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*Vortec MAX shown. EPA est. MPG 15 city/19 hwy. †Whichever comes first. See dealer for details. **Dependability based on longevity: 1981–July 2005 full-line light-duty truck company registrations. Excludes other GM divisions. ©2006 GM Corp. Buckle up, America!
THE NEXT-GENERATION FORMAT FOR HIGH-DEF ENTERTAINMENT With powerful capabilities like full 1080p resolution*, up to 7.1 channels of surround sound, 50 GB of storage capacity and backward compatibility with your existing DVDs, Blu-ray Disc will change the way you WATCH movies, ENJOY music, PLAY games, RECORD high-def content and STORE your favorite files. Best of all, since Blu-ray Disc has the broadest industry support of any high-def format, you’re assured of getting the best high-def content, product choices and overall viewing experience. It’s here! Get the hottest news on Blu-ray content and product availability right now at www.experiencebluray.com
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EMULSION/LINESCREEN: RR PDF/X-1a, SWOP Digital content proof
*HDTV required. As with other optical media devices, user factors and other circumstances may limit Blu-ray Disc playback. Some content may require HDMI-compatible TV for high-definition playback. © Copyright 2006 Blu-ray Disc Association. All rights reserved. Blu-ray DiscTM and the Blu-ray Disc logo are trademarks of the Blu-ray Disc Association. Spider-Man; Motion Picture © 2002 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All rights reserved. Spider-Man Character ® & © 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved. Resident Evil: Apocalypse; © 2004 Davis Films/Impact (Canada) Inc./Constantin Film (UK) Limited. All rights reserved. Underworld: © 2003 Subterranean Productions LLC. All rights reserved. Coming soon on Blu-ray Disc: THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA. NARNIA, and all book titles, characters and locales original thereto are trademarks of C.S. Lewis Pte Ltd. and are used with permission. © Disney/Walden, Fantasia © Disney, The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl © Disney, Finding Nemo © Disney/Pixar. “Scrat” TM & © 2006 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. Fantastic 4 and X-MEN character likenesses: TM &© 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved. John Legend © 2006 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT. Harry Potter characters, names and related indicia are trademarks of and © Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC Comics. SUPERMAN and all related characters and elements are trademarks of and © DC Comics. © 2006 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
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For motor oil, an engine is a complex, dangerous mechanism crammed with parts that move, grind and slam. Life inside its metallic shell is brutal. Fortunately, Pennzoil Platinumt is custom-built to stand up to that brutality.
Find out more about adaptive molecules at PennzoilPlatinum.com.
PS1206FOB_TOCS R1
10/19/06
THE FUTURE NOW
FOUNDED IN 1872
6:44 AM
Page 07
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CONTENTS THIS MONTH’S GUIDE TO INNOVATION AND DISCOVERY
DECEMBER ’06
VOLUME 269 #6
41
features
BEST OF WHAT’S NEW 2 0 0 6
BEST OF WHAT’S NEW 2006
Our annual guide to the year’s top 100 products.
41 HOME TECH 48 GADGETS 54 AVIATION & SPACE 62 RECREATION 71 AUTO TECH 80 HOME ENTERTAINMENT 84 ENGINEERING 92 GENERAL INNOVATION 96 HEALTH 102 COMPUTING
71
best of what’s new: POPSCI INNOVATORS
Call it the best of who’s new: The people behind five of this year’s winningest innovations.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: SATOSHI; COURTESY PORSCHE; BOB SAULS; LUIS BRUNO; COURTESY GOODYEAR; COURTESY CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION; LUIS BRUNO; COURTESY TOM RILES/BRIAN J. NELSON; JOHN B. CARNETT
45 THE TOOL-DOCTORS ARE ON CALL Tool company Stanley’s R&D people live on job sites, listening to real workers complain. That’s how they knew it was time to reinvent the hammer. By Joe Brown
68 RAPID DEVELOPMENT
Visit Scott Shipley’s man-made rivers, perfectly designed for whitewater thrills. By Tom Colligan
91 THE TAILGATING ARCHITECT
To build the perfect football stadium, Peter Eisenman considered every aspect of the game—including the view from the nosebleed seats. By Gregory Mone
91
101 THE ORGAN FARMER
Anthony Atala has many bladders. No, not in his body—in a lab, made from scratch and ready for transplant to patients. By Elizabeth Svoboda
106 DR. NAIL VS. THE MONSTER
Who ever gave much thought to the simple nail? Ed Sutt did. His new design may keep houses from tearing apart during the next big hurricane. By Tom Clynes
62
84 71
54 48
96
DECEMBER 2006 POPULAR SCIENCE 07
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CONTENTS
129
16
123
on the web
BEST OF WHAT’S NEW 2006
FLYING SOLO The Polecat surveillance plane hides from radar, no pilot required.
REGULARS MEGAPIXELS
16 THE MUST-SEE PHOTOS OF THE MONTH A supernova travels faster than expected. So does a speedboat powered by fat.
HEADLINES 21 ENERGY
Tapping black gold deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico.
24 BIGGER, BETTER, FASTER A 55,000-ton ship and other notable record-breakers. A Tesla coil that can unleash 20 million volts of lightning.
30 SHRINKAGE
Visit popsci.com to see the tech toys on display at our Best of What’s New showcase, plus exclusive behind-the-scenes videos and more!
The lastest weapon against counterfeiters is just one hundredth of an inch tall.
31 ASTRONOMY
A giant umbrella for space telescopes makes it easier to spot distant planets.
32 WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Why George Church wants to decode your DNA.
How 2.0
115 YOU BUILT WHAT?!
With a homemade disco floor, you can catch Saturday Night Fever in your basement any day of the week.
123 GRAY MATTER
Theodore Gray’s element-collecting obsession means a free periodic-table poster for you.
124 USE IT BETTER
Turn a pocket-size Internet tablet into a phone that makes calls over Wi-Fi.
127 ASK A GEEK
Dig yourself out from under your inbox.
FYI
129 The sound of genius, fat planets, and the risks of turning wind into watts.
OTHER STUFF
10 FROM THE EDITOR 12 LETTERS 162 THE FUTURE THEN
08 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
GO TO POPSCI.COM/BOWN AND: Watch writer Tom Colligan brave the waves at the U.S. National Whitewater Center. See the editors test products at POPSCI HQ (warning— someone bleeds).
Catch a glimpse of the world’s fastest street-legal car in action. Download an audio tour of the BOWN Showcase. Enter a sweepstakes to win prizes fit for technophiles.
POPSCI.COM
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY NASA/ESA/THE HUBBLE HERITAGE; THE SIMPSONS TM 2006 TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM CORPORATION; COURTESY LOCKHEED MARTIN; JOHN B. CARNETT; COURTESY BUGATTI; COURTESY THEODORE GRAY
COULDN’T MAKE IT TO OUR BIG EVENT IN NEW YORK’S GRAND CENTRAL STATION?
26 ODD INVENTIONS
AS REAL AS IT GETS
CONGRATULATIONS. YOU’VE RIGHTED YOUR PLANE. NEXT UP: EMERGENCY LANDING IN THE JUNGLES OF THE CONGO.
After that, let’s see you rescue an injured climber on Mt. Kilimanjaro. Or take on the world’s best pilots in the Red Bull Air Races. With 23 aircraft and over 50 real-world missions, it’s the most realistic version yet. Whole cities and airports have been faithfully recreated, with a 16X overall improvement in terrain graphics. Suddenly, calling it a “simulator” just doesn’t seem right.
(ACTUAL GAME SCREEN SHOT) © 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Windows, and the Microsoft Games Studios logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Intel, the Intel Inside logo, Intel Centrino, and the Intel Centrino logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. Take flight with Intel Technology.
PS1206 EdLetter/Masthd 10/14/06 10:41 AM Page 10
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FROM THE EDITOR THE FUTURE NOW
Editorial Director Scott Mowbray
Editor Mark Jannot Design Director Sam Syed
SOMETIME IN MID-SEPTEMBER, the editors of this magazine locked ourselves in a poorly ventilated conference room to debate, harangue, expound, and ultimately forge a consensus. What we were doing—for the first time in our 19 years of anointing the year’s top 100 new technologies—was choosing a grand Grand Award winner from the pool of Best of What’s New innovations featured in this issue. It was a brutal exhortatory smackdown, let me tell you, with advocates passionately pleading the merits of some mighty dazzling contenders: the 253mph, 1,001-horsepower, $1.2-million Bugatti Veyron supercar; a $130 laptop designed to bring computing to children in developing countries; the first functional human organ grown in a lab. Tremendous, transformative technologies, all of them, but neither supercar nor simple computer nor synthesized bladder emerged triumphant from the scrum. No, this year’s winner of winners, the top new technology of 2006 is—actually, it’s sitting atop my computer as I type this, and at a glance it doesn’t look particularly special. Resting on its head, it rises to an elevation of about two and a half inches. It’s a nail. Ah, but what the HurriQuake nail lacks in visible high-tech glitz, it more than makes up for in potential influence. The surprising insight that inspired the HurriQuake’s development is that when wood-frame structures collapse in an earthquake or hurricane, it’s the nails that fail first—they pull out, or their heads pull through the wood, or they snap in half at a joint. Yet until engineer Ed Sutt came along, there hadn’t been a significant advance in nail technology in . . . well, pretty much ever. Sutt (a.k.a. “Dr. Nail”) and his team at Bostitch spent six years addressing that oversight. They increased the nail head’s size by 25 percent, added angled barbs to the shaft, twisted the top, and cooked up a high-carbon alloy designed to best balance stiffness and pliability. The finished product fits into existing nail guns and adds just $15 to the price of the average house, but it will double that house’s resistance to high winds and boost its sturdiness against earthquake forces by up to 50 percent. The HurriQuake may not look like much, but it’s a model of engineering ingenuity applied to an underrecognized problem— and it could, over time, save thousands of lives. That’s why it’s our 2006 Innovation MARK JANNOT of the Year.
Our dazzlingly humble 2006 grand Grand Award winner
[email protected]
10 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY Art Director Matthew Cokeley Photo Editor Kristine LaManna Staff Photographer John B.Carnett Senior Designer Stephanie Fehmel Contributing Artists Peter Bollinger, Bryan Christie, Kevin Hand, Nick Kaloterakis, John MacNeill, Graham Murdoch, Stephen Rountree, Bob Sauls, Nik Schulz, Paul Wootton Photo Intern Susan Sheeran POPSCI.COM Web Editor Megan Miller Assistant Web Editor John Mahoney Web Production Intern Fred Koschmann POPULAR SCIENCE PROPERTIES
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INNOVATION NAILED
EDITORIAL Executive Editor Michael Moyer Editorial Production Manager Felicia Pardo Military, Aviation & Automotive Editor Eric Adams Senior Editors Nicole Dyer, Mike Haney, Kalee Thompson Copy Chief Rina Bander Associate Editors Joe Brown, Doug Cantor, Martha Harbison Assistant Editors Lauren Aaronson, Bjorn Carey Editorial Assistant Barbara Caraher Editor at Large Dawn Stover Contributing Automotive Editor Stephan Wilkinson Contributing Editors Theodore Gray, Eric Hagerman, Joseph Hooper, Suzanne Kantra Kirschner, Preston Lerner, Gregory Mone, Steve Morgenstern, Jeffrey Rothfeder, Jessica Snyder Sachs, Rebecca Skloot, Bill Sweetman, Phillip Torrone, James Vlahos, Charles Wardell, Speed Weed Contributing Troubadour Jonathan Coulton Contributing Futurist Andrew Zolli Intern Abby Seiff
Recycling that’s easy to wrap around.
Wrapping yourself around a plan that recycles your used rechargeable batteries is easy. Check the batteries in your cordless and cellular phones, camcorders, cordless power tools, laptop computers, digital cameras, and two-way radios. If they no longer hold a charge, recycle them by visiting one of many collection sites nationwide, including those retailers listed below. For a complete list of rechargeable battery drop-off locations, visit www.call2recycle.org or call toll free 877-2-RECYCLE.
Recycle your rechargeable batteries.
Recycle at one of these national retailers:
©2006 Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation. Founded in 1994, RBRC is a non-profit organization dedicated to recycling rechargeable batteries and cellular phones. For more information: www.rbrc.org or 1-800-8-BATTERY. To learn more about the animal featured in this ad, visit our web site.
PS1206 Readers Letters 10/13/06 4:50 PM Page 12
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LETTERS
[email protected]
COMMENTS FROM OUR BLOG Our story “New Secrets of Area 51” [October] started debate on our Web site about national security. Here’s what you said.
Bill Sweetman’s articles are always great fun. His informed speculation reminds me of NFL draft previews, which often diverge wildly from eventual reality. Is he correct? I hope so. Does his opinion compromise security? No. Even if the tech he
Brushes with Brilliance I read your article about the top young scientists of the year, called “The Brilliant 10” [Oct.]. Although I found nine of the profiles true to the title, the work presented for Luis von Ahn [“The Matrix Builder”] seemed significantly less so. Having a computer-science degree myself, I find his approach very defeatist. Rather than push the limits of what a computing platform is able to do so that the human doesn’t have to (which is kind of the point), von Ahn simply gives up and makes a clever game that uses human behavior to solve his problem. I’ll admit his approach is ingenious, but brilliant it is not. Chuck Ruffino Pittsford, N.Y. Your article on Nima Arkani-Hamed [“Inventor, Fifth Dimension”] was interesting, but I take exception to the concluding sentence: “As he explains, ‘The significance of our world within the multiverse will be no greater than one atom relative to all the matter in our universe.’ ” As our search of the heavens continues and we discover the everincreasing size of the universe, the human race becomes more valuable, not less. In all our searches, we have yet
12 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
to find intelligent life elsewhere. We have no evidence that there is another Arkani-Hamed across the multiverse looking for us, which makes us unique in an expanding pool. Tom Sheppard Flat Rock, N.C. There was a bit of an error in the article about Fields Medal winner Terry Tao’s work with prime numbers [“Math’s Great Uniter”]. You stated that “The PAP [Prime Arithmetic Progression] ‘5,11,17, 23’ is just one of an infinite number of PAPs with four numbers in it.” Actually, that PAP has five numbers in it. The next number in the series is 29, since each of those numbers increases by six from the number before it, and 29 is also a prime number. Tom McClellan Lakewood, Wash. Assistant editor Lauren Aaronson replies: We received several letters on this topic, so we went straight to Terry Tao (who, shortly after our article hit newsstands, won a MacArthur “genius” grant, along with aforementioned Brilliant 10 researcher Luis von Ahn). Says Tao, “It is still correct to characterize ‘5, 11, 17, 23’ as a four-term prime arith-
describes does exist, our adversaries have no hope of countering or duplicating it. So where’s the harm? Posted by John You know, all this stuff is interesting, but really, security comes first in my list of priorities, and, well, it comes ahead of speculation. Posted by Matt
metic progression; it just happens that it is included in a larger five-term PAP. This means that it is not a maximal PAP, but it is still a PAP.”
Unlikely Invisibility Some sort of invisibility cloak [“Unveiling the First Invisibility Shield,” Instant Expert, Oct.] will no doubt be available to a few Special Ops units around 2050, but the average soldier could die of overconfidence if he were issued one. Even a fiber-optic or metamaterial
THE FUTURE NOW
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©2006 Sony Electronics Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole in or part without written permission is prohibited. Sony, Sony logo, Alpha, and Like No Other are trademarks of Sony. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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LETTERS
[email protected]
“INVISIBLE DOES NOT MEAN UNDETECTABLE. EVEN A HIGHTECH INVISIBILITY CLOAK COULD GET MUD SPLATTERED ON IT.” cloak could get mud splattered on it. On top of that, grass and bushes would part as you walked through them, and you would leave footprints or tank treads in the dirt. It would no doubt scare the living daylights out of an enemy soldier the first time he saw a set of footprints magically appear out of nowhere, or the grass mysteriously part, or leg holes appear in water. But after that, whenever he saw a pair of leg-shaped mud-splatters coming at him, he’d simply aim his gun a meter above the ground. Invisible does not mean undetectable. C. Allen Doudna Grand Island, Neb.
Antique Critique I have been a reader of POPULAR SCIENCE for many, many years, and now I am compelled to write to say that I was distressed and disappointed over the article on how to retrofit a collectible tube radio with modern speakers and amplification to use as a speaker system for an iPod [“Antique Geek Chic,” How 2.0, Oct.]. Radios of this vintage are highly prized by many collectors and hobbyists, who take great pains to locate, repair, and restore these artifacts of Americana to their original condition. To simply destroy a 60-year-old vintage radio by gutting it of its innards is a shame. Dennis G. Wesserling Sterling Heights, Mich.
Safe Surfing In “The Internet Is Sick . . . But We Can Make It Better” [Oct.], I was astounded to see no mention of better programming practices as a remedy. Yes, Internet infrastructure could be improved to allow for better packet tracing, helping us identify
spammers, phishers and crackers. But that only succeeds as a security measure if police can shut down criminal operations. You never touched on the most pervasive problem facing computer users today: poorly written software. A better strategy would be to switch to operating systems and applications that are written with security as a higher priority. The Firefox and Safari browsers, as well as Linux, BSD and Mac OS X operating systems, are all more secure than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Windows and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Open-source and open-source-derived software offers the best protection against nefarious Internet attackers today, not in a hypothetical future where Microsoft’s programmers have abandoned their current, insecure development techniques. Troy Davis Cincinnati
An Idea with Legs I would like to extend my esteem and congratulations to robotics engineers Atsuo Takanishi and Kotaro Fukui, as well as Eduardo Torres-Jara, for producing such humanistic robotic elements [“This Modern Robot” and “5 Paths to the Walking, Talking, Pie-Baking Humanoid Robot,” September]. Advances such as robots with hands and vocal cords are decidedly commendable for reverse-engineering human anatomy and physiology. By modeling robotic elements after their human counterparts, we may well accomplish two goals in one: We could better the dream of a more functional robot and might also further enormous advances in prosthetic design for our physically challenged citizens. Jenny Santiano Cedar Park, Tex
POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 15
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MEGAPIXELS
THE MUST-SEE PHOTOS OF THE MONTH
LIFE IN A BUBBLE
A Milky Way supernova is providing clues to the origins of planets—and people Cassiopeia A, the remnants of the most recent star to explode in our Milky Way galaxy, is only 10,000 lightyears away, close enough for astronomers to get a detailed look at it through the Hubble Space Telescope. By comparing this composite image of Cas A with one taken nine months earlier, scientists have discovered that the glowing cloud of debris left behind by the supernova is not expanding uniformly, as was once assumed. Instead two opposing jets of material are moving at 32 million mph, about 20 million mph faster than the rest of the debris [in this image, one stream extends from the upper left side of Cas A]. Another surprise: This view, which highlights different elements by color (for example, oxygen is shown as green), shows that materials of similar chemical composition remained clumped after the explosion. Supernovae are a major source of all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium and the primary source of heavy elements like iron. These scattered elements eventually coalesce into new stars and planets. They are also what we’re made of. BY DAWN STOVER
STAR BURST Renderings depict eight sequential moments of Cassiopeia A’s 325-year-long explosion.
16 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
NASA, ESA AND THE HUBBLE HERITAGE (STSCI/AURA)-ESA/HUBBLE COLLABORATION; ROBERT A. FESEN/DARTMOUTH COLLEGE; JAMES LONG/ESA/HUBBLE
image by robert a. fesen and james long
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POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 17
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MEGAPIXELS
FAST FUELED
Powered by vegetable oil and animal fat, a sleek new boat aims to circumnavigate the globe in record time
WAVE RIDER The biodiesel-fueled boat has a triple-hull design [above, a prototype] that allows it to pierce 50-foot waves.
OCEANFILMBOAT.COM; INSET: COURTESY JOHN KING
New Zealand engineer Pete Bethune had a grand plan: Bring attention to the potential of biodiesel by building an innovative powerboat capable of setting an overall speed record for world circumnavigation. And he had a gruesomely flamboyant first step: Suck fat out of his own body to provide some of the fuel. Unfortunately, the quarter of a pound Bethune had lipoed created only enough biodiesel to power his one-of-a-kind boat, christened Earthrace, about 300 feet. To make the trip around the world, the 78-foot tri-hull will need 35,000 gallons of fuel (at its cruising speed of 15 to 25 knots, it gets about a mile a gallon). If all goes as planned, Bethune will raise the remaining $400,000 he needs to fund the voyage by March and set off on his 65-day quest. “I look forward to getting on the water,” Bethune says, “and proving to the world that renewable fuels are synonymous with power and performance.” BY ABBY SEIFF photograph by Bruna Shidler
18 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
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HEADLINES D I S C O V E R I E S , A D VA N C E S & D E B AT E S I N S C I E N C E
THIS MONTH
22
A laser weapon for airports
24
26
Building a lightning lab in the desert
The largest cargo ship in the world
DOWN UNDER Parked 270 miles southwest of New Orleans, the deep-water oil rig Cajun Express can drill to 35,000 feet.
Rock layers
Salt Trapped hydrocarbons
THE MIDDLE WEST? A recent test for oil buried deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico’s seafloor drew 6,000 barrels a day.
ILLUSTRATION: NIK SCHULZ; PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY TRANSOCEAN INC.
ENERGY
DEEP-SEA FISHING FOR OIL Newly discovered wells in the Gulf of Mexico could ease U.S. oil woes—if we can tap them WHEN WILL THE OIL AGE END? Not anytime soon, if Chevron and its partners have their way. This September, the oil giants released test results from an underwater well about 270 miles off the coast of New Orleans suggesting that the region could hold the largest discovered cache of U.S. crude since Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay in 1967. If tapped, industry experts report, the 300 or so deposits in the area could boost U.S. oil reserves by up to 15 billion barrels, increasing domes-
POPSCI.COM
tic reserves by a staggering 50 percent. This may sound like good news, given our growing dependence on foreign oil, but don’t cancel that order for solar panels just yet. Buried beneath 2,000 to 10,000 feet of water and several more miles of rock and salt, the oil isn’t exactly gushing up from the ocean floor. Extracting it will require an unprecedented engineering effort, some of the largest, most expensive rigs ever built, and pumping technology that remains untested in
such extremes of temperature and pressure. That all adds up to a bill large enough to make even oil executives gasp. Whereas searching for and developing a new field on dry land costs about $8 a barrel, the price for tapping deep-water sources could run to four or more times that figure. In fact, energy experts say, exploiting the region makes sense only while the price of oil remains high. Translation: Forget about $2-a-gallon gasoline. Still, with U.S. reserves dwindling and
DECEMBER 2006 POPULAR SCIENCE 21
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HEADLINES
security
MISSILE-PROOFING RUNWAYS Homeland Security eyes high-power lasers to shoot down shoulder-fired missiles aimed at commercial flights
Laser beam
Infrared tracking radar
STEP 1 FIND TARGET
An infrared camera on the laser continuously scans a 6- to 10-mile radius around the airport for suspicious heat emissions. When it finds a plume, it relays the coordinates to an identification-and-tracking system, which is also on the unit.
foreign countries shutting down access to their own stores, the Lower Tertiary, as the region of earth is known, may be the industry’s most promising source for oil. Paul Siegele, Chevron’s vice president of deepwater exploration and projects, says that Jack Field, the site of the recent headlinegrabbing test, is just one of numerous spots the company is exploring in the area. Siegele’s group is using new simulation software to model how the oil in Jack might flow and how best to get it out.
22 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
Yet surveying is the easy part; setting up the equipment to actually extract the oil is another matter. For the Jack test alone, drilling down under the ocean floor required a pipe taller than 18 Sears Towers stacked one atop another. Accessing other, deeper fields in the area will demand even larger equipment. Companies will need to build or rent behemoth rigs just to anchor those drill pipes steady against wind, waves and undersea currents. One of these rigs, nearly the length of an aircraft carrier, rents
for $500,000 a day. And these monsters can explore only one field in the region at a time, so checking all of the 300 potential oil-stocked plots will be a costly endeavor. “Companies may spend several hundred million dollars before they see a drop of oil,” says Ken Gray, a drilling engineer at the University of Texas. Once the hole has been drilled and the production equipment put in place, the high-pressure environment should push the oil through tiny holes in the
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STEP 4 DESTROY MISSILE
Missile
The laser-beam cannon emits a burst of intense light aimed at the missile’s most vulnerable spot, usually the explosives compartment. Simultaneously, it relays a wireless signal to a computer located in the airport control tower to give authorities a fix on the origin of the rocket.
Communication signal
STEP 2 CONFIRM THREAT
STEP 3 PREPARE TO FIRE
The onboard computer checks the object’s heat signature against a data bank, confirms that it’s a missile (and not a bird or a plane), and activates the laser.
JOHN MACNEILL
Control tower
Reactive gases in the laser’s fuel tanks are funneled through a vacuum tube to heat up atoms and send them cascading through resonator mirrors. This produces a tightly focused, high-energy beam.
THIS SUMMER’S WAR between Lebanon and Israel was the most recent demonstration of the deadly threat posed by shoulder-fired missiles. Lebanese Hezbollah fighters armed with portable rocket launchers fired more than 3,700 missiles into Israeli cities during the 34-day conflict. With a growing number of such weapons, referred to in military-speak as MANPADS—Man-Portable Air Defense Systems—showing up on the black market, U.S. officials are becoming increasingly concerned about their
risk to commercial aircraft. That’s why the Department of Homeland Security is nearly doubling its spending on countermeasure research to $110 million this year. One particularly notable technology under consideration is a laser called Skyguard that can make mincemeat out of a missile in a matter of seconds, according to its developer, defense contractor Northrop Grumman, which adapted the laser from a larger militarized version. Packed inside a unit the size of three school buses and stationed
close to the runways, Skyguard is essentially a giant laser gun with brains. It focuses a powerful energy beam with pinpoint accuracy on a missile, heating up the explosives inside to make them detonate before reaching their target. Of course, such Star Wars–grade protection carries a hefty price tag. Each unit costs about $150 million, although large-scale production could bring the price down to as low as $30 million. Northrop says its system could be deployed at major U.S. airports by 2008.
pipe, forcing it up toward the surface. From there, the hurdle becomes getting the oil to shore. Jack Field is roughly 100 miles from the nearest pipeline, and connecting directly to it may prove too costly. One alternative is a special tanker that would roll in after the drill ship has put the production infrastructure in place. It would drink up the oil by connecting to detachable hoses running down to pumping equipment sitting on the seafloor and then transfer the oil to an even bigger ship for transport.
As long as oil prices stay above $40 a barrel, deep-sea drilling will probably be profitable.
from the bottom of the sea worth it? “Absolutely,” Siegele says. As long as oil prices remain above $40 a barrel, industry experts say, Chevron’s deep-sea drilling efforts will probably be profitable. In fact, the company has already committed to leasing two brand-new $650-million drill ships. If all goes well, Chevron estimates that oil could flow as soon as 2010. “There are lots of challenges in the deep water,” Siegele says, “but we’re determined to overcome them.”—Gregory Mone
Given the multibillion-dollar cost of developing just one field, let alone the engineering risks of operating in such extreme conditions, is dredging up oil
—Stephen Handelman
POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 23
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HEADLINES
BIGGER, BETTER, FASTER
OVERACHIEVERS WE LOVE
A giant cargo ship, an ultra-green Antarctic abode and a truly super computer set new benchmarks
BIG AND BOXY Emma, the biggest cargo ship on the sea
BETTER
ECO-FRIENDLY The Princess Elisabeth, the greenest Antarctic research base
WHEN THE EMMA MÆRSK pulls into port, other cargo ships cower in her massive shadow. Measuring 1,303 feet from bow to stern, with a deck that towers 251 feet above the waterline, the behemoth boat’s official capacity is 11,000 standard 20-foot containers. That’s about 1,400 more than any other ship at sea. The 2,300-ton engine is nothing to sneeze at either: It cranks out 110,000 horsepower. All this, and Emma is still relatively easy on the environment. By feeding exhaust back into the engine and mixing it with outside air, the ship reduces emissions and boosts energy production by 12 percent. Plus, a new silicon-based paint keeps barnacles off the hull to cut down on drag, replacing the industry-standard biocides that leach into the oceans. Launched this September in Denmark, Emma is now en route to Hong Kong.–ADAM BRIGHT
FASTER
NO WINDOWS MDGrape-3, the fastest computer ever
IN 2007, Belgium will begin construction on the most environ-
MOVE OVER BLUE GENE/L, there’s a new supercomputer in
mentally friendly Antarctic research station ever. The $8-million Princess Elisabeth facility will be built with natural materials such as wood and granite, as well as nontoxic recyclable materials. Wind turbines and solar-energy collectors will supply 98 percent of the station’s power, and the facility will recycle 50 to 90 percent of its gray water to avoid contaminating the environment.—BJORN CAREY
town. The MDGrape-3, built by the Japanese research organization Riken to study protein folding, achieves a theoretical “petaflops” of processing power—that’s 1,000 trillion calculations per second, roughly three times as fast as IBM’s vaunted Blue Gene/L. The computer’s power comes from 200 processing units, each housing 24 MDGrape-3 chips running at around 200 gigaflops.—B.C.
24 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
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HEADLINES
Two-channel Ambilight
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NON-DANGER ZONE Greg Leyh stands inside a Tesla coil’s terminal, where the electric field is zero.
Odd Inventions
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THE LIGHTNING LAB A plan to unleash 20 million volts of man-made static in Nevada
WHEN IT COMES TO creating giant bolts of electricity, a mere mortal is giving Zeus a run for his tunic. Electrical engineer Greg Leyh designs magnet-drive systems for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, California, by day but in his spare time builds devices that would make even the god of lightning envious. Among his creations are a Taser cannon that shoots a 40-foot arc of electricity and the world’s largest Tesla coil, a high-voltage current-flinging device in New Zealand. Now Leyh has his sights set on an even larger project: the Nevada Lightning Lab. Part research station, part tourist attraction, the yetto-be-built facility would contain two 120foot-tall Tesla coils spaced about 250 feet apart, between which lightning bolts would spark
back and forth. Scientists don’t fully understand how lightning travels through the air, and existing labs are too small to conduct proper testing. Leyh says his facility would provide a perfect place for this kind of research. It’s not just for physics experiments, though. The lab would also blast aircraft to test for structural weaknesses and serve as an educational center for lightning safety. The facility’s design is nearly completed, but Leyh still needs to drum up the $8.9 million to build it. He also needs to purchase real estate, ideally a sparsely populated locale in the desert, because, as he puts it, “something that generates this much lightning is not going to be quiet. It’s going to be disturbing.” —BJORN CAREY
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26 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
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Ordinary day
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30-SECOND SCIENCE
FLAB IN THE LAB A new way to lose fat, gain it, and even turn it into medicine
1
ONE-SHOT FAT FIX
Want to fight fat? Eat less, exercise more—and get vaccinated. A fat vaccine is in the works at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, where tests have led to leaner lab rats. The trick is blocking ghrelin, a hormone that slows down the body’s metabolism. The vaccine triggers the immune system to release antibodies that attack the hormone, enabling you to burn more fat. But don’t pass the holiday ham just yet. Human trials are several years away.
2
3
FAT INTO MUSCLE
HOT ’N’ HEAVY
Staying warm and cozy could catch up with your waistline. Spending too much time in a thermoneutral zone—a range of temperatures where the body doesn’t have to work to keep warm or cool— means that you’ll burn even fewer calories when idle. Climate control is one of several new explanations offered up by scientists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham for America’s ever-thickening lipid layer. Lack of sleep and quitting smoking also made the list.
Inside every fat cell there’s a muscle cell trying to get out. UCLA scientists have transformed stem cells from adipose tissue (courtesy of liposuction patients) into smooth muscle—the kind that lines arteries and intestines, not the skeletal muscle in the biceps. The bad news for beer guts is good news for medicine: Fat stem cells may have organ-repair applications. And with its abundant supply, fat provides a politically agreeable stem-cell fix.—eric mika
GETTIN’ JIGGLY WITH IT Human fat cells, magnified 3,000 times
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PAINFUL READING MicroText is so small, you could print Ulysses on six pages.
- SHRINKAGE
The Quest To Make Really Tiny stuff
THE FINE PRINT Xerox unveils a new weapon against counterfeiters: teeny text Xerox have created letters that stand only one hundredth of an inch tall. Printed inconspicuously on checks, birth certificates, school transcripts and other papers, they could distinguish authentic documents from fakes. Microprint itself isn’t new. Look at a credit card or $20 bill under a magnifying glass, and you’ll see that some of the dark lines and borders are actually strings of letters and numbers. But until recently, it was impossible to personalize these characters. Now, with the special Xerox font, anything can be custom-printed in miniature. For instance, in less than a minute, an employer could turn out 100 payroll checks with 100 unique names on each of them; custom-forging each check would be virtually impossible. As for verification, bankers could simply authenticate the checks by examining the microprint to make sure it matches the payee’s name. To create the font, Xerox researcher Reiner Eschbach and his colleagues wrote new software (for room-size commercial printers) that emphasizes ultraprecise alignment of the ink dots within each letter. The no-frills characters are readable even when miniaturized, unlike with more beautifully sculpted fonts. Most people won’t notice the microscopic writing on their documents. But, Eschbach says, “the counterfeiter will know it’s there.”—DAWN STOVER
30 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
COURTESY JOHN GRIEBSCH; FACING PAGE: BOB SAULS
PREPARE TO SQUINT. Researchers at
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HEADLINES
ASTRONOMY
A GLARE GUARD FOR SPACE
By blocking starlight, this giant cosmos-bound parasol may help astronomers find other Earths IN JUST OVER A DECADE, astronomers have discovered evidence of more than 200 planets outside our solar system. Unfortunately, they can’t see them all that well. An Earth-like planet often orbits a parent star that is 10 billion times as bright as itself. The star’s glare prevents scientists from collecting critical data, such as the exact size of the other worlds and whether they harbor useful stuff like oxygen and oceans. Now astrophysicist Webster Cash of the University of Colorado at Boulder is engineering a promising solution. He has designed a 164-foot-wide sunflower-shaped disk that blocks the starlight to improve the view of space-based telescopes. If his design passes muster with NASA, where it’s currently under
review, Cash’s starshade could be rocketing into space by 2013. Researchers will remotely control the shade’s thrusters to position it between the blinding star and the telescope. Along the way, its petal-like fringe will unfurl to prevent light from leaking around the edges, giving astronomers a clear line of sight to their target planet. After gathering their fill of data, the scientists will then send the craft on to its next destination. Cash hopes that the first starshade, an estimated $400-million project, will work in tandem with the James Webb Space Telescope, slated for launch by 2013. The spacecraft could enable astronomers to get a good look at more than 75 solar systems in a two-year period.—Gregory Mone
Star Starshade
Planet
HOW THE STARSHADE WORKS
1 Telescope
Launching a few months after the James Webb Space Telescope, the starshade will head for its first destination.
2
The shade unfurls en route to its position between the telescope and a star, where it will cut glare around the target planet.
3
After the scope makes its observations, the starshade moves to another target. It can operate for up to two years without refueling.
POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 31
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HEADLINES
UNLOCKING DNA George Church peers out from a cold room where he stores gene samples.
“If sequencing your DNA saves you even a day in the hospital, it’s a no brainer.”
WHAT’S THE BIG
IDEA?
IS THAT A GENOME IN YOUR POCKET?
Genomics pioneer George Church wants to make DNA sequencing as common as an eye exam
Q. Even if you reduce the cost to $1,000, will insurance companies pay it? A. A personal genome that costs between $1,000 and $5,000 is nothing spread over 80 years. If that helps you avoid even a day in the hospital, it should be a no-brainer.
Q. If I wanted to have my DNA sequenced today, how much would it cost? A. You could get a pretty good genome
Q. Part of the PGP is to post volunteers’ genetic data online. What will that gain? A. I put my medical records online, and a
32 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
sequence in the $2 million to $8 million range. With the technologies that we’re developing, you’ll be able to get the most medically important 1 percent of the genome for $3,000 within a year. Q. How are you cutting costs? A. We’ve patented a technology called polynase sequencing, which miniaturizes and speeds up the sequencing process and reduces the total price of sequencing.
doctor in Seattle noticed a problem with my cholesterol medication, so I changed my dose and my diet. I’ve since lost 50 pounds. It might work similarly with your personal genome, except computer programs could compare your genome with your medical records and give your doctor medical advice, which he would then discuss with you. Q. What about genetic discrimination? A. We already discriminate based on the genetic expressions we can see. But let’s say you have the gene for Huntington’s disease. Will employers shy away from you, or will insurance companies deny you coverage? Will your neighbors ostracize you if they find out you share a gene with psychopathic killers? Of course, you’ll find out good things as well, but these are important questions, and the PGP is the first step toward getting answers.
POPSCI.COM
JOHN B. CARNETT
FIVE YEARS after George Church and his colleagues from the Human Genome Project decoded nearly all three billion bits of the body’s DNA, the project’s big potential payoff—medicine tailored to your genetic makeup—has yet to materialize. That’s why Church, a Harvard Medical School geneticist, has launched the Personal Genome Project (PGP), the first-ever effort to sequence individual genomes, compare the data with the volunteers’ medical records, and post the results online. Church hopes the effort will not only help advance personal medicine by making DNA mapping more routine but also serve as a litmus test for what happens when genomes are made public. We caught up with Church in his Boston lab.—Michael Fitzgerald
It’s a fine line between respecting your teen’s privacy and doing your job as a parent. How far should you go? As far as you have to. Because teenagers t o d ay h av e a m i n e f i e l d o f r i s k y b e h av i o r s t o n av i g a t e —
drugs, drinking, tobacco, sex — with powerful influences like peer pressure and mixed messages from pop culture, and new technologies such as the internet. Fortunately, there’s one influence in your teenager’s life that trumps them all. You. So take action. Let them know just where you stand on risk-taking and its consequences. And spell things out, because it’s the contract both you and your teen will be living by. Set clear rules with your teen for safety and guidance. That’s right, getting them to agree to the rules and understand the consequences gives them more responsibility and every teen wants that. And yes, do keep close tabs on your teens. Know where they are and who they’re with. Cell phones make it easier than ever to just “check in.” It’s not saying you don’t trust your teen, it’s saying you care. Get on the internet, too. Familiarize yourself with the kind of content they might be exposed to. Above all else, one of the most powerful things you can do for your teenager is to set a good example when it comes to drug, tobacco and alcohol use. Respect them, be honest with them, be clear with them and they’ll do the same. Everyone wins.
Signed, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, American Academy of Family Physicians, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Legacy Foundation, American Lung Association, CTIA–The Wireless Association®, Cox Communications, Leadership to Keep Children Alcohol Free, National African American Tobacco Prevention Network, National Asian Pacific American Families Against Substance Abuse, National Cable and Telecommunications Association, National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, National Families in Action, National Latino Children’s Institute, Qwest Communications, and The Partnership for a Drug-Free America. Office of National Drug Control Policy
For more tips and support on parenting your teen, call 1-800-788-2800 or visit www.theantidrug.com
Presenting the only Blu-ray Disc™ product made by people who make movies. And music When we set out to create the most powerful hi-def experience ever, we didn’t just talk to our engineers. asked moviemakers, what do you want out of Blu-ray Disc™ technology? We asked musicians and game harder for what you’re trying to do? The answers were surprising, and inspiring. The result? Now you can More music. More action. More extras. More levels. More interactivity. More capacity. More depth. More intensity
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© 2006 Sony Electronics Inc. All rights reserved. Sony, the Sony logo, like.no.other, PlayStation, Blu-ray Disc, Blu-ray Disc logos, VAIO, Cinema Tuned and More, in every sense are trademarks of Sony. All other marks are properties of their respective owners. Features and specifications are subject to change without notice. HDMI is a trademark of HDMI Licensing LLC. 1 Certain circumstances may limit/prevent Blu-ray Disc of DVD playback. Requires an HDMI-capable HDTV with 1080p display. 2With compatible HDTV 1080p display. 3Certain circumstances may limit/prevent Blu-ray Disc playback. VAIO computers may not support movie playback on packaged media recorded in AVC or VC1 formats at high bit rates. Video recording to Blu-ray Disc media is done in MPEG2 format only. 41 GB=1 billion bytes. 524 Mbps transfer rate.
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P O P S C I ’ S
1 9 t h
A N N U A L
BEST OF WHAT’S NEW 2 0 0 6 41 48 54 64 71
HOME TECH GADGETS AVIATION & space RECREATION AUTO TECH
80 84 92 96 102
HOME ENTERTAINMENT ENGINEERING GENERAL INNOVATION HEALTH COMPUTERS
THE WORLD IS BETTER IN 100 DIFFERENT WAYS THIS YEAR. Doctors are growing human organs in a lab. A 253mph car is loose on the streets. An electronic book that can rival paper finally arrives. A radical new nail is set to save lives. WANT MORE? Turn the page for these and 96 other award-winning innovations that prove the future is now—and it looks good.
POPSCI.COM
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w h a t ’ s
n e w
2 0 0 6
HOME TECH SATOSHICLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY SAMSUNG; COURTESY DAVID ROSE; COURTESY WESTINGHOUSE DIGITAL; COURTESY GE PLASTICS; COURTESY ELECTROLUX
BOSTITCH HURRIQUAKE NAIL
THE ALPHA NAIL THAT MAKES YOUR HOME TWICE AS TOUGH
HURRICANE WINDS RIP apart nailed-together walls, and earthquakes shake houses so violently that a nailhead can pull straight through a piece of plywood. Since we can’t stop natural disasters, Bostitch engineer Ed Sutt has dedicated his career to designing a better nail. The result is the HurriQuake, and it has the perfect combination of features to withstand nature’s darker moods. The bottom section is circled with angled barbs that resist pulling out in wind gusts up to 170 mph. This “ring shank” stops halfway up to leave the middle of the nail, which endures the most punishment during an earthquake, at its maximum thickness and strength. The blade-like facets of the nail’s twisted top—the spiral shank—keep planks from wobbling, which weakens a joint. And the HurriQuake’s head is 25 percent larger than average to better resist counter-sinking and pulling through. The best part: It costs only about $15 more to build a house using HurriQuakes. $45 per 4,000; bostitch.com READ ABOUT DR. NAIL’S LIFELONG QUEST ON PAGE 106.
Grand award winner
innovation
of the year POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 41
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tales of testing Stanley FatMax Xtreme Fubar
EVIL SON OF THE HAMMER
Meet the Fubar’s makers on page 45
kind of hammer with an appetite for destruction, because the chicken-wire-like backing on my friend’s plaster walls was dulling my reciprocating saw blades like they were made of wax. Stanley designed the tool because today’s contractors use hammers mostly to break stuff—they drive nails with pneumatic guns. The Fubar’s square head and tapered edge tore huge holes in the walls, and the toothed jaws wrenched studs so forcefully I swear I heard the wood cry out in pain.—Joe Brown $40; stanleytools.com
liquid Breaker omni breaker panel
LG electronics SteamWasher
GETTING 400 GALLONS of water dumped in his living room when his
THAT SHIRT YOU WORE for just an afternoon? Return it to the top of the “clean” pile with LG’s SteamWasher. It chases off light wrinkles and odors with a 20-minute steam-only cycle, pumping the wash drum full of 212°F water vapor. There’s also a steamand-water cycle that uses the steam to relax the clothes’ fibers, allowing more moisture to penetrate than with water alone. And it uses nearly one gallon less water per load. $1,600; lgusa.com
LIKE A CIRCUIT BREAKER FOR YOUR HOME’S WATER
hot-water heater burst inspired Giovanni Fima to create a system that would enable future victims to stop the damage before it got that bad. The Liquid Breaker electronically controls a series of valves you install in your plumbing system that will shut off the flow if something’s amiss. You can shut off the water from any Internet-connected computer, and the system will alert you to problems by e-mail or text message. $1,000 for an average home; liquidbreaker.com
42 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
STEAM YOUR CLOTHES CLEAN
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JOHN B. CARNETT; COURTESY LG ELECTRONICS; LUIS BRUNO; FACING PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY DELTA (2); LUIS BRUNO (3)
I BROKE OUT the Fubar, a new
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HOME TECH
Cosella-Dörken Products Delta-Dry
WATERPROOF YOUR HOUSE
Herman Miller Leaf
THE LIGHT CHOICE
STUCCO, BRICK, SIDING: none are a perfect barrier to water. So contractors put a layer just under a home’s outer wall called house wrap. That wrap has to be semipermeable to allow any moisture that collects behind it, whether from humidity or leakage, to evaporate out. But Delta-Dry is a completely waterproof wrap with a series of dimples and channels that keep it from ever being totally flush against a surface, so air flows freely around it, letting Runoff any moisture dry up or drain out. 60 cents per square foot; delta-dry.com
Oreck XL Professional Air purifier
HOSPITALCLEAN AIR AT HOME IN AIR-FILTERSPEAK, there are
large particles (hair, pollen, mold) and small particles (bacteria, smoke, viruses). Oreck’s XL is the first home unit to excel at eliminating both, zapping 98 percent of allergens with technology usually reserved for hospitals and nuclear subs. A mesh filter catches large particles so they don’t block the way for smaller ones, which are charged in an electromagnetic field and yanked onto oppositely charged plates coursing with 8,000 volts of electricity, leaving only clean air to pass through. $700; oreck.com
WITH A MICROPROCESSOR
Humidity
Leakage
DRY WALL Any moisture that penetrates your home’s outer walls runs out through DeltaDry’s channels.
that controls two banks of LEDs—one yellow and one blue—the Leaf lamp lets you choose the kind of light you want, from a glare-reducing white, perfect for working at a computer, to a warm glow that’s easy on the eyes while reading. The LEDs last 100,000 hours, so you’ll have plenty of time to find your favorite setting. $525; hermanmiller.com
Dyson Root 6
THE HAND VAC THAT SUCKS THE MOST
THE PROBLEM WITH hand vacuums is that they generally don’t work very well. So Dyson’s engineers not only added software that gives the Root 6 consistent suction no matter how much battery life is left, they optimized their cyclonic system—which uses a tornado-like force in a canister to pick up dirt—to fit the coffeepot-size space. The proportions for a smaller vacuum required the cones that spin the air around to be taller than usual. The formula works: The twirling air exerts a force 70,000 times the strength of gravity, enough to lift a 2x4. $150; dyson.com
REPORTED BY Adam Bright, Joe Brown, Chuck Cage, Doug Cantor, Nicole Price Fasig and Sarah Z. Wexler
POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 43
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HOME TECH gorilla glue company Gorilla Tape
THE TOUGHEST TAPE EVER MADE
OH, WHAT MACGYVER could have done with the new
RIP EASY Gorilla’s engineers found that perfectly offset layers of fabric made the tape too hard to tear, so instead they offset them only slightly.
Southwest Windpower Skystream 3.7
WIND POWER FOR EVERYONE
THE SKYSTREAM home wind-
tales of testing Bosch Litheon 10.8V Pocket Driver
MIGHTIEST MINI DRILL
WHEN I SQUEEZED the drill’s trigger, I felt its 80 inch-pounds of torque move my hand, and I’m 6'1", 270 pounds. This from a drill smaller than my first Walkman. The power comes from its Twinkiesize 10.8-volt lithium-ion battery. Bosch overcame li-ion’s biggest hurdle—that batteries can get really hot—by preventing the motor from drawing too much current. It drove 85 three-inch wood screws on a charge, twice the number I got from my nickel-cadmium-powered driver. —Chuck Cage $130; boschtools.com
44 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
mill starts cranking out electricity in scant 8mph winds. Its 12foot-long blades allow it to hit maximum output (1.7 kilowatts, 30 to 90 percent of most homes’ needs) at 20 mph and keep its noise on par with an air conditioner. Installation is easy, with all electrical parts contained in the turbine body. And you can sell extra watts to your utility company to fund that solar-panel project. About $10,000; windenergy.com
GearWrench X-Beam Combination Ratcheting Wrench
AN OBVIOUSLY BETTER WRENCH MAYBE YOU THOUGHT
wrench technology had progressed as far as it could—but then you see the X-Beam. Its handle is twisted in the middle, putting its ends at a 90-degree angle from each other, so, unlike with standard wrenches, you always grip a wide, flat surface, not an uncomfortable edge. From $50 per set; gearwrench.com
ILLUSTRATIONS: PAUL WOOTTON; PHOTOGRAPHS, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: LUIS BRUNO (2); COURTESY SOUTHWEST WINDPOWER; JOHN B. CARNETT; FACING PAGE: JOHN B. CARNETT
Gorilla Tape in place of his beloved gray stuff. On the sticky side, a double-thick layer of adhesive better surrounds and grips uneven surfaces. To prevent premature tearing, Gorilla’s engineers laid down two layers of fabric backing but offset them slightly. The result is 145 percent stronger than any other duct tape, and it can still be torn by hand —in case you lost that Swiss Army knife at the airport. $6; gorillatape.com
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BRILLIANT 10
POPSCI INNOVATOR
The ToolDoctors Are on Call Where do new tools come from? Angry workmen and this R&D squad. Meet the Stanley Discovery Team
FROM TOP: JOHN B. CARNETT; LUIS BRUNO
THE FIRST TIME Jimmy Addison remembers thinking that the world needed a new breed of hammer, he was on a construction site in Texas, doing what he does for a living: talking to a construction worker. The guy was semi-successfully using the claw of a hammer to twist a 2x4 warped by the summer humidity. He sure wished his hammer did a better job at it, he said. Addison wrote that down. Addison is about six and a half feet tall. He’s pushing 300 pounds, has a cast-iron handshake and an easy smile. He works the Southern and Western U.S. for Stanley’s Discovery Team, an arm of the 150-year-old tool company’s R&D department. Discovery Team members spend most of their time in the field, talking to workers about how their tools could be improved. “When I’m on a job site and I hear some rough language,” Addison says, “well, that’s where our next tool is coming from.” Along with Addison, the team includes Kellie Fenton, an industrial engineer who previously researched new kinds of metal for the steel industry. She covers the Eastern U.S., and Wendy Maes handles Europe. They report to Paul Wechsler, a.k.a. “Numbers,” who keeps track of test results, customer surveys and information on what’s selling where. When the team finds that there’s a real need for a new or redesigned tool, they work with Stanley designers to create one. Case in point: the hammer, which is rarely used to drive nails these days. “Pros all have pneumatic nailers,” says Fenton, explaining why the team reconfigured the trusty old tool. Yet hammers are often used for demolition, something they were never designed for. So
ON THE JOB The Discovery Team—(left to right) Jimmy Addison, Wendy Maes, Paul “Numbers” Wechsler and Kellie Fenton—watch a workman use their new creation, the Fubar.
the team gave their proto-tool an oversized, sledgehammeresque head. Then they flattened out the shaft under the striking face to rip even bigger gashes into drywall. But because demolition is about more than putting holes in walls—there’s usually a lot of wood to be ripped out—designers relocated the crow’s foot from opposite the striking face to the bottom of the handle and replaced it with a set of fixed jaws scaled to grab the most common sizes of wood found in homes. After about 18 months of back and forth, the Fubar, whose name refers to the World War II acronym for “fouled up beyond all recognition,” was on the shelves [see “Evil Son of the Hammer,” page 42]. Now the Discovery team is back to doing what it does best: running toward the sounds of profanity on job sites around the world.—Joe Brown
“WHEN WE HEAR ROUGH LANGUAGE, THAT’S WHERE OUR NEXT TOOL IS.” POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 45
The most fuel-efficient auto company in America*. Meet Small Oil. Honda has always been committed to developing environmentally responsible technology. And with cars like the all-new Fit along with the legendary Civic, Honda will continue as the leader in fuel efficiency.† Through innovation and hard work, Small Oil can make a world of difference. That’s our Environmentology.™
Honda thinking in action.
*Based on model year 2005 CAFE average fuel-economy ratings and weighted sales for passenger-car and light-truck fleets sold in the U.S. by major manufacturers. †Civic Hybrid and Fit Sport with 5MT shown. 2007 EPA mileage estimates: 49 city/51highway, 33 city/38 highway, respectively. Use for comparison purposes only. Actual mileage may vary. ©2006 American Honda Motor Co., Inc. environmentology.honda.com
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GADGETS SONY READER PRS-500
GOODBYE, PAPER
MAYBE THAT’S OVERSTATING IT, but
Grand award winner SCIENCE NOVEMBER DECEMBER 2006 48 POPULAR SCIENCE
POPSCI.COM
SATOSHI
Sony’s long-awaited Reader—the first E-ink-equipped e-book reader in the U.S.—can hold hundreds of books, has a nearly inexhaustible battery, and inflicts no more eyestrain than your typical paperback. That’s because MITdeveloped E-ink doesn’t glow like the backlit LCD screen on your computer monitor. Instead it uses microcapsules filled with oppositely charged black and white nanoparticles floating in liquid. Hit the page-turn button, and in each capsule, a positive jolt brings black particles to the surface, while a negative charge moves up the white ones, and together they form words. The bits stay put until the next jolt, so a full battery will last you 7,500 page turns, or about 25 books. Fill the slim Reader from Sony’s online store—each of the 10,000 available titles costs about 25 percent less than the hardcover—or load any other PDF or text file. What will you do with all those empty bookshelves? $350; sonystyle.com
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Pioneer Inno
SAVE XM RADIO AND PLAY YOUR OWN SONGS SATELLITE-RADIO FANS can finally carry their
Nokia N95
THE PHONE THAT COULD REPLACE . . . WELL, EVERYTHING
NOKIA IS LOOKING to have the lock on your pocket real estate with the N95. It has HSDPA high-speed wireless Internet access that lets you download at up to 10 megabits per second (as fast as home broadband), Wi-Fi and a five-megapixel camera, the best cellphone cam in the U.S. It also includes a media player that supports copy-protected music files from services such as Napster and a GPS receiver that automatically downloads maps based on your current position. $600–$700; nokia.com 50 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
Navman iCN 750
A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY FOR YOUR GPS
HOW WILL YOU FIND that killer fishing hole again? Snap a photo of it with the Navman’s built-in 1.3-megapixel camera. It will pair the shot with the location’s coordinates, so you can select the photo and let it guide you back. Share your pics at the NavPix Web site, where you can tap into other people’s favorite spots by downloading their shots to your device. $800; navpix.net
LUIS BRUNO (3); FACING PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY OLYMPUS; LUIS BRUNO; JOHN B. CARNETT
own music library and add to it on the fly with the Pioneer Inno. The deck-of-cards-size receiver tunes in live XM radio and plays your MP3 and WMA files. When you hear a song on XM that you’d like to keep, press the “record” button, and the entire track is saved to the Inno’s one-gigabyte memory— enough for a few hundred songs—where it stays until you delete it. Use the home dock to schedule recordings. $350; pioneerelectronics.com
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GADGETS Olympus EVOLT E-330
FIRST PRO DIGITAL WITH A REAL LIVE PREVIEW
Display sensor
SERIOUS photographers can finally peel their eye from that tiny viewfinder. The 7.5megapixel E-330 is the first DSLR that shows whatever you’re pointing the camera at on its LCD, just like pointand-shoot cameras do. SLRs typically can’t offer this socalled live preview because a mirror and shutter block the sensor. The E-330 gets around this, literally, by reflecting light off a series of mirrors until it hits a second sensor near the camera’s viewfinder, which processes the image and sends it to the LCD in back. $1,000; olympusamerica.com
Mirrors
THE ROUNDABOUT PATH Light bounces off five mirrors to a second sensor so you can see what you’re about to shoot on the E330’s rear 2.5-inch LCD screen.
Light tales of testing Motorola moto Q
A SMARTPHONE THAT’S ACTUALLY COMFORTABLE IN YOUR POCKET
I’VE FLIRTED WITH cellphone/PDA combos for years, but none turned into a long-term relationship. After several months together, it looks like the Q will change all that, and I’m not ashamed to say the attraction is largely physical. It has all the typical smartphone tricks, including Outlook syncing, Web browsing, and video and audio (with support for wireless Bluetooth headphones). But the design is what hooked me: a well-spaced and responsive keyboard and a brilliant LCD display on the slimmest fullQwerty smartphone available, just half an inch thick. Call me shallow, but I’m in love.—Steve Morgenstern
Shure e500PTH
qlr??
$200; verizonwireless.com
REPORTED BY Joe Brown, Mike Haney, Dan Havlik, John Mahoney and Steve Morgenstern
PUSH-BUTTON ACCESS TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD SHURE’S E500PTH ear-
buds squeeze a tweeter and two woofers into a featherweight design you can wear all day long. And with its push-to-hear (PTH) function, you can do just that, leaving the sound-isolating buds in place while listening to the flight attendant’s safety lecture. Flipping the PTH switch dampens the music and turns on a small microphone that pumps outside sounds into your ears. $550; shure.com
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GADGETS
Kodak Easyshare V570
WIDE-ANGLE SHOTS IN A POCKET-SIZE CAMERA
PICK YOUR SHOT—standard or wide—with Kodak’s EasyShare V570, the first point-and-shoot to squeeze an entire second lens and sensor into its svelte body. On top is a wide-angle fixed 23mm lens; on the bottom,
tales of testing
a 39mm–117mm zoom. When you press the “zoom” button, the camera automatically changes which sensor is active. To maintain a compact profile, folded optics keep the lenses flat even at full zoom. $400; kodak.com
Advance Wireless Solutions Backup-Pal
NEVER LOSE YOUR CONTACTS
EVER LEFT YOUR PHONE in a cab? Dropped it? Took it for a swim? The only thing more annoying than having to replace it is reentering your contacts. Never again. Now you can plug in the Backup-Pal, press the button, and the device will store up to 1,000 contacts on its 128 megabytes of memory. Since the way phones store contacts is nearly universal, the Pal can reload your digits into a phone of a different brand or carrier, or to your computer. $40–$50; backuppal.com
BUY SONGS ANYWHERE
I’M SITTING OUTSIDE a café, and it comes out of nowhere: the unmistakable bass line of “Billie Jean.” Desperately needing to hear the rest, I pull out my music player, only to find that somehow my 500 albums don’t include Thriller. Thankfully, the café has free wireless Internet, and my device is a Gremlin, the first Wi-Fi-equipped portable player that can download songs directly from a twomillion-song online store. I can instantly fetch the Jacko I’m craving and send it to any connected Gremlin user anywhere. Let’s see your iPod do that.—John Mahoney $300; musicgremlin.com
52 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
Sony DVDirect
BURN A DVD, COMPUTER-FREE
TRANSFERRING home videos and digital photos to DVD doesn’t have to be a tedious project. With Sony’s DVDirect, just plug in your camera or memory card and press “record.” Select shots and scenes using the builtin LCD screen, or dump everything onto a disc. $250; sonystyle.com
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: LUIS BRUNO (3); JOHN B. CARNETT
The Gremlin
If you’re not watching football on a Sony® SXRD™ HDTV, what are you watching? SXRD technology produces brilliant detail and clarity–even in deep shadows. And with 1080p resolution you’ll see every snap, every pass and every end zone dance with depth, dimension and fluid motion – no matter how quickly the action unfolds. Experience sports in Sony Full HD 1080 – the world’s most powerful HD experience. sony.com/HDTV Screen images simulated. ©2006 Sony Electronics Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in part or whole is prohibited without prior written consent by Sony. Sony, SXRD and “like.no.other” are trademarks of Sony.
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QinetiQ and Surrey Satellite technology TopSat
Grand award winner SCIENCE NOVEMBER DECEMBER 2006 54 POPULAR SCIENCE
EYE IN THE SKY Compare TopSat’s size [left] with a typical reconnaissance satellite [above]. TopSat’s folded optics compress a long focal length into a small space.
POPSCI.COM
BOB SAULS
THE U.K.’S DORM-FRIDGE-SIZE TopSat spy satellite can’t match the highresolution images of the U.S.’s hugely expensive Crystal sats, but the future of space-based Earth observation may in fact belong to these wee birds. The reason is simple: Mini satellites are cheap, permitting the use of many satellites over larger areas. Created for the British Ministry of Defence and the National Space Centre by QinetiQ and Surrey Satellite Technology, the prototype 265-pound TopSat began sending usable spy images last December. A new foldedoptics camera—which uses mirrors and lenses to cram long focal lengths into a compact space—delivers ninefoot resolution, enough to distinguish between a car and a truck, but future versions will be able to identify specific vehicles. British defense planners think the TopSat’s descendants will be the sharpest eyes in a large future flock of small, inexpensive satellites. www.sstl.co.uk
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Honda and Piper HondaJet
GOLD WINGS
HONDA’S FIRST light private jet, to be built in partnership with U.S. aircraft manufacturer Piper, is shaking up the bizjet business. Placing the engines over the wings instead of on the fuselage frees up space for passengers and bags, since the engines’ internal support structures move to the wing. And because the placement of the engines on the wings actually improves airflow, it reduces drag, making the HondaJet faster and more efficient than its competitors: The craft has a top speed of 480 mph and a range of 1,270 miles. $4 million; honda.com
HONDA POWER HondaJet’s all-new engines are being jointly designed by Honda and GE.
Elbit Skylark II
GETTING CLOSE IS OFTEN the only way to tell terrorists from innocents, but it can be hazardous to your health. Israeli company Elbit’s 77-pound Skylark II, an unmanned air vehicle that can launch from a Humvee, can fly for six hours up to 30 miles away. Its electric motor is inaudible at 100 yards. That’s close enough for the gyro-stabilized, high-definition zoom camera, advanced thermal-imaging night camera and laser illuminator to identify the bad guys, day or night. elbitsystems.com
Venus Express
PREFAB SPACESHIP
POOR VENUS. So often ignored in favor of our other, redder neighbor, Venus has company for the first time in a decade, courtesy of the European Space Agency. Since its arrival in April, Venus Express—built in record time by using the same basic design from its predecessor, Mars Express—has been studying Venus’s mysterious atmosphere closer than ever before. Early results from its cloud-piercing cameras show that the giant double vortex over the south pole [illustration, left] radically changes shape with elevation. Next question: Why? venus.esa.int
EADS Barracuda
EUROPE’S ROBOT FIGHTER EUROPEAN DEFENSE GIANT EADS surprised the worldwide military establishment in January when its Barracuda unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) prototype was unveiled not as a glorified toy airplane like earlier European stealth UCAVs, but a full-size machine. For the Barracuda, EADS is developing radar, electronic and optical sensors, and missiles and bombs that release from an internal bay. The craft’s conventional aircraft configuration—as opposed to the flyingwing UCAVs at U.S. test centers—makes it much more maneuverable in the air. eads.com
56 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
TRICKY TESTING In September, the first prototype Barracuda crashed—this remains a significant risk with autonomous aircraft—but the program continues.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY AMERICAN HONDA MOTOR CO.; COURTESY ELBIT SYSTEMS; COURTESY EADS; COURTESY ESA; FACING PAGE: COURTESY GE
SILENT STEALTH SURVEILLANCE
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AVIATION & SPACE TEST STAND In March, General Electric began testing the GEnx engine in Peebles, Ohio. It will enter service in 2008.
General Electric GEnx
BIG JETS GET CLEANER AND QUIETER GENERAL ELECTRIC’S ultra-efficient GEnx engine, devel-
oped for Boeing’s new 787 and the newest version of the 747, burns up to 15 percent less fuel and is substantially quieter than any of its predecessors. All jet engines send some of the air moving through them into a turbine, where they produce power—the rest is moved around the turbine and accelerated by the fan to supplement that power. GEnx’s
wide fan and carefully sculpted blades create a high “bypass ratio” and a quieter engine, since this air is moving more slowly than engines with smaller-diameter fans—yet the engine still produces up to 75,000 pounds of thrust. A new combustor uses tornado-like vortices to more thoroughly mix air and fuel particles for cleaner, more efficient fuel burning. geaviation.com POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 57
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LONG RANGE By the 2030s, the first production version of the new F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter will be followed by more than 4,000 additional airplanes.
Lockheed Martin aeronautics F-35 Lightning II
LONG-AWAITED FIGHTER JET UNVEILED Fighter, which saw its production-model debut in July, is the most ambitious defense project ever—the first stealth airplane designed for mass production and the first to be cleared for export to U.S. allies. The major challenge was developing new flight, stealth, attack and defense systems
OUTER LIMITS New Horizons will explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, the mysterious ring of icy dwarf planets just beyond Neptune.
Jupiter
for three separate versions: an Air Force fighter, a Navy airplane that will fly from aircraft carriers, and a variant for the Marines that can land vertically and take off in 550 feet of road. Flight tests of the heavily armed supersonic fighter will begin immediately. It’s expected to enter service in 2012. $45–60 million; jsf.mil
Uranus
Pluto
New Horizons’s path 58 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
Neptune
Kuiper Belt
New Horizons
FAST TRACK TO PLUTO
PLANET OR NOT, we know next to nothing about Pluto. It’s too far away and too small to make out anything more through our telescopes than an icy blob, and it’s the only planet (sorry—former planet) never to be visited by a spacecraft. The New Horizons probe is carrying seven instruments to explore the mysterious realm that Pluto inhabits, and it’s moving there in a hurry. Soon after its launch in January, it hit 36,000 mph, making it the fastest spacecraft ever launched. It will pass by Jupiter this spring but won’t reach Pluto for another nine years. pluto.jhuapl.edu
REPORTED BY Eric Adams, Michael Moyer and Bill Sweetman
ILLUSTRATION: KEVIN HAND; PHOTOGRAPH: NEAL CHAPMAN/LOCKHEED MARTIN; FACING PAGE, FROM TOP: COURTESY DENNY LOMBARD; COURTESY DJET; COURTESY WASP
THE LOCKHEED MARTIN F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike
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AVIATION & SPACE
Lockheed Martin Polecat
AN INVISIBLE EYE IN THE SKY
UNMANNED AIRCRAFT can’t evade attackers, so if you want one that can snoop around in missile-infested enemy turf for 24 hours, it had better be stealthy. The Polecat prototype from Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works uses new inlets that hide the engines from radar and an automatic system that scans behind the airplane for its own contrails, adjusting the cruise altitude until they disappear. A low-drag wing increases fuel economy, and advanced autonomous flight controls let it fly higher than earlier tailless airplanes, up to 65,000 feet—keeping it out of range of any missile launchers that somehow do spot it. lockheedmartin.com
AeroVironment Wasp
COURTESY DJET; COURTESY WASP
HANDHELD SPYPLANES
HAND-LAUNCHED flying robots can tell soldiers who’s lurking around the corner or what’s over the next hill. The Wasp has a 16-inch wingspan and weighs just over half a pound but packs forward- and side-looking cameras and an automated GPS navigation system. The key technology: The Wasp’s lithium-ion battery is also its wing, saving weight and allowing it to fly for up to an hour. avinc.com
Diamond Aircraft D-Jet
FIRST SINGLE-ENGINE PRIVATE JET
MOST SMALL AIRPLANES use propellers and piston engines. Why? Jet engines are expensive, and until now all business jets have had two of them. To make the first private jet able to operate efficiently with only one engine—also saving on maintenance and fuel costs—Diamond created a lightweight, compact and aerodynamically svelte design. It then lowered the maximum altitude to 25,000 feet, which is less demanding on the control, power and safety systems. Expect a lot of jets to follow in the D-Jet’s single contrail. $1.4 million; diamondair.com POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 59
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AVIATION & SPACE
BOB SAULS
DOUBLE VISION STEREO’s nearly identical spacecraft orbit the sun from either side of Earth, creating 3-D views of solar eruptions.
60 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
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nasa Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory
A 3-D LOOK AT THE SUN’S ERUPTIONS BINOCULAR VISION is what allows us to perceive depth,
to transform the two-dimensional images coming into each eye into a detailed 3-D view of the world. For the first time, it’s coming to a satellite. Actually, the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) comprises two satellites, one leading and one following Earth as it orbits around the sun. STEREO will combine the images
from the satellites to create 3-D views of coronal mass ejections—violent eruptions of billions of tons of solar material flying into space at a million miles an hour, which imperil satellites, astronauts and even our power grid here on Earth. The studies will allow scientists to predict if and when each burst will reach our planet. www.nasa.gov/stereo
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RECREATION
YOUR TOUR GUIDE TO OUTER SPACE THIS IS THE DEVICE amateur stargazers have been wait-
ing for since, well, Galileo—a simple tool that tells you what you’re looking at in the night sky and guides you to what you want to see. No more complex star charts, and no more uncertainty about whether that thing hovering in the south is Jupiter, Mars or the bright star Spica. A GPS receiver gives the handheld SkyScout its position, an electronic compass tells it what direction it’s pointing, and an
POPULAR SCIENCE SCIENCE NOVEMBER DECEMBER 2006 2006 62 POPULAR 62
Grand award winner
accelerometer determines the angle at which it’s being held. When backyard astronomers peer through the targeting window, the SkyScout identifies the chosen object and provides a description on its LCD screen and through headphones. Want to find the Andromeda Galaxy? Select “M31” from the menu, and blinking arrows will guide you to it. Frustration and confusion, meanwhile, are sucked into a black hole. $400; celestron.com
POPSCI.COM
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RECREATION
Nike+iPod sports kit
RUNNING STATS FOR THE MASSES THE NIKE+IPOD system isn’t the first pace-
Cloudveil 8x Waders
TOUGH FISHING WADERS WITH A SOFTER SIDE
BUILT TO WITHSTAND the rocks, trees and trash of obstacle-strewn rivers, waders often feel one step shy of walking with your feet in cement blocks. Cloudveil’s 8x waders are the first to balance durability with comfort by eliminating unneeded material. The waders’ lower legs—the most abused area—are made of five layers of waterproof Gore-Tex. From the knees to the waist, three GoreTex layers protect against floating bogeys. The bib, which keeps the torso dry, is a lighter layer of breathable fabric. $425; cloudveilfishing.com
and-distance tracker for runners, but it is the first priced for the casual jogger, thanks to the falling cost of nanoscale accelerometers, originally developed to trigger airbags and now used in all sorts of devices that measure movement (including the AirPod [facing page, bottom right]). Better yet, it’s the easiest system ever to
Receiver
use: Drop the shoe pod in a pair of compatible Nikes (or slip it under the laces of your old sneakers), then press the iPod Nano’s center button to hear your pace, time and distance while you run. When you’re done, plug the iPod into your computer, and your workout data automatically uploads to a personalized training page on Nike’s site. $29; nike.com
Foil kayak flyak
PADDLE ABOVE THE WAVES
WHEN AT REST in the water, this 17-foot carbon-fiber kayak doesn’t look much different than any other flat-water racing boat. But at roughly 10 mph, its hull rises several inches out of the drink on aluminum foils, reducing drag and revealing what might be the fastest human-powered watercraft in history. The kayak’s Norwegian designers, Einar Rasmussen and Peter Ribe, have already clocked it at speeds just shy of the 21.2 8mph record set in 1991 by an MIT pedal-powered hydrofoil. The boat will set you back a couple grand, which you can win back drag racing rowing shells at the local reservoir. $2,500; foilkayak.com
64 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
REPORTED BY Eric Adams, Joe Brown, Tom Clynes, Matthew Cokeley, Tom Colligan and Mike Haney
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY CLOUDVEIL; LUIS BRUNO; JOHN B. CARNETT
Sensor
We gave them the new Nikon® D80.™ What they gave back was stunning. They shoot for photo sites like Flickr.™ They shoot for family photo albums. They shoot because they’re passionate about taking pictures. What did they capture with the new 10.2 megapixel Nikon D80? See the jaw-dropping highlights at stunningnikon.com/dslr
©2006 Nikon Inc.
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RECREATION D3o RibCap
HARD HATS FOR SMART HEADS
PREFER TO HIT the slopes with a soft knit hat rather than a rigid brain bucket? The flexible padding used in the RibCap stiffens on impact, providing less protection than a helmet but considerably more than that old Steelers cap. Made of elastic polymers that harden and regain their flexibility in microseconds, d3o’s molecules bond tightly when hit, absorbing and redistributing the force of a crash. The material showed up in ski gear first but is now expanding to other sportswear in which weight and protection are at odds. From about $90; d3olab.com
tales of testing Yamaha FJR 1300AE
A CLUTCH ADVANCE IN MOTORCYCLES
AS A MOTORCYCLE PURIST, I was initially skeptical
Gregory Escape packs
COMFORT IS IN THE BAG
I DIDN’T THINK any backpack could ever fit me comfortably, until I strapped on an Escapeseries pack. Within the first halfmile of my hike in Vermont’s Green Mountains, I was eagerly cramming my partners’ loads into my bag. The secret is Gregory’s Response Suspension System, which incorporates auto-adjusting shoulder straps and an independently pivoting hip belt that allow body and pack to move autonomously. Unlocked from my swaying skeleton, the load stayed balanced, shifting with me instead of fighting me—and leaving me with energy to spare at the end of the day.—TOM CLYNES $270; gregorypacks.com
Adidas +Teamgeist
ROUNDER IS BETTER
PERHAPS the only image from this summer’s World Cup more ubiquitous than The Headbutt was the sleek, photogenic new game ball, the Adidas +Teamgeist. Assembled from 14 propeller-shaped panels, the ball is closer to perfectly round than the traditional stitched 32panel design, and its thermally bonded construction gives it finer, more waterproof seams. It’s also 30 percent more consistent than previous balls, according to a robotic leg Adidas built to test it. $80; adidas.com
$15,300; yamaha-motor.com
tech4o AirPod
A TIMER FOR THE FREQUENT FLYER
WORN BY SKIERS, snowboarders or skateboarders just above the knee, the AirPod recognizes hang time by detecting G-forces; then it starts counting. When an accelerometer inside records gravity and an equal opposing force, it knows you’re back on terra firma—and whether the jump was certifiably rad. $100; tech4o.com
ILLUSTRATION: PAUL WOOTTON; PHOTOGRAPHS, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: LUIS BRUNO (2); TOM RILES/BRIAN J. NELSON; YAMAHA MOTOR U.S.A.; LUIS BRUNO (2); STEPHEN MATERA
tales of testing
of Yamaha’s new “clutchless” FJR 1300AE. After two and a half hours of stop-and-go traffic on San Diego’s infamous Route 76, that skepticism had turned to awe. The FJR’s five-speed manual transmission literally shifts with only the touch of a finger—a first among motorcycles. The bike’s computer attaches to an electronic shift actuator and clutch controller that retain the bond between rider and machine while eliminating the fatigue associated with operating a conventional clutch. The shifting response is flawless, and, at 1,298 cc’s, the engine kicks some serious SICK SHIFT Yes, asphalt.—MATTHEW COKELEY it’s a manual.
©2006 Nikon Inc.
stunningnikon.com/joe
stunningnikon.com/timothy
If photography is your passion, the stunning new Nikon® D80™ is your Digital SLR. The Nikon D80 is here. With a 10.2 megapixel Nikon DX format image sensor and a new high-resolution image processing engine, the Nikon D80 offers unprecedented sharpness and color in a Digital SLR at this level. Add an instant 0.18 sec start-up with a fast 80ms shutter response and the ability to shoot up to 2,700 images per battery charge, and you’ve got a Digital SLR that’s uniquely suited to the needs of the passionate shooter. The Nikon D80, available with an astonishing 18-135mm 7.5x Zoom-AF Nikkor ® lens for just $1299.95.* Further proof that there are Digital SLRs and then there are Nikon Digital SLRs. For more, go to stunningnikon.com/dslr
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photo community.
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FAUX FROTH The author battles man-made Class III rapids.
Tales of testing U.S. National Whitewater Center
NO ONE gets into whitewater kayaking to paddle fake rivers. So I had some serious doubts as to whether a 12-million-gallon tank of recirculating water could replicate the real thing. And frankly, it doesn’t —the waves and holes, which can be finely tuned with pneumatic gates and moveable rocks, are less prone to the subtle changes of a natural-flowing stream. But it’s just that predictability that makes you want to push yourself harder and drop into that big wave again and again. Which is easy to do in whitewater that knows no season and runs under lights until 11 p.m.—Tom Colligan From $15 for 90 minutes; usnwc.org
JOHN B. CARNETT; FACING PAGE: PAUL WOOTTON
WORLD’S LARGEST ARTIFICIAL WHITEWATER PARK
WAVE MAKER Three-time Olympian Scott Shipley stands midstream. His course’s custom-built pumps could fill an Olympic-size swimming pool in 75 seconds.
68 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
p OPsCI ON THE WEB
To see video of the author’s run, go to popsci.com/bown.
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RECREATION
POPSCI INNOVATOR
Rapid Development A pro paddler has built the biggest river park ever. And he’s just getting started SCOTT SHIPLEY is standing on an island in the North Carolina woods surrounded by whitewater. It’s a familiar perspective for the former Olympic kayaker, who trained for years on the tumbling rivers west of here, but today he’s not scouting rapids. He’s talking into his cellphone, orchestrating the movements of forklifts from the vantage point of a concrete dam at the center of the island. An island, not incidentally, that he designed himself. That plot of land is the beating heart of the U.S. National Whitewater Center outside Charlotte, which became the world’s largest artificial whitewater park when it opened on August 27. The $36-million-dollar park is set up much like a ski resort. Rafters and kayakers navigate any of three concrete channels that stretch from an upper pool to a lower pool, 21 feet below. A conveyor belt then runs the paddlers up the center of the island, providing an endless loop of fast and bouncy Class II to IV rapids. When Shipley, 35, a 2002 graduate of Georgia Tech’s graduate engineering program, teamed up with Gary Lacy, a former city engineer for Boulder, Colorado, to create the park, they had two requirements: provide a venue for elite competition, and
attract recreational users as well. These dual goals inspired ingeniously simple innovations, like the park’s unique multichannel design, which can accommodate expert slalom racers and beginners at the same time. Another breakthrough: energy-saving pneumatic gates at the head of each channel that allow the streams to be opened or closed independently and water to be pumped for only the stream that’s being used. Of course, it’s the quality of the rapids that will determine if people come. And so Shipley sought out the best whitewater features in the world and carefully modeled and improved on his favorites. The bouncy M-Wave is fashioned after a surfing wave in Montrose, Colorado. The park’s biggest whitewater feature, the roaring seven-foot drop at the bottom of the expert channel, is based loosely on a famous river rapid in Bratislava, Slovakia. Shipley’s goal is to spread his parks across the U.S. (he’s already planning installations for Phoenix and Dallas). “The future,” he says, “is to tie these parks in with land-development projects, to put one of these parks right where people live, so they can paddle on their way to work in the morning.”—Tom Colligan
FAKING WAVES Water flows from the top pool through a combined 4,000 feet of artificial river, boiling around turns and bouncing over cement-fixed boulders. From the bottom pool, the water is churned back uphill by seven 680-horsepower submersible pumps (the park’s electric bill can reach $4,000 per day).
1 When the water is off, many of the channels’ “rocks” can be easily reconfigured.
2
3
An inflatable bladder raises a flap that can close off individual channels. 2
Gates positioned mid-channel can be adjusted to change the water flow.
1
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Movable rocks
Submerged pumps
Conveyer belt
Headgates
Mid-channel gates
POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 69
Introducing OnStar Turn-by-Turn Navigation, the world’s simplest and smartest navigation system. Here’s how easy it is: Push the OnStar button. Tell the Advisor your destination. Listen to the voice prompts as your OnStar GPS system determines when it’s time to turn. Arrive safely. We also made it easy to find — on over 2 million vehicles from Chevy, Buick, Pontiac, GMC, Saturn, HUMMER, Saab, and Cadillac in the coming year. Press your blue OnStar button or visit onstar.com to learn more. You may never get lost again.
OnStar Turn-by-Turn Navigation requires ABS and is not available in certain areas. See dealer for details. Visit onstar.com or call 1-888-4ONSTAR (1-888-466-7827) for system limitations and details. ©2006 OnStar Corporation. All rights reserved. The marks of General Motors, its divisions, slogans, emblems, vehicle model names, vehicle body designs, and other marks appearing in this document are the trademarks and/or service marks of General Motors Corporation, its subsidiaries, affiliates, or licensors. OnStar and the OnStar Emblem are registered trademarks of OnStar Corporation.
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AUTO TECH Grand award winner
BUGATTI VEYRON 16.4
COURTESY BUGATTI
SPEED Turning this key permits the car to hit 253 mph.
HORSEPOWER The Veyron is the only car with this gauge.
POPSCI.COM
THE FASTEST PRODUCTION CAR EVER THE BUGATTI VEYRON 16.4 cannot fairly
be compared with other cars, because none, including Formula One racers, can match its specs: 1,001 horsepower, 253 mph, 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds. In 2000, Ferdinand Piech, then CEO of parent company Volkswagen, announced the project and its stunning perfomance goals. The Veyron would make a statement, not a profit. (The car sells for $1.2 million; each of the 300 models to be made will cost VW a rumored $5–6 million.) Engineers spent years refining the eight-liter, four-turbo,
16-cylinder engine—the 16.4 in the name— to squeeze 1,001 horsepower from it. They refined the aerodynamics with a morphing rear wing and an adjustable suspension to get a final top speed of 253 mph. They developed a seven-speed dual-clutch transmission to harness the 922 pound-feet of torque blasted to all four wheels. The final product is a supremely stable supercar that can be driven by anyone (its gearbox has a docile automatic mode), is mind-bendingly fast, and will probably never be matched in our lifetime. $1.2 million; bugatti.com
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bugatti veyron 16.4
INSIDE A STREET-LEGAL LAND ROCKET You can’t get a 5,000-pound car up to 253 miles an hour without some serious engineering black magic. Step one: Make sure it stays on the ground AIR CONTROL In fourth gear in the Veyron, you pass the liftoff speed for a 747. To avoid a similar fate, underbody channels create low-pressure zones that suck the car to the road. At 137 mph, the front drops two inches and a spoiler deploys for added downforce.
Sending 1,001 hp to just two wheels would make every tap on the throttle a study in burnout. Solution? All-wheel drive and traction control.
72 XX POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
COURTESY BUGATTI
POWER TO PAVEMENT
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AUTO TECH FIRE IN THE BELLY The eight-liter W16 engine (a more compact configuration than a “V”), aided by four turbochargers, generates approximately 3,000 horsepower; two thirds of this is lost as heat, leaving 1,001 horses going to the wheels. The resulting gas mileage: 9.5 mpg city, 19 highway and about 4 at top speed.
WINGING IT When braking hard above 124 mph, the rear wing pitches forward to become an air brake, adding 0.5 G of stopping force.
BULLETPROOF GEARBOX The alternating clutch design of Volkswagen’s direct-shift gearbox (DSG), had to be strengthened to harness the engine’s 922 pound-feet of torque.
COOLING OFF Keeping the engine cool requires 10 radiators and a completely uncovered engine compartment.
RUBBER GLOVES 14.4-inch-wide Michelin run-flat rear tires are the widest ever made for a road car. Custombuilt for the Bugatti, they are the only tires capable of a sustained 250 mph. They last 10,000 miles; a full set costs $12,000.
STOP SHORT Ceramic disks and eight-cylinder calipers help bring the Veyron from 253 mph to a full stop in less than 10 seconds and in a third of a mile.
BACK END Rear diffusers straighten airflow from the underbody, reducing the turbulence that creates lift at the back of the car.
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WILD RIDE Bugatti’s vaunted Veyron morphs its shape to accommodate high speeds. Insets: a memorable drive for the author.
BUGATTI VEYRON 16.4
VEYRY AWESOME Bugatti offered us the chance to drive its 253mph Veyron 16.4 supercar from San Francisco to Los Angeles. We said yes I’M BLASTING THROUGH the California desert in the fastest car on Earth, trying to grip the wheel calmly as it vacuums up the highway in front of me with savage voracity. The Veyron is capable of hitting 253 mph, and here on this empty highway I quickly realize that my nerve (and the law) is the only real limit. So be it. Already at triple-digit speeds, I crush the pedal, and the Bugatti lunges forward. At 137 mph, I see the rear wing spring up from the body. The nose lowers two inches, and I can feel the car pushing harder into the road. The only question now is how far, and for how long, I dare keep that pedal down. My drive to Los Angeles began early that morning at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco, where I met ex–Le Mans and Formula One race driver Pierre-Henri Raphanel, Bugatti’s official test driver, who would ride shotgun with me. As I slipped into the car, I noticed how the six years and estimated $1.5 billion dollars that Volkswagen put into its halo car manifested themselves in a thousand peculiar ways. First, there’s the enormous dial in the instrument cluster reading from 0 to 1,001 (that would be horsepower). Then there’s the unexplained, conspicuous absence of a 12-volt power outlet— evidently, charging your cellphone, smoking, or mounting a radar detector is verboten in a Veyron. Finally, there’s the slot on the floor for the key that reconfigures the car’s aerodynamics and suspension settings specifically for a straight-line sprint to 253 mph. Last I checked, my Passat did not have one of those. Out on the highway, I familiarize myself with the dual-clutch, paddle-shift gearbox. Even under hard acceleration, my head
74 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
doesn’t bob at each gear change—I can’t even feel it happening. It just goes, shooting past 60 mph in a mere 2.5 seconds. In “sport mode,” the transmission automatically downshifts to keep the engine roaring away at redline. When I stand on the pedal to pass someone, it launches into the maneuver. My companion, meanwhile, looks bored. Not because he’s a former race driver, and certainly not because he has faith in my driving abilities. He just has absolute confidence in the car. Later, I see why. On a spirited trip up the steep inclines and finely banked turns of L.A.’s Mulholland Drive, the Veyron proves to be as much about road-holding and acceleration as it is its stratospheric top speed. The car’s extra-wide tires and all-wheel drive give me undiluted traction while I accelerate out of each corner, trying unsuccessfully to glimpse where the car’s limits might be. No matter the speed or the situation, the Veyron is astoundingly stable and easy to control. When we finally pull into Los Angeles International Airport, two dozen travelers, pilots and security guards begin circling before I can come to a complete stop, as if they were expecting me (this gathering of groupies was a familiar theme throughout the trip). As for that magic 253mph mark, I never saw it—though in certain barren stretches of California desert, I blasted up to, well, respectable velocities. It may have been built expressly to hit 1,000 horsepower and 253 mph, but the Veyron’s true achievement is how perfect it feels everywhere in between. —Eric Adams
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY BUGATTI; COURTESY ERIC ADAMS (2); FACING PAGE: CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY VOLKSWAGEN AMERICA (2); COURTESY AUDI SPORT; COURTESY AMERICAN HONDA MOTOR CO.
Tales of testing
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AUTO TECH Volkswagen Eos
HARDTOP CONVERTIBLE, WITH SUNROOF
VOLKSWAGEN’S SLEEK NEW EOS brings the advantages of hardtop convertibles—structural rigidity and better cold-weather insulation—to the masses. Not only is it among the first hardtop convertible four-seaters for less than $30,000, it’s the first at any price with a fully functional sunroof. Spanning the entire width of the roof, the sunroof slides back to expose a full seven square feet of open air. When you want the top totally down, the five-piece roof folds into the trunk in 25 seconds and leaves enough room for four suitcases. $28,000; vw.com
Honda Fit
TINY CAR STUFFED WITH TECH
NO $14,000 SUBCOMPACT should carry an engine this sophisticated. The Fit is one of the first economy cars with an electronic accelerator in place of the mechanical linkage between the gas pedal and the throttle. This means more precise fuel delivery to the engine—further enhanced with computer-controlled valve timing— for a car that responds quickly, produces very low emissions, and gets up to 38 mpg. Inside, the rear bench seat can fold up, allowing tall objects like bikes to load upright behind the front seats, or it can fold flat onto the floor, giving the subcompact near-SUV-like cargo space. $13,850; honda.com
Audi R10 TDI
THE NEW FACE OF RACING: CLEAN, FAST— AND DIESEL
AS THE FIRST DIESEL to win the famous 24 Hours of Le Mans, Audi’s R10 TDI emphatically displayed the advantages of diesel—high fuel efficiency with enormous torque and power. Audi’s feat: creating a dieselinjection system that can produce 650 horsepower and a transmission that can harness its 811 pound-feet of torque. audi.com
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Kevlar
Carbon fiber
Goodyear Eagle ResponsEdge
RACY TIRE PROVIDES TRACK-LIKE HANDLING TO GIVE REGULAR CARS racer-like cornering
without losing that civilized feel, Goodyear reinforced the outer sidewall of its new Eagle ResponsEdge tire with carbon fiber—a strong, lightweight material that racecar builders love— and gave the tire an inner layer of shockabsorbing Kevlar. $100; goodyear.com
THE CLEANEST DIESEL
THE MERCEDES-BENZ E320 Bluetec sedan, which gets a combined 35 mpg, is the least polluting production diesel ever made. Its V6 engine uses higher injection pressure and higher compression ratios to combust more of the fuel, leaving less waste. In addition, the exhaust system employs four separate
scrubbing technologies, including two catalytic converters and a particulate filter, to reduce carbon monoxide, unburned hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides. The introduction of low-sulfur diesel fuel makes the system useful in the U.S. (sulfur clogs particulate filters). It’s slated next for Mercedes SUVs. mbusa.com
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY GOODYEAR; COURTESY PORSCHE; COURTESY MERCEDES-BENZ USA; FACING PAGE: CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: COURTESY CHRYSLER GROUP; COURTESY MERCEDES-BENZ USA; COURTESY NEW ECHELON
Mercedes-Benz E320 BlueTec
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AUTO TECH Porsche 911 Turbo
HOT FINS KILL TURBO LAG
WITH TWO TURBOCHARGERS that don’t hesitate when you drop the gas, Porsche’s 911 Turbo out-accelerates Ferraris and Lamborghinis. Blades that guide exhaust into the turbocharger vary their angle based on engine speed, precisely controlling airflow and building boost even at low engine speeds, eliminating turbo lag. This allows the 480hp beast to reach 60 mph in a scant 3.7 seconds. $123,000; porsche.com
tales of testingon
OnStar Directions & Connections
Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Four-Door
NAVIGATION, NO GADGETS REQUIRED
FAMILY TRUCKSTER
WHEN I FOUND MYSELF in the first-ever fourdoor Wrangler, perched on the side of a mountain in Zambia, I had to ask my passenger, Jeep engineer Jim Misner: How could this family-style version be as capable as the old Jeep? Should I be worried? He explained that, despite the vehicle’s added length, the new suspension could actually negotiate steeper inclines. The stiffened frame could take any punishment. The electronically locking differentials send equal power to all wheels for extra grip. So I shut up and let the Wrangler speak for itself. It made easy work of some of the toughest terrain on Earth.—JOE BROWN $20,400; jeep.com
TURN-BY-TURN directions
Mercedes-Benz Adaptive Brake Lighting
FLASHING BRAKE LIGHTS SAVE LIVES
SLAM THE BRAKES, and Adaptive Brake Lights flash five times per second. Sounds like a small thing, but Mercedes’s tests in Europe show that the flashing better alerts drivers to emergency braking ahead and prevents accidents. It’s now available only on the E-Class sedans in Europe and its flagship S600 here in the U.S. Federal regulations prohibit flashing lights anywhere on a vehicle, but Mercedes got an exemption so that it could prove the technology in a small number of cars in hopes of standardizing it. mbusa.com
usually means pulling over and inputting your destination on a touchscreen. Today on most 2007 General Motors vehicles, you can get your navigation from the OnStar service. Press a button and tell the operator your destination; he’ll send voice directions that play over your speakers and display on the stereo screen. OnStar now also uses sensors to periodically check key systems—engine, airbags, brakes—and automatically send e-mail reports alerting you to necessary servicing. $300 per year; onstar.com
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AUTO TECH BMW Turbosteamer
RECYCLE THE HEAT FROM YOUR CAR’S ENGINE
Acura RDX
A LITTLE SUV GETS A BIG BOOST
THE COMPACT RDX features Honda’s first turbo, and it’s a doozy. By varying the flow of exhaust gas into the turbocharger through a continuously adjusting valve, the system virtually eliminates turbo lag. This gives the four-cylinder SUV the power of a six-cylinder—and a 0–60 time of 7.5 seconds. The RDX also has all-wheel drive that can spin the rear wheels at different speeds, generating a yawing motion that helps it steer precisely even under hard acceleration. Inside, a climate-control system uses GPS to adjust the temperature based on the sun's position and your location. $33,000; acura.com
cent of the engine’s exhaust heat into power, boosting performance without using more gas. Mated to a 1.8-liter four-cylinder engine, it reduces fuel consumption by 15 percent while generating nearly 14 additional horsepower. The system heats fluid to 1,500ºF to form highpressure steam that’s routed through a fan to help turn the engine crankshaft. The technology could arrive in BMWs within the decade. bmw.com HOW IT WORKS An electric pump (1) moves distilled water through a steam-generator (2) that vaporizes it. A superheater (3) further heats the steam to above 1,000ºF. The steam then rushes through a piston2 driven expander (4) that helps turn the crankshaft (5). 1
3
5
4
Lexus LS 460
THE LUXURY RIDE THAT’S FUN TO DRIVE AND PARK LEXUS’S NEW FLAGSHIP LS boasts two world-firsts that
make stomping the gas in it more fun than in your average sedan. Electronic valve-timing actuators more precisely regulate the opening and closing of valves to improve emissions, especially during cold starts, and give the car quicker reflexes—no
78 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
delay while passing trucks. And the eight-speed transmission harnessed to the 4.6-liter, 380-horsepower V8 means smoother acceleration (0–60 is 5.9 seconds) and more power to make that move. Done playing? Find a spot and let go of the wheel; the 460 will parallel park itself. $61,000; lexus.com
REPORTED BY Eric Adams, Joe Brown and Dan Lienert
POPSCI.COM
ILLUSTRATION: STEVEN CROSS; PHOTOGRAPHS, FROM TOP: COURTESY AMERICAN HONDA MOTOR CO.; COURTESY LEXUS DIVISION, TOYOTA, USA
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HOME ENTERTAINMENT NINTENDO Wii
THE CONSOLE THAT GETS YOU IN THE GAME REMEMBER WHEN videogames were fun? When
the controllers had only a couple buttons and you didn’t have to spend an hour learning the seven-step finger dance for “walk?” Nintendo does, so it took a step back, looked at its superpowered competitors, and took a totally different path with its new console, Wii (pronounced “we”). Nintendo’s processor is 75 percent slower than an Xbox 360’s. The company decided that gamers didn’t need to pay extra for photo-realistic renderings of its iconic talking mushrooms. Instead it reimagined the controller, introducing a three-axis accelerometer that transforms your hand motions into in-game action, so you really play the games. In Wii Tennis, for example, swing your hand just as you would a racket. In Excite Truck, hold both ends of the controller as if it were a steering wheel. And look out for that tree, because, photo-real or not, these games will draw you in. $250; nintendo.com
SATOSHI
Grand award winner 80 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
POPSCI.COM
UNLIKE LEWIS AND CLARK, YOU’LL HAVE THE PHOTOS TO PROVE IT.
For all we know, certain explorers tended toward exaggeration. If only they’d had a digital SLR that’s designed for such journeys. The K10D is lightweight, easy-to-use, and features Shake Reduction that works with 24 million existing PENTAX lenses.
Essential to the experience. ©2006 PENTAX Imaging Company. All rights reserved.
pentaxslr.com
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Samsung HL-S5679W LED-backlit DLP HDTV
MORE COLORS THAN YOU’LL KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH
AS THE FIRST rear-projection TV lit by LEDs, this set displays every color defined by broadcast standards—and then some. Most sets fall short because they rely on a white bulb, the wavelength range of which doesn’t cover the entire visible spectrum. This 56-inch TV shines one red, one green and one blue LED in varied intensities to create a perfectly colored beam of light, which bounces off a mirrored chip to project on the screen. And with LEDs’ longevity, the image will look good for years. $4,200; samsung.com
Logitech Wireless DJ music system BLACK Adding dark frames improves fast-action scenes
Hitachi 37HLX99 LCD HDTV
QUICK-DRAW TV
ALL LCD TVS fall victim to some level of motion blur. During fastaction sequences, the display can’t keep up, turning a speeding racecar into a multicolored streak. So Hitachi added a darker frame in between each of the standard 60 frames drawn every second. The added frame is very dark, giving a sharper look to the next bright frame that appears. The darkness increases the perceived blacks, heightening contrast. In a side-by-side comparison . . . well, there is no comparison. $3,000; hitachi.us
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HEAR ALL YOUR MUSIC ANYWHERE
MP3, AAC, WMA: Digital music comes in a dozen formats, all with different rules. Want to send your songs wirelessly from PC to stereo? Good luck—most streaming devices simply copy the file from your computer and try to decode it, so they choke on protected music like iTunes tracks or atypical formats. Logitech’s solution is to leave the decoding and authentication to the computer and just broadcast the processed signal. Small boxes plug into any powered speakers to receive the sound. Beam music, including Web radio, to any room up to 165 feet away, and control it with the remote. $250; logitech.com
ILLUSTRATION: PAUL WOOTTON; PHOTOGRAPHS, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY SAMSUNG; INSET: ROBERT C. NUNNINGTON/GETTY IMAGES; LUIS BRUNO; COURTESY HITACHI; INSET: SAM SHARPE/CORBIS; FACING PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JOHN B. CARNETT; LUIS BRUNO (3)
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HOME ENTERTAINMENT
tales of testing DataColor SpyderTV
SEE A TV’S TRUE COLORS
MY NEW TV came with blaring color and brightness settings meant for a showroom floor. Since my living-room decor isn’t Best Buy Modern, I suction-cupped SpyderTV— the first consumer colorcalibration device for TVs— to the screen and connected it to a PC. Its seven silicon sensors read color values, while software calculated the TV’s optimum settings. In minutes, I had step-by-step directions for adjusting my set—which, by the way, looks awesome.—Joe Brown
$230; spydertv.com
XM Mini-Tuner
TAKE YOUR XM RADIO WITH YOU
LISTENING TO satellite radio in your car, your den and on your portable player typically means paying three subscriptions. But the XM Mini-Tuner carries your info on it, so you can pay once and listen on any compatible player. The Mini-Tuner currently works with a variety of XM-ready receivers using a $30 docking station, and an even more elegant solution—Mini-Tuner slots built directly into car and home receivers—is on the way. $29; xm.com
Onkyo D-TK10
WHEN THE SPEAKER BECOMES THE INSTRUMENT
ORDINARILY, A SPEAKER CABINET’S only job is to hold the tweeters and woofers steady without vibrating. But an Onkyo engineer suggested a radically different approach: Use the cabinet as a resonating surface, like a musical instrument, to produce warmer, richer sound than a small speaker’s limited woofer size would allow. Working with Japanese guitar maker Takimime, the design team spent three years strategically balancing internal support and cabinet thickness to get the right vibrations. The result is a speaker that fills a room with more lifelike sound than anything its size normally would. $2,000 per pair; onkyousa.com
Samsung BD-P1000 Blu-ray Disc Player
DECLARING A WINNER IN THE HIGH-DEF WAR
THERE ARE TWO new types of high-definition discs vying for your attention: Blu-ray and HD DVD. Both deliver high-definition video on DVD-size optical discs, and both provide beautiful video and spectacular surround sound. We prefer Blu-ray and its first player, the BD-P1000. It supports the top-of-the-line 1080p HDTV resolution, boots up and responds to commands faster than its HD DVD rival, and reads digital-camera memory cards for displaying photos in high resolution on your TV. Beyond the tech, seven out of eight Hollywood studios support it (versus three for HD DVD), meaning more movies for early adopters. $1,000; samsung.com
REPORTED BY Lauren Aaronson, Joe Brown, Gary Merson and Steve Morgenstern
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THIN SKIN China’s new Olympic swimming center features transparent foil in lieu of windows.
ENGINEERING “THE WATER CUBE” BEIJING NATIONAL SWIMMING CENTER
THE OFFICIAL SWIMMING FACILITY of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China, will span 7.8 acres, house five pools, and seat 17,000 spectators, yet it doesn’t contain a single steel cable, concrete column or structural beam. Instead its walls and ceilings are composed of a network of slender steel pipes linked together by 12,000 load-bearing nodes. These nodes evenly distribute the weight of the building, making
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it strong enough to withstand Beijing’s most severe earthquakes. Plastic foil—just eight one-thousandths of an inch thick—covers the entire structure like Bubble Wrap. It lets in more light and heat than glass does, helping to keep the pools warm and slashing energy costs by 30 percent. Construction will finish up this year, with the official opening slated for the Summer Olympics. arup.com
PETER BOLLINGER
A BUILDING MADE OF BUBBLES
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Grand award winner
UV light
BRIGHT IDEA Ultraviolet light penetrates the walls’ plastic insulation, heating cool air as it’s drawn into the building. This creates a cozy greenhouse effect that keeps the pool warm.
Warm air
Cold air
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ENGINEERING Hydro Ormen Lange/ Langeled Project
RIDIN’ HIGH A few sheets of glass are all that keep visitors on the Skywalk from a 15-second free fall to the canyon floor.
THE LONGEST PIPELINE OVER THE TOUGHEST TERRAIN
EARLIER THIS YEAR, divers finished welding a major section of the 746-mile Langeled underwater gas pipeline, which snakes from a giant gas field in the Norwegian Sea to the U.K. The final step is to lay pipe through the Storegga Slide, a ragged maze of 200-foot peaks and 35-degree hills. To do it, engineers are now peppering the seabed with 400 acoustic transponders. These will help create 3-D maps to guide shipboard technicians controlling two remotely operated vehicles as they clear away boulders and dig trenches 3,000 feet below. When gas starts flowing next year, the $10-billion pipeline will provide one fifth of the U.K.’s natural gas. hydro.com/en
KRIS HOLLAND; FACING PAGE, FROM TOP: COURTESY ORMEN LANGE (3); COURTESY FIGG, ENGINEER OF RECORD FOR THE BRIDGE; ILLUSTRATION: STEVE CROSS
MAINE DECK The western tower of the Penobscot Narrows Bridge includes an elevator that leads to an observatory 420 feet above the river.
MRJ Architects, Lochsa Engineering & Apco Skywalk
A RARE VIEW OF THE GRAND CANYON EASILY THE MOST audacious tourist attraction of the year, the Skywalk U-shaped footbridge extends 65 feet beyond the lip of the Grand Canyon, with zero support from below. Set for completion next month, the $30-million balcony consists of two curved, parallel steel beams joined together by a 2.5-
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inch-thick glass floor, offering a view of the ground nearly three quarters of a mile below. To secure the bridge, 96 steel rods bore 50 feet into the canyon wall just beneath the visitors’ center, and a set of 1.6-ton steel dampers brace the structure against wind gusts up to 90 mph. www.destinationgrandcanyon.com
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ORMEN LANGE GAS FIELD Ormen Lange Norway
England
3,600 feet
PIPE SCHEMES The Langled gas pipe begins in Norway’s Ormen Lange Gas Field, 3,600 feet underwater, and snakes 746 miles to England.
Four subsea rigs house wells that tap into the gas reservoir
Ships lower remotely operated excavators to the seabed
MIX ’N’ MATCH The Penobscot bridge is supported by 40 cables, each housing 41 to 73 steel strands. This unique cradling system allows engineers to test new materials, monitor individual strands, and swap out damaged ones without closing the bridge.
Test material
Cradle
Strand removed for repair
Monitored strand
FIGG Engineering Penobscot Narrows Bridge
A BRIDGE YOU CAN FIX WITHOUT STOPPING TRAFFIC
IN TRADITIONAL cable-stay bridges, the cables that hold up the roadway pass through the support towers in a big bundle. That not only leaves them vulnerable to friction and corrosion, it makes repairs an all-or-nothing affair. Maine’s 2,120-foot Penobscot Narrows Bridge, which opened last month, uses a unique cradle system that gives each epoxy-coated steel strand its own oneinch steel sheath. This protective coating keeps the steel from rubbing and allows workers to replace cables one at a time. The entire assembly is pumped full of pressurized nitrogen, an inert gas that fends off corrosion. The $85-million bridge is expected to last twice as long as its predecessor and will be one of just three bridges in the world with an observatory. waldohancockbridge.com
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ENGINEERING Retractable roof
7.5hp motor
Track
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OPEN SESAME It takes 64 motors 13 minutes to open or close the roof. While opening, motors feed power into the grid.
GRAHAM MURDOCH
Roof panel
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Walter P. Moore Engineers/Uni-Systems University of phoenix Stadium
A STADIUM THAT GOES FROM INDOORS TO OUTDOORS IN A FLASH
THE NEW 63,400-SEAT, $455-million Cardinals stadium in Glendale, Arizona, features two of the largest moving parts in sports history: the country’s first completely retractable grass
field and the first inclined retractable roof. At the press of a button, the 2.2-acre field, which spends most of the year outdoors in a giant steel tray, can be wheeled in on tracks in just over an hour. And the two 550-ton
Mobile field
retractable panels that make up the stadium’s roof pump juice back into the electrical grid as they slide open. Now, if only the long-suffering Cardinals can match the performance. azcardinals.com/stadium
FRESH GREENS Automated tracks roll the Cardinals playing field in and out of the stadium in about an hour. (Other retractable fields can take half a day.)
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T.Y. Lin International and Moffatt & Nichol New San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge
THE SUSPENSION BRIDGE BUILT TO TAKE ANY QUAKE
THIS YEAR, workers finally broke ground
PILLAR OF STRENGTH The new San Francisco Bay bridge will be the world’s first single-tower, selfanchored suspension bridge.
Steven Holl Architects Linked Hybrid Project
THE LARGEST GEOTHERMAL HOUSING COMPLEX
BELOW THE 690 apartments—not to mention the gyms, bars, dry cleaners and movie theater—that make up the 15-acre Linked Hybrid residential complex in Beijing, China, are 660 geothermal wells that eliminate the need for air conditioners and boilers. Each well funnels water 328 feet beneath the ground into bedrock, where the constant 60ºF temperature either heats or cools it before it’s pumped back to the surface and piped through the building’s concrete floors. The system will reduce energy costs by up to 30 percent in the summer and up to 40 percent in the winter. stevenholl.com
90 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
Geothermal well
COOL COMPLEX The climate of the Linked Hybrid housing project is controlled by circulating groundwater from 328 feet down.
REPORTED BY Adam Bright and Nicole Dyer
on California’s ingenious quakeproof bridge, temporarily called the New East Span. Representing the eastern part of the four-and-a-half-mile San Francisco– Oakland Bay Bridge—deemed unsafe after damage sustained in the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989—the replacement is designed to withstand an 8.2-magnitude monster. Expandable joints in the 2.2-mile deck act like shock absorbers, so the bridge can expand and contract during tremors. Adding to the bridge’s safety is the single 525-foot, bedrock-rooted tower from which a 10-lane highway will be slung. Replaceable steel beams linking the tower’s four legs deform under pressure to absorb force. All of which will give muchneeded peace of mind to the 280,000 people who cross the bridge daily. newbaybridge.org
FROM TOP: COURTESY CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION (2); KRIS HOLLAND; COURTESY STEVEN HOLL ARCHITECTS
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ENGINEERING
POPSCI INNOVATOR
The Tailgating Architect A lifelong football fan gets his dream job: designing a stadium from scratch IN 1997, Michael Rushman of the National Football League’s Arizona Cardinals called architectural iconoclast Peter Eisenman to see if he would be interested in submitting a design for a new stadium. Do you know anything about football? Rushman asked. The 74-year-old Eisenman, famous for high-concept projects such as Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, replied that he did, in fact, know a few things about the sport. He explained how he spends Sundays every fall sitting in the nosebleed section of Giants Stadium drinking beer and eating hot dogs while cheering on his beloved team. Then he named the 1947 Chicago Cardinals backfield. He won the job a week later. As a longtime New York Giants season ticket holder, Eisenman has logged quite a few hours tailgating on the asphalt, staring up at the cement-dominated, strictly utilitarian arena. “I hate it,” he says of Giants Stadium. “It’s terrible.” So when he got the Cardinals assignment, he set out to design something that would be a kind of cathedral for football fans like himself but also a cultural icon for the entire region, something both tailgaters and tourists could enjoy [see page 88]. One of the Cardinals’ stadium’s most impressive features—an inclined retractable roof—was Eisenman’s idea, though he is quick to credit the engineers for executing the grand plan. The roof could have been an energy hog, but it offsets the power drain of the uphill push required to close it by pumping watts back into the grid when the roof slides open. Eisenman proposed a grass field that slides in and out of the stadium on an enormous wheeled tray, like a kitchen drawer, because he thought this would make the stadium itself more versatile. Football games, he notes, take up only 10 or so days a year, and all those other days should be open to other events. The field-on-a-tray can slide outside the stadium in roughly an hour, so Cardinals Stadium could host an NFL game on Sunday night and be ready for a boat show by Monday morning. To make sure every fan gets a great view, Eisenman designed
SKY LIGHT Eisenman’s original design called for the glass slats on the stadium’s sides to extend over the roof, but it was too expensive to implement.
JOHN B. CARNETT
EISENMAN SET IT UP SO THAT FANS CAN GET A HOT DOG AND STILL NOT MISS A PLAY. the twin trusses that support the stadium’s roof so that neither one obscures the field from the upper rows. Even the concourse is fan-centric. At most stadiums, the walkways and concession stands are on the exterior, away from the action, but Eisenman set it up so that the entire concourse has a view of the field. He can get his hot dog and not miss a play. “Because I’m an architect and a football fan,” he explains, “I didn’t want the architecture to get in the way of the football.” —Gregory Mone
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JOHN B. CARNETT; ILLUSTRATION: KEVIN HAND; INSETS, LEFT: COURTESY JAMES KING-HOLMES/HEWLETT-PACKARD; RIGHT: JORDAN HOLLENDER/GETTY IMAGES
GENERAL INNOVATION Grand award winner HP Memory Spot
STICK DIGITAL DATA ON ANYTHING
WANT YOUR NEXT POSTCARD to express more than three cornball sentences? Soon you’ll be able to add video of your trip with the stick-on Memory Spot, developed by HP Labs. The two-millimeter-square chip packs in half a megabyte of flash memory and can swap all its data in less than a second, so you can load it up or read files off it almost instantaneously. To exchange songs, short videos or other files, you’ll simply tap the chip with your cellphone or iPod, which could easily be equipped to read the tags. A tiny built-in antenna will send or grab your files over high-frequency radio waves. These waves are what let the Memory Spot transmit info 1,000 times as fast as RFID, and, with a mere one-millimeter range, they also ensure privacy. Commercial uses are a few years off but could include patient wristbands that store medical records, printouts that also hold digital versions, or postcards that will make your friends really wish they were there. hp.com
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POPSCI.COM
Sony recommends Windows® XP Media Center Edition.
More action. More drama. More entertainment. More. In every sense.™
Sony® Full HD. Now available in the premium VAIO® AR notebook. Introducing the world’s first notebook with Blu-ray Disc™ technology. Now you can see more. Hear more. And do more, especially with its fast Intel® Centrino® Duo Mobile Technology, integrated TV tuner and gorgeous 17" screen.1 Discover how much more for yourself at sony.com/vaio-ar The world’s most powerful HD experience.
1. Viewable area measured diagonally. ©2006 Sony Electronics Inc. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. All rights reserved. Sony, Sony logo, VAIO, VAIO logo, like.no.other, More. In every sense. are registered trademarks of Sony. Intel, Intel Inside, the Intel Inside logo, Intel Centrino, the Intel Centrino logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Blu-ray Disc is a trademark. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.
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GENERAL INNOVATION
Brightside DR37-P
THE BEST TV YOU CAN’T BUY . . . YET
WING AND A PARACHUTE The wing hangs by cords during touchdown so the jumper can maneuver unimpeded.
BY REPLACING the traditional fluorescent light inside an LCD with 1,380 individually adjustable LEDs, this 37-inch set produces eye-poppingly realistic images with 10 times the brightness and 100 times the contrast of other LCDs. Software changes the strength of each LED 60 times a second, so the set displays shades across nearly the entire range of normal light levels. For now, the pricey tech appeals to places that rely on highcontrast images, such as medical labs, but less expensive versions could show up in TVs within three years. $49,000; brightsidetech.com
SURVEILLANCE THAT SEES ALL
TYPICAL INFRARED motion detectors in security systems can’t distinguish hoodlum from housecat because they look for heat, not visual characteristics like size. The Eyetec is the first device to integrate infrared and camera sensors. An onboard processor analyzes both streams of data and combines the results to more accurately separate bad guys from bad pets. siemens.com
ESG and FreeSky Gryphon Flying Wing
THE WEAPONIZED BATWING
ORIGINALLY DESIGNED for recreational thrill seekers, the Gryphon could revolutionize the way paratroopers enter the fray. With the carbon-fiber gliding wing strapped on their backs, soldiers can scream through the air at more than 250 mph—considerably faster than the 25 mph they achieve with a regular chute and a strong tailwind. It also allows them to travel up to 25 miles from their jumping-off point, and its streamlined design makes for a quiet ride that’s difficult to detect by radar. The sturdy wing houses an oxygen supply and steering controls, as well as a “trunk” to stow 110 pounds of weapons and gear. Oh, and a parachute to ensure a soft landing for both jumper and wing. esg.de/en 94 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
Fizzy Fruit FizzyCup
A SNACK THAT SPARKLES
HOW DO YOU GET kids to eat fruit? Make it taste like you stuffed it with Pop Rocks. Fizzy Fruit is pumped with carbon dioxide to carbonate the juice inside, creating bubbles without changing nutritional content. An airtight jar keeps the fruit from going flat for up to two weeks. From $1.89; fizzyfruit.com
REPORTED BY Lauren Aaronson, Adam Bright, Bjorn Carey, Eric Mika and Gregory Mone
ILLUSTRATION: PAUL WOOTTON; PHOTOGRAPHS, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY ESG (2); COURTESY SIEMENS; COURTESY FIZZY FRUIT
Siemens Eyetec
©2006 Garmin Ltd or its subsidiaries
So, you found the perfect navigator. Call someone who cares. StreetPilot® c550 – GPS navigator with hands-free calling.1 Hello dad? You’ve gotta hear this. I’m talking to you through my new Garmin GPS. I just touch the screen to dial a number or answer a call. Talk about worry-free driving. Now there’s no more fumbling with your phone’s handset — just tap the GPS screen and you’re connected. Talk a mile a minute into the c550’s built-in mic. The c550 will continue to give you clear, turn-by-turn directions and voice prompts to your driving destination. It even announces the name of exits and streets so you never have to take your eyes off the road. Find out more about the navigator that has everyone talking. www.garmin.com
Simple, one-touch dialing options
1
Traffic alert services included 2
When paired with phones with Bluetooth® wireless technology. See www.garmin.com/bluetooth for list of compatible phones. 2 90-day free trial. The Bluetooth word mark and logos are owned by the Bluetooth SIG, Inc. and any use of such name by Garmin is under license. Other trademarks and trade names are those of their respective owners.
NASDAQ GRMN
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HEALTH CUSTOM-GROWN BLADDERS
CREATING HUMAN ORGANS IN THE LAB DEPENDENCE ON DEPENDS is a sad fact of life for millions, but thanks to tissue engineer Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University, embarrassing bladder woes may be nearing an end. Atala and his colleagues have created bladders from scratch, clearing one of the biggest hurdles in tissue engineering: growing a real human organ in the lab and proving that it works. Researchers seeded a biodegradable bladder-shaped scaffold with cells from
the patient’s own bladder and then transplanted the scaffold into the patient. As the cells matured, the scaffold dissolved, leaving behind a fully functional bladder. This year, Atala made the landmark announcement that none of the seven patients who received the organs four years ago suffered the rejection problems that commonly plague transplant patients. Next he’ll take on more complex organs, like the heart and kidneys. wfirm.org
JOHN B. CARNETT
Grand award winner
MEET THE DOCTOR WHO GREW THIS BLADDER, ON PAGE 101 SCIENCE NOVEMBER DECEMBER 2006 96 POPULAR SCIENCE
POPSCI.COM
ONLY A HANDFUL OF COMPANIES IN THE U.S. STILL WORK TO DEVELOP NEW VACCINES.
WE’RE PROUD TO BE ONE OF THEM. At Merck, the fight against sickness never ends. Every day, 8,000 Merck scientists strive to create medicines and vaccines that treat and prevent conditions like obesity, heart disease, Alzheimer’s and even cancer. And we are one of the few companies still working on vaccines for adults as well as children. Because the best way to treat illness is to stop it from happening in the first place.
To learn more, call 1-800-963-7257 or visit merck.com.
©2006 Merck & Co.,Inc. All rights reserved.
Where patients come first
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HEALTH Sound processor
Envoy Medical Esteem
HOW THE HEARING IMPLANT WORKS: The Esteem takes signals from the eardrum, removes excess noise, and then passes them to the cochlea.
Internal sensor
THE FIRST INVISIBLE HEARING AID
Outer ear
Direct Medical Systems Plug and Play Ultrasound Probe System
ULTRASOUND ON YOUR LAPTOP
THE PLUG AND PLAY Ultrasound Probe System delivers all the capabilities of a standard ultrasound probe but without the six-figure price tag, getting ultrasound into more doctors’ offices and reducing pricey specialist visits for expecting moms. Doctors simply download the software to the exam room’s computer, plug in the handheld unit’s USB cable, and scan mom’s belly. The feat was designing motors efficient enough to run on the scant five volts trickling through the USB cables. FDA approval is expected in a few months. Around $5,000; dmsww.com
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Eardrum
Cochlea
aids require external batteries or microphones, the implantable Esteem is totally out of sight—and could boost hearing by 30 decibels. Surgically inserted under the skin behind the ear, the device circumvents the faulty connections between the inner and outer ear that create hearing loss. An internal sensor registers vibrations received by the eardrum and transmits the signals to a sound processor. The processor, in turn, sends vibrations to the cochlea, where the brain interprets them as sound. Pending FDA approval, the device should be available next summer. envoymedical.com
UCLA Saliva-Based Oral Cancer Test
FINDING CANCER WITH SPIT MOUTH CANCERS aren’t the
most common cancers, but they are among the deadliest, killing half of their victims within five years. Long before telltale lesions appear, UCLA’s new, reliable spit test detects oral cancer by scanning a sample for certain red-flag RNA molecules. The test is 85 percent accurate, and results come back in 24 hours. UCLA scientists are now working to simplify it for home use. www.dent.ucla.edu
HeartWatch Remote Cardiac Care Service
CALL-IN HEARTATTACK HELP
ON AVERAGE, heart-attack victims take five to six hours to get treatment once symptoms start. The HeartWatch monitor can get you a diagnosis in five minutes. Twelve leads attach to your chest to record 45 seconds of heartbeats, which you play back into your phone. Software turns the bleeps into a full cardiograph reading so HeartWatch’s doctors can tell if you’re having a heart attack and, if so, call an ambulance. $300 plus $59/month; 247heart.com
ILLUSTRATION: KEVIN HAND; PHOTOGRAPHS, FROM LEFT: LUIS BRUNO; COURTESY UCLA SCHOOL OF DENTISTRY; LUIS BRUNO; FACING PAGE, ILLUSTRATION: KEVIN HAND; PHOTOGRAPHS, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: LUIS BRUNO (3); INSET: COURTESY ZCORP; COURTESY CONOR MEDSYSTEMS (2)
WHEREAS standard hearing
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HEALTH
BETTER FOOTING The Proprio’s more-natural movement helps correct the back-straining limp many amputees experience.
Ossur Proprio Foot
THE FOOT WITH BRAINS
THE PROPRIO FOOT comes closer to mimicking real foot action than any other prosthetic because it flexes at the ankle, using artificial intelligence and a muscle-mimicking motor. Sensors in the ankle sample movement more than 1,000 times a second to determine walking speed and transmit the data to the onboard computer. That signals a piston to move the foot to match the other foot’s pace. $15,000–$18,000; bionics.ossur.com
Conor Medsystems CoStar stent
A DRUG DISPENSER FOR CLOGGED ARTERIES
Zcorp Zscanner 700
HANDHELD 3-D IMAGING
HARDLY BIGGER THAN A VIEWMASTER, the portable ZScanner 700 is the first mobile device able to digitize the body in real time, creating crisp, three-dimensional scans in seconds. Wave the lowpower laser unit over a patient’s body part like a wand, and the device analyzes reflected light to assemble a 3-D profile. Doctors can upload the data into a 3-D CAD program to custom-design orthopedic braces and bone implants or to print out a 3-D model. $39,900; zcorp.com HEALING FROM WITHIN The CoStar stent precisely releases medicine [blue] into ailing arteries.
WHAT SETS COSTAR apart from conventional stents, implanted in an estimated three million Americans’ arteries annually, is its hundreds of tiny reservoirs. Each is packed with up to 20 layers of medicine that can prevent arteries from closing up in the months following angioplasty. Other stents pump out drugs in the first few days or weeks; the CoStar does it gradually and evenly over a period of months. Approved for use in Europe, it should be available in the U.S. in early 2008. conormed.com FLEXY Custom hinges absorb stress to keep the medicineholding struts from bending.
REPORTED BY Nicole Dyer, Nicole Price Fasig, Gregory Mone and Elizabeth Svoboda
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HEALTH TALES OF TESTING PLAYING DOCTOR The included finger-pricker lets you collect your own blood for the tests.
Lung Endoscope Heated basket Bronchial tube Asthmatx Alair system
A WAY TO FRY ASTHMA ATTACKS Polymer Technology Systems CardioChek
THE FIRST AT-HOME CHOLESTEROL TEST
AFTER A PHYSICAL EXAM two years ago showed that I had borderline high cholesterol—at age 28—I quit smoking, cut my onion-ring intake, and started running again. Lately I’d been wondering if it all helped, but I don’t like going to the doctor. Lucky for me, the handheld, batterypowered CardioChek let me run five tests—including my levels of HDL (good) cholesterol, triglycerides and glucose—right at my bathroom counter. To fit all those tests into one unit, inventors developed a series of chemical-permeated plastic strips that react with plasma in a blood sample. I just pricked my finger with an included lancet (looking away because I’m a wimp), put a drop of blood on a strip, and inserted it into the unit, where internal sensors analyzed the strip’s subsequent color changes. Two minutes later, my results appeared on the digital display: all normal. Time for some onion rings. —Mike Haney
$120; cardiochek.com
Merck Gardasil
A HOT-SHOT VACCINE FOR CANCER
ALMOST 5,000 WOMEN die of cervical cancer every year. Gardasil is a preemptive strike against the disease, protecting patients from strains of sexually transmitted human papillomavirus (HPV), which can cause cancerous growths. Gardasil uses virus-like particles that contain the same proteins as HPV, spurring the body’s immune response to attack the real thing. This year, the FDA deemed the vaccine safe for girls as young as nine. Next up: approval for use in men, who can transmit the virus. $360 per vaccination; gardasil.com 100 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
The Alair system is an experimental surgical procedure that could ward off asthma attacks without drugs. During three half-hour treatments, a doctor snakes a catheter into the lungs’ airways, where it extends a basket-like tip that pushes against the airway walls. The system delivers a 10second pulse of radio-frequency energy, heating the surrounding muscles, which limits their ability to contract— the typical wheeze-inducing reaction to triggers like dust. Clinical tests are now under way. asthmatx.com
BREATHE EASY The airways of an asthmatic constrict [left], causing wheezing. The Alair treatment opens them [right] using heat and requires no anesthetic.
Intralytix LMP 102
STOPPING KILLER MEATIA
E. COLI GRABS ALL THE HEADLINES, but the littleknown listeria bacterium is even deadlier, killing one of every three people who contract it, typically from processed cheese or cold cuts. This year, the FDA approved the most effective, albeit bizarre, defense yet: spray-on viruses that munch bacteria. One spritz at the meat-processing plant keeps meat safe for months. intralytix.com BUG ON BUG A close-up of a phage, a virus that eats bacteria before you do
ILLUSTRATIONS: KEVIN HAND; PHOTOGRAPHS, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: JOHN B. CARNETT; EYE OF SCIENCE/PHOTO RESEARCHERS; COURTESY MERCK & CO.
NO MORE PUFFING on the inhaler or popping pills.
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HEALTH BODY BUILDER Atala feeds a bladder. Next up: the kidney. “Dialysis costs $200,000 a year,” he says. “Even if it cost $100,000 to create a kidney, wouldn’t that be worth it?”
Atala has been developing the procedure for 16 years, but he became the toast of the industry this year when he announced the first successful transplant of lab-grown organs into humans. Seven volunteers received the organs—new bladders—beginning in 1999, and today all report improved urinary control. Although the bladder is perhaps the simplest organ to replicate because it lacks blood vessels, Atala’s achievement paves the way for creating far more complex body parts, such as livers and kidneys. “The current organ shortage is a public health crisis,” he says. “People are living longer, and there aren’t enough organs to go around. That brings up the question, ‘Can we grow them instead?’ ” Atala has been wrestling with that very question for 20 years. The soft-spoken researcher attended medical school at the University of Louisville, where he specialized in urology. Struck by the ineffectiveness of standard bladder-repair procedures—intestinal tissue grafts that heightened cancer risks—he resolved to improve on the technique. In 1990 he became a research fellow at Children’s Hospital in Boston and set about developing a prototype for the first homegrown bladder. Like others working
“PEOPLE ARE LIVING LONGER, AND THERE AREN’T ENOUGH ORGANS TO GO AROUND.” POPSCI INNOVATOR
The Organ Farmer A doctor’s quest to grow body parts from scratch could spell the end of waiting lists
JOHN B. CARNETT
ANTHONY ATALA MAKES BLADDERS. Not the plastic-model kind but actual living, human organs. Step into his office at Wake Forest University’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine (IRM), where the 48-year-old tissue engineer is director, and you’ll find a suite of climate-controlled chambers the size of hotel mini fridges. Inside, spheres of human bladder cells resembling deflated pink balloons divide and grow. Culled from patients with incontinence problems, these cells will assemble themselves over time, forming into brandnew replacement bladders for the cell donors.
on similar tissue-engineering projects, he kept facing the same bugaboo: When he tried to grow bladder cells outside the body, they would divide and grow for only a few days or weeks before dying off. After years of trial and error, he hit on a solution: harvesting younger cells. “We used the layer of cells at the very, very base of the bladder,” he explains. “Once we started working with them, we were able to grow enough bladder cells to cover a football field in 60 days.” The IRM is now collaborating with local biotech company Tengion, which is bankrolling large-scale clinical trials of Atala’s bladders and hopes to manufacture them eventually. Meanwhile, Atala is busy replicating more than 20 kinds of tissues and organs, including hearts and livers. But because the vast snarls of blood vessels inside these organs are exceedingly difficult to grow in the lab, he thinks it might be decades before his work yields commercially viable treatments. “Rushing may be OK when you’re trying to get a widget or a videogame on the market,” he says, “but not when you’re dealing with patients’ lives.”—Elizabeth Svoboda
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THE GOAL OF THE XO is simple and noble: to give every child a laptop, especially in developing countries, where the machines will be sold in bulk for about $130 apiece. But the One Laptop Per Child nonprofit, formed at MIT, didn’t just create a cheap computer. In addition to cutting costs—by designing lower-priced circuitry and using an open-source operating system, among other things—it also improved on the standard laptop by slashing the machine’s energy use by 90 percent, ideal for a device that could be charged by hand-cranked power in rural villages.
SCIENCE NOVEMBER DECEMBER 2006 102 POPULAR SCIENCE
The biggest power hog is typically the display, so engineers invented a new LCD. Each pixel has one part that reflects light and one that lets light pass through a colored filter. Turn on the LED behind the screen, and a full-color image appears as rays stream through the tinted filters. Turn it off to save power, and light bounces off the reflective parts of the pixels to form a black-and-white image perfect for e-mail or e-textbooks. Even more efficient, the CPU suspends itself when the image is static. Expect the tech in full-price laptops in a few years. laptop.org
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Tell him they’re little, shiny, round, historic action figures.
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G E N U I N E LY W O R T H W H I L E
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CELERY Mail service
COMPUTERLESS E-MAIL
CLOSED
MEDIA MONSTER As a Media Center PC, the M2010 can tune and record live television.
MY BOYFRIEND’S DAD sends me e-mail by handwriting “Dear Lauren” on a sheet of paper and pressing two buttons on his fax machine. His note goes to Celery, a new e-mail-by-fax service, where its servers use handwriting-recognition software to match my name to an e-mail address stored in Pop’s list of friends. Then it turns his letter into a PDF file and dispatches it to my inbox. When I hit reply, my message or photo comes out on his end as a fax. Now the whole family shares news in an instant. —Lauren Aaronson $140 a year; mycelery.com
Logitech MX Revolution Dell xps M2010
A LAPTOP THAT CRUSHES YOUR LAP THINK OF IT more like a portable desktop. This 20-inch behemoth—the
first of several laptops of this size released this year—is most at home in your living room, where you can sit on the couch and point the remote at its high-def widescreen or type e-mails on the detachable Bluetooth keyboard. But the 18-pounder is still surprisingly easy to take on the go: When you close the M2010 and pick it up by the display hinge that doubles as a handle, you can carry it just like the faux-leather briefcase it resembles. $3,000; dell.com 104 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
SPEED SCROLLER
WITH ONE FLICK of its scroll wheel, the MX Revolution zooms past up to 10,000 spreadsheet lines. The secret is a hidden ball bearing: When it presses against the wheel inside the mouse, the wheel ratchets at the usual line-by-line pace. But when a motor pulls the ball away, the scroller spins freely, moving faster the harder you flick. It can even switch modes automatically based on the program. $100; logitech.com
REPORTED BY Lauren Aaronson, Joe Brown, Nicole Price Fasig, Mike Haney and Steve Morgenstern
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY ART. LEBEDEV STUDIO; JOHN B. CARNETT; LUIS BRUNO
TaLES OF TESTING
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COMPUTING Apple Boot Camp
art. lebedev Optimus Mini Three
ANIMATED KEYBOARD
TWO COMPUTERS IN ONE
WINDOWS AND MAC OS X can finally run on the same machine. Apple’s Boot Camp software lets users of Intel-based Macs launch either OS X or XP at start-up. By providing the system files Windows requires, Boot Camp temporarily turns Apple’s hardware into a bonafide PC with impressive software compatibility. Free; apple.com
PROGRAM THE KEYS on this customizable controller for your computer to take on different functions based on the application you’re working in—in Word, for example, “New,” “Save” and “Print.” The small OLED screens built into each button change appearance with the function. Or use the screens to track information such as stocks, time or weather. $160; artlebedev.com
MCAfee SiteAdvisor
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: LUIS BRUNO; COURTESY FARECAST.COM; LUIS BRUNO (2); COURTESY MCAFEE; LUIS BRUNO
SPOT DANGER BEFORE YOU CLICK
THERE ARE WEB SITES that can download virus-like programs onto your computer just by your clicking on them, and they show up in search engines just like any other site. The SiteAdvisor plugin for Firefox or Internet Explorer overlays your search results with red warnings, yellow cautions or green go-ahead signs. The safety ratings are based on tests run at McAfee by computers that visit millions of sites to see if they install unwanted programs, flood your inbox with spam, or create other e-nuisances. Best of all, SiteAdvisor won’t slow down your browsing. Free; siteadvisor.com
Belkin Cable-Free USB Hub
Farecast.com
FASTER THAN BLUETOOTH or Wi-Fi, Ultra-Wideband technology can send data wirelessly over a distance of about 30 feet—perfect for streaming video or connecting to printers. The first product to use it is Belkin’s USB hub, which transmits several short pulses over a wide spectrum of radio waves to beam up to 480 megabits per second. Stick a receiver in your computer, and you can wirelessly zap info to MP3 players, scanners or any other USB device attached to the hub. $200; belkin.com
THE PRICES OF PLANE tickets go
GET RID OF ALL YOUR WIRES
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up and down more often than a commuter shuttle. But now there’s Farecast.com, which predicts whether the price of your flight is likely to rise or fall before your travel date and tells you to buy or wait. The site achieves its 70 to 75 percent accuracy rate—high for a market so volatile—by using data mining to analyze past flights and determining which factors most affect ticket prices. The service is available on more than 2,000 popular routes. Free; farecast.com
Linksys WRTSL54GS wireless-G router
SHARING DATA GETS CHEAP AND EASY
NETWORK ATTACHED STORAGE (NAS)—a hard drive that any computer on a network can access— usually requires buying an extra, dedicated NAS drive. But Linksys packed all the necessary NAS software inside a wireless router. Plug in any USB storage device, such as your flash drive, and the router turns it into NAS for anyone on your network. $120; linksys.com
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POPSCI INNOVATOR
Dr. Nail vs.
Could thwarting the devastating effects of hurricanes and THE HEAD 25 percent wider than normal nails to prevent plywood from ripping off
THE STEEL Novel carbon-steel alloy is 20 percent stronger in earthquakes
THE TWIST Fills in the space that the barbs open up to hold the nail in place
named Ed Sutt took off for a spur-of-the-moment trip to the Caribbean. But beaches and rum drinks weren’t on the agenda for this civil engineer. Hurricane Marilyn had just torn through St. Thomas, and Sutt was part of a team examining how and why 80 percent of the island’s homes and businesses had collapsed in the storm’s 95mph winds. “The destruction was so complete in places that it was almost surreal,” Sutt recalls. “There were troops in the streets and military helicopters hovering overhead.” As Sutt moved through the wreckage of roofless and toppledover houses, he was struck by the sense that much of the destruction could have been avoided. “In house after house,” he says, “I noticed that it wasn’t the wood that had failed—it was the nails that held the wood together.” At the time, Sutt couldn’t have predicted that this realization would spark a journey through earthquakes, wind tunnels and head-to-head battles with giant wallwrecking machines. Or that 11 years, dozens of hurricanes and thousands of prototypes later, he would be
106 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
credited with reinventing the little spike of steel that holds together most of the world’s houses.
THE OVERLOOKED IMPORTANCE OF THE NAIL For more than two centuries, nails have been the fastener of choice for wood-frame structures. But for all that is riding on nails, they have been the focus of precious little R&D. Nails have evolved into a grab-whatever’s-cheapest commodity, taken for granted by contractors and engineers. Sutt should know. The man now known to his colleagues as “Dr. Nail” grew up the son of an architectcontractor in suburban Connecticut, where he spent his weekends at job sites, framing houses from the age of 14. As a young adult, he worked as a carpenter, then started his own construction business. “I wasn’t a very successful contractor,” says the 38-year-old Sutt, “mostly because I liked to hand-nail everything. One day I was nailing off a top plate over a door. I looked at my swollen hands, and I couldn’t see my knuckles. So I decided to go back to school.” To finance his engineering degree, Sutt took a researchassistant position at Clemson’s Wind Load Test Facility,
SATOSHI; FACING PAGE: JOHN B. CARNETT
I
N 1995 A CLEMSON UNIVERSITY graduate student
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HOME TECH
the Monster earthquakes be as simple as designing a better nail?
BY TOM CLYNES
THE BARBS Hold the shaft firmly in the frame to prevent pullout
PAGING DR. NAIL Ed Sutt admires the HurriQuake in Bostitch’s Rhode Island manufacturing plant.
which had received a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to study the relationship between wind velocity and the failure of wood-frame structures. The position turned out to be a good fit, since it allowed Sutt to combine engineering with his practical knowledge. “We hand-built these mobile weather stations that measure wind speed and barometric pressure,” he says. “Then we would race out in front of hurricanes and drop them in the storm’s path. After it was over, we came back to see if we could make a correlation between real wind speed and when a house starts coming apart.” When he integrated the results of the fieldwork with his laboratory experiments, Sutt discovered that the most effective way to strengthen a house was to improve its fasteners, especially the nails that hold the roof and wall sheathing to the frame. “I began to see that the engineers and buildingcode writers had been missing the point. Everyone had always just accepted that a nail is a nail. No one was focusing on what we could do to make the connection better.” In 2000, with his Ph.D. in hand, Sutt sent his résumé to Stanley Works. His timing couldn’t have been better. The
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HOME TECH Low pressure outside
Sheathing
High pressure inside
2x4
Broken window
HurriQuake HUFF AND PUFF, AND . . . House failure often starts with a broken window. High winds act to inflate the house like a balloon while creating a zone of low pressure above. This pressure difference can [right] pull the nail’s head through the sheathing, yank the nail from the frame, or shear the nail sideways. The HurriQuake nail [above] was designed with a large head, barbs and a locking twist top to stop failure.
3 Ordinary failures
PULL-THROUGH
PULLOUT
SHEAR
company had recently begun to increase its investment in fastener engineering, and it called Sutt in for an interview, during which the young engineer shared his vision of a new way to think about research. “In the past,” Sutt says, “fastener companies had focused on how to manufacture nails. I wanted to look at how structures perform based on the nails that are used.” Sutt signed on as a fastener engineer at Stanley’s subsidiary Bostitch and settled into a new lab at the company’s headquarters complex in Rhode Island. Then he began concentrating on the mission that he had seemingly spent his entire life preparing for: designing a better nail.
REINVENTING THE STEEL During the HurriQuake nail’s six years of development, 14 major hurricanes and tropical storms destroyed hundreds of thousands of houses in the U.S. and inflicted an estimated $166 billion in damages. The U.S. hasn’t had a major earthquake since parts of the Los Angeles area were leveled in the Northridge quake of 1994, but around the world, thousands of people have lost homes and family members as wooden structures collapsed. Although there are no precise statistics, Sutt’s research indicated that nail failure accounted for a substantial per-
108 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
centage of the destruction in these catastrophes. And when nails fail, it’s for one of three reasons. Either the nail rips its head through the sheathing, its shank pulls out of the frame, or its midsection snaps under the lateral loads that rock a house during high winds and earthquakes. Sutt’s job was to design a nail that resisted all three. “With the first prototypes,” Sutt says, “we proved that a bigger head has substantial advantages in terms of stopping the nail from pulling through the sheathing. But it couldn’t be too big, because it needed to fit into popular nail guns.” As the Bostitch team tweaked the head-to-shank ratio, Sutt and metallurgist Tom Stall worked on optimizing high-carbon alloys, trying to find the highest-strength trade-off between stiffness and pliability—the key to preventing snapped nails. “Meanwhile,” Sutt says, “we were focusing on how to keep the nail from pulling out.” The team machined a series of barbed rings that extend up the nail’s shaft from its point, experimenting with the size and placement of the barbs. “You want the rings to have maximum holding power,” he says, “but if they go up too high, it creates a more brittle shank that shears more easily.” The team tested hundreds of designs, looking for the best compromises. The late prototypes held fast, and Bostitch came out with a barbed nail with a larger head in
ILLUSTRATIONS: KEVIN HAND; FACING PAGE: COURTESY BOB EPSTEIN/FEMA
“EVERYONE ACCEPTED THAT A NAIL WAS A NAIL. NO ONE WAS TRYING TO MAKE IT BETTER.”
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BRILLIANT 10 STORM SURVIVAL The HurriQuake will double the resistance of homes to high winds, like the category-5-force winds of Hurricane Andrew that devastated South Florida in 1992. No Atlantic hurricane since has been stronger at landfall.
2005 called the Sheather Plus. But the solutions created problems of their own: As the barbs pierced the sheathing, they generated a hole that was slightly bigger than the shank, resulting in a loose, sloppy joint. “We needed a way to lock the top of the shank into the sheathing,” says Sutt, who attacked the problem in a series of brainstorming sessions with his engineers. Their solution: a screw-shank, a slight twist at the top of the shaft that locks the nail in place. The combination of the screw-shank, barbed rings, fatter head, and high-strength alloy added up to an elegant solution to the failures that had plagued nails for more than two centuries. Sutt’s team had, in effect, reinvented the nail.
SNAPPING WALLS FOR SCIENCE Tests conducted by researchers at Florida International University and the International Code Council—the independent building-safety standards organization—confirmed that the HurriQuake has more than twice the “uplift capacity” of standard power-driven nails. Other independent tests showed that the HurriQuake can double a typical home’s resistance to high winds and add up to 50 percent more resistance to earthquakes. I wanted to see what that resistance looked like on real boards, so I asked Scott Schiff, the coordinator of the civilengineering and engineering-mechanics graduate programs at
Clemson, to run some tests on the HurriQuake. And I asked Sutt to accompany me back to his old stomping grounds. Schiff, who taught Sutt at Clemson, meets us at the Wind Load Test Facility, which occupies two large sheds a couple miles from the university’s main campus in northwestern South Carolina. Inside the sheds, Schiff has created something of a storm chaser’s fantasy lab. There’s a giant wind tunnel, Styrofoam models of cities and suburbs, even a homemade cannon that fires two-by-fours into walls. In the rear shed, a 20-foot-tall frame of steel I-beams rears up like a medieval torture device. Schiff’s students have bolted into the device an eight-foot-square section of wall, built with conventional 8d “common nails,” that will soon be methodically torn apart. “Meet the Monster,” Schiff says, motioning toward the rig’s actuator, which will pull the wall up at a 45-degree angle. “We use it to simulate the forces of simultaneous uplift and shear, which is what is exerted against a house in a high-wind event.” With a capacity of up to 20,000 pounds of force—“We won’t get near that today,” Schiff assures me—the Monster tests how fasteners perform as part of a system. “The first time I used it,” Sutt says, flashing a guilty grin, “I was trying to apply a shear force on nails through rafters, as part of my Ph.D. research. But I had it set up [CONTINUED ON PAGE 134]
POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 109
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LADIES’ NIGHT Everyone who actually worked on the floor and isn’t a professional model, raise your hand.
When dance fever hit MIT, students built a computer-controlled, LED-lit disco floor. Now you can, too
A FEW SEMESTERS AGO, a group of undergrads at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took on a challenge more daunting than classwork: disco. Before a dorm party, they worked night and day for a week to build a computer-controlled, pixelated dance floor out of 1x4s, LEDs, tinfoil, paper towels and old computer parts. The 8-by-16-foot result would make Travolta weep with joy. Each of the 512 six-inch-square pixels contains three LEDs pointed down at a square of paper towel that sits in a larger piece of foil. The foil reflects the light up through the plastic floor, while the paper towel mutes its glow. (LEDs stay cool, so the towels won’t ignite.) A computer controls each pixel individually, and the software generates 25 disco-tastic patterns, enabling DJs to match the light show to the music they’re playing. After earning minor fame at MIT (one of the inventors scored dates because of his uncanny soldering skills), the students began upgrading the floor. Their latest model, for sale at dropoutdesign.com for $450, has a prebuilt circuit board and instructions, so anyone can turn a basement into a discotheque.—GREGORY MONE
JOHN B. CARNETT; STYLING: LANI HOANG
HOW IT WORKS 1 WEEK $5,000 easy LIGHTS By varying the intensity of each bulb, the students can blend light from the red, green and blue LEDs housed in each pixel to produce any color. POPSCI.COM
CONTROL Any Internetconnected computer can control the floor, and the open-source software allows code-savvy disco fans to add new light patterns.
hard RESILIENCE With its wooden frame and a quarter-inchthick layer of Lexan plastic, the floor has proven to be nearly indestructible.
UNDER THE PLASTIC The new version needs just one tricolor LED per pixel but still uses paper towels for softer light.
DECEMBER 2006 POPULAR SCIENCE 115
PS1206 Elements Poster
10/17/06
8:15 AM
Page 1
1918713864 p.1
THE ELEMENTS
Atomic symbol
Atomic number
ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT 2006 THEODORE W. GRAY, EXCEPT AS FOLLOWS: H COURTESY NASA; LR, SG COURTESY LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LABORATORY; RF COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER; CM, ES, NO, RG COPYRIGHT NOBEL FOUNDATION; BH COURTESY NIELS BOHR ARCHIVE; FM COURTESY U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY; MT COURTESY HAHN-MEITNER INSTITUTE; U.C. BERKELEY SEAL COPYRIGHT AND TRADEMARK 2001 U.C. REGENTS; CF, DS, HS, DB COURTESY THE RESPECTIVE CITY OR STATE. POSTER COPYRIGHT 2006 THEODORE W. GRAY, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
This poster of the periodic table showcases 93 element samples from the collection of POPSCI contributing editor Theodore Gray, who spent four years assembling and photographing them.
Buy beautifully printed copies of this poster up to four and a half feet wide at periodictabletable.com.
KEY Elements 96–111 are exotic and difficult to photograph; many exist only as a few atoms at a time in reactors. Here, we show the person or place after which they are named. Elements 112–118 have either not yet been named or not yet been discovered.
Radioactive elements
For information, write: Element Collection P.O. Box 81 Urbana, IL 61803
PS1206 Elements Poster
10/17/06
8:15 AM
Page 1
1918713864 p.1
THE ELEMENTS
Atomic symbol
Atomic number
ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT 2006 THEODORE W. GRAY, EXCEPT AS FOLLOWS: H COURTESY NASA; LR, SG COURTESY LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LABORATORY; RF COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER; CM, ES, NO, RG COPYRIGHT NOBEL FOUNDATION; BH COURTESY NIELS BOHR ARCHIVE; FM COURTESY U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY; MT COURTESY HAHN-MEITNER INSTITUTE; U.C. BERKELEY SEAL COPYRIGHT AND TRADEMARK 2001 U.C. REGENTS; CF, DS, HS, DB COURTESY THE RESPECTIVE CITY OR STATE. POSTER COPYRIGHT 2006 THEODORE W. GRAY, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
This poster of the periodic table showcases 93 element samples from the collection of POPSCI contributing editor Theodore Gray, who spent four years assembling and photographing them.
Buy beautifully printed copies of this poster up to four and a half feet wide at periodictabletable.com.
KEY Elements 96–111 are exotic and difficult to photograph; many exist only as a few atoms at a time in reactors. Here, we show the person or place after which they are named. Elements 112–118 have either not yet been named or not yet been discovered.
Radioactive elements
For information, write: Element Collection P.O. Box 81 Urbana, IL 61803
PS1206 Elements Poster
10/17/06
8:15 AM
Page 1
1918713864 p.1
THE ELEMENTS
Atomic symbol
Atomic number
ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT 2006 THEODORE W. GRAY, EXCEPT AS FOLLOWS: H COURTESY NASA; LR, SG COURTESY LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LABORATORY; RF COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER; CM, ES, NO, RG COPYRIGHT NOBEL FOUNDATION; BH COURTESY NIELS BOHR ARCHIVE; FM COURTESY U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY; MT COURTESY HAHN-MEITNER INSTITUTE; U.C. BERKELEY SEAL COPYRIGHT AND TRADEMARK 2001 U.C. REGENTS; CF, DS, HS, DB COURTESY THE RESPECTIVE CITY OR STATE. POSTER COPYRIGHT 2006 THEODORE W. GRAY, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
This poster of the periodic table showcases 93 element samples from the collection of POPSCI contributing editor Theodore Gray, who spent four years assembling and photographing them.
Buy beautifully printed copies of this poster up to four and a half feet wide at periodictabletable.com.
KEY Elements 96–111 are exotic and difficult to photograph; many exist only as a few atoms at a time in reactors. Here, we show the person or place after which they are named. Elements 112–118 have either not yet been named or not yet been discovered.
Radioactive elements
For information, write: Element Collection P.O. Box 81 Urbana, IL 61803
PS1206 H20 GrayMatter R1
10/16/06
4:11 PM
Page 123
630493880 p.123
HOW 2.0 ATOMIC ART The author’s periodictable table holding some of his 1,063 element samples
BUILDING A PERIODIC-TABLE TABLE 2,000 hours $25,000 saNe crazy
GRAY
Gray’s table measures 4 feet by 8 feet and cost him a fortune in samples. Find links to less-expensive element sets and see Gray’s full collection at periodictabletable.com.
MATTER
AN ELEMENTAL FASCINATION
SOMETIMES the best things in life are just a big mistake. My writing this chemistry column the past few years? All based on a complete misunderstanding. I read in Oliver Sacks’s Uncle Tungsten that Sacks liked to visit a periodic table at the Kensington Science Museum in London, and I actually thought it was a real table with samples sitting on it for people to look at. Disappointed to learn that it was just a wall display, I resolved that I was going to build a proper periodic-table table. IN CASE YOU MISSED IT, YOU CAN TEAR OUT THEODORE GRAY’S PERIODICTABLE POSTER RIGHT HERE.
123 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
It’s been downhill ever since. First, I started collecting elements to go on the table. Then I started writing about them for my Web site, periodictabletable.com. Then POPSCI offered me this column. Pretty soon I was hanging out late at night in the back alleys of the Internet, looking for a fix of uranium or another hit of gadolinium. There is a thrill in discovering pure elements in new and unexpected places, like the solid blocks of magnesium you can find in camping stores (used as fire starters). Or when I finally got my hands on a real bottle of Radithor-brand radioactive thorium-water health tonic, still driving my Geiger counter wild 75 years
after it was outlawed (eBay, of course). The elements are the gateway between the mathematical purity of physics and the messy reality of life. Between you and the ancient supernova in which the stuff of your body was created, there is one link: your elements (really just the nuclei of your elements—the electrons got swapped out long ago). So to celebrate the astonishing diversity of nature, I decided that after four years of collecting and photographing the elements, I was ready to make the very thing I started by rebelling against: a periodic-table poster to hang on the wall.
p OPsCI on the web
—Theodore Gray
See popsci.com/periodictable for an interactive version of Gray’s poster.
MIKE WALKER
How the author’s element-collecting hobby turned into a real periodic table—and a free poster for you
H20G_5Things/Geek_FINAL
10/11/06
5:22 PM
Page 124
413996364 p.124
HOW 2.0
5 THINGS. . . YOU CAN DO ON THE WEB, NO SOFTWARE REQUIRED
1 WRITE YOUR NOVEL USE IT BETTER
HACKER’S DELIGHT Make the open-source Nokia 770 Internet tablet do anything IMAGINE A GADGET that fits in your back pocket and lets you surf the Web anywhere, write documents, make VoIP calls, watch movies, and listen to your entire music library. That’s not exactly what Nokia had in mind when it released the 770 ($360; nokia.com), a PDA-size Internet tablet with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. But because the device has an opensource operating system, anyone can build new programs for it, endowing it with nearly endless functions (we’ve nicknamed it the HackBerry). To get started, download the apps below, and find over 100 more at maemo.org.—Joe Brown and John Mahoney
THREE EXTRA TALENTS OF THE 770
Use Google’s Writely (writely.com) to write, edit, and even collaborate on documents right in a browser window. All the familiar tools are there, including bullet points, tables and spell-check. Publish your document straight to your blog, share it with someone else, or export it to Word.
2 EDIT HOME MOVIES
Upload your clips to Jumpcut.com, arrange them on the drag-and-drop timeline, and add titles, transitions, music and special effects. Then show your masterpiece to the world (or just friends) using the site’s YouTube-like sharing feature.
3 SPRUCE UP PHOTOS
Upload your pictures to MyTheme .com and give them the full Photoshop treatment. You can crop, rotate, and resize them, and choose from a wide assortment of fixes and enhancements. Save the results to your PC or your MySpace page.
4 CHAT WITH EVERYONE CONTROL YOUR HOME PC
MAKE FREE CALLS
Connect a 770 to a Bluetooth GPS receiver, and use it as a portable navigation device with Maemo Mapper. Download maps ahead of time, or set it to grab them automatically.
VNC Viewer lets you remotely link to any computer over the Internet and creates a virtual desktop on your 770. Open and copy files just as if you were at home.
Why rack up cell minutes? Download VoIP software from Gizmo Project and call any number in the U.S. for a penny a minute, or make international calls for a few cents more.
KEEP IT ONLINE ALL THE TIME Free yourself from Wi-Fi by pairing the 770 with any Bluetooth cellphone, and use the phone’s data connection to surf. The fastest available is the LG CU500 ($150; cingular.com), the first phone in the U.S. to use HSDPA, which gives you 10 megabits per second—better than home broadband.
124 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
5 EVERYTHING ELSE
Although you can’t quite leave Windows behind, you can do just about everything you need inside your browser with Glide Effortless (glidedigital.com). The site can handle music and photo management, file storage, e-mail and more—all wrapped in one interface. It syncs with your PC over the Web, so you can access and work on your files from any machine.—Rick Broida
LUIS BRUNO
FIND THE WAY
Head to Meebo.com when you need to send an instant message to anyone, anywhere. The service lets you gab on Jabber, Gtalk, AIM, ICQ, MSN or Yahoo. Just type in your ID and password, and you’re ready to go.
HOW 2.0
THE
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Studio ($33; makayama.com) to a Windows computer, and you can turn your Casio Exilim or Sony Cybershot into a surprisingly functional portable movie player. Slip a DVD in your computer, and the software will convert and compress the movie to fit on a 512-megabyte memory card. The Casio EX-Z60 we used got over three hours of playback on a full battery.—Doug Cantor
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HOW CAN I TAME MY OVERFLOWING INBOX?
ASK A
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GEEK MERLIN MANN is the creator of the productivity-tips site 43folders.com. GOT A QUESTION FOR OUR GEEK CHORUS? Send it to us at
[email protected].
START BY CHECKING your e-mail less often—say, once an hour—and by always processing, but not necessarily responding to, new mail right away. Focus on taking action on your e-mails, rather than just rereading or filing. Quickly scan your messages for appointments, anything you might need to reference again, and requested actions, and immediately make notes in your calendar and to-do list. For e-mails requiring only a quick response, send your reply as soon as the message arrives, and keep it short. If the recipients need more information, they’ll tell you; just move it off your plate. If you get many similar requests, use an application like QuickTemplates for Windows ($24; mapilab.com) or MailTemplate for Mac ($15; mactank.com) to knock out boilerplate responses. Finally, simplify your e-mail filing system as much as you can stand. Put anything requiring a near-term reply in a folder labeled “To Respond” and the rest in one called “Archive.” Rely on your program’s search tool to find what you need. To move messages fast, set up keyboard commands with apps like SpeedFiler ($20; claritude.com) for Windows or, for Mac, Mail Act-On (free; indev.ca).
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S O M E T I M E S
THE SIMPSONS TM 2006 TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM CORPORATION
q
Do music lessons make kids smarter?
a
Several studies published in the past few years involving children ages four to 15 have strengthened the theory that music lessons have a positive effect on kids’ brains. The first, by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, looked at 90 boys between the ages of six and 15; half were in the school’s string orchestra, and the rest had no musical training. Another study, by the University of Toronto, enlisted 144 six-year-olds and randomly assigned them to a year of piano lessons, voice coaching or nothing.
130
132
Just how fat can a planet get?
Y O U
Will wind farms destroy the fresh ocean breeze?
J U S T
The researchers discovered that lessons on a musical instrument can boost mathematic ability and overall IQ. Unsurprisingly, the longer a student sticks with it, the greater those improvements. Most recently, scientists at McMaster University and the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto revealed that as little as four months of music lessons cause noticeable improvements during brain development. The study followed a handful of four- to six-year-old aspiring musicians over the course of a year, measuring patterns of neuronal activity in each participant’s brain. When the scientists compared the young Mozarts with a control group, they found that music students’ brains were developing differently. For
N E E D
T O
K N O W
DARN TOOTIN’ Learning an instrument helps kids score high grades.
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example, instruction improved an information-processing area of the brain associated with attention. Unlike their peers, the nascent musicians’ general memory capacity (measured by how easily subjects could memorize strings of numbers) increased over the course of the year.
Before you start kicking yourself for having given up the tuba, take comfort: Even quitters reap some benefits. Studies have shown that instead of losing their abilities wholesale, children who stopped their lessons retain some of the skills engendered by their musical training.—Abby Seiff
Q A
PIPSQUEAK JUPITER It’s pretty huge. But it’s still much smaller than the largest planets in the galaxy.
How big can a planet be?
It's tough to gauge “big”—are we talking largest diameter or most massive? Let’s start with massive. The heaviest planets reach roughly 13 times the mass of Jupiter, the most massive planet in our own solar system (Jupiter’s mass is about 318 times that of Earth). In an orb much more massive than that, the inside grows dense and hot enough to fuse hydrogen nuclei. That makes the object a
brown dwarf, which burns far less brightly than a star yet still emanates a distinctly un-planet-like glow. But also consider the physical expanse. If you make a planet too heavy, it squishes under its own weight and gets smaller, according to astronomer Dimitar Sasselov of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. A planet with a mass greater than 13 Jupiters will end up being smaller in diameter than Jupiter itself. “The sweet spot is around two Jupiter masses,” Sasselov says of the point at which planets reach their maximum girth before added mass forces them to compress. If a planet this size is made primarily of hydrogen and helium—light elements that float far apart from each other—it will achieve the maximum possible wingspan: 106,627 miles, or roughly 20 percent wider than Jupiter. Some planets, though, seem to defy these rules. Mysterious “puffy planets” and young planets beat the diameter limit, but only because heat (in the
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FYI
CROP CIRCLES Turbines could dry out the air near crops and affect agriculture.
case of young planets, from their formation) makes them expand. Sasselov recently found a planet that’s nearly 40 percent wider than Jupiter. But he notes that once planets age and cool, they shrink to a more reasonable size. If only beer guts worked that way. —Lauren Aaronson
Will wind farms mess up the weather by interfering with storms and wind?
A
Only if you’re a cornstalk. Computer models of atmospheric physics suggest that very large wind farms—far larger than exist today— could affect the climate, but only directly underneath the turbines. The ground temperature below a 10,000-turbine farm might rise by about 1.3°F, according to a simulation described in a 2004 issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research. The spinning rotors mix air and pull moisture upward, warming and drying out the air closest to Earth. This could cause grief
to the crops planted directly underneath the wind farm (by increasing the need for irrigation), but globally the effect wouldn’t add up to much. Simulations led by researchers at the University of Calgary revealed that even if there were enough turbines to produce 17 terawatts of electricity— several times the largest estimate for the next half-century—any local changes would still dissolve into the larger atmosphere.
Today’s wind farms are too small (the largest has 5,400 turbines) to have any influence on weather at all. And even if they someday could, energy experts agree that the benefits of wind power far outweigh the potential harm. “There is a price to be paid [even for] renewable energy,” writes study author Somnath Baidya Roy of the University of Illinois. “[But] when climate change and air quality costs are considered, wind power comes out ahead.”—A.s.
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Q
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Dr. Nail vs. the Monster [CONTINUED FROM PAGE 109]
wrong, and when I turned it on, I basically destroyed it.” “We had to send it out to get rebuilt,” Schiff says, with an expression hinting at second thoughts about his star student’s reappearance. “What we’re going to do,” he says, as he punches instructions into a computer, “is simulate what happens to a house over a lifetime, which might include a few nor’easters, several gales, and a hurricane or a tornado.” The Monster will try to pull the wall panel apart, ramping the pressure up and back down again 18 times. Each time, it will gradually increase the force until it hits the wall’s failure point.
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During the first few cycles, not much happens. But as the force escalates to 5,000 pounds, the wall begins to crackle and pop. At 7,000 pounds, the sheathing begins to separate at the joints. At 9,000 pounds, the popping gets more intense, as nails begin to pull out of the framework. “It’s crackling like a holiday fire.” Schiff says, as the gauge tops 10,000 pounds. “Time to get out of the house,” Sutt says, watching the panels twist outward. At 13,500 pounds, the structure splits apart, separating with a sickening crack. We walk over to examine the nails. In some cases, they have pulled out of the framing; in others, the heads have pulled through the sheathing. Many of the spikes are bent into an S-shape, deformed by the combination of loads. “This is typical of how conventional nails fail,” Schiff says. He and his students recalibrate the machine and swap panels. An hour later, the Monster is ready to go again. This time, the panels are fastened with the HurriQuake 1, which is the same size as an 8d common nail. Schiff fires up the machine, and we wait. The screen shows that the Monster is pulling at the wall panel with 12,000 pounds of pressure, but the structure shows no sign of stress. There’s not even a creak. The machine ramps to 14,000 pounds, past the failure point of conventional nails. At 16,000 pounds, the registration marks reveal that the wall has shifted less than a quarter of an inch. Finally, at 18,300 pounds, the Monster begins to pull the nails from the mounting, and the panel begins to move. After a pizza break, another panel is ready to go. This time, the wall is fastened with the HurriQuake 2, a stockier version of Sutt’s nail. The Monster cranks up to 10,000, then 15,000 pounds. There’s no noticeable effect. Schiff watches his computer screen as the pressure-graph line keeps rising, to 17,000 pounds, to 18,000. The wall lets out a little groan. “I wonder if we can max the Monster out,” Sutt says. “Leave your credit card,” Schiff says, casting a worried eye at the screen. At 19,000 pounds, parts of the strand board begin to pull apart slightly, but the nails continue to hold. The line on the graph arcs to 19,500, then trem- [CONTINUED ON PAGE 136]
/ #
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HOME TECH [CONTINUED FROM PAGE 134]
Dr. Nail vs. the Monster bles up toward 20,000. Schiff steps back as the actuator shudders. Suddenly the cables go slack. “Uh-oh,” Sutt says. “I think I may have trashed the machine . . . again.”
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Upon inspection, Schiff determines that the Monster is in fact OK; the actuator gave up before it gave out. The professor kneels down to inspect the bottom of the wall, shaking his head. “The strand board was starting to give, but the nails held in there,” he says. “I’ve never seen anything like this.” As we nibble at the last cold slices of pizza and watch the students unbolt the wall, Sutt wears a broad grin. His former teacher is clearly impressed with his invention. Sutt’s bosses at Bostitch must be happy too. The company is selling every HurriQuake nail it produces and has been doubling production capacity every month. Although the nail is currently available only in the Gulf region (it adds about $15 to the cost of an average 2,000-square-foot house), the company is adding new production lines to meet nationwide demand. Meanwhile, the nail is getting rave reviews from building-technology experts. “This is a major innovation,” says Tim Reinhold, director of engineering for the Institute for Business and Home Safety, an insurance-industry research group. “And in places that are affected by high winds and earthquakes, it looks like it’s going to make a big difference.” Before I leave Clemson, I ask Schiff if he sees any downside to his protege’s invention. “Homeowners and insurance companies are going to love these nails,” he says. “But contractors are going to hate them, because when they make mistakes, it’s not a trivial thing to remove them. Once you nail something together, it’s going to stay together. “To us, that’s a good thing.” In the July issue, Tom Clynes presented a plan for ending our fossil-fuel addiction.
136 POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
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PUBLICATION TITLE: Popular Science 2. PUBLICATION NO.: 577-250 FILING DATE: October 1, 2006 4. ISSUE FREQUENCY: Monthly NO. OF ISSUES PUBLISHED ANNUALLY: 12 6. ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION PRICE: $19.95 COMPLETE MAILING ADDRESS OF KNOWN OFFICE OF PUBLICATION (Street, City, County, State and Zip + 4): Time4 Media, Inc., 2 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10016 COMPLETE MAILING ADDRESS OF HEADQUARTERS OR GENERAL BUSINESS OFFICE OF PUBLISHER: Time4 Media, Inc., 2 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10016 FULL NAMES AND COMPLETE MAILING ADDRESS OF PUBLISHER, EDITOR AND MANAGING EDITOR: Publisher, Gregg R. Hano, Time4 Media, Inc., 2 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10016: Editor: Mark Jannot, Time4 Media, Inc., 2 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10016; Managing Editor: Felicia Pardo, Time4 Media, Inc., 2 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10016 OWNER (If owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereafter the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding 1 percent or more of the total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address must be stated.): The owner is Time4 Media, Inc., 2 Park Avenue, New York, New York, 10016, which is an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Time Inc., 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020, which is an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Time Warner Inc.,One Time Warner Center, New York, New York 10019. KNOWN BONDHOLDERS, MORTGAGEES, AND OTHER SECURITY HOLDERS OWNING OR HOLDING 1 PERCENT OR MORE OF TOTAL AMOUNT OF BONDS, MORTGAGES OR OTHER SECURITIES: To the best knowledge of Time Warner Inc. the names and addresses of stockholders beneficially owning one percent or more of the common stock of Time Warner Inc. (as of 3/31/2006 unless otherwise noted) are as follows: (a) Time Warner Inc. Common Stock; AllianceBernstein L.P., 1345 Avenue of Americas, New York, NY 10105*; Barclays Global Investors, N.A., 45 Fremont Street, San Francisco, CA 94105*; CAM North America LLC, 399 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022*; Capital Guardian Trust Company, 333 South Hope Street, Los Angeles, CA 90071*; Capital Research & Management Company, 333 South Hope Street, Los Angeles, CA 90071*; CEDE & Co., PO Box 20, Bowling Green Station, New York, NY 10004-9998 (as of June 30, 2006)*; Dodge & Cox, One Sansome Street, San Francisco, CA 94104; Fidelity Investments, 82 Devonshire Street, Boston, MA 02109*; Goldman Sachs Asset Management, One New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004*; Harris Associates L.P., 2 North LaSalle Street, Chicago, IL 60602-3790*; Legg Mason Capital Management, Inc., 100 Light Street, Baltimore, MD 21202*; Northern Trust Company, 50 South LaSalle Street, Chicago, IL 60675*; Starfire Holding Corporation, 445 Hamilton Avenue, White Plains, NY 10601*; State Street Global Advisors, 1 Financial Center, Boston, MA 02111*; T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., 100 E. Pratt Street, Baltimore, MD 21202*; TWE Holdings II Trust, c/o Edith E. Holiday, 801 West Street, Wilmington, DE 19801 (as of June 30, 2006)*; UBS Securities LLC, 677 Washington Blvd., Stamford, CT 06901*; Van Kampen Investments, 1 Parkview Plaza, P.O. Box 5555, Oakbrook Terrace, IL 60181*; Vanguard Group, Inc., 100 Vanguard Boulevard., Malvern, PA 19355*; Wellington Management Company, LLP, 75 State Street, Boston, MA 02109* (b) By virtue of ownership and convertibility of Time Warner Inc. Series. LMCN-V Common Stock, Liberty Media Corporation, 12300 Liberty Boulevard, Englewood, CO 80112. To the best knowledge of Time Warner Inc., as of June 30, 2006, Depository Trust Co., P.O. Box 20, Bowling Green Station, New York, NY 10004-9998 holds of record one percent or more of the debt securities of Time Warner Inc.* *Believed to be held for the account of one or more security holders
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Regulators discover our home water machines produce water that can kill disease causing pathogens when filters & distillers can’t...saving a town in Colorado $10,000/day in fines! No water treatment company could eliminate the smell of a 5 acre municipal waste lagoon with over 10 1/2 million gallons of sewer waste that smelled for miles! After spraying the surface of the lagoon with 1,000 gallons of energized tap water from our machine, the smell was gone in 24 hours! Years ago, chlorine in your drinking water eliminated the smell of disease causing pathogens that originate in the colon. Now it doesn’t because pathogens have mutated and they are untreatable by ordinary means! That’s why chlorine bleach can’t get rid of the smell in a septic system anymore. OUR WATER DOES and IT DOESN’T HARM THE ENVIRONMENT like chlorine because IT KILLS ONLY BAD BACTERIA...not good bacteria! As a result, a few years ago they would have told you to wash contaminated spinach in chlorinated water. Now, they tell you to throw it away! When the inventor was in Engineering School in 1950 there were 2 1/2 billion people on the planet and you rarely heard of people with cancer and a host of diseases that exist today. NOW THERE ARE 6 1/2 BILLION PEOPLE FLUSHING THEIR DISEASES INTO THE GROUND WATER 5 TIMES A DAY! That’s why our worldwide patents show you how our machines reprocess water 100’s of times per gallon...not once! Millions of people buy pure water products, but they end up with the same problems because none of them do what our machines do!
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Today’s “Pure Water” spreads disease because energy levels are so low it can’t kill mutated pathogens! The water from our home water machine does and small amounts work better than chlorine that destroys the environment! As a result of this discovery, we built a 418 acre research center on a mountain overlooking the Delaware River near Grey Towers, the Gifford Pinchot Estate. He coined the word “environmentalist” and started the National Park Service under Teddy Roosevelt. Continuing his legacy, our technology is saving lives and the environment (see below)! Listen to a toll free recording at 1-800-433-9553 John Kennedy dedicated the 100 acre Pinchot Estate to the NPS. Thousands of people visit the estate annually including major universities involved in environmental studies and they have contacted us because our property has larger facilities with a pavilion. Our water machines provided the millions needed to build this beautiful facility that is in a trust for future generations to enjoy. Also, unlike the NPS, admission will be free. A recent discovery on the property will fund the overhead for 200 years! The hand of God moves in mysterious ways! That’s why our water is advertised on religious TV . . . we can analyze it! We have increased the energy to a 114˚ hydrogen bond angle! If we haven’t, why do they get unheard of results, causing an uproar in the water industry? Also, why would they bring heavy power 2.5 miles (Verizon 100 phone lines) to the property, at no cost to us, if it isn’t a momentous discovery? Is our water like it was before the flood when they lived 100’s of years? After losing the end of his finger, a friend found that if he soaked his hand in our water it didn’t hurt. St. Lukes M.D.: “Who would believe this! Your
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WRITE FOR FREE INFORMATION I understand the information you are providing is for educational purposes only. As stated above, this information is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent disease. In all health-related situations, qualified healthcare professionals should always be consulted.
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It doesn’t matter how OLD you are. It doesn’t matter how out of shape you are. Combat Conditioning will turn your life around. By Matt Furey Best-selling author of Combat Conditioning I was the total skeptic. Not only had I lifted weights and run long distance for years, but I had major success under my belt, including a world kung fu championship and a national collegiate wrestling title. So I just didn’t want to believe what Karl, a 76year old man told me about exercising WITHOUT weights… and WITHOUT long-distance running. Most importantly, I didn’t want to hear that a good exercise program only took a few minutes. Hate to admit it, but I was addicted to the “hard work or nothing” mentality and refused to believe you could get into the best shape of your life by doing LESS… not more. Let me tell you, when I looked at this so-called “old man’s” physique and watched him demonstrate his exercises, I could not look the other way. I had to check them out for myself, even if it meant saying, “Okay, I’ve wasted a lot of time doing it the wrong way.”
What I discovered shocked me from head to toe! Before I met Karl I THOUGHT I was strong. I thought I was tough. But the exercises he gave me exploited every weakness that weights and running could not cover, In a matter of minutes, I knew Karl “had me.” So I gave up the weights and began a routine of bodyweight calisthenics called Combat Conditioning. Afterall, when a man of 76 can do things that a 36-year old cannot do, that tells you that “Yes, there’s gold in them there hills.” The exercises I learned had such a profound and dramatic effect on me, that for six years I have been introducing men and women of all ages and of all backgrounds to this extraordinary program – and the results are shocking, awe-inspiring and PROOF that this system works, and works FAST.
Who is Combat Conditioning for? It’s for the hard-working man or woman who often finds it difficult to squeeze in a quick workout. It’s for the traveling executive who sleeps in hotel rooms more than at home. It’s for those who have trained their whole lives on weights. It’s for athletes, martial artists and the military. And .. IT’S FOR the man or woman who hasn’t done a lick of exercise in decades. Even One Minute a Day Brings Results! Unlike other exercise program where you are told you MUST do 30 minutes of cardio per day and an hour of weights, to get results, Combat Conditioning is totally different. 15 minutes is all it takes to whoop the hardcore trainee. But for the total beginner, he or she can get results starting with ONLY one minute a day. And no, this is not a joke. Time is not the issue! Forget all those workouts that take all day. With Combat Conditioning, all that’s required is your own Matt Furey won a national collegiate wrestling title in 1985 and a world shuai-chiao kung fu championship in 1997. Furey has a knack for taking the average and ordinary person and transforming him with his powerful programs. Furey was inducted into the Edinboro University Athletic Hall of Fame in 1998 and spends much time each year traveling throughout the world, searching for the very best information available to his world-wide audience. His website, www.mattfurey.com, is one of the finest in the world, giving valuable information that changes lives.
body and a tiny “get started NOW” decision to DO a little something each day. The key to your success is in the magical, transformative power of these exercises – not in your belief system about hard work. For many people, just one rep is all they can do at first, and they’re shaking like a leaf on a windy day in Chicago. And so, that’s all that person should do at first. Even if you think you’re not doing enough – the exercises work their magic anyway. Your body has it’s own intelligence and will work FOR YOU if you’ll simply get out of the way and let it. When you do, pretty soon you’ll be the type of person who can do 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 or 128 repetitions and feel no fatigue. Instead of tiredness you’ll feel exhilaration and ENERGY. You’re building strength and endurance from the INSIDE-OUT. And believe me, once you can do more than a few reps, inches of unsightly fat and pounds of excess flab will fly off your body at break-neck speed.
New Results from Forgotten Exercises Are the exercises in Combat Conditioning NEW? Well, not really. They go back about 5,000 years – but for the most part, they got lost in the shuffle when weights, gadgets and gyms came around. So although they aren’t NEW, they’re “New to YOU!” Before I learned these exercises, I read about the Great Gama of India, a wrestler who followed this program and was unbeaten in 5,000 matches. I also read that the legendary Bruce Lee did these exercises, too. And we all know about Lee’s incredible martial arts skills. Then there was the All-Pro NFL running back, Hershell Walker, who did bodyweight exercises each day. The list goes on and on. The key is in having a proven program with a track record, and Combat Conditioning is just that.
Puts You into the Old Clothes You Dream of Wearing Again! The main reason why Combat Conditioning works
burn excess body fat a lot, lot faster. This means fitting into the clothes you WANT to wear. 2. Packs attractive and healthy functional muscles (not grotesque) onto your entire body 3. Simultaneously doubles your strength and flexibility – and does so without needing separate workouts for each. 4. Quadruples your endurance inside of 30 days. Never get tired again. 5. Within a couple weeks, it often eliminates chronic back and shoulder pain from years of heavy squats, deadlifts and bench pressing – or other forms of abuse. 6. Sleep like a log. Eight hours of deep sleep is no longer a goal. It’s automatic. As soon as you hit the rack you’re out like a light. 7. Your self-confidence will have no bounds. Especially when you got compliments from people who hardly paid attention to you before. 8. You can train anywhere. You don’t need more than a few square feet of carpet or pavement and you’re all set. You don’t need equipment. Just your own bodyweight. 9. You get a kick-butt workout done in 15 minutes or less. 10. You’ll turn back the clock. Friends may tell you that you look 5–10 years younger. 11. You’ll have an explosive type of strength that weights cannot give you. Your every movement will be lively and full of vigor. 12. Your muscles will be pliable and powerful, like a tiger’s. Here’s How to Order Combat Conditioning: Functional Exercises for Fitness has 48 super effective bodyweight exercises along with seven different programs that will get you into kick-butt shape fast. Order NOW and you’ll receive 3 free Special Reports on how to eliminate knee, back and shoulder pain. Your total investment in this no-nonsense book is only $29.95 plus $6 S&H U.S. (foreign orders add $12). Order online at www.mattfurey.com. Or pick up the phone right now and call 1 813 994 8267 to order. You can also send a money order to Matt Furey Enterprises, Inc., 10339 Birdwatch Drive, Tampa, FL, 33647.
is because it targets all the weak links in your body. And when all those weak links are given a little attention, your entire body gets stronger, faster, more powerful and more energetic. Spend time each day doing a few functional exercises and the payoff is HUGE. You get functional strength, endurance and flexibility – all at the same time. Not to mention seeing the excess inches flying off your body, making it ❏ Yes, Please Send Me Combat Conditioning: Functional Exercises for Fitness easy for you to fit into the for only $29.95 plus $6 S&H ($12 foreign S&H), and if I’m one of the first 25 to order, clothes you dream of wearI will also receive 3 Special Reports on eliminating knee, back and shoulder pain. ing again. Stop dreaming. Start DOING. And get NAME: _____________________________________________________________ results. ADDRESS: ___________________________________________________________
12 Ways Combat Conditioning Will Change Your Life!
Follow this program and your body is going to change big time. In fact, I’ve made a list of 12 of the most powerful benefits that hundreds of thousands of others all over the world have gotten from the Combat Conditioning program. Let’s take a look: 1. Cranks up your metabolism so you
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Future Then.FINAL
10/11/06
5:25 PM
Page 162
1761905810 p.162
THE FUTURE THEN
FROM THE POPULAR SCIENCE ARCHIVES AUGUST 1982
The Original $100 Computer
OTHER STORIES FROM THE AUGUST 1982 ISSUE
Low cost and wide distribution defined an early PC for the masses “Our wallets are in for a pleasant surprise,” POPSCI wrote in 1982 of the Sinclair 1000, Timex’s foray into the budding personal-computing market. The computer was little more than a stumpy keyboard loaded with BASIC and two kilobytes of RAM, but the $99.95 price tag made it seem revolutionary. “It could—and probably will—change the way you and I work, shop, and spend our leisure time,” we predicted of the device, which used the household TV as its monitor. The machine didn’t last long; Timex bowed out of the computer business two years later. The power of the mass-accessibility concept, however, remained. For a look at the first $100(ish) laptop, see page 102.—ABBY SEIFF
RECORD STORAGE
The optical digital disc these RCA researchers are showing off represented the height of early-’80s digital storage technology. Both sides of the disc held information in microscopic pits—11 gigabytes’ worth, or “enough for an entire encyclopedia,” we raved.
DIGS IN SPACE
When NASA asked University of Houston researchers to design space housing, it assumed that in a few years, large numbers of construction workers would be needed beyond the exosphere. The scientists’ models were thus appropriately comprehensive: private bedrooms, storage spaces, gyms and A/V libraries were included. 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 flat 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 01617370/85/$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 Time4 Media, Inc., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016 for foreign requests. For domestic requests (article reprints only), write, call, or e-mail PARS International Corp., 102 West 38th St., New York, NY 10018; 212-221-9595 x105; [email protected]. POPULAR SCIENCE® is a registered trademark of Time4 Media, Inc. Occasionally we make our subscriber list available to carefully screened companies that offer products and services we believe would interest our readers. If you do not want to receive such offers and information, please advise us at P.O. Box 51286, Boulder, CO 80322-1286. POPULAR SCIENCE Business and Executive Offices: 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. Editorial Offices: 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. Microfilm editions are available from Xerox University Microfilms Serial Bid Coordinator, 300 N. Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48106. Subscription Inquiries: Send new or renewal subscriptions or changes of address (send both new and old addresses) to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 62456, Tampa, FL 33662-4568. Allow six to eight weeks for change of address. If you have a subscription problem, please write to the above address. Subscriptions, U.S. and its possessions: 1 year, $19.95; 2 years, $26.95; 3 years, $32.95. For Canada, add $10 per year (includes GST). For foreign destinations, add $30 per year. Subscriptions processed electronically. Subscribers: If the post office alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within two years. Postmaster: Send changeof-address notices to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 60001, Tampa, FL 336600001. POPULAR SCIENCE entered as periodical postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. POPULAR SCIENCE new Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement No. 40110178. Return undeliverable Canada addresses to Postal Stn. A, P.O. Box 4015, Toronto, ON, M5W 2T2 GST #R-122988066. POPULAR SCIENCE (ISSN 0161-7370) is published monthly by Time4 Media, 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. Printed in U.S.A. © 2006 Time4 Media, Inc.
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EarthLink trueVoice® uses Linksys® hardware. †COMPARE
TO REGULAR PHONE SERVICE: Local Service: $35 + Long Distance: $20 = Monthly Price: $55 – Typical savings. Pricing varies by local provider.
©2006 EarthLink, Inc. *Exclusive retail offer available for a limited time. Gift card and mail-in rebate apply to Unlimited Plan only. Gift card subject to rebate requirements and sent by mail with the rebate check. Service not available in all areas. Requires high speed Internet service. Per minute international rates vary by country and are always billed in addition to monthly fees. Promotional recovery fee of $50 may apply. Service is for fixed residential use only. Certain taxes and other fees may apply. Monthly price of $19.95 for the first 6 months, $24.95 per month thereafter. E911 service may be limited or not available before service is activated or in the case of power or broadband service failure. Directory or operator assistance charges will apply. See www.earthlink.net for all charges and rates. Cancellation must be by phone, US Mail or fax before the next billing period begins to avoid further charges. Other restrictions may apply. Trademarks are the property of their respective owners. All rights reserved.
ALL NEW CHEVY SILVERADO Worthy of this country. With a new frame. More intelligent engines that let you tow more and stop at the pump less.* And now, the 2007 Silverado® is backed by the GM® 100,000 mile/5-year Powertrain Limited Warranty.† 2007 Silverado. From Chevy.™ The most dependable, longest-lasting trucks on the road.** America, meet your truck at chevy.com THIS IS OUR COUNTRY. THIS IS OUR TRUCK.™
*Vortec MAX shown. EPA est. MPG 15 city/19 hwy. †Whichever comes first. See dealer for details. **Dependability based on longevity: 1981–July 2005 full-line light-duty truck company registrations. Excludes other GM divisions. ©2006 GM Corp. Buckle up, America!
THIS IS OUR TRUCK.
