tailored to individuals. It could even lead to that holy grail of medical science: the ability to grow new tissue and organs from the patient’s own cells, virtually eliminating the possibility of rejection. While such benefts are hardly around the corner, Connor is optimistic that circumventing the use of embryonic stem cells has cleared the path. “I think we’re on the cusp,” she says. “There’s no ethical concern. You take a skin biopsy and of you go.”

Supercomputer Crunches Climate A 1.5-petaﬂops IBM supercomputer, dubbed Yellowstone, will begin full operations this year at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center. Its 72,288 processor cores can perform 1.5 quadrillion calculations per second. Yellowstone will dramatically improve climate models and visualizations in the earth sciences, including simulations that show how tornadoes, hurricanes, and wildﬁres move across the landscape. —T.K.

Access to large numbers of specialized cells could change how doctors study disease. january 2013

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The steadiness of climate scientistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; message is also its undoing in the media.

2013 NEWS BYTES

Climate SCientiStS Say it again By Curtis Brainard

The

warning from climate scientists has been clear and consistent for decades: Man-made greenhousegas emissions, which increase every year, are causing the planet to warm, and that will have dire consequences—the specifcs of which (timing, intensity, location) aren’t completely understood right now. Unfortunately, the steadiness of that message is also its undoing in the media; more ofen, the rare scientifc dissenter gets the limelight. “Because it’s been pretty much the same for 25 years, it almost never gets reported,” says Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Two statements of scientifc consensus forthcoming in 2013 will provide an opportunity to set the record straight: the National Climate Assessment, which lays out observed and anticipated trends in the U.S., and the Fifh Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a global evaluation of the peer-reviewed literature conducted by thousands of researchers. Journalists will still be looking for catchy news pegs, particularly in the IPCC report. They’ll fnd only nuanced diferences from the last assessment in 2007, Schmidt says. Yet many will stretch those fne distinctions into exaggerated and overwrought headlines, which can lead to public confusion. That’s what happened when the U.K.’s climate-monitoring organization, the Met Ofce, released an update to its globaltemperature data set in October. Despite British scientists’ explanation Journalists that it showed multiwill be decadal warming, outlets looking for such as the Daily Mail catchy news cherry-picked the data pegs. They'll to support the headﬁnd only line: “Global Warming nuanced Stopped 16 Years Ago.” diﬀerences The Met Ofce called from the last the coverage “misleadassessment in 2007. ing,” but it was widely

reprinted by other media outlets. That’s not to say that good science can’t break through the sound bites. As any scientist searching for the climate-change signal among reams of weather data will tell you, it just takes practice to flter out the noise.

asia takes two Routes to Space By Valerie Ross

earTh’s

two most populous nations have major space launches slated for 2013: China will send a lander to the moon and India will propel an orbiter toward Mars. On the surface, their goals appear similar—cement a toehold in a frontier dominated by the U.S., Russia, and Europe—but the ways in which they will achieve them are very diferent. China wants to do everything that other nations have done in space, and more, including building its own space station and mounting a lunar sample-return mission. And it has a methodical road map to reach those targets. The planned Chang’e 3 lunar probe will serve as a testbed for launch and landing techniques, as well as cameras, samplers, and other instruments. “China is beyond doing things in space for show,” says Gregory Kulacki, head of the China project at the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Global Security Program. Instead, it is building toward “a comprehensive set of space capabilities.” India runs a much smaller, more tightly focused program. Its budget is perhaps a third to a ffh of China’s, estimates Dinshaw Mistry, an expert in Asian security and space issues at the University of Cincinnati. Over the past decade, it has launched about a ffh as many spacecraf, most of which have been satellites for furthering the country’s development. Its highest profle mission so far, the Chandrayaan-1 moon probe in 2008, carried instruments from the European Space Agency and NASA. The Mangalyaan Mars orbiter, planned for a November launch, will be more independent. But its budget is low and the timetable tight. Space exploration is anything but routine— either mission could fail. But it’s more likely they’ll both be successful, proving there are several paths to blaze in orbit. Whether by scrappy collaboration or in grand, go-it-alone style, more missions invariably mean more data—and a deeper understanding of space.

Solar Activity Peaks The approximately 11-year cycle of solar activity will climax this fall with about 75 sunspots, or regions where magnetic ﬁelds emerge from inside the sun. When these twist and snap, they can send plasma hurtling toward Earth, causing geomagnetic storms that disrupt radio transmissions, knock out power, and produce auroras. —T.K.

Animals Sue for Rights Certain animals—such as dolphins, chimpanzees, elephants, and parrots— show capabilities thought uniquely human, including language-like communication, complex problem solving, and seeming self-awareness. By the end of 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project plans to ﬁle suits on the behalf of select animals to procure freedoms (like protection from captivity) previously granted only to humans. —T.K.

Google Glass Ships Out Google will bring augmented reality one step closer to consumers when preproduction units for its Project Glass ship to developers early this year. The Google Glass Explorer Edition has a built-in camera, audio, and visual display that provide the user with real-time information. As developers experiment with apps, wearable computing will get its ﬁrst real test. —Colleen Park

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energy levels the Field By Abrahm Lustgarten

NaTural

gas has emerged as a cheap, abundant fuel source because of hydraulic fracturing, and energy companies are now racing to develop it. Gas isn’t perfect. Its environmental reputation is controversial at best; emissions from methane that escapes during drilling give it a big carbon footprint. But natural gas releases 50 percent less carbon dioxide than coal at the smokestack, so proponents have championed its use as a bridge to still-cleaner sources of power. Recent trends seem to support that idea. Coal use is plummeting—it now generates just 42 percent of U.S. electricity—and carbon emissions from energy production have dropped to the lowest level in 20 years (the recession deserves credit for that too). Meanwhile, wind generation jumped 10 percent in 2012, and solar more than doubled. But for gas to really be a bridge fuel, it has to lead to, not block, the destination at the other end. According to a new analysis by the Congressional Research Service, the glut of natural gas and its rock-bottom prices are actually keeping renewables from taking of—even though their costs have never been more competitive. That could begin to change in 2013. As public concern over the environmental and health impacts of fracking mounts, multiple agencies may levy new regulations on drilling. If that occurs, gas prices would likely rise, increasing the appeal of renewables. Wind and solar could see boosts of their own. Although the production tax credit for wind energy—an important subsidy due to expire in 2012—faces opposition from Congress, the governors of 28 states with strong wind development called for its extension. Also watch for the Department of the Interior to make good on promises to allow solar energy plants on giant swaths of federal lands in Colorado and elsewhere, and for commercial utility-scale solar projects in the Southwest to near completion. If all that happens, renewable energy will reach a scale on which it can truly compete. Only then will we know if natural gas was a step in the transition, or if it turned out to be a bridge to nowhere.

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By allowing equity investment, lawmakers expect to supercharge crowdfunding.

2013 NEWS BYTES

Gaia Starts Stellar Census The Gaia satellite is tasked with one of the most ambitious undertakings in the history of space exploration: After it launches in 2013, the spacecraft will create a 3-D map of one billion stars—1,000 times more than Hipparcos, a previous mission. This vast stellar census will help astronomers understand the evolution and origin of the Milky Way. —M.K.

Urban EVs Lighten Up

CROWDFUnDing PayS OFF By Cliﬀ Ransom

April 5, 2012, President Barack Obama sat at a small, wooden desk in the White House Rose Garden and signed the JOBS Act, one of the most transformative pieces of securities legislation written since the Great Depression. Among the 22 pages of dense legalese, one section stood out: the Crowdfund Act. Pending the creation of SEC regulations later this year, new businesses will be able to make their own IPOs, and small investors could act as venture capitalists. Start-ups and inventors raised an estimated $2.8 billion on crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter in 2012, a 529 percent increase from 2009. But they could only solicit donations, presales of products, and loans. By allowing equity investment, lawmakers expect to supercharge crowdfunding, which would make nascent businesses less reliant on angel investors and banks while spurring innovation across a wider range of companies. There are, of course, pitfalls. More than half of all start-ups fail within 10 years. “It’s not clear yet whether the wisdom of the crowds

will hold for picking successful businesses,” says Josh Lerner, a professor of investment banking at Harvard Business School. Investor losses could lead to big disappointments, litigation, or, worse, allegations of fraud, says Bryan Sullivan, a lawyer in California. “My mother is a secretary,” he says. “My father is a construction worker. Those are the kind of people who would throw $5,000 in and think they can make $100,000. What happens when it fails?” The crowdsourced-equity model is not untested, however. The Australian Small Scale Oferings Board has transferred about $130 million to start-ups since 2007 with little reported fraud. Plus, the Crowdfund Act helps protect investors: Those who make less than $100,000 can commit only $2,000 or 5 percent of their annual income, whichever is greater. The act also requires company disclosures, so investors can do their due diligence. Once the SEC sets the ground rules, anyone who backs a great idea will stand to proft. But the biggest beneft will likely be to innovation itself.

The Crowdfund Act would make nascent businesses less reliant on banks while spurring innovation.

While carbon-ﬁberreinforced plastic (CFRP) has long been used in Formula One racecars, commuters can take it for a spin in the allelectric BMW i3 later this year. The CFRP used in constructing the car’s passenger module is 50 percent lighter than steel and equally strong. Though its 100-mile range is comparable with that of other electric vehicles, the i3 will have 170 horsepower—considerably more muscle. —C.P.

Lunar Mission Blasts Off Twenty-five teams are still in the race to claim the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE, which will be awarded to the first privately funded groups to safely land a robot on the moon and explore its surface. The current front-runner, Astrobotic, enlisted SpaceX to launch the company’s lander and rover on the four-day journey as soon as December 2013. —T.K.

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Researchers have found ways to turn smartphones into portable spies.

HaCKeRS attaCK mObile PHOneS By Robert Lemos

2009, the annual Pwn2Own cybersecurity competition provided hackers with a shot at cracking smartphones. They failed. In September, the event ofered phones as targets again. This time, contestants seized control of them, successfully exploiting vulnerabilities in the two most popular operating systems, iOS and Android. For the most part, smartphones have escaped the viruses and botnets that have plagued desktop computers for decades. That luck may not hold out in 2013. The learning curves of cybersecurity professionals and cybercriminals track pretty closely. If the good guys have hacked iOS and Android, the bad guys will quickly follow. The frst mobile malware attempted familiar invasions, stealing contact information and pictures from devices. But cybersecurity professionals expect a range of unconventional hacks as well. In the last couple of years, researchers have found ways to turn smartphones, with their cameras, GPS, and accelerometers, into portable spies. 40

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Researchers from Indiana University and the Naval Surface Warfare Center, for example, created PlaceRaider, which enables a smartphone camera to surreptitiously take photos. The proof-of-concept program then stitches them into a 3-D representation of the user’s location, enabling attackers to identify valuable information in the environment. In another demonstration, researchers from Georgia Tech used the accelerometer of a smartphone sitting next to a keyboard to track the vibrations of individual keystrokes. They identifed typed text with up to 80 percent accuracy. At the 2012 TEDGlobal conference, Malte Spitz, a member of Germany’s Green party, showed he could use telecom data to re-create his whereabouts in detail for six months. Hackers have likewise already used malware to track a user’s location. Combining that information with other sensor data, such as images from the camera, could give them an unprecedented look into their victims’ lives.

If the good guys have hacked iOS and Android, the bad guys will quickly follow.

2013 NEWS BYTES

Science Funding Remains Strong By Juliet Eilperin

WITh

his second term secured, President Barack Obama can now turn his full attention to advancing the priorities that will help defne his legacy. On the stump, Obama championed science and technology. Under his administration, those felds, particularly renewable energy and medical research, should continue to enjoy signifcant federal support over the next four years. John Holdren, Obama’s science and technology adviser, told Popular Science: “We are committed to continuing our focus on ensuring that science, technology, innovation, and education have the support they deserve in order to fuel America’s economy, prepare the techsavvy workforce and science-savvy citizenry of tomorrow, and meet the manifold challenges of health and biomedicine, energy, environment, and national security.” Although the lion’s share of federal research dollars still goes to defense—56 percent in fscal year 2012—7.5 percent is devoted explicitly to “general science and basic research.” Close to half of that fnances the Department of Energy’s Ofce of Science, which supports work that advances the development of new fuels, materials, and technologies. Assuming it escapes sequestration at the end of 2012, funding for health research, which accounted for 22 percent of R&D dollars in 2012, should also remain strong. Advocates of stem cell research are particularly elated over Obama’s win. An executive order he signed in 2009 lifs some limits on the use of such cells for federally funded research. Federal support for research and development has been declining in absolute terms since 2010; the National Science Foundation’s R&D budget fell from $7.6 billion in 2009 to $5.5 billion in 2011. Obama has proposed spending $142 billion on R&D in 2013, about $1.7 billion more than last year—but the Republicanled House will likely attempt to cut nondefense research dollars, as it has for the last two years. Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, says his group is optimistic. Even given current politics, Leshner is confdent Obama can protect R&D from the budget ax: “Investments in science, everyone agrees, are investments in the future that have paid of handsomely in the past.”

Watson Treats Patients

Jeopardy! was just a warm-up for IBM’s Watson. Oncologists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York are teaching the supercomputer to help diagnose and treat various cancers. Watson analyzes clinical knowledge and case histories, then provides doctors with treatment options. After training for breast, lung, and prostate cancers this past year, Watson will be distributed to a wider group of clinicians. —C.P.

New Comet Blazes by Earth The newly discovered Comet ISON, which is now passing between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, will be visible in December 2013. Assuming it survives a close brush with the sun en route, the comet could be the one of the brightest seen in history. Some astronomers predict that it could be as luminous as a full moon. —M.K.

Digital Sight Hits Shelves A device that restores vision to people blinded by retinitis pigmentosa could reach the U.S. market by spring. It’s been unanimously recommended for approval by an FDA advisory panel. Made by Second Sight Medical Products, the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System sends electric pulses to cells in the eye that the wearer learns to interpret as visual patterns. —T.K.

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2012

The Big Stories

First private spacecraft docks with ISS

“Houston, station. Looks like we got us a Dragon by the tail.” —Astronaut Don Pettit, on the arrival of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule

An at-a-glance summary of the year’s 25 most important scientiﬁc events REPORTING BY

Heredity may not be limited to DNA Six other types of sugars can form nucleic acid backbones, called XNAs, to retrieve and store genetic information.

Colleen Park

I l l u S T R AT I O N A N d d E S I G N B Y

Headcase Design

Journals debate scientiﬁc censorship Hurricane Sandy slams U.S.

Biofuel takes ﬂight

With 140 terajoules, more than twice the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima

With 100% unblended fuel derived from Brassica carinata, a plant in the mustard family

Scientists create XXXXXX forms of avian ﬂu that XXXXX XXXXXX between mammals, creating a heated XXXXXX as to whether details should be redacted or published.

Arctic ice cap reaches new low Extent shrunk since last record minimum in 2007 = 290,000 square miles, or about the size of Texas earth

Robot beats Turing test for A.I.

Physicists conﬁrm Standard Model (maybe)

Commitment period of Kyoto Protocol expires

52% Humanness rating of robotic players 40% Humanness rating of human players

800,000,000,000,000

More dinosaurs wore feathers

Number of proton collisions generated to ﬁnd Higgs boson–like subatomic particle

Even the most ancient ones

Nations that met their target reduction Nations that didn’t

Felix Baumgartner dives from stratosphere Time: 9 minutes 9 seconds Distance: 24.3 miles Max Speed: 833.9 mph

Researchers generate hottest man-made temperature

5.5 trillion K 350,000 times hotter than the sun

NSF christens Alaskan research vessel James Cameron dives to Mariana Trench Time: 2 hours 36 minutes Distance: 6.8 miles Max Speed: 4.7 mph

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NEW Sikuliaq 261 ft OLD Alpha Helix 133 ft

Italy convicts scientists of manslaughter Crime: Failing to adequately warn the public before a 6.3-magnitude earthquake Sentence: 6 years

FDA approves ﬁrst home HIV test Time it takes to get results:

Scientists drill to Lake Vostok But so far, no signs of life. Depth of Antarctic ice = 12,366 ft

20 minutes

Autonomous cars drive closer to reality

300,000 Number of miles logged by Google’s self-driving cars

Voyager 1 nears edge of the solar system

DARPA tests high-res camera

1.0 gigapixels Equivalent to looking through 10x binoculars—in 1,000 diﬀerent spots

11.4+ billion Number of miles from Earth

Geoengineer goes rogue Dumps 100 tons of iron dust in the ocean oﬀ the coast of British Columbia

Retired space shuttles ﬁnd new homes Endeavour

Atlantis

Enterprise

Discovery

→ California

→ Florida

→ New York

→ Virginia

Curiosity lands on Red Planet Distance from the rover to past Mars probes: SpiriT

1,432 mi

vikiNg 2

1,946 mi

phOENix

3,563 mi

OppOrTuNiTy

5,267 mi

vikiNg 1

5,944 mi

First fully bionic leg hits market 64% of users report a reduction in

pAThfiNDEr

6,022 mi

trippi n g

Venus transits the sun Directly aligns between the sun and the Earth. Next transit: 2117 N

7 HO

URS

The Sun

Venus W

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INSIDE CHINA’S SECRET ARSENAL THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT IS RAPIDLY BUILDING A BIGGER, MORE SOPHISTICATED MILITARY. HERE’S WHAT THEY HAVE, WHAT THEY WANT, AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE U.S. STORY BY PETER W. SINGER

ILLUSTRATIONS BY NICK KALOTERAKIS

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DARK SWORD DRONE In 2006, China unveiled an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) design known as Dark Sword, which has since vanished from the public eye. Western analysts aren’t sure whether the craft is still under development. If it is, certain design characteristics—such as a suspected ramjet engine—suggest that it’s a highspeed drone that could carry out surveillance and strikes far from Chinese shores. Whatever the Dark Sword’s fate, China’s UAV plans are ambitious: This past summer, the Chinese government announced plans to build 11 coastal drone bases. — C L AY D I L L O W

I N SI DE C HI NA’ S SE C R E T A RSE NA L

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INSI DE CHINA’S SE C R ET A R SENA L

PTERODACTYL I DRONE China’s Pterodactyl I UAV strongly resembles the U.S. military’s Predator drone. It appears to be designed for medium-altitude, long-endurance surveillance and strike missions. Another Chinese drone—the Soaring Dragon—looks like a smaller version of the U.S. Army’s RQ-4 Global Hawk; analysts think it’s designed for high-altitude maritime surveillance and reconnaissance. —C.D.

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N A SINGLE GENERATION, China has transformed itself from a largely agrarian country into a global manufacturing and trading powerhouse. China’s economy is 20 times bigger than it was two decades ago and is on track to surpass the United States’ as the world’s largest. But perhaps most startling has been the growth of China’s ambitious and increasingly powerful military. Just 10 years ago, the budget for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was roughly $20 billion. Today, that number is more like $100 billion. (Some analysts think it’s closer to $160 billion.) The PLA’s budget is only a sixth of what the U.S. devotes to defense annually, but defense dollars go much further in China, and in the years ahead, Chinese military spending will grow at the same rate as its economy. Meanwhile, Chinese president Hu Jintao has called for the PLA to carry out “new historic missions” in the 21st century—to move beyond the traditional goal of defending the nation’s sovereignty and develop the global military reach of a true world superpower. In some cases, China’s increasing international presence could lead to greater cooperation with the U.S., as it did in 2008 when

CHINESE PRESIDENT HU JINTAO HAS CALLED FOR THE PEOPLE’S LIBERATION ARMY TO CARRY OUT “NEW HISTORIC MISSIONS” IN THE 21ST CENTURY. China joined antipiracy patrols of Somalia. But if American and Chinese forces end up in the same place with diferent goals, the result could be a standof between two of the best-equipped militaries in the world. American ofcials aren’t just concerned about the amount of money the Chinese military is spending. They’re worried about the technology that money is buying. U.S. military hardware remains a generation ahead of any rival’s, but the Chinese have begun to close the gap. Consider China’s progress in building advanced warplanes. Until recently, American ofcials thought their F-22 and F-35 aircraf were the world’s only ffh-generation fghters (the name given to a class of stealthy fghter jets developed in the past decade, which are equipped with radarevading features, high-performance engines and avionics, and networked computer systems). Then, on a 2011 trip to China, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates learned otherwise. While Gates met with Hu Jintao, his hosts “coincidentally” revealed

J-20 STEALTH FIGHTER JET In 2011, the PLA began testing the J-20, China’s first homegrown stealth fighter, which could enter service sometime after 2017. Analysts believe the J-20 has radar-deflecting skin and internal weapons bays. Very little public information about China’s combat aircraft development program exists, but the emergence this past September of a second stealth fighter prototype—the J-31 Falcon Eagle, which some observers think could be capable of performing takeoffs and landings on aircraft carriers—suggests that the J-20 is only the first in a series of advanced Chinese fighters. —C.D.

the existence of an advanced new fghter, the J-20, by staging the inaugural public fight over the city of Chengdu. The J-20 is far from China’s only new aircraf. The PLA is also aggressively upgrading its drone feet. A decade ago, the army had almost no unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). At aviation trade shows today, Chinese contractors display scores of drones under development. Among the most notable: the Yilong (Pterodactyl I) and BZK-005, which greatly resemble the U.S. military’s Predator and Global Hawk, respectively. China’s future UAVs may also get a boost from American technology: Iran has reportedly given Chinese scientists access to the RQ-170 advanced spy drone that went down in its territory last year. Additionally, China is investing heavily in its navy. Today, the U.S. is the only country that can send aircraf carriers loaded with fghter jets to any corner of the globe. The PLA would like to change that. The Chinese have spent the past few years retroftting a 65,000-ton Soviet aircraf carrier (which the PLA acquired using a fake travel agency as a front) with new engines and weapons including Flying Leopard surface-to-air missile batteries and

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INSIDE CHINA’S SE C R ET A R SENA L

DF-21D ANTI-SHIP BALLISTIC MISSILE Stationary ballistic missiles are easy for enemy forces to destroy preemptively. China’s mobile, truck-launched DF-21D ballistic missiles are not. After blasting oﬀ near the coast, the missiles travel to the edge of space before reentering the atmosphere at more than 3,000 mph and dropping 1,300 pounds of explosives on targets. China didn’t nickname the DF-21D the “carrier killer.” U.S. defense analysts did. —C.D.

automated air defense machine-gun systems. The ship, called the Liaoning, can carry approximately 50 aircraf, including the Shenyang J-15 Flying Shark, a fghter jet that may be as capable as an F-18. China is also building stealthy 8,000-ton destroyers, along with nuclear submarines and amphibious assault ships. A new 36,000-ton cruise ship modifed for military purposes, the Bahai Sea Green Pearl, can carry more than 2,000 soldiers and 300 vehicles. With its new naval muscle, China has dispatched troops and police to U.N. peacekeeping operations in places as far-fung as Africa and Latin America.

IN SOME WAYS, China’s rise echoes that of imperial Germany at the turn of the 20th century. At the time, Britain was the world’s undisputed economic and military superpower. When Germany decided to build battleships to match the Grand Fleet’s dreadnoughts, the two nations entered an arms race that helped set the stage for the frst world war. But when war broke out, Britain didn’t lose a single battleship to Germany’s High Seas Fleet. German mines and submarines, on the other hand—new 48

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CHINA DOESN’T HAVE TO AMASS A NAVY AS POWERFUL AS THE AMERICAN FLEET IF IT CAN MAKE THE SEAS TOO DANGEROUS FOR U.S. SHIPS TO TRAVEL. technologies that arrived unexpectedly and changed the rules of battle—sunk 13 British battleships. Similarly, the PLA has more to gain by developing new technologies than by racing to match American sea and air power. China doesn’t have to amass a navy as powerful as the American feet if it can make the seas too dangerous for U.S. ships to travel. To that end, the PLA is acquiring weapons such as mobile, truck-launched anti-ship ballistic missiles and radar-evading, ramjet-powered Sunburn cruise missiles, which tear toward their targets at Mach 2.5, giving defenses only seconds to respond. China could also easily go afer American vulnerabilities in space. More than 80 percent of U.S. government and military communications, which direct everything from soldiers in the feld to precision missile strikes, travel over satellites. GPS satellites control the movement of 800,000 U.S. military receivers on everything from aircraf carriers to individual bombs and artillery shells. The system isn’t foolproof: In early 2010, a GPS “glitch” lef almost 10,000 of these receivers unable to connect for days.

Meanwhile, China is also expanding its ability to knock things out of space. In addition to its proven satellite-killing missiles, the PLA is developing maneuverable microsatellites that would act like tiny space kamikazes, along with directed-energy (laser) devices that could blind or melt U.S. systems in space. In 2007, Senior Colonel Yao Yunzhu of the Chinese Academy of Military Science (the highest research institute in the PLA) announced that the U.S. wouldn’t be the world’s only “space superpower” for long. The Chinese plan to send more than 100 civilian and military satellites into orbit in the next decade, and the PLA is testing what appears to be an unmanned, reusable space plane. China’s most potent new capability, though, might be what the PLA has called “informationized warfare,” or cyber war. Just as the U.S. military has created its own Cyber Command, the PLA has assigned more than 130,000 personnel to cyber warfare programs. And while Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has warned about a potential cyber Pearl Harbor, the greater threat might be the thef of U.S. government secrets and intellectual property. So far, operations thought to have originated in China have compromised sensitive networks in the State Department as well as computers involved in the F-35 joint strike fghter program.

IN THE 1984 MOVIE Red Dawn, one character explained why war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union seemed inevitable: “Two toughest kids on the block, I guess. Sooner or later, they’re gonna fght.” A few years ago, when Hollywood set out to remake

THE SHENLONG SPACE PLANE With a space station under construction and plans for a manned moon mission, China aims to alter the balance of power in orbit. In 2007, the nation showed oﬀ its antisatellite missiles by shooting down a decommissioned weather satellite, creating 40,000 shards of space junk in the process. Now it’s testing an unmanned orbital vehicle known as Shenlong, or Divine Dragon. Comparable to the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B space plane, the Shenlong could rapidly place satellites in orbit—and potentially carry weapons that could disable the communications, navigation, and surveillance satellites of adversaries. —C.D.

the movie, the flmmakers updated the script by replacing the Soviet bad guys with the Chinese. Then real-world economics came into play. To avoid losing access to China’s multibilliondollar flm market, they digitally switched the adversary to North Korea in postproduction. The episode underscores an important point: Unlike the U.S. and the Soviets, the U.S. and China are bound together by hundreds of billions of dollars in mutual trade and investments. War between the two countries would be mutually ruinous. Leaders on both sides know it. American and Chinese forces will eye each other suspiciously, and the relationship may become tense. But recall that the much feared war between the U.S. and Soviets—the issue that defned world politics for the second half of the 20th century—never did break out. With so much to lose, the two toughest kids decided it wasn’t worth it to fght. Peter W. Singer is director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative and a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.

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THE HELMET WARS Athletes in the U.s. sUffer 3.8 million sports-relAted concUssions eAch yeAr. While helmet mAkers dither With smAll improvements, sWedish scientists hAve bUilt something thAt coUld protect Us All.

stor y by to m fos ter photog r a ph s by tr Av is r Athbo ne

strained brains Most helmets do a good job preventing skull fractures but do not directly address concussions.

On August 19, 2012, in week two of the NFL preseason, Indianapolis Colts wide receiver Austin Collie ran 17 yards out from the line of scrimmage, cut right toward the center of the feld, caught a pass, and was immediately tackled by Pittsburgh Steelers cornerback Ike Taylor. As Taylor came in for the hit, his helmet appeared to glance of the lef side of Collie’s helmet. Then the cornerback wrapped his arm around Collie’s neck and jerked the receiver’s head to the right. An instant later, Steelers linebacker Larry Foote came barreling in from the opposite side and slammed his elbow into the right side of Collie’s helmet. As the receiver fell to the ground, his helmet frst hit Foote’s knee and then struck the ground face-frst. january 2013

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Professional fooTball Players receive as many as 1,500 hiTs To The head in a single season. ThaT’s 15,000 in a 10-year Playing career. athletes, it’s hard to know whom to believe. And despite all the research and development, and the public outcry, the injuries just keep coming. What makes the situation even more tragic is that a helmet technology already exists that could turn the concussion epidemic around. The Trouble wiTh concussions

o understand why current helmets aren’t better at reducing concussions, consider the nature of the injury. A concussion is essentially invisible. Even the most advanced medical-imaging technology isn’t sensitive enough to show the physical manifestations, the damaged brain tissue. Diagnosis, then, is based entirely on symptoms and circumstances. Is the patient dizzy or confused, or was he briefy unconscious? Does he have a headache or nausea? Does he remember what happened, and did it look like he got hit in the head really hard? Even if doctors could reliably diagnose concussions, identifying the injury does little to protect against it; for that, scientists need an

DOUG PENSINGER/GETTy ImAGES

Collie sat up, dazed, and had to be helped of the feld a minute later. He didn’t return to play for three weeks. The diagnosis: concussion. It wasn’t the frst time Collie had sufered what’s clinically called a traumatic brain injury. On November 7, 2010, he spent nearly 10 minutes lying motionless on the 34-yard line afer being hit in the head almost simultaneously by two Philadelphia Eagles players. Medics carried him of the feld on a stretcher. In his frst game back, two weeks later, he lef in the frst quarter with another concussion. He missed three more games, only to sufer yet another concussion on December 19, which ended his season. Professional football players receive as many as 1,500 hits to the head in a single season, depending on their position. That’s 15,000 in a 10-year playing career, not to mention any blows they received in college, high school, and peewee football. And those hits have consequences: concussions and, according to recent research, permanent brain damage. It’s not just football, either. Hockey, lacrosse, and even sports like cycling and snowboarding are contributing to a growing epidemic of traumatic brain injuries. The CDC estimates that as many as 3.8 million sports-related concussions occur in the U.S. each year. That number includes not only professionals but amateurs of all levels, including children. Perhaps most troubling, the number isn’t going down. In the past two years, the outrage surrounding sports-related concussions has mounted. In January 2011, Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) called for a Federal Trade Commission investigation of the football helmet industry for “misleading safety claims and deceptive practices,” which the agency is currently pursuing. In June 2012, more than 2,000 former NFL players fled a class-action suit against the league as well as Riddell, the largest football-helmet manufacturer and an ofcial NFL partner, accusing them of obfuscating the science of brain trauma. The litigation could drag on for years and cost billions of dollars. The real issue is that lives are at stake. In 2006, this fact became tragically clear when former Philadelphia Eagles star Andre Waters committed suicide by shooting himself. Subsequent studies of his brain indicated that he sufered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a form of brain damage that results in dementia and is caused by repeated blows to the head. A sickening drumbeat of NFL suicides has followed, including former stars Dave Duerson, Ray Easterling, and Junior Seau, who by one estimate sufered as many as 1,500 concussions in his career. For equipment manufacturers, the demand for protective headgear has never been greater. Leading companies, as well as an army of upstarts, have responded by developing a number of new helmet designs, each claiming to ofer unprecedented safety. The trouble is that behind them all lie reams of conficting research, much of it paid for, either directly or indirectly, by the helmet manufacturers or the league. For players or coaches or the concerned parents of young

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the fallen Junior seau’s suicide in 2012 heightened the controversy around head trauma in athletes. Colts receiver austin Collie [above] received three game-ending concussions in 2010 before he was benched for the season.

accurate picture of what’s happening inside the head. For generations, doctors believed that concussions were a sort of bruising of the brain’s gray matter at the site of impact and on the opposite side, where the brain presumably bounced of the skull. The reality is not nearly that simple: Concussions happen deep in the brain’s white matter when forces transmitted from a big blow strain nerve cells and their connections, the axons. To understand how that happens, it’s important to recognize that diferent types of forces—linear and rotational acceleration—act on the brain in any physical trauma. Linear acceleration is exactly what it sounds like, a straight-line force that begins at the point of impact. It causes skull fracture, which makes perfect sense: You hit the bone hard enough, it breaks. Rotational acceleration is less intuitive. It occurs most acutely during angular impacts, or those in which force is not directed at the brain’s center of gravity. You don’t have to know much about football or hockey to realize that rotation is a factor in a whole lot of hits. “Think about it,” says Robert Cantu, a neurosurgeon at Boston University School of Medicine and the author of 29 books on neurology and sports medicine. “Because most hits are of-center and because our heads are not square, most of the accelerations in the head are going to be rotational.” Further complicating matters, the human brain is basically an irregularly shaped blob of Jell-O sitting

crash course The helmet market is booming. What sets the new products apart?

riddell 360 the oﬃcial NFL helmet partner since 1989, riddell launched the 360 in 2011. It has extra padding around the front and sides of the head, and the company’s signature Concussion reducing technology, which adds even more padding. yet for all that foam, most experts say it does little to address rotational forces, the primary cause of concussions.

Xenith X2 Made by the nine-year-old helmet company Xenith, the X2 replaces foam padding with an array of air-ﬁlled cylinders that compress upon impact by releasing air through tiny holes. the harder the hit, the stiﬀer the response. such adaptive cushioning can protect against both lower-level and higher-level forces but still does little to address rotation.

schutt ion 4d Made with thermoplastic urethane cushioning that performs consistently even in extreme weather, the Ion 4D, schutt says, “is designed with the intent to reduce the risk of concussions.” yet the specs don’t mention rotational force, and a 2011 promotional video dismisses the idea that frequent lesser impacts are as dangerous as the rare violent one, calling it “unproven.”

rawlinGs Quantum Plus better known for its baseball helmets, rawlings introduced a line of football helmets a few years ago that, like riddell’s, relies on what’s called large-oﬀset design—in other words, increased distance between the head and the shell in order to make more room for extra padding.

sGh helmet this startup from the self-proclaimed godfather of safety, motorsportsequipment legend bill simpson, says it makes the lightest helmet on the market. Its shell includes Kevlar and carbon ﬁber; its padding consists of a single layer of a proprietary composite whose makeup simpson won’t divulge until it is patented.

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Guardian caP Developed by atlanta engineer Lee hanson, the guardian Cap is a padded sock worn over a standard helmet. Critics say the guardian could get caught during impact, causing neck injuries and exacerbating rotation. hanson says the sock would just slip oﬀ. as for the obvious aesthetic issues, he says the guardian is meant only for practice, not games.

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H e lmet WarS

shock treatment stefan Duma, a biomedical engineer at Virginia tech, studies the forces exerted on a helmet during a vertical-drop test [left]. the test is the basis for the NoCsaE football helmet safety certiﬁcation. Duma also tests helmet performance during horizontal impacts [above].

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impedes the development of better helmets. But there’s another reason helmet technology hasn’t improved, one more troubling than gaps in our knowledge: a self-regulated industry governed by badly outdated safety standards. 4 0 - y e a r - o l d s Ta n d a r d s

icture the head of a typical crash-test dummy, the kind you see in car commercials. It’s attached to a rigid metal arm that hangs above a cylindrical anvil topped with a hard plastic disc. A lab technician straps a football helmet to the headform, cranks the arm up to precisely fve feet above the anvil, and lets it drop—crack. Inside the dummy head, an accelerometer positioned at the center of gravity records the linear acceleration transmitted during impact. This brutish trial is called a vertical drop test, and it’s the basis for how all football helmets are certifed safe by the National Operating Committee

COURTESy STEfAN DUmA/vIRGINIA TECh (2)

inside a hard shell lined with ridges and clifs. Afer a football tackle or a hockey check, that blob moves, and does so in irregular ways. “Rotational forces strain nerve cells and axons more than linear forces do,” Cantu says. “They’re not only stretching, but they’re twisting at the same time. So they have a potential for causing greater nerve injury.” So what’s the problem? If scientists know that a concussion is nerve strain caused largely by rotation of the brain, why can’t they fgure out a way to stop the rotation? Just as the actual injury isn’t visible to medical imaging technology, the rotation that causes the injury isn’t measurable in impact conditions; scientists cannot be inside an athlete’s brain measuring its movement. But in a grisly 2007 study, researchers at Wayne State University in Detroit used a high-speed x-ray to observe the brains of human cadaver heads ftted with football helmets and struck from various angles. The research, corroborated by computer models, showed that the brains moved very little—just millimeters. Yet those small movements are enough to cause nerve strain and afect neurological function. Making things even more difcult is that every brain is diferent. Young brains respond diferently than older brains, female brains diferently than male. Researchers have also found that weaker, subconcussive hits can have a cumulative efect over time and lead to CTE, which is likely the cause of many former-player suicides. But how many hits it takes, and what kind, is unclear— and the condition can’t be diagnosed while the player is alive. Only when his brain is cut open can researchers spot the dead zones in the tissue. The scientifc ambiguity surrounding concussions clearly

if scienTisTs know ThaT a concussion is caused largely by The roTaTion of The brain, why can’T They figure ouT a way To sToP The roTaTion? on Standards for Athletic Equipment (NOCSAE), an association funded by equipment manufacturers, which in turn funds much of the research on sports-related head trauma. The standard has remained largely unchanged since its creation in 1973. Now think back to Austin Collie’s concussion in August 2012— the jerking of the head afer the initial hit, the collisions with Larry Foote’s elbow and the ground. Those impacts don’t look much like the straight-line force of the NOCSAE drop test. And that brings up a very important question, perhaps the central question

scientists and helmet makers are trying to solve today: Is the linear acceleration measured by a drop test correlated to rotational acceleration, and if so, by how much? Untold lives and billions of dollars in sales, medical fees, and litigation costs could depend on a clear answer. If the relationship between the forces is strong, the key to reducing rotational acceleration is the same as reducing linear acceleration: Add more padding. Clearly helmet manufactures would prefer such a simple solution. If the connection is weak, however—or at least weak in the most dangerous hits—more padding will do little to reduce concussions, and companies will need to rethink current designs entirely, a very costly endeavor. In 2003, a New Hampshire–based company named Simbex introduced a research tool called the Head Impact Telemetry System (HITS). Among other things, it seemed to have the potential to answer the question of correlation. HITS is an array of six spring-loaded accelerometers positioned inside a helmet to record

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POPULAR SCIENCE

H e l met WarS

the location and severity of signifcant impacts. Afer any hit over a certain threshold, the system beams the data to a companion device on the sidelines. Coaches can monitor players in real time, and researchers get reams of real-world data to dig through. Stefan Duma, the founding director of Virginia Tech’s Center for Injury Biomechanics, is among those working with HITS data; at his urging, every player on the university’s football team wears a HITS-equipped helmet. Afer analyzing data from two million impacts, Duma says there is a clear and strong connection between linear and rotational forces. Unfortunately, other researchers say it’s not that simple. The correlation is high if you look at all hits, they say, but it falls apart when you look at highly angular ones—the hits that carry a greater risk of concussion. “Take an extreme example,” says Boston University’s Cantu. “If you impact the tip of the face mask, if you have another player coming at it sideways, you’re going to spin the head on the neck and have very low linear acceleration and very high rotational acceleration.” Indeed, for every advocate of the HITS data, there exists an equally vocal critic. They say that helmets deform under the force of a 250-pound linebacker, skewing data. They say the HITS algorithm that calculates rotation is fawed. They point out that the founder of HITS is a co-author on all the published studies that validate the system. Blaine Hoshizaki, a biomechanics professor at the University of Ottawa whose research focuses on angular hits, sounds exasperated when I ask him about Duma’s fndings. “You’ve got to look at the events that are really contributing to concussion,” he says. “It may be that in 1,000 hits, only 50 are highly non-centric, but maybe those 50 are the most dangerous—and that’s what our data shows.” In essence, the system created to answer questions about concussions has raised a lot more questions. The resulting confusion sets of a cascade of efects. Unclear science makes for unclear standards, and unclear standards leave a lot of room for interpretation. The impact on the helmet industry is conspicuous: It’s become a free-for-all.

imPact tracker Coaches and medics can use the head Impact telemetry system (hIts) to monitor the force and location of certain tackles from the sidelines.

“if someThing is available ThaT makes your helmeT more safe, you should be held liable for NOT using iT.”

n December 2010, a longtime auto-racing safety equipment maker named Bill Simpson happened to attend one of the Colts games in which medics helped Austin Collie of the feld afer a concussion. Following the incident, Simpson asked the Colts’ ofensive coordinator, a friend, what had happened to his receiver. “Oh, that’s just part of the game,” the coach said. Simpson saw an opportunity. In auto racing, he’s known as the Godfather of Safety, and once set himself on fre to demonstrate the efcacy of one of his racing suits. He fgured he could make a better football helmet, so he got to work in his Indianapolis warehouse. By 2011, several pros, including Collie, were wearing early

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experimental versions of Simpson’s helmet. That an individual inventor could develop, produce, and deliver a product into the hands of professional athletes speaks to the upheaval in the world of helmet manufacturing. What was once a rather staid industry dominated by a few large companies has now grown to include an increasing number of upstart frms, serial entrepreneurs, and individual inventors. The result has been a proliferation of new designs. Mainstream helmet makers have stuck with variations on previous models: polycarbonate shells flled with various densities and thicknesses of padding. Newcomers have developed more creative, albeit less rigorously tested, approaches. Perhaps the best-known is the bizarre-looking Guardian Cap, a padded sock that slips over a typical helmet. Another

COURTESy RIDDELL

The helmeT arms race

the Helmet that might Save Football

Sliding Layer Rubber Straps

the sYstem The Multidirectional Impact Protection System (MIPS) reduces the rotational forces that cause concussions. In a MIPSequipped helmet, a thin layer of molded plastic fits atop a player’s head, beneath the padding and hard polycarbonate shell. Rubber straps affix the MIPS layer to the helmet. how it works MIPS mimics the human head’s own protective system, in which a layer of slippery cerebrospinal fluid sits between the brain and the skull. When an impact occurs, the skull can rotate just a bit relative to the brain. With MIPS, the rubber straps allow the helmet to move just a bit relative to the sliding, low-friction head cap, thereby eliminating much of the twisting motion before it reaches the brain.

Polycarbonate Shell

Pre Impact

At Impact Foam Padding

GRAhAm mURDOCh

the results In lab tests, MIPS reduces brain rotation by as much as 40 to 50 percent.

approach that received a lot of attention in 2011, the Bulwark, came from the workbench of an aerospace engineer and selfprofessed “helmet geek” in North Carolina; it had a modular shell that could be confgured to match the demands of diferent players. It never made it out of prototype stage. For his part, Simpson ofcially launched his SGH helmet in October 2012 to immediate fanfare. Sports Illustrated “injury expert” columnist Will Carroll tugged one on and had someone whack him over the crown of the head—a strong, almost purely linear force. He reported not feeling much at all. His conclusion: This helmet must work. When I called Simpson to discuss the helmet and ask how it reduces the forces responsible for concussion, he mentioned that none of the neuroscientists he’s spoken with have been able to tell him what forces actually cause a concussion. “How do you know you’re stopping the right forces, then?” I asked him. “If you don’t know what’s causing a concussion, how can you prevent it?” “You’re asking me a lot of questions that are pretty of the wall, my friend,” he said. “A lot of questions I can’t answer.” He explained that his helmet uses a composite shell made of carbon fber and Kevlar, plus an inner layer of adaptive foam made of

Styrofoam-like beads. It performs better in a NOCSAE-style drop test than anything else on the market, he said. “Does it specifcally address rotational acceleration?” I asked. He laughed. “No helmet does that.” I tried a more direct approach: “Can you make claims about concussion reduction with your helmet?” “Oh, hell no,” he said, “I would never make a claim about that.” The NFL, at least since Congress took an interest, has gotten serious about sorting out who is claiming what—or not. “There is not a week that passes that I don’t see a new device,” says Kevin Guskiewicz, a University of North Carolina sports medicine researcher and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient who also chairs the NFL’s Subcommittee on Safety Equipment and Playing Rules. “There’s a binder weighing down the corner of my desk. I don’t think you’re going to see the NFL fat-out endorsing a product, but they certainly feel that they’re responsible for trying to help prevent these injuries. So we’re going to be reviewing these technologies in order to say, here are three or four that need to be studied further.” The boldest claim from mainstream helmet makers comes, perhaps not surprisingly, from Riddell. The company’s newest helmet, the 360, builds on a system called Concussion Reducing

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POPULAR SCIENCE

H e l met WarS

The nfl, aT leasT since congress Took an inTeresT, has goTTen serious abouT sorTing ouT who is claiming whaT—or noT. Technology (CRT), which it frst launched in 2002. According to a highly adrenalized promotional video, which has since been removed from the Riddell website, engineers designed CRT in response to an NFL-funded study by a Canadian research lab called Biokinetics. Researchers looked at flm from actual NFL hits that resulted in concussions and attempted to map their location, distance, and speed. The two main fndings: that rotational acceleration is a major factor in concussions, and that players get hit a lot on the side of the head. In response to the study, the designers developing CRT added energy-attenuating material (extra padding) to side- and frontimpact areas. They also increased the overall dimensions of CRT-equipped helmets by a few millimeters to allow for still more padding. The designers of the 360 built on the CRT but went a step further, adding an even greater amount of padding to the impact areas. It wasn’t clear to me how those changes addressed rotation—the single greatest factor in the concussions that CRT and the 360 helmet meant to reduce. So I asked Riddell’s head of research and development, Thad Ide. “Well, in many cases the linear acceleration and the rotation that linear imparts go hand in hand,” he said, echoing Duma’s HITS fndings at Virginia Tech. “Reducing linear forces will reduce the rotational forces.” So the question remains: If addressing linear force is the key, and better padding is the way to do that, then why hasn’t the number 58

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of concussions decreased? “You haven’t seen it change because [the helmet makers] haven’t addressed it,” says the University of Ottawa’s Hoshizaki. a new hoPe

n a small room of the basement garage of a building on the outskirts of Stockholm, an entirely diferent kind of helmet test is taking place. Peter Halldin, a biomechanical engineer at the Royal Institute of Technology, is strapping a helmet onto a dummy head afxed to a custom drop-test rig. Rather than slamming a helmet into a stationary anvil, as in the NOCSAE test, Halldin’s rig drops it onto a pneumatic sled that moves horizontally. By calibrating the angle of the helmet, the height of the drop, and the speed of the sled, Halldin says he can more accurately re-create the angular forces that result in rotational acceleration than other labs can. Within the dummy head, nine accelerometers measure the linear force transmitted during impact; a computer nearby calculates rotational acceleration from that data. Today Halldin is testing two ski helmets that are identical except for one thing: Inside one, a bright yellow layer of molded plastic attached with small rubber straps sits between the padding and the head. This is the Multidirectional Impact

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calls for justice Former NFL players Daryl Johnston and Dave Duerson [above] in 2007 at a senate hearing on disability beneﬁts for retired athletes. Duerson [left] committed suicide in 2011 by shooting himself in the chest. he left a note asking that his intact brain be donated to the boston University school of Medicine for research.

Protection System (MIPS), which is also the name of a company he co-founded. Halldin spends about half of his time as CTO of MIPS and the other as a faculty member of the Royal Institute. The idea behind MIPS is simple: The plastic layer sits snugly on a player’s head beneath the padding. By allowing the head to foat during an impact, MIPS can eliminate some of the rotational force before it makes its way to the brain. First up in Halldin’s test is the nonMIPS helmet. Halldin fips on a high-speed camera and steps back from the impactor, dead zones Dark ready to catch the helmet on its rebound. spots in the brain of a “Five, four, three, two, one…” There’s a former football player loud clattering as the sled shoots forward correspond to the at 22 feet per second and the helmet drops buildup of tau protein. to meet it at 12 feet per second—crack. I can see on the computer that the head sustained about 170 Gs of linear force, and it rotated 14,100 radians per second squared (the standard scientifc metric the disease what causes it? For decades, the term “punch-drunk” has at its most basic, CtE is a cumulative for rotation). It’s a big hit, one that would been used to describe boxers left permanently effect from repetitive head trauma—not just probably result in a concussion or worse. loopy after a career of fighting. the clinical concussive blows but also weaker ones. Now comes the second helmet. Every name for the condition is chronic traumatic Impacts damage the brain’s neural pathways, variable is the same as in the frst test encephalopathy (CtE), and it can happen and as a result a protein called tau builds up. except for the addition of the low-fricto any athlete who suffers frequent blows to the more tau along the pathways, the less tion MIPS layer. “Five, four, three, two, the head. CtE has no known treatment, and easily brain signals can move around, which doctors can only diagnose it postmortem, by can lead to memory loss, lack of impulse one…”—crack. This time the computer physically examining the brain for symptoms. control, aggression, and depression. shows rotation of 6,400 radians per second squared, a 55 percent reduction. Halldin starts in on a detailed explanahow common is it? what does it mean for helmets? tion of the efects of multiple impact tests scientists at the Center for the study because football helmet safety standards on the performance of a helmet over time, of traumatic Encephalopathy at boston were designed to prevent skull fracture, but I interrupt: “How would you characUniversity examine the brains of dead contactpadding has to be stiff enough to weather an terize that test result?” sports athletes. In its first year of operation, 17 extremely hard hit. but stiff cushioning allows of the 18 brains researchers tested had CtE. a lot of force to reach the head. over time, He looks at the colorful graphs on the also, a team of scientists recently reported that that can lead to CtE. Certain companies, computer screen again. If the test dummy former NFL players are three times more likely such as Xenith, have begun to use adaptive were a football player, he would have just than the general population to die from brain cushioning. It stays stiff during a big impact, walked away from a game-ending impact diseases such as alzheimer’s. but softens during a smaller one. without a concussion. Halldin smiles just a bit, and permits himself a very un-Swedish boast. “I would say that’s f--–king amazing.” Halldin is careful not to claim the MIPS system can create those kinds of results in all impacts in all helmets. But, he says, “we can reduce rotation in Rotational forces quickly became their focus, and eventually they all directions, and it’s signifcant in most directions. We might get came up with the idea for MIPS. The frst product was a complete 35 percent in one direction, 25 percent in another direction, and helmet, designed for the equestrian market. Although the helmet 15 percent in another. And hopefully the 15 percent is not in the was well received, the team quickly learned that a smart concept most common impact direction for that sport.” in the lab doesn’t easily translate into a successful product launch. MIPS is not new: The company’s roots go back to 1997, when Production problems and quality-control issues led the team to Hans von Holst, a neurosurgeon at Stockholm’s Karolinska rethink their strategy and hire a new CEO, an experienced SwedHospital (the same hospital that adjudicates the Nobel Prize for ish executive named Niklas Steenberg. Steenberg took a look at medicine), got tired of seeing patients come in with brain injuries the situation and decided that, like airbags in cars or Intel chips in from hockey and other sports, and decided to do something about laptops, MIPS was not an end-market product. Instead they would it. He joined up with Halldin at the Royal Institute, and together focus on licensing it to existing helmet companies so those manuthey spent the next 10 years studying traumatic brain injuries. facturers could improve their own products.

C O U R T E S y A N N C m C K E E , m . D . / vA b O S T O N / b O S T O N U N I v E R S I T y S C h O O L O f m E D I C I N E

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made from SCraP Half of the caravan is salvaged parts. Walls and a door, for example, came from a remodeled house.

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A Home for the Long Haul An eco-minded couple hits the road in a DIY covered wagon s t o r y b y Katie Drummond p hot o gr a p h s b y Webb Chappell

aFter their LandLord sold her house, Tristan Chambers and Libby Reinish found themselves scrambling for a new home. They agreed then to never again endure the insecurity of leased living. It was 2010, “a time when we didn’t know where we were going, but we still wanted to have roots,” Chambers says. Unable to afford a conventional brickand-mortar house, they spent roughly a month’s rent to build what they call

the Whittled-Down Caravan: an Oregon Trail–style mobile abode made mostly of salvaged parts. Chambers and Reinish, who were living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the time, had no clue how to construct a mobile home. So they spent two months learning woodworking, wiring, and other essential skills from the Internet. A three-month build kicked off with little more than a 4-by-8-foot utility trailer topped with a

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plywood box, which served as the caravan’s rolling foundation. Wooden boards made up the lower interior walls, and oak arches completed a bare-bones frame for the roof. The couple wanted to cover the frame with wooden planks, but calculations showed the wood could overburden their ride—a four-cylinder Hyundai sedan unable to tow more than 1,000 pounds. To cut the caravan’s weight and keep an eco-friendly ethos, Chambers and Reinish scavenged for lightweight parts and bought others secondhand. Corrugated steel siding for the caravan’s lower exterior, for example, came from the side of a road. They also built front and rear walls out of wood paneling gutted from a 1970sera house. A solar panel from a flea market powered their electronics on the run. Once road ready, the 574-cubic-foot wagon weighed about 600 pounds. The couple towed it for 1,800 miles on a four-

The percentage of homes in New Mexico that are mobile—the highest rate of any U.S. state

month-long journey that ended in Northampton, Massachusetts, and eventually settled down nearby. Their cat, Lionshead, tagged along. An outdoor “catio,” accessible via a flapped door in the caravan’s rear wall, helped to placate her after cramped car rides. Chambers, 30, and Reinish, 27, now own an immobile home and rarely use the caravan. They’ve added a gas stove, though, and plan to install a composting toilet, a heater, and insulation to provide friends a cheap, cozy place to crash. They also intend to post full construction plans online. “We find a lot of people are interested, but they’re intimidated,” Reinish says. “I can relate to that. I remember thinking, ‘Is this going to fall apart the minute we hit 55 miles an hour?’ ”

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ELECTRICITY A motorcycle battery stores energy gathered by a 50-watt solar panel on the caravan’s roof. A modified plug-in car inverter transforms the battery’s DC output into AC, and a charge controller conditions power for common electronics. Chambers and Reinish say their system collects enough juice to run three devices—e.g., LED lights, a portable fan, and a laptop—for at least three hours.

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MATERIALS Borrowing the travel-light tricks of pioneers, such as rounded caravan walls, helped the couple trim their home’s weight and cost. Corrugated steel gave structural support without the heft of wood planks, and waterproof canvas made for a suitable ceiling. They also skipped insulation, built a mattress out of straw, and dual-purposed couch cushions as dirty laundry sacks.

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50 BODY LENGTHS PER SECOND Top scuttling speed of the American cockroach, one of the fastest-known invertebrates on Earth

H2.0 BUILD IT

TIME 3 hours for circuit, 20 minutes for surgery COST $50 for parts [or $100 for kit] DIFFICULTY ▯▯▯▯●

HEAVY LIFTERS Cockroaches can haul 20 times their own weight. That’s plenty of strength for a cyborg backpack— and fancy accessories.

Roach Control

An insect cyborg that scurries at your command If cockroaches send you scrambling, use neuroscience to reverse the human-insect power balance. Carefully electrifying the nerves in a roach’s antennae makes the insect think it has met an obstacle—a sensation that can be manipulated to steer it. The trick could turn roaches into handy tools. Alper Bozkurt, an engineer at North Carolina State University, envisions a network of cyborg roaches assisting in search and rescue. Neuroscientists Greg Gage and Tim Marzullo, meanwhile, think hacking insects could inspire kids to research and improve electronic interfaces with the human nervous system. Gage and Marzullo developed a $100 RoboRoach kit that includes all the tech required for insect neurosurgery. But you can follow these steps to assemble a similar kit—and command your own troop of six-legged cyborgs—on the cheap. s T o R Y B Y Amanda Schupak I L L UsT R AT I o Ns B Y Graham Murdoch

POPULAR SCIENCE

JANUARY 2013

THE ROBO

THE ROACH

The RoboRoach kit contains a circuit board and controller, but you can hack the essential parts from a remote-controlled Hexbug toy.

Pet stores typically sell false death’s head cockroaches as reptile food. These big-andslow roaches make great cyborgs, but pick an adult to avoid disrupting its maturation process (yes, roaches can enjoy their postcyborg lives in lettuce-lined terrariums).

CIRCUIT BOARD Remove the Hexbug’s circuit board. The toy’s infrared remote control can start and stop current to the roach’s antennae from afar. TIMER CHIP Electricity needs to flow at 55 pulses per second to mimic the chatter of roach neurons (and hijack the insect’s senses). Computer chips called 555 timers can get the job done. Detach each motor on the Hexbug circuit board and solder on a timer. BATTERY Replace the Hexbug’s two batteries with a single 12-millimeter, three-volt lithium-ion battery. CAPACITOR To stimulate neurons, current must flow in each direction. Add a capacitor to the timer’s output pin. ELECTRODE CONNECTORS Snip a pair of three-electrode segments from a header. Wire one set to the circuit board and solder a one-inch strand of 41-gauge silver wire to each electrode on the other. The latter set will be superglued to the roach’s head as an electrode connector for the circuit board.

ICE BATH Dunk the roach in ice water for a few minutes to anesthetize it. Dry the back of its head and sand off some of the wax. Superglue the electrode connector in place. WIRING Poke the left silver wire about one millimeter into the roach’s thorax, under a wing just behind its head, and secure it with superglue. Cut each antenna to expose a neuronlined tube. Insert the middle wire one millimeter into the left tube, and the right wire into the right tube. Superglue both wires into place. CONNECT AND COMMAND Hot-glue the circuit board onto the roach’s back and plug it into the head connector. After the roach wakes up, press the remote’s left button to urge it right, and the right button to move it left. The cyborg will ignore commands after a few minutes. Peel off the circuit board and clip all wires to ensure a long retirement.

For a video of the surgery, visit popsci.com/roboroach.

141 FEET Diameter of the world’s largest clock face, on the Makkah Clock Royal Tower in Saudi Arabia

H2.0

TIME 6 weeks COST $0

THEME BU ILDING

Clever Measures Three projects that reimagine conventional calculating s T o R Y B Y Miriam Kramer

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY GREGORY DE GOUVEIA; COURTESY PUBLIC LAB FOR OPEN TECHNOLOGY; COURTESY THOMAS HUDSON

Analog Bike Clock Artist and cycling enthusiast Gregory de Gouveia, based in Chico, California, has built bike sculptures before. But his 12-foot-tall clock called Time to Change—a fusion of more than a dozen two-wheeled machines—is his largest and most functional aesthetic contribution to the sport. The project began when another local artist asked de Gouveia if he wanted to create a sculpture for the 2011 Chico Wildflower Century Ride. De Gouveia decided to build an unofficial clock for the bike event. He called on nearby cycling communities to donate used bikes, and once enough junkers rolled into his shop, he held a “disassembly party” to remove their gears, frames, chains, and other components. De Gouveia pieced together the gigantic clock’s skeleton from the scrap metal in roughly three weeks, and then spent another three weeks adding parts and tuning the gears. The finished clock’s heart is a 600-rpm variable-speed drill motor. Solar panels charge a 12-volt battery that powers the motor, which spins a geared bike wheel near the twelve o’clock position. The coordinated movement of 12 bicycle wheels, 13 cranks, and 26 chains keeps time like the gears of an analog wristwatch. The clock debuted at the Wildflower ride and made a second public appearance in 2012 at San Francisco’s Maker Faire Bay Area. De Gouveia says it runs about 30 seconds slow, but adjusting the battery’s voltage should help the clock’s second hand hit precisely one revolution per minute. Look for his symbolic masterpiece at future West Coast bike races.

TIME 3 months COST $110

TIME 1 day COST $50

Honeybee Counter

Thermal Flashlight

Thomas Hudson, an engineer and beekeeper in Portland, Oregon, wanted to log his insects’ comings and goings, so he built a row of 22 tunnels at the mouth of their hive. Infrared sensors that detect bee movement flank the ends of each tunnel and count entries and exits. Hudson maps hive patterns with the data. Researchers might use the device to study honeybee ecology.

Mapping energy leaks in poorly insulated homes no longer requires hiring a technician. The thermal flashlight, designed by the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, changes the color of an LED light beam in step with an infrared thermometer’s readings. By sweeping the handheld device across walls and floors during long-exposure photos, anyone can “paint” a room’s inefficiencies.

JANUARY 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

H2.0 A sk A G e e k

Will yanking a portable drive destroy my data? We’ve all failed to eject a USB drive before unplugging it, prompting warnings—but not absolute truths—about lost data. Knowing the mechanics of three common storage devices could save you precious time, 1s, and 0s. Traditional hard drives can store terabytes of data on spinning, magnetized disks. Unplugging a hard drive, however, can cause data-reading components to suddenly crash into them. Damage is rare but severe, ranging from permanent errors to a dead drive. Better safe than sorry. Always click Eject. Solid-state drives, or SSDs, lack the mov-

answer b y Jack Donovan illustration b y

ing parts and whirring sounds of hard drives. They’re more yank-friendly—with two caveats: SSDs can’t be transferring data or running TRIM, a command that “trims” away deleted data to boost speed. Sudden removal can fry tiny components, so eject SSDs, too. As for pinkie-size flash drives? Yank them at your leisure, unless, that is, you’ve turned

Thilo Rothacker on write-cache mode. This process offloads files to computer memory to increase transfer speeds. Unplugging the drive before it’s done copying data can cause it to fail. Fortunately, most devices don’t enable write-cache by default, and many computers disable it the moment a drive is plugged in.

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92 Percentage of U.S. households with TVs in 2003 that owned a VCR. By 2012, less than 59 percent owned one.

100% 1980

2012

Retro Spinner

H2.0

Rep u Rp oseD Tech

story b y colleen park

courtesy rohit de sa

Turn a VCR and USB mouse into a computer jog wheel

1 Disassemble a VCR and pull out its polished,

Early in his engineering career, Rohit de Sa faced a painful reality: endless scrolling through lengthy computer documents. Just an hour of flicking a mouse’s wheel was enough to cause carpaltunnel-like symptoms in his wrist. So de Sa repurposed an old VCR, computer mouse, and camera lens caps to build an ergonomic jog wheel. With your own box of junk and some effort, you can re-create de Sa’s retro spinner. For de Sa’s full instructions, visit popsci.com/jogwheel.

drumlike head. Strip all wiring and gut the electronics.

2 Harvest a mouse’s computer chip, oscillator (typically a two-pronged cylinder), and USB cable.

3 Bend the mouse chip’s pins to fit into a two-millimeterpitch veroboard. Solder surface mount capacitors between the chip’s power supply and ground pins.

4 Drill two holes into a camera’s rear lens cap that align with screw threads on the VCR head’s lower half.

5 Print an encoder wheel pattern (goo.gl/vsCNn) and

glue it inside the top of the VCR head. Encoders in mice convert a scrollwheel’s spin into data, but the jog wheel will instead log the speed of the pattern inside the top. This requires an optical encoder—so find two SG-105 photo-reflective sensors, which both emit and detect light (hobby stores carry them), and solder them onto a spare piece of stripboard.

6 Glue your optical encoder inside the VCR head to face TimE 5 hours CosT About $10 DiffiCulTy ▯▯▯○○

the printed wheel pattern. Solder the encoder to the mouse chip and the USB cable to the chip’s USB pins.

7 Assemble the spinner with screws from the VCR head, plug in the USB cable, and get scrolling.

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F O r y O u r I n F O r m aT I O n

Have a burning science question? E-mail it to fyi@popsci.com, or tweet @popsci hashtag #PopSciFYI.

answers b y Daniel Engber

Why don’t spiders get trapped in their own webs? SHOrT anSWEr

Hairy feet and oily legs. Orb-weavers, arachnids that capture their prey using sticky webs, make up more than one fourth of all known spiders. These species spin their creations with spiral crossbeams dotted with drops of viscous goo. (The webs’ radial and framing threads are left clean.) When an insect brushes against these drops—each thread can carry several dozen per millimeter—it gets stuck, and the spider rushes over to inject it with venom or cocoon it in silk. The question, of course, is how does the predator escape its own glue traps? Naturalists have only recently worked out the mechanics of the sticky web—and

JAN TOvE JOhANSSON/gETTy ImAgES

LOnG anSWEr

of avoiding it. “It’s surprising how little attention the topic has gotten despite how many people wonder about it,” says Brent Opell, a biologist at Virginia Tech who has researched spiders’ capture threads. Opell has shown that when a bug tries to pull away from a web, the droplets divide the force across a length of stretchy silk, so that no single point bears all the strain. As for how spiders avoid their goo, scientists have plenty of ideas but not much data.

Spiders seem to use an oily coating to protect themselves.

One hypothesis, that spiders simply skip over the sticky threads, has been more or less discredited. In fact, orb-weavers sweep their hind legs across the goo hundreds or thousands of times as they make their webs. They also brush their bodies against the drops while they’re subduing prey. Another, more promising theory originated in 1905, when a French naturalist named Jean-Henry Fabre noted that the orb-weavers frequently ran their legs across their mouthparts. He wondered if they might be spitting up or otherwise secreting some sort of lubricant that protected them from their own web. Fabre tried washing spider legs with solvent, and reported that many became ensnared. Early last year, a team of researchers at the Natural History Museum in Bern, Switzerland, re-created Fabre’s experiment, albeit under more controlled conditions. They installed spiders in laboratory boxes and left them to build webs. The scientists then pulled off the spiders’ legs and pressed them very carefully against the adhesive silk. When washed in water or left untreated, the legs barely stuck at all. But when treated with an organic solvent, the legs seemed twice as prone to sticking. Fabre had been right, they said: Spiders seem to use an oily coating to protect themselves. There may be more to the story, though. Another study published in 2012, this one done in Costa Rica, came to a similar conclusion about the oily coating. But the Costa Rican study also used video analysis, which showed other adaptations: A spider moves its hind legs across the capture threads at an angle that minimizes the glue’s effects, and tiny barbs on the bristles of its feet, or tarsi, help keep its legs from sliding into the goo. The idea that a spider might have multiple ways of avoiding snaring itself doesn’t surprise Opell. “If it’s an important thing to the spider,” he says, “there probably are several mechanisms that have evolved to contribute to the nonsticking ability.” All of the above applies to orb-weavers, but their webs aren’t the only ones that stick their prey. A related family of spiders, called Deinopidea, makes use of an older method that predates the evolution of viscous goo. Dry cribellar threads catch on the stout bristles of an insect’s body, or adhere to it through capillary and van der Waals forces. What tricks do Deinopidea use to escape their cribellar yarns? The arachnologists haven’t yet worked that one out.

January 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE

Q: Can too much antiperspirant

cause me to overheat? Used only under the arms? No.

Sweating is how the body cools down. As water evaporates off the skin, due to a difference in vapor pressure, it draws heat away from the body. So if we stopper our sweat glands with metallic salts (the active ingredient in most antiperspirants), decreasing the amount of sweat our bodies can release, will that leave us overheated? Would that in turn prompt our brains to compensate by signaling our glands to sweat more in untreated areas? Would a vicious circle of perspiration begin? No. According to Craig Crandall, a specialist in thermoregulation at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, the places where we tend to put our antiperspirant aren’t particularly important for keeping us cool. The armpits LOnG anSWEr

are more involved with apocrine sweating, the kind inspired by emotional arousal, than eccrine sweating, which regulates temperature. Whatever eccrine sweating does happen in the armpits doesn’t cool the body much anyway; because the moisture sits tucked between your arm and torso, it can’t easily evaporate. Crandall also notes that the amount of skin affected by normal antiperspirant use is relatively small. In burn victims who have lost the capacity to sweat from at least 40 percent of their bodies due to large-scale skin grafts, Crandall found “a huge detriment” to their body’s ability to regulate its temperature. To match that disability using an antiperspirant, you’d have to roll a tube of Mitchum over every square inch of both your legs, feet and then over your entire head.

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Since then, MIPS has licensed its sliding low-friction layer to about 20 helmet manufacturers, for sports from snowboarding and skiing to cycling and motocross. Recently, Steenberg decided, the company was ready to start hunting

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would fall all over themselves to license or create something like MIPS, a simple product that directly addresses a critical factor in concussions and incorporates easily into existing helmet designs. “I thought we’d have people hugging us, saying, ‘Thank you!’ ” says Ken Yafe, a former NHL executive who lef the league in March 2012, afer 19 years, and signed on with MIPS to help them get an audience with U.S. manufacturers. But afer nearly a year of squiring Steenberg and Halldin around to diferent companies, he says, “we’ve been met with skepticism.” One of the reasons, Yafe suspects, is that current safety standards don’t require the companies to do anything more than what they’re already doing. It’s a criticism privately echoed by most helmet researchers: Simplistic certifcation standards provide convenient legal cover for the manufacturers. If NOCSAE certifes a company’s helmets as safe, then the company has less risk of being held responsible for injuries. On the other hand, if that same company goes above and beyond the standards, it could put itself at risk of getting sued: Suddenly all of its existing helmets would appear to be inadequate, and worse, the company might have to admit knowing that they fell short. Duma, of Virginia Tech, points to NOCSAE’s industry funding to explain how such a situation has persisted in football. “Follow the money,” he says. “Imagine if Ford were the only organization testing its cars, and it was saying that every one got the top rating. It’s a very unusual arrangement.” To Steenberg, the MIPS CEO, the situation is both harmful and backward. “If something is available that makes your helmet more safe, you should be held liable for not using it,” he says. It’s not the frst time a new safety technology has faced such a paradox. All too ofen implementation hangs on the grim calculus of whether the cost to industry of adopting a safety measure is more or less than the cost to the public of going without it. When liability enters the equation, lawyers and judges and lawmakers get involved, and even the most urgent matters can end up mired in argument. For example, it took more than a decade to legislate seat belts as standard equipment in automobiles. It’s worth noting that the two companies that frst popularized and implemented seat-belt standards C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 7 7

POPULAR SCIENCE

january 2013

h El mEt wA R S

were Saab and Volvo, both Swedish. Change is on the horizon, though. The University of Ottawa’s Hoshizaki has a grant from NOCSAE to develop a new standard that incorporates rotation. “I want to be fair to the manufacturers,” he says. “If they could make a safer helmet, they would. I don’t think they are against it; they’re just making sure they don’t cross that line and say, ‘Yeah, we should be managing rotation,’ because that would bring up liability issues.” With a new standard, that roadblock could vanish. One enterprising company has already launched a product to directly address rotational acceleration in another contact sport. In the summer of 2012, Bauer, the number-one helmet maker in ice hockey, released the Re-akt. Inside the helmet, a thin, bright-yellow layer of material sits loosely between the head and the padding, allowing the head to move a little bit in any direction during an impact. Called Suspend-Tech, the layer appears, to the color, suspiciously similar to MIPS. In fact, during the development of the Re-akt, MIPS co-founder Halldin tested an early version on his impact rig at the Royal Institute. The stories diverge as to how that collaboration came about, and how Bauer came up with the idea for a sliding layer, but any questions that arise about intellectual property may not matter. Bauer’s Suspend-Tech is a signifcant debut: It is the frst attempt by a mainstream company to include a rotational layer in contactsports helmets. MIPS is betting that since one hockey manufacturer has embraced the idea, the rest of the feld will start shopping for their own version. And that, in turn, could create enough momentum for MIPS to break into the football market. In perhaps the most hopeful sign of all, the NFL acknowledges that MIPS-like products have the organization’s attention. Kevin Guskiewicz of the NFL’s safety equipment subcommittee says the league is already evaluating the concept. “We’re looking at it very seriously,” he says. Meanwhile, as scientists do more tests and manufacturers bicker, 4.2 million people will suit up and play football this year, most of them children with stilldeveloping brains. Every one of them needs a good helmet. Tom Foster is based in Brooklyn, New York. This is his frst story for Popular Science. jANuARY 2013

popuLaR Science

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Claim your “Mermaid’s Treasure.” On any vessel crossing the oceans, there was no more precious cargo than aquamarine. Sailors paid handsomely for its power, considering it their most valuable commodity. In scientific terms, the chemical composition of our Maré Necklace beads are cousins to precious emeralds. A legend among luxury jewelers. Named for the Latin words for “water of the sea,” aquamarine shines with all the colors of the ocean. Each Stauer Exclusive! Order bead is like a droplet of the sea today to get 67% OFF! frozen in space and time. Walk into the most exclusive retail jewelers and you’ll find the gem in a place of honor. Fifth Avenue thinks nothing of offering a strand of aquamarine “pebbles” for nearly $12,000. But you deserve more than a dollop. That’s why we collected the bluest stones from three continents, polished them to perfection and arranged them in this 20" double-stranded, 300-carat masterpiece. Other jewelry stores hate us because we don’t play by their rules. Stauer wants to turn the luxury business on its head. We took the Maré Aquamarine Necklace to an independent appraiser who works with auction houses, luxury estate sales and insurance companies. He valued our Maré necklace at $1,590.* We thanked him for his professional opinion and then ignored it. Because even if a graduate gemologist tells us that this necklace is valued at nearly $1600, we want you to wear it for ONLY $129. Yes, we’re serious. Your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed. If you don’t fall in love with the Maré, send it back within 30 days for a complete refund of your purchase price. It’s that simple. Call now to set sail on your own incredible aquamarine deal while they last! JEWELRY SPECS: - 14K gold-layered spacers and clasp - 300 ctw of genuine polished aquamarine

MarŽ Aquamarine Collection

Necklace (300 ctw) Appraised at $1,590 .................................Your price $129

Bracelet (60 ctw).................Only $79 Earrings (15 ctw).................Only $59 Bracelet & Earrings Set (300 ctw)— $138 .....................................Now only $99

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Stauer

14101 Southcross Drive W., Dept. MAN236-02 Burnsville, Minnesota 55337

www.stauer.com

Stauer has a Better Business Bureau Rating of A+

Necklace enlarged to show luxurious color.

* For more information concerning the appraisal process, visit http://www.stauer.com/appraisedvalues.asp.

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Lim i or ted t de o rs th fro e fi m rst thi 2, s a 50 Bring home 300 carats of aquamarine, the legendary d! 0 “sailor’s gem” — now available for under $130!

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How to Outsmart a Millionaire

Only the “Robin Hood of Watchmakers” can steal the spotlight from a luxury legend for under $200!

r. Bigshot rolled up in a roaring highperformance Italian sports car, dropping attitude like his $22,000 watch made it okay for him to be rude. ThatÕs when I decided to roll up my sleeves and teach him a lesson. ÒNice watch,Ó I said, pointing to his and holding up mine. He nodded like we belonged to the same club. We did, but he literally paid 100 times more for his membership. Bigshot bragged about his five-figure purchase, a luxury heavyweight from the titan of high-priced timepieces. I told him that mine was the Stauer Corso, a 27-jewel automatic classic now available for only $179. And just like that, the man was at a loss for words. Think of Stauer as the “Robin Hood of Watchmakers.” You deserve a watch that can hold its own against the luxury classics for a fraction of the price. YouÕll feel the quality as soon as you put it on your wrist. The Corso is an expertly-crafted time machine... not a cry for attention. Never judge a watch by the size of its price tag. Our factory spent over $40 million on Swiss-made machinery to insure the highest quality parts. Each timepiece takes over 200 individual precision parts to create the complex assembly. Peer through the exhibition back to see the 27-jeweled automatic movement in action and youÕll understand why we can only offer the Corso in a limited edition. Our specialty is vintage automatic movements. The Corso is driven by a self-winding design, inspired by a 1923 patent. Your watch will never need batteries. Every second of power is generated by the movement of your body. The black dial features a trio of date complications including a graphic day/night display. The Corso secures with a twotoned stainless steel bracelet and is water-resistant to 3 ATM. Your 100% satisfaction guarantee. Test drive the Corso. If you donÕt love it, send it back within 30 days and weÕll refund every dollar of your purchase price. Spending more doesnÕt make you smarter. But saving thousands will leave you feeling (and looking) like a genius!

Exclusive OFFER! Order the Stauer Corso and these Stauer Flyboy Optics™ Sunglasses (a $99 value) are yours FREE! Polarized with UV protection

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Stauer

14101 Southcross Drive W., Dept. CSW278-02 Burnsville, Minnesota 55337 www.stauer.com

From the arChiv es

FEBRUARY 1941 Own This COver! Order prints of vintage PopSci covers from our online store.

Air Power st o r y b y Colleen Park

The Single-Seater Grumman F4F-3 “Wildcat”

In operatIon 1940–1943 / Speed 330 mph / range 850 miles / WIng Span 38 feet / WeaponS Four wing-mounted 0.50-caliber machine guns and two 100-pound bombs re pl ayph o to s. com / po pula rsci encephot ost ore

POPULAR SCIENCE magazine, Vol. 282, No. 1 (ISSN 161-7370, USPS 577-250), is published monthly by Bonnier Corp., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. Copyright ©2012 by Bonnier Corp. All rights reserved. Reprinting in whole or part is forbidden except by permission of Bonnier Corp. Mailing Lists: We make a portion of our mailing list available to reputable frms. If you would prefer that we not include your name, please write to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing ofces. Subscription Rates: $19.95 for 1 year. Please add $10 per year for Canadian addresses and $20 per year for all other international addresses. GST #R-122988066. Canada Post Publications agreement #40612608. Canada Return Mail: Pitney Bowes, P.O. Box 25542, London, ON N6C 6B2. Printed in the USA. Subscriptions processed electronically. Subscribers: If the post ofce alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within two years. Photocopy Permission: Permission is granted by POPULAR SCIENCE® for libraries and others registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) to photocopy articles in this issue for the fat fee of $1 per copy of each article or any part of an article. Send correspondence and payment to CCC (21 Congress St., Salem, MA 01970); specify CCC code 0161-7370/85/$1.00–0.00. Copying done for other than personal or reference use without the written permission of POPULAR SCIENCE® is prohibited. Address requests for permission on bulk orders to POPULAR SCIENCE, 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016 for foreign requests. Editorial Ofces: Address contributions to POPULAR SCIENCE, Editorial Dept., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. We are not responsible for loss of unsolicited materials; they will not be returned unless accompanied by return postage. Microflm editions are available from Xerox University Microflms Serial Bid Coordinator, 300 N. Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48106.

POPULAR SCIENCE

January 2013

POPULAR SCIENCE ARChIvE

When two Grumman F4F-3 “Wildcat” fighters appeared on PoPular Science’s cover in February 1941, the U.S. had not yet joined World War II, but the possibility of an attack on American soil loomed large. Writer Carl Dreher estimated the likelihood of an air bombing on a U.S. city by analyzing foreign aerial strength. He said that mainland cities were secure, but coastal cities were in danger of hit-and-run raids. At the time, military aircraft could not fly directly from Asia or Europe to the U.S. (though Dreher predicted that “such bombers will be an aeronautical commonplace in five years”). Instead, planes would take off from a nearby land base or aircraft carrier—which they did 10 months later when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, prompting the U.S. to declare war. The world’s military air powers have evolved since 1941, of course. Last year, China unveiled the stealthy, high-speed J-20 fighter jet, which rivals America’s best. Turn to page 44 to learn more about China’s new arsenal.

Its speed and durability will have your D-SLR nervously looking over its shoulder.

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