Popular Science USA 2013-01

CHINA
THE SECRET ARSENAL

BULLETS
THAT SOLVE
CRIME
PG. 24
2013
PREDICTIONS
Hackers Hit Your Phone
A Global Space Race
Stem Cells for All
PLUS
Top Stories
of 2012
THE HELMET THAT

CAN SAVE FOOTBALL PG. 50
D
PROMOTION
Y BAN
EVER ALM OF
UCING
INTROD
IN THE PANDS!
YOUR H
A FULLY INTERACTIVE APP

BASED ON YOUR iTUNES
LIBRARY AND LOCATION.
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JANUARY
2013
Volume 282 No. 1 contents
50
FEATURES
The Helmet Wars

Americans suffer 3.8
million sports-related
concussions each year.
Can we build a better
device to protect
the brain?
By Tom Foster
32
The Year in
Science
The big stories to
watch for in 2013,
plus a look back at
last years highlights.
44
Chinas Secret
Arsenal
Inside the Chinese
military buildup.
By Peter W. Singer
T R AV I S R AT H B O N E ; O N T H E C O V E R : N I C K K A L O T E R A K I S
Access videos, animations, and

more with the POPSCI Interactive app.
Hover your smartphone over pages
with this icon to launch the extras.
DEPARTM EN TS 10 The Goods: A quiet keyboard, and more 26 Infographic: The heat records of 2012
12 Fords practical plug-in hybrid 28 A tiny sub that swims through veins
04 From the Editor 14 Slimmer speakers with ferrofluid 30 The future of 3-D printing and copyright
05 Peer Review 16 Tools that clean up after themselves HOW 2.0
06 Megapixels: An explosion on the sun 17 A disaster-proof hard drive 61 Inside a DIY covered wagon
73 FYI: Can antiperspirant make you hotter? 18 The death of channel-surfing 64 A remote-controlled cyborg cockroach
84 The Future Then HEADLINES 67 The heat-detecting flashlight
WHATS NEW 21 Why large predators are invading cities 68 When its okay to yank out flash drives
09 Skis for any slope 24 The crime-solving bullet 69 Turn a VCR into a computer interface
JANUARY 2013 POPULAR SCIENCE 03

FROM THE EDI TOR
THE
FUTURE
NOW
Editor-in-Chief Jacob Ward

Creative Director Sam Syed
Executive Editor Cliff Ransom
Managing Editor Jill C. Shomer
EDITORIAL
Articles Editor Jennifer Bogo
Senior Editors Seth Fletcher, Martha Harbison
Projects Editor Dave Mosher
Senior Associate Editor Corinne Iozzio
Associate Editor Susannah F. Locke
Assistant Editor Amber Williams
Editorial Assistant Rose Pastore
Editorial Production Manager Felicia Pardo
LUCKY 13
Copy Editor Kelly Borgeson
Proofreader Chris Simpson
Ideas Editor Luke Mitchell
Contributing Editors Lauren Aaronson, Eric Adams, Brooke Borel,
Tom Clynes, Theodore Gray, Eric Hagerman, Mike Haney, Joseph Hooper,
Preston Lerner, Gregory Mone, Steve Morgenstern, Rena Marie Pacella,
Catherine Price, Dave Prochnow, Jessica Snyder Sachs, Rebecca Skloot,
Mike Spinelli, Dawn Stover, Elizabeth Svoboda, Kalee Thompson,
Phillip Torrone, James Vlahos, Speed Weed
Editorial Interns Miriam Kramer, Taylor Kubota, Colleen Park
I
ART
BELIEVE 2013 will be 2013 is going to rock Art Director Todd Detwiler
Photo Editor Thomas Payne
a grand year. because of all the Designer, Information Graphics Katie Peek
Designer, Motion Graphics Michael Moreno
Big things are coming. tools and innovations Senior Designer Ashley Smestad
Digital Producer Griffin Plonchak
First of all, astronomers expect a that are about to be Digital Art Director David Quaranta
Digital Imaging Hiroki Tada
cloud of gas roughly three times available to us.
the mass of Earth to begin falling POPSCI.COM
Online Content Director Suzanne LaBarre
into a supermassive black hole in Senior Editor Paul Adams
Associate Editor Dan Nosowitz
September. Its not just going to be Web Intern Krislyn Placide
Contributing Writers Rebecca Boyle, Clay Dillow, Emily Elert, Colin Lecher
amazing (blasts of x-rays and radio And in 2013, the growing availability
waves!), it will be the first time of data is going to open business, BONNIER TECHNOLOGY GROUP
Vice President/Group Publisher Steven B. Grune
such a thing happens within range government, and intelligence to an Associate Publisher Anthony Ruotolo
of human instrumentation, which ever-larger group of citizen-analysts. Executive Assistant Christopher Graves
Associate Publisher, Marketing Mike Gallic
means we get to watch. (Ill also say that as a new father, I Financial Director Tara Bisciello
Northeast Advertising Office David Ginsberg, Caitlyn Welch
This is also the first year we hope this is the year well finally see Photo Manager Sara Schiano
expect private spaceflight to begin the adoption of the anti-concussion Ad Assistant Amanda Smyth
Northwest Manager Jay Monaghan 415-777-4417
delivering payloads into orbit at the technology Tom Foster discovered Midwest Manager John Marquardt 312-252-2838
Ad Assistant Kelsie Phillippo
regularly scheduled intervals with in his expos of the football helmet West Coast Account Managers Robert Hoeck, Bob Meth 310-227-8963
Ad Assistant Janice Nagel
which we move big things around industryan industry that, as he so Detroit Manager Edward A. Bartley 248-502-2172
here on Earth. Also, the post-Higgs capably writes, has shown an appall- Ad Assistant Diane Pahl
Southern Manager Jason A. Albaum jason@afatlanta.com
era begins this year. Like I say, lots ing inability to get on the right side Classified Advertising Sales Chip Parham 212-779-5492
Direct Response Sales Alycia Isabelle 860-542-5180
to look forward to. of history.) Advertising Director, Digital Alexis Costa
Digital Operations Manager Rochelle Rodriguez
But what will make 2013 truly The financial woes and political Digital Project Coordinator Elizabeth Besada
grand is not the big, cosmic stuff. rancor of 2012 may have sapped our Senior Integrated Sales Development Manager Kat Collins
Integrated Sales Development Managers Kate Gregory, Kelly Martin
2013 is going to rock because of all strength and distracted us from our Group Director, Creative Services/Events Mike Iadanza
Director of Events Michelle Cast
the tools and innovations that are goals. Im looking forward to putting Special Events Manager Erica Johnson
Marketing Art Director Jonathan Berger
about to be available to us. all of that behind us. My greatest wish Promotions Manager Eshonda Caraway-Evans
This year, you and I will gain is that 2013 rewards your boldest Consumer Marketing Director Bob Cohn
Associate Directors Lauren Rosenblatt, Andrew Schulman
access to a new investing mecha- dreams and brings you endless Senior Planning Manager Raymond Ward
New-Business Managers Jeff Shafer, Elona Zejnati
nism. A provision of the JOBS Act creative energy. Happy New Year. Retention Manager Hong Truong
Fulfillment Manager Hemarie Vazquez
that takes effect this year makes it Single-Copy Sales Director Vicki Weston
possible for any American to offer an Publicity Manager Caroline Andoscia Caroline@andoscia.com
Human Resources Director Kim Putman
equity stake in an enterprise over the Production Manager Erika Hernandez
Group Production Director Laurel Kurnides
Internet. That sort of activity could
democratize investment in the same
way that technology has democra- JACO B WA R D
tized media. Anyone from a fledgling jacob.ward@popsci.com | @_jacobward_ Chairman Jonas Bonnier
Chief Executive O cer Terry Snow
chef to a garage inventor can issue Chief Financial O cer Randall Koubek
shares in his or her dreams, and PS If you happen to receive a tablet for the Vice President, Corporate Sales John Driscoll
Chief Brand Development O cer Sean Holzman
receive payment for them from all holidays this year, may I suggest an app? Vice President, Consumer Marketing Bruce Miller
over the country. (We explain this POPULAR SCIENCEs Evolver makes you the star Vice President, Production Lisa Earlywine
Vice President, Information Technology Shawn Larson
MARIUS BUGGE
of the history of human evolution. With new Vice President, Corporate Communications Dean Turcol
further on page 39.) The rise of 3-D image-mapping technology, we show you what Publishing Consultant Martin S. Walker
General Counsel Jeremy Thompson
printing will let inventors and design- you might have looked like as everything from
ers prototype their own creations in an early Australopithecus to the last of the For reprints e-mail: reprints@bonniercorp.com
new materials with new properties. Neanderthals. Search for it on the iTunes store.
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04 POPULAR SCIENCE JANUARY 2013

PEEr rEVI EW
ProPheT or frauD?
Some readers called us nuts to publish a
story about Andrea Rossis controversial
I A N D R E A
cold-fusion machine in our November
issue. Others cheered us for spotlighting
R O S S I S a stigmatized branch of science. Either
N F I N I T E way, the underdog tale resonated with
E N B L A C K garage scientists everywhere.
E R G Y B O X THE
FUTURE
NOW
MAIN OFFICE
A lone Italian inventor says he has built a
machine that can power the world.
Could the answer to humanitys energy
troubles be so simple?
2 Park Ave., 9th Floor
BY S TE V E FE ATHERS TONE
New York, NY 10016
popsci.com
62 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2012
NEW
Innite Energy?
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Change of address or
I applaud Steve Featherstones article Andrea Rossis Black Box subscription problems:
[November]. Low-energy nuclear reaction could revolutionize heat- Popular Science

P.O. Box 420235
using industries and even propulsion and transportation. This energy Palm Coast, FL 32142
386-597-4279
breakthrough, combined with the use of advanced materials, could popsci.com/cs
usher in a new era of growth and prosperity. Jim Dunn Millbury, Mass. INTERNATIONAL
EDITIONS
Everything that Andrea Rossi says or does screams scam! The Inquiries regarding
international licensing
criteria for proving cold fusion should include a reactor that f rom P oP s c I hq or syndication:
makes dozens or hundreds of watts for days or weeks without syndication@popsci.com
fresh fuel, with an output-power-to-input-power ratio of 3:1. Our New Years Resolutions LETTERS
Everything should be tested independent of the inventor. None of No more hashtags To the editor:
letters@popsci.com
this has ever been done for Rossis machine. Build an icosahedron with Buckyballs
maryyugo Learn to make soft electronics
FYI questions:
fyi@popsci.com
via popsci.com Commandeer Edwin Olsons [The Ask a Geek:
Brilliant Ten, 2012] robot army h20@popsci.com
Dear Mr. Steve Featherstone, Spend more time in zero gravity Story queries:
I read the article in Popular Science. It is nice and honest. Brew a wormwood pale ale queries@popsci.com
Wonderful photos. Comments may be
edited for length and
Warm Regards, Awesome Abandoned Things clarity. We regret that
Andrea Rossi on Our Desks we cannot answer
unpublished letters.
Model of a human lower leg wearing
Popular Science @PopSci / 16 NOv / If you were to remake a famous building a heavy jackboot
today, what would you do differently? Two pistol bayonets
David Hamilton @thatfooldave / 16 NOv / Id rebuild the Empire State Catapult that hurls (toy) cats
Building as a giant glass vertical farm that gives New York some food security. Jar of 11-month-old, vacuum-
Shaun Lopez @Slop44 / 16 NOv / Statue of Liberty. I would put her in a biz
preserved mashed potatoes
suit and put an iPad where the book is, but I would leave the torch, of course!
Nerf machine gun
PopSci.coms
Top Stories of 2012
1. First-Ever Images of 4. German Hackers Are
Atoms Moving Inside a Building a DIY Space Program Senior web editor
Molecule to Put Their Own Uncensored Paul Adams heated
2. Is Typophobia a Real Internet Into Space the potatoes to 252F
to test how well he
Phobia? 5. Meet the Climate Change can kill pathogens
3. A Working Assault Rifle Denier Who Became the Voice of in canned food.
This product is from
sustainably managed
Made With a 3-D Printer Hurricane Sandy on Wikipedia He will eat these on forests and controlled
Feb. 1, 2013. sources.
january 2013 POPULAR SCIENCE 05

MEGAPIXELS
NASA/GSFC/SDO
06 POPULAR SCIENCE January 2013

Star Burst
st ory b y Taylor Kubota
On August 31, 2012, more than one bil-

lion tons of plasma exploded from the suns
surface and began speeding toward Earth
at approximately three million mph. Unlike
a solar are, which is a burst of extreme
radiation, a coronal mass ejection (CME) is
an eruption of million-degree electried gas.
Because the sun spins faster at its equator
than at its poles, its magnetic elds twist to
the point of breaking as often as three times
a day. When they reconnect, the energy
involved pushes plasma clouds into space.
A camera aboard NASAs Solar Dynamics
Observatory satellite captured this 200,000-
foot lament right before it detached; a
304-angstrom-wavelength lter enabled
scientists to see the plasma. Three days
later, the CME produced a benign eect:
auroras over the Northern Hemisphere.
January 2013 POPULAR SCIENCE 07

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Disaster-proof storage page 17 PLUS: Power tools that clean up their own messes page 16
EDITED B Y
Corinne Iozzio
wHAT sNEw@PoPscI.coM
Skis for
Any Slope
With a new core material,
skis ride as well in powder
as they do on ice
sToRY B Y Berne Broudy
P HoToG RAP H B Y Claire Benoist
U ntil now, there hasnt been an

all-mountain ski that rides well
in any conditions. Skis must
be either sturdy and narrow to chop through
icy snow or exible and wide to glide across
powder. The core of a ski determines its
weight and strength, and thus the conditions
its best suited for. Engineers at Wagner
Custom have created a core thats strong
yet light, and the rst skis to incorporate
it, the 2-4 Ultralights, are t for just about
any mountain.
To create a core 40 percent lighter and
30 percent stronger than traditional hard-
wood, Wagner engineers pressure-soak soft,
light East Coast timber in a epoxy resin de-
Wagner rived from paper mill waste. When hardened,
Custom 2-4 the resin turns the wood into a plasticized
Ultralight block. A double helix of carbon ber woven
Core Skis around the core adds even more lateral (i.e.,
turning) strength. The resulting skis are so
WEIGHT light they could oer relief from hip-and-
3.8 pounds knee-straining hardwood models, and so
(70.9-inch ski) versatile they could replace stacks of skis
PRICE $1,900 in lodges and garages.
JANUARY 2013 POPU L AR S C I E N C E 09

wn WHAT S
NEW
3
Under three ounces, the Hero3 is the highest-performing
video camera of its size. It shoots in 4Ka resolution
normally used in cinematic cameras. Action-seekers
can snap the Hero3 to helmets with a special mount or
film from afar using a remote. GoPro Hero3 $400
A dozen great ideas in gear Photographers usually carry

extra memory cards, but with
E D I T E D B Y Amber Williams the SDXC, theres no need:
At a quarter terabyte, its the
highest-capacity card in the
world. To create more space,
engineers placed the storage
cells on top of one another,
rather than alongside.
Lexar 256GB SDXC
Memory Card $900
1
The Ouroboros wireless
mouse is the fastest
responder on the market. A 2
laser and optical sensor detect
At less than three pounds,
the tracking surface 10 times
the Sherpa 50 is the lightest
quicker than competitors.
solar panel and recharger
The resulting one-millisecond
available. Six hours of sunlight
response rate puts gamers
fully charges the 13-volt
at a distinct advantage.
lithium-ion battery, which
Razer Ouroboros $130
can power a USB-connected
cellphone for up to 50 hours.
Goal Zero Sherpa 50 $250
10 POPULAR SCIENCE JANUARY 2013 C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P L E F T : C O U R T E S Y G O P R O ; C O U R T E S Y M AT I A S ; C O U R T E S Y 4 5 N R T H ; C L A I R E

B E N O I S T ; C O U R T E S Y W O R X ; C L A I R E B E N O I S T ; C O U R T E S Y P O G O S E AT ; C O U R T E S Y B R O T H E R ;
CLAIRE BENOIST; COURTESY GOAL ZERO; COURTESY RAZER; COURTESY LEXAR
9
Bicyclists dont always break
for cold weather. Wlvhammer
biking boots will keep their
toes toasty. The fleece-lined
inner boot has a two-millimeter
layer of Aerogel to insulate
against a pedals cold metal
clip. The outer shoe, made
from waterproof Cordura,
5 has a polyurethane-coated
Typing on a Quiet Pro Keyboard produces just 45 decibels mudguard. 45NRTH
of soundthe noise level in a librarymaking it the quietest Wlvhammer $325
mechanical keyboard ever built. To reduce clacking, engi-
neers installed 1.5-millimeter rubber dampers underneath
each key. Matias Quiet Pro Keyboard $150
6
At 11 inches deep, the
MFC-J4510DW has the
smallest footprint of
any multifunction inkjet
printer. Designers reori-
ented the paper tray from
the traditional portrait 10
to landscape, so it sits
With the Pogoseat app,
entirely inside the printer.
fans in an arena can
And the jets cover more of
upgrade their view of
the page at once, making
the action mid-game.
printing faster. Brother
After picking an empty
MFC-J4510DW $200
spot from an overhead-
seating chart, users pay
the difference in ticket 11
price from within the Notes taken with a LiveScribe Sky
app and move on down. pen automatically sync to
Pogoseat Free Evernote. As a writer scribbles, a
7 sensor on the pens tip tracks move-
The 73Ci shredder is ment. A Wi-Fi radio then uploads files
virtually jam-proof. to the cloud, so users can access
Paper fed into the their notebooks anywhere. LiveScribe
mouth encounters Sky Smartpen From $200
a sensor, which
measures thickness
and signals the motor
to run at the appropri-
ate torquetoo much
paper and it shuts off.
Fifty-six pairs of rotat-
ing blades cut each
sheet into 399 pieces.
Fellowes 73Ci $200
12
With the Worx SD SemiAutomatic Driver, DIYers
will never fumble to change screwdrivers again. A
rotating cartridge holds up to six tips; users cock
back the top of the driver to spin the cartridge and
8 release a spring, which pushes the next one into
place. Worx SD SemiAutomatic Driver $50
With enough spin, a tennis ball that looks like its soaring
out of bounds will drop right inside the court. A player
using the Wilson Steam racket will add more than
200 revolutions per minute to his shot. Engineers
decreased the traditional number of horizontal strings by
four; with fewer strings to flex, the remaining ones snap
back faster on impact. Wilson Steam 99S $220
A D D I T I o NA L R E P o R T I NG B Y Miriam Kramer, Taylor Kubota, and Colleen Park JA NUA RY 2013 POPU L AR S C I E N CE 11
620 MILES
Driving range of a fully fueled C-Max Energi
Detroit
WHAT S
NEW
FI V E FEAT URES
The
Practical P lug-in cars save gas and cut pollution, but at a cost. The Nissan Leaf
has a maximum driving range of about 75 miles. The Chevrolet Volt seats
just four people. And at nearly $40,000 apiece, neither is cheap. The
Ford C-Max Energi plug-in hybrid, by contrast, seats ve and combines
gas power and a grid-charged lithium-ion battery to reach the EPA-certied equivalent
Plug-In
of 108 mpg. It goes 620 miles on a full gas tank and battery. And at $29,995 (after
tax credits), it is by far the most aordable plug-in on the market. Its the kind of car
that could, just maybe, take automotive electrication mainstream.
The Ford C-Max Energi is roomy,

2 Aordable, Compact Battery 3 Custom Power Control
affordable, and, best of all, gets Engineers gave the C-Max a relatively small Using a button mounted on
108 miles per gallon 7.6-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack, the center stack, the driver
which Ford assembles in Michigan. The can mix and match electric
sT o R Y B Y Lawrence Ulrich
Chevrolet Volt, by comparison, runs on a and gas power with three set-
16-kilowatt-hour battery. As a result, the Energi tings: EV Now (electric-only
1 Gas-Electric Powertrain
gets 21 miles of all-electric range to the Volts driving), Auto EV (combined
The C-Max Energi combines a pair of electric motors and
38but its $10,000 cheaper. gas and electric power), and
a 2.0-liter four-cylinder Atkinson-cycle gasoline engine
EV Later (gas engine only).
(the same ultraecient design used in the Toyota Prius).
Together, they can push the car to a top speed
of 102 mph; the C-Max can hit 85 mph
on electricity alone. TWIN CHARGERS
The C-Max is available
in conventional hybrid
and plug-in versions;
Ford expects the plug-
in to account for
20 percent of U.S.
C-Max sales.
4 Breathing Room
The ve-passenger hatchback
has 10 more cubic feet of
interior space than the
Chevrolet Volt and nearly
COURTESY FORD MOTOR CO.
double the cargo area.

2013 Ford
C-Max Energi 5 Quick Charger
Like Fords Focus Electric, the C-Max uses a
POWER TRAIN Gas-electric plug-in hybrid 6.6-kilowatt onboard charger to ll its battery.
FUEL ECONOMY 108 mpg equivalent Plugged into a 240-volt outlet, the charger lls the
ELECTRIC-ONLY RANGE 21 miles
PRICE From $29,995
battery at a rate twice as fast as the Nissan Leaf,
going from empty to full in two and a half hours.

$199
Stunning HD display Exclusive Dolby audio Ultra-fast Wi-Fi

22 million movies, TV shows, songs, games, apps, magazines, books and more
45 YEARS OF MEMORY FOAM 1966 NASA cushions 1977 football helmets
1991 mattresses 2002 walking shoes 2012 headphone earcups
WHAT S
NEW
TECH REBORN
LIQUID SEAL
Magnetic uid [inset] Sony
holds the speakers
voice coil and
BVD-N790W
diaphragm steady. Blu-ray
Home
Cinema
SPEAKER
DIMENSIONS
10 by 3.5 by 3.8
Speakers
inches
FREQUENCY RANGE
87.5108 MHz
From
PRICE $500
Space
A NASA-developed liquid
allows for clearer sound from
smaller packages
A t the beginning of the space

program, one big problem
facing NASA engineers
was nding a way to move
rocket fuel into engines in space with no
gravity to guide the ow. They developed an
additive called ferrouid, a liquid infused with
magnetite particles that they could manipulate
with a magnetic eld. Companies now use
the substance to control parts in everything
from racecar suspensions to hard drives. This
year, designers at Sony found a new use for
it: building slim speakers that produce louder,
clearer sound than any others their size.
Designers replaced a key speaker
component, the damper, with a microns-thin
ring of ferrouid. Speakers generate sound
waves when a magnet moves a voice coil
back and forth to push against a diaphragm; T H R E E MOR E
the damper ensures that the spring doesnt
wobble and that the diaphragm doesnt ALTERNATIVE SPEAKER DESIGNS
overextend. But dampers cause friction, which UNMONDAY 4.3L ORIGINAL KOOSTIK AUDIOMASONS COMET
creates sound-distorting vibrations and can No matter which side the Inspired by acoustic The Comet produces
INSETS: COURTESY SONY (2)
lower a speakers overall volume. Ferrouid hexagonal Unmonday speaker guitars, the Koostik passive sound thats 57 percent
holds the coil and diaphragm in place, sits on, its ceramic housing amplier quadruples an less distorted than that of
without friction. Without will dampen vibrations. iPhones speaker volume. a traditional wood speaker.
Based on how the speaker is Two hemispherical sound Designers embedded the
a damper in the way, the positioned, an accelerometer chambers concentrate audio two drivers in a solid block of
s To R Y BY
speakers can produce Corinne Iozzio tells it to act as part of a mono, much like a megaphone before stone, a substance that wont
louderup to three stereo, or surround setup. sound waves exit through absorb sound waves. $1,400
decibelsclearer sounds PH o To GR APH BY $890 (import) front-facing holes. $95 (pair) T A Y L O R K U B O T A
across all frequencies. Claire Benoist

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0.3 The size [in microns] of the smallest airborne particle that a HEPA filter will trap
4 The average diameter of a strand of spider silk
WHAT S 10 The size of a silica particle
NEW
TECH T REND
Dustless
THE TREND
A rotary hammer, which simultaneously turns and punches a
drill bit, is the ideal tool for drilling holes into brick and concrete.
Drilling
But making those holes also creates a huge, powdery mess.
Snap-on HEPA vacuums developed by tool manufacturers can
now trap dust right at the source.
THE BENEFIT
Tools with attachable vacuums clean up Pulverized concrete contains silica, a known carcinogen. In the
after themselves past, DIYers had to tether their tools to freestanding shop vacs to
keep the dust contained. They can now attach a compact vacuum
directly to the tool. Suction from the vacuum pulls debris through
s T o R Y B Y Sal Vaglica a nozzle near the tip of the bit, into aluminum tubing, and directly
P HoT o GR A PH B Y Claire Benoist into a canister. The only cleanup required is dumping the waste.
DeWalt DC233KLDH Milwaukee M12 Makita LXRH011

Despite a huge 36-volt battery pack, HammerVac 2306-22 Though one 18-volt battery powers both
the DeWalt DC233KLDH ts into tight The M12 is the only vacuum that can the vacuum and the hammer in Makitas
spaces. The vacuum canister snaps attach to any corded or cordless rotary system, a single charge lasts 50 percent
onto the bottom of the hammer, hammerregardless of brand. Users longer than on the companys prior
instead of its side. Both the hammer adjust a metal strap to t over the drill vacuum-less hammer. To extend the
and vacuum connect to the same head, and a jaw on the strap grabs runtime, engineers swapped the old
power source, so pulling the trigger onto the 3.3-pound vacuum, which motor for a brushless model; without
simultaneously starts the drilling draws power from its own 12-volt brushes, theres less internal friction for
and the suction. $899 lithium-ion battery. $250 the motor to work against. $539

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data indenitely libraries. Yet most drivestypically made from lightweight materials such as plasticwont last through a disaster.
on glass. A The ioSafe N2 will. Designers wrapped the systems dual hard drives in materials that protect it against the worst.
femtosecond
laser carves
data as code
40 megabytes
worth for every Failure Drops and Theft Heat Fire Water
square inch By default, the dual A 0.05-inch steel An inch of custom The N2s ventilation IoSafe says the
into heat- and
hard drives mirror shell surrounds insulation protects system circulates N2 will keep data
water-resistant
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programmed one drive fails, the protects the drive temperatures up to use, but prevents as three days in
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I C O N I L L U S T R AT I O N S : G U Y S TA U B E R
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hOUrs viewed per persOn, per mOnTh
wn
100 Television
What s 38 Netflix
23 All other Web video
neW
OUTLO OK
Predictive
Television
TVs will soon tell us exactly
what we want to watch
no channel surng required
T wenty years ago, Bruce

Springsteen lamented 57
channels, and nothin on.
Today, 57 channels would be a relief:
Between cable, broadcast, and Web ser-
vices, we have tens of thousands of indi-
vidual programs to choose from, and no
good way to figure out what to watch. In
the early days of the Internet, surfers were
just as confounded. Then search engines
arrived and made it easy to find informa-
tion. A similar change is now occurring
in televisionand it promises to deliver
viewers from painstaking channel surfing
to perfectly tailored programming.
Right now, viewers have plenty of
help sorting though individual catalogs.
Netflix, for instance, uses an algorithm
s to ry by Mark Hachman illustration b y Michael Cho
that translates viewers ratings into sug-
gestions, which are reportedly accurate
within half a star 75 percent of the
time. Comcast is also starting to imple- right now, each video servicebe it
ment recommendations for its cable
subscribers. But each video servicebe
netflix or Comcastis an island.
it Netflix or Comcastis an island; no
matter how precise their recommenda- and viewers still have to do all the work search engines, and adjust for each per-
tions get, they still exclude program- tell an app who they are, what they like, son in a household. In the average U.S.
ming from other sources. and what theyre looking for. home, four people share the same TV
Some set-top-box companies have That may not be the case for much screen. Disparate ages, tastes, and inter-
taken the first steps toward creating longer. Sam Rosen, a technology ana- ests mean suggestions based on a single
broader recommendation engines. Last lyst at ABI Research, says that in the set might range from Dinosaur Train to
fall, Roku and Google TV debuted coming years, smart set-top boxes will The Grudge. Microsoft Research, for
search functions that index across sev- automatically learn preferences. These example, has developed Kinect-based
eral sources, including Netflix, HBOGo, services will keep tabs on a viewers facial recognition that will help the con-
and Amazon Instant Video. And a few choices and make recommendations sole detect whos just plopped down on
services, including the Peel remote- based on them, the same way that the sofa. From there, the system could
control tablet app, can make recommen- Google and Bing use a persons search select movies and shows specifically for
dations based on the shows and genres history to rank search results. that person, providing each viewer with a
that users flag as their favorites. The Video recommendations could eventu- custom, automatic listing of what he
trouble is that the searches are limited, ally surpass the sensitivity of Web-based wants to see. No surfing necessary.
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Embry-Riddle is something of a star in the world
of ight we count current and former NASA
astronauts among our alumni, for example. Yet
much of our research makes life better right here
on our home planet. Embry-Riddle is pursuing green
automobile technology and looking at ways to transform
wind and ocean currents into clean, renewable
energy. We also foresee low-cost, unmanned aerial
vehicles (UAVs) that can monitor wildlife habitat
and gather hurricane data. Yes, at Embry-Riddle
we aim for the stars. But we always keep home
close to our hearts.
ship e a r t h .
e
spac
n
ly o
are
u
sq
set
h ts
s
ig
s it s
a
r si ty h
The e u nive
c
w orlds premier a erospa
SCAN TO SE E U S I N ACTION
w w w. e m b r y r i d d l e . e d u / N A SA
The bullet that solves crime page 24 PLUS: What thousands of weather stations say about climate page 26
E DITE D BY Susannah F. Locke HEADLINEs@ P oP sc I.coM
Wild
Among I TS BEEN a while since he Downtown coyotes, which roam among
Us
tried to count them all, but the towers and traffic of the Chicago
Stan Gehrt estimates that Loop, thrive in the city by hunting
more than 2,000 coyotes make a com- enough small rodents to feed themselves
fortable living in the Chicago metropoli- and their young. Some urban coyotes
tan area today. And in the 12 years hes have even been spotted crossing streets
spent tracking the animals with radio and in busy trafficat the light, looking both
Why coyotes, bears, GPS collars, Gehrt, a wildlife ecologist ways, just like human Chicagoans.
and mountain lions are
EVERETT COLLECTION
at Ohio State University, has witnessed Whats happening in Chicago is hap-

moving into cities, and some remarkable adaptations. Suburban pening around the world, and not just
what to do about it coyotes, like the pack in a residential with coyotes. Gehrt and other research-
area a few miles from OHare airport, ers in his field are convinced that urban
s To R Y BY have learned to live in much smaller areas should prepare to make room for
John Mahoney territories than they do in rural places. large carnivores. Coyotes, which live in

THE URBAN COYOTE DIET (Most frequently to least frequently found in scats) rodents, plants, fruit, garbage, pets (cats and dogs)
HEADL I NE S
THE TR END
every state but Hawaii, have appeared BUT I JUST

in cities from Los Angeles to New York. WANTED A
SANDWICH!
This spring, biologists in Los Angeles
Animal control
radio-collared the first mountain lion ocers nab a
ever found in Griffith Park, the home of coyote that was
the Hollywood sign. Complaints about found hanging
bears in Nevada around Lake Tahoe out in a Chicago
increased tenfold between 1997 and Quiznos restaurant
in 2007.
2007. Red foxes have colonized London.
These animals are going to great
lengths to live in human territory. Two
years ago in London, building staff
found a fox living on the 72nd floor of
the unfinished Shard skyscraper, where
it had been living on construction
workers discarded food scraps. The new
territory is changing animals behavior,
too. Some bears in Lake Tahoe, well fed
on garbage year-round, now neglect to
hibernate in winter.
Its reasonable to assume that these
animals are moving to the city because
As we make our cities greener,
theyre being displaced by climate they become more attractive to humans
change and habitat destruction, but
thats only part of the explanation. One
and animals alike.
of the biggest factors is that there are Gehrt and two other wildlife ecologists which they are genuinely scared of us.
more large carnivores than there used traveled to Broomfield to help officials Gehrts report urges anyone who spots
to beprimarily, Gehrt says, because of find out what was causing the attacks, a coyote to shout, throw rocks, or even
successful conservation efforts. As we and the report that they wrote serves as a shoot it with a paintball gun.
make our cities greener, they become template for other cities dealing with car- When a large predator loses its instinc-
more attractive to humans and animals nivores. Much of the advice is common tive fear of humans, after all, that animal
alike. Finally, the relationship between sense. Taking away easy mealsgarbage becomes more likely to attack. Gehrt
humans and large predators is chang- and outdoor pet foodcan help control says that culling truly fearless animals is
ing. Were now seeing generations of issues with any species. In Nevada, for necessary for maintaining a harmonious
certain carnivores that have had fairly example, bear-proofing garbage cans urban life with coyotesa life that
light amounts of persecution by people, and dumpsters has helped decrease com- he sees as inevitable. The question
Gehrt says. They may view cities quite plaints by two thirds since 2008. becomes, to what degree are we going
a bit differently than their ancestors did Ultimately, though, the key to living to tolerate the risk, and what kind of
50 years ago. Then, if they saw a human, with urban carnivores might be to return adjustments to our lives are we willing
there was a good chance they were going to an older, more natural relationship to make? Gehrt says. Because we cant
to get shot. between humans and wildlifeone in get rid of them.
While the new inhabitants keep their
distance from people most of the time,
conflict is inevitable when these animals
A P P H O T O / S U N - T I M E S , S C O T T S T E WA R T
and humans share space. Sometimes the

conflict is between the invading predators
3-D Reproduction
and our own domesticated animals. A few For the rst time,
years ago in a Chicago suburb, an elderly Helical path Hyper-helical Hyper-activated
scientists have lmed
woman fought off a coyote that tried to the movements of sperm
attack her leashed poodle in a mall park- in 3-D. In addition to
ing lot. More serious clashes are rare but swimming forward,
not unheard of. In a two-month span in the sex cells travel in 1.1 sec
2011, a coyote attacked children in the three dened patterns, 0.5 sec
Denver suburb of Broomfield on three 0.0 sec
shown here.
separate occasions.

1892 First use of fingerprints
to solve a murder
HEADL I NE S
THE BIG FI X
T HE S C A L E
Explosivity
The energy released in
Bullet Proof
an explosion is measured
in TNT equivalents.
1 lb. gunpowder
0.0000003
kilotons TNT
The clue-catching cartridge 1 stick dynamite
0.0000005 kt TNT
THE PROBLEM
Sherlock Holmes could look at a gun shell and know exactly
what went down. The firearm? The shooters stance? The 1 gallon gasoline
culprit? All revealed with a glance. In the real world, using a 0.00003 kt TNT
shell to solve a crime is a painstaking, and often unsuccess- Oklahoma City truck
ful, process. Investigators may be able to match a bullet bomb (1995)
with a gun type, but that doesnt necessarily lead to the 0.002 kt TNT
person who shot it. Useful fingerprints are rare, and the
heat of firing a weapon can destroy DNA evidence.
THE SOLUTION
A team of nanomaterials scientists led by Paul Sermon, of
Brunel University in England, has developed a bullet that
captures the DNA of anyone who touches itand leaves a
tracer on the person, too.
1
Scientists dipped a bullet in a North Korean
formaldehyde-urea resin, creating nuclear test (2009)
a microscopic scratchy surface that 2 kt TNT
snags skin cells. When fired in lab tests,
the bullet retained 53 percent more
analyzable DNA than an untreated one.
Little Boy, the
2 atomic bomb
dropped on
The team needed a compound that Hiroshima (1945)
would tag whoever handled a bullet, 15 kt TNT
something both sticky and rare enough
to be recognizable. They started with
a natural source: pollen. Because of
its rough texture, pollen clings to skin
and clothing; some grains even remain
after a handshake or a run through a Soviet nuclear test of
washing machine. Theyre also invis- Tsar Bombathe
ible to the human eye. Pollen alone, largest bomb ever
however, isnt unique enough to pin- detonated (1961)
point a criminal. So the team coated 50,000 kt TNT
Easter lily pollen with a 63-nanometer
layer of titanium dioxidea combina-
tion that doesnt exist in nature. A
bullet painted with thousands of the
modified pollen grains would mark
a shooters finger when he loads the s To RY BY
bullet. To have any effect on crime,
Amber Williams
governments would have to require
that ammunition manufacturers
make modified bullets; Sermons IL L Us TR ATIo N BY
team is in talks with U.K. officials. Davvi

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HEADL I NE S
2012 HIGH-TEMPERATURE RECORDS: 27,631
BY THE
NUMBERS
The oldest high-temperature record
that fell in 2012 was beaten when the
mercury hit 87F at Elko Regional Sidney Municipal
Airport in Nevada on April 22. Airport in Nebraska
logged 54 record
highs, the most of
The
any weather station.
Warmup
Dissecting a year of
record-breaking heat
A s of November, when
this issue went to
press, 2012 was on
track to become the warmest year in
the U.S. since 1895, when national
record keeping began. From January
through October, the 4,451 U.S.
weather stations that have been
tracking temperatures for at least
30 years measured nearly 28,000
high-temperature records but only
5,200 lows. Thats the largest ratio
of high to low records ever. There
is a lot of natural variability in these
numbers, says Claudia Tebaldi, a
senior scientist at the independent
research organization Climate
Central. But its definitely behavior
that has the imprint of a warming
climate. Scientists say this trend will
continue. An Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change report published The three hottest days were
last year predicted that the kind of recorded in Death Valley:
128F on July 12, and
heat records that fall once every 20
126F on August 9 and 10.
years now will be broken every two
years by the end of the century.
LOW-TEMPERATURE RECORDS: 5,212
KEY
Each circle represents the number of records
broken or tied at a weather station from
January to October 2012.
60 40 20 0
sT o RY A ND I LLU s T R AT I o N BY Katie Peek

134F The hottest temperature ever recorded on EarthDeath Valley, California, on July 10, 1913
NINE DECADES OF HIGHS AND LOWS

Percentage of high [red] and low [blue] temperature records set from January to October each year.
100%
50%
0%
1922 1952 1982 2012
Wisconsin and 24 other In March, three Michigan

states experienced the high temperature
warmest March on record. records were beaten
by a margin of 32F.
A heat wave from June 23 to July

9 produced 324 all-time records,
mostly in the Midwest and Southeast.
The hottest among them: 118F in
Norton, Kansas, on June 28.
On March 20, some 700

records were tied or broken
the most on a single day in
2012. It was 89F in Columbia,
South Carolina, that day.
A springtime heat
wave resulted in the
warmest March since
record keeping began.
July was the single

warmest month on
NUMBER OF DAILY RECORDS record in the U.S.
500
250
0
January February March April May June July August September October
S O U R C E : N AT I O N A L C L I M AT I C D ATA C E N T E R JANUARY 2013 POPULAR SCIENCE 27

Maximum speed of blood flow through aorta 2.2 MPH
Average speed of Amazon River 1.5 MPH
H EADLI N ES
BLUEPR INT
Fantastic Voyage
A mini sub that could steer through the body
In the future, tiny vehicles

might travel through your body
to image your insides, take
the device near a magnetwe imagine
the patient lying on a magnetic tableand
use radio waves to tell the prototype how
samples, and deliver drugs. At Stanford to use its electrodes. The electrodes send
University, my colleague Anatoly Yakovlev electrical current through the surrounding
A HANDYMANS
and I built a prototype of such a device. Its fluid, creating a net force that moves the
about the size of Abraham Lincolns head on device. With an upward magnetic field, a
GARAGE
a penny. We power and control the prototype counterclockwise electrical current pushes
wirelessly by sending radio waves to its two- the device forward and a clockwise current
SWEEPSTAKES
by-two-millimeter antenna from about two pushes it backward. By making circuits that
inches away. No battery is required, which is create opposing forces on each side, we can
key to miniaturization. also turn the device left or right.
Mechanical propulsion is inefficient at With our relatively weak magnet, the
this scale. Instead, we use magnetohydro- prototype moves 0.2 inches per second
dynamic propulsion, which takes advantage in a dish of saline. If it were in the blood
of the fact that an external magnetic field streamcleaning out your arteries, for
can push an object by creating a Lorentz exampleyoud need a stronger magnet to
force on its electrical circuitry. We operate overcome the flow of blood. But that is still
a ways off. In the near term, we imagine
using the device to image the GI tract; there,
it wouldnt need to travel as fast. It could
reduce the cost of cancer screenings, and
it would be a welcome alternative to at least
one traditional method: colonoscopy.
Daniel Pivonka, an electrical engineer,
worked on the tiny vehicle project while a
graduate student at Stanford. As told to
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vary from items shown 28 POPULAR SCIENCE JANUARY 2013
Physics and Our Universe:
How It All Works
IM
ED T E OF
Taught by Professor Richard Wolfson
IT middlebury college
LIM
FE
lecture titles
70%
R
1. The Fundamental Science 30. Electric Potential
2. Languages of Physics 31. Electric Energy
off 3. Describing Motion 32. Electric Current
15
4. Falling Freely 33. Electric Circuits
OR
RY
ER A 5. Its a 3-D World! 34. Magnetism
D
BY F E B R U 6. Going in Circles 35. The Origin of Magnetism
7. Causes of Motion 36. Electromagnetic Induction
8. Using Newtons 37. Applications of
Laws1-D Motion Electromagnetic Induction
9. Action and Reaction 38. Magnetic Energy
10. Newtons Laws in 2 39. AC/DC
and 3 Dimensions 40. Electromagnetic Waves
11. Work and Energy 41. Reflection and Refraction
12. Using Energy Conservation 42. Imaging
13. Gravity 43. Wave Optics
14. Systems of Particles 44. Cracks in the
15. Rotational Motion Classical Picture
16. Keeping Still 45. Earth, Ether, Light
17. Back and Forth 46. Special Relativity
Oscillatory Motion 47. Time and Space
18. Making Waves 48. Space-Time and Mass-Energy
19. Fluid Statics 49. General Relativity
The Tip of the Iceberg
50. Introducing the Quantum
20. Fluid Dynamics
51. Atomic Quandaries
21. Heat and Temperature
52. Wave or Particle?
22. Heat Transfer
53. Quantum Mechanics
23. Matter and Heat
54. Atoms
24. The Ideal Gas
55. Molecules and Solids
25. Heat and Work
56. The Atomic Nucleus
26. EntropyThe Second Law
of Thermodynamics 57. Energy from the Nucleus
27. Consequences of 58. The Particle Zoo
the Second Law 59. An Evolving Universe
28. A Charged World 60. Humble Physics
PhysicsMade Clear 29. The Electric Field What We Dont Know
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Cyberspace, left to itself, will not fulfill the promise of freedom. Left to itself, cyberspace will become
a perfect tool of control. Lawrence Lessig, from Code 2.0: And Other Laws of Cyberspace
HEADL I NE S
F=M A
Clone Wars
Music piracy? Who cares.
Wait until people start
copying iPhones
L AST JANUARY,
Swedish BitTorrent tracker
Pirate Bay quietly intro-
the
duced a new category, called Physibles,

to its inventory. We believe that things
like three-dimensional printers, scan-
ners, and such are just the first step,
one of the sites managers wrote at the
time. We believe that in the nearby
future you will print your spare parts for
your vehicles. You will download your
sneakers within 20 years.
Thats probably an understatement.
MakerBots $2,199 Replicator 2, which
prints small objects from drips of melted s To R Y BY Luke Mitchell ILLUsTRATIoN B Y Ryan Snook
bioplastic filament, is generating head-
lines today. But far sharper home stereo-
lithographic printers, which selectively
cure liquid photopolymer resins with
Digital rights
lasers, are on the way; Formlabs is set to management for 3-D former CTO of Microsoft, patented a
begin delivery on its $2,299 Form 1 in printers is just the scheme to control object production
February. And thats just the start. The
next generation of consumer 3-D printers
beginning. rights that would require every 3-D
printer to validate every file in a print
will be able to generate complex parts of queue against a database of authorized
variable elasticity and conductivity, and iPhone app, 123D Catch, that scans items. No validation, no copy. The sys-
from far more than plastic or resin. A objects on the fly. And, as CT scanning tem likely wont catch onApple ditched
commercial bioprinter from Organovo gets cheaper, youll be able to map the clunky digital rights management on
can already shape human cells into interior as well. Forget sneakers. Were iTunes years agobut its just the begin-
usable tissue, and a Columbia, Missouri, gaining the ability to copy anything: a ning. The intellectual property battles of
start-up called Modern Meadow is work- leaked iPhone 7, a life-saving medicine, the last two decades will seem trivial in
ing on a device that prints edible meat. a deadly virus. comparison to the coming war over who,
A team at the University of Glasgow Which means the Physibles section at in the most literal sense, controls the
has even found a way to print custom Pirate Bay, among other places, is about means of production.
chemical compounds, opening the way to become the site of some important
to home pill-printers. In September, battles. In October, Intellectual Ventures, Luke Mitchell (luke.mitchell@popsci.com)
meanwhile, Autodesk released a free a company run by Nathan Myhrvold, covers constraint and creativity each issue.

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a new frontier
The year ahead promises
some spectacular events in
astronomy. Plus, physicists
will be looking to space for
evidence of dark matter.
32 POPULAR SCIENCE january 2013

The Year in
sCienCe
WHICH STORIES WILL DOMINaTE THE NEWS
IN 2013? HERES a gLIMPSE INTO THE FUTURE.
ILLUSTRaTIONS bY
JESSE LENZ

yE ar I n S CIEnCE
Physics Enters New Era

By Sean Carroll 2013
NEWS
On
July 4, 2012, a panel of scientists at BYTES
the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva
announced the discovery of a new
particle, the long-anticipated Higgs Black
boson (or something very much like it). The Hole
Higgs is the fnal piece of the Standard Model Chows
of particle physics, a theory that accounts for
everything we experience in our lives, from
Down
S
A giant blob of gas
rocks to puppies to stars and planets. Afer
headed directly for the
decades of searching and billions of dollars, the supermassive black
Higgs discovery marked the end of one era and hole at the center of
the beginning of another, which scientists will our galaxy could begin
embark upon in 2013. to drop into the abyss
If the previous era was about understand- mid-year, blasting x-ray
radiation into space in a
ing the physics of everyday stuf, the next will
brilliant display of light.
be dominated by the attempt to grasp more Witnessed for the rst
elusive realms, including one of the most time by scientists, the
mysterious of all: dark matter. Astronomers decades-long process
have verifed that the universe has about fve will help answer the
cience and times more matter than we can account for question of how black
holes grow. Miriam
with the ordinary particles weve discovered
technology here on Earth. The rest is dark matter. Physi-
Kramer
have utterly cists havent observed it directly yet, but theyre

getting much closer.
transformed human life Several diferent detectors are currently
Ocean
searching for dark matter underground, X PRIZE
in the past few genera- conducting experiments designed to sense a Launches
tions, and forecasts of dark matter particle scattering of the nucleus
of an ordinary atom. A couple of them have
As ocean water absorbs
carbon dioxide, it
the future used to be already yielded tantalizing evidencenot becomes more acidic
and incompatible with
measured in decades. enough to convince most physicists, but enough
to get people excited. The LUX detector,
life. But pH sensors that
can aordably, accu-
But big changes arrive recently installed in a South Dakota mine, rately, and wirelessly
should prove the most sensitive one yet when it measure that change
faster and faster these begins collecting data in 2013. on a global scale dont
days. So here weve Alternatively, dark matter could be found

by looking up into space. Scientists analyzing
yet exist. This year, the
X PRIZE Foundation will
shifed our forecast to observations of cosmic gamma rays in 2012
announce a competition
meant to kick-start
discovered an unusual excess at a particular
the near-term, because energy emanating from the center of our
the invention of those
instruments. Taylor
were right on the verge galaxy. One explanation for the signal is that
dark matter parti-
Kubota
of some extraordinary cles are colliding

stuf. These are the and converting into If the previous Mental
high-energy radia- era was about Disorders
trends and events to tion. This coming understanding Better
year will no doubt the physics of
watch out for in 2013. bring new data, everyday stu,
Dened
THE EDITORS better analysis, and the next will For the rst time in
12 years, the American
maybe, just maybe, be dominated Psychiatric Association
evidence that pins by the attempt (APA) will update The
down dark matter to grasp more Diagnostic and Statistical
once and for all. elusive realms. Manual of Mental

Disorders, which guides
how psychiatrists and
psychologists diagnose
patients. The APA invited
the public to comment
on the draft, and its
working groups are
using the feedback to
revise criteria. By clearly
dening new disorders,
the manual could help
patients with previously
vague diagnoses nd
new treatments and
resources. M.K.
Planck
Dumps
New Data
For the past three
years, the Planck
spacecraft has mapped
and measured cosmic
background radiation
left behind from the
Big Bang using its high-
frequency instrument
sensor. In early 2013,
the European Space
Agency plans to publicly
release the crafts most
STEM CELLS SIDESTEP

recent ndings, the
rst data dump since
2011. The information
CONTROVERSY
will further reveal what
the universe might have
looked like as it was rst
forming. M.K.
By Clay Risen
land in New Zealandinvolve inserting genes
Super-
During
into skin cells that force diferentiation. Both
2012, two scientifc efcient and scalable, the work could stimulate computer
teams announced, in a cascade of follow-up research focused on Crunches
separate studies, that
they had transformed
developing other cell types in 2013.
Access to large numbers of specialized cells
Climate
A 1.5-petaops IBM
ordinary adult skin cells into neural cells, a could change how doctors study disease and supercomputer, dubbed
breakthrough that could change the course how pharmacologists test drugs, which could Yellowstone, will begin
of human stem cell research. Stem cells hold in turn bring about new treatments tailored full operations this year
enormous potential for medicine because they to individuals. It could even lead to that holy at the NCAR-Wyoming
can develop from undiferentiated cells into a grail of medical science: the ability to grow new Supercomputing Center.
variety of specialized ones. But their use has tissue and organs from the patients own cells, Its 72,288 processor
cores can perform 1.5
been stymied by ethical concerns; most are virtually eliminating the possibility of rejection. quadrillion calculations
harvested from human embryos, which are While such benefts are hardly around the per second. Yellow-
destroyed in the process. corner, Connor is optimistic that circumvent- stone will dramatically
In 2006, Shinya Yamanaka of Japans ing the use of embryonic stem cells has cleared improve climate models
Kyoto University fgured out a way to bypass the path. I think were on the cusp, she says. and visualizations in the
embryonic cells: He generated stem cells from Theres no ethical concern. You take a skin earth sciences, includ-
ing simulations that
skin cells, a discovery for which he shared the biopsy and of you go. show how tornadoes,
2012 Nobel Prize in medicine. But his method hurricanes, and wild-
was slow and inefcient. The new techniques Access to large numbers of res move across the
pioneered by Marius Wernig of Stanford and specialized cells could change landscape. T.K.
Bronwen Connor of the University of Auck- how doctors study disease.

yE ar I n S CIEnCE
The steadiness
of climate
scientists
message is also
its undoing in
the media.
2013
NEWS BYTES
Solar
Climate reprinted by other media outlets. Activity
Thats not to say that good science cant Peaks
SCientiStS
break through the sound bites. As any scientist The approximately
searching for the climate-change signal among 11-year cycle of solar
reams of weather data will tell you, it just takes
Say it again
activity will climax
practice to flter out the noise. this fall with about 75
sunspots, or regions
where magnetic elds
By Curtis Brainard asia takes emerge from inside the
two Routes to Space sun. When these twist

and snap, they can send
The
plasma hurtling toward
By Valerie Ross Earth, causing geomag-
warning from climate scientists
earThs
has been clear and consistent for netic storms that disrupt
radio transmissions,
decades: Man-made greenhouse- two most populous knock out power, and
gas emissions, which increase nations have major produce auroras. T.K.
every year, are causing the planet to warm, and space launches
that will have dire consequencesthe specifcs slated for 2013:
of which (timing, intensity, location) arent China will send a lander to the moon and India Animals
completely understood right now.
Unfortunately, the steadiness of that message
will propel an orbiter toward Mars. On the
surface, their goals appear similarcement a
Sue for
is also its undoing in the media; more ofen, toehold in a frontier dominated by the U.S.,
Rights
Certain animalssuch as
the rare scientifc dissenter gets the limelight. Russia, and Europebut the ways in which they
dolphins, chimpanzees,
Because its been pretty much the same for will achieve them are very diferent. elephants, and parrots
25 years, it almost never gets reported, says China wants to do everything that other show capabilities
Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA nations have done in space, and more, thought uniquely human,
Goddard Institute for Space Studies. including building its own space station and including language-like
Two statements of scientifc consensus forth- mounting a lunar sample-return mission. And communication, complex
problem solving, and
coming in 2013 will provide an opportunity to it has a methodical road map to reach those
seeming self-awareness.
set the record straight: the National Climate targets. The planned Change 3 lunar probe By the end of 2013,
Assessment, which lays out observed and will serve as a testbed for launch and land- the Nonhuman Rights
anticipated trends in the U.S., and the Fifh ing techniques, as well as cameras, samplers, Project plans to le
Assessment Report from the Intergovernmen- and other instruments. China is beyond suits on the behalf
tal Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a global doing things in space for show, says Gregory of select animals to
procure freedoms (like
evaluation of the peer-reviewed literature Kulacki, head of the China project at the
protection from captivity)
conducted by thousands of researchers. Union of Concerned Scientists Global Secu- previously granted only
Journalists will still be looking for catchy rity Program. Instead, it is building toward to humans. T.K.
news pegs, particularly in the IPCC report. a comprehensive set of space capabilities.
Theyll fnd only nuanced diferences from India runs a much smaller, more tightly
the last assessment in 2007, Schmidt says. Yet focused program. Its budget is perhaps a third Google
many will stretch those fne distinctions into to a ffh of Chinas, estimates Dinshaw Mistry, Glass
exaggerated and overwrought headlines, which an expert in Asian security and space issues
can lead to public confusion. at the University of Cincinnati. Over the past
Ships Out
Google will bring
Thats what happened when the U.K.s decade, it has launched about a ffh as many
augmented reality one
climate-monitoring organization, the Met spacecraf, most of which have been satellites step closer to consum-
Ofce, released an update to its global- for furthering the countrys development. Its ers when preproduction
temperature data set in highest profle mission so far, the Chandrayaan-1 units for its Project
October. Despite British moon probe in 2008, carried instruments Glass ship to develop-
scientists explanation from the European Space Agency and NASA. ers early this year. The
that it showed multi-
Journalists The Mangalyaan Mars orbiter, planned for a Google Glass Explorer
will be Edition has a built-in
decadal warming, outlets looking for November launch, will be more independent. camera, audio, and
such as the Daily Mail catchy news But its budget is low and the timetable tight. visual display that
cherry-picked the data pegs. They'll Space exploration is anything but routine provide the user with
to support the head- nd only either mission could fail. But its more likely real-time informa-
line: Global Warming theyll both be successful, proving there are tion. As developers
nuanced experiment with apps,
Stopped 16 Years Ago. dierences several paths to blaze in orbit. Whether by
wearable computing
The Met Ofce called from the last scrappy collaboration or in grand, go-it-alone will get its rst real
the coverage mislead- assessment style, more missions invariably mean more test. Colleen Park
ing, but it was widely in 2007. dataand a deeper understanding of space.

yE a r I n S CIEnCE
energy levels the Field

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

2013
By allowing equity NEWS BYTES
investment, Gaia
lawmakers expect Starts
to supercharge Stellar
Census
crowdfunding. The Gaia satellite is
tasked with one of the
most ambitious under-
takings in the history of
space exploration: After
it launches in 2013, the
spacecraft will create a
3-D map of one billion
stars1,000 times more
than Hipparcos, a previ-
ous mission. This vast
stellar census will help
astronomers understand
the evolution and origin
of the Milky Way. M.K.
Urban EVs
Lighten
Up
While carbon-ber-
reinforced plastic (CFRP)
has long been used in
CROWDFUnDing
Formula One racecars,
commuters can take
it for a spin in the all-
electric BMW i3 later this
PayS OFF
year. The CFRP used in
constructing the cars
passenger module is
50 percent lighter than
By Cli Ransom will hold for picking successful businesses, steel and equally strong.
says Josh Lerner, a professor of investment Though its 100-mile
range is comparable
ON
banking at Harvard Business School. Investor with that of other electric
April 5, 2012, President Barack losses could lead to big disappointments, litiga- vehicles, the i3 will have
Obama sat at a small, wooden desk tion, or, worse, allegations of fraud, says Bryan 170 horsepowerconsid-
in the White House Rose Garden and Sullivan, a lawyer in California. My mother is erably more muscle.
signed the JOBS Act, one of the most a secretary, he says. My father is a construc- C.P.
transformative pieces of securities legislation tion worker. Those are the kind of people who
written since the Great Depression. Among the would throw $5,000 in and think they can
22 pages of dense legalese, one section stood make $100,000. What happens when it fails? Lunar
out: the Crowdfund Act. Pending the creation of The crowdsourced-equity model is not Mission
SEC regulations later this year, new businesses
will be able to make their own IPOs, and small
untested, however. The Australian Small
Scale Oferings Board has transferred about
Blasts O
Twenty-ve teams are
investors could act as venture capitalists. $130 million to start-ups since 2007 with little still in the race to claim
Start-ups and inventors raised an estimated reported fraud. Plus, the Crowdfund Act helps the $30 million Google
$2.8 billion on crowdfunding platforms such protect investors: Those who make less than Lunar X PRIZE, which will
be awarded to the rst
as Kickstarter in 2012, a 529 percent increase $100,000 can commit only $2,000 or 5 percent privately funded groups
from 2009. But they could only solicit dona- of their annual income, whichever is greater. to safely land a robot on
tions, presales of products, and loans. By The act also requires company disclosures, so the moon and explore
allowing equity investment, lawmakers expect investors can do their due diligence. Once the its surface. The current
to supercharge crowdfunding, which would SEC sets the ground rules, anyone who backs front-runner, Astrobotic,
make nascent businesses less reliant on angel a great idea will stand to proft. But the biggest enlisted SpaceX to
launch the companys
investors and banks while spurring innovation beneft will likely be to innovation itself. lander and rover on the
across a wider range of companies. four-day journey as soon
There are, of course, pitfalls. More than half The Crowdfund Act would make as December 2013.
of all start-ups fail within 10 years. Its not nascent businesses less reliant on T.K.
clear yet whether the wisdom of the crowds banks while spurring innovation.

yE a r I n S CIEnCE
Researchers have found

ways to turn smartphones
into portable spies.
HaCKeRS attaCK
mObile PHOneS
By Robert Lemos
Researchers from Indiana University and the
IN
Naval Surface Warfare Center, for example,
2009, the annual Pwn2Own cybersecu- created PlaceRaider, which enables a smart-
rity competition provided hackers with phone camera to surreptitiously take photos.
a shot at cracking smartphones. They The proof-of-concept program then stitches
failed. In September, the event ofered them into a 3-D representation of the users
phones as targets again. This time, contestants location, enabling attackers to identify valuable
seized control of them, successfully exploiting information in the environment. In another
vulnerabilities in the two most popular operat- demonstration, researchers from Georgia Tech
ing systems, iOS and Android. used the accelerometer of a smartphone sitting
For the most part, smartphones have escaped next to a keyboard to track the vibrations of
the viruses and botnets that have plagued individual keystrokes. They identifed typed
desktop computers for decades. That luck may text with up to 80 percent accuracy.
not hold out in 2013. The learning curves of At the 2012 TEDGlobal conference, Malte
cybersecurity professionals and cybercriminals Spitz, a member of Germanys Green party,
track pretty closely. If the good guys have showed he could use telecom data to re-create
hacked iOS and Android, the bad guys will his whereabouts in detail for six months. Hack-
quickly follow. ers have likewise already used malware to track
The frst mobile malware attempted familiar a users location. Combining that information
invasions, stealing contact information and with other sensor data, such as images from
pictures from devices. But cybersecurity profes- the camera, could give them an unprecedented
sionals expect a range of unconventional hacks look into their victims lives.
as well. In the last couple of years, researchers
have found ways to turn smartphones, with If the good guys have hacked
their cameras, GPS, and accelerometers, into iOS and Android, the bad guys
portable spies. will quickly follow.

2013
NEWS BYTES
Watson
Science Funding Treats
Remains Strong Patients
Jeopardy! was just
By Juliet Eilperin a warm-up for IBMs
Watson. Oncologists at
WITh
Memorial Sloan-Kettering
Cancer Center in New
his second term secured,
York are teaching the
President Barack Obama can supercomputer to help
now turn his full attention diagnose and treat vari-
to advancing the priorities ous cancers. Watson
that will help defne his legacy. On the stump, analyzes clinical knowl-
Obama championed science and technology. edge and case histories,
then provides doctors
Under his administration, those felds, particu-
with treatment options.
larly renewable energy and medical research, After training for breast,
should continue to enjoy signifcant federal lung, and prostate
support over the next four years. cancers this past year,
John Holdren, Obamas science and technol- Watson will be distributed
ogy adviser, told Popular Science: We are to a wider group of clini-
cians. C.P.
committed to continuing our focus on ensuring
that science, technology, innovation, and educa-
tion have the support they deserve in order
New
Comet
to fuel Americas economy, prepare the tech-
savvy workforce and science-savvy citizenry of
tomorrow, and meet the manifold challenges of Blazes
health and biomedicine, energy, environment,
and national security.
by Earth
The newly discovered
Although the lions share of federal research Comet ISON, which is
dollars still goes to defense56 percent in fscal now passing between
year 20127.5 percent is devoted explicitly to the orbits of Jupiter and
general science and basic research. Close to Saturn, will be visible in
half of that fnances the Department of Ener- December 2013. Assum-
ing it survives a close
gys Ofce of Science, which supports work brush with the sun en
that advances the development of new fuels, route, the comet could be
materials, and technologies. the one of the brightest
Assuming it escapes sequestration at the end seen in history. Some
of 2012, funding for health research, which astronomers predict that
accounted for 22 percent of R&D dollars in it could be as luminous
as a full moon. M.K.
2012, should also remain strong. Advocates of
stem cell research are particularly elated over
Obamas win. An executive order he signed in
Digital
2009 lifs some limits on the use of such cells
for federally funded research. Sight Hits
Federal support for research and develop- Shelves
ment has been declining in absolute terms since A device that restores
2010; the National Science Foundations R&D vision to people blinded
budget fell from $7.6 billion in 2009 to $5.5 by retinitis pigmentosa
billion in 2011. Obama has proposed spend- could reach the U.S.
market by spring. Its
ing $142 billion on R&D in 2013, about $1.7 been unanimously recom-
billion more than last yearbut the Republican- mended for approval by
led House will likely attempt to cut nondefense an FDA advisory panel.
research dollars, as it has for the last two years. Made by Second Sight
Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Associa- Medical Products, the
tion for the Advancement of Science, says his Argus II Retinal Prosthe-
sis System sends electric
group is optimistic. Even given current politics, pulses to cells in the eye
Leshner is confdent Obama can protect R&D that the wearer learns
from the budget ax: Investments in science, to interpret as visual
everyone agrees, are investments in the future patterns. T.K.
that have paid of handsomely in the past.

yE ar I n S CIEnCE
2012
First private spacecraft docks with ISS
The Houston, station.

Looks like we got us
Big a Dragon by the tail.
Stories
Astronaut Don Pettit, on the arrival of
SpaceXs Dragon capsule
An at-a-glance summary of the years Heredity may not be

25 most important scientic events limited to DNA
REPORTING BY Colleen Park Six other types of sugars can
I l l u S T R AT I O N A N d d E S I G N B Y Headcase Design form nucleic acid backbones,
called XNAs, to retrieve and
store genetic information.
Journals debate scientic censorship

Scientists create XXXXXX forms of avian u that
Hurricane Sandy slams U.S. Biofuel takes ight
XXXXX XXXXXX between mammals, creating a
With 140 terajoules, more than With 100% unblended fuel derived
heated XXXXXX as to whether details should be
twice the energy of the atomic from Brassica carinata, a plant in
redacted or published.
bomb dropped on Hiroshima the mustard family
Arctic ice cap reaches new low

Extent shrunk since last record minimum in 2007 =
290,000 square miles, or about the size of Texas
earth
Robot beats Commitment period of

Turing test for A.I. Kyoto Protocol expires
52% Humanness rating of
robotic players
40% Humanness rating of
human players
Physicists conrm Standard Model
(maybe)
More dinosaurs
38 23
800,000,000,000,000 wore feathers
Number of proton collisions generated to nd Even the most
Higgs bosonlike subatomic particle ancient ones
Nations that met
their target reduction
Felix Baumgartner dives from stratosphere Nations that didnt
Time: 9 minutes 9 seconds
Distance: 24.3 miles
Max Speed: 833.9 mph
Researchers generate hottest
man-made temperature
5.5 trillion K
350,000 times hotter than the sun
Italy convicts
NSF christens Alaskan research vessel scientists of
NEW manslaughter
James Cameron dives to Mariana Trench Sikuliaq Crime: Failing to
Time: 2 hours 36 minutes 261 ft adequately warn
Distance: 6.8 miles OLD the public before
Max Speed: 4.7 mph Alpha Helix a 6.3-magnitude
133 ft earthquake
Sentence: 6 years

FDA approves rst Scientists drill to Lake Vostok
home HIV test But so far, no signs of life. Depth of
Time it takes to get results: Antarctic ice = 12,366 ft
20 minutes
Autonomous cars drive closer to reality
300,000
Number of miles logged by Googles self-driving cars
Voyager 1 nears edge of the

DARPA tests high-res camera solar system
1.0 gigapixels
Equivalent to looking through 10x binocularsin
1,000 dierent spots
11.4+ billion
Number of miles from Earth
Geoengineer goes rogue

Dumps 100 tons of iron dust in the
ocean o the coast of British Columbia
Retired space shuttles nd new homes

Endeavour Atlantis Enterprise Discovery
California Florida New York Virginia
Curiosity lands on Red Planet

Distance from the rover to past Mars probes:
SpiriT 1,432 mi
vikiNg 2 1,946 mi
phOENix 3,563 mi
OppOrTuNiTy 5,267 mi
vikiNg 1 5,944 mi
First fully bionic leg hits market
64% of users report a reduction in pAThfiNDEr 6,022 mi
trippi n Venus transits the sun

Directly aligns between the sun and the Earth.
g Next transit: 2117

N
7 HO
URS
Venus
E The Sun W

INSIDE
DARK SWORD DRONE
In 2006, China unveiled an unmanned aerial vehicle
(UAV) design known as Dark Sword, which has since
vanished from the public eye. Western analysts arent
sure whether the craft is still under development.
If it is, certain design characteristicssuch as a
CHINAS
suspected ramjet enginesuggest that its a high-
speed drone that could carry out surveillance and
strikes far from Chinese shores. Whatever the Dark
Swords fate, Chinas UAV plans are ambitious: This
past summer, the Chinese government announced
plans to build 11 coastal drone bases. C L AY D I L L O W
SECRET
ARSENAL
THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT IS
RAPIDLY BUILDING A BIGGER, MORE
SOPHISTICATED MILITARY. HERES
WHAT THEY HAVE, WHAT THEY WANT,
AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE U.S.
STORY BY PETER W. SINGER
ILLUSTRATIONS BY
NICK KALOTERAKIS

I N SI DE C HI NA S SE C R E T A RSE NA L

INSI DE CHINAS SE C R ET A R SENA L
PTERODACTYL I DRONE
Chinas Pterodactyl I UAV strongly resembles the U.S. militarys Predator
drone. It appears to be designed for medium-altitude, long-endurance
surveillance and strike missions. Another Chinese dronethe Soaring
Dragonlooks like a smaller version of the U.S. Armys RQ-4 Global Hawk;
analysts think its designed for high-altitude maritime surveillance
and reconnaissance. C.D.
I
N A SINGLE GENERATION, China has transformed itself
from a largely agrarian country into a global manufacturing and
trading powerhouse. Chinas economy is 20 times bigger than it
was two decades ago and is on track to surpass the United States
as the worlds largest. But perhaps most startling has been the
growth of Chinas ambitious and increasingly powerful military.
Just 10 years ago, the budget for the Peoples Liberation Army
(PLA) was roughly $20 billion. Today, that number is more like
$100 billion. (Some analysts think its closer to $160 billion.)
The PLAs budget is only a sixth of what the U.S. devotes to
defense annually, but defense dollars go much further in China,
and in the years ahead, Chinese military spending will grow at
the same rate as its economy. Meanwhile, Chinese president
Hu Jintao has called for the PLA to carry out new historic
missions in the 21st centuryto move beyond the traditional
goal of defending the nations sovereignty and develop the
global military reach of a true world superpower. In some
cases, Chinas increasing international presence could lead
to greater cooperation with the U.S., as it did in 2008 when

J-20 STEALTH FIGHTER JET
In 2011, the PLA began testing the J-20, Chinas rst homegrown stealth
ghter, which could enter service sometime after 2017. Analysts believe
the J-20 has radar-deecting skin and internal weapons bays. Very little
public information about Chinas combat aircraft development program
CHINESE PRESIDENT HU JINTAO exists, but the emergence this past September of a second stealth ghter
HAS CALLED FOR THE PEOPLES

prototypethe J-31 Falcon Eagle, which some observers think could be
capable of performing takeos and landings on aircraft carrierssuggests
LIBERATION ARMY TO CARRY that the J-20 is only the rst in a series of advanced Chinese ghters. C.D.
OUT NEW HISTORIC MISSIONS

IN THE 21ST CENTURY. the existence of an advanced new fghter, the J-20, by staging the
inaugural public fight over the city of Chengdu.
China joined antipiracy patrols of Somalia. But if American and The J-20 is far from Chinas only new aircraf. The PLA is also
Chinese forces end up in the same place with diferent goals, aggressively upgrading its drone feet. A decade ago, the army had
the result could be a standof between two of the best-equipped almost no unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). At aviation trade
militaries in the world. shows today, Chinese contractors display scores of drones under
American ofcials arent just concerned about the amount of development. Among the most notable: the Yilong (Pterodactyl I)
money the Chinese military is spending. Theyre worried about and BZK-005, which greatly resemble the U.S. militarys Preda-
the technology that money is buying. U.S. military hardware tor and Global Hawk, respectively. Chinas future UAVs may also
remains a generation ahead of any rivals, but the Chinese have get a boost from American technology: Iran has reportedly given
begun to close the gap. Consider Chinas progress in building Chinese scientists access to the RQ-170 advanced spy drone that
advanced warplanes. Until recently, American ofcials thought went down in its territory last year.
their F-22 and F-35 aircraf were the worlds only ffh-genera- Additionally, China is investing heavily in its navy. Today, the
tion fghters (the name given to a class of stealthy fghter jets U.S. is the only country that can send aircraf carriers loaded
developed in the past decade, which are equipped with radar- with fghter jets to any corner of the globe. The PLA would like
evading features, high-performance engines and avionics, and to change that. The Chinese have spent the past few years retroft-
networked computer systems). Then, on a 2011 trip to China, ting a 65,000-ton Soviet aircraf carrier (which the PLA acquired
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates learned otherwise. While using a fake travel agency as a front) with new engines and weap-
Gates met with Hu Jintao, his hosts coincidentally revealed ons including Flying Leopard surface-to-air missile batteries and

INSIDE CHINAS SE C R ET A R SENA L
DF-21D ANTI-SHIP BALLISTIC MISSILE

Stationary ballistic missiles are easy for enemy forces to destroy
preemptively. Chinas mobile, truck-launched DF-21D ballistic missiles are
not. After blasting o near the coast, the missiles travel to the edge of space
before reentering the atmosphere at more than 3,000 mph and dropping
1,300 pounds of explosives on targets. China didnt nickname the DF-21D
CHINA DOESNT HAVE TO AMASS
the carrier killer. U.S. defense analysts did. C.D. A NAVY AS POWERFUL AS THE
AMERICAN FLEET IF IT CAN MAKE
automated air defense machine-gun systems. The ship, called THE SEAS TOO DANGEROUS
the Liaoning, can carry approximately 50 aircraf, including the
Shenyang J-15 Flying Shark, a fghter jet that may be as capable FOR U.S. SHIPS TO TRAVEL.
as an F-18. China is also building stealthy 8,000-ton destroyers, technologies that arrived unexpectedly and changed the rules of
along with nuclear submarines and amphibious assault ships. A battlesunk 13 British battleships.
new 36,000-ton cruise ship modifed for military purposes, the Similarly, the PLA has more to gain by developing new tech-
Bahai Sea Green Pearl, can carry more than 2,000 soldiers and nologies than by racing to match American sea and air power.
300 vehicles. With its new naval muscle, China has dispatched China doesnt have to amass a navy as powerful as the Ameri-
troops and police to U.N. peacekeeping operations in places as can feet if it can make the seas too dangerous for U.S. ships to
far-fung as Africa and Latin America. travel. To that end, the PLA is acquiring weapons such as mobile,
truck-launched anti-ship ballistic missiles and radar-evading,
ramjet-powered Sunburn cruise missiles, which tear toward their
targets at Mach 2.5, giving defenses only seconds to respond.
IN SOME WAYS, Chinas rise echoes that of imperial Germany China could also easily go afer American vulnerabilities in
at the turn of the 20th century. At the time, Britain was the space. More than 80 percent of U.S. government and military
worlds undisputed economic and military superpower. When communications, which direct everything from soldiers in the
Germany decided to build battleships to match the Grand Fleets feld to precision missile strikes, travel over satellites. GPS satel-
dreadnoughts, the two nations entered an arms race that helped lites control the movement of 800,000 U.S. military receivers on
set the stage for the frst world war. But when war broke out, everything from aircraf carriers to individual bombs and artillery
Britain didnt lose a single battleship to Germanys High Seas shells. The system isnt foolproof: In early 2010, a GPS glitch
Fleet. German mines and submarines, on the other handnew lef almost 10,000 of these receivers unable to connect for days.

THE SHENLONG SPACE PLANE
Meanwhile, China is also expanding its ability to knock things With a space station under construction and plans for a manned moon
out of space. In addition to its proven satellite-killing missiles, mission, China aims to alter the balance of power in orbit. In 2007,
the PLA is developing maneuverable microsatellites that would the nation showed o its antisatellite missiles by shooting down a
decommissioned weather satellite, creating 40,000 shards of space junk
act like tiny space kamikazes, along with directed-energy (laser) in the process. Now its testing an unmanned orbital vehicle known as
devices that could blind or melt U.S. systems in space. In 2007, Shenlong, or Divine Dragon. Comparable to the U.S. Air Forces X-37B
Senior Colonel Yao Yunzhu of the Chinese Academy of Military space plane, the Shenlong could rapidly place satellites in orbitand
Science (the highest research institute in the PLA) announced potentially carry weapons that could disable the communications,
that the U.S. wouldnt be the worlds only space superpower navigation, and surveillance satellites of adversaries. C.D.
for long. The Chinese plan to send more than 100 civilian and
military satellites into orbit in the next decade, and the PLA is
testing what appears to be an unmanned, reusable space plane. the movie, the flmmakers updated the script by replacing the
Chinas most potent new capability, though, might be what the Soviet bad guys with the Chinese. Then real-world economics
PLA has called informationized warfare, or cyber war. Just as came into play. To avoid losing access to Chinas multibillion-
the U.S. military has created its own Cyber Command, the PLA dollar flm market, they digitally switched the adversary to North
has assigned more than 130,000 personnel to cyber warfare Korea in postproduction.
programs. And while Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has The episode underscores an important point: Unlike the
warned about a potential cyber Pearl Harbor, the greater threat U.S. and the Soviets, the U.S. and China are bound together by
might be the thef of U.S. government secrets and intellectual hundreds of billions of dollars in mutual trade and investments.
property. So far, operations thought to have originated in China War between the two countries would be mutually ruinous.
have compromised sensitive networks in the State Department as Leaders on both sides know it. American and Chinese forces will
well as computers involved in the F-35 joint strike fghter program. eye each other suspiciously, and the relationship may become
tense. But recall that the much feared war between the U.S.
and Sovietsthe issue that defned world politics for the second
half of the 20th centurynever did break out. With so much to
IN THE 1984 MOVIE Red Dawn, one character explained why lose, the two toughest kids decided it wasnt worth it to fght.
war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union seemed inevitable:
Two toughest kids on the block, I guess. Sooner or later, theyre Peter W. Singer is director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative and
gonna fght. A few years ago, when Hollywood set out to remake a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.

THE
strained brains
Most helmets do a
good job preventing
skull fractures but do
not directly address
concussions.
HELMET
WARS
Athletes in the U.s. sUffer
3.8 million sports-relAted
concUssions eAch yeAr.
On August 19, 2012, in week two of
the NFL preseason, Indianapolis Colts
wide receiver Austin Collie ran 17
yards out from the line of scrimmage,
While helmet mAkers dither cut right toward the center of the feld,
With smAll improvements, caught a pass, and was immediately
sWedish scientists hAve tackled by Pittsburgh Steelers corner-
back Ike Taylor. As Taylor came in for
bUilt something thAt the hit, his helmet appeared to glance
coUld protect Us All. of the lef side of Collies helmet.
Then the cornerback wrapped his arm
around Collies neck and jerked the
receivers head to the right. An instant
later, Steelers linebacker Larry Foote
came barreling in from the opposite
stor y by side and slammed his elbow into the
to m fos ter right side of Collies helmet. As the
receiver fell to the ground, his helmet
photog r a ph s by frst hit Footes knee and then struck
tr Av is r Athbo ne the ground face-frst.

H e l met WarS
Collie sat up, dazed, and had to be helped of

the feld a minute later. He didnt return to play
for three weeks. The diagnosis: concussion. It
wasnt the frst time Collie had sufered whats
clinically called a traumatic brain injury. On
November 7, 2010, he spent nearly 10 minutes
lying motionless on the 34-yard line afer being
hit in the head almost simultaneously by two
Philadelphia Eagles players. Medics carried
him of the feld on a stretcher. In his frst game
back, two weeks later, he lef in the frst quarter
with another concussion. He missed three more
games, only to sufer yet another concussion on
December 19, which ended his season.
Professional football players receive as many
as 1,500 hits to the head in a single season,
depending on their position. Thats 15,000 in a
10-year playing career, not to mention any blows
they received in college, high school, and peewee
football. And those hits have consequences:
concussions and, according to recent research,
permanent brain damage. Its not just football,
either. Hockey, lacrosse, and even sports like
cycling and snowboarding are contributing to
a growing epidemic of traumatic brain injuries.
The CDC estimates that as many as 3.8 million
sports-related concussions occur in the U.S. each
year. That number includes not only profession-
als but amateurs of all levels, including children.
Perhaps most troubling, the number isnt going down.
In the past two years, the outrage surrounding sports-related Professional fooTball Players
concussions has mounted. In January 2011, Senator Tom Udall
(D-NM) called for a Federal Trade Commission investigation of the
receive as many as 1,500 hiTs To
football helmet industry for misleading safety claims and decep- The head in a single season. ThaTs
tive practices, which the agency is currently pursuing. In June
2012, more than 2,000 former NFL players fled a class-action suit 15,000 in a 10-year Playing career.
against the league as well as Riddell, the largest football-helmet
manufacturer and an ofcial NFL partner, accusing them of obfus- athletes, its hard to know whom to believe. And despite all the
cating the science of brain trauma. The litigation could drag on for research and development, and the public outcry, the injuries just
years and cost billions of dollars. keep coming. What makes the situation even more tragic is that
The real issue is that lives are at stake. In 2006, this fact became a helmet technology already exists that could turn the concussion
tragically clear when former Philadelphia Eagles star Andre epidemic around.
Waters committed suicide by shooting himself. Subsequent studies
of his brain indicated that he sufered from chronic traumatic The Trouble wiTh concussions
encephalopathy (CTE), a form of brain damage that results in
T
dementia and is caused by repeated blows to the head. A sicken- o understand why current helmets arent better at
ing drumbeat of NFL suicides has followed, including former stars reducing concussions, consider the nature of the
Dave Duerson, Ray Easterling, and Junior Seau, who by one esti- injury. A concussion is essentially invisible. Even
DOUG PENSINGER/GETTy ImAGES
mate sufered as many as 1,500 concussions in his career. the most advanced medical-imaging technology isnt
For equipment manufacturers, the demand for protective sensitive enough to show the physical manifestations,
headgear has never been greater. Leading companies, as well as the damaged brain tissue. Diagnosis, then, is based entirely on
an army of upstarts, have responded by developing a number symptoms and circumstances. Is the patient dizzy or confused, or
of new helmet designs, each claiming to ofer unprecedented was he briefy unconscious? Does he have a headache or nausea?
safety. The trouble is that behind them all lie reams of conficting Does he remember what happened, and did it look like he got hit
research, much of it paid for, either directly or indirectly, by the in the head really hard?
helmet manufacturers or the league. Even if doctors could reliably diagnose concussions, identifying
For players or coaches or the concerned parents of young the injury does little to protect against it; for that, scientists need an

accurate picture of whats happening inside the head.
For generations, doctors believed that concussions
were a sort of bruising of the brains gray matter at
the site of impact and on the opposite side, where the
brain presumably bounced of the skull. The reality
is not nearly that simple: Concussions happen deep
in the brains white matter when forces transmitted
from a big blow strain nerve cells and their connec-
tions, the axons.
To understand how that happens, its important
to recognize that diferent types of forceslinear
and rotational accelerationact on the brain in any
physical trauma. Linear acceleration is exactly what
it sounds like, a straight-line force that begins at the
point of impact. It causes skull fracture, which makes
perfect sense: You hit the bone hard enough, it breaks.
Rotational acceleration is less intuitive. It occurs
most acutely during angular impacts, or those in
which force is not directed at the brains center of
gravity. You dont have to know much about football
or hockey to realize that rotation is a factor in a whole
lot of hits. Think about it, says Robert Cantu, a
neurosurgeon at Boston University School of Medi-
cine and the author of 29 books on neurology and
the fallen Junior seaus suicide in 2012
sports medicine. Because most hits are of-center
heightened the controversy around head trauma and because our heads are not square, most of the
in athletes. Colts receiver austin Collie [above] accelerations in the head are going to be rotational.
received three game-ending concussions in Further complicating matters, the human brain is
2010 before he was benched for the season. basically an irregularly shaped blob of Jell-O sitting
crash course The helmet market is booming. What sets the new products apart?
T O P D O w N : S A m R I C h E / m C T v I A G E T T y I m A G E S ; N y D A I Ly N E w S v I A G E T T y I m A G E S ;
riddell 360 Xenith X2 schutt ion 4d rawlinGs sGh helmet Guardian caP
h E L m E T I L L U S T R AT I O N S b y G R A h A m m U R D O C h
the ocial NFL helmet Made by the nine-year-old Made with thermoplastic Quantum Plus this startup from the Developed by atlanta
partner since 1989, helmet company Xenith, urethane cushioning that better known for its self-proclaimed godfather engineer Lee hanson,
riddell launched the the X2 replaces foam performs consistently baseball helmets, of safety, motorsports- the guardian Cap is a
360 in 2011. It has extra padding with an array of even in extreme weather, rawlings introduced a equipment legend bill padded sock worn over a
padding around the front air-lled cylinders that the Ion 4D, schutt says, line of football helmets simpson, says it makes standard helmet. Critics
and sides of the head, compress upon impact is designed with the a few years ago that, the lightest helmet on the say the guardian could
and the companys by releasing air through intent to reduce the risk like riddells, relies on market. Its shell includes get caught during impact,
signature Concussion tiny holes. the harder of concussions. yet the whats called large-oset Kevlar and carbon ber; causing neck injuries and
reducing technology, the hit, the stier the specs dont mention designin other words, its padding consists exacerbating rotation.
which adds even more response. such adaptive rotational force, and a increased distance of a single layer of a hanson says the sock
padding. yet for all that cushioning can protect 2011 promotional video between the head and proprietary composite would just slip o. as
foam, most experts say against both lower-level dismisses the idea that the shell in order to make whose makeup simpson for the obvious aesthetic
it does little to address and higher-level forces frequent lesser impacts more room for extra wont divulge until it is issues, he says the
rotational forces, the but still does little to are as dangerous as the padding. patented. guardian is meant only
primary cause of address rotation. rare violent one, calling it for practice, not games.
concussions. unproven.

H e lmet WarS
shock treatment
stefan Duma, a biomedical
engineer at Virginia tech,
studies the forces exerted
on a helmet during a
vertical-drop test [left].
the test is the basis for
the NoCsaE football
helmet safety certication.
Duma also tests helmet
performance during
horizontal impacts [above].
inside a hard shell lined with ridges and clifs. Afer a football
tackle or a hockey check, that blob moves, and does so in irregu-
lar ways. Rotational forces strain nerve cells and axons more
than linear forces do, Cantu says. Theyre not only stretching,
but theyre twisting at the same time. So they have a potential for
causing greater nerve injury.
So whats the problem? If scientists know that a concussion is
nerve strain caused largely by rotation of the brain, why cant they
fgure out a way to stop the rotation?
Just as the actual injury isnt visible to medical imaging tech-
nology, the rotation that causes the injury isnt measurable in
impact conditions; scientists cannot be inside an athletes brain
measuring its movement. But in a grisly 2007 study, researchers impedes the development of better helmets. But theres another
at Wayne State University in Detroit used a high-speed x-ray to reason helmet technology hasnt improved, one more troubling
observe the brains of human cadaver heads ftted with football than gaps in our knowledge: a self-regulated industry governed by
helmets and struck from various angles. The research, corrobo- badly outdated safety standards.
rated by computer models, showed that the brains moved very
COURTESy STEfAN DUmA/vIRGINIA TECh (2)
littlejust millimeters. Yet those small movements are enough to 4 0 - y e a r - o l d s Ta n d a r d s

cause nerve strain and afect neurological function.
P
Making things even more difcult is that every brain is difer- icture the head of a typical crash-test dummy, the kind
ent. Young brains respond diferently than older brains, female you see in car commercials. Its attached to a rigid metal
brains diferently than male. Researchers have also found that arm that hangs above a cylindrical anvil topped with
weaker, subconcussive hits can have a cumulative efect over time a hard plastic disc. A lab technician straps a football
and lead to CTE, which is likely the cause of many former-player helmet to the headform, cranks the arm up to precisely
suicides. But how many hits it takes, and what kind, is unclear fve feet above the anvil, and lets it dropcrack. Inside the dummy
and the condition cant be diagnosed while the player is alive. head, an accelerometer positioned at the center of gravity records
Only when his brain is cut open can researchers spot the dead the linear acceleration transmitted during impact. This brutish trial
zones in the tissue. is called a vertical drop test, and its the basis for how all football
The scientifc ambiguity surrounding concussions clearly helmets are certifed safe by the National Operating Committee

if scienTisTs know ThaT a concussion scientists and helmet makers are trying to solve today: Is the linear
acceleration measured by a drop test correlated to rotational
is caused largely by The roTaTion acceleration, and if so, by how much?
Untold lives and billions of dollars in sales, medical fees, and
of The brain, why canT They figure litigation costs could depend on a clear answer. If the relation-
ship between the forces is strong, the key to reducing rotational
ouT a way To sToP The roTaTion? acceleration is the same as reducing linear acceleration: Add more
padding. Clearly helmet manufactures would prefer such a simple
on Standards for Athletic Equipment (NOCSAE), an association solution. If the connection is weak, howeveror at least weak in
funded by equipment manufacturers, which in turn funds much the most dangerous hitsmore padding will do little to reduce
of the research on sports-related head trauma. The standard has concussions, and companies will need to rethink current designs
remained largely unchanged since its creation in 1973. entirely, a very costly endeavor.
Now think back to Austin Collies concussion in August 2012 In 2003, a New Hampshirebased company named Simbex
the jerking of the head afer the initial hit, the collisions with Larry introduced a research tool called the Head Impact Telemetry
Footes elbow and the ground. Those impacts dont look much System (HITS). Among other things, it seemed to have the poten-
like the straight-line force of the NOCSAE drop test. And that tial to answer the question of correlation. HITS is an array of six
brings up a very important question, perhaps the central question spring-loaded accelerometers positioned inside a helmet to record

H e l met WarS
the location and severity of signifcant impacts. Afer imPact tracker

Coaches and medics can
any hit over a certain threshold, the system beams the use the head Impact
data to a companion device on the sidelines. Coaches telemetry system (hIts)
can monitor players in real time, and researchers get to monitor the force and
reams of real-world data to dig through. Stefan Duma, location of certain tackles
the founding director of Virginia Techs Center for from the sidelines.
Injury Biomechanics, is among those working with
HITS data; at his urging, every player on the univer-
sitys football team wears a HITS-equipped helmet.
Afer analyzing data from two million impacts, Duma
says there is a clear and strong connection between
linear and rotational forces.
Unfortunately, other researchers say its not that
simple. The correlation is high if you look at all hits,
they say, but it falls apart when you look at highly
angular onesthe hits that carry a greater risk of
concussion. Take an extreme example, says Boston
Universitys Cantu. If you impact the tip of the face
mask, if you have another player coming at it side-
ways, youre going to spin the head on the neck and
have very low linear acceleration and very high rota-
tional acceleration.
Indeed, for every advocate of the HITS data, there
exists an equally vocal critic. They say that helmets
deform under the force of a 250-pound linebacker,
skewing data. They say the HITS algorithm that
calculates rotation is fawed. They point out that the
founder of HITS is a co-author on all the published
studies that validate the system. Blaine Hoshizaki, a
biomechanics professor at the University of Ottawa
whose research focuses on angular hits, sounds
exasperated when I ask him about Dumas fnd-
ings. Youve got to look at the events that are really
contributing to concussion, he says. It may be that
in 1,000 hits, only 50 are highly non-centric, but
maybe those 50 are the most dangerousand thats
what our data shows.
In essence, the system created to answer questions about
concussions has raised a lot more questions. The resulting confu-
if someThing is available ThaT
sion sets of a cascade of efects. Unclear science makes for makes your helmeT more
unclear standards, and unclear standards leave a lot of room for
interpretation. The impact on the helmet industry is conspicuous: safe, you should be held liable
Its become a free-for-all.
for NOT using iT.
The helmeT arms race
experimental versions of Simpsons helmet.
I
n December 2010, a longtime auto-racing safety equipment That an individual inventor could develop, produce, and deliver
maker named Bill Simpson happened to attend one of the a product into the hands of professional athletes speaks to the
Colts games in which medics helped Austin Collie of the upheaval in the world of helmet manufacturing. What was once a
feld afer a concussion. Following the incident, Simpson rather staid industry dominated by a few large companies has now
asked the Colts ofensive coordinator, a friend, what had grown to include an increasing number of upstart frms, serial
happened to his receiver. entrepreneurs, and individual inventors. The result has been a
Oh, thats just part of the game, the coach said. proliferation of new designs. Mainstream helmet makers have
COURTESy RIDDELL
Simpson saw an opportunity. In auto racing, hes known as the stuck with variations on previous models: polycarbonate shells
Godfather of Safety, and once set himself on fre to demonstrate flled with various densities and thicknesses of padding. Newcom-
the efcacy of one of his racing suits. He fgured he could make a ers have developed more creative, albeit less rigorously tested,
better football helmet, so he got to work in his Indianapolis ware- approaches. Perhaps the best-known is the bizarre-looking Guard-
house. By 2011, several pros, including Collie, were wearing early ian Cap, a padded sock that slips over a typical helmet. Another

the
Sliding Layer
Helmet
Rubber
Straps
that
might Save
Football
the sYstem The Multidirectional
Impact Protection System (MIPS)
reduces the rotational forces that
cause concussions. In a MIPS-
equipped helmet, a thin layer of
molded plastic ts atop a players
head, beneath the padding and hard
polycarbonate shell. Rubber straps Polycarbonate
ax the MIPS layer to the helmet. Shell
how it works MIPS mimics

the human heads own protective
system, in which a layer of slippery
cerebrospinal uid sits between the
brain and the skull. When an impact
occurs, the skull can rotate just a
bit relative to the brain. With MIPS, Pre Impact At Impact
the rubber straps allow the helmet
to move just a bit relative to the Foam
sliding, low-friction head cap, thereby Padding
eliminating much of the twisting
motion before it reaches the brain.
the results In lab tests, MIPS

reduces brain rotation by as much as
40 to 50 percent.
approach that received a lot of attention in 2011, the Bulwark, Styrofoam-like beads. It performs better in a NOCSAE-style drop
came from the workbench of an aerospace engineer and self- test than anything else on the market, he said.
professed helmet geek in North Carolina; it had a modular shell Does it specifcally address rotational acceleration? I asked.
that could be confgured to match the demands of diferent play- He laughed. No helmet does that.
ers. It never made it out of prototype stage. I tried a more direct approach: Can you make claims about
For his part, Simpson ofcially launched his SGH helmet concussion reduction with your helmet?
in October 2012 to immediate fanfare. Sports Illustrated injury Oh, hell no, he said, I would never make a claim about that.
expert columnist Will Carroll tugged one on and had someone The NFL, at least since Congress took an interest, has gotten
whack him over the crown of the heada strong, almost purely serious about sorting out who is claiming whator not. There is
linear force. He reported not feeling much at all. His conclusion: not a week that passes that I dont see a new device, says Kevin
This helmet must work. Guskiewicz, a University of North Carolina sports medicine
When I called Simpson to discuss the helmet and ask how it researcher and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient who also chairs
reduces the forces responsible for concussion, he mentioned that the NFLs Subcommittee on Safety Equipment and Playing Rules.
none of the neuroscientists hes spoken with have been able to tell Theres a binder weighing down the corner of my desk. I dont
him what forces actually cause a concussion. How do you know think youre going to see the NFL fat-out endorsing a product, but
youre stopping the right forces, then? I asked him. If you dont they certainly feel that theyre responsible for trying to help prevent
GRAhAm mURDOCh
know whats causing a concussion, how can you prevent it? these injuries. So were going to be reviewing these technologies in
Youre asking me a lot of questions that are pretty of the order to say, here are three or four that need to be studied further.
wall, my friend, he said. A lot of questions I cant answer. He The boldest claim from mainstream helmet makers comes,
explained that his helmet uses a composite shell made of carbon perhaps not surprisingly, from Riddell. The companys newest
fber and Kevlar, plus an inner layer of adaptive foam made of helmet, the 360, builds on a system called Concussion Reducing

H e l met WarS
calls for justice Former

NFL players Daryl Johnston
and Dave Duerson [above]
in 2007 at a senate hearing
on disability benets for
retired athletes. Duerson [left]
committed suicide in 2011 by
shooting himself in the chest.
he left a note asking that his
intact brain be donated to
the boston University school
of Medicine for research.
T O P D O w N : C h U C K K E N N E D y / m C T / m C T v I A G E T T y I m A G E S ; J O N AT h A N D A N I E L / S T R I N G E R / G E T T y I m A G E S
The nfl, aT leasT since congress Took an inTeresT, has goTTen
serious abouT sorTing ouT who is claiming whaTor noT.
Technology (CRT), which it frst launched in 2002. According of concussions decreased? You havent seen it change because
to a highly adrenalized promotional video, which has since been [the helmet makers] havent addressed it, says the University of
removed from the Riddell website, engineers designed CRT in Ottawas Hoshizaki.
response to an NFL-funded study by a Canadian research lab
called Biokinetics. Researchers looked at flm from actual NFL a new hoPe
hits that resulted in concussions and attempted to map their loca-
I
tion, distance, and speed. The two main fndings: that rotational n a small room of the basement garage of a building on
acceleration is a major factor in concussions, and that players get the outskirts of Stockholm, an entirely diferent kind of
hit a lot on the side of the head. helmet test is taking place. Peter Halldin, a biomechanical
In response to the study, the designers developing CRT added engineer at the Royal Institute of Technology, is strapping
energy-attenuating material (extra padding) to side- and front- a helmet onto a dummy head afxed to a custom drop-test
impact areas. They also increased the overall dimensions of rig. Rather than slamming a helmet into a stationary anvil, as in
CRT-equipped helmets by a few millimeters to allow for still more the NOCSAE test, Halldins rig drops it onto a pneumatic sled
padding. The designers of the 360 built on the CRT but went a that moves horizontally. By calibrating the angle of the helmet,
step further, adding an even greater amount of padding to the the height of the drop, and the speed of the sled, Halldin says
impact areas. It wasnt clear to me how those changes addressed he can more accurately re-create the angular forces that result in
rotationthe single greatest factor in the concussions that CRT rotational acceleration than other labs can. Within the dummy
and the 360 helmet meant to reduce. So I asked Riddells head head, nine accelerometers measure the linear force transmitted
of research and development, Thad Ide. Well, in many cases the during impact; a computer nearby calculates rotational accelera-
linear acceleration and the rotation that linear imparts go hand in tion from that data.
hand, he said, echoing Dumas HITS fndings at Virginia Tech. Today Halldin is testing two ski helmets that are identi-
Reducing linear forces will reduce the rotational forces. cal except for one thing: Inside one, a bright yellow layer of
So the question remains: If addressing linear force is the key, and molded plastic attached with small rubber straps sits between
better padding is the way to do that, then why hasnt the number the padding and the head. This is the Multidirectional Impact

Protection System (MIPS), which is also
the name of a company he co-founded.
Halldin spends about half of his time as
CTO of MIPS and the other as a faculty
member of the Royal Institute.
The idea behind MIPS is simple: The
plastic layer sits snugly on a players head
beneath the padding. By allowing the head
to foat during an impact, MIPS can elimi-
nate some of the rotational force before it
makes its way to the brain.
First up in Halldins test is the non-
MIPS helmet. Halldin fips on a high-speed
camera and steps back from the impactor,
ready to catch the helmet on its rebound. dead zones Dark
Five, four, three, two, one Theres a spots in the brain of a
loud clattering as the sled shoots forward former football player
correspond to the
at 22 feet per second and the helmet drops
to meet it at 12 feet per secondcrack.
I can see on the computer that the head
Whats behind buildup of tau protein.
sustained about 170 Gs of linear force,

and it rotated 14,100 radians per second
the nFl Suicides?
squared (the standard scientifc metric the disease what causes it?
for rotation). Its a big hit, one that would For decades, the term punch-drunk has at its most basic, CtE is a cumulative
probably result in a concussion or worse. been used to describe boxers left permanently eect from repetitive head traumanot just
Now comes the second helmet. Every loopy after a career of ghting. the clinical concussive blows but also weaker ones.
name for the condition is chronic traumatic Impacts damage the brains neural pathways,
variable is the same as in the frst test encephalopathy (CtE), and it can happen and as a result a protein called tau builds up.
except for the addition of the low-fric- to any athlete who suers frequent blows to the more tau along the pathways, the less
tion MIPS layer. Five, four, three, two, the head. CtE has no known treatment, and easily brain signals can move around, which
onecrack. This time the computer doctors can only diagnose it postmortem, by can lead to memory loss, lack of impulse
shows rotation of 6,400 radians per physically examining the brain for symptoms. control, aggression, and depression.
second squared, a 55 percent reduction.
Halldin starts in on a detailed explana-
how common is it? what does it mean for helmets?
C O U R T E S y A N N C m C K E E , m . D . / vA b O S T O N / b O S T O N U N I v E R S I T y S C h O O L O f m E D I C I N E
tion of the efects of multiple impact tests

scientists at the Center for the study because football helmet safety standards
on the performance of a helmet over time, of traumatic Encephalopathy at boston were designed to prevent skull fracture,
but I interrupt: How would you charac- University examine the brains of dead contact- padding has to be sti enough to weather an
terize that test result? sports athletes. In its rst year of operation, 17 extremely hard hit. but sti cushioning allows
He looks at the colorful graphs on the of the 18 brains researchers tested had CtE. a lot of force to reach the head. over time,
computer screen again. If the test dummy also, a team of scientists recently reported that that can lead to CtE. Certain companies,
former NFL players are three times more likely such as Xenith, have begun to use adaptive
were a football player, he would have just
than the general population to die from brain cushioning. It stays sti during a big impact,
walked away from a game-ending impact diseases such as alzheimers. but softens during a smaller one.
without a concussion. Halldin smiles just a
bit, and permits himself a very un-Swedish
boast. I would say thats f--king amazing.
Halldin is careful not to claim the MIPS
system can create those kinds of results in
all impacts in all helmets. But, he says, we can reduce rotation in Rotational forces quickly became their focus, and eventually they
all directions, and its signifcant in most directions. We might get came up with the idea for MIPS. The frst product was a complete
35 percent in one direction, 25 percent in another direction, and helmet, designed for the equestrian market. Although the helmet
15 percent in another. And hopefully the 15 percent is not in the was well received, the team quickly learned that a smart concept
most common impact direction for that sport. in the lab doesnt easily translate into a successful product launch.
MIPS is not new: The companys roots go back to 1997, when Production problems and quality-control issues led the team to
Hans von Holst, a neurosurgeon at Stockholms Karolinska rethink their strategy and hire a new CEO, an experienced Swed-
Hospital (the same hospital that adjudicates the Nobel Prize for ish executive named Niklas Steenberg. Steenberg took a look at
medicine), got tired of seeing patients come in with brain injuries the situation and decided that, like airbags in cars or Intel chips in
from hockey and other sports, and decided to do something about laptops, MIPS was not an end-market product. Instead they would
it. He joined up with Halldin at the Royal Institute, and together focus on licensing it to existing helmet companies so those manu-
they spent the next 10 years studying traumatic brain injuries. facturers could improve their own products.
C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 7 6

INTRODUCING!
PopPhoto Poses with Lindsay Adler is the essential posing

guide for photographers looking to add creative and unique
posing options for their clients. Each photo includes the
tips and techniques to easily direct and shoot fashion.
Fashion Poses
LL NEW!l
A ssentia
The e fashion
r
app fo graphers
photo
Lindsay Adler is a portrait and fashion photographer based

in NY. Her images have appeared in dozens of publications
internationally. Lindsay has authored two photography
books and teaches thousands of photographers annually how
to improve their vision and craft.
Scan to see
a photo tip
PopPhoto Poses with Lindsay Adler from Lindsay
HOW2.0
WarnIng
We review all our projects
before publishing them,
but ultimately your safety
is your responsibility.
Always wear protective
gear, take proper safety
precautions, and follow
all laws and regulations.
Tips, Tricks, Hacks, and Do-It-Yourself Projects edited b y Dave Mosher H2 0@ p op sc i.co m
made from SCraP

Half of the caravan is
salvaged parts. Walls and
a door, for example, came
from a remodeled house.
yo u B u i lt Wh at? !
A Home
for the aFter their LandLord sold her
house, Tristan Chambers and Libby
the Whittled-Down Caravan: an Oregon
Trailstyle mobile abode made mostly of
Long Haul
Reinish found themselves scrambling for salvaged parts.
a new home. They agreed then to never Chambers and Reinish, who were liv-
again endure the insecurity of leased living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the time,
ing. It was 2010, a time when we didnt had no clue how to construct a mobile
An eco-minded couple hits the know where we were going, but we still home. So they spent two months learning
road in a DIY covered wagon wanted to have roots, Chambers says. woodworking, wiring, and other essential
s t o r y b y Katie Drummond Unable to afford a conventional brick- skills from the Internet. A three-month
and-mortar house, they spent roughly build kicked off with little more than a
p hot o gr a p h s b y Webb Chappell a months rent to build what they call 4-by-8-foot utility trailer topped with a

17.2 The percentage of homes in New Mexico that
are mobilethe highest rate of any U.S. state
CONGRATULATIONS TO
H2.0
RUDOLPH plywood box, which served as the cara-
vans rolling foundation. Wooden boards
made up the lower interior walls, and oak
month-long journey that ended
in Northampton, Massachusetts,
and eventually settled down near-
BEHRENS arches completed a bare-bones frame for

the roof. The couple wanted to cover the
frame with wooden planks, but calcula-
tions showed the wood could overburden
by. Their cat, Lionshead, tagged
along. An outdoor catio, acces-
sible via a flapped door in the
caravans rear wall, helped to pla-
winner of the their ridea four-cylinder Hyundai sedan cate her after cramped car rides.
POPSCI TECH CHALLENGE unable to tow more than 1,000 pounds. Chambers, 30, and Reinish,
To cut the caravans weight and keep an 27, now own an immobile
Sponsored by eco-friendly ethos, Chambers and Reinish home and rarely use the cara-
scavenged for lightweight parts and van. Theyve added a gas stove,
bought others secondhand. Corrugated though, and plan to install a
steel siding for the caravans lower exte- composting toilet, a heater,
rior, for example, came from the side of a and insulation to provide
road. They also built front and rear walls friends a cheap, cozy place to crash. They
out of wood paneling gutted from a 1970s- also intend to post full construction plans
era house. A solar panel from a flea mar- online. We find a lot of people are inter-
ket powered their electronics on the run. ested, but theyre intimidated, Reinish
Once road ready, the 574-cubic-foot says. I can relate to that. I remember
wagon weighed about 600 pounds. The thinking, Is this going to fall apart the
couple towed it for 1,800 miles on a four- minute we hit 55 miles an hour?
HOW IT WORKS
Whittled-
Down
Caravan
WINNING PROJECT: TIME 3 MONTHS
COST $1,500
Autonomous
Marine Robot
This is an autonomous
robot meant to operate
at sea for extended
periods and turn algae
into synfuel. It uses a
B.E.A.M. robotic
ELECTRICITY MATERIALS
architecture. All the A motorcycle battery stores energy gathered Borrowing the travel-light tricks of pioneers,
electronics were bought by a 50-watt solar panel on the caravans such as rounded caravan walls, helped
roof. A modified plug-in car inverter the couple trim their homes weight and
at RadioShack. transforms the batterys DC output into AC, cost. Corrugated steel gave structural
and a charge controller conditions power for support without the heft of wood planks,
common electronics. Chambers and Reinish and waterproof canvas made for a suitable
Explore other great creations, say their system collects enough juice to run ceiling. They also skipped insulation, built
and nd all of the parts for three devicese.g., LED lights, a portable a mattress out of straw, and dual-purposed
fan, and a laptopfor at least three hours. couch cushions as dirty laundry sacks.
your own designs at
RadioShack.com/DIY
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PLUMBING
A sink in the caravan drains through
a hose in the wall and into a five-
gallon jug for disposal. A four-gallon
solar shower, essentially a black
plastic bag with a hose and perfo-
rated nozzle at one end, soaks up
solar rays in the morning to provide
hot showers and dishwashing water.
Coming soon: a composting toilet.

50 BODY LENGTHS PER SECOND Top scuttling speed of the American
cockroach, one of the fastest-known invertebrates on Earth
H2.0
BUILD IT
TIME
3 hours for circuit,
20 minutes for
surgery
COST
$50 for parts
[or $100 for kit]
DIFFICULTY

HEAVY LIFTERS
Cockroaches can haul
20 times their own weight.
Thats plenty of strength
for a cyborg backpack
and fancy accessories.
Roach
Control THE ROBO
The RoboRoach kit contains a circuit board
THE ROACH
Pet stores typically sell false deaths head
An insect cyborg that scurries and controller, but you can hack the essential cockroaches as reptile food. These big-and-
at your command parts from a remote-controlled Hexbug toy. slow roaches make great cyborgs, but pick
If cockroaches send you scrambling, use an adult to avoid disrupting its maturation
CIRCUIT BOARD process (yes, roaches can enjoy their post-
neuroscience to reverse the human-insect
Remove the Hexbugs cyborg lives in lettuce-lined terrariums).
power balance. Carefully electrifying the circuit board. The toys
nerves in a roachs antennae makes the infrared remote control
ICE BATH
insect think it has met an obstaclea sensa- can start and stop
Dunk the roach in ice water for a few minutes to anes-
tion that can be manipulated to steer it. The current to the roachs
thetize it. Dry the back of its head and sand off some
trick could turn roaches into handy tools. antennae from afar.
of the wax. Superglue the electrode connector in place.
Alper Bozkurt, an engineer at North Carolina TIMER CHIP
WIRING
State University, envisions a network of Electricity needs to flow at 55 pulses per second to
Poke the left silver wire about
mimic the chatter of roach neurons (and hijack the
cyborg roaches assisting in search and one millimeter into the roachs
insects senses). Computer chips called 555 timers
rescue. Neuroscientists Greg Gage and Tim can get the job done. Detach each motor on the
thorax, under a wing just
Marzullo, meanwhile, think hacking insects behind its head, and secure
Hexbug circuit board and solder on a timer.
could inspire kids to research and improve it with superglue. Cut each
BATTERY antenna to expose a neuron-
electronic interfaces with the human nervous Replace the Hexbugs two batteries with a single lined tube. Insert the middle
system. Gage and Marzullo developed a 12-millimeter, three-volt lithium-ion battery. wire one millimeter into the
$100 RoboRoach kit that includes all the CAPACITOR left tube, and the right wire
tech required for insect neurosurgery. But To stimulate neurons, current must flow in each into the right tube. Superglue both wires into place.
you can follow these steps to assemble a direction. Add a capacitor to the timers output pin. CONNECT AND COMMAND
similar kitand command your own troop of ELECTRODE CONNECTORS Hot-glue the circuit board onto the roachs back and
six-legged cyborgson the cheap. Snip a pair of three-electrode segments from a header. plug it into the head connector. After the roach wakes
Wire one set to the circuit board and solder a one-inch up, press the remotes left button to urge it right, and
s T o R Y B Y Amanda Schupak strand of 41-gauge silver wire to each electrode on the the right button to move it left. The cyborg will ignore
other. The latter set will be superglued to the roachs commands after a few minutes. Peel off the circuit
I L L UsT R AT I o Ns B Y Graham Murdoch head as an electrode connector for the circuit board. board and clip all wires to ensure a long retirement.
64 POPULAR SCIENCE JANUARY 2013 For a video of the surgery, visit popsci.com/roboroach.
141 FEET Diameter of the worlds largest clock face,
H2.0
on the Makkah Clock Royal Tower in Saudi Arabia
TIME 6 weeks THEME BU ILDING

COST $0
Clever
Measures
Three projects that reimagine
conventional calculating
s T o R Y B Y Miriam Kramer
Analog Bike Clock

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY GREGORY DE GOUVEIA; COURTESY PUBLIC LAB FOR OPEN TECHNOLOGY; COURTESY THOMAS HUDSON
Artist and cycling enthusiast Gregory

de Gouveia, based in Chico, California,
has built bike sculptures before. But his
12-foot-tall clock called Time to Changea
fusion of more than a dozen two-wheeled
machinesis his largest and most functional
aesthetic contribution to the sport.
The project began when another local art-
ist asked de Gouveia if he wanted to create
a sculpture for the 2011 Chico Wildflower
Century Ride. De Gouveia decided to build
an unofficial clock for the bike event. He
called on nearby cycling communities
to donate used bikes, and once enough
junkers rolled into his shop, he held a
disassembly party to remove their gears,
frames, chains, and other components. De
Gouveia pieced together the gigantic clocks
TIME 3 months TIME 1 day
skeleton from the scrap metal in roughly COST $110 COST $50
three weeks, and then spent another three
weeks adding parts and tuning the gears.
The finished clocks heart is a 600-rpm
variable-speed drill motor. Solar panels
charge a 12-volt battery that powers the
motor, which spins a geared bike wheel near
the twelve oclock position. The coordinated
movement of 12 bicycle wheels, 13 cranks,
and 26 chains keeps time like the gears of Honeybee Counter Thermal Flashlight
an analog wristwatch.
The clock debuted at the Wildflower ride Thomas Hudson, an engineer and Mapping energy leaks in poorly insulated
and made a second public appearance in beekeeper in Portland, Oregon, wanted to homes no longer requires hiring a technician.
2012 at San Franciscos Maker Faire Bay log his insects comings and goings, so he The thermal flashlight, designed by the Public
Area. De Gouveia says it runs about 30 built a row of 22 tunnels at the mouth of Laboratory for Open Technology and Science,
seconds slow, but adjusting the batterys their hive. Infrared sensors that detect bee changes the color of an LED light beam in
voltage should help the clocks second hand movement flank the ends of each tunnel and step with an infrared thermometers readings.
hit precisely one revolution per minute. Look count entries and exits. Hudson maps hive By sweeping the handheld device across
for his symbolic masterpiece at future West patterns with the data. Researchers might walls and floors during long-exposure photos,
Coast bike races. use the device to study honeybee ecology. anyone can paint a rooms inefficiencies.

H2.0
A sk A G e e k
Will yanking a
portable drive
destroy my data?
Weve all failed to eject a USB drive before
unplugging it, prompting warningsbut not
answer b y
absolute truthsabout lost data. Knowing the Jack Donovan
mechanics of three common storage devices
could save you precious time, 1s, and 0s. illustration b y
Traditional hard drives can store terabytes ing parts and whirring sounds of hard drives. on write-cache mode. Thilo Rothacker
of data on spinning, magnetized disks. Theyre more yank-friendlywith two caveats: This process offloads
Unplugging a hard drive, however, can cause SSDs cant be transferring data or running files to computer memory to increase
data-reading components to suddenly crash TRIM, a command that trims away deleted transfer speeds. Unplugging the drive before
into them. Damage is rare but severe, rang- data to boost speed. Sudden removal can fry its done copying data can cause it to fail.
ing from permanent errors to a dead drive. tiny components, so eject SSDs, too. Fortunately, most devices dont enable
Better safe than sorry. Always click Eject. As for pinkie-size flash drives? Yank them write-cache by default, and many computers
Solid-state drives, or SSDs, lack the mov- at your leisure, unless, that is, youve turned disable it the moment a drive is plugged in.
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100% 92 Percentage of U.S. households with TVs in 2003 that owned a VCR. By 2012, less than 59 percent owned one.
1980 2012
H2.0
Retro Spinner
Rep u Rp oseD Tech
story b y
Turn a VCR and USB mouse into a computer jog wheel colleen park
Early in his engineering 1 Disassemble a VCR and pull out its polished,
career, Rohit de Sa faced drumlike head. Strip all wiring and gut the electronics.
a painful reality: endless 2 Harvest a mouses computer chip, oscillator (typically
scrolling through lengthy a two-pronged cylinder), and USB cable.
computer documents. 3 Bend the mouse chips pins to fit into a two-millimeter-
Just an hour of flicking pitch veroboard. Solder surface mount capacitors
between the chips power supply and ground pins.
a mouses wheel was
enough to cause carpal- 4 Drill two holes into a cameras rear lens cap that align
with screw threads on the VCR heads lower half.
tunnel-like symptoms
in his wrist. So de Sa 5 Print an encoder wheel pattern (goo.gl/vsCNn) and
glue it inside the top of the VCR head. Encoders in
repurposed an old VCR,
mice convert a scrollwheels spin into data, but the jog
computer mouse, and wheel will instead log the speed of the pattern inside
camera lens caps to the top. This requires an optical encoderso find two
build an ergonomic jog SG-105 photo-reflective sensors, which both emit and
courtesy rohit de sa
wheel. With your own detect light (hobby stores carry them), and solder
box of junk and some them onto a spare piece of stripboard.
effort, you can re-create 6 Glue your optical encoder inside the VCR head to face
de Sas retro spinner. the printed wheel pattern. Solder the encoder to the
TimE 5 hours mouse chip and the USB cable to the chips USB pins.
CosT About $10
For de Sas full instructions, DiffiCulTy 7 Assemble the spinner with screws from the VCR head,
visit popsci.com/jogwheel. plug in the USB cable, and get scrolling.
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One hypothesis, that spiders simply skip
over the sticky threads, has been more or
less discredited. In fact, orb-weavers sweep
F O r y O u r I n F O r m aT I O n their hind legs across the goo hundreds or
thousands of times as they make their webs.
They also brush their bodies against the
drops while theyre subduing prey. Another,
more promising theory originated in 1905,
when a French naturalist named Jean-Henry
Have a burning
Fabre noted that the orb-weavers frequently
science question?
E-mail it to ran their legs across their mouthparts. He
fyi@popsci.com, wondered if they might be spitting up or
or tweet @popsci otherwise secreting some sort of lubricant
hashtag #PopSciFYI. that protected them from their own web.
Fabre tried washing spider legs with solvent,
and reported that many became ensnared.
Early last year, a team of researchers
at the Natural History Museum in Bern,
Switzerland, re-created Fabres experiment,
albeit under more controlled conditions.
They installed spiders in laboratory boxes
and left them to build webs. The scientists
then pulled off the spiders legs and pressed
them very carefully against the adhesive
silk. When washed in water or left untreated,
the legs barely stuck at all. But when treated
with an organic solvent, the legs seemed
twice as prone to sticking. Fabre had been
right, they said: Spiders seem to use an oily
Q: answers b y
Daniel Engber
coating to protect themselves.
There may be more to the story, though.
Another study published in 2012, this one
done in Costa Rica, came to a similar con-
Why dont spiders get clusion about the oily coating. But the Costa
Rican study also used video analysis, which
showed other adaptations: A spider moves
trapped in their own webs? its hind legs across the capture threads at
an angle that minimizes the glues effects,
and tiny barbs on the bristles of its feet,
or tarsi, help keep its legs from sliding into
SHOrT anSWEr
of avoiding it. Its surprising how little the goo. The idea that a spider might have
Hairy feet and oily legs. attention the topic has gotten despite how multiple ways of avoiding snaring itself
many people wonder about it, says Brent doesnt surprise Opell. If its an important
LOnG anSWEr Orb-weavers, arachnids Opell, a biologist at Virginia Tech who has thing to the spider, he says, there probably
that capture their prey researched spiders capture threads. Opell are several mechanisms that have evolved
using sticky webs, make up more than one has shown that when a bug tries to pull to contribute to the nonsticking ability.
fourth of all known spiders. These species away from a web, the droplets divide the All of the above applies to orb-weavers,
spin their creations with spiral crossbeams force across a length of stretchy silk, so that but their webs arent the only ones that
JAN TOvE JOhANSSON/gETTy ImAgES
dotted with drops of viscous goo. (The webs no single point bears all the strain. stick their prey. A related family of spiders,
radial and framing threads are left clean.) As for how spiders avoid their goo, scien- called Deinopidea, makes use of an older
When an insect brushes against these tists have plenty of ideas but not much data. method that predates the evolution of
dropseach thread can carry several dozen viscous goo. Dry cribellar threads catch
per millimeterit gets stuck, and the spider on the stout bristles of an insects body,
rushes over to inject it with venom or cocoon
it in silk. The question, of course, is how
Spiders seem to use or adhere to it through capillary and
van der Waals forces. What tricks do
does the predator escape its own glue traps? an oily coating to Deinopidea use to escape their cribellar
Naturalists have only recently worked protect themselves. yarns? The arachnologists havent yet
out the mechanics of the sticky weband worked that one out.

Q: Can too much antiperspirant
cause me to overheat?
SHOrT anSWEr Used only under the arms? No.
LOnG anSWEr Sweating is how the are more involved with apocrine sweating,
body cools down. the kind inspired by emotional arousal,
As water evaporates off the skin, due to than eccrine sweating, which regulates
a difference in vapor pressure, it draws temperature. Whatever eccrine sweating
heat away from the body. So if we stopper does happen in the armpits doesnt cool
our sweat glands with metallic salts (the the body much anyway; because the
active ingredient in most antiperspirants), moisture sits tucked between your arm
decreasing the amount of sweat our bodies and torso, it cant easily evaporate.
can release, will that leave us overheated? Crandall also notes that the amount of
Would that in turn prompt our brains to skin affected by normal antiperspirant use
compensate by signaling our glands to sweat is relatively small. In burn victims who have
lost the capacity to sweat from at least 40
STOCkbyTE/gETyy ImAgES
more in untreated areas? Would a vicious
circle of perspiration begin? percent of their bodies due to large-scale
No. According to Craig Crandall, a skin grafts, Crandall found a huge detri-
specialist in thermoregulation at the ment to their bodys ability to regulate its
University of Texas Southwestern Medical temperature. To match that disability using
Center, the places where we tend to put an antiperspirant, youd have to roll a tube of
our antiperspirant arent particularly Mitchum over every square inch of both your
important for keeping us cool. The armpits legs, feet and then over your entire head.
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H elmet WarS
C O N T I N U E D f R O m PA G E 5 9
Since then, MIPS has licensed its the big gamefrst American hockey and would fall all over themselves to license
sliding low-friction layer to about 20 then the biggest of all, football. or create something like MIPS, a simple
helmet manufacturers, for sports from product that directly addresses a critical
snowboarding and skiing to cycling and follow The money factor in concussions and incorporates
motocross. Recently, Steenberg decided, easily into existing helmet designs.
the company was ready to start hunting One would think the Riddells of the world I thought wed have people hugging
us, saying, Thank you! says Ken Yafe, a
former NHL executive who lef the league
in March 2012, afer 19 years, and signed
on with MIPS to help them get an audi-
ence with U.S. manufacturers. But afer
nearly a year of squiring Steenberg and
Halldin around to diferent companies, he
says, weve been met with skepticism.
One of the reasons, Yafe suspects, is
that current safety standards dont require
the companies to do anything more than
what theyre already doing. Its a criti-
cism privately echoed by most helmet
researchers: Simplistic certifcation stan-
dards provide convenient legal cover for
the manufacturers. If NOCSAE certifes
a companys helmets as safe, then the
company has less risk of being held respon-
sible for injuries. On the other hand, if that
same company goes above and beyond
the standards, it could put itself at risk of
getting sued: Suddenly all of its existing
helmets would appear to be inadequate,
and worse, the company might have to
admit knowing that they fell short.
Duma, of Virginia Tech, points to
NOCSAEs industry funding to explain
how such a situation has persisted in
football. Follow the money, he says.
Imagine if Ford were the only organiza-
tion testing its cars, and it was saying that
every one got the top rating. Its a very
Make Artistic Projects and Mechanical Parts unusual arrangement.
Includes Industry-Leading Software To Steenberg, the MIPS CEO, the situ-
Simple to Operate - Runs Off Your Computer ation is both harmful and backward. If
something is available that makes your
helmet more safe, you should be held liable
PlasmaCAM is a well thought-out for not using it, he says. Its not the frst
tool. The software is incredible. time a new safety technology has faced
I can quickly go from concept to such a paradox. All too ofen implementa-
tion hangs on the grim calculus of whether
a nished part. I havent seen
the cost to industry of adopting a safety
anything we cant do with this measure is more or less than the cost to
machine. It has saved us so much the public of going without it. When liabil-
time and effort, its just incredible! ity enters the equation, lawyers and judges
and lawmakers get involved, and even the
-Jim, Custom Turbo Engineering most urgent matters can end up mired in
argument. For example, it took more than
a decade to legislate seat belts as standard
equipment in automobiles. Its worth noting
PO Box 19818 5112 Graneros Rd. that the two companies that frst popular-
Colorado City, CO 81019 ized and implemented seat-belt standards
www.plasmacam.com C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 7 7
(719) 676-2700 fax (719) 676-2710
h El mEt wA R S
were Saab and Volvo, both Swedish.

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

This is his frst story for Popular Science.
jANuARY 2013 popuLaR Science 77

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From the arChiv es
FEBRUARY
1941
Own This
COver!
Order prints of vintage
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online store.
Air
Power
st o r y b y Colleen Park
When two Grumman F4F-3

Wildcat fighters appeared on
PoPular Sciences cover in February
1941, the U.S. had not yet joined
World War II, but the possibility of
an attack on American soil loomed
large. Writer Carl Dreher estimated
the likelihood of an air bombing
on a U.S. city by analyzing foreign
aerial strength. He said that main-
land cities were secure, but coastal
cities were in danger of hit-and-run
raids. At the time, military aircraft
could not fly directly from Asia or
Europe to the U.S. (though Dreher
predicted that such bombers will
be an aeronautical commonplace in
five years). Instead, planes would
take off from a nearby land base or
aircraft carrierwhich they did 10
months later when Japan attacked
Pearl Harbor, prompting the U.S. to
declare war. The worlds military air
powers have evolved since 1941,
of course. Last year, China unveiled
the stealthy, high-speed J-20 fighter The Single-Seater Grumman F4F-3 Wildcat
jet, which rivals Americas best. In operatIon 19401943 / Speed 330 mph / range 850 miles / WIng Span 38 feet /
Turn to page 44 to learn more about WeaponS Four wing-mounted 0.50-caliber machine guns and two 100-pound bombs
POPULAR SCIENCE ARChIvE
Chinas new arsenal. re pl ayph o to s. com / po pula rsci encephot ost ore
POPULAR SCIENCE magazine, Vol. 282, No. 1 (ISSN 161-7370, USPS 577-250), is published monthly by Bonnier Corp., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. Copyright 2012 by Bonnier Corp. All rights reserved. Reprinting in whole or part is
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CHINA

THE SECRET ARSENAL

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