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 24

What about
Venus? The
decades-long
CONTENTS
quest to get to
know our scorching
neighbor.

34 40

Glimpse a How mastering

55-million- a quirk of
year-old preview physics could
of what a make air
toastier climate conditioning
means for Earth obsolete

46

Rising temperatures
may be too
extreme for the
human body 52 60
to handle.
Now what? A Utah Inside the
town eyes a ancient,
long-awaited searing
recovery from process that
its radioactive turns sand
legacy into glass

CHARTED
6 Did humans heat Earth?
An answer in four charts
8 The microbes that color
Yellowstone’s grand spring
9 How to design a home
that doesn’t need AC
ASK US ANY THING
JOHN TOOLAN (FIRE)
12 Everything you know
about hydration is wrong
13 A three-point plan for
dealing with wildfires
13 What happens when the
sun inevitably burns out
14 Can science quantify
human hotness?
20 Surefire ways to quickly
start a roaring blaze
21 The inner workings of
thermometers
22 Choose the perfect grill
for every need
LIFE L AB
74 The right way to build a
76 This DIY Slip ‘N Slide
doesn’t fritter away water
77 The only trick you need
to prevent chub rub
78 A few things you never
knew to do with a glue gun
CENTENARIAN
79 Concentrated sunlight is

10 What to do when a vol- fire for cooking an efficient power source.

cano obliterates your lab GOODS Why hasn’t it caught on?
16 Ice cream made from 75 Keep all your gadgets
11 The Arctic’s hottest day real milk—no cows required from melting down

11 A few words on asbestos. 18 The best gear to shield 75 Semi-obvious tips and
First: We’re sorry. your skin from the sun tricks for staying cool

COVER PHOTOGRAPH: JESSICA PETTWAY PROP STYLING: STEPHANIE YEH FABRICATION:

THE FACTORY NYC RETOUCHING: MATT OCCHUIZZO AND GENE BRESLER/CATCHLIGHT DIGITAL 3
 EDITOR’S LETTER
another
scorcher
AROUND THE 100 TH BIRTHDAY OF A
close friend’s grandmother, we asked her to
name the single greatest invention she’d seen
in her lifetime. She’d been around when the
first cars rolled off Ford’s assembly line, when
commercial airliners made flying across the
country or around the globe an everyday occur-
rence, and as person-to-person communication
moved from copper lines to cell towers.
Despite how much change she’d lived
through, her reply came quickly and without
hesitation: air conditioning. An artificial oasis
cooled to a brisk 68 degrees on a blazing sum-
mer afternoon? Nothing could compare.
For all the comfort it’s brought, though, AC is
the quintessential example of the complicated
relationship modern humans have with heat.
Our desire for indoor chill in the steamy months
feeds into the very problem it was conceived
to ease—a bandage that itself spreads the in-
fection. The units suck tremendous amounts
of power, increasing demand for energy most
often supplied by burning fossil fuels. And the
coolants that circulate through them can seep
into the atmosphere, becoming greenhouse
gases. All that adds up to higher temps, and, in-
evitably, more air conditioners.
But as much as heat plagues us, it’s also es-
sential. Cooking over fire spurred evolutionary
changes that quite literally made us who we
are today. Charred proteins and veggies and
4
starches take less energy to chew and digest
than raw ones, netting more calories and nutri-
ents with each forage and hunt. That provided
fuel for our massive brains, which we’ve since
put to use harnessing combustion to power fac-
tories, trains, automobiles, and the internet.
Now our species’s hot streak has caught
up with us, which is why this issue of PopSci is
all about defining our new relationship with
extreme highs. Kat Eschner digs into the phys-
iological realities of living in perpetual summer,
Andrew Zaleski details a quirk of physics that
could reduce our reliance on air conditioning,
and Megan Gannon follows NASA scientists
asking if Venus, our 800-degree neighbor,
might hint at Earth’s future.
We uncover joyful methods of simmering
down too. A homemade Slip ‘N Slide can con-
serve potable water, and ice cream made from
cow-free dairy hints at refreshment with fewer
methane-belching bovines. There’s plenty
of work to do before we can say goodbye to
Grandma’s beloved AC, but at least now we’re
devising bandages that are part of the cure.
STAN HORACZEK
SUMMER 2021 Vo l . 2 9 3 , N o . 2

Editor-in-Chief Corinne Iozzio

Design Director Russ Smith
Executive Editor Rachel Feltman
Managing Editor Jean McKenna
EDITORIAL
Senior Editor Purbita Saha
Senior Gear Editor Stan Horaczek
Science Editor Claire Maldarelli
DIY Editor John Kennedy
Technology Editor Rob Verger
Features Editor Susan Murcko
Digital Edition Editor Chuck Squatriglia
Video Producer Tom McNamara
Engagement Editor Ryan Perry
Associate Editors Jessica Boddy, Sara Chodosh
Assistant Editors Sandra Gutierrez G.,
Sara Kiley Watson
Copy Editor S.B. Kleinman
Researchers Cadence Bambenek, Jake Bittle,
Matt Giles, Diane Kelly, Grace Wade
Interns Nikita Amir, Emily Cerf, Lauren Leffer
ART AND PRODUCTION
Art Director Katie Belloff
Photo Director John Toolan
Production Manager Glenn Orzepowski
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Brooke Borel, Kat Eschner, Tom Foster,
William Gurstelle, Gregory Mone, Sarah Scoles,
P.W. Singer, Nick Stockton, James Vlahos
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
Senior Director Amy Schellenbaum
COMMERCE
VP Commerce Nate Matthews
Director of Commerce, Technology Billy Cadden
Senior Commerce Editor, Technology Jen McCaffery
Associate Commerce Editor, Technology Tony Ware
Special Projects Editor Jason Lederman
SEO Manager Elizabeth Young
SEO Specialist Angelique Robinson
Editorial Assistants Quinn Gawronski, Natasha Roy
CONSUMER PRODUCTS
Creative Director Gabe Ramirez
Licensing Manager Janet Stewart

Chief Executive Officer Lance Johnson

Chief Revenue Officer Matt Young
Chief Technology Officer Justin DeMaris
VP of Finance Garrett Hesley
VP of Performance Marketing Jamal Bara
Executives in Residence Alex Ford, Kane Russell,
Michael Sacks
Head of Product Marketing Kristen Ong
Director of Talent Mahea Schulman
Senior Communications Manager Cathy Hebert
Human Resources Manager Alexandria Phillips
SALES AND ADVERTISING
VP Sales John Graney
VP Digital Sales Operations Lee Verdecchia
VP Ad Operations Brie Fisher
Advertising Directors Kristine Bihm, Katie Dudek,
Kelly Hediger, Katie Logan, Cyndi Ratcliff, Jeff Roberge
Advertising Coordinator Nicky Nedd
Marketing Manager Amanda Gastelum
Client Services Managers Allie Hedlund, Lynsey Poff
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
SVP Business Development Julie Smartz
Director of Business Development Dante Sandoval

POPULAR SCIENCE magazine (ISSN 161-7370) is published quarterly by

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5
 C H A R T E D
SUMMER 2021

A / Naturally produced carbon is falling Lines plot data from four climate models

-6.0
Ratio of natrually made carbon to

-6.5
human-produced carbon

-7.0

-7.5

-8.0

-8.5

-9.0
1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

A / Fossil-fueled skies B / The stratosphere is cooling Lines show data from two weather balloons
Since 1800, global CO2 levels have
climbed more quickly than in any 1.5 ºC
other period during the past mil-
Change in temperature

lion years. Analyzing isotopes in the

1.0
atmosphere shows that carbon-12,
found largely in vegetation, ac-
0.5
counts for most of the increase;
concentrations of the element’s
0
two other isotopes fell in compar-

A: KEELING ET AL. 2017; B: KARL 2006; C: CRIMMINS & CRIMMINS 2019; D: EPA
ison. Climate scientists argue the
only possible source for the added -0.5
carbon-12 is fossil fuels, which are
derived from ancient plants and re- -1.0
lease the pollutant when burned. 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000

B / Shrinking stratosphere B / The troposphere is warming

If, as some folks claim, increased
solar activity is causing global warm-
Change in temperature

ing, the entire atmosphere would

be growing hotter. Instead, data 0.5 ºC
reveals greenhouse gases are trap-
ping heat in the troposphere (the
portion closest to us), making it ex- 0
pand. Meanwhile, the stratosphere
above it is cooling and shrinking. It’s
lost a quarter mile since the 1980s -0.5
and may retract another 0.6 miles by
2080, which could create stronger
storms and disrupt satellite trajec- 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
tories and GPS communications.

6 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 / P O P S C I.CO M
 BAR CHART+ EARTH IS EVER SHIFTING.
Continents drift, ice ages come and
annals of a go, odd and wonderful creatures take
shape only to one day vanish. Review-
warming world ing the history of our world, some might
be tempted to dismiss the warming we
are experiencing as just another of these
BY N E E L D H A N E S H A / planetary ebbs and flows. Yet scien-
ILLUSTRATION BY R E L A JA E L C O C O tific consensus is clear: Not only is the
climate rapidly changing, but humans
are to blame. Each decade for the last
40 years has replaced the preceding one
as the hottest on record, and historical
data proves this acceleration isn’t natu-
ral. But decadal temperature increases
are hard to feel. Here are some signs that
Homo sapiens are behind this trend, and
a couple of effects you can feel yourself.

C / Spring starts earlier now When spring starts now How much earlier Day spring used to start

Northeast 6.1 days

Ohio Valley 8.8 days

Central Plains 9.3 days

Pacific North 8.6 days

Southern Rock 8.2 days

Southwest 18.8 days

Jan 1 Jan 30 Mar 1 Mar 31 Apr 30 May 30

D / Lyme disease is moving north C / A spring in spring’s step

87.1 106 Nationwide, spring arrives between
Increase in Lyme New Hampshire Maine six and 19 days earlier than it did 70
disease cases per years ago. More balmy days sounds
100,000 people 100 great, but the seasonal reset disrupts
since 1991 Vermont nature’s clock. Plants bloom before
pollinators emerge from hiberna-
tion, migratory birds arrive to find
23.4 previously reliable food sources on
Minnesota different schedules, and crops that
25.3 52.0 blossom early can succumb to late
Wisconsin Pennsylvania frosts. Continued climate change
will make seasons even more unpre-
dictable, so it may be impossible to
settle into a new normal.

D / Bug out
Warming is bringing deer ticks into
26.4
areas that were until recently too
New Jersey cold for them, introducing Lyme
disease to new regions. Infections
52.3 in the US nearly doubled between
Delaware 1991 and 2018, with potentially seri-
16.4 ous implications: If untreated, Lyme
Maryland can cause joint, heart, and neuro-
logical disorders. As temperatures
13.3 continue climbing and winters grow
Virgina shorter, the little bloodsuckers will
18.2 keep on spreading—they’ve already
West Virgina arrived in parts of Canada that were
previously free of them.

P O P S C I.CO M / S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 7
 PICTURE IT
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK Although hot enough to sear skin and

the hottest is stunning, yet even by that measure,

the Grand Prismatic Spring aston-
scorch plants, the pond teems with
heat-loving microbes called cyanobac-

colors ishes. Sulfuric water, heated by the

supervolcano beneath northwest Wyo-
ming, burbles from a fissure 121 feet
BY G R AC E WA D E / below the pool’s surface and radi-
ILLUSTRATION BY RU I R I CA R D O ates out 370 feet in concentric bands.
teria. These organisms, among Earth’s
oldest, have adapted to life in this hos-
tile environment and give the popular
attraction its signature hues. Here’s
how they create a terrestrial rainbow.

Blue /At a scalding 189°F, the
thermic feature’s aquamarine
center is much too harsh for
most life-forms. This renders
the mineral-rich H2O daz-
zlingly clear. But it appears
azure for the same reason the
ocean does: The translucent
liquid absorbs red wave-
lengths and reflects blue ones,
creating a brilliant cerulean.
Yellow /As the water
spreads, it cools enough
to allow bacterial growth.
Synechococcus is the first to
appear, at a balmy 165°F. With
no trees providing cover, the
thermophile—normally an
earthy green—produces a
type of pigment called carot-
enoid in a vivacious yellow to
protect it from the sun.
Orange /A bit farther out,
the temperature recedes
to about 149°F, allowing
Chloroflexus to join the party.
The bacterium creates a
pigmentary sunscreen like
its lemon-tinted cousin, but
favors a reddish tinge. The
two colors combine to create
a blazing shade that brings to
mind a ripe tangerine.
Burgundy / The outermost
ring reaches a mere 131°F,
which suits a wider array
of microorganisms. Each of
them produces carotenoids
in a variety of warm tones
that come together in some-
thing approaching maroon.
Calorthrix dominates the deep-
brown spurs reaching away
from the pool in all directions.

8 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 / P O P S C I.CO M
 DOLLHOUSE

chill out 4
BY N I K I TA A M I R /
ILLUSTRATION BY LUCY E N G E L M A N

A WARMING WORLD 4/Summertime shade

will make summers in-
creasingly uncomfortable,
but that doesn’t mean
air-conditioning bills need
to rise too. For centuries,
architects have helped folks
brave the heat using tools
like natural ventilation and
passive cooling. The key is
controlling how the struc-
ture interacts with solar
energy. Designing with the
sun’s rays in mind can keep
a dwelling comfortable
with minimal impact on the
planet and the wallet, mak-
ing staying cool a breeze.
1/Wind patterns
Placing doors and other
openings so that prevail-
ing winds hit them ensures
interior breeziness. North
and south walls are best for
windows because the sun
won’t shine through them
at low angles.
2/Rising heat
Hot air rises, leaving the
denser, chillier stuff below.
Vaulted ceilings, atria, and
skylights funnel warmth
away from living areas to
the highest reaches of the
residence. This motion also
draws in frosty air, making
it comfier on the couch.
Deciduous trees block rays
during the ice-cream-and- 2
lemonade months, but
let them through during
winter. Awnings and over-
hangs also work. Building
into a hillside provides
5
cover and takes advantage
of the soil’s insulation.
5/Reflective roofs
Insulating the roof or at-
tic keeps the cold in and
the hot out (and vice versa
when days turn frigid).
Light-colored shingles,
or newfangled dark ones 3
with reflective coatings,
deflect the searing sunlight
beating down on them.
6/Thick walls 6
Dense materials like stone,
concrete, and brick ab-
sorb large amounts of heat,
slowing its transfer to the
interior and storing it until 1
cooler evening temps can
dissipate it. That makes
them well suited for walls
that take a lot of sun.

3/Cross drafts
Windows of similar size op-
posite each other promote
cross ventilation. Opening
more of them on the wind-
ward side creates a venturi
effect, increasing flow.
Avoid the east and west
walls, though—afternoon
sun is brutally hot.

P O P S C I.CO M / S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 9
 ASBESTOS
ANYTHING
A NYTHING
ARCTIC
MASTER CLASS
HOW DO YOU
STUDY A VOLCANO
WHEN YOUR OFFICE
IS IN ITS PATH?
BY SARAH EMERSON
SINCE ITS FORMATION IN 1983,
- o- cone had risen and
Kilauea’s Pu‘u‘o‘
fallen as magma fluctuated through-
out the volcano’s vibrant East Rift
Zone. But on April 30, 2018, Pu‘u‘o‘- o-
announced its retirement with a
rumble. The once-brimming basin
drained down into the earth like an
unclogged sink. Newly liberated lava
crept from the summit toward the
Big Island’s eastern tip. Soon Leilani
Estates, a community of around 2,000,
would confront the eruption firsthand.
10 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 / P O P S C I.CO M
AS K US
Fissures exploded with ash, noxious
gas, and molten lava across roads and
into backyards. Pu‘u‘o‘ - o’s
- swan song
ultimately destroyed some 700 homes.
Then the foundation of the
Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO)—
established by the US Geological Survey
(USGS) in 1912—began to crack. On
May 16 the staff was forced to evacu-
ate. “We scattered to the winds and
took what we could carry,” recalls Brian
Shiro, who was then a geophysicist
at the site. Shiro has always had a
front-row seat in the rapidly chang-
ing field of hazard monitoring, but
Kilauea presented the unique challenge
of extracting real-time data from an un-
controllable force of nature. It taught
him lessons he now applies to monitor-
ing earthquakes as deputy director of
the USGS Geologic Hazards Science
Center in Golden, Colorado.
Shiro, who began his career as a tsu-
nami researcher, settled in Hawaii in
2005. After a stint with the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra-
tion, he joined HVO in 2016 to apply his
knowledge of seismic hazard monitor-
ing to the complex world of volcanology.
“These volcanoes are living, breathing
things, and it’s exciting to have your fin-
ger on the pulse of the Earth,” he says.
As the 2018 cataclysm shook their
facilities, Shiro and his colleagues en-
gaged a remote monitoring system of
GPS and seismic stations, cameras,
drones, and other sensors to gather info.
Dozens of devices were lost, damaged,
or destroyed. Ash blanketed the solar
charging panels of UV spectrometers
meant to measure gas, rendering them
ATTRACTION
APOCALYPSE
inoperable for months.
Thankfully, the observatory had pre-
pared for such obstacles years prior. “All
of our stations talked to each other in a
way that was easily configurable, allow- w
ing us to reroute a signal from one site
to another without having to go there,”
Shiro says. Throughout the eruption—
which officially ended on September 5,
2018—he and USGS colleagues collab-
orated with emergency managers and
public safety authorities and worked
around the clock, publishing updates
that empowered residents to plan their
lives around a volcano’s whims.
Despite their efforts, the effects of
the eruption were widespread. Federal
and county officials found that road re-
pair costs would reach $82 million;
local farmers suffered some $28 million
in collective damages; and communities
lost up to $94 million in tourism that year.
Still, the work of HVO staff and other
responders meant that no one died.
The event taught the USGS team how
to handle a rapidly evolving crisis while
simultaneously disseminating criti-
cal information to those affected, which
Shiro believes will assist them in future
eruption response efforts. Now, at the
Geologic Hazards Science Center, he
manages a group of scientists who keep
tabs on earthquake hazards. Their work
is central to populating the USGS website
earthquake. gov, which publishes cur-
COURTESY OF USGS
rent data to, in part, educate the public
and reduce the potential for harm when
the ground trembles. “It’s a new haz-
ard for me, having come from tsunamis
and then volcanoes,” says Shiro. “I’m
checking off different hazards here.”
 POSTCARD

HOTTEST DAY
WHAT DOES THE

AT THE
NORTH POLE MEAN FOR THE WORLD? BY EMILY CERF

O N D AY S W H E N A R C T I C
temperatures soar above their usual
summer peak of 40-something de-
grees Fahrenheit, the tundra turns into
an unrecognizable mess. The dissolv-
ing permafrost releases mudslides,
and wildfire smoke chokes the air. Such
was the case on June 20, 2020, when
the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk—
known for being one of the coldest
inhabited areas on the planet—hit
100.4ºF. Las Vegas recorded the same
temperature that day.
Being so far from human pollution,
the top of the Earth was once consid-
ered safe from climate change, says
Rob Huebert, a circumpolar-security
researcher and professor at the Univer-
sity of Calgary in Canada. But as ocean
and air currents pulled in contaminants
from more populated places and cargo
ships ventured north, the region slowly
grew warmer. Between 1970 and 2019,
temperatures rose about 5.6ºF—triple
the global average, per the World Me-
teorological Organization. “This is the
first time, as a species, that humans are
going to see an ice-free Arctic in the
summer months,” Huebert notes.
When the upper latitudes get toasty,
it creates a vicious feedback loop for
the rest of the world. The long-frozen
tundra holds thousands of years’
worth of dead organic matter; as
the surface layer thaws, it could free
up more greenhouse gases than hu-
mans have emitted since the Industrial
Revolution. Marine ice melt is also
speeding up sea level rise: After swell-
ing 8 inches since 1880, the Earth’s
oceans may surge 1 to 8 feet by 2100,
according to NASA projections.
Meanwhile, local lifestyles are in
flux as extreme heat and flooding
pound inland waterways and coasts.
“Things are changing quite rapidly” for
both Indigenous and non-Indigenous
communities, says Sue Natali, Arctic
program director for the Woodwell Cli-
mate Research Center. As the ground
collapses beneath their homes, peo-
ple must choose whether to adapt or
uproot themselves entirely, with little
or no government support.
In June 2021, the mercury near Verk-
hoyansk broke 118ºF, showing that the
2020 record wasn’t just a one-off. US
cities like Phoenix and Seattle expe-
rienced scorchers in the same week.
The Arctic is a barometer for climate
change, and the pressures it’s experi-
encing will one day be felt everywhere.

WHY DID EVERYONE’S

WHERE WE WENT WRONG

1900s, asbestos became the do- dust and fibers can lead to meso-
it-all material in modern goods thelioma, a tissue-based cancer
like soundproof tiles, automobile that takes decades to manifest. As-

FAVORITE BURN-PROOF
brakes, and firefighting suits. Its
flame resistance made the bedrock
silicate the stuff of lore, drawing
praise from builders, manufactur-
bestos is implicated in 80 percent
of the disease’s fatal cases. The can-
cer killed more than 45,000 people
between 1999 and 2015.

MATERIAL BACKFIRE?
ers, and even Popular Science.
“With asbestos armor and tools
men can fight the fiercest fires
known since first the disgruntled
Prometheus stole the pyric secret
from the gods,” contributor Orville
H. Kneen wrote in the December
When you’ve been publishing for a century and a half,
1927 issue. “That is why when oil
some off-base ideas are going to creep into your pages.
wells have flamed asbestos clothes
We’re diving into the archives to give you a fresher
and shoes have been rushed by
take on “popular science.”
Johns-Manville, Inc., from Chicago
BY P U R B I TA S A H A
and New Jersey by air mail as far
as the Wyoming fields.”
But the narrative started to turn
MACEDONIANS SHROUDED after a 1924 British pathology re-
their dead with it. The Greeks port linked the mineral to lung
spun fabrics from it. Inuits shaped scarring. A string of medical re-
wicks out of it. And by the early search revealed that inhaling the
While miners and factory work-
ers have borne the brunt of those
mortalities, firefighters suffered
gravely too: A 2013 study by US
health agencies found that the can-
cer afflicts them at about twice the
rate of the general population due
to outdated gear and exposure to
burning buildings. The Environ-
mental Protection Agency banned
use of the substance in clothing,
roofing, and many other products
in 1989, but a federal court over-
turned most of the regulation in
1991. The fabled crystals that al-
lowed humans to conquer “the
pyric secret” continue putting
them in jeopardy today.
 ASK US ANYTHING
MYTHBUSTING
EVERYTHING
EVER YOU
HYDRATION
ASK
BUT DIDN’T THINK TO
THE HUMAN BODY IS 55 TO 65 PERCENT
water. That makes proper hydration
crucial for maintaining everything from
the brain to the bowels. Yet there are
many myths surrounding this essen-
tial fluid and the best ways of getting
enough of it. Let’s debunk a few.
Do I need eight glasses daily?
Maybe not. The right amount depends
upon your weight, your activity level,
and the temperature. Lifting hard at the
gym? You’re gonna need to gulp down
more than someone trapped behind a
desk. As it happens, the moisture found
in everything you eat and drink provides
much of what you need without your
having to reach for the Nalgene.
12 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 / P O P S C I.CO M
WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT
Wait—solid food can hydrate you?
It’s no surprise that soup boosts fluid
intake. But fresh fruits like watermelon,
grapefruit, and cantaloupe are great
for staving off thirst because they con-
tain loads of H2O—and vitamins too.
Applesauce is another excellent choice.
Don’t discount snacks like pretzels,
granola bars, and pickles. They help
replace sodium lost to sweating.
What about sports drinks?
Although these brightly colored bever-
ages replace potassium, salt, and other
electrolytes sapped by perspiration,
they don’t hydrate you any more than
the same volume of water. A 12-ounce
bottle also contains more than half your
daily recommended intake of sugar,
which has its own drawbacks. If you ar-
en’t doing intense exercise or schvitzing
profusely, stick to agua.
BY CHUCK SQUATRIGLIA
Will coffee and other caffeinated
drinks dry you out?
Although caffeine is a diuretic—it
makes you pee—you’re not losing more
water than coffee, tea, and other bever-
ages contain, so the effect isn’t enough
to offset their hydrating properties.
SARA CHODOSH, MARISSA SHIEH, AND CLAIRE MALDARELLI
ADAPTED FROM POPSCI.COM. REPORTING BY NIKITA AMIR,
Adding a bit of milk further diminishes
those losses. Too much joe doesn’t do
your heart rate any favors, though, so
enjoy four cups a day—absolute max.
Does drinking hot liquids on a
summer day really cool you off?
Paradoxically, yes. Although a tall
glass of something cold makes you feel
cooler, that dip means you perspire less
and lose the benefit of the body’s evap-
orative cooling. Scalding beverages
hydrate you without curbing the body’s
natural air conditioning, but the upside
compared to iced ones is minimal.
T
S
A
HOW SHOULD WE
C
DEAL WITH
E
R
O
WILDFIRES?
F
BY S A R A K I L EY WAT S O N
FORESTS EVOLVED TO
burn. But a century- long
emphasis on relentlessly
suppressing this ecologi-
cal necessity has left the
country brimming with tin-
der that fuels devastating
wildfires. A warming world
will only make these blazes
larger, more destructive,
and increasingly frequent.
That’s frightening, be-
cause at least one-third of
US houses sit in woodlands
or other heavily vegetated
areas. Compounding the
threat, fire season has
grown up to 50 percent lon-
ger in some places, lasting
as long as six months and
providing scant respite,
says Stanford University
biologist Chris Field. With
little chance of revers-
ing these trends, he and
other forestry experts of-
fer a three-point plan for
mitigating the threat and
minimizing the damage.
Building codes should re-
quire flame-resistant siding
and roofs, double-paned
windows, sprinklers, and
other proven protection
measures. Montecito, Cal-
ifornia, adopted such
guidelines after 427 build-
ings burned in nearby
Santa Barbara in 1990.
The new rules were one
reason the town lost just
seven structures to an in-
ferno in 2017. Advocates
of such mandates concede
upgrading existing homes
isn’t cheap and say insurers
and governments should
offer rebates, tax breaks,
and other help.
At the same time, cities
should rethink their zoning
laws to limit housing den-
sity in wooded areas. They
also must ensure neigh-
borhoods have adequate
water supplies and ample
evacuation routes.
Over the next decade,
ecologists say, the US must
change how it tends its
forests. Blazes that pose
little threat to property
should be allowed to run
their course, taking excess
fuel with them. Vegetation
should be cleared through
grazing, thinning, and con-
trolled burns. Models in
California show that such
tactics can reduce the size
and intensity of wildfires
by at least 30 percent. The
upkeep isn’t cheap, the
analysis showed, but pre-
venting fires costs a lot less
than fighting them.
LITTLE Q
WHAT WILL
HAPPEN WHEN
THE SUN
BURNS OUT?
BY RAHUL RAO
IT’S AN APOCALYPTIC TRUTH: THE
yellow dwarf star that has illuminated Earth for
more than 4 billion years will eventually die. As-
tronomers are fairly sure how this will play out.
The ball of light at the heart of our solar system
generates unfathomable energy by fusing hydro-
gen. The element accounts for 73 percent of the
orb’s mass, but the core may run out in 5 billion
years or so. After that, the sun will spend another
billion years consuming what’s left in its surround-
ing layers as it cools and expands— eventually
swallowing Mercury, Venus, and perhaps even this
planet—on its way to becoming a more mature
star known as a red giant.
After achieving that level of stardom, the burning
sphere will begin fusing helium. It will then shrink
rapidly in what astronomers call a helium flash,
consuming around 6 percent of its supply in min-
utes and partially rebuilding its center.
Fast-forward another 100 million years or so
and the geriatric ball of gas will swell again as it
seeks any remaining hydrogen and helium, a quest
that could inflate it past the asteroid belt on the
far side of Mars. Eventually, the dying titan will
shed its outer strata in an enormous bright halo,
a 100,000-year show that will leave a celestial
gravesite called a planetary nebula.
But even that’s not quite the end. Roughly half
of the sun’s mass will coalesce into a white dwarf,
an ultradense yet faint stellar core no larger than
the blue planet it once warmed. So begins its last,
lonely form. Over many billions of years, that smol-
dering ember will slowly fade to black.
THE BIG Q
IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM, tempting
a mate appears easy. Male peacocks un-
furl their sexy feathers when they spot a
would-be love. Spiders woo with the erotic
gift of dead insects. For humans, the pros-
pect of such a simple path to achieving
hotness can be mighty tantalizing. But can
science identify a shortcut to that initial
spark and a key to fanning the flames of a
successful relationship?
Probably not. But that hasn’t kept ev-
eryone from the ancient Greeks to modern
psychologists and anthropologists from
searching. While neuroscientists have
identified a behavioral “attraction system”
that seems to activate nerve cells in the
14 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 / P O P S C I.CO M
BY ERIN BLAKEMORE
midbrain to release the oh-so-pleasurable
neurotransmitter dopamine when we’re
into someone, they still don’t understand
why only some potential mates spur activ-
ity. Over thousands of years, people have
landed on only vague clues in pursuit of the
keys to this ineffable magnetism.
Take 1.618..., the golden ratio. This sup-
posedly pleasing number has been on
our minds since at least 300 BCE. Math-
ematician Euclid offered that if you take
a segment of a line and divvy it up into
roughly 60/40 parts, the ratio of the larger
chunk to the entire line equals the ratio
of the segments to one another. When ap-
plied to physical proportions, the schema is
thought to produce beautiful results.
The golden ratio gained popularity
during the Renaissance, where artists and
thinkers, most notably Leonardo da Vinci,
held it up as the epitome of visual harmony
(read: facial hotness). Modern proponents
claim our eyes are immediately drawn to
faces that are about 1.6 times longer than
they are wide and that have bottom lips
1.6 times as full as their uppers. But after
reviewing dozens of papers on the subject,
the researchers behind a 1995 study in the
journal Perception failed to come to any de-
finitive conclusion about whether people
associate the ratio with attractiveness—let
alone whether it can help them snag dates.
As with so much psychology, research
on the subject is littered with small sample
sizes and baked-in biases. Over the decades,
study authors have identified a general lean
toward facial symmetry, but that doesn’t
mean it’s the sole measure of sex appeal.
A 2015 literature review in the Dental Press
Journal of Orthodontics noted that up to one
in three people has some amount of facial
asymmetry, and it’s not as if that many of
us belong to the lonely-hearts club. Beyond
that, what we see as hot can be a moving
target. A 1980 study in Psychological Reports
showed that Miss America contestants and
Playboy models had gotten thinner over the
two preceding decades; a similar study in
2002 showed there’s never been any consis-
tent hip-to-waist ratio among winners and
centerfolds, negating the myth of a univer-
sally appealing hourglass. A 2008 report in
Personality and Individual Differences ID’d
men with light stubble as more attractive
than bros with beards or clean shaves, but
we know trends have swung from heavy hair

to clean faces and back in the last century.
Though individual preferences vary, what-
ever we think “attractiveness” means, we
sure care a lot about it. One 2005 study out
of the University of Pennsylvania assessed
data from more than 10,000 individuals who
signed up for speed dating, mass events in
which participants have a series of brief
meetings with multiple potential partners.
Would-be matches decided to pursue second
dates based almost exclusively on “physically
observable attributes” (think height, weight,
age). Personality and things commonly cited
as deal breakers, like differences in religious
belief or education levels, weren’t as signifi-
cant as factors folks could spot right away.
“The first time you meet someone, phys-
ical attractiveness matters a lot,” says Paul
Eastwick, a psychology professor at the
University of California, Davis who studies
how people initiate romantic relationships.
How well you play the dating game also
has an effect. A 2020 study in the Journal
of Social and Personal Relationships suggests
that people can manipulate their “mate
value”—their ability to be more selective
and their perceived reproductive viability—
by playing hard to get. In a series of online
and in-person experiments, the researchers
found that those who seemed more choosy
about their mates generated more sexual
attraction than those who didn’t appear to
ILLUSTRATION BY JACQUES KLEYNHANS
be picky about who slid into their DMs.
But spotting a hottie (and getting them to
spot you) in the wild is only half the equa-
tion. What are the odds you’ll actually like
one another? The science there is even more
iffy. “If compatibility is so great, then where
does it come from?” Eastwick asks. “For me,
that’s the great question we have to tackle.”
In the absence of the ability to send
people out on a big number of perfectly con-
trolled rendezvous, speed dating is the next
best thing. It gives scientists like Eastwick
the opportunity to set up a large group of
singles and see if his team can predict how
much a person tends to like other humans
in general, whether that person tends to be
liked by others, and how well two unique
individuals will click as a relationship unit.
In 2017, Eastwick and colleagues had
participants complete a questionnaire that
measured more than 100 traits and pref-
erences—with queries designed to suss
out things like attachment styles, relation-
ship goals, basic personality attributes,
and someone’s own rating of their physical
features—before going on quick dates. An
algorithm used the proffered info to fore-
cast who would sizzle and who would fizzle.
Though the predictions could reliably foretell
which subjects would like partners in general
or be generally liked, the computer turned
out to be terrible at determining whether two
individuals would like each other specifically.
“Can we say why two people hit it off and
other people didn’t? That’s the kind of pre-
diction we can’t really do yet,” says Eastwick.
When it comes to actual hookups, each
pairing seems to be almost entirely de-
pendent on the twists and turns not just
of physical connection, but also of con-
versational dynamics, mood, and other
seemingly random factors. “We have to find
ways of studying each relationship as its
own little precious entity,” says Eastwick.
He and his colleagues are trying to come up
with ways to do just that. In the meantime?
“I’m just excited that we can now properly
articulate the problem,” he says.
P O P S C I.CO M / S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 15

SAVE YOUR SKIN » HANDY TOOLS FOR MAKING FIRE » HOW
TO FIND THE RIGHT TEMP » THE BEST GRILL FOR EVERY NEED
BY STA N H O R AC Z E K
ONE PERFECT THING
get the
scoop
NOTHING HITS QUITE SO GOOD AS A CONE FULL OF
ice cream on a sweltering summer day. Alas, that single serv-
ing of classic vanilla may cool you off, but it has the exact
opposite effect on the Earth. The dairy industry accounts
for a massive 3.5 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emis-
sions, and the nation’s 8.8 million cows are a huge source of
the planet-warming gas methane.
A generous helping of Brave Robot’s cool confection—may
we suggest the Raspberry White Truffle?—is different. Al-
though it is every bit as delicious as a bowl of your favorite
melty treat, it doesn’t involve our bovine pals at all.
The vegan recipe starts with a milk substitute created
by Perfect Day. The California startup skips the udder
by adding cow DNA to a prolific strain of a fungus called
Trichoderma reesei. Give those modified microbes a lit-
tle sugar and a stint in a fermentation chamber and they
churn out a mixture of dairy proteins, including casein
and whey, that are molecularly identical to those that give
SUMMER
2 0 2 1
PG
16
products made with regular old moo juice their wonderful
consistency. From there it’s simply a matter of adding a bit
of water and some plant-based fats to create creamy good-
ness that requires no animals at all.
Perfect Day’s research found that its process generates
85 to 97 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than con-
ventional dairy production. It also doesn’t use any of the
hormones or antibiotics (or, for that matter, land) needed
to keep that immense livestock machine running. You
won’t find any lactose or cholesterol, either.
Frozen treats in scrumptious flavors like Hazelnut Choco-
late Chunk and Oregon Strawberry ship nationwide from the
Brave Robot, Nick’s, Graeters, and Smitten creameries. But
that’s just the start of Perfect Day’s delectable plan. Because
its synthetic milk provides the same taste and texture as the
real thing and is a true one-to-one substitute in the kitchen, it
could play a starring role in eco-friendlier butter, yogurt, and
even the elusive wonder that is cheese.
PHOTOGRAPH BY A L I B LU M E N T H A L P O P S C I.CO M / S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 17
 STARTER KIT

skin savers Face filters

Maui Jim Onshore Sunglasses sport
glare-killing lenses and a frame that
EVEN IF YOU’RE NOT REGULARLY curves to meet the contours of your
TURNING INTO A LOBSTER, CUMULA- face. The close fit prevents reflected
light from roasting your eyeballs—
TIVE EXPOSURE TO RAYS FROM THE
which, yes, can burn.
GALAXY’S NEAREST STAR CAN CAUSE
WRINKLES, AGE SPOTS, AND EVEN
THE MOST COMMON FORM OF CAN-
CER. SOME SPF-EQUIPPED GEAR WILL
KEEP YOU COVERED—LITERALLY.

Kiss cooler
Ingesting sunblock is gross, but
your lips can sear too. With flavors
like pineapple and Key lime, the Sun
Bum Sunscreen Lip Balm SPF 30
makes it more likely that you’ll
cover your kisser.

Hoops goop
Sweat obliterates sunscreen, but
ThinkSport Safe Sunscreen can en-
dure more than 60 minutes of hard
exercise before wearing off
because it contains 20 percent
ray-deflecting zinc oxide.

Cool cover-up
A tight weave of recycled polyester
gives the Patagonia Sunshade
Technical Hoody the best possible
ultraviolet protection, stopping more
than 98 percent of harmful rays. The
hood offers plenty of room for a cap.

18 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 / P O P S C I.CO M
 Nice cream
Lotions labeled “broad-spectrum”
block UVA and UVB rays but degrade
quickly. Neutrogena Ultra Sheer Slim shady
Dry-Touch Sunscreen relies on a Collapsing to a mere 10 inches, the
multitiered mixture of compounds Coolibar Bund Compact Umbrella
called helioplex that lasts for hours. fits in even the most overstuffed
beach bag. Its 43-inch canopy is in-
fused with a reflective layer that
repels UV radiation.

Lit lid
The Columbia Bora Bora II Booney’s
blend of synthetic fibers creates an
almost impenetrable dome of ultra-
violet protection for the noggin, ears,
neck, and face. A mesh vent lets cool
breezes in and sweaty air out.

19
 OVERKILL

spark
ranger
SKILLED SURVIVALISTS CAN überleben Zünden Fire Starter
The recipe for flames is simple:
MAKE FIRE WITH ALMOST Gather tinder, add spark. Drag this
ANYTHING. THE REST OF tool’s blunt edge across the 5⁄16-inch-
diameter rod—made of ferrocerium,
US? WE NEED HELP. THESE
an alloy used as the “flint” in
DEVICES CREATE FLAMES IN lighters—to create a 5,500-degree
THE WORST CONDITIONS. shower of burning metal.

TG Plasma lighter
Rather than relying on butane to
create a flame like Granddad’s trusty
fire starter, this 3.5-ounce torch
makes its own lightning. An electrical
current creates high-voltage arcs
between four electrodes, generating
more heat than flicking a Bic.

Zippo Typhoon Match Kit

Most matches use a small dab of red
phosphorus to get started. The extra-
thick coating of it on these 4-inch
wonders lets them burn for up to 30
seconds, even in wind or rain. The
watertight plastic case holds up to 15
and boasts a replaceable strike pad.

20 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 / P O P S C I.CO M
HOW IT WORKS

master of degrees
MERCURY ENCAPSULATED IN GLASS TUBES HAS BEEN RELIABLY READING TEMPERA-
TURES SINCE THE EARLY 18TH CENTURY. MODERN INSTRUMENTS USE VARIOUS
METHODS TO MAKE CHECKUPS SIMPLER, MORE ACCURATE, AND A LOT LESS LIKELY TO
POISON YOU WHEN THEY BREAK. HERE’S HOW THEY WORK.

Liquid metal
The Equate Glass Oral
Thermometer swaps the
traditional mercury for a
nontoxic blend of metals.
It needs about three min-
utes to reveal the temp,
but the analog method
means you’ll never worry
about a dead battery.

Current
The Kinsa Quickcare
uses electrical resistance
to measure temperature.
A weak current runs
through the gadget’s
metal probe during its
8-second test; the slower
those electrons move,
the higher your fever.

Light
The iHealth Infrared
Forehead Thermometer
measures radiation com-
ing off the skin 100 times
per second. Two auxiliary
sensors track the device’s
distance from the patient
and the ambient tempera-
ture to prevent faulty data.

P O P S C I.CO M / S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 21
 CHOICE

hot grill
summer
BARBECUING IS AN ART FORM WITH
MANY DISCIPLINES. EACH OF THESE
RIGS IS SUITED FOR A SPECIFIC KIND
OF SUPPER, WHETHER IT’S SMASH-
BURGERS OR AN 18-HOUR BRISKET.

For fast starts

A series of precisely placed holes and
air channels pull air through the
Solo Stove Charcoal Grill’s stainless
steel cooking chamber. That breeze
allows it to go from cold to burger-
ready in just 10 minutes.

For tailgating
Weighing just 12 pounds, the Nomad
IQ Portable Propane Gas Grill sports a
226-square-inch ceramic-coated bed
of grates. It uses camping-style pro-
pane cans, so it starts quickly and
spares you lugging bags of briquettes.

For doing it all

The Big Green Egg’s oblong ceramic
chamber draws heat from a pile of
charcoal burning in a firebox below. Its
thick walls keep meticulously consis-
tent temps whether you’re smoking a
pork shoulder or charring a pineapple.

22 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 / P O P S C I.CO M
 For flame-kissed char For satisfying grill marks
You won’t find digital controls or Wi-Fi A classic backyard propane cooker, the
on the Grillworks Langelier Elite. A Weber Genesis II 335 has a porcelain-
pulley system raises and lowers the enameled lid to bottle in heat. A
angled 54-inch grate over a fire to con- powerful supplemental burner reaches
trol the intensity of the heat hitting the temperatures higher than 700°F for
meat. It’s perfect for bone-in steaks. quick chophouse-style searing.

For high volume

The carbon steel cooking surface atop
the Blackstone 28-inch Griddle is
roomy enough for nearly four dozen
wieners. Two propane burners under
the flattop provide an ample 34,000
BTUs for crisply smashed burgers.

For going low and slow

Use the Traeger Ironwood 885 pellet
grill’s companion app to select a
temperature, and its auger will dis-
pense the precise amount of wood
pellets to hold it there, producing
perfectly tenderized cuts.

23
POPSCI.COM / SUMMER 2Ø21 / PG 24 1962-041A / 1962-12-14 19:59:28 / $554 MIL.
MARINER 2 (1962)

OUR NEXT-DOOR PLANET IS SIMILAR TO EARTH IN SIZE AND COMPOSITION, BUT EXTREME
CONDITIONS MADE VENUS A HELLSCAPE. A DEVOTED FOLLOWING OF RESEARCHERS WANTS TO KNOW
WHAT CAUSED THEIR WILDLY DIVERGENT PATHS, AND NASA IS FINALLY FEELING THE PULL.
JÖRN HELBERT WAS standing outside a stranger’s apartment
in the north end of Berlin with a bouquet of yellow roses. It was
June 2020, and the woman behind the door was in mandatory
quarantine. She had just moved to Germany from the United
States, and as a favor to Helbert, a fellow planetary scientist,
she was acting as a courier, bringing rocks far too precious to be
put in the care of international postal systems hopelessly back-
logged because of the pandemic. Already one shipping snafu
had sent the package to a nail salon in Tucson and nearly lost it.
26 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 / P O P S C I.CO M
Helbert was familiar with the kind of questioning you might run
into when carrying geologic samples through German customs,
so the flowers were a gift for her trouble.
The handoff had involved so much effort and intrigue that he
felt as if the parcel should be in a suitcase that got handcuffed
to his wrist. Instead, Helbert was amused to see a rumpled plas-
tic Walgreens bag left outside for contactless pickup. It held
30 disks made of various rocks analogous to those that might
be found on Venus. They had been painstakingly collected and
 VENUS RISING

PIONEER (1978)

27
analyzed by Darby Dyar, an astronomy professor at Mount
Holyoke College in Massachusetts.
Helbert, Dyar, and a team of colleagues were in the last stages
of pitching NASA on a mission called VERITAS, which would
send a satellite to map Venus at higher resolution than ever
before. Despite the pandemic, their deadlines hadn’t budged.
NASA selects low-cost (around $500 million) projects through
a program called Discovery only every few years. The team was
desperate to get the rock disks into Helbert’s lab at the Ger-
man Aerospace Center, where he was calibrating an instrument
for the VERITAS spacecraft that could determine what sorts
of rocks make up Venus’ geological formations; getting a bet-
ter sense of these would help write the planet’s history. Granite
could show us where there were oceans. Basalt could lead us to
active volcanoes. Stitching the features together could show us
the steps that turned the planet into an uninhabitable inferno.
If you imagine that our solar system is a cul-de-sac where
Earth is our cozy home and Mars is the empty lot down the
street where developers pitch a shiny future, then Venus is
the haunted house a few doors down, camouflaged by an over-
grown yard and drawn curtains. It’s similar to Earth in size,
density, mass, composition, and gravitational pull, but at its
surface, it has lead-melting temperatures of more than 850°F
and air pressure equivalent to standing under half a mile of
ocean water. Its magnetic field is too weak to protect it from
the solar wind, it spins backward, and it has a permanent layer
of heat-trapping clouds that veil its face from view.
The best topographic radar maps we have were produced in
the 1990s, and they’re quite coarse compared to our charts of
Earth and Mars. We know Venus’ surface has mountains, val-
leys, volcanoes, lava fields, and bizarre geological goodies, but
among its many mysteries, scientists still don’t even really
know what kind of rocks might reside there.
Venusophiles say it’s embarrassing that we haven’t gotten
to know our neighbor better. Magellan, NASA’s last expedi-
tion there, left Earth in 1989. Since then, the space agency has
launched 14 missions to Mars while researchers submitted about
30 Venus proposals to no avail. VERITAS was already in that ig-
nominious club of the unchosen; earlier iterations had been put
forward for more than a decade. During the last round, in 2017,
VERITAS and DAVINCI, a very different Venus project aimed
at sampling the planet's noxious atmosphere, had been part of
a five-team Discovery shortlist, but hadn’t made the final cut.
After that disappointment, David Grinspoon, one of the
DAVINCI scientists, wrote an essay titled “Not Venus Again,”
lamenting that he and his colleagues were like long-suffering Cubs
fans but if the Cubs had made it to the World Series and lost.
In the spring of 2021, both teams were back at the plate, anx-
iously awaiting NASA headquarters to call with their Discovery
decisions. “I’ve really put my heart and soul into this particular
mission, so for me, it is now or never,” says VERITAS principal
investigator Sue Smrekar, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propul-
sion Laboratory in California. “I can’t imagine investing this
intense effort again into getting a mission selected."
Other countries are planning Venus missions, because there
are good reasons to go. As scientists have studied solar systems
28 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 / P O P S C I.CO M
beyond our own with instruments like the recently retired Kep-
ler Space Telescope, they’ve found dozens of exoplanets with
Earth-like properties. That prospect has reawakened the ques-
tion that has confounded astronomers and philosophers alike
for millennia. Are we alone? Except here’s the thing: We have a
rocky twin world next door that looks nothing like ours. “I want
to understand why Earth is the place where life can exist, and
that's what Venus can tell us,” says Martha Gilmore, a planetary
geologist who is on both teams. “I think it's of the highest prior-
ity for understanding how we got to be here.”
VENUS SOMETIMES APPEARS as a twilight star that chases
down the sun, other times as a morning star that rises at dawn.
Early revelations about the planet gave just enough license for
wild speculation about what—and who—might be living there.
In 1761, Russian physicist Mikhail Lomonosov observed Venus
transiting in front of the sun like a roving freckle, a rare phe-
nomenon that allowed astronomers to estimate its diameter.
Lomonosov noticed a strange fuzziness around its edges. That
haze, he concluded, was a thick atmosphere. Because clouds on
Earth were made of water, it stood to reason that Venus should
be a very steamy and swampy place.
In the late 18th century, astronomers also developed a theory
that the orbs in our solar system got progressively older the far-
ther from the sun they were. By the late 19th, some imagined Mars,
the fourth planet, to be covered in ruins of abandoned canals dug
by long-dead thirsty beings. Meanwhile, Venus, the second, en-
joyed a reputation as our more primordial twin, full of landscapes
that resembled our world in the Carboniferous Period 350 million
years ago, when fern forests grew, freakish sharks dominated the
seas, and four-limbed creatures were just beginning to stretch out
across the land. Perhaps old myths that associated Venus with fer-
tility goddesses contributed to this Edenic image. The Victorian
poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson gave it “never fading flowers.” Ray
Bradbury, in one short story, pictured the planet more grimly as
covered in a sickly white jungle with “cheese-colored leaves,” soil
like “wet Camembert” and ceaseless rainfall that feels like a thou-
sand hands touching you when you don’t want to be touched.
Lush visions of Venus dried up as new evidence trickled in.
One especially damning sign came in 1956, when a team at the
Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., pointed the
50-foot dish of its radio telescope at the planet. They found it
emitted the amount of radiation they would expect from an
object hotter than 600°F. NASA’s Mariner 2 spacecraft—the
first-ever successful planetary probe to leave Earth—confirmed
the hot atmosphere during a flyby in 1962.
 VENUS RISING
T H E S C O U T I N G PA RT I E S

Despite how close Earth and Venus sit in our

solar system, we know precious little about
our superhot neighbor. Two teams are now
prepping missions—the first NASA's funded
in decades—to scope out the orb in greater
It was during this decade that astronomer Carl Sagan made
detail than ever before.
a name for himself proposing that a greenhouse effect was at
work on Venus, with poison gases in the clouds locking heat in.
In October 1967, the Soviets sent their Venera 4 probe there,
this being the first time a spacecraft entered another planet’s
V E R I TA S
atmosphere. It beamed back disconcerting data: The air was
much denser than expected and was made up of 95 percent car-
bon dioxide with negligible amounts of oxygen and water vapor.
So crushing was this result that in 1968, science fiction authors
Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison put together a mournful an- After its launch in 2028,
thology called Farewell, Fantastic Venus, gathering suddenly the VERITAS probe will
unscientific essays and stories from researchers and sci-fi writ- orbit Venus for roughly
ers that had been set on the “no-longer magical” world. three years. From more
Although astronauts lost any hope of planting their boots on than 100 miles above
Venus, exploration continued. In 1975, Venera 9’s descent vehicle
the surface, its radar
delivered the first photograph of the surface, a 180-degree pan-
sensors will gather our
orama showing a desolate field strewn with shattered rocks and
boulders. NASA’s 1978 Pioneer Venus mission produced the first most precise map yet of
crude radar maps. But in the decade that followed, NASA launched the planet’s geography,
no planetary science missions. President Ronald Reagan, who took including topographic
office in 1981, helmed this dark age, focusing the agency’s efforts on details like the heights
near-Earth orbits reachable by the space shuttle. of peaks. A device called
One casualty was the planned Venus-mapping VOIR (Venus a spectrometer will re-
Orbiting Imaging Radar) spacecraft. When the news came in cord the light reflected
1982, Dyar, now deputy principal investigator of VERITAS, was by the rocks, which will
a graduate student in planetary science at MIT. She arrived that allow geologists to fig-
day to find classmates openly crying. Eventually the research
ure out what elements
community was able to patch together a simpler, cheaper ver-
they're made of.
sion, which launched in 1989 as Magellan, an orbiting spacecraft
that mapped what was beneath Venus’ impenetrable cloud layer
by bouncing radar waves off the planet’s surface.
In the early 1990s, then–NASA administrator Dan Goldin es-
tablished the Discovery program to fulfill his “faster, cheaper, and DAV I N C I+
better” mandate, emphasizing the use of ready-made commer-
cial hardware and software to get small missions off the ground.
The second project to launch, in 1996, was Pathfinder, which
included a Mars lander and the first-ever rover, a wagon-size ve-
The DAVINCI+ probe,
hicle named Sojourner. It was a huge success and drummed up
launching in 2029, will
public support for exploration of the red planet. NASA approved
projects with increasingly big budgets: the Mars Odyssey orbiter gather two waves of
(2001), the rovers Spirit and Opportunity (2003), the still-operat- data during its hourlong
ing Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (2005). Those undertakings descent through Venus'
atmosphere. First, it will
sniff for gases like kryp-
ton and xenon (clues
MARS ROVERS ARE LOVABLE about how the planet
evolved) and hydro-
ROAD-TRIPPERS. IT’S LESS CLEAR gen (a telltale sign of
long-gone oceans).
HOW TO MARKET VENUS, HOSTILE TO The spherical probe will
then begin snapping
HUMAN EYES AND ROVERS ALIKE. photos of the land for-
mations below before
beaming its data out of
the hostile atmosphere.
 VENERA 4 (1967)

paved the way for Curiosity, InSight, and now Perseverance. Since
the 1990s, the guiding principle for these efforts has been to
“follow the water,” looking for conditions that could once have
supported life—but undoubtedly driven by the tantalizing pros-
pect of future human exploration.
With so much money going into Mars, that’s where planetary
scientists go. Curiosity alone has had nearly 500 working on its 10
instruments, and untold numbers of grad students have cut their
teeth on its data. Success begets success in the eyes of the public
too. New Mars rovers aren’t presented like $2.5 billion pieces of
hardware but lovable extraterrestrial road-trippers who narrate THROUGHOUT THE PAST couple of decades, interest in places
their journeys on social media and share photos along the way. beyond Mars hasn’t entirely disappeared. NASA’s next flagship
NASA knows how to sell Mars to taxpayers. It’s less clear how to mission, the $4.25 billion Europa Clipper, will launch in 2024 to
market Venus, hostile to human eyes and rovers alike. spend about six years traveling to Jupiter to study the ice shell and

30 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 / P O P S C I.CO M

ocean of the planet’s sixth-farthest moon. But Venus has been a
glaring blind spot, especially considering it’s so close to Earth. (A
spacecraft takes only about four months to get there.) Although
NASA hasn’t dedicated a line of funding to studying Venus since
the 1990s, a passionate research effort has persisted. Scientists
are still reanalyzing data from Magellan and even the Pioneer and
Venera missions. They’re also looking at info from the European
Space Agency’s Venus Express and the Japanese Akatsuki climate
orbiter—the only two such undertakings since Magellan.
Sue Smrekar, the VERITAS leader, was a postdoc at MIT when
Magellan sent the first results of its radar mapping to JPL. The
whole team was assembled, along with many guest investigators
from around the world, to look at what she recalls as the “famil-
iar yet alien images.” She thought it was the closest she would
VENUS RISING
come to “setting foot on another world.” Here were topographic
surveys of geologic features found nowhere else, such as tes-
serae, strange upland regions with such chaotic-looking ripples
that researchers named them with the Greek word for mosaic
tiles. Some scientists think the formations could be the equiva-
lent of Earth’s continents; others believe they might be more like
the scum on top of a pond of hardened magma.
Magellan also documented a small number of meteorite craters,
most of which were quite pristine, suggesting that Venus’ current
surface is relatively fresh, around 500 million years old. Many think
this overhaul happened in a planetwide volcanic event, perhaps on
par with the end-Permian extinction that wiped out most species
on our Pale Blue Dot. Volcanism on Earth is linked to plate tecton-
ics; however, scientists have yet to find evidence of Venus’ crust
shifting, so what drives its eruptive properties remains opaque.
The data left gaps Venusophiles were determined to fill in. Ma-
gellan’s image resolution was around 100–250 meters across each
pixel. VERITAS (short for Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, In-
SAR, Topography & Spectroscopy) would improve that by an
order of magnitude. Perhaps more impressively, it would boost the
topographic resolution by two orders of magnitude. In its pitch to
NASA, the VERITAS team showed how Hawaii’s Big Island would
look in Magellan’s view: like an unintelligible collection of pixels.
The VERITAS view brought the volcanic island’s ridges and val-
leys and the peak of Mauna Kea into sharp relief.
“I often compare where we are with Venus to where we were
with Mars in the ’80s,” says Paul Byrne, a planetary geologist at
North Carolina State University in Raleigh who’s due to take up
a new post soon at Washington University. He’s not part of either
mission but has advocated for more research on the planet in gen-
eral. He leads the Venus panel of the Planetary Science Decadal
Survey, which helps set the field’s priorities for the next 10 years.
“We had global image coverage of Mars, but it was relatively coarse.
And it was when we started to fly more capable instruments there
we started seeing stuff that we could never have dreamed we’d see
in terms of the detail. We don’t have that for Venus yet.”
VERITAS, which would launch around 2028, would also glean
new data about the composition of Venus’ geologic formations us-
ing spectroscopy, an imaging technique to identify matter based
on how it absorbs and reflects light. Because Venus’ thick clouds
block most light, Dyar, Helbert, and their colleagues had to invent a
whole new way to interpret the data that can squeeze through the
narrow wavelength range that can penetrate the cover.
Helbert created a Venus-simulating chamber in his lab that
would heat Dyar’s rocks to ungodly temperatures to test a pro-
totype of the Venus Emissivity Mapper, or VEM, one of the
instruments proposed for VERITAS. COVID-19, of course, was
the wrench in their international collaboration, especially con-
sidering the teams found out only in February 2020 that they
were moving to the next level of Discovery program selections.
They needed more data from various igneous rocks to expand
their calibration of the instrument. During those early confusing
months of the pandemic, Dyar sent frantic emails to colleagues
across the country asking for samples and soon had a large col-
lection from locations like Pikes Peak in Colorado, Mount St.
Helens in Washington, and the Leucite Hills in Wyoming. Some

"IF YOU CAN'T UNDERSTAND
VENUS, WHICH IS OUR CLOSEST
EARTH-LIKE NEIGHBOR, WHAT
CHANCE DO YOU HAVE OF
BELIEVING ANYTHING SOME
ASTROPHYSICIST TELLS US ABOUT
EXOPLANETS?" SAYS PLANETARY
SCIENTIST SANJAY LIMAYE.
of the samples were the size of softballs and needed to be cut
into small disks to fit in the Venus chamber. With her college
closed, Dyar appealed to a retired mineral collector who had
special saws and grinders in his basement to do the job. In a
rendezvous in a Friendly’s parking lot, she received the 30 rock
disks that would eventually make their way to Berlin.
WHILE VERITAS WOULD have its eyes on the ground,
DAVINCI+—for Deep Atmosphere of Venus Investigations of
Noble Gases, Chemistry and Imaging (the plus sign added for
this round of proposals)—is primarily designed to search for
clues about the planet’s history in its opaque atmosphere. The
concept was born out of a Venus summit in late 2007 and early
2008, but the current principal investigator, Jim Garvin, chief
scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland,
has been dreaming of a new expedition since he finished his
Ph.D. in the 1980s. The spacecraft would launch around 2029
and drop a parachute-equipped, aeroshell-protected spherical
probe that would sail through the cloud cover. Using spectrom-
eters similar to the ones developed for the chemistry lab aboard
Curiosity, it would measure inert gases like krypton and xenon
(think of them like fossils of the early processes that formed
32 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 / P O P S C I.CO M
Venus’ atmosphere) as well as hydrogen isotopes, which could
determine when and at what rates the planet lost the oceans it
is suspected to have had in its early history.
That water-loss data would be hugely important. Michael
Way, a physical scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space
Studies in New York, and his colleagues produced models in
2016 suggesting Venus not only had water before Earth did but
also was covered in a shallow ocean for some 3 billion years.
Those findings have energized researchers and revived the im-
age of a wet world, at least in its past. “You put that 3 billion
years of water on Venus next to the 300 million years that Mars
had water and you realize that if we’ve been looking for signs of
life somewhere else in our own solar system, maybe we’ve been
barking up the wrong tree,” says Dyar.
The DAVINCI+ team also proposes to put a camera on its de-
scent vehicle to capture views of the surface far better than the
Venera 9 images that hooked Garvin when he was a student. He’s
convinced his spherical probe can see mountains at scales not pos-
sible from orbit. To prove it, he hired a UH-1 (Huey) helicopter test
crew in August 2016 to take him for a series of daredevil rides over
a quarry in Maryland. As the aircraft plunged toward the ground,
trying to mimic the path of the descent vehicle, he hung out the
window taking pictures of the rocks below. This past winter the
team heated a full-scale prototype in the lab to make sure it could
operate in the atmosphere long enough to send readings home.
Coloring in our image of Venus’ long-gone seas could help
answer the Big Question. In the 260 years since Lomonosov
watched the planet’s transit, scientists have developed tele-
scopes so sophisticated they can observe the transit of faint
planets in systems thousands of light-years away. Based on
their size, their motion, and the wavelengths of light they emit,
astronomers can estimate the conditions of the orbs. Some
60 are considered potentially habitable, meaning they appear
to have the right parameters to sustain liquid oceans. But by
those same parameters, if we were observing our own solar sys-
tem from afar, we might think Venus should be Earth-like too.
“If you can’t understand Venus, which is our closest Earth-like
neighbor, what chance do you have of believing anything some
astrophysicist tells us about exoplanets?” says planetary scien-
tist Sanjay Limaye of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Limaye is part of a contingent of Venus researchers interested in
finding out whether its cloud layer could still host microbial life. In
2020, investigators reported in the journal Nature Astronomy see-
ing signatures of phosphine—a chemical known thus far only to
come from biological sources—in the atmosphere. Though claims
about the possible discovery didn’t pan out, the news helped to
spotlight the planet as an overlooked astrobiology target.
The Indian Space Research Organization plans to fly its own
radar-mapping orbiter at the end of 2024—and it’s not the only for-
eign space agency actively pursuing a Venus trip. The ESA intends
to launch a satellite called EnVision in the early 2030s to look at re-
cent geological activity. And Russia is considering a mission called
Venera D that would sniff for signals of life. In 2016 NASA launched
its HOTTech program to fund research into hardware that could
survive at hellish temperatures for at least a couple of months;
with such tech, a Venus lander or rover could be a possibility.

THE VENUSIAN SURFACE
What the Venus research community needs most is more data.
Lauren Jozwiak, a VERITAS volcanologist at Johns Hopkins
University who got her Ph.D. in 2016, says she was told to look
elsewhere in her studies since there were few prospects for Ve-
nus. An influx of new data, though, will feed the next generation.
“There is so much that we don’t know about Venus,” she says.
In the early hours of June 2, 2021, Smrekar and Dyar were
sitting in their respective kitchens on opposite sides of the
country, texting back and forth. Neither had slept much. This
was the morning they knew they’d find out which Discovery
missions NASA had greenlit. Around 5:30 a.m. Pacific Daylight
Time, Smrekar got the call: VERITAS had been approved.
“It is an indescribable feeling to work toward something
for 10 long years with heart and soul and finally have it come
to fruition,” Dyar says. She spent the day wandering around
in shock until she could pop corks with her colleagues in
VENUS RISING
a virtual fete. Smrekar was ecstatic. “I don’t plan to stop
celebrating for a while,” she says.
When the agency phoned Garvin that same morning, he nearly
fell off his chair. DAVINCI+ would be going to space too. The next
few days were a blur—his team buzzing. Both missions had beaten
out their competitors, spacecraft proposed to explore Jupiter’s
moon Io and Neptune’s moon Triton. After a 30-year drought of
new NASA missions to Venus, two will rocket there within the de-
cade, the product of countless hours of research and testing, rock
fetching, helicopter riding—and relentless optimism.
“We’ve got this brilliant planet sitting next door with a giant
atmosphere and a fascinating crust and a history that somehow
didn’t end up like our own planet’s,” says Garvin. “To look back in
time at what that world was like—probably Earth-like and maybe
even better—is an opportunity for the people of planet Earth at
this point. Maybe 30 years ago we weren’t ready. But now we are.”
34 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 / P O P S C I.CO M
 55 million years ago, the planet’s thermostat suddenly

HOTHOUSE
shot up—and life on Earth dramatically changed. Here’s what

OF
history can teach us about our modern temperature surge.

FUTURE
By Riley Black • Illustrations by Renaud Vigourt

P O P S C I.CO M / S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 35
 T
here was a time when alligators
slid through weed-choked swamps
near the North Pole. Some 55 mil-
lion years ago—just around
10 million years after the mass
extinction that killed T. rex and most of its
kin—the average global temperature sat more
than 20°F higher than it does today. Subtropi-
cal forests spread to northern latitudes, and
mammals thrived in lush new habitats. ¶ The
toasty weather had nothing to do with the event
that killed the dinos. The driver for the climatic
shift came not from above, but from below—in
Earth’s oceans. Paleontologists and geologists
suspect that some amount of natural warm-
ing that took place during the Paleocene, or
the period following the die-off, caused great
deposits of crystallized methane to transform
into gas. Seabeds belched the excess out into
the water and the air, which was bad news for
the planet: Methane is a greenhouse gas far
more potent than carbon dioxide. The globe rap-
idly warmed in response—jumping about 10°F
in less than 20,000 years—and held steady for
some 70,000 more before starting a long and
slow recovery. ¶ Paleontologists call this hot
spot the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
(PETM). It’s a time when subtropical forests
spread over the continents and new animals got
to stake their claims on the planet, all thanks to
an atmosphere and oceans in turmoil. This part
of the fossil record is a remnant of the past, but
it may also be a preview of our future.
36 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 / P O P S C I.CO M

HUNGRY, HUNGRY
INSECTS
• The PETM was a good time to be
a bug. Warmth spurred the spread of dry trop-
ical forests north, making ancient Wyoming
look more like modern Texas. Because many
insects are ectothermic (their body tempera-
tures and physiological needs are tied to the
climes of their habitats), the spike opened the
gates for a flood of tiny critters to move in.
The evidence is in fossil leaves found in
rocks dated to the period. A sample of more
than 5,000 petrified bits of flora from before,
during, and after the PETM shows an uptick in
the amount and diversity of insect damage. In
one study of Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin, more
than half the fossil leaves from the PETM had
been damaged by bugs—20 percent more
than before or after. Bugs nibbled the edges of
plants, bored holes into them, and created little
trails on their surfaces as they chewed away at
changing forests. It’s likely even more critters
would have thrived if the grub had been bet-
ter: Plants grown in elevated carbon dioxide
tend to be less nutritious, and this greenhouse
gas was abundant during the PETM.
While some modern pests suffer in heat—in
Puerto Rico, struggling insects used to stable
temps are imperiling the food chain—others,
like some mosquitoes and ticks, are moving
into new territories. One 2019 study estimated
that by 2080, the number of people exposed
to mosquito-borne illness around the world
could increase by nearly a billion.
THE HOTHOUSE OF FUTURE PAST
OCEANIC
EXTINCTIONS
• In a sense, the ocean is like a big
conveyor belt. Typically, cold air and salty wa-
ter mix in the Southern Hemisphere to create
dense, cool “deep water,” which keeps things
moving. The toastier PETM climate, though,
caused more rain to fall at the North Pole,
which weakened currents and shifted things
around. In less than 5,000 years, cold air
and salty oceans were instead mixing in the
North Atlantic. The change in flow warmed
the ocean even more. Higher temperatures
increased the metabolisms of local critters
and, as a result, their demand for food. But
hotter water also holds less oxygen, so it’s not
hard to see how the conditions of the PETM
put marine life in an impossible situation:
Animals needed more food to get by, while
the lack of oxygen made the environment
harsher and kept nutrients scarce.
The climate effects lasted 100,000 years,
and some organisms couldn’t keep up with
the change. Deep-sea varieties of so-called
“armored amoebas” (aka benthic foramin-
ifera or forams), a favorite of paleontologists
studying evolution and extinction because of
their abundance in the fossil record, suffered
a major die-off. More than 35 percent of their
species went extinct, marking their only sig-
nificant crisis in the last 90 million years.
Forams have long been a staple food of many
small ocean creatures, so paleontologists sus-
pect their absence made a big difference.
37

RAPID
EVOLUTION
• New species are always evolving
just as others are going extinct. Paleontolo-
gists refer to the rate at which new species
replace older ones as turnover. Fossils from
the remnants of Paleocene oceans sug-
gest that up near the surface, the process
happened at breakneck speed during the
PETM—in evolutionary terms, at least.
In shallow waters near the coasts, exist-
ing types of snails and clams died off, but
were quickly replaced by similar mollusks
that took up the same ecological roles—
sifting through sand and grazing on algae.
Other changes were more dramatic. Trig-
gerfish and puffer fish suffered a mass
extinction, and it took nearly 20 million years
for these swimmers to evolve enough new
species to regain their lost diversity. Near
the equator, corals similar to those alive to-
day retreated, and disk-shaped organisms
called larger foraminifera filled their niche
as reef builders until the seas finally cooled
back down several million years later.
38 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 / P O P S C I.CO M
SHRINKING
MAMMALS
• Before an asteroid devastated all
nonavian dinos 66 million years ago, the largest
furry critter on Earth was about 11 pounds, or
the size of an American badger. Just shy of a
million years later, with new ecological niches
cleared out by the mass extinction, the biggest
topped the size of a German shepherd. Beasts
were proliferating through the world’s warm
forests, diversifying into new forms of herbi-
vores, carnivores, and omnivores. Then, under
the heat of the PETM, some began to shrink.
Biologists see this same phenomenon
among living mammals today. In colder cli-
mates, for example, moose are often about
80 pounds heavier than their southern
compatriots. Bigger builds are better at
retaining internal heat: Having a smaller
proportion of body surface exposed to the
elements relative to overall mass means
creatures lose warmth more slowly. But in
hot times, it becomes less important to stay
toasty and more crucial to be able to dump
excess heat—something that’s easier with
the greater surface-area-to-body-mass ratio
of smaller creatures. An early horse known
as Sifrhippus sandrae, for example, shrank
by nearly one-third during the PETM, and
an early primate called Cantius abditus went
down in size by about 10 percent between the
middle of the period and its end.
 THE HOTHOUSE OF FUTURE PAST

DANGER
ZONES
• By the time the PETM started, the
oceans were already hot. The ancient At-
lantic, for instance, was 92°F at the equator
before the warming pulse, or nearly 10°F
higher than it is today. The PETM lifted that to
above 98°F, more than 16°F above the modern
average equatorial Atlantic temperature.
The seas quickly became heat stressed. With
such toasty surface waters, the deeper seas
lost their cooling source. Cold water is better
at retaining oxygen, so O2 levels plummeted
down below. The influx of carbon dioxide

STRANGE from the global warming also caused a sharp

increase in the ocean’s acidity.

NEW RAINS Few forms of life can survive in such suf-

focating waters. In fossil deposits from the
PETM, paleontologists have found that
• Swampy polar forests didn’t just dinoflagellates—tiny organisms that ooze tox-
spring up on their own when temperatures ins and can create deadly algal blooms called
jumped during the PETM. Plants need hydra- “red tides”—flourished in the nearly 100°F
tion, after all, and changes to the world’s rain surface water of the equator. These blooms
cycle provided an essential assist in the prolif- choke oxygen out of the ocean, which is why
eration of subtropical canopies. they’re so deadly. Our modern waters are cop-
Much of our planet’s weather patterns— ing with a similar scenario: With hundreds of
the ways air and water circulate through sea so-called dead zones documented across the
and sky—are influenced by the differences world, including in the Gulf of Mexico and
between temperatures at the hot equator multiple spots in the Baltic Sea, we risk turn-
and those at the chilly poles. Prior to the ing back the clock to the PETM.
PETM, H2O that evaporated near Earth’s
midsection formed rain clouds that dropped
water both in the tropics and at polar lati-
tudes. But the warming climate’s alterations
to air currents caused more of the equator’s
moisture to travel as far as the poles before
coming back down. This is part of what al-
lowed huge pecan and cypress trees to grow
in the ancient Arctic, giving lemur-like pri-
mates a place to clamber.
But rain has to come from somewhere; this
surge in wet weather in some parts of the
world meant arid regions saw even more of
their moisture lost to evaporation. Modern cli-
mate change may have similar effects. Wetter
winters are already increasing the frequency
of damaging floods in northwestern Europe.
Meanwhile, the southwestern United States is
on track to become even more parched than it
already is. Research suggests that by the end
of the century, soils in the region will be 10 to
20 percent drier than they are now, increasing
the risk of drought by at least 20 percent.

39
the
cooler
NANOSCIENCE
D U S TS O F F A
Q U I R K O F P H YS I C S
TO O P T I M I Z E A I R
C O N D I T I O N I N G.
C A N I T H E L P SAV E
T H E P L A N E T TO O?

BY
ANDREW ZALESKI

POPSCI.COM
SUMMER 2021
PG 40
 T H E Y L O O K L I K E M I R R O R S : 3 2 R E C TA N G L E S N E AT LY
ARR ANGED IN EIGHT ROWS ON THE ROOF TOP OF A
SUPER M A RK E T C A L L ED GROCERY OU T L E T IN S TOCK TON,
C A L I F O R N I A . S H I M M E R I N G B E N E AT H A B R I G H T S K Y,
AT F IR S T GL A NC E T HE Y C OUL D BE S OL A R PA NEL S, BU T
T HE JOB OF T HIS R IG IS QUI T E DIF F ER EN T. I T K EEP S T H E
S T O R E F R O M O V E R H E AT I N G .
TILTED TOWARD THE SUN, THE PANELS ABSORB
almost none of the warmth beating down on them; they even
launch some into space, improving the performance of the
systems that keep things inside cold. The feat relies on a phe-
nomenon called radiative cooling: Everything on Earth emits
heat in the form of invisible infrared rays that rise skyward. At
night, in the absence of mercury-raising daylight, this can chill
something enough to produce ice. When your car’s windshield
frosts over, even if the thermometer hasn’t dipped below freez-
ing? That’s radiative cooling in action.
To Aaswath Raman, who created Grocery Outlet’s shiny
tiles, that effect seemed like an opportunity. “Your skin,
your roof, the ground, all of them are cooling by sending
their heat up to the sky,” he says.
Raman, a materials science and engineering professor at
the University of California at Los Angeles, is the co-founder
of SkyCool Systems, a startup trying to flip the script on the
technology we depend on to create chill. As the world warms,
demand for air conditioning and refrigeration is going up. But
these systems themselves expel a tremendous amount of heat,
and the chemical compounds they use can escape skyward,
where they act as a planet-warming greenhouse gas. Ac-
cording to the Birmingham Energy Institute in the UK, these
substances and the power involved accounted for at least 11 per-
cent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2018. By 2050, more
than 4.5 billion air conditioners and 1.6 billion refrigerators are
projected to consume nearly 40 percent of all electricity. If it
goes mainstream, SkyCool’s tech—and similar approaches in
the works from competitors and other researchers—could
slow the cycle by naturally lowering building temperatures
and easing the energy burden on conventional methods.
After Grocery Outlet put the panels on the roof of the
25,000-square-foot building in late 2019, energy use by
the store’s refrigeration system dropped by 15 percent. That
amounts to almost $6,000 in savings per year.
It’s hard to say if the installation has grabbed the infrastruc-
tural upgrade brass ring and paid for itself. Lime Energy, a
national retrofitter specializing in upgrades to boost efficiency,
covered the supermarket’s setup costs, which made the pan-
els affordable. To work on a massive scale, though, radiative
cooling needs to be cheap to manufacture and install. Make
that happen, and it could be one way to conserve power and re-
duce emissions. “I was somewhat skeptical that you could gain
this significant amount of cooling even under direct sun,” says
Chris Atkinson, a former program director of the Advanced
Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E), a division of the
42 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 / P O P S C I.CO M
US Department of Energy (DOE) that funded Raman’s
early research. “But once it was explained to me, it sounded
plausible—and the results are remarkably compelling.”
CENTURIES AGO, DESERT-DWELLING PEOPLES
exploited radiative cooling to make ice. In the evenings,
they insulated the walls of large bowls or pits, then poured
in water. During the pitch-black night, heat escaped the liq-
uid, and by morning, it was frozen solid.
Architects and physicists were long skeptical that the ef-f
fect could ever work in daylight. In the 1970s and ’80s, they
made various attempts to apply it to buildings using pools
of water on rooftops. But the structures were difficult to
maintain and still absorbed too much of the sun’s warmth.
Raman’s own interest in the technique took hold in 2012
while he was finishing his doctorate in applied physics at
Stanford University. He was fascinated with how materials
interact with light and thought about pursuing a career in
solar energy. Then he happened upon research discussing
radiative cooling and became fixated on whether the effect
could ever happen under direct sunlight.
“What’s happening at night is you are losing heat to the
sky, and the sky is letting some of that go to space,” he says.
“During the day, you want to continue doing that, but at the
same time you want to avoid absorbing the sun’s energy.”
Luckily, Raman had nanotechnology at his disposal—a
discipline that designs and produces materials through ar- r
ranging molecules and atoms to behave exactly as needed.
Under the guidance of Shanhui Fan, an applied physics
and electrical engineering professor at Stanford, and with
a small team from the engineering department, Raman
developed the material that now forms the basis of Sky- y
Cool Systems. (ARPA-E helped with a $300,000 grant;
later, the agency awarded the team some $2.5 million in
additional funding.) In the labs, he had access to a vari-
ety of tools: physical vapor deposition machines, used for
producing ultrathin multilayered coatings; scanning elec-
tron microscopes to determine the thickness of the layers;
and a variety of spectrophotometers, which measured the
ultraviolet
a and infrared properties of the substances.
In less than a year, they created a thin film composed of
seven microscopic layers atop a sliver of silver. The slices
alternated between hafnium oxide, an inorganic compound
that acts as an electrical insulator, and silicon dioxide, or
 BREATHING
THING
THE COOLER
ROOM

silica, a natural material that makes up quartz, sand, and

nearly two-thirds of Earth’s crust.
Acting together, the substances enable a special set of
optical properties. For starters, they’re especially good
at emitting infrared light. Greenhouse gases and water
molecules in the atmosphere usually absorb most of these
rays and send them back to Earth. Infrared between 8 ambient air temperature, which was well above 80°F, a result
and 13 micrometers in wavelength, however, isn’t ab- he subsequently published in Nature.
sorbed by the atmosphere and instead slips into space, Around that same time, mutual friends connected him with
so Raman tuned the film to radiate only within that nar- Eli Goldstein, who was at Stanford finishing a doctorate in me-
row range. What’s more, the material reflects 97 percent chanical engineering. The men spent the next two years giving
of the sun’s beams, enough to generate a cooling effect themselves a practical education in air conditioning and refrig-
during the day. “It’s actually sending more heat out to the eration, talking to manufacturers as well as their customers.

1
HOW
RADIATIVE
COOLING
WORKS

1. Invisible infrared
light is emitted by
every thing from
the sun to your
sneakers.
2 4
2. SkyCool’s spe-
cialized roof tiles
absorb that light.
3. The panels re-
flect the infrared
at a wavelength
between 8 and
13 micrometers.
4. That frequency 3
allows the waves to
wiggle through the
atmosphere, send-
ing high temps out ILLUSTRATION BY MARTINA CECCHI
into space.

sky than the sky as a whole sends back,” says Raman.
Around 2013, Raman began testing his specialized reflec-
tor in the real world. That summer, he set up a small array
of panels atop the university’s electrical engineering build-
ing. One morning, while checking instruments measuring
radiation and reflectivity, Raman placed his hand on one of
the sheets baking in the sunshine. It felt cold.
“That was immediately pretty exciting,” Raman al-
lows. In fact, the material was about 40°F cooler than the
In 2016, the pair founded SkyCool Systems—its name a nod to
night sky cooling, another term for the physics phenomenon—
and set out to commercialize their tech.
ON A TRIP TO MUMBAI TO VISIT HIS GRANDMOTHER,
Raman had glimpsed just how influential the new film might
be. More homes than he remembered from childhood had

P O P S C I.CO M / S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 43

AC units installed in their windows.
While only an estimated 15 percent of the world’s
population—mostly in the US, Japan, Korea, and China—has
air conditioning, its use is precipitously expanding. According
to 2015 projections, sales in countries like Brazil and Indonesia
are increasing by upwards of 15 percent every year, although In-
dia is estimated to be the fastest-growing sector: When Raman
was testing his film, residents owned more than 20 million air
conditioners; by 2020, it was 48 million. The International En-
ergy Agency (IEA), a Paris-based group that makes policy
recommendations to national governments on sustainable
energy solutions, projects that Indians will own more than
1 billion units by 2050. It’s a victory for public health—in 2015,
more than 2,300 people in the country died in a crippling heat
wave—but a harbinger of climate consequences.
FROM LEFT:
Atop a big-box
store’s Califor-
nia roof, SkyCool’s
panels fling in-
frared light into
space, helping to
cool the building
below. Company co-
founder Aaswath
Raman, who hopes
to make AC as we
know it obsolete.
Meanwhile, the basics of cooling technology are about
the same as when the first electric air-conditioning unit
was designed in 1902. AC systems pump a refrigerant—the
chemical compound that moves heat and, in turn, causes
cooling—through a mechanical system that forces it through
several phase changes. The refrigerant funnels indoors
through a coil as a liquid, where it turns into a vapor as it ab-
sorbs heat. It exits the building and enters a condenser, where
the refrigerant is compressed and expels heat to the outside as
it turns from vapor back into liquid. That process repeats until
the inside is at the temperature set by the thermostat.
The fossil fuels that power this choreography and the
chemicals required, however, are major contributors to
global warming. In 2016, the DOE reported that stationary
AC systems accounted for nearly 700 million metric tons of
44 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 / P O P S C I.CO M
greenhouse gas emissions globally every year. The pol-
lution comes from the combustion to produce the power
that runs the units and the hydrofluorocarbons used as re-
frigerants, which are prone to escaping during repairs or
retirement. Their effect is “several thousand times higher
than that of carbon dioxide,” the report concluded.
In broad strokes, the world is simply starting to use
too much air conditioning too quickly—and yet it must,
as temperatures rise. This is leading, as the IEA put it in
2018, to an impending “cold crunch.” By midcentury, the
juice required to run ACs will become one of the top driv-
v
ers of worldwide electricity demand, helping to push the
planet beyond the point of irrevocable ecological damage.
Indeed, our increasing need to lower indoor tempera-
tures is speeding us toward the 1.5°C warming threshold
established in 2018 by the United Nations Intergovern-
mental Panel on Climate Change.
“Temperatures are getting hotter, and that’s inherently
going to mean that air conditioners and refrigeration sys-
tems become less efficient,” says SkyCool’s Goldstein.
Eventually, he and Raman realized their panels could
have a greater impact on energy usage if they aug- g
mented existing climate-control systems. Around
2016, SkyCool ran another trial at Stanford; this time,
it set up a rig with thin water pipes running directly
underneath. Over three days, radiative cooling lowered
the temperature of the water by upwards of 40°F. It
wouldn’t be hard to connect the pipes to the condenser
of a conventional AC or refrigeration setup, where the
superchilled water would help to chill the refrigerant,
reducing the overall energy load. One of the models
showed that integrating the technique into a two-story
office building in Las Vegas would lower electricity de-
mand by 21 percent during the summer.
Raman and Goldstein decided to launch the busi-
ness with locations that use refrigeration systems,
 THE COOLER

since—unlike AC—those need to run every hour of every

day. Their estimates indicated that electricity savings for
cooling infrastructure that runs constantly are greater
than 500 kilowatt-hours per year per square meter of
SkyCool film. From 2017 through 2019, the company
signed up several California customers interested in try- y
ing out anything that might lower their bills: a convenience
but they admit that SkyCool’s future challenges will be on
store, a data center, and Grocery Outlet. The 32 panes atopthe manufacturing—not the scientific—side of things. A 2015
that market cover 62 square meters; data collected so far study by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, part of
shows the store is using 100 fewer kilowatt-hours per day, the DOE, estimated that if rooftop panels like SkyCool’s could
or 36,500 fewer kilowatt-hours every year. be built and installed for less than $6.25 a square meter, the
There is a limit, however, to the overall effectiveness of
costs would be covered by energy savings over five years.
radiative cooling. The best climates in which to deploy the The pair think they can hit a worthwhile price inside three
technology are relatively dry with clear skies: California,years, in part because they’ve further refined the film they
Arizona, Nevada, and the like. Cloud cover and high hu- originally tested at Stanford. These days, the precise makeup
midity reduce the effect during the day, as water moleculesis proprietary, although it still contains a mix of polymers and
in the air trap some of the emitted infrared. inorganic materials. “We’ve figured out ways to do it that are
SkyCool is in discussions with the California State Uni-lower cost and better suited to manufacturing,” Raman says.
versity system to use its tech to chill water that will be With the help of a $3.5 million federal energy grant, SkyCool
piped through the ceilings of three classrooms at Cal Mari-soon hopes to have the sort of manufacturing connection that
time. (Goldstein hopes the project will launch in 2022.) But
could make its film cost-effective. The startup is collaborating
with the 3M Company through 2022 to devise
an affordable means of making hundreds of
thousands of its films. The goal is to drive down
the price enough by 2023 that customers with
persistent cooling needs can recoup installation
“IMAGINE INSTEAD OF HAVING costs in three to five years.
On top of those challenges, other researchers
TO BUY AN AIR CONDITIONER IN say they can get the same result with paint. The
A HOUSE IN INDIA OR AFRICA, YOU white version tried decades ago didn’t reflect
enough rays to create a cooling effect. In 2020,
COULD JUST PUT THIS ON THE ROOF,” though, Purdue University engineers created
SAYS SKYCOOL’S ELI GOLDSTEIN. an ultrawhite variety that works like SkyCool’s
mirrorlike material. According to Xiulin Ruan,
a professor of mechanical engineering involved
in its development, the product reflects 98.1
percent of sunlight and radiates infrared at the
right wavelength to escape into space—cooling
in dry climates, it might be enough to use the panels buildings midday to 8°F below the ambient temperature.
by themselves. “Imagine instead of having to buy an Ruan admits that the paint is more a supplemental measure.
air conditioner in a small house in India or Africa, you “You still need to turn on air conditioners, but it can offset a lot
could just put this on the roof,” says Goldstein. of the heat from the sun and reduce demand,” he says. In that
sense, it’s missing one component of SkyCool: the ability to
connect to existing systems and boost their performance. Still,
paints have caught Raman’s eye. Last year he co-published an
BECAUSE OF THE PROMISE OF RADIATIVE article in the journal Joulee discussing the possibility of modifyy-
ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF SKYCOOL SYSTEMS

cooling, other startups have rushed into the field. Engi- ing off-the-shelf paints so they too carry out radiative cooling.
neers from the University of Colorado, Boulder and the
University of Wyoming teamed up to create their own
film-like material in 2017. Engineers at the University
of Buffalo published research in February 2021 on their
own version: two mirrors composed of 10 thin layers of
silver and silicon dioxide. They’re now trying to bring it
to market through their company, Sunny Clean Water.
The big question is how likely people are to imple-
ment a brand-new product. “The technology makes
sense,” says Jeremy Munday, a University of California,
Davis professor who studies clean-energy innovations.
“It really comes down to things like the market, the
cost, and then just having the motivation to adopt it.”
Raman and Goldstein aren’t disclosing their pricing,
If any of these methods do catch on, no one seems too con-
cerned about sending heat into the final frontier. “If all that
energy was emitted back into space, it would not have any no-
ticeable effects anywhere at all,” says Atkinson, the former
DOE official who backed Raman’s early research.
For now, SkyCool is trying to win over more businesses.
Soon it plans to deploy its panels in office buildings to augment
commercial AC. In March, a big-box retailer in Southern Cali-
fornia became the latest customer. On the roof, five full rows of
the creaseless, mirrorlike films sit between two columns of so-
lar panels—a fitting juxtaposition, considering Raman’s prior
interests. Now he wants to cut energy, not produce it.
“All you have to do,” he says, “is put the material outside,
and it stays cool.”

P O P S C I.CO M / S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 45
INTO THE
 I L LU S T R AT I O N BY C R I S T I N A S PA N O

The human body can IT BEGINS WHEN YOU STOP SWEATING. Perspiration usually
cools you down by releasing heat into the air as sweat evaporates,
withstand extreme
but eventually, if your body becomes dehydrated or the external
temperatures for only mixture of hot air and humidity gets too high, you can no longer
so long—and the planet’s push the salty liquid through your pores. You flush all over as
blood moves toward your skin—an attempt to shuttle warmth
thermostat keeps rising. away from your core. Muscles cramp up as your salt reservoirs
Can we keep our cool? deplete. Organs swell as your body kicks up an immune response.
Your thinking gets fuzzy. You might start hallucinating. You vomit
so your stomach can stop wasting energy on digestion. Your heart
By Kat Eschner pounds and your head aches. You may begin to have seizures.
When death finally comes, whether within the hour or a few
days later, it’s in the form of a heart attack or organ failure. In
PopSci.com the throes of heatstroke, your internal temperature may spike
above 105°F, but if you’re alone—victims often are—you’ll have
Summer 2021
gone cold by the time someone finds you. It’s likely no one will
PG 47 know that the true killer was heat.
COOLER HEADS PREVAILING
The human physique begins to fall apart when it gets too hot.
The spreading risk of death by heat will need more than “We have to maintain a very specific range of body temperatures,”
one solution. These are a few of the people trying to figure says Shane Campbell-Staton, a Princeton University evolutionary
out how to keep things from boiling over. biologist who studies the impact of extreme temps on people and
animals. Most of us are comfortable when the air around us hovers
I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY A R U N A S K A C I N S K A S
between 68°F and 77°F, which allows us to maintain an internal
thermostat somewhere around 98 degrees. When the environment
pushes us past those limits, the delicate balance of chemical re-
actions that keep us alive starts to wobble, leading to cascades of
negative effects that can very quickly become fatal.
Officially, only about 700 people in the US die from exposure to
extreme heat per year, largely among vulnerable populations, like
the unhoused and elderly, and people who spend long hours out-
side for work or sport. But scientists who study the links between
weather and human health believe the actual number is much
higher, says Scott Greene, a University of Oklahoma geographer
who has been researching the subject since the 1990s. Exposure
Wendelyn Oslock Gregory Wellenius to extreme highs could be the culprit behind thousands of deaths
Founder and past pres- Environmental health in the United States each year and many more around the globe.
ident, Sustainability in epidemiologist, Boston It’s hard to say how many for certain, given that most of them go
Medicine at Ohio State University unrecorded. But whatever that grim tally is, we know one thing
University for sure: We can expect more in the years to come.
Using the most recent Without dramatic climate action in the near future, we will
I’m the founder of a available data—from likely experience a sharp uptick in extreme heat events across
sustainability-focused 2001 to 2006—my col- the country by midcentury. That means a greater percentage of
student group on my leagues and I studied the population will deal with dangerous highs—according to the
med school campus (I whether heat alerts from National Weather Service that’s triple digits, or anything in the
just graduated!). We host the National Weather 90s paired with 65 percent humidity or more.
training sessions that Service prevented deaths Recent data from the Union of Concerned Scientists predicts
complement the school’s in 20 cities. Outside of that nearly 90 million people will experience 30 days or more
curriculum with an eye Philadelphia, they didn’t of 105°F temperatures per year by 2050, compared to the fewer
on adapting to aspects seem to offer a big ad- than 1 million who experienced such heat annually in the late
of climate change that vantage. But it’s not 1900s. Those 30 scorchers will affect nearly one-third of Ameri-
impact patients, like surprising that telling can urban areas, predominantly in the Sunbelt and the southern
increased incidence of people, “It’s going to be Great Plains. Temperatures in the Northeast could exceed 90°F
asthma. When students hot tomorrow” didn’t for up to 42 days a year, while some states in the Midwest can
at Ohio are learning have a big impact when expect similar forecasts for more than 100 days a year. We can
about diseases of a there wasn’t infrastruc- protect ourselves by changing our lifestyles to suit these climes,
particular organ system, ture in place to help them but public health experts say it will take a concerted effort from
Sustainability in Medi- avoid danger. Today, local, state, and national governments to educate people on the
cine will bring in experts many cities use warn- dangers of heat, alert them when temperatures creep too high,
to speak to how those ings but also have more and offer them solutions—like public access to AC and water.
conditions are tied to targeted approaches. Some of us are more vulnerable than others. The elderly gen-
the environment. Last New York City, for exam- erally don’t sweat or pump blood as efficiently as youngsters can,
year, the group joined ple, reimburses certain while children tend to perspire less and have greater surface-to-
a national organization low-income homes for body-mass ratios. Certain medications, like antipsychotics and
called Medical Students fan or air-conditioner in- blood pressure pills, can throw internal thermostats out of whack.
for a Sustainable Future. stallation. There are a lot People without homes or access to air conditioning don’t have
They’re auditing curricula of seemingly good ideas safe spaces in which to cool down, while construction workers and
around the country to see out there about how to other laborers sometimes have no choice but to be outdoors, often
which schools are falling protect people on hot during the hottest parts of the day.
short in dealing with cli- days—things like splash But anyone can succumb to rising temps. The National
mate change and related pads and mobile alerts— Weather Service’s heat index indicates that even temperatures
illnesses—and to try to but we don’t yet know in the 80s come with the risk of illness if you’re exposed for hours
close the gap. Extreme which deliver the return at a time and humidity is high, or if you’re engaged in strenuous
heat exposure is going to on investment in terms of outdoor activity like athletics. The risk goes up in lockstep with
become more of an issue lives saved and illnesses increasing airborne moisture and temperatures.
in the future, and physi- averted. That’s what my How likely a person is to die from exposure, however, remains
cians need to know how team is working to figure somewhat opaque. That’s why Greene and others in his field ex-
to spot it and treat it. out right now. amine how many people die in a given (CONTINUED ON PAGE 51)

48 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 / P O P S C I.CO M
SOOTHING BALMS

The country is warm-

ing quickly from coast I L LU S T R AT I O N BY C R I S T I N A S PA N O

to coast. The West is

adapting to new highs,
while cities in the East Every region of the country will see more dangerously
juggle the existing threat hot days over the next century. This data shows scorch-
of bitter-cold winters A MATTER ers by region in 2100, but with a twist: It assumes some
and the rising specter of amount of work to mitigate emissions. If we don’t make
extreme heat in the OF DEGREES progress, the numbers will get a lot bigger.
summer. This is how
locales are coping. north plains midwest
3 days 6 days days over 100ºF

Los Angeles, California northwest

1 day northeast
Since 2014, the city has 3 days
required almost all new
residential roofs to use
material that reflects sun-
light, which keeps heat southwest southeast
from seeping into homes 23 days 15 days
below. Research suggests
widespread adoption of
this tech could reduce
future exposure by 50
percent or more.
south plains
NOW 21 days

Chicago, Illinois
BY 2100
After more than 700 ex-
cess deaths occurred northwest north plains midwest northeast
4 days 10 days 27 days 12 days
in one week during a
1995 wave, Chicago—
traditionally associated
with intense cold—began
to take action. One cur-
rent tactic is a rollout of
air-conditioned buses to
help the city’s vulnerable
residents cool off while
staying close to home.

Phoenix, Arizona
southeast
60 days
This fast-warming city
adopted a “Tree and
Shade Master Plan” in
2010 but was slow to
get started. Today it has
committed to working southwest south plains
toward “tree equity”— 24 days 57 days
making sure that all
neighborhoods have the
chilling power of leafy
canopies—by 2030.
I N F O G R A P H I C BY SA R A C H O D O S H
(CONTINUED ON PAGE 50)
 (CONTINUED FROM PAGE 49)
97°F–99°F
Everything hums
along like normal, Miami, Florida
though you might
start to sweat if Miami-Dade County
you’re exerting appointed its first chief
yourself. heat officer in 2021,
and it reportedly aims to
100°F adopt a comprehensive
Your hypothala- plan as soon as possi-
mus, a brain region ble. One small but much-
in charge of tem- needed intervention
perature regulation, already underway: shade
puts sweat glands structures to keep bus
to work. Their job stops from baking.
is tougher if it’s
humid and perspi- 100.4°F
ration can’t quickly This is where your
Anchorage, Alaska
evaporate. body should be
during physical
Alaskan summer tempera-
exertion—when
tures and humidity are
“feeling the burn”
rising enough to cause
is still a good thing. illness among folks not
used to the swelter, espe-
101°F cially since buildings and
Your heartbeat in- boats of the frozen North
are designed to keep
creases about 10
warmth in. The city is
times per minute for
working on a plan to edu-
every 2-degree ele- cate its residents on the
vation in body temp, risks and create cooling
boosting blood flow strategies before 2025.
to carry heat to the
skin and away from
vital organs.
New Orleans, Louisiana
104°F
The municipal health de-
As fail-safes like
partment teamed up with
sweat reach their a community app-based
limits, you’ve lost climate reporting ser-
enough salt that the vice called iSeeChange
chemical reactions during a 2020 heat wave
104°F–106°F
that power your to figure out which parts
Organs are soon on
cells get wobbly. You of the city sizzle. Prelimi-
the fritz and nerves
may feel increas- nary results indicate that
don’t fire as they
ingly exhausted poorer areas with lower
should. You could tree cover can be up to
and strange.
hallucinate or slip 18ºF hotter.
into a coma.

106°F
Without medical at- New York, New York
tention to cool your
core and restore the In 2020, NYC passed
sodium and water a bylaw requiring the
lost to perspiration, Department of Health to
death is likely. report annually on the
number of deaths where
extreme highs were a
Most people struggle to maintain a normal factor and to identify
body temperature once the external mer- which neighborhoods
cury hits 75°F to 80°F. Here’s what happens are most vulnerable. This
TOO HOT TO HANDLE as your internal thermostat creeps higher. way the city can target its
interventions.

I L LU S T R AT I O N BY C R I S T I N A S PA N O
 COOLER HEADS PREVAILING CONT.
(CONTINUED FROM PAGE 48) area during an unusually hot period,
as opposed to just looking at those deaths that coroners or med-
ical examiners code as related to hyperthermia. They search for
what are known as “excess deaths”—fatalities that spike above
the number typical for an area with the same demographics
during that time of year. A similar analysis published by a dif-
ferent team in Environmental Epidemiology in 2020 suggests that
heat is a direct or indirect cause of up to 10,000 fatalities in the
United States each year—far higher than the official count. The
circumstances are right for that number to keep going up, but the
crisis is already at our door. Even based on official statistics, heat
is already the leading weather-related killer in the country, ahead
of winter storms, hurricanes, and flooding. Jason Cervenec Kimberly McMahon
There’s still time, however, to prevent gruesome deaths. When Education and outreach Public weather services
Greene started researching this field in the 1990s, a stretch of director, Byrd Polar and program manager,
fatally hot weather in the US—most notably, the 1995 Chicago Climate Research Center, National Weather
heat wave that killed more than 700 people in five days—led cit- Ohio State University Service
ies across the country to start planning ahead. There hasn’t been
sufficient research on such programs to quantify the exact ben- In 2016, the city of We spend a lot of time
efits, according to the CDC, but what data we have is positive. Columbus, Ohio, asked thinking about how best
The widespread adoption of warning systems to make residents my organization to lead to communicate the
aware of extreme temperatures and their health risks is one of a team in creating a dangers of high tempera-
the most important changes to come out of those efforts. An climate change adap- tures. We’re currently
investigation of one such initiative in Philadelphia from 1995 to tation plan. Columbus is developing a national
1998, for example, found that the city’s interventions saved 117 warming faster than the heat strategy. That ef-
lives in three years. The urban area’s accompanying response national average. Our fort includes changing
infrastructure also played an important role, Greene says. The winters will look more our phrasing from “ex-
media educated the public on the dangers of high temps, local like North Carolina by cessive heat” to “extreme
utilities maintained services throughout the heat wave even in 2100, and our summers heat,” which research
cases where payments were overdue, cooling centers offered ac- will look more like north- has told us better con-
cess to shelter and water, and the city increased its staffing for ern Texas. One of our veys the danger. We’re
emergency medical services. Greene and others are still working plan’s big focal points is also evangelizing some-
on tallying the exact impact of each of these mitigation efforts. increasing the number thing called WetBulb
Still, he says, it’s clear that simply making residents aware of the and coordination of cool- Globe Temperature. It’s
dangers can go a long way toward saving lives. ing centers—safe places a little more complicated
But hot spells that take locals by surprise remain a concern, where anyone can come than what people are
especially in cities. A phenomenon called the urban heat island inside to get out of the used to, but has a wealth
effect can raise temperatures in areas with lots of heat-holding heat and get water— of information, includ-
concrete and a dearth of trees by several degrees compared to which have become even ing guidance on the safe
surrounding areas. That means densely packed metropolises can more important here amount of time to spend
fall into the danger zone while folks in the suburbs feel fine. because the summer outside. The heat index
And even though new warning systems and infrastructure have nighttime temperatures we produce now uses
helped, there’s more work to do. “The main thing that separates are rising fastest. But temperature and humid-
us from the rest of the tree of life is our unique ability to buffer there’s only so much a ity to predict what it will
ourselves against extremes,” says Princeton’s Campbell-Staton. city can do by itself. Take feel like in the shade.
To keep dropping the number of deaths, even as temperatures power infrastructure, WetBulb Globe Tempera-
go up, city, county, state, and federal governments need to coordi- which gets stressed by ture takes into account
nate their responses, Greene says. He wants to see a more robust rising temps. Most of that things like downward so-
centralized national forecasting effort that predicts temperature is governed by state law, lar radiation and forecast
spikes as far out as possible. With advance notice, cities could so sometimes all we could wind speed. It also gives
prepare by freeing up emergency funds and properly staffing recommend was that the activity guidance based
infrastructure like ambulances and cooling centers. Such alerts city request this or that on temperatures in di-
could also clearly spell out what extreme heat might mean for from the state or federal rect sunlight, instead of
a given locale: Just as an inch of snow is more of an emergency government. Between the assuming you’ll be under
in Atlanta than it is in Boston due to baseline preparedness and delays—there’s been a lot cover where it’s safer.
local knowledge, you might not need a heat alert in Phoenix for of turnover since we’ve That’s particularly im-
the same temperatures as in Anchorage. These efforts could help gotten started—and the portant for people who
raise the profile of extreme highs as an issue, Greene says, and limits of what we could spend a lot of time out-
save lives while they do. But for now, it’s important to realize just suggest, it’s clear cities side, like construction
how many people are at risk—and how few of them know it. face big challenges. workers or athletes.

P O P S C I.CO M / S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 51
 AN AMERICAN TAIL

The radioactive legacy of the nuclear era in the US

scars landscapes across the country. Cleanup crews

and outdoor lovers in Moab, Utah—once the Uranium

Capital of the World—are finally eyeing recovery.

By Sarah Scoles
 The Atlas mill
near Moab was
the epicen-
ter of the area’s
uranium boom.
PopSci.com
--
Summer 2Ø21

53

On a given day in the area around Moab, Utah, visitors
may view snowcapped mountains while gazing through a
red-rock-desert arch that curves above a Grand-rivaling
canyon. Or they might fish a river and then scale sand-
stone cliffs. Or perhaps they’ll wander a pine forest in the
morning and uncover a dinosaur fossil after lunch.
“There’s no one that’s seen it all,” says
Russell von Koch, speaking of the vast and
wild lands around the town he’s lived in for
more than 30 years. He pauses, then says,
“There are many out trying.”
And he does mean “many.” Moab, with a
population of just over 5,000, is a capital-D
Destination for outdoor enthusiasts. Three
million people visit every year. Some go be-
cause it’s the gateway to both Canyonlands
and Arches national parks, the latter of
which regularly announces on social me-
dia that it’s at capacity. Others come for
the less regulated or less trafficked pub-
lic lands: national forest, state parks, and
1.8 million acres overseen by the Bureau
of Land Management’s (BLM) Moab Field
Office. Von Koch worked for the BLM for
three decades, in large part as a recreation
manager for the Moab area, develop-
ing amenities like campgrounds and bike
paths. “Almost anything that’s outside the
national parks, I probably had some role in
the creation of the facilities,” he says.
54 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 / P O P S C I.CO M
Von Koch understands the strong force
of the place. “The areas around Moab have
more scenic diversity than any place I’ve
ever been in the world,” he says.
Because of this, Moab attracts ATV en-
thusiasts who power down trails, Jeep
drivers who slink along canyon roads, hik-
ers who traipse tricky paths, and mountain
bikers who crank their tires over the rocks.
The town’s Main Street is home to every-
thing from MOYO (frozen yogurt) to the
Moab Brewery to Pagan Mountaineering.
In the middle of that Patagonia-saturated
stretch, though, you’ll also find a structure
labeled Uranium Building. Once full of of-
fices, today it also houses a novelty T-shirt
store. But it was constructed and named
during the city’s first boom, in the 1950s—
the one that put it on the map.
Moab, see, was home to the Atlas Ura-
nium Mill, one of the most productive
processing facilities for the raw radioactive
ore. The site was one of a couple dozen in
the US that transformed the stuff into the
refined material that seeded power plants
and weapons during Cold War times.
The facility also transformed Moab from
a sleepy town into a wide-awake city. But
when demand for element 92 waned and
the plant was shuttered in 1984, a danger-
ous environmental legacy remained: an
80-foot-tall, 16-million-ton mound of radio-
active (colloquially “hot”) waste. The heap
contains radium, which uranium produces
when it decays. Radium’s half-life—how
long it takes for half of a given sample to
decay—is 1,600 years. But the real prob-
lem is that it becomes radon, a gas that
can increase humans’ risk of cancer when
inhaled. The waste also transmits radioac-
tive material, metals, and other unwanted
substances into the groundwater and the
Colorado River, harming wildlife. All just
three miles from the city center.
Some call it “the Pile” or “the Eyesore.”
Since 2003, the US Department of
Energy (DOE)—steward of the nation’s nu-
clear weapons and charged with addressing
environmental and atomic challenges—
has been working to clean up the mess.
Across the West, the DOE has remediated
18 uranium processing sites in the same
category as Moab’s, their own piles rang-
ing from 60,000 to 4.6 million cubic yards
of material. The only ones left are a dis-
posal site in Grand Junction, Colorado, and
Moab, which has the dubious distinction of
having to deal with 12 million cubic yards of
waste. “But that will end,” von Koch says.
“And so what happens next?”
What-next is, in fact, von Koch’s job. As
chair of Moab’s Site Futures Committee,
he coordinates an effort to plan poten-
tial development of the nearly 480-acre
federally owned property. It’s the kind of
real estate—waterfront, next to a national
PREVIOUS SPREAD: COURTESY OF US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
park—that would sell for unimaginable
millions if it were listed (which it won’t be).
Von Koch is preparing for the event that
the DOE will simply turn over the land to
local government after the agency finishes
scrubbing the site. The plan detailing what
might then become of it has a straightfor-
ward title: “After the Pile.”
emediating the Atlas
R property—an endeavor called
the Moab Uranium Mill
Tailings Remedial Action
(UMTRA) project—is the job of a second
Russell, Russell McCallister, the DOE’s
 cleanup director. “That site’s been there
for a long, long time,” McCallister says.
“Most everybody in Moab, to a person,
wants it gone.” His work’s an industrial Steen had hit upon
version of the “Leave no trace” motto,
which urges adventurers to minimize the largest high-grade
their impact on the land.
uranium deposit in the
Or, more accurately, remove the trace of
whoever came before. That’s McCallister’s
US, around 3,000 feet
specialty. He spent six years, for instance,
dealing with the mess left at a former nu- long, 800 feet wide,
clear weapons factory in Colorado called
Rocky Flats, which had been so poorly run and up to 35 feet thick.
that the FBI raided it in the late 1980s for
environmental violations—like illegally He became known as
burning hazardous waste under cover of
night. McCallister’s team shortened the es- the King of Uranium.
timated detox time by nearly 70 years.
Three years into his UMTRA tenure, And Moab, once a slow
Moab’s countdown clock has gone from a
projected finish time of 2034 to one of 2029. farming community,
He hopes he can move it to 2027, maybe
even 2025, by speeding up the pace while became the Uranium
maintaining safety (no one’s been hurt on-
site in more than four years). Capital of the World.
What came before at Moab traces back
SARAH SCOLES
to the beginning of the Cold War, when the
Atomic Energy Commission—the DOE’s
predecessor—was desperate for ura-
nium to fuel nuclear weapons projects. It
mounted a public relations campaign to
convince people to go prospecting. “‘We’ll
buy any uranium you guys got, and we’re
going to pay you top dollar,’” says McCallis-
ter, describing the government’s pitch.
In the early 1950s this lit a spark for ge-
ologist Charlie Steen, who took a Jeep and
his family to a tar-paper shack outside
Moab. In July 1952, he broke his drill on a
coal-like core made of a mineral he didn’t
recognize. “He was down to his last dime,”
says McCallister, when Steen drove to a gas
station, hoping to get some fuel on credit.
He brought a chunk of the dark stuff with
him, and the store’s owner happened to
be Geiger-counting some samples. Steen,
mostly in jest, stuck
his find up to the Once bustling,
instrument. “It went the Atlas mill site
off the charts,” Mc- is now the do-
Callister says. Steen main of cleanup
had found a deposit experts only.
of pitchblende, which today geologists call messes that we can make if we don’t look boom and bust, leaving behind abandoned
uraninite, a rich and radioactive ore. forward properly and with a clear eye.” mines and mills, including Atlas’. Start-
In fact, it turned out to be the largest The taint on the land, and harms to ing in the late ’80s, the company used soil
high-grade uranium deposit in the US, human health, were the effects of short- to place a temporary cover over the tail-
around 3,000 feet long, 800 feet wide, and sighted thinking, Fettus points out. They ings. The pile didn’t present an immediate,
up to 35 feet thick. Soon, Steen developed were born of a perceived national security acute risk of leaking or harming health, but
the claim into a mine called Mi Vida: “My need, a lack of understanding, and a lack it required a permanent cover and better
Life.” He became known as the King of of regulation. “That was something the barrier to block it from leaching into the
Uranium. And Moab, once a slow farming country started to come to grips with in water. Atlas had plans for that but went
community, became the self-styled Ura- the ’60s and ’70s,” he continues. bankrupt in 1998. Eventually, in 2001, the
nium Capital of the World. Hearing of his In 1978, Congress passed the Uranium pile became the DOE’s problem.
cache, would-be discoverers descended, Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act, leg-
ballooning the population from 1,200 to islation intended to spur the cleanup of
4,600 within a few years. Locals started inactive processing sites. Five years later,
renting their yards to campers. Water grew the Environmental Protection Agency en-
short. Schoolkids had to learn in shifts. acted standards to improve such facilities he DOE got to work in 2003.
Straight out of the earth, uranium ore from the start. But even then, says Fettus, T The agency installed wells to
isn’t much good: It needs to be processed radioactivity wasn’t in hazardous waste extract polluted groundwater,
into a concentrated form called yellow- laws—and today it is treated separately. sent it to a storage tank, and
cake, which resembles fancy mineral “There’s none of that straightforward reg- sprayed it on the tailings pile to control
makeup. To make the stuff, Steen estab- ulatory control,” he says. the radioactive dust. It dug other wells
lished a mill called the Uranium Reduction Contamination appears across the Inter- to divert clean water from the Colorado
Company on the banks of the Colorado mountain West, where extraction went River and inject it into the surrounding
River. “Trucks and trucks and trucks of
this material were rolling through the
streets,” says McCallister.
In processing, machines crush the ore,
then mix in acid or an alkaline solution,
which dissolves the uranium, leaving the The taint on the land,
undesirable rock and other minerals.
Those sandy leftovers are called tailings, and harms to human
and the mill pumped them into a pond on
health, were the effects
the west side of the property. In 1962, Steen
sold the mill to a corporation called Atlas.
of shortsighted thinking,
The facility continued to churn through
1,400 tons of ore every day, fueling weapons points out Geoffrey Fettus
through about 1970 and power plants after
that. Over decades, the waste piled up. It of the National Resources
was full of heavy metals and radium, a by-
product of uranium’s decay. Radium itself Defense Council. They
transmutes into radon, which gives birth to
radioactive particulates. “Those can be in- were born of a perceived
haled, get caught in your lungs, and radiate
people for a long time,” says McCallister, national security need, a
increasing the risk of cancer.
The problem wasn’t just the radiation lack of understanding, and
that the pile lofted upward. Rainwater fil-
tered through the material into the soil, a lack of regulation.
then the groundwater, which leached
into the Colorado River, contaminating
it with substances like ammonia. When
the DOE released its environmental anal-
ysis in 2005, ammonia in the part of the
river nearest the tailings pile was more
than 10 times the acceptable amount, kill-
ing young, already endangered fish. The
Moab mill, says Geoffrey Fettus, senior
attorney at the Natural Resources De-
fense Council, “is a dreadful relic that
shows the scope and scale of the kinds of

56 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 / P O P S C I.CO M
 RIGHT: Depart-
ment of Energy
workers dig
up the pile of
waste at the
Atlas uranium
mill. BELOW:
Government
barriers warn off
residents and
adventurers.
soil to dilute the contaminants. Since the
start of the project, the effort has stopped
more than 955,000 pounds of ammonia
and 5,300 pounds of uranium from slip-
ping into the waterway.
For years, officials considered what else
to do, and how. DOE officials debated bury-
ing the pile under a special cover on the
FROM LEFT: SARAH SCOLES; RUSSELL VON KOCH
original site or moving it to one of several
drier and less populated places nearby.
After taking 1,600 public comments and
doing an environmental impact analysis,
they settled on relocating the refuse around
30 miles up the road, to a disposal cell in a
spot called Crescent Junction, which exists
mostly as “the place where one exits I-70 to
get to Moab.” A literal junction.
Since 2009, workers have transferred
11.5 million tons of waste—more than 70
percent of what was there to start with.
Today, they’re working on the last por-
tion. They dig out the tailings with heavy
equipment and spread them out in open
“drying beds” (which poses no greater risk
than already exists at the site). Once the
residue has shed its water weight, it goes
into steel containers and gets loaded onto
a train to nowheresville. Since he took over
in 2017, McCallister has doubled daily trips
from two to four and added more cars,
pushing up the projected finish line.
The Moab site appears pretty unobtru-
sive unless you already know what’s going
on. Sure, there’s a giant red-dirt scar on the
landscape, with trucks wheeling toward
railcars. But that looks like any number of
active extraction-industry spots in Utah for
metals, natural gas, oil, and coal. At one en-
trance, a chain-link and barbed-wire fence
lines a public pull-off, a small roadside area
with weeds growing through the cracks. A
yellow-and-magenta biohazard sign hangs
next to a yellow one that says “No Tres-
passing, by order of the United States
Department of Energy.” Beside it, there’s a
kiosk like you’d find at a trailhead, with a
single sheet of paper pinned to corkboard,
detailing the history and background of the
Moab UMTRA project.
Because the signage is low-key, people
do sometimes end up accidental trespass-
ers, pulling campers into the employee
entrance, wanting to use the bathroom
(no), then finding they can’t turn around.
Two years ago, tourists followed their GPS
in, got around the security guard, and had
to be escorted out. Being on-site for short
periods isn’t hazardous—it doesn’t raise ra-
diation exposure much above background.
57
In part to avoid unexpected visits from the
public, though, McCallister has struggled
with whether to be more upfront with the
branding. But attention is complicated. “Do
you advertise that you’re a DOE site clean-
ing up radioactive material?” he asks. That
might draw unsavory curiosity, purposeful
trespassers, souvenir seekers, angry activ-
ists. “Or do you just leave that little sign out
there that nobody seems to notice?”
he branding at the disposal
T area outside Crescent Junction
is subtler. A small black-and-
white sign at the entrance to
the access road says simply, “DOE SITE,”
pointing toward an open gate that warns
against trespassing. More barbed wire
defines the rest of the boundary, with the
same yellow signs as at Moab. Still, if you
climb the badlanded hill adjacent to the
property and look down, you can see a long
line of train cars and hear their clanking. In
the midst of the distant action, a giant dark
L marks the land, abutted by a few scraped-
away rectangles. It might be a tilled field
or a gravel pit. Very little indicates it’s the
final resting place for radioactive waste.
Few people are around to notice at all. In
Crescent Junction, there are two houses
and a gas station called Jackass Joe’s.
Painted in neon green, it’s designed to
do the opposite of the DOE sites: get your
attention. Giant signs above the pumps
proclaim “Jackass Joe’s UFO Jerky” and
“Twilight Zone.” Nearby, a third one says
“Welcome to Our World” around a painted
flying saucer, although there aren’t any
more sightings here than in any other
random spot in the West. Yet another
promises that customers may purchase
“Food & Sandwiches & Cheap Ass Micro-
wave Shit.” There’s a Scooby-Doo Mystery
Machine parked out front.
It’s a good distraction from what’s going
on a mile or so away. There, trucks take tail-
ings from the train to the disposal cell, an
excavated area that, once finished, will be a
mile long and nearly half a mile wide. The
waste will be buried 25 feet down. But first,
a dozer spreads the material and a roller
squishes it. Once all of it is in place, work-
ers will create a cap to keep contaminants
from leaking up or down. The permanent
covering will be 9 feet deep, comprising
several different layers of soil and rock—
most importantly, radon-blocking shale.
McCallister actually wants to change the
cap’s design. Its top layer—straight rock,
excavated from nearby Fremont Junction—
was the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
norm 20 years ago. “Now those covers are
failing,” he says. Water seeps through and
doesn’t evaporate, so it could eventually
find its way to the underground supply.
A newer type of top layer—a mix of rock
and soil—would allow water to perme-
ate only about a foot and then evaporate.
But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
won’t approve the design until the end
of 2023. McCallister plans to forge ahead
with preparations anyway. “It’s the right
thing to do,” he says, adding it’s a gamble:
He will have to go back to the old idea if
the commission says so.
Whatever the top is made of, the invis-
ible contaminants should stay trapped,
barely raising the
radiation level at
Hot waste from
Jackass Joe’s, when the Atlas mill will
the project is fin- be laid to rest
ished. In 2020, the at this site in
total annual gamma Crescent Junc-
radiation at the home tion, Utah.
COURTESY OF US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
nearest the site was about 26 percent
above Crescent Junction’s natural buzz.
hen the project is finished”
is a milestone von Koch
W
spends a lot of time consider-
ing. “Everyone wants to get it
done,” he says, “to get it done right.” He ac-
tually volunteered to lead the Site Futures
Committee back in 2013 to plan for The
Aftertimes, because he realized his experi-
ence with the Bureau of Land Management
would help. He’s a busy guy, though: He’s
also the community’s liaison with the De-
partment of Energy and a staff member
for the Moab Tailings Project Steering
Committee. As with the campgrounds
and benches, if there’s a tailings project in
Moab, von Koch has probably touched it.
As he sees it, relations between the proj-
ect and the community are pretty smooth,
at least for a giant radioactive government
scheme. Still, the work hasn’t been without
hiccups. In 2014, there was a rockslide (en-
ter: a brick wall to block future spillage). In
2016, a cartage truck flipped. Probably the
biggest friction point between the UMTRA
project and the city is dust—radioactive
powder that blows around with the wind.
“My solution to the dust problem is to get
rid of the pile,” says McCallister.
Von Koch wants that too, so he and other
residents can realize their hopes for the site
if the DOE turns it over to the local govern-
ment. That happened just up the interstate,
in Colorado’s Grand Junction, where a for-
mer processing site became Las Colonias
Park, owned by the city, which added an
amphitheater, skate park, and boat ramp
to the site. Places like these continue to be
monitored by the DOE, to make sure their
remaining releases are acceptable.
Laid out in 2018, Moab’s latest plan is
ambitious. Where there’s now a hump of
radium and dust, the community envi-
sions an event center that could host car
shows and concerts. At an eatery area,
food trucks could park. People might rec-
reate on playgrounds, do pullups at fitness
stations. There could be an ice rink in the
winter that becomes a reflecting pond in
the summer. Climbing walls. Slacklines. A
swimming pool. A transit center shuttling
people out to Arches, downtown Moab, or
popular trailheads. Maybe someday a pas-
senger train could travel along the spur
that now carries the tailings.
Lest anyone forget, though, informational
Probably the biggest
friction point between
the project and the city is
dust—radioactive powder
that blows around with the
wind. “My solution to the
dust problem is to get rid
of the pile,” says cleanup
director Russell McCallister.
signs would tell the story of the site, and a
memorial would stand “to those individu-
als and families affected by the exploration
for uranium and its mining, milling, and re-
mediation on the Colorado Plateau.” That
process often exploited Indigenous miners,
thousands of whom went to work for low
pay in dangerous conditions.
In this vision, the mill would transmute
into something wholly different, just as
uranium itself does, in a process that is
the exact opposite of decay.
Still, traces of the old identity will re-
main. Despite whatever playgrounds and
snack shacks appear, or which earthen
mixture tops the disposal cell, these
marks will signal that Moab was once the
Uranium Capital of the World.
It’s fitting; the Moab region reveals
its past more easily than most places.
Geologic strata lie exposed. Canyons
snaking across the landscape display
water’s long-ago flow. One can mentally
re-place piles of fallen rock right back
into the cliff from which they came.
A few miles up the road from Crescent
Junction, petroglyphs from almost 2,000
years ago etch the cliffs near the roofless
buildings of a tiny mining town aban-
doned in the middle of the last century.
In this extremely dry climate, even foot-
prints stick around.
Very little, here, has ever left no trace
at all.
P O P S C I.CO M / S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 59
 of heart

glass

The craft of turning molten silica, soda ash, and lime into

stunningly delicate works of art dates back millennia—but

a modern twist could lead it to a more sustainable future.

Photographs by Ian Allen

By Rachel Feltman

P O P S C I.CO M / S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 61
 E V E R Y T H I N G T H E Y M A K E AT T H E M U S E U M O F G L A S S
starts at 2100°F. The approximately 1,000 pounds of molten silica, soda
ash, and lime brimming from the facility’s furnace is a kind of Goldi-
locks—strong enough to hold a shape, yet pliable enough to mold using
only lung power and simple hand tools. Raising the temperature of the
oven to all-out scorching takes tremendous time and energy, so the
crew in Tacoma, Washington, keeps the flames going 24/7. But burning
all that natural gas doesn’t do the planet any favors, so the institution
made an upgrade in 2021: The new forge uses 41 percent less fossil fuel,
thanks to a design that captures some of the heat that would otherwise
escape up the flue. Sustainable innovations aside, the craft is much
the same as it was when Syrian artisans invented it 2,000 years ago.

62
 Each project begins
with the artist in-
serting the far end
of a blowpipe into
the furnace and
rolling it back and
forth until a gob—
it’s actually called
that—of glass
forms. Any excess is
dropped into a steel
can and reused.

A wooden mold
called a block helps
shape the molten
bubble. Although it
cools rapidly, the
material is still more
than 1800°F. The
team soaks the tim-
ber in water to
create a protective
layer of steam that
keeps the tool from
burning—which
would damage it and
mar the artwork.

P O P S C I.CO M / S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 63
Ben Cobb, who
leads the museum’s
glass studio, calls
his craft a team
sport. Here he uses
a wooden paddle to
provide resistance
for Sarah Gilbert,
who is to his right,
as they flatten the
bottom of a vase.
Gabe Feenan plugs
the blowpipe with
his thumb, trapping
air in the vessel so it
doesn’t collapse.

64
P O P S C I.CO M / S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 65
Glass comes out of
the furnace with no
color, so artists add
hues to the clear
gob they draw from
the forge. The crew
gave this piece an
amber tinge, then
added a bit more
transparent mate-
rial to refine the
shade and size of
the artwork.

66
 Artisans use rudi-
mentary tools like
jacks—which look
like large tweezers—
paddles, and shears
to shape and trim
the molten glass.

To create a ribbed
effect in their
works, museum
craftspeople built a
custom graphite jig
that they roll hot
material over.

P O P S C I.CO M / S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 67
The hot works are
soft enough to cut
with shears not
unlike household
scissors. The
museum recycles
most of its trim-
mings, but some—
like an aquamarine
gem (opposite)
shorn off a molded
vase—are beauties
all their own.

68
 Gilbert works the
business end of the
blowpipe as Cobb
shapes their work
into a disk called a
rondelle. News-
paper, folded over
several times and
kept damp so it
doesn’t burn, is a
common tool for
this task.

The finished pieces

are still a searing
1200°F. To ensure
they cool slowly
enough that they
won’t crack or shat-
ter, the team places
them in a 900°F
chamber called an
annealing oven for
several hours.

P O P S C I.CO M / S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 71
CANCER DO
NEITHER
FOR ONE NIGHT. WE
ESN’T STOP.
DO WE.
STAND TOGET HER.

SATURDAY 8/21
8 ET/7 CENTRAL

American Lung Association’s LUNG FORCE, Amgen, Cless Family Foundation, Fanconi Anemia Research Fund, Farrah Fawcett Foundation,
Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Laura Ziskin Family Trust, Legacy Circle, LUNGevity Foundation, Mirati Therapeutics, Pancreatic Cancer Canada,
Sara Schottenstein Foundation, Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer, Lew, Jean, and Kari Wolff

Stand Up To Cancer is a division of the Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF), a 501(c)(3) charitable organization.
 LIFE LAB
BEAT THE HEAT

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JULIA BERNHARD SUMMER 2021 / PG 74 / POPSCI.COM

101 OUR ANCESTORS BEGAN cooking with fire at
least a million years ago, and some even say it’s
fire starter what sparked the evolution of modern humans. But
it’s not an instinctive skill and involves more than
setting some sticks ablaze, as raging infernos are
not good for fixing food. The biggest challenge is
BY JOHN KENNEDY controlling the flames to ensure constant heat.
You’ll need dry wood, a clear location, an ax, a
poker, something to produce a spark, and an easy-
to-light fire starter. This last item can be anything
from fatwood—naturally resin-soaked pine—to a
greasy newspaper. It can take 90 minutes to burn a
pile of logs down to a red-hot bed of chef-ready
coals, so plan ahead so no one goes hungry.

STEP 1 STEP 3

Use your ax to make Once your fire is burn-

kindling out of dry ing strong, add the
wood and put it bigger pieces of
down along with your wood around and 1 3
fire-starting material. over it in a log cabin
Build a loose pyramid formation. This con-
around it all with the struction will give your
larger splinters. This flames a constant
shape will provide supply of oxygen that
good airflow, which is will keep them alive
crucial for feeding and thriving.
your flames.
STEP 4
STEP 2
It’s time to cook.
Light your fire by get- While you do, keep
ting the kindling and your fire healthy by 2 4
other smaller pieces adding more fuel. If
burning first. Next, add you have room, feed
the full logs. If you do small pieces of wood
this too early, the dry into one side of the
wood could smother flames as you fix your
the flames, and you’ll meal over the other.
have to start all over Strategically slide any
again. Wait until your newly formed coals
blaze is steady be- under your food with
fore you continue to the poker to keep the
the next step. heat consistent.
 SUMMER 2021 / POPSCI.COM

TROUBLESHOOTING

how to be chill AF
HUMANS AREN’T BUILT for extreme highs. Our cooling system works best at around
70°F, and shedding thermal energy gets harder when the mercury climbs beyond that.
Once our insides push 104°F, things can get deadly. These tips will keep you comfy.

BY JOHN KENNEDY

DRESS THE PART

Loose clothing made from a

weave or knit—like cotton,
linen, or Merino wool—whisks
warm air away from the skin
FINE-TUNE while letting soothing
breezes flow through. Light

keep the ice in colors are ideal, as they re-

flect the sun’s brutal rays and
minimize heat absorption.
your device DRINK UP
BY SANDRA GUTIERREZ G. Hydration cools the body, re-
places fluids, and regulates
blood flow. Water is best, but
AND DAVID NIELD. FOR “CHILL” BY EMILY CERF, CLAIRE MALDARELLI, NIKITA AMIR, AND CORINNE IOZZIO

anything with loads of H2O

ADAPTED FROM POPSCI.COM. REPORTING FOR “DEVICE” BY WHITSON GORDON, SOPHIE BUSHWICK,

GADGETS, LIKE PEOPLE, don’t like overheat- will work, so eat fruit, slurp
ing. Running at excessive temps can decrease soup, or enjoy a cup of coffee.
performance, damage components, and A sports beverage can replen-
shorten a device’s life span. That’s why laptops ish electrolytes lost during a
use heat sinks, fans, and vents to modulate workout or heavy sweating.
temperature, and most computers, phones,
and tablets shut down when they begin to FREEZE UP
swelter. That said, prevention is the best strat-
Ice packs or cold towels trick
egy for avoiding long-term problems.
the hypothalamus—the part
On scorching days, keep your electronics
of the brain that manages
off the ground and out of direct sunlight. Bet-
temperature—into thinking
ter yet, tuck them into the folds of a towel or
you’re cooler. Place them on
stash them in a tote bag to block relentless
the wrists, temple, or neck,
rays. Juggling fewer tasks helps processors
where blood vessels are clos-
chill out, so shutting down power-hungry
est to the surface, to make
apps, disabling location tracking, and nixing
everything feel frostier.
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi can help.
A temperature-monitoring app can keep
THROW SHADE
tabs on things. You should start worrying
when a gadget exceeds 158°F, at which point Umbrellas cast a shadow
you risk irreparable harm. Use Speccy for that can feel 10 to 15 degrees
Windows machines or Macs Fan Control for comfier than direct sunlight.
Apple computers (leave the fan controls in Those designed for solar pro-
auto mode); CPU Monitor works well with An- tection are often treated to
droid phones, but iOS users are out of luck. block harmful ultraviolet
There’s no way of knowing how warm an radiation, but conventional
iPhone or iPad is running. But no matter the polyester and nylon rain
device, if it’s too hot to handle, it’s too hot to use. canopies work nicely too.

75
LIFE LAB
PROJECT
your own private
water park
Time: 2 hours
Cost: $100–$200
Difficulty: Easy
Materials:
6-foot-wide plastic
sheeting
14 (3.5-inch-thick) pool
noodles (for a 30-foot
slide)
Water transfer pump
(Optional) Tear-free soap
Tools:
Garden hose, extension
cord, and scissors
STEP 1
Pick a location and
rake it clean. Try to find
a spot with a gentle,
not-too-steep slope—
this will make the
water flow better.
STEP 2
Cut the plastic to your
desired length. Ours
was 30 feet long.
STEP 3
Lay the pool noodles
down for the sides of
your 4-foot-wide track.
Keep them less than a
foot apart end to end
to keep the kids from
jetting off the slide.
76
THE BACKYARD WATER slide is a clas-
sic summertime toy. With a bit of plastic
and some water, children can zip across
the grass with a squeal and a splash.
STEP 4
Drape the plastic over
the noodles, ensuring
it extends a few inches
beyond the foam so it
doesn’t come loose. It
should stay in place
on its own.
STEP 5
Roll a stacked pair of
pool noodles into the
plastic at the end of
the slide and push
them tightly against
the rows you laid in
Step 3. This will create
a pool to help you re-
cycle water and slow
the kids down.
Pro tip: You can
glue or epoxy the
noodles in place
to keep the pool
intact, but this
makes disassem-
bly harder.
Our version has bumpers, breaks down
easily for storage (which keeps your
lawn fresh), and even recycles water to
help minimize waste.
BY JEAN LEVASSEUR
STEP 6 STEP 8
Thoroughly wet the (Optional) Lubricate
plastic with a garden
the sheeting with tear-
hose. Fill the pool at free soap to add
the end of the slide to speed. Just a few
feed the pump. drops—too much
oomph and you’ll turn
STEP 7 your rollicking ride into
a treacherous trip.
Submerge the pump’s
intake siphon in the
deepest part of the
pool, then run the
output hose to the
top of the slide and
let it empty straight
down the middle.
WARNING Don’t use
a pump that sits in
the water—you risk
the kids crashing into
it, as well as electro-
cution. Make sure the
device’s delivery
height, or head,
matches or exceeds
the elevation differ-
ence of your slide. Find more details on
popsci.com/slipandslide

JUST TRY THIS
dodge the chub rub
FEW THINGS RUIN the fun of being
outdoors faster than chafing—the
tender spots, blisters, and erosions
that arise when your skin makes
too much contact with clothing or
another patch of flesh. Staying dry
is one of the best strategies for
avoiding chub rub. “Skin cells are
more fragile when wet, and they
lose some structural integrity,”
says Lacey Kruse, assistant profes-
sor of pediatrics- dermatology at
Northwestern University School of
Medicine. “That makes you more
sensitive to friction.”
EXCLUSIVE MERCH AVAILABLE NOW AT
HOTTOPIC.COM
SUMMER 2021 / POPSCI.COM
BY RACHEL FELTMAN
Before your adventures, apply
antiperspirant anywhere you
sweat heavily, such as the creases
between the thighs and crotch. “If
you’re prone to sweating, it might
make a difference,” Kruse says.
Wearing moisture-wicking fabric
or a tight base layer can help, as
can applying a lubricant like petro-
leum jelly to areas prone to
rubbing. Another suggestion:
Towel off from time to time if nec-
essary, and change out of damp
garments ASAP. Your body’s larg-
est organ will thank you for it.
 LIFE LAB

MULTITOOL

stop the world and

melt with glue
HOT GLUE GUNS are simple: They melt a polymer stick,
which morphs into an adhesive as it cools. But why stop
there? You can shape the goopy substance into new objects, or
use it to dress up disappointing things you already own.

BY SANDRA GUTIERREZ G.

MAKE NONSLIP SOCKS

Slide a piece of cardboard
inside a pair of loose socks
and drop some hot glue dots
and lines on the soles. The
beads will add friction and
prevent you from sliding on
slick floors. Just don’t don
your new duds until the glue
is completely set.

3D-PRINT A BOX
Draw a square on parchment
paper—this will be the bot-
tom of your box. Then add a
rectangle to each side of it.
Use hot glue to trace the
outline and fill in the shape
with more glue. Once it dries,
peel your creation off the
paper and bend its sides in-
ward. Fasten one vertical
edge together and hold it still
until it stands firm, then repeat
for the remaining seams.

EXPERIMENT WITH
SANTOKU, CHEF’S KNIFE,
DRIP PAINTING
SERRATED UTILITY KNIFE
(SHOWN) Tear the paper off a crayon
and load it into the gun (whit-
tle it down if it’s too thick).
INTRODUCING THE SAVEUR SELECTS ® Because melted wax is more
PRO-PERFORMANCE CUTLERY COLLECTION fluid than hot glue, you now
have the perfect tool for
These high-quality knives are forged from high alloy German steel, splattering vibrant hues on a
NSF certified, and out-of-the-box ready for every slicing, dicing, canvas bag or a bland sweat-
shirt. Be sure to hand-wash
chopping, and mincing task in the kitchen.
your creation with cold water
to avoid color bleed.
SE E MORE AT AMAZON.COM
SAVEUR Selects® is a registered trademark of Camden Media Inc. and used under license. 78
CENTENA RI A N Updating the science of the PopSci archives
BY B I L L G OU RG EY
harnessing the sun
• Robert Hutchings Goddard always had rock-
ets on the brain. Of the early-20th-century
inventor’s 214 patents, the vast majority focused
on catapulting us into space; those that didn’t
still had astronomical inclinations.
One such invention, published in Popular Sci-
ence in November 1929, was for a solar generator
to “supply abundant and cheap power” that could
prove useful on Earth but that Goddard admit-
ted he mainly intended for “interplanetary
navigation.” Unlike photovoltaics, which gener-
ate energy when the sun’s rays liberate electrons
from light-sensitive materials, Goddard’s scheme
concentrates light so it can boil water in a turbine.
While Goddard did not invent the concept—
known as either solar-thermal power or
concentrating solar power (CSP)—he set in mo-
tion improvements that have helped make it a
contender in our growing renewables arsenal.
The first CSP installation, opened in Egypt in
1913, was wildly inefficient: Only 4 percent of the
sun’s heat became electricity. (Burning coal hits
30–40 percent.) Goddard’s design proposed im-
provements to reach 50 percent. But it would
take more than five decades for his ideas to sur-
face in the world’s first commercial plants, in
California. The holdup: “Coal was just cheap and
proven,” says Cliff Ho, a senior scientist at Sandia
National Laboratories who specializes in CSP.
The tech has since come to compete economi-
cally with fossil fuels, he points out.
In the last two decades, more than 100 CSP
plants have been installed worldwide, employ-
ing variations on concepts traceable to Goddard:
A field of reflectors concentrates sunlight onto a
collector to warm a synthetic fluid or engineered
salts to more than 1100°F. The liquid then pipes
into tanks, and steam turbines convert the heat
into electricity. The method reaches 30–40 per-
cent efficiency. Ho is looking at compounds,
including a novel sandlike ceramic, that cook
even hotter to hit 50 percent.
Today, solar-thermal power represents only
about 3 percent of sun-derived energy in the
US. And if battery storage costs drop, Ho thinks
solar will trend almost exclusively photovoltaic.
But that doesn’t mean CSP will become obso-
lete. Industrial processes, like those used to
make cement and steel, require furnaces as hot
as 1,800 degrees. “They’re extremely expensive
to electrically heat,” Ho says. “That’s
an untapped market, and that’s where
I think CSP’s future is.”
November 1929
When a propeller plane
graced our cover at the
end of the 1920s, the
idea of manually crank-
ing the aircraft’s motor
to get it moving was on
its way out. The issue
showcased a new tech-
nology that used an
explosive cartridge to spin the mo-
tor into action. The starter added
only 2 pounds to the craft.
79
 WHO SAYS SCIENCE
CAN’T BE ALL

ZUFO™ POPULAR SCIENCE™

STEAM TOYS ARE NOW
AVAILABLE AT TARGET!

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POPULAR SCIENCETM is a trademark of Camden Media Inc. and used under license.