VOLUME 266 #6

T
JUNE 2005 CONTENTS

There are cynics in the crowd who are not entirely convinced
that Fossett can handle the tricky bird at its maximum weight.
FOUNDED IN 1872
They’re sure he’ll just plow it into the runway and die
a mile into his takeoff roll.
tech ROUND TRIP, p. 66
19 | What’s New
GADGETS MP3-enabled phones arrive.
AUTOMOTIVE Audi’s ultrafast gearbox.
HOME TECH The supercomfy desk chair.

87 | How 2.0
GEEK GUIDE Do more with the Mac Mini.
GRAY MATTER How to gild anything.
TECH LESSON Drawing with GPS.
TECH SUPPORT Build a better Wi-Fi antenna.

news and views

37 | Headlines
TRAVEL TECH Air taxis prepare for takeoff.
SPACE Catapulting astronauts to the moon.
66
SHRINKAGE Better lube for micromachines.
INVENTION Cousteau’s robotic shark suit.

48 | Soapbox
MEDIASCOPE Quit with the sensationalist,
fear-mongering headlines. By Rebecca Skloot
PLUGGED IN New international copyright
laws to save the Web. By Cory Doctorow
stories
T H I S PA G E , C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P : J O H N B . C A R N E T T; J O H N M A C N E I L L ( 2 ) ; G R E G O R H A L E N D A ; J O H N M A C N E I L L

➤
55 | Best of What’s Next Tech that
will change your life: holographic TVs,
spray-on space suits, bionic eyes, plastic
buildings and interactive roller coasters.
O N T H E C O V E R : I L L U S T R AT I O N S : J O H N M A C N E I L L ; P H O T O G R A P H : J O H N B . C A R N E T T;

66 | Round Trip The inside story on Steve

55
Fossett’s record-setting round-the-world
trip in a flying fuel tank. By Eric Adams
72 | Master of the Universe A century
ago, Albert Einstein changed the world.
What will as-yet-undiscovered “Einsteins”
bring in the next 100 years?
82 | Ringed Victory The Cassini-
Huygens mission to Saturn discovers
methane rain, a gigantic mountain ridge,
a wayward atmosphere, and other
oddities. By Michael Moyer

8 From the Editor 98 FYI

12 Contributors 128 Looking Back 24
14 Letters

POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005 7

T
FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial Director Scott Mowbray

Editor Mark Jannot

Art Director Nathalie Kirsheh
Executive Editor, Features Emily Laber-Warren
Science Editor Dawn Stover
Senior Technology Editor Suzanne Kantra Kirschner
Senior Editor, What’s New Eric Hagerman
Aviation & Automotive Editor Eric Adams
Senior Editors Michael Moyer, Kalee Thompson
Managing Editor Jill C. Shomer
Senior Associate Editor Nicole Dyer
Copy Chief Rina Bander
Associate Editors Joe Brown, Jenny Everett,
Mike Haney, Martha Harbison

How 2.0 Win Assistant Editor Rena Marie Pacella

Deputy Art Director Christopher Chew
Designer Laura Konrad
Photo Editor Kristine LaManna
Art/Photo Intern Jamie Beck
Staff Photographer John B.Carnett
FOR MUCH OF OUR l33-YEAR HISTORY, Editorial Assistant Barbara Caraher
P OPULAR S CIENCE offered readers Web Producer Leslie Wong
Contributing Design Editor Chee Pearlman
a steady diet of hands-on home- Contributing Automotive Editor Stephan Wilkinson
Contributing Editors Cory Doctorow, Theodore Gray, Joseph
workshop-type projects: everything Hooper, Preston Lerner, Gregory Mone, Jeffrey Rothfeder,
from building decks to making rudi- Jessica Snyder Sachs, Rebecca Skloot, Bill Sweetman, Phillip
Torrone, James Vlahos, Charles Wardell, William Speed Weed
mentary computers. The intensity of that do-it-yourself focus waned Contributing Troubadour Jonathan Coulton
over the past decade or so, and about a year and a half ago we decided that Contributing Futurist Andrew Zolli
Contributing Artists Mika Grondahl, Jason Lee, John
we needed to tap more consistently into that classic POPSCI spirit. In MacNeill, Garry Marshall, Stephen Rountree, Bob Sauls
the meantime, though, consumer technologies had become complex and Editorial Interns Amanda MacMillan, Matthew Olson

solid-state—circuits in place of gears—and the challenge of how-to and POPULAR SCIENCE PROPERTIES

home-project stories in the post-monkey-wrench age required a total
reinvention of approach. And so, after a harrowingly short gestation
period, we launched the How 2.0 section in March of last year to
address the passion of readers who still want to get their hands dirty, even
if it means dirty with code. The underlying message: Take control of
your technology and improve it. Build a digital photo frame. Assemble
a cheap home theater. Hack your TiVo.
Well, our reinvention seems to have struck a chord. I’m thrilled to
announce that the American Society of Magazine Editors has deemed
How 2.0 the best magazine section in the country, honoring it with
this year’s coveted National Magazine Award in that category. Such
recognition is particularly astounding considering that How 2.0 was a
brand-new section competing against more than 130 better-established
sections from other magazines. The lion’s share of the credit for this
triumph belongs to editor Mike Haney, who dazzles me (and you) every
month with a section that the NMA judges declared is “meticulously
conceived, often witty and always fun to navigate.”
Publisher Gregg R. Hano
Advertising Director John Tebeau
General Manager Robert Novick
Executive Assistant Chandra Dwhaj
Northeast Advertising Office: Manager Howard S. Mittman
(212) 779-5112, Jill Schiffman (212) 779-5007,
Mike Schoenbrun (212) 779-5148,
Michael Saperstein (212) 779-5030
Ad Assistant Christopher Graves
Midwest Advertising Office: Manager John Marquardt
(312) 832-0626, Megan Williams (312) 832-0624
Ad Assistant Nikki Schneider
Los Angeles Advertising Office: Manager Dana Hess
(310) 268-7484, Ad Assistant Mary Infantino
Detroit Advertising Office: Manager Edward A. Bartley
(248) 988-7723, Ad Assistant Diane Pahl
San Francisco Advertising Office: Manager Amy Cacciatore
(415) 434-5276, Ad Assistant Carly Petrone
Southern Regional Advertising Office: Manager Dave
Hady (404) 364-4090, Ad Assistant Christy Chapman
Classified Advertising Sales Joan Orth (212) 779-5555
Direct Response Sales Marie Isabelle (800) 280-2069
Business Manager Jacqueline L. Pappas
Director of Brand & Business Development
L. Dennett Robertson
Sales Development Managers Daniel Vaughan

BEN BAKER/REDUX; GROOMING BY MICHELLE CEGLIA FOR iGROUP;

Senior Manager, Events and Promotions
Come to think of it, that description could be applied to each one of our Christy Chapin Ellinger
Creative Services Designer Mary McGann
sections, which are the heart and soul of POPSCI, the places you know you Marketing Coordinator Eshonda Caraway
can turn to for your monthly hit of what you look forward to in the Advertising Coordinator Evelyn Negron
Consumer Marketing Director Barbara Venturelli
STYLING BY NAILA RUECHEL FOR STOCKLAND MARTEL

magazine, whether it’s cutting-edge consumer-tech intel in What’s New Senior Planning Manager Margerita Catwell
or sprung-from-the-labs discoveries in Headlines or FYI’s irreverent Consumer Marketing Managers Adam Feifer, Kristen Shue
Senior Production Director Laurel Kurnides
compendium of science news and notes. So please indulge me while Manufacturing Business Mananger John Conboy
Production Assistant Shawn Glenn
I take this opportunity to also recognize and thank the rest of our talented Prepress Director Robyn Koeppel
cohort of section editors: Eric Hagerman and Jenny Everett on What’s Prepress Manager José Medina
Publicity Manager Hallie Deaktor
New, Nicole Dyer on Headlines, Martha Harbison on FYI, and senior
technology editor Suzanne Kantra Kirschner, whose tech omniscience
infuses authority into every page of both What’s New and How 2.0. President Mark P. Ford
Bravo, one and all! Senior Vice Presidents James F. Else,
Victor M. Sauerhoff, Steven Shure
Editorial Director Scott Mowbray
Vice President, Production and Technology Sylvia Mueller
MARK JANNOT Director, Corporate Communications Samara Farber Mormar
mark.jannot@time4.com CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SUBSCRIPTIONS
For 24/7 service, please use our Web site: popsci.com/
customerservice You can also call: 800-289-9399 or write to:
Popular Science P.O. Box 62456 Tampa, FL 33662-4568

8 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005

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CONTRIBUTORS

BESTOFWHAT’SNEXT 2005 5

For our second annual Best of What’s Next, we

enticed five writers to examine the most exciting
new technologies coming down the pike: a Saran-
wrapped building, an individually programmable
roller coaster, a 3-D holographic TV, a spray-on
space suit for orbital tourists, and a real-life bionic
eye [page 55]. Writer JILL DAVIS [1] can’t wait to
test the roller coaster; an admitted coaster fiend, [1] [2]
she loves Coney Island’s Cyclone, a 78-year-old
wooden contraption known for leaving riders black
and blue. JONATHON KEATS [2] believes that the
holographic TV would be put to good use by
director John Waters, given his pioneering work in
Odorama, the scratch-and-sniff component of his
film Polyester. “Were he to bring holography into
the picture,” Keats observes, “he might finally
accomplish the sensory overload that seems to
motivate his cinematic aesthetic.” On the subject of
bionic eyes, MICHAEL STROH [3] says, “As the
proud former owner of a Six Million Dollar Man
action figure, I’ve kept a close eye on retinal-
implant research during the past couple years. [3] [4]
Wouldn’t it be ironic if someday blind people could
not only see, but see better than people with
healthy eyes?” Space tourism is a little cramped
for PATRICK DI JUSTO [4]: “No way. I’m a bit
claustrophobic, and I wouldn’t like to have that
space suit so close to my body.” JESSIE SCANLON’s
[5] passion for architecture and design informed
her investigation of the “building wrap” concept.
Creating visual avatars of the items was POPSCI
contributing artist (and space enthusiast) JOHN
MACNEILL [6], who says that of all this year’s Best
of What’s Next objects, he’d really love to test out
that new spray-on space suit—in orbit, of course.
[5] [6]

+ OLIVER WOLFSON likes his images hyperrealistic—but with a twist. “I

try to incorporate a visual pun into my illustrations,” he says: “objects
that look real at first glance but really don’t exist.” For a story detailing
the myriad uses of the Mac Mini [page 87], Wolfson crafted a Swiss
Army version of the computer. He also makes short animated films,
such as the award-winning Bowlin’ Fer Souls, a 10-pin-themed tear
through hell. A follow-up film should be completed in 2006.

+ Before he began his gouache paintings for our coverage of all things
Einstein [page 72], artist RYAN HESHKA downloaded a dozen images
of the physicist to familiarize himself with Einstein’s physique. Many of
these characteristics are visible in Heshka’s depictions. Fluffy white
hair? Check. Push-broom mustache? Check. Potbelly? Potbelly? “Ein-
stein was a little bit slouchy,” Heshka explains. “You don’t really want
to make fun of him, but you need to inject some humor.”

12 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR LETTERS@POPSCI.COM

Half a Century of Inspiration.

That’s No Simulation
I have been a regular reader of POPULAR SCIENCE
for more than 50 years and must tell you how
your magazine has inspired me. It’s amazing how
POPSCI has guided and predicted the paths
mechanical and technological progress have taken.
I especially enjoyed the virtual-vs.-reality article
“Race against Reality” [April]; it was very enlight-
ening to see how you guys put simulation to the
test. I have designed a full-motion joystick cockpit
for simulated flying. My clients, many of whom
are pilots, tell me it’s just like being there.
Thanks again for half a century of inspiration.
“Doc” Holloway
Penticton, British Columbia

When I saw your April cover, I thought,
“Finally—an article about the realism
of virtual games.” Instead I picked up
a six-page advertisement for Micro-
soft’s new game. Graphical and sensory
realism in videogames has increased
dramatically in the past few years.
Some games soon to come have almost
photorealistic screenshots, and I ex-
pected that an article with a cover
picture comparing a real to a virtual
Porsche would have a slightly broader
base of analysis. And am I supposed
to be impressed that some videogame
nerd comes close to professional lap
times? This isn’t an article about
science or technology; it’s a promotion
for Forza with a side examination
of the differences/similarities of real
and virtual racecar drivers. The
content of the article is very impres-
sive, but it’s not objective enough
for the cover story of your magazine.
Paul Houser
Cedar Rapids, Iowa
CLARIFICATION
• The Porsche Carrera GT featured on
our April cover was loaned to us by Preston
Henn, founder of the Swap Shop in Ft. Laud-
erdale, Florida.
Building Blocks
Your story “The Low-Risk High-Rise”
[April] neglected to suggest a better so-
lution for the load-bearing structures:
titanium. Chromium-molybdenum steel
alloys can add 100° to 200°C in heat
resistance, but titanium can add 300°C
to the melting point, and even more to
the point at which it begins to weaken
—enough to keep its integrity beyond
temperatures that something like burn-
ing aviation fuel can attain. If titanium
girders and, perhaps more important,
bolts, had been used in the World Trade
Center towers, they would still be stand-
ing. Even titanium cladding of steel
girders would do a lot to increase their
fire- and corrosion-resistance.
At the moment, titanium is more
expensive, but with new formation
methods and new ore discoveries in
Australia, volume production of girders
could bring down the cost substan-
tially and would do more than almost
any other factor toward making the
building resistant to a terrorist attack.
Its greater strength and lower density
would also make possible a more flexi-
ble design for the building as a whole.
Jon Roland
Austin, Texas
Your plan for a terrorist-proof sky-
scraper does much to improve safety
and escape features but little to improve
the structure that must be able to with-
stand the impact of a bomb, airplane,
etc. A weak outer shell incapable of re-
sisting significant horizontal forces was
exactly the reason the World Trade
Center buildings fell down; the fact
that they fell vertically was a miracle
preventing even greater destruction.
y
(CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE)
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14 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (CONTINUED) LETTERS@POPSCI.COM

The only way to build a terrorist-

proof skyscraper is to make the outer
else the hosting companies would face
having their block of addresses pulled.
YOUR GUIDE TO THIS
shell sufficiently resistant to horizontal We vigilante geeks would then only MONTH’S POPSCI
loads such that they cannot penetrate need to identify the abusers to the From “americium 241” to “z coordinates”
the outer shell more than several feet. keepers of the gates. Any users having AMERICIUM 241 PAGE 75
This requires substantial reinforced- their network-address ranges blocked
ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE 81
concrete or structural-steel floors, not or Web and mail servers taken down
weak joist-supported floors that offer would need to prove that they had ANTI-PIRACY GOUGING 52
little if any resistance to horizontal brought their software into compliance ATLAS MOUNTAINS 70
forces. These materials are more expen- and would face even harsher penalties
BEETLE, SINGLE-TESTICLED 105
sive, yes; significantly so, no. Buildings for not properly responding to fix any
of the old generation (e.g., the Empire problems in the future. No ineffective BROKEN-HEART SYNDROME 48
State Building) would have been able to laws or taxpayers’ dollars would be BROWNIAN MOTION 74
resist such forces without falling down. needed in this system. I predict that
BUBONIC PLAGUE, RETURN OF 48
Lawrence Fischer the problem would disappear in a year.
Sarasota, Fla. Barry Williams CAR-PUTER 87
Marietta, Ga. CENSORSHIP 52
Flying Fish
CROP-CIRCLE MAKERS 94
The A380 may be a big airplane on the Hurricane Virus?
outside [“Birth of a Titan,” April], but I found your article “Biological Warfare” DRAGON STORM 83
I bet your readers would be more inter- [March] very interesting and very scary. It DUAL-CLUTCH GEARBOX 30
ested in the size of the seats and the would be great if the research would lead
E=MC2 74
amount of seating space between rows. to curing some diseases. But, as stated in
This thing could be nothing more than the article, by expanding the research EMERGENCY BAILOUT 105
the largest flying sardine can ever built. facilities, you become vulnerable to dis- ENCELADUS 84
John Bannister gruntled employees or transportation
FUEL LOSS, MYSTERIOUS 70
Sarasota, Fla. problems. One thing concerned me even
more: natural disasters. How are these GILDING INDIANA 91
The Spam Solution facilities protected from hurricanes (the GPS 3-D COCKPIT DISPLAY 38
Columnist Cory Doctorow is correct Galveston, Texas, facility in particular)
HOLOGRAPHIC TV 60
to advise everyone to switch to less- or tornados or fire? Couldn’t a hurricane
vulnerable operating systems, browsers lift the roof off a facility and quickly IAPETUS 85
and mail clients to combat the phalanx spread a deadly virus? ICE VOLCANOES 82
of wankers we face each day as we Brian Ashcraft
INTERGALACTIC SPAM 101
traverse the world through the Internet Overland Park, Kan.
[“Spam and Punishment,” Plugged In, J. EDGAR HOOVER 128
Soapbox, April]. The only thing is that MAGNETOSPHERE COLLISION 39
most users are barely sentient when _FROM THE BLOGS METHANE OCEAN 84
it comes to using computers, and the Last month, more than 650 Web logs
burden for the fix shouldn’t be on MUSIC-READY PHONES 19
linked to popsci.com. A sample:
the users anyway. I have two ideas ON-DEMAND AIR TAXIS 37
“A Must-Have Magazine”_
that I think are better and put the I should really try to get a job at POPULAR PARIS HILTON’S GRANDFATHER 69
responsibility to fix the problem where SCIENCE. I push this magazine on people
it belongs, which is with the Internet as if it were the Bible or something. My PRINGLE-CAN ANTENNA 96
service providers, hosting companies dad has had a subscription since the RADIOACTIVE TOOTHPASTE 103
and software providers that have early ’70s; I can remember it from when
I was a wee little shortie. I always used SATURN’S E RING 85
created and perpetuated the mess.
to grab it from the mailbox and read it SCARY CRACKING NOISES 88
First, the governing bodies of the before giving it to him. The What’s New
Internet should require the vendors and section of this magazine is what makes it. SPACE CATAPULT 38
users of mail-server software to sell and Gadget central. And who doesn’t like STEVE AUSTIN 59
use only software that effectively deals gadgets? In recent years, they have
with security issues such as spoofing added another section called How 2.0, TOPSY-TURVY SENSATIONS 128
which comes a very close second. Check 40
and unauthorized users. Second, TROJAN SHARK
it out and tell me they don’t have some
require service-hosting companies to cool little projects. Tell me! UPCHUCK FACTOR 57
respond to spammers and the Web sites posted by Dave Wolf, Eclectic Ramblings
they promote and to users of unsecured VELVET ELVIS 101
davewolf.net
mail servers by pulling their access, or Z COORDINATES 60

16 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005

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It went fine, until the
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hallucinations began. NEXT
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YOU, ON TITAN: FOOTAGE
FROM NASA’S SATURN PROBE WHO MATCHED HIS PRODUCTIVITY
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Fling me to the moon: Watch NASA’s proposed space catapult in action
Sick of the blue screen of death? Gear for PC users moving to a Mac
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INSIDE PIPING SUNLIGHT INDOORS 28 AUDI’S FIRST-EVER DUAL-CLUTCH GEARBOX 30 WIELD YOUR VERY OWN LIGHT SABER 34

GADGETS

Finally, Cellphones That Rock

A new breed of mobiles gets serious
about playing your digital music

» THE NEXT TIME some-

one asks who’s on
MOTOROLA E725
CARRIER: Not set
the line, you can say it’s NETWORKS: CDMA, EV-DO
Bono, because 2005 is BATTERY: 4 hours talk,
7 days standby
shaping up to be the year
MEMORY: 41MB internal; MiniSD
of the music phone.
FM Transmitter
Previously, phones that
played music had limited
storage, and queuing up a
song was cumbersome. But
as carriers roll out MP3-
Music jog dial
friendly high-speed cell-
phone networks, phone
manufacturers have been
inspired to boost memory
and design phones with
dedicated PLAY buttons, SAMSUNG P777
CARRIER: Cingular
built-in speakers, FM trans- NETWORKS: GSM, EDGE
mitters and graphic equaliz- BATTERY: 5 hours talk,
ers. In other words, they’re 8 days standby
MEMORY: 100MB internal
functional MP3 players.
Before too long, you’ll be
able to download songs
directly to your phone,
Graphic equalizer
wherever you are, in less
than a minute. Motorola
announced that it will MP3 instant-on button
release a phone that works
with iTunes this year, and a
Stereo speakers
slew of competing services
are expected to follow. By
year’s end, every major
handset manufacturer will
offer tune-centric models,
including Sony Ericsson’s
L U I S B R U N O ; I N S E T: C O U R T E S Y M O T O R O L A

Walkman W800 and

Nokia’s N91—which will LG 8100
have a whopping four giga- CARRIER: Verizon
NETWORKS: CDMA, EV-DO
bytes on board—along with
BATTERY: 3 hours talk,
the ones on this page. Here 9 days standby Dedicated
are a few of the best you’ll MEMORY: 512MB internal; MiniSD music buttons
soon be able to get your
hands, and ears, on.
—SUZANNE KANTRA KIRSCHNER

POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005 19

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WHAT’S NEW | PHOTOGRAPHY

Gutsy Shooters Casio Exilim

Pro EX-P505
Satisfy your inner Avedon CAMCORDER KUDOS: When
and Scorsese with this elite using Past Movie mode you can
corps of hybrid digital cameras record the five seconds before you
press the shutter button. Or opt

» YOUR CAMERA-CAMCORDER combo

may deliver 30 frames per second at
for Short Movie mode, which
takes eight-second video snippets
VGA resolution—sounds great, right?—but in with one click. Audio is captured
reality, the result is only as good as the file’s in stereo. MPEG-4 video
density. Your camera doesn’t have the process- » f3.3–3.6, 5x optical zoom
ing power to compress video files without los- » $500 » exilim.casio.com
ing rich detail. These four new pocket shooters
are among the first armed with the guts
(specifically, the latest chipsets) to compress
your movies into true TV-quality files. Motion Konica Minolta
JPEG, AVI, QuickTime and MPEG-4 all bang DiMAGE Z5
out at least an hour’s worth of TV-quality video
CAMCORDER KUDOS: To counterbal-
on a one-gig card. MPEG-4 is at the top of the
ance camera movement, the Z5 shifts the
compression food chain because it gathers,
CCD micrometers in the opposite direc-
squishes, and transports video data while pre-
tion. In low-light shooting, the camera
serving richness. Result: sharper video but with
amplifies the image sensor’s sensitivity to
a much lighter toll on the battery and memo-
collect more light, and if you need an
ry—both of which are at a premium in the
extreme close-up, there’s Super Macro
ever shrinking world of digital imaging. The
mode, which can focus at as close
five-megapixel cameras we’ve chosen here
as four tenths of an inch. Motion JPEG
offer the best mix of camcorder features and
video » f2.8–4.5, 12x optical zoom
video brawn.—JACKSON LYNCH
» $500 » kmpi.konicaminolta.us

Canon S2 IS

C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P : L U I S B R U N O ( 2 ) ; C O U RT E S Y C A N O N ; L U I S B R U N O ; I N S E T: C R A I G L O V E L L / C O R B I S
CAMCORDER KUDOS: The S2 IS is the first to snap full five-megapixel still images
while video recording, so you never have to choose between the two modes
again. What’s more, the camera features optical image stabilization, CD-quality
stereo sound capture, and a wind screen to reduce ambient noise.
AVI video » f2.7–3.5, 12x optical zoom » $500 » usa.canon.com

Sony
DSC-M1
CAMCORDER KUDOS:
The M1 is about the size of a deck of
cards and, in true camcorder style, is held
vertically in movie mode. Its 2.5-inch LCD
swivels up to reveal the navigation and
menu controls. It takes five-megapixel
stills, and when you snap a shot in the
“hybrid” function, it also captures eight
seconds of video (the five seconds before
and three seconds after the shot).
MPEG-4 video » f3.5–4.4, 3x optical
zoom » $500 » sonystyle.com

[T POPSCI Visit popsci.com/cameras for a full list

ON THE WEB of cameras that take TV-quality video. ]
22 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005
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WHAT’S NEW | GENERAL INNOVATION

Do the Robot!
Got a screwdriver handy? ’Bot-
building’s going mainstream

» IF YOU’VE EVER THOUGHT it’d be cool to make

your own robot but didn’t because your options
were Legos (ho-hum) or fabricating one from scratch
GREGOR HALENDA; STYLING BY STEPHANIE BASRELIAN

(who’s got the time?), listen up: RadioShack’s new Vex

Robotics Design System (www.vexrobotics.com) is the
ultimate compromise. The $300 kit contains more than
500 parts, including steel plates, motors, radio
receivers and a six-channel remote. What to build?
That’s up to you. The manual, created at the Carnegie
Mellon University Robotics Institute, is more engineer-
ing primer than instruction book, providing tasks, not
plans for preconceived designs. We’re working on one
that can open bottles.—JOE BROWN

[ T POPSCI Tell us what you’d build

ON THE WEB for a chance to win a kit.
Details are at popsci.com/vex. ]
24 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005
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WHAT’S NEW | HOME TECH

Sweet Seat Relief

Sitting on hundreds of little
springs has never felt so good

» AT AGE 12, Jerome Caruso won a GM design

competition with a car he carved from a block of
wood. Since then he’s racked up more than 70 patents
by designing everything from freezers to furniture,
including the chair President Jimmy Carter sat in during
his inauguration and, now, this Herman Miller Cella
office chair (hermanmiller.com). Four years in the works,
the Cella’s seat and back are made up of 1,578 circular
polypropylene pads, each half an inch in diameter. Six
curved arms splay from each pad and connect to its
neighbors, about a quarter of an inch away. The shape
of each arc determines how stiff each pad feels. By vary-
ing the arms’ curvature, Caruso was able to design the
chair’s topography so that it would offer more support in
specific areas of the upper and lower back and, most
important, under the two sit bones, which carry the
brunt of our seated weight. Cost of having a smarter
seat than your boss: $450 to $650.—JENNY EVERETT

SITTING PRETTY
A web of circular pads
makes up the unique
suspension system in
the Cella office chair,
available this summer.

C O U RT E S Y H E R M A N M I L L E R

CELLA’S PERFECT PRESSURE MAP

The chair offers the most support
under your sit bones [red], which have
a stronger structure and more cushion-
ing than your legs.

26 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005

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WHAT’S NEW | HOME TECH

Moving on to Parabolic

Greener Fixtures mirror

1
A clever system that pipes
sunlight into homes is set to
T
ease your energy-bill woes SUN
LIGH

» NATURAL LIGHT has a positive effect on

human health. But skylights—our go-to
source for delivering sunlight indoors—transmit
2 Secondary
heat, taxing your A/C system. Sunlight Direct mirror
(sunlight-direct.com) is testing a smarter approach: Fiber-optic 3
bundle
hybrid solar lighting (HSL). HSL captures direct sun- T
LIGH
light while excluding heat-saturated infrared rays SUN
and uses optical fibers to channel it to indoor fix-
tures. On a sunny day, this system can transmit
50,000 lumens, enough to illuminate 1,000 Fiber-optic
square feet. Beta installations began in May at cable Fixture
the American Museum of Science and Energy 4 5
in Tennessee. Coming to a ceiling near you, for
$8,000, by 2007.—PATRICK DI JUSTO

A four-foot parabolic aluminum

mirror tracks the sun using GPS
1 and reflects full-spectrum sunlight to
a nine-inch secondary mirror.

A thin coating on the secondary

2 mirror reflects visible light but not
heat-carrying infrared light.

Visible light is concentrated into a

single 1.5-inch-diameter bundle of
3 127 plastic fiber-optic cables,
each three millimeters in diameter.

Light snakes through up to 30 feet of

cable to enter the house. Approxi-
mately 50 percent of the light makes
4 it to the ceiling fixtures. (Until fiber
optics become more efficient and less
expensive, HSL will be installed only
in the top story.)

Bundles of 15 fibers plug into each

glass diffusion tube in the fixture.
5 Hundreds of angled grooves etched
into the surface of each tube spray
sunlight evenly throughout the room.
I L L U S T R AT I O N S : K R I S H O L L A N D , M A F I C S T U D I O S , I N C

Diffusion tubes
THE SUM OF SUN’S BENEFITS

Sensor INSIDE THE CITY

NUMBER OF SUNNY
DAYS PER YEAR
KWH SAVED
PER YEAR
SAVINGS
PER YEAR*
FIXTURE
JUNEAU, AK 110 2,904 $232.30
A sensor continu- SEATTLE, WA 172 4,541 $363.30
ally measures
lumen output ST. LOUIS, MO 208 5,491 $439.30
and sends a sig- NEW YORK, NY 212 5,597 $447.75
nal to dimmable
MIAMI, FL 256 6,758 $540.65
fluorescent tubes
to raise electric PHOENIX, AZ 310 8,184 $654.70
Fluorescent
tubes light levels when *based on national
it’s cloudy. average of
Sources: National Climatic Data Center, U.S. Department of Energy $.08 per kWh

28 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005

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WHAT’S NEW | AUTO TECH

Transmission Transition
Two clutches, no waiting; a revolutionary gearbox
charms street racers and Sunday drivers alike

» AUTOMATICS ARE EASY, but everyone knows manual transmissions have

more fun. And so-called performance manu-matics, the halfhearted com-
promise, don’t deliver the brisk response you get from a stick shift. Until now.
Audi’s parent company, Volkswagen Group, has developed a new transmission 2006
2006 AUDI
AUDI A3
A3 3.2
3.2 QUATTRO
QUATTRO
dubbed Direct-Shift Gearbox (DSG) that is a manual at heart but can also do the
PRICE: $30,000 (EST.)
shifting for you—fast. Whether you finesse the Formula One–style paddle shifters
or select the auto mode, DSG changes gears in just two tenths of a second, cer- ENGINE: 3.2-LITER V6
tainly faster than any automatic, not to mention faster than it’s humanly possible POWER: 250 HP, 236 LB.-FT. TORQUE
to shift a conventional manual. Notably, its twin clutches let this happen without 0–60: 6.3 SEC.
interrupting torque during acceleration. Look for DSG in the 2006 Audi A3, arriv- TOP SPEED: LIMITED TO 130 MPH
ing late this year—and, we imagine, leaving the lot in a hurry.—MATTHEW PHENIX

» BOX OF TRICKS
A traditional manual gearbox
has one input shaft (to bring
the engine’s power into the
transmission), one clutch (to
disconnect the engine and
transmission during shifting)
and one output shaft (to drive
the wheels). DSG has two of
each. The input shafts (A, B)—
one nestled inside the other—
are flanked by the two output
shafts (C, D). Each input shaft
operates three of the six for-
ward gears. This configuration
allows two gears to be en-
gaged simultaneously—one
active and one on deck. When

I L L U S T R AT I O N : K E V I N H A N D ; P H O T O G R A P H : C O U RT E S Y A U D I U S A
it’s time to shift, DSG opens
one clutch (F) the instant the
other (E) closes, eliminating the
typical interruption of power to
the wheels. A central controller
C D
[not shown] gathers information
from a dozen sensors that [ OUTPUT SHAFTS ]
measure engine speed, throttle
position, braking, and so on,
A
[TO ENGINE ]
to anticipate the next gear and B E F
preselect it. [ INPUT SHAFTS ] [ CLUTCHES ]

»
30
AUDI’S NEW GEARBOX SHIFTS FOUR TIMES AS
FAST AS THE AVERAGE HUMAN HEART BEATS.
POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005
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WHAT’S NEW

THE GOODS [
20 HOT PRODUCTS THAT
(ALMOST) SPEAK FOR
THEMSELVES BY JOE BROWN

Bass-Boosted Bud Brew for Two Phone Drone

Shure E4c Krups KP1010 Sony Ericsson ROB-1
» Airflow creates bass in ear- » The first pod- » This 4.5-inch spybot gets
phones but also lets in noise. brewing coffee its orders from your
Shure encloses its new buds’ maker with two Java-enabled Bluetooth
speakers in a vented box within separate spouts, phone. Its VGA camera can
the casing, bump- it’ll do two different beam pics or stream video
ing up bass while kinds of coffee at from up to 165 feet
buffering the the same time. It’s away, and its lens tilts.
inner ear from also the only pod $250 » sonyericsson.com
outside racket. brewer with a filter.
$300 » shure.com $190
» www.krups.com
Formula-One
Vacuum
Power Pedal Dyson DC15 The Ball
Freeplay » In their new vac, Dyson
Freecharge replaced wheels with
» Working the one large ball and linked
foot pump will the brush head to the
generate up to handle so that when you
480 amps of 12- twist the grip, the vacuum
volt electricity— turns. It’ll take a 90- In-the-Know
enough to revive your dead car bat- degree corner without Navigation
tery, or any gadget that has a 12V lifting off the floor. TomTom GO 700
cigarette-lighter plug. $200 $600 » Pair it via Bluetooth with
» freeplay.net » dyson.com your GSM cell to down-
load live traffic and
weather info, or use
Ratchet Job A Better Batterer it as a hands-free
Snap-On Chef’s Choice 840 for your mobile;
SGDMRCE4 » This waffle iron is 2.5-gig hard
» The gears of ordinary ratchet- hinged to keep the drive. $900
ing screwdrivers use the same top griddle parallel to » tomtom.com
teeth to limit motion in either the bottom at all
direction. This pivoting model times, so your Bel-
uses separate teeth on opposing gian beauties
sides of a central cog, resulting come out uni-
in twice the load-bearing ability formly thick.
of Snap-On’s previous model. $70
$25 » snapon.com » chefschoice.com

Flexible Phone System

Motorola SD4504
» Add up to eight peripherals to this land-line base
station—like a VGA camera ($80—use the handset
as a baby monitor) or a cellphone dock ($100).
Available in July. $80 » motorola.com

Designated Hitter
QMotions-Baseball
» Clamp the sleeve around your
own bat, and swing for real in
Xbox or PC baseball games.
Four optical sensors in the plate
track your swing’s arc and
speed. $60 » qmotions.com

32 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005

T
WHAT’S NEW
Bluetooth-er Cord-Managing Medusa
Motorola DC800 Power Sentry PowerSquid
» This device can broadcast » It’s a power strip minus the
or receive a Bluetooth stream. strip: Each of the five female
Plug your home stereo into the stan- sockets is attached to its own
dard headphone jack to play music cord, so bulky plugs won’t
from your Bluetooth MP3 player— block other outlets. $15
or vice versa. $60 » motorola.com » powersentry.com

Power
Plans
Plantronics
Tahiti
Radio-Friendly Music » To charge this
JamPlug FM » Plug this FM trans- Bluetooth headset,
mitter directly into your guitar, you can use your
and turn any radio into an amp. Nokia, Motorola,
Six channels to choose from; lithi- Siemens or Sony
um-ion battery lasts two to four Ericsson charger
hours. $50 » jamplug.com or the included
AAA-powered
charging holster;
Caddy Shack 25 hours of talk
Bag Boy NXO Series time; weighs in at
Deluxe Cart Bag less than nine
» It’s the only golf bag to grams. $200
employ rubber grippers inside » plantronics.com
the 14 sleeves to keep
your clubs from falling out.
Stash a 12-pack in the
insulated pocket. $175
» bagboycompany.com

Storage Included
PalmOne LifeDrive Cool Shoes
Mobile Manager Brooks Trance 5
» The first PDA with a hard » Strands of silver
drive, Palm’s new flagship woven into the insole,
model has four gigs of disk heel and tongue of
space, 802.11b Wi-Fi, Blue- Brooks’s new running
tooth, and native support for shoes channel heat from
Word, Excel, PowerPoint and your feet out vents in the
Acrobat files; 320x480 screen. back. $135
$500 » palmone.com » brooksrunning.com

Future Fuel
Fireplace
Hearth & Home
Aqueon
Jedi Toy Trick » The world’s first
Master Replicas consumer hydrogen-
Lightsaber burning fireplace
» Two motion sensors in electrolyzes water to
the hilt trigger Lucas- Pumped-Up PC harvest its H2.
licensed Star Wars Expansion Solutions The combustion’s
Episode III sound effects as Empire Series byproduct is
you duel; 64 LEDs, wired » Media Center PCs play movies and music, oxygen, so you don’t
in series, move light up or but you need an amplifier to hear the sound. This one has need to install a chim-
down the blade when you a 1,000-watt, 7.1-channel amp built in; 3GHz Pentium 4 ney.
power it on or off. $120 processor; up to four gigs of ram. $3,000 $50,000
» masterreplicas.com » www.expansionsolutions.com » hearthnhome.com

34 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005

 POPULAR

HEADLINES scıence
T
JUNE 2005
DISCOVERIES, ADVANCES & DEBATES IN SCIENCE AND THE WORLD

INSIDE A SPACE-BASED CATAPULT 38 • HOLOGRAPHIC EYES 40 • ARE HIGH-TECH PASSPORTS SECURE? 43 • OUR WANING LIFE SPAN 45

WHERE TO? If NASA

has its way, futuristic
air-taxi jets like this
one will someday
ferry passengers to
rural locales.
I L L U S T R AT I O N : K R I S H O L L A N D , M A F I C S T U D I O S , I N C . ; P H O T O G R A P H : C O U RT E S Y J O E Y P O N T H I E U X / N A S A L A N G L E Y R E S E A R C H C E N T E R

Head-up
display •
Virtual
terrain

[TRANSPORTATION]
•

Cab It to the Hinterlands!

This month NASA and friends show off the air-taxi system
SHOW ME THE WAY Synthetic Vision, one of
they hope will breathe new life into small-town airports several new cockpit tools for air-taxi jets, gen-
erates a photoreal image of oncoming terrain

T
HE TEXAS CATTLE-COUNTRY TOWN OF GRANBURY (POP.: 5,718) IS AN IDEAL so that pilots can fly safely in harsh weather.
spot for weekend getaways. Located about 65 miles southwest of Dallas, it
boasts a stone opera house built in 1886, a double-decker riverboat, a well-
worn Jesse James legend—everything except regular airline service. But if an
air-taxi demonstration in Danville, Virginia, this month goes as planned, tourists tium for Aviation Mobility, which represents
could soon be zipping in and out of Granbury as though it were Dallas. the manufacturers, universities and airport
The demonstration will showcase the latest technologies underpinning the officials that have teamed with NASA to
Small Aircraft Transportation System, a point-to-point travel scheme devised by develop the necessary technologies.
NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration and the aircraft industry. The aim Less a single revolutionary system than a
is simple: to enable hundreds of thousands of travelers to sidestep the nation’s broad, high-tech initiative for change over
overtaxed hub-and-spoke airports by kick-starting on-demand air-taxi service at the coming years, SATS could make small
the 5,400 or so tiny airstrips around the U.S. [see “Taxi! Taxi!” October 2002]. airports just as accessible as big ones—rain
SATS could relieve congestion at major hubs by as much as 10 percent by or shine. Today when visibility is low, the
2010, says Shahid Siddiqi, an aeronautical engineer with the National Consor- FAA permits only one aircraft at a time to

TICKER 03.15.05 STEM-CELL FACTORY OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY RESEARCHERS DEVISE A WAY TO MASS-PRODUCE EMBRYONIC-STEM-CELL LINES NOW IN SHORT SUPPLY ///

POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005 37

T
HEADLINES
[TRANSPORTATION] CONTINUED
approach or depart from any airport with-
out a control tower or radar. The result is
often lengthy holding patterns, ground
delays or no service at all.
With new technologies, such as a GPS-
based 3-D cockpit display that shows the
positions of nearby aircraft, several planes
can be routed safely through the soup.
This collision-avoidance device, several
versions of which will be available for
lightweight planes next year, can coordi-
nate with similarly-equipped planes to
guide pilots toward the best traffic
sequence. It can also communicate with a
virtual air-traffic controller on the ground,
sparing cash-strapped communities the
seven-figure expense of installing a tower.
Air taxis could ease
traffic at major hubs
by 10 percent five
years from now.
Other tools that will make flying air taxis
easier include head-up displays that project
instrument panels onto the windshield and
forward-looking radar that generates
images of oncoming terrain. All of these
technologies will be featured at the
Danville demo, where six planes, including
a Cirrus SR22 single-engine prop and an
Adam Aircraft A700 jet, will be on display,
and several will take off and land under the
supervision of a virtual controller.
Meanwhile, a few air-taxi firms are
already gearing up for business. POGO Jet
in Bridgeport, Connecticut, run by Peoples
Express founder Donald Burr and former
American Airlines CEO Robert Crandall,
has ordered 75 of the $2.1-million A700s.
And DayJet in Delray Beach, Florida, plans
to buy several hundred of the new sub-$1-
million six-seat Eclipse business jets.
Yet full deployment of SATS could
take 20 years or more as puddle-jumpers
and unequipped aircraft are upgraded
with the new technologies. “This is a par-
adigm shift,” says Peter McHugh, the
SATS program manager at the FAA. “Five
years ago the FAA was not talking about
small airports as part of the transporta-
tion system. There was no national strat-
egy. Today there is.”—JOSHUA TOMPKINS
03.17.05 IS THE DAMAGE DONE? EVEN IF WE REDUCED GREENHOUSE-GAS EMISSIONS TO ZERO TODAY, GLOBAL TEMPERATURES WOULD STILL CLIMB BY ONE DEGREE FAHRENHEIT
38 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005
[SPACE]
Spun and Flung
Engineers test a radical way to
travel to the moon: by catapult
NASA’S REVAMPED APPROACH TO SPACE EXPLORATION
puts two tasks atop its to-do list: Return to the moon and save
money. A 90-mile-long solar-powered tether spinning around
Earth could help the agency check off both items. Twirling like
a baton, the bottom tip would autonomously grab hold of a
manned crew capsule in low-Earth orbit and catapult it to the
moon, flinging astronauts toward their destination without
guzzling thousands of pounds of rocket fuel on the way.
The system, called the Momentum-Exchange Electrody-
namic Reboost Tether, or MXER for short, is more than just a
quirky physics project. With $1.5 million in funding from
NASA, engineers at Tennessee Technological University, along
with scientists at Tethers Unlimited in Bothell, Washington,
successfully tested a 1/10-scale model of the tether’s capture
mechanism in a laboratory last March.
Tossing astronauts moonward is the long-term goal, but at
first the system would be used to lift satellites back into higher
orbits. According to Tethers Unlimited president Rob Hoyt, this
would save $500 million in rocket fuel over 10 years for a
4,400-pound payload. Hoyt hopes to have the MXER spin-
ning in space by 2018.—GREGORY MONE
Tether •
Catch
mechanism
•
1 PREPARE
Spooled into a capsule, the
tether is launched into orbit,
where it unfurls to its full 90-
Boom •
mile length. To start spinning,
a power node at the center of
the tether distributes electrical
charge along its length.
• Masses on each end of the
Crew
capsule tether pivot around the node
and keep the tether taut.
 4 FLING
When the capsule is at the
top of the tether’s arc—
and farthest from Earth—
the tether lets it go.

Solar
panels
5 DROP
After transferring its
momentum to the
moon-bound capsule,
the tether drops into a
lower orbit and uses
Earth’s magnetic field to
boost itself back into a
higher orbit [see inset].

3 SPIN
The tether continues
• Central its rotation, swinging
power
node the capsule along at
3,600 mph, into ever
higher orbits.

2 CATCH
The tether speeds along its
orbital path at 21,000
mph, so the crew capsule is
programmed to be in the A MAGNETIC PUSH FROM BEHIND
right place at the right time. After flinging its payload, the tether loses speed, and its orbit shrinks.
The 550-pound catch mech- To climb back up for the next job, it takes advantage of Earth’s electri-
anism looks like a square cally charged magnetosphere. Using energy collected by its solar
lasso. When the capsule panels and an onboard avionics system, the tether ejects electrons
comes within range, sen- from its base that collide with the magnetosphere. The resulting force
sors trigger the lasso to pushes the tether farther from Earth.
cinch tight around the tar-
get’s 200-foot-long boom in Magnetosphere
a fraction of a second. Tether
reboost
JASON LEE

Payload
pickup

TICKER
AND SEA/// 1.10.03
LEVELS VIRALRISE
WOULD ANNIVERSARY THEBY
FOUR INCHES COMPUTER VIRUS CELEBRATES
2100, ACCORDING ITS 20-YEAR
TO A STUDY BY THE ANNIVERSARY; FORMER
NATIONAL CENTER FOR UNIVERSITY
ATMOSPHERICOF RESEARCH
SOUTHERN IN
CALIFORNIA
BOULDER,GRAD STUDENT
COLORADO FRED
///

POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005 39

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HEADLINES

[INVENTIONS] [MEDICAL TECH]

I Was a Trojan Shark The Eyes

Tucked inside a robotic great white, filmmaker Fabien
Cousteau captures rare footage of the deep-sea world Tell All
A holographic contact
lens sees trouble brewing
» AT 1,200 POUNDS AND 14 FEET
long, “Troy” is chunkier than the aver-
hours in the $100,000 submarine, custom-
built by engineers at E.P. Industries in El inside the body
age great white shark. He might smell kind of Segundo, California, shooting video footage
funny too. But do the pods of sharp-toothed for a documentary film on shark cognition
predators he swam among last winter know that’s due out by the end of the summer.
that, inside, there’s just a man? Or that it was Using a camouflage device, he believes,
Fabien Cousteau, grandson of pioneering allows scientists to capture animal behavior
undersea explorer Jacques, surreptitiously in a purer way (most great-white footage is
recording their every movement? “My hope,” shot by divers inside a cage). To wit:
Cousteau quips, “is that they think, ‘Hey, that Cousteau, posing as Troy, is the only person
looks strangely like my retarded cousin from to ever capture on film a female shark Infrared light images a holographic lens.
Australia!’ ” Cousteau spent more than 100 attacking another female.—KALEE THOMPSON

» KALEIDOSCOPIC HOLOGRAMS
like the ones stamped on your
credit cards could soon wind up in the
A diver films
Cousteau eyes of diabetics. Researchers at Smart
disguised as Holograms in Cambridge, England, have
a shark. devised a contact lens that changes shape
in response to glucose found in tears—a
direct indicator of blood sugar. To find out
whether it’s time for an insulin shot, the

The head flips open like a
can lid, allowing the
diver to enter and exit
the sub underwater.
A closed-circuit
rebreather with four air
tanks allows Cousteau to
swim for up to six hours
without resurfacing.
An infrared video
camera is hidden
inside a rubber
suckerfish attached
to Troy’s back.
Cousteau uses a joystick
to control Troy’s pneumatic
propulsion system. Pistons
drive pressurized air into
cylinders, and cables flap
the tail, mimicking the
movement of a real shark.
I L L U S T R AT I O N : J A S O N L E E ; P H O T O G R A P H S , F R O M T O P : C O U RT E S Y S M A RT H O L O G R A M S ; C O U RT E S Y M I K E H O O V E R
wearer would simply snap a picture of his
eye with a handheld infrared camera that
would then analyze changes in the holo-
gram and display the results.
Since nearly half of all diabetics wear
For a realistic look,
contacts, the hologram lens—set to enter
Troy’s shell is made of
Skinflex, a soft, flexi-
clinical trials next year—could be a con-
ble material often venient, painless alternative to traditional
used for prosthetics. finger-prick tests. Early results show that
it’s at least 50 percent more accurate.
The lens contains your basic hologram:
a clear, 10-micron-thick polymer film
imprinted with a layer of dots that reflect
light. What gives the hologram its sensitiv-
ity, and sets it apart from typical holo-
grams, is a coat of synthetic receptors that
bind to sugar molecules. The reaction
causes the hologram to absorb water and
swell (imperceptibly to the wearer),
The two-inch-
changing the length of the light waves
thick hollow
ribs are made reflected off the patterned film.
of stainless Also in the works is a portable iPod-
steel. Super- shaped device that uses shape-shifting
strong plastic holograms to detect microbes such as
forms a dou-
ble spine.
anthrax and smallpox.—RENA MARIE PACELLA

04.12.05 SAFE CALL A STUDY BY THE DANISH CANCER SOCIETY FINDS NO LINK BETWEEN CELLPHONE USE AND THE RISK OF BRAIN TUMORS IN 1,249 SUBJECTS ///

40 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005

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HEADLINES

SHRINKAGE
DEPT. Research updates on
the quest to make really tiny things

LUBING UP THE
MICROMACHINES
Your car will survive if a dry spot in
the transmission shaves off a few
microns of metal from first gear.
Not so in a machine that’s just a
few millionths of a meter long. At
that size, one micron could be the
motor. “Friction is a big considera-
tion when building any machine,
but microscopic ones are posing
new challenges,” says Michael Dug-

I L L U S T R AT I O N : L - D O PA ; P H O T O G R A P H : C O U RT E S Y O F F I C E O F PA S S P O RT S E R V I C E S , U . S . D E PA RT M E N T O F S TAT E
ger, a materials scientist at Sandia
National Laboratories who studies
friction on the microscopic scale.
Thanks to sophisticated new
building methods, ever tinier
machines are finding their way into
all manner of electronics, from rear-
projection TVs to airbag sensors.
Trouble is, the oil-based lubricants
that keep many of them running
smoothly degrade quickly under
extreme heat. So Dugger and his
colleagues have devised a tougher
alternative: a lubricant made of
nonstick tungsten disulfide (WS2)
that can withstand temperatures
up to 600°F.
How do you apply it? One
atomic layer at a time, by injecting
a gaseous mix of tungsten and sul-
fur into an airtight chamber. The
particles bind to the machine’s
surface and to one another, creating
a fine layer of WS2—and perhaps
the most meticulous lube job on the
planet.—JOE BROWN

05.25.05 FLYING METEOROLOGIST THE

[SECURITY]
Meet Your 64Kb Passport
New identity papers are harder to fake—and easier to spy on
» RENEWING YOUR PASSPORT SOON?
You may want to craft a tinfoil sleeve to
store it in. That’s because the next generation
of U.S. passports, set to hit travelers’ hands by
September, will come with a radio transponder
and a 64-kilobyte computer chip embedded in
their back covers. The chip will store the same
information that’s printed in your passport,
and the transponder will broadcast it to a
reader synced up to an inspector’s computer.
It’s part of a cover-to-cover passport overhaul
to make the document harder to counterfeit.
Why the tinfoil? The transponders, also
known as radio-frequency identification (RFID)
tags, can theoretically send their contents to
readers as far as 15 feet away unless they’re
shielded by metal. Privacy advocates worry
that thieves could use their own readers to
secretly swipe your data. But Frank Moss,
•
WORLD’S MOST ADVANCED WEATHER SATELLITE, GOES N, IS SLATED TO LAUNCH FROM CAPE CANAVERAL ///
deputy assistant secretary of state for passport
services, says the new passport’s cover will act
as a shield, protecting the chip when the book
is closed. Even when it’s open, Moss says, the
chips will have a broadcast range of only
about 10 centimeters and the data will be
guarded by an encrypted digital signature.
The U.S. State Department has spent an
estimated $15 million developing the new
chips, which are seen as the first step to bio-
metric inspections. Initially, an officer will sim-
ply compare your face with the digital mug
stored on the chip, but the government hopes
to implement an on-the-spot face-recognition
scan as early as 2007. “Eventually we’d like
to compare the traveler’s image with a watch
list,” Moss says. “We also have room on the
chip to introduce iris or fingerprint scanning.”
Tinfoil case sold separately.—MIKE HANEY
The RFID-equipped
chip is only one of the
new passport’s security-
enhancing features. Here
are some of the others:
RR INTRICATE GRAPHICS
Patriotic images with subtle
details, such as fading color, can
be easily checked by inspectors.
RR PROPRIETARY PAPER
Interior paper is custom manu-
factured exclusively for the
passports, so it’s harder to fake.
RR SPECIAL INKS
Graphics are printed with invisi-
ble or optically variable inks;
the latter change color based
on how light strikes the page.
RR ENHANCED HEAD SHOT
Photos, now scanned and
printed, are superimposed
with graphics such as the eagle
and wavy lines seen here.
POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005 43
 T
[THE POPSCI POLL] HEADLINES
RESULTS BASED ON
3,478 RESPONSES STATISTICALLY SPEAKING. . .
POSTED TO POPSCI.COM
Good News for Social Security?
IF IT WERE The U.S. leads in medical technology but not in longevity. Scientists now
AFFORDABLE, predict that the average U.S. life span may decrease over the next 50 years
WOULD YOU USE
AN IRIS-SCAN 77 Years by
SYSTEM TO LOCK AVERAGE LIFE Months by which obesity
YOUR HOME? EXPECTANCY which obesity is expected to
FOR PEOPLE
BORN IN THE
U.S. TODAY
4—9 reduces today’s
average U.S. 2—5 reduce aver-
age U.S. life
YES life expectancy expectancy
in 2055
79% 47
AVERAGE LIFE

[45]
AVERAGE LIFE expectancy for
EXPECTANCY
FOR PEOPLE
82 people born in Japan today
BORN IN THE

NO
21%

VOTE ON NEXT MONTH’S POLL

AT POPSCI.COM
30.5
U.S. IN 1900

Percent of U.S. adults

who are obese
Compiled by Dawn Stover
»
34
AVERAGE LIFE expectancy for
people born in Sierra Leone today
NUMBER OF
COUNTRIES WITH
LONGER LIFE
EXPECTANCIES
THAN THE U.S.
Sources: CIA World Factbook, National Center for Health Statistics, New England Journal of Medicine, United Nations

TO SEE NEXTMONTH’S
POLL VISIT POPSCI.COM
T
HEADLINES

[COMPUTERS]

Monster Mainframes Battle for Bragging Rights

The world’s fastest supercomputer is about to get even faster. Can anyone outdo Blue Gene/L?

» THE QUEST TO BUILD THE WORLD’S

most potent supercomputer is like a
never-ending Olympic event, with the pride of
entire nations at stake. This summer, the U.S.
will tighten its grip on the gold when engi-
neers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory boost the
speed of IBM’s reigning champion Blue
Gene/L to an anticipated 270 teraflops—a
floor-shaking 270 trillion calculations per sec-
ond. That mark, which will make Blue Gene/L
five times as fast as the competition, should
hold for at least the next couple rounds of
testing, says University of Tennessee computer-
science professor Jack Dongarra, who twice a
year helps rank the top 500 supercomputers.
After all, neither the second- nor third-place
machines—NASA’s 52-teraflop Columbia
(named for the destroyed space shuttle) or the
Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and
Technology’s 36-teraflop Earth Simulator—is
slated for a major upgrade anytime soon.
Yet their designers have cause for back-
slapping, too: Collectively, the world’s best
supercomputers are about 1,000 times as
powerful as their predecessors of a decade
ago, thanks to the same trend of ever faster,
ever cheaper processors that propels the
personal-computer market. String enough of
those processors together—Blue Gene/L,
using the PowerPC architecture found in
many PCs and other devices, will have
131,000 when finished—and you’ll get the
kind of cyber-brawn necessary to do atmos-
pheric modeling, crash simulation, and other
huge tasks fraught with millions of interde-
pendent variables too daunting for humans.
Here, a look at how the world’s fastest
data-crunchers stack up.—JOSHUA TOMPKINS

➤ THE COMPUTER ➤ WHAT IT DOES ➤ HOW IT WORKS ➤ BEST CRUNCH SO FAR

BLUE GENE/L
IBM and Dept. of Energy
Speed: 135.3 teraflops
Processors: 65,536
OS: Linux
+ +
COLUMBIA
NASA
Speed: 51.9 teraflops
Processors: 10,240
Runs simulations to assess Uses IBM’s system-on-a-
Modeling an incredible
the safety of the nation’s chip technology to reduce
16 million atoms, simulated
aging nuclear-weapons cost and power needs.
the rapid resolidification of
stockpile, easing the bur- Each chip includes two
liquid tantalum to help
den on the DOE’s other, processors, network
test how metals react
slower supercomputer hardware and memory
under extreme pressure
+
Supports space exploration Processors are teamed in Demonstrated its ability to
projects such as designing groups of 512 (versus the predict the consequences
flexible fabrics for new the much smaller groups of damage to an orbiting
space suits and conducting in other supercomputers) to space shuttle in 24 hours

I L L U S T R AT I O N : R O B K E L LY; P H O T O G R A P H S , F R O M T O P : R O S S R O B E RT S / G E T T Y I M A G E S ; N A S A ; G E T T Y I M A G E S
OS: Linux fracture assessment on the streamline data pathways (previous computers took
International Space Station and facilitate huge jobs three months)
+ + +
EARTH SIMULATOR Conducts atmospheric and Uses vector processors, each Simulated the phenome-
Japan Agency for oceanic simulation, solid- of which can crunch an array non by which the Earth’s
Marine-Earth Science earth modeling, and of numbers simultaneously; solid-iron inner core and
and Technology atomic-energy research processors inside most super- liquid-iron outer core
Speed: 35.9 teraflops computers can handle only interact to generate the
Processors: 5,120 one calculation at a time planet’s magnetic field
OS: Unix

HEADLINE FROM THE FUTURE EVAN SNYDER

2025 CURED IN THE WOMB

From a standard genetic test, doctors discover that a pregnant woman’s two-month-old fetus carries
a gene that leads to fatal nerve damage, the symptoms of which won’t appear until age 40. What
once was cause for alarm is now corrected in a routine prenatal microsurgery. Using tissue from
the hospital’s stem-cell bank, surgeons implant healthy neural stem cells into the baby’s brain, where
the new cells intermix with, and eventually displace, the diseased ones. Prenatal stem-cell implants
are used to treat dozens of formerly incurable conditions, including diabetes and heart disease.
—AS TOLD TO DAVID KOHN
Evan Snyder is the director of stem-cell research at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, Calif. He was a leading force behind the California Stem Cell Initiative,
which will provide $3 billion for research over the next 10 years. Snyder is currently investigating the regenerative properties of stem cells for organ repair.

06.05.05 GREEN DAY MAYORS FROM AROUND THE GLOBE CONVENE IN SAN FRANCISCO TO SIGN “GREEN CITY” ACCORDS IN HONOR OF WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY ■

46 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005

 SOAPBOX
POPULAR
scıence T

INSIDE THE UNDERWATER LAB • MELTING NUKE WASTE • WILLIE NELSON, OILMAN? • DARPA ROBOT RACE PREVIEW

MEDIASCOPE
EXAMINING THE SCIENCE BEHIND
I decided to write an article about the
science behind health-media freak-outs.
SCIENCE NEWS COVERAGE Every epidemiologist I talked to—even
BY REBECCA SKLOOT those whose research depended on West
Nile being a threat—said the coverage
was hype. The same was true for most of
the stories I investigated: The Impending
Mad Cow Disease Epidemic, Hanta Virus
Wiping Out the West, The Return of
Bubonic Plague—none were completely
true to the science.
And nothing has changed. I bet few
people in America went online or looked
at a TV or newspaper in mid-February
without encountering some variation of
this: “In a study published just in time

Anyone could
lose a loved one.
Are we all at
risk of dropping
dead from this?

C O L U M N I S T I L L U S T R AT I O N : R O B K E L LY; C O L U M N I S T P H O T O G R A P H : J O H N Z I B E L L ; P H O T O G R A P H S : J O H N B . C A R N E T T
for Valentine’s Day . . . doctors reported
how a tragic or shocking event can stun
the heart.” Deadly Broken Heart syn-
drome made headlines from Boston to
Bombay. It was on the front page of the
New York Times. The Internet buzzed.
TV news ran images of people being
rushed from ambulances, heart moni-
tors flatlining.
Responding to press releases from

Hype That Breaks Your Heart

Johns Hopkins University, the media
reported that sudden stress—from, say,
the shock of a surprise party or the
THE ISSUE: Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the news hit that death of a loved one—can cause a surge
a breakup or a surprise party could kill us. Well, not quite of adrenaline that can, essentially, poi-
son the heart muscle and cause some-

W
HEN MOSQUITOES BROUGHT WEST NILE VIRUS TO NEW YORK, ALL THE PAPERS thing that resembles a heart attack.
said it was going to be the next big deadly epidemic (which, of course, According to ABC’s World News Tonight,
it wasn’t). The day the news came out, I was in my garden in Pitts- “there is no way to predict who is most
burgh, and a mosquito landed on my arm. I smacked it, then immediately thought, likely to suffer Broken Heart syndrome”
“Oh my god! West Nile virus!” So I ran inside and did something I hadn’t done and it “may be more common than most
since grade-school summer camp: I doused myself with insect repellant. Then I got doctors realize.” Scary stuff—anyone
a whiff of the fumes and remembered I just read an article saying insecticides can lose a loved one or walk into a room
cause Parkinson’s disease! I’m only slightly ashamed to say I screamed, ran like a full of people yelling “Surprise!” Are we
girl, and jumped in the shower. Then I came to my senses. I was a trained scientist all at risk of dropping dead from this?
who knew better than to fall for every this-is-going-to-kill-you headline; if those Well, no. The media was reporting on
articles flipped me out, what were they doing to the general public? research that didn’t prove anything.

48 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005

T
SOAPBOX
There was no broken-heart study. There
was a “small observational case series,” PLUGGED IN
YOUR PERSONAL-TECH
which is basically a group of scientists say- ADVOCATE
ing, Here’s something we noticed that
warrants investigation. Of the thousands BY CORY DOCTOROW
of people in Baltimore who experienced
sudden stress in three years, this report
looked at just 19 people. The Times
reported that the syndrome seems to
affect more women than men—which
might have something to do with the fact
that there was only one man in the sam-
ple for it to affect. What the research
found was a potential connection between
sudden stress and a reversible heart syn-
drome (which no one actually died from).
But connection does not mean cause, and
cause can’t be determined without a large,
carefully controlled study.
When I spoke with Redford Williams,
director of the Behavioral Medicine
Research Center at Duke University, who
has been studying the effects of stress on
the heart since 1965, he was downright
furious about the coverage of Broken
Heart syndrome: “[It’s] about as common
as getting struck by lightning, and there’s
nothing you can do to prevent it, aside

C O L U M N I S T I L L U S T R AT I O N : R O B K E L LY; C O L U M N I S T P H O T O G R A P H : J O N AT H A N W O RT H ; I L L U S T R AT I O N : O L I V E R W O L F S O N
from avoiding sudden stress, which is
impossible.” This kind of hype distracts
from real problems, he says, such as
chronic stress—caused by high-pressure

Rewriting the Web’s Rules

jobs, traffic jams, domestic problems and
the like. “Chronic stress is far more com-
mon and costly in terms of the public
health impact, lives lost and human suf- THE ISSUE: A new global treaty could reform the insane
fering. And it is preventable.” Last year, a copyright rules that govern the Web today
bona fide study of 50,000 people world-

wide found that chronic stress is as much
of a risk factor for deadly heart disease as
high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity
are. Shame that didn’t get nearly the
press Broken Heart syndrome did. ■
Get on your own soapbox!
A
DECADE AGO, THE PERPETUALLY PARANOID HOLLYWOOD STUDIOS TRIED TO
get Congress to de-fund the Internet. They failed, so they took their case
to the United Nations and suckered the World Intellectual Property
Organization (WIPO), the UN agency that draws up copyright treaties, into giving
them a new set of global laws for copyright on the Internet. And WIPO got it com-
pletely wrong. It treated the Internet as a problem to be solved, a system that
made copies too easily with too little control. Yet in the ensuing years, it has

@ Write to mediascope@time4.com
or pluggedin@time4.com.
utterly failed to stop infringement. Instead we’ve seen only a series of show-
arrests of scientists, thousands of indiscriminate lawsuits against file-sharers,
and laws that make it easy to censor political opponents and harass competitors.

➤
Now there’s a chance to rewrite these old wrongs. Activists at WIPO are draft-
3 OTHER RECENT HEADLINES ing a new treaty called Access to Knowledge (A2K) that will celebrate the Internet’s
THAT MAY HAVE MISLED YOU

➤ “NEW AIDS SUPERBUG” News broke ➤
worldwide of an AIDS “superstrain.”
“Unimaginably aggressive,” resistant to drugs,
kills in months—all based on one guy whose
infection progressed fast. Cause for further
study? Absolutely. For hysteria? No way.
“VIAGRA NOW MENDING
HEARTS” Researchers showed that Via-
gra may prevent heart enlargement or re-
pair damage in enlarged hearts. Interesting
research, but it was done in mice. There’s
no indication that it works in humans.
➤ “STUDY BOLSTERS CANCER–RED
MEAT LINK” Well, sort of, but many of the
study’s numbers weren’t statistically significant.
The reality: There was about a 40 percent in-
creased risk of cancer but only in 1 percent of
people who consumed large amounts of meat.

50 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005

 T
SOAPBOX |PLUGGED IN
ability to enable opportunities for edu-
cation, cross-border cooperation and
the disabled, while getting rid of the
crazy stifling laws of the past.
One of the worst of these laws is
“anti-circumvention,” which makes it
illegal just to tell someone how to
break a software lock. In 2001 the
FBI imprisoned Russian programmer
Dmitry Sklyarov the day after he gave
a presentation at the Def Con hacker
conference demonstrating the incom-
petence of Adobe’s e-book protection.
Charges were eventually dropped, but
on Sklyarov’s return to Russia, the
Russian government issued a warning
Dumb treaties have undermined
due process and cooperation
without solving infringement.
to its scientists to steer clear of Ameri-
can conferences, as we’d turned into
the kind of nation that threw people in
jail for talking about math.
Another awful WIPO rule is “notice
and takedown.” This lets Internet serv-
ice providers off the hook for their cus-
tomers’ infringement so long as
the ISP promptly disappears any docu-
ments that attract copyright com-
plaints. You don’t need to prove
3 MORE THINGS
TICKING CORY OFF
THIS MONTH
1
➤ ANTI-PIRACY GOUGING
Makers of anti-piracy software
for cellphones want to charge
carriers $1 per handset to use
it, or more money than carriers
made by actually selling digital
media last year.
2
➤ SECURITY SCAMMING
A Canadian ISP cites bogus
“security risks” to justify
charging customers an
extra $50 to open the ports
that allow people to run
their own e-mail server.
3
➤ SONY FAILS MATH A
Sony music exec says that
Americans won’t mind
copy restrictions on CDs,
even though in an inde-
pendent survey, nearly 70
percent said they would.
➤ Full stories at popsci.com/soapbox.
52 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005
infringement to get documents cen-
sored—an accusation is sufficient.
Before the 2004 elections, internal
memos from Diebold leaked onto the
Web detailing the company’s illegal
responses to the failures of its voting
machines. Diebold didn’t deny the
memos; instead it targeted the ISPs of
the activists who republished them,
claiming that the notes were copy-
righted works and demanding that
they be taken offline immediately.
Censorship and control is what’s in
the treaties, but worse is what’s miss-
ing. The Internet enables informal col-
laboration among strangers to make
good stuff happen. But copyright
treaties only guarantee authors and
performers the same rights from coun-
try to country—the public’s rights are
different in every nation. A new treaty
could finally harmonize those rules.
For example, thousands of strangers
have taken the time to scan or retype
books for a free online repository
called Project Gutenberg, but an Aus-
tralian who sends her scanned copy of
1984 to a friend in New York runs
afoul of the law: Orwell is in the pub-
lic domain in Australia but not here.
Likewise, an American who makes a
blind-friendly edition of the latest
Harry Potter novel is covered under
U.S. law, but when he sends it to a
blind friend in Johannesburg, the South
African becomes a criminal. And on
and on. Organizations that would oth-
erwise facilitate these activities are
scared off by the specter of lawsuits.
A2K is the answer. Librarians,
disabled-rights advocates, academics
and interested parties of every stripe
are batting about proposals, using a
mailing list that you can follow at
lists.essential.org/mailman/listinfo/a2k.
It’s about time. For a decade, dumb
treaties have undermined due process,
privacy and cooperation, without dent-
ing the problem of infringement. The
next century deserves laws that love
the Internet for what it is, and if we
keep fighting, we just might get them. ■
 THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC EYE, PAGE
58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60 • THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62

THE FUTURE • THE TOURIST’S SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE ROLLER
COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC
TV, PAGE 60 • THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62 • THE TOURIST’S SPACE

STARTS HERE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE
BIONIC EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60 • THE SMART
HOME, PAGE 62 • THE TOURIST’S SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTI-
MATE ROLLER COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC EYE, PAGE 58 • THE
TAKE A LOOK AT HOLOGRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60
• THE SMART HOME, PAGE
FIVE UNBELIEVABLE 62 • THE TOURIST’S SPACE
SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTI-
TECHNOLOGIES MATE ROLLER COASTER,
PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC EYE,
TRUCKING PAGE 58 • THE HOLO-
GRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60 • THE
TOWARD REALITY. SMART HOME, PAGE 62 •
THE TOURIST’S SPACE SUIT,
PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER,
THEN BELIEVE THEM PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLO-
GRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60 • THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62 •
ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE TOURIST’S SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE ROLLER
JOHN MACNEILL COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC
TV, PAGE 60 • THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62 • THE TOURIST’S SPACE SUIT,
PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC EYE,
PAGE 58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60
• THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62 • THE
TOURIST’S SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE
ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER, PAGE 56 •
THE BIONIC EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLO-
GRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60 • THE SMART
HOME, PAGE 62 • THE TOURIST’S
SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE
ROLLER
There are plenty of great ideas for the future out there. COASTER,
Predicting whichPAGE 56 become
ones will • THE
BESTOFWHAT’SNEXT more than ideas, which technologies will come storming
BIONIC into
EYE,your
PAGElife58
and• flip
THEit upside
HOLO-
down—that’s dangerous business. But it sure is a rush. And it’s exactly what we’ve done in the pages that
GRAPHIC TV,follow:
PAGE We 60 •homed in on
THE SMART
the most jaw-dropping research projects happening in five core realms and extrapolated just how—and when—they’ll come to exist.
HOME, PAGE 62
We’ll turn you on to holographic television and a robotic roller coaster that would be a blast even if you couldn’t program
• THE TOURIST’S
SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE
it yourself, which you can (in 2008). We’ll show you the space suit galactic tourists will wear and the infinitely customizable
ROLLER
electronic-walled homes the rest of us will live in. Oh, yeah: And we’ll explain what it’ll take to make the blindCOASTER,
see. We PAGE
may 56 • THE
or may
not be spot-on with the dates, but rest assured that with all these marvels, it’s a question of when, BIONIC
not if. EYE, PAGEout58what’s
So check • THEnext.
HOLO-
GRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60 • THE SMART
HOME, PAGE 62 • THE TOURIST’S
SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE
THE ROLLER COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC
BIONIC EYE, EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC TV, PAGE
PAGE 58 • THE • THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62 • THE TOURIST’S
SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE BION-
IC EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60 • THE SMART HOME, PAGE
62 • THE TOURIST’S SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE ROLLER
COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC TV,
PAGE 60 • THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62 • THE TOURIST’S SPACE SUIT,
PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE BION-
IC EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60 •
THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62 • THE

POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005 55

 HELL ON WHEELS
The RoboCoaster replaces the pas-
senger car of a traditional roller
coaster with an industrial robotic
arm. The four-jointed arm swings
TKTK YOUR BRAINriders out into a virtual-reality
universe, up to 22 feet away from
The transcran magnetic
stimulation (TMS)the track, as it zooms along.
helmet
[1] is equipped with
movable magnets [2].
Microsecond energy
pulses induce electrical
activity in neurons within
the pulses’ magnetic
fields. Experts envision
cognitive-training clinics
where a person’s neural
circuitry will first be eval-
uated. A mental trainer
would then prescribe a
regimen of brain exer-
cises in combination
with drugs designed to
“reorganize the brain’s
circuitry into a better
functional state,” says
Tim Tully, a professor at

The 5,000-pound
articulating arm
creates extreme
torsional loads. To
handle them, the
rails of the track
use reinforced
high-strength steel
PHOTO CREDIT TK

and are set wide

apart for stability.

56 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005

 1
RECREATION
BESTOFWHAT’SNEXT 2008

The Ultimate Roller Coaster

Hang On for Your Life! (Forget Your Lunch)
CROSS A ROBOT WITH VIRTUAL REALITY,
AND WHAT DO YOU GET? A THRILL RIDE
GUARANTEED TO BLOW YOUR MIND
THE ROAD TO THRILLS
THE BIG PICTURE
The RoboCoaster will snake
through a building made up
of a series of domed theaters.
INSIDE THE RIDE
By creating multiple ride profiles,
programmers can design jour-
neys that appeal to guests of
every taste—a boon for theme
parks. Visitors can choose any
experience from an extreme
space battle to a gentle tour of
the solar system. Eventually, rid-
ers will interact with their envi-
PHOTO CREDIT TK
You are dangling like bait at the end of a 22-foot-long
robotic arm, and it looks and feels exactly like you’re zooming
through space. It’s tempting to gaze at distant planets, except
[1873]
Some 35,000 tourists pay
$1 each to ride the Mauch
Chunk Switchback Gravity
Railroad in Pennsylvania.
America’s first mechanical
roller coaster was built to
transport coal.
[1919]
John Miller patents “under-
friction wheels,” which grip
coaster rails from the bot-
tom, side and top, thus pre-
venting cars from derailing.
Now designers are free to
create hairpin turns and
steep drops while keeping
the cars on the track.
[1959]
Arrow Development engi-
neers the first tubular-steel
coaster track—Disney-
land’s Matterhorn—which
becomes the basis for all
modern steel coasters.
Steel proves more versatile
than wood, clearing the
way for loops.
[2004]
AMEC Dynamic Structures
and KUKA Robotics
demonstrate a prototype
track-based RoboCoaster
in Orlando, Florida.
[2008]
RoboCoaster opens its
first 3-D track-based ride.
that an asteroid as big as a house is hurtling toward you. Just
before impact, you blast it with a phaser cannon while executing a
series of buttery barrel rolls to avoid the debris. The asteroid bits pelt
your ship, rattling you to the marrow. Then, without warning, you’re
sucked through the blackness of a wormhole—back into reality.
This is the future of the roller coaster, as told by a jolly 46-year-old
Brit named Gino De-Gol, founder of an unusual company called
RoboCoaster. What fuels his ambitious vision is a belief that the all-
American icon of thrill, circa 2005, is fundamentally a one-trick pony.
“You are stuck on a track, you know exactly where you are going,
and the ride is always the same,” De-Gol says in mock exasperation.
What he has in mind is a hybrid ride, one that combines the high
G-forces of today’s coasters, the computer-generated trickery of
virtual-reality simulators and, eventually, the interactivity of
videogames. Propelled through a snaking series of domed theaters,
riders will swing far out into a computer-generated universe to come
face-to-face with aliens, navigate a pulmonary artery or, if they’re so
inclined, chase butterflies through the forest.
In 2002, two years after quitting his engineering job at KUKA
Robotics, Europe’s largest industrial-robot manufacturer, De-Gol
wowed the amusement industry when he installed the world’s first
passenger-certified robot at Legoland in Denmark. His innovation? He
attached a double-seated chair to the end of a KR 500—a 5,000-
pound aluminum robotic arm more commonly found lifting Mercedes-
Benz engines so they can be spot-welded. The arm’s six joints allow it
to move any which way imaginable. Using a touchscreen, riders built
their own thrills, choosing among barrel rolls, corkscrews and inver-
sions. But with the robot bolted to the floor, De-Gol says, his first Robo-
Coaster was “more like a really wild bull ride.”
Now he wants to mount KR 500s to a track and speed them
along one after another. Propel a rider on a twisting, undulating
trip while shaking him like a cat would a rat, and you greatly com-
pound the physical stimulation. Which brings us to the project’s
highest hurdle: the upchuck factor. If your inner ear and your eyes
send conflicting messages to your brain about your body’s posi-
tion—say, an alien lands on your ship, but the ride jerks a tenth of
a second later—the illusion is shattered, and your body could
revolt. Paul Evans, a mechanical designer at the engineering firm
AMEC Dynamic Structures, which is partnering with RoboCoaster,
is programming a series of KR 500 maneuvers to match, frame-by-
frame, a 3-D film of a roller coaster ride, in large part to deter-
mine which moves are too . . . sick. “We don’t exactly know what
the human body will tolerate when we combine extreme move-
ments with 3-D imagery,” he says. The amusement-park industry

ronment as in a videogame.
doesn’t keep tabs on nausea, though, so how will De-Gol ensure
that his ride is thrilling and enjoyable? “Guest satisfaction cards

[T POPSCI See the stationary version of the Robo-

ON THE WEB Coaster in action at popsci.com/thrill. ] will tell us a lot,” he enthuses. “The beauty is that we can simply
go in and reprogram it.”—JILL DAVIS

POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005 57

TKTK YOUR BRAIN SCLERA
The transcran magnetic
stimulation (TMS) helmet
[1] is equipped with
movable magnets [2].
Microsecond energy
pulses induce electrical
activity in neurons within
the pulses’ magnetic
fields. Experts envision
cognitive-training clinics
where a person’s neural
circuitry will first be eval-
uated. A mental trainer
would then prescribe a
regimen of brain exer- RETINA
cises in combination
with drugs designed to
“reorganize the brain’s ELECTRODE ARRAY
circuitry into a better
functional state,” says ANTENNA
Tim Tully, a professor at
CAMERA

SEE IT? BELIEVE IT

A seven-by-four-millimeter camera
with a light sensor, implanted in the
eye, wirelessly beams an image to a
small digital image processor outside
the body. Once processed, the image
is transmitted back to the internal
antenna and fed via cable to an elec-
trode array mounted on the retina,
stimulating the nerves to produce sight.

58 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005


PERSONAL HEALTH BESTOFWHAT’SNEXT
The Bionic Eye
We See the Future Better Than 20/20
RESEARCHERS HAVE ALREADY RESTORED Steve Austin had that enviable telescopic squint. Star Trek
SOME SIGHT TO THE BLIND. WHY chief engineer Geordi La Forge saw darkness as daylight with
NOT GIVE THEM SUPER VISION? his 24th-century ocular implants. And now it looks like a genera-
THE ROAD TO ARTIFICIAL VISION
[1929]
German neurologist Otfrid
Foerster electrically stimu-
lates the visual cortex of a
human volunteer’s brain,
causing his subject to “see”
small points of light.
[1968]
Giles S. Brindley of the
DIGITAL IMAGE PROCESSOR University of Cambridge
An external microprocessor implants 80 electrodes
encodes images from the under the scalp of a 52-
year-old woman who had
interocular camera into a form
suitable for the electrode array. gone blind. When he
Leaving heat-generating applies electricity, the
electronics outside the body woman sees spots of light.
prevents damage to sensitive
nerves and vessels.
[2004]
Armand Tanguay and his
colleague Noelle Stiles con-
duct the first experiment to
implant a digital camera in
an eye, replacing a dog’s
natural lens with a glass
lens and a sensor.
[2010]
USC researchers conduct
Electrodes
the first human trial of an
Tack implantable digital camera
connected to a 256-
electrode retinal implant.
ELECTRODE ARRAY
The electrode array is fixed to [2014]
the retina with a single tack The introduction of
through the sclera, the eye’s a 1,000-electrode
tough white rind. Each platinum implant allows blind
electrode stimulates nearby volunteers to recognize
nerve cells to produce a local- faces and read half-inch
ized sensation of light. Simula- type for the first time.
tions show that this 256-
electrode array could allow blind
subjects to see large objects.
2
2010
tion of very real people who have lost their sight are next in line for
such seemingly sci-fi vision. “I’m hesitant to use the word ‘super-
power,’ ” says Armand R. Tanguay, Jr., an electrical-engineering pro-
fessor at the University of Southern California who is building the
world’s first implantable camera for the blind. But if the device works,
he says, “a blind person will have abilities you and I don’t.”
Tanguay’s intraocular camera is part of a multimillion-dollar USC
effort backed by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Sci-
ence Foundation to develop an artificial retina to restore sight to peo-
ple whose light-sensitive cells have burned out as a result of decay or
disease. That’s 10 million people. The project is paying off: Six blind
volunteers now have an electrode-studded sliver of silicone tacked to
one of their retinas. A digital camera mounted to sunglasses feeds
images wirelessly to this implant, whose 16 electrodes zap retinal
nerves to produce impressions of light in the brain. Although the reso-
lution is crude next to the 100-million-pixel resolution of a healthy eye,
the volunteers can distinguish cup from plate, light from dark, and
they can tell when someone strolls past on the sidewalk.
“And we can do better,” says USC ophthalmology professor Mark
Humayun, the surgeon who pioneered retinal implants and now
directs the university project. He intends to implant a 60-electrode sen-
sor with nearly four times the resolution of the original by early 2006
and a 256-electrode chip a few years later. His ultimate goal is
1,000 electrodes. “That should allow people to recognize a face and
read,” Humayun says. He’s giving himself less than a decade to do it.
It’s no slam-dunk. “Imagine throwing your TV set in the ocean and
making it work,” says Robert Greenberg, CEO of Second Sight, the
California firm that builds the retinal implants. The eye is filled with
saltwater that can corrode electrodes. And then there’s the fact that
humming electronics can sear nerves and blood vessels.
This is why Tanguay’s plan to put the camera inside the eye is so
bold. The aspirin-size device he’s building consists of an aspherical
glass lens and a CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor)
sensor—which produces less heat than a conventional CCD (charge-
coupled device)—packed in a watertight tube. The camera would sit
just behind the pupil, in the small pouch where the eye’s crystalline
lens normally is. For people with artificial sight, not only would an
implantable camera mean no more goofy spy-cam sunglasses, they
wouldn’t have to sweep their heads constantly to scan their surround-
ings—that’s what the eye does, naturally.
Tanguay says his camera’s three-millimeter focal length will make
objects appear crisp no matter how far or close they are, something
even the eye can’t manage. And he could use a sensor tuned to
infrared light, the basis for night-vision scopes, so blind people could
see in the dark. One of his colleagues, biomedical engineer James
Weiland, prefers the Bionic Man archetype. “You could hook our sys-
tem up to an electron microscope and give someone super vision,” he
says. He’s only half joking.—MICHAEL STROH
POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005 59
 3
HOME ENTERTAINMENT
2015 BESTOFWHAT’SNEXT

The Holographic Television

Think Reality TV Isn’t Realistic? Watch This
Even if you had free run of any skybox in Madison THE ULTIMATE 3-D TV CAN’T HANG
Square Garden, you still wouldn’t see half the action that ON YOUR WALL, BUT YOU’LL
you will in your own living room, one day soon, on a large- BE TOO ENGROSSED TO NOTICE
screen holographic television. Without ever leaving your chair,
you’ll be poised to watch each play unfold from whatever per- THE ROAD TO 3-D TV
spective you choose, gazing into the depths of your TV. The only
thing lacking will be the soggy cheese fries.
Although this scenario is a decade away, a small-scale version
exists today in the Dallas laboratory of Harold Garner, a tireless Object beam
51-year-old medical doctor, plasma physicist and biochemist at the [1947]
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. The prototype he While working for the
built is the first machine ever to generate holographic movies—true Thomson-Houston Electric
Company in Rugby,
3-D without special glasses or nausea.
England, Hungarian physi-
How did a guy who works in a medical center discover the key to cist Dennis Gabor invents
depicting holographic objects in motion? Garner’s chair in develop- the hologram, for which
mental biology at UT is endowed in part by the founders of Texas he is awarded the Nobel
Instruments, and the company gave him early access to a digital Prize in 1971.
Reference beam
micromirror device (DMD) that is now used in high-end video projec-
tors. It is made up of nearly a million reflective panels, each of which
[1987]
can be angled by a computer several thousand times per second to TI engineer Larry Horn-
reflect or deflect beams of light, producing moving pictures. Garner’s beck invents the digital HOW TO RECORD A HOLOGRAM
big idea was to blast the DMD with a laser rather than with a typical micromirror device, an Shine a laser at an apple through
projection bulb. He programmed the DMD to reflect a sequence of optical semiconductor used a partially transparent mirror that
2-D interference patterns (called interferograms) that disrupt the laser in video projectors and TVs splits the light into an object beam
starting in 1996. and a reference beam. The object
light in such a way that it reflects a 3-D hologram.
beam scatters when it hits the
Garner’s biggest challenge has been to find a suitable screen. To apple and then recombines with
unfold the 2-D interference patterns into true 3-D images, the projec- [2003] the undisturbed reference beam.
tion surface must have volume. A column of mist will work, as will a University of Texas South- This creates an interference pat-
tub of Jell-O, but both diffuse the projected image, marring sharpness. western Medical Center tern that is recorded on a piece of
So Garner is working with a display composed of layers of microthin researcher Harold Garner film. Illuminate the film with a ref-
demonstrates the first erence beam, and it reproduces
LCD panels, each of which can, when electrically charged, be made
holographic video- multiple 2-D images that look like
clear or opaque. When the panels flash on and off in quick succes- one three-dimensional image.
projection system, screen-
sion to assemble the hologram, the speed is more than sufficient to ing hazy red images of a
convince the eye that it’s seeing a solid object. helicopter circling a jet.
Such displays exist today, but they work without the benefit of
holography; instead they have to slice up a 3-D image and send it
sliver by sliver to the LCD screens. The picture is almost the same as [2008]
Garner’s would be, but this method requires far greater processing The U.S. Air Force installs
holographic head-up dis-
power, because you need the x, y and z coordinates for every plays in fighter jets, bring-
slice. This is why Garner’s approach is the most viable solution for ing aviators 3-D images
3-D TV. “We’re sending the 3-D images as a 2-D interferogram,” of battlespace positions.
Garner says, pointing out that this doesn’t require any more band-
3 4 5
width than today’s television signals, “so we can use the current
[2015]
broadcast infrastructure.” As for creating holographic content, it
Holographic TV goes
would have to be recorded with a series of cameras shooting from
live with a pay-per-view
different viewpoints. satellite broadcast of
The first application of Garner’s technology may be in the holo- the heavyweight boxing
graphic imaging of MRIs or in head-up displays for the military (he’s championship. 2 1
had discussions with the U.S. Air Force and Lockheed Martin), so it’ll
be a while before this TV makes it to Circuit City. Still, it may well hap-
pen before the Knicks win the NBA title again.—JONATHON KEATS

60 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005

 TV GETS DEEP
The holographic TV is a box with a deep screen
onto which the three-dimensional moving picture
is projected. The screen comprises 100 ultrathin
transparent LCDs; each one can be made clear or
white by running electric current through it. The
plates are switched on and off in rapid succession,
faster than the eye can see, showing slices of the
hologram projected from behind. Taken together,
the thin sections give the illusion of a 3-D picture.
The top and sides of the set
[shown here in cutaway] will be
opaque. The perspective you’ll
see from the front of the screen
will change if you shift your
viewing angle even slightly.

THE HOLOGRAM PROJECTOR TV

A digital micromirror device is programmed
with an interference pattern that mimics holo-
graphic film. In this 3-D TV, a laser [1] shines
through a magnifying lens [2] onto the
DMD [3], which turns the beam into a holo-
graphic projection. That image bounces
through a second magnifying lens [4] onto the
screen [5], which is made up of a series of
microthin LCDs. This process happens more
than 30 times a second, creating full-motion
video. A full-color TV would use three DMDs
and three lasers—red, green and blue.

POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005 61

 4
HOME TECH
2015 BESTOFWHAT’SNEXT

The Smart Home

Little Plastic Houses for You and Me
The next time you close your eyes and imagine your THESE WALLS CAN TALK. AND DISPLAY VIDEO,
house of the future, picture a bunch of soda bottles. That’s HEAT YOUR HOME, LIGHT THE INTERIOR,
essentially what Philadelphia architects Stephen Kieran and AND UTTERLY REMODEL ARCHITECTURE
James Timberlake have been working with in their quest to
identify materials, technologies and mass-manufacturing tech- THE ROAD TO SELF-SUSTAINING HOMES
niques that they expect will reinvent their profession. Their
research has led to several design awards and, most recently, to
an innovation they call SmartWrap. SMARTWRAP CROSS SECTION
Designed as an exterior skin that would be stretched taut over OLED Airspace/ OPV cells
an aluminum frame, like nylon over tent poles, SmartWrap consists [1941] Aerogel
of two layers of a polyester film called PET—the same clear plastic British chemists of the
used in soda bottles. The idea is to use the thin, flexible film as a Calico Printers’ Associ-
substrate onto which micro-components for lighting, heating, ation patent polyethylene
energy storage and even information display can be printed, like terephthalate (PET). Almost
paper-thin, PET is tougher PCM
ink on paper. The result will be electronic walls that are inexpen-
and stiffer than other low-
sive and infinitely customizable both at the manufacturing stage cost plastics. Polyester film
and at home, so that you could, for instance, program one side of
the living room to be a built-in movie screen or turn an entire side
of the house into a window at the flick of a switch. [1973] ORGANIC LIGHT-
SmartWrap is structured as a PET sandwich with a two-inch- The Institute of Energy EMITTING DIODE (OLED)
Conversion builds Solar An OLED sandwiches
thick space between the layers. The inside layer of PET will be
One, the first solar house, electroluminescent
quilted with pillows of aerogel, a highly porous silica (it’s 99.8 at the University of materials between two
percent air) that was developed by NASA as insulation for the Delaware. Roof arrays conductive layers.
Mars Pathfinder Sojourner rover. The two-inch barrier has the generate electricity from When electricity is
same insulation factor as a 17-inch-thick concrete-and-brick wall sunlight, and batteries applied, the positive
filled with polystyrene insulation (the pink fluffy stuff). The PET is store surplus power. and negative particles
pair up and cause the
coated with a clear resin containing micro-capsules of phase-
materials to glow.
change materials, which absorb ambient heat during the day [2003]
and release it when the temperature drops at night, turning the The architectural firm
walls themselves into a heating element (although you’ll still need PHASE-CHANGE
KieranTimberlake debuts
MATERIAL (PCM)
a heating and cooling system). SmartWrap prototype at
The tiny plastic
Organic photovoltaic solar cells, or OPVs, would be printed on New York’s Cooper-Hewitt
capsules in this
exterior sun-facing surfaces to harvest energy and to power the museum. Organic photo-
layer of resin contain
voltaics, OLED screens and
OLED (organic light-emitting diode) displays and lighting patterns wax that releases
thin batteries are attached
on the inside. These solar cells work on roughly the same princi- heat when it solidifies
to panels silk-screened with
ple as the silicon solar cells you’re familiar with, but they’re far and absorbs heat
conductive ink.
when it melts,
less expensive. Instead of being manufactured at 572°F in a clean
to regulate indoor
room, organic photovoltaics are made with less-expensive carbon- climate.
based compounds and can be deposited onto a thin, flexible plas- [2008]
Researchers boost the
tic substrate at room temperature using a process similar to news-
efficiency of OPVs to 10
paper printing. One major stumbling block is their efficiency: ORGANIC PHOTO-
percent, making
They convert at most 6 percent of available light into electricity VOLTAIC (OPV) CELL
SmartWrap viable.
versus about 18 percent for silicon. Photons from
sunlight strike
Kieran says they’ll need a minimum of 10 percent efficiency the cell, exciting
for SmartWrap to fly. Scientists point out that organic photo- [2015]
electrons on the
voltaics are a newer field and that it’s only a matter of time Rolls of SmartWrap begin
surface and
to appear in home-
before they work through the infinite combinations of polymers triggering them
improvement and building-
to find the most efficient one. “There are still stumbling blocks on to flow freely. That
supply stores.
the science side,” Kieran says. “And we will see digital newspa- current is siphoned
off as electricity.
pers and wallpaper before we have an electronic building
facade. But we’ll get there.”—JESSIE SCANLON

62 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005

 A SQUARE WITH FLAIR
The SmartWrap house is infinitely customizable.
Micro-components for lighting, climate control, and
power generation can be printed onto the clear
polymer walls as easily as ink on paper. Because the
process is computer-controlled, architects could pro-
gram the components in any pattern, making an
entire wall a projection surface or leaving a space
blank to create a window.
PHOTO CREDIT TK

POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005 63

TKTK YOUR BRAIN
The transcran magnetic
stimulation (TMS) helmet
[1] is equipped with
HEY, NICE THREADS!
movable magnets [2].
In the orbital
Microsecond energyhotel of the
pulsesfuture,
induceyour space suit will
electrical
activitybeincustom-made
neurons within on-site.
After magnetic
the pulses’ creating a 3-D laser
fields.scan of your
Experts body in
envision
microgravity,clinics
cognitive-training a robot will
where“spray”
a person’s on a protective
neural
layer
circuitry willoffirst
composites
be eval- over an
uated.insulating
A mentalbase layer. The
trainer
wouldprocess, called electrospin-
then prescribe a
regimen ning,
of liquefies
brain exer- polymers
cises ininto microfibers that con-
combination
tract as
with drugs they cure—apply-
designed to
ing the the
“reorganize mechanical
brain’s counter-
pressure
circuitry into a necessary
better to keep
you alive
functional state,” in space.
says The hel-
met aattaches
Tim Tully, professor to aatpolymer
torso shell that contains
life-support systems.

64 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005


SPACE
BESTOFWHAT’SNEXT
The Tourist’s Space Suit
Get Slinky at the Space Hotel
YOU CAN KEEP THE ROBE, BUT As Ansari X Prize champs Burt Rutan and Paul Allen and
PLEASE RETURN THE KEVLAR SUIT their band of multimillionaire brothers—Virgin Galactic’s
AND THE GECKO SLIPPERS Richard Branson and hotelier Robert Bigelow—close in on devel-
THE ROAD TO SPACE TOURISM
GECKO FABRIC
Millions of
nanometer-size [1935]
synthetic setae— Aviator Wiley Post sets
stalklike hairs altitude record of 50,000
with spatula-like feet. He wears the first
structures on their practical pressurized suit,
ends—are fabri- similar to a deep-sea div-
cated out of a
ing suit, made of cloth
polymer sub- lined with rubber.
stance such as sil-
icone. The spatu-
las grip nearly [1965]
any surface For the Gemini program,
through a weak David Clark coats a rubber
intermolecular and neoprene bladder with
attraction not nylon mesh and a fire-
unlike static cling resistant outer layer. An
[see inset]. internal cable-and-pulley
system helps astronauts
move their limbs when the
suit is pressurized.
[1983]
Shuttle astronauts use suits
with detachable arm and
leg units that accommo-
date various body types.
[2005]
Dava Newman proves the
feasibility of Bio-Suit
fabrication by creating
a prototype Kevlar
sleeve that properly
pressurizes one leg.
NANO-BIOSENSORS
Nano-bioreceptors sheathed
with a one-molecule layer of [2020]
a reagent are implanted Tourists visiting the new,
under the skin. They turn orbiting SkyHotel don
brighter when they react with their Bio-Suits, the same
increased levels of sub- getup used for NASA's
human exploration
stances such as glucose or
stress hormones. A scanner mission to Mars.
shines near-infrared rays
through the skin to measure
the sensors’ brightness.
5
2020
oping the launch vehicles and orbital habitats that will open space
travel to the well-heeled tourist, one big question remains: What are
you going to do up there? If MIT aerospace-engineering professor
Dava Newman has her way, you’ll eventually be able to scout out
infinite freezing darkness in a custom-made space suit that performs
far better than the ones astronauts have been using for decades.
Newman is developing the materials and the design for a space
suit that astronauts could use to explore Mars or the moon. But if
you’ve got the cash, you could sport one, too. As a space tourist,
your suit would be fabricated right on-site. First, robotic arms pirouette
around you, creating a 3-D laser scan of your body. Guided by that
image, the arms extrude a liquid composite of Kevlar, spandex and
nylon (over an insulating undergarment), which tightens as it cures,
sort of like shrink-wrap. Materials integrated into the weave will
actively control thermal regulation. Most of the suit’s materials will be
recycled when you are finished using it. A polymer torso shell serves
as a docking point for your helmet and a frame for your oxygen
tank—and maybe a holster for your digital camera. Newman’s
innovation is to use mechanical counterpressure to constrain your
body’s tissues, rather than a bulky layer of gas to pressurize the suit.
By orienting the threads along something called the body’s lines of
non-extension, she can make the suit extremely tight yet highly flexi-
ble. Thus far, Newman has been able to create a sleeve around one
leg that applies the appropriate mechanical counterpressure.
The best footwear inside and out of your zero-gravity hotel will
be a pair of Velcro-like gecko slippers, based on the research of
electrical-engineering professor Ron Fearing of the University of Cali-
fornia at Berkeley. Gecko feet are covered with nanometer-size hairs
called setae. What makes them grip is similar to static cling: Elec-
trons at the end of the setae and on the surface interact to keep the
two stuck together. Fearing has produced gecko fabric with a hold-
ing force of about seven pounds per square inch, but he’ll need to
crowd more polyurethane setae into that space to match the gecko’s
holding power—150 pounds per square inch.
Unfortunately for any spacewalker, weightlessness disturbs our
physiology. To make sure everything’s OK, you might be monitored
by nano-biosensors developed by University of Illinois biomolecular
engineer Michael Strano, a leading researcher in nanomechanics.
He discovered last year that a thin coating of potassium ferricyanide
on a carbon nanotube changes brightness based on the amount of
glucose in a solution. By implanting these nanotubes beneath the
skin and shining near-infrared light onto them, a modified bar-code
scanner could read their intensity through the skin to calculate blood
glucose levels—without ever drawing blood. Today, Strano is simply
trying to create a quick and painless diagnostic test for diabetics, but
he’s working on reagents for cholesterol, electrolytes and stress hor-
mones, which would be applicable to space tourists. After all, who
wants to be stressed out while on vacation?—PATRICK DI JUSTO
POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005 65
 TRIP

A mysterious fuel
ROUND

loss, a GPS snafu,

dehydration,
crushing fatigue—
it’s all here in our
inside story of Steve
Fossett’s record-
breaking solo flight
around the world
BY ERIC ADAMS
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
JOHN B. CARNETT
 AIRBORNE With only minutes
of daylight left, Steve Fossett
lifts off from Salina, Kansas, in
Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer.
His next stop: Salina, Kansas—
and the record book, for
a solo, nonstop, unrefueled
flight around the world.

POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005 67

6 P.M., SUNDAY:
T-MINUS 24 HOURS
It’s easy to cop an attitude about Steve Fossett. The 60-year-old
multimillionaire investor-turned-adventurer has circumnavi-
gated the world solo in a balloon, he has set 24 extreme-sailing
records, he’s swum the English Channel, competed in the
Iditarod and the 24 Hours of Le Mans auto race, run 100 miles
through a desert in Colorado—heck, he’s even set the world
speed record in a blimp (69.4 mph)—and now he intends
to pilot a flying fuel tank around the world nonstop . . .
but frankly, he
just doesn’t have
the look. He has
never possessed,
Atlantic GlobalFlyer out for its long-awaited extended spin,
when a reporter asks him about motivation. Fossett lets loose
some boilerplate about the technical challenges, the personal-
endurance challenges, and the pure accomplishment that
comes with being the fastest, first, only or best—and then he
adds, quite simply, that “it’s good for my self-esteem.”
Again, not your usual pilot-speak, but let’s give the guy a
break. He may be painfully taciturn and oddly unheroic in
demeanor, but when he does speak, he’s genuine. Still, as the
hours and minutes tick down
toward the moment of truth for
Fossett and GlobalFlyer, there are

›
DREAM TEAM Scaled Composites engineer Jon Karkow [left, in GlobalFlyer cockpit] oversaw
the design and construction of the aircraft, based on boss Burt Rutan’s conceived configuration.
Karkow was also the program’s chief test pilot, an unusual dual role in the aerospace industry.
Fossett [above] patiently waits for his mission controllers to green-light his flight. The team from
Scaled Composites signed the inside of the nose gear door [right]—echoing a similar gesture
made by the builders of Charles Lindbergh’s Atlantic-crossing Spirit of St. Louis.

say, the charisma of Charles Lindbergh, the quiet confidence of

Chuck Yeager or the steely determination of his most recent
predecessor, Dick Rutan, the combat-hardened test pilot who in
1986 flew the twin-engine, piston-powered Voyager around the
world nonstop in a grueling nine-day ordeal, with co-pilot Jeana
Yeager (no relation to Chuck) mostly managing fuel.
So Fossett doesn’t quite fit the mold of the hard-boiled, Ray
Ban–sporting jet jocks. It probably doesn’t help that most of
the aviation records he has set in airplanes were won at the
››
controls of his Cessna Citation X, a cushy $20-million business
jet. And to make matters worse, here he is answering questions
at a press conference, killing time waiting for conditions to
align so that he can take his specially commissioned Virgin
cynics in the crowd who are not entirely convinced that Fos-
sett can handle the tricky bird at its maximum weight, a feat
never before attempted during testing. After all, he isn’t an
actual test pilot with vast experience in unorthodox aircraft; he
has flown GlobalFlyer only eight times. They’re sure he’ll just
plow it into the runway and die a mile into his takeoff roll.
1:30 P.M., MONDAY: T-MINUS 4.5 HOURS
Fossett and his team have been in Salina, Kansas, for nearly two
months preparing for the flight, which could last nearly 70
hours. They’ve spent most of the past four weeks waiting for a
break in the weather. Everything must be right, from runway
winds to the jet streams along his intended route to the timing

68 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005

 of the day and night phases—ideally, takeoff and landing will
happen in daylight because it’s safer and allows the chase plane
to more easily detect problems.
The variables seem to be coming together. The ground crew
moves GlobalFlyer out to the end of the runway for fueling. In
order to minimize taxi time when fully loaded, Fossett will sim-
ply start the engine and take off.
›› 3 P.M., MONDAY: T-MINUS 4 HOURS
Persistent winds continue to keep everyone guessing through-
out the day. Journalists linger in the media center. Fossett’s long-
time friend and co-adventurer, Virgin founder Richard Branson,
talks business on his cellphone. Flight planners in red Global-
Flyer fleece vests stare at weather maps on computer monitors
in the elaborate mission-control center built by Virgin specially
for this mission. GlobalFlyer lead engineer and chief test pilot
Jon Karkow pensively sits sipping fruit juice in a nearby cafe-
teria. (Karkow’s boss, Burt Rutan—the man who designed Voy-
ager 25 years ago and is more recently famous
for creating the world’s first private space vehi-
cle, SpaceShipOne—is notably absent. Some-
thing about important meetings that could
not be rescheduled.) At a table not far from
Karkow, Fossett chats up famed test pilot Bob
Hoover and hotel heir and aviation buff Barron
Hilton. A clutch of British photographers rushes past, the savvi-
M A P : C O U R T E S Y N AT I O N A L G E O P H Y S I C A L D ATA C E N T E R , N AT I O N A L O C E A N I C
est one enlightening the rest: “It’s Paris Hilton’s grandfather!”
A N D AT M O S P H E R I C A D M I N I S T R AT I O N , U . S . D E PA R T M E N T O F C O M M E R C E
›› 4:15 P.M., MONDAY: T-MINUS 2.5 HOURS
The sun is perilously close to the horizon when Fossett gets the
thumbs-up and heads to the runway, with all the journalists and
VIPs scrambling onto shuttle buses. There, Fossett, now in his
flight suit, says his good-byes to his friends, crew members and
his wife, Peggy, and climbs cheerfully into the cockpit.
GLOBE-TROTTER AROUND THE WORLD IN 67 HOURS
-60
2
1/9
8 3
4 6
-30
7 7 Decision to “go for it”
0
Like Lindbergh in his Spirit of St. Louis, Fossett has no direct
forward view, just a tiny bubble canopy—and even that is use-
ful (most crucially during takeoff and landing) only if he shifts
his seat fully upright and squeezes a few extra cushions under
himself. The rest of the flight he’ll recline, face-to-face with the
instrument panel’s multiple electronic displays and autopilot
controls and the myriad switches used to manage the complex
fuel system for optimal aircraft balance. Also arrayed within
reach: navigational maps, Slim-Fast shakes (his chosen, and
sole, nourishment for the duration), water stored in CamelBak
hydration packs, and an oxygen mask in case his cabin pres-
surization fails. He’s catheterized, the urine to be ejected from
the aircraft; consuming nothing but liquids will prevent the
need for solid-waste disposal.
HOT SEATS Fossett and Virgin founder Richard Branson face the press
prior to liftoff [below left]. Project manager Paul Moore gauges
Fossett’s mood during the fuel crisis [below].
›› 6:47 P.M., MONDAY: TAKEOFF
Last-minute ground-crew preparations in the cold 38°F sun-
set—including trouble with three different portable engine
starters—continue to delay the takeoff. Finally, with heli-
copters hovering close by, emergency crews positioned near
the end of the runway, and a few hundred spectators lining
the fences along the taxiways, Fossett gets clearance from
the control tower and pushes the throttle of the lone
Williams FJ44 jet engine to 100 percent. The exotic insect-
1 Depart Salina, Kansas
2 GPS trouble over Canada
3 Early arrival at 45,000 feet
4 Sightseeing over Atlas Mts.
5 Halfway point, near Calcutta
6 Fuel shortage revealed
5
8 Cross Santa Catalina, Calif.
9 Arrive Salina, Kansas
POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005 69
like GlobalFlyer rolls forward. At 8,000 feet of the 12,300-foot
runway, Fossett pulls back slowly on the stick and coaxes the
heavy plane off the ground. The black sky swallows him up.
›› 10 P.M., MONDAY: T-PLUS 3 HOURS
His first success under his belt, Fossett aims for Canada, on a
route that will take him across the Atlantic to Morocco, Algeria,
Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and then on to India, China and Japan
before crossing the Pacific back to the U.S.
Midway into his first night, though, the GPS system sud-
denly stops receiving satellite signals—a potential showstop-
per. “We experienced the failure as I was leaving the U.S.
toward Canada,” Fossett later tells reporters from the aircraft.
“This really was a big worry, since we are unable to fly with-
out GPS, especially when out of radio range—we couldn’t
even be directed by air-traffic control.”
THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME From left: GlobalFlyer glides above Kansas farmland. Fossett’s knee-
board, showing his landing procedures. Richard Branson congratulates the triumphant pilot soon after
touchdown. Two ways to fly Virgin: solo, or with 400 others on board a 747.
As Fossett flies over Canada, he, Karkow and chief mission
controller Kevin Stass—as well as Branson, who chimes in,
buddy-to-buddy, to encourage Fossett—discuss strategies for
continuing the flight, including receiving steering controls from
the chase plane and mission control.
›› 1 A.M., TUESDAY: T-PLUS 6 HOURS
The GPS reengages. Karkow determines that the device was
››
looking for a type of satellite signal, WAAS, that is available
only in the U.S. Outside the United States it uses standard
GPS signals, but at the borders, it looks for WAAS signals
even when they’re weak.
›› 8 A.M., TUESDAY: T-PLUS 13 HOURS
Fossett reaches an altitude of 45,000 feet, just west of Africa.
This is surprising, considering that Karkow had said the pre-
70 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005
vious evening that GlobalFlyer’s absolute ceiling early in the
flight would be about 39,000 feet. It wasn’t supposed to reach
45,000 feet until, having burned off much of its fuel, it
became lighter, around Saudi Arabia. Karkow attributes the
discrepancy to “better-than-expected performance.”
All in all, Fossett seems to be enjoying himself. “I’m seeing
some beautiful scenery,” he says via satellite telephone.
“Madeira; the coast of Morocco. Crossing the Atlas Moun-
tains was just magnificent.” Then, “The Virgin chase plane
just met up with me, and it was nice to see them.”
These occasional peeks out the window and contacts with
›
the chase plane (actually Fossett’s Citation, being flown by
three Virgin Atlantic pilots) are rare diversions from the visu-
al monotony of the cockpit. Fossett’s minute-by-minute exis-
tence is dominated by the instrument panel and the steady
drone of the jet engine just a few feet from his head. It’s
almost always dark—the fact
that he’s flying east, against the
rotation of the Earth and in winter ensures that 80 percent of
his flight will take place at night. “It’s now my second night,
and I’m a little bit tired,” Fossett says late in the day. “But I’ve
done this before. I’ve downed three of these milkshakes—not
my preferred meal, but they’ll do the trick.”
8 A.M., WEDNESDAY: T-PLUS 37 HOURS
As a press conference is about to begin, a buzz has gone
around that there was a problem overnight. Some speculate
that Fossett had to divert from his filed flight plan because of
weather or aircraft trouble. (Such a diversion would be a no-
no to officials from the Swiss-based world air-sports govern-
ing body, Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, which
requires record-setters to stick to their filed flight plans, the
way billiards players must call their shots.) The reality turns
out to be a mysterious fuel loss. An estimated 2,600 pounds of
the original 18,194 pounds of JP4
military jet fuel have vanished. Mis-
sion control began noticing discrep-
? WHAT HAPPENED TO FOSSETT’S FUEL?
GlobalFlyer engineer Jon Karkow says that 3,100 pounds—not the 2,600 originally thought—
ancies between sensors in the gas escaped from GlobalFlyer in the flight’s first three hours. Inadequate venting in the two main boom
tanks and their projected fuel-con- tanks caused expanding air to push fuel into the wing tanks and out of their vents. Engineers didn’t
sumption rates early on Tuesday— discover the problem earlier because they never attempted risky full-fuel takeoffs. Had Fossett taken
“I think we didn’t want to believe off during daylight, the chase planes might have noticed the leaking fuel, and if so, they would have
there was actually a problem,” certainly ended the flight—unnecessarily, we now know, because the absent fuel lightened Global-
Karkow laments—but couldn’t con- Flyer, making it significantly more efficient and able to complete the flight with fuel to spare.
firm it until Fossett was able to per-
form in-flight tests to estimate Glob-
alFlyer’s weight.

›› 1 P.M., WEDNESDAY: T-PLUS 42 HOURS

Given the fuel loss, Fossett needs a tailwind of 58 knots on aver-
age to make it back to Salina, and forecasts are unclear about
says. They know it leaked out of multiple vent lines, which
help equalize pressure inside the tanks, but what caused it to
vent so dramatically is unknown. The loss does, however,
explain why Fossett got to 45,000 feet so much sooner than
expected: GlobalFlyer was substantially lighter than it should
have been at that stage of the flight.
The mood in the mission-control center is grim; the team
seems almost convinced that Fossett won’t make it.

›› 10 P.M., WEDNESDAY: T-PLUS 51 HOURS

The winds have held true, and spirits are beginning to lift.
“We’re really pleased with the tailwind,” project manager Paul

whether he’ll have it. If he doesn’t, he’ll be forced to

land early, most likely in Hawaii. Mission control
brings Fossett in on the satellite phone. “This is a huge
setback, to think that we might not have the fuel to make it,” he
says. “We’ll make our decision based on wind forecasts, but I
don’t have a high level of confidence right now.” His face—
frozen on the poky video feed overhead—is a picture of fatigue
and miserable dejection. (It may also be betraying the misery of
severe headaches, which Fossett is experiencing at the same
time. Mission controllers conclude that it’s dehydration and
order him to drink more water and go on oxygen. He reveals
after the flight, though, that he accidentally depleted his entire
emergency oxygen supply when he placed something on top of
the low-mounted oxygen toggle switch, triggering it.)
The alarming loss of fuel is a complete mystery, Karkow
Moore says. “It’s been averaging 100 knots or more. But it still
hangs in the balance. Fuel alone will not take him all the way
to Kansas, and the tailwind estimates for after Hawaii are less
than 40 knots.”
On the phone, Fossett tempers his own enthusiasm: “‘Con-
fident’ isn’t the right word here. I’m hopeful.” Later that night,
51 hours into his flight and 400 miles north of Hawaii, he’s
all smiles. “I hit the jet stream very well, which has put us in
a better fuel position,” he says with customary restraint. “I
have every hope of making it to Salina tomorrow.”
›› 8 A.M., THURSDAY: T-PLUS 61 HOURS
Thursday’s weather in Salina is a season removed from Mon-

[ ]
day’s—sunshine and nearly 70°F. Fossett crosses the California
Virtual GlobalFlyer When Fossett coast at Santa Catalina Island. In Kansas, 20,000 spectators
T POPSCI took off in GlobalFlyer, 24-year-old gather for his homecoming.
ON THE WEB flight instructor Brad Amstutz did
too—flying a digital model of the airplane in an exclusive
POPULAR SCIENCE simulation. Read about the startling similari-
ties between the two flights at popsci.com/globalflyer.
›› 1 P.M., THURSDAY: T-PLUS 66 HOURS
Silence descends on Salina as the crowds scan the sky for
GlobalFlyer. Fossett’s arrival time (CONTINUED ON PAGE 108)
y

POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005 71

 100 YEARS OF EINSTEIN

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POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005 73

 100 YEARS OF EINSTEIN

WHAT IF EINSTEIN HAD

BEEN A BETTER VIOLINIST?
Just how different would life be today if the world’s most famous
scientist had made a different career choice? By Gregory Mone

I
T’S EARLY 1905 IN BERN, SWITZERLAND, AND 25-
year-old Albert Einstein is walking home after
another day at the patent office. He’s tired of working,
exhausted from thinking too much. He takes a differ-
ent route, avoiding the clock tower and train station
that have been prompting so many odd thoughts about
the nature of time and motion. That’s it, he says to him-
self, I give up. Let all those physicists who won’t let me
into their infernal club figure out the universe. I’m
going to be a clerk, a father, a regular guy. I’m going
to be a violinist.
A hundred years later, in Peoria, Illinois, Einstein’s
great-great-great-grandson, Brad, a struggling musician,
wakes up late. The blinds are drawn, and he has to squint
to read the time on his alarm clock, because the light-emit-
ting diodes (LEDs) common to today’s clocks don’t exist.1
He doesn’t go online to check his e-mail or the weather,
because the Internet is still in its infancy.2 After staring
into his empty fridge, he decides to head to his sister’s
house for lunch. Traffic is bad; Brad takes a shortcut and
ends up lost. He’s in no position to afford the sort of lux-
ury car that’s equipped with GPS navigation, but even if
he were, he’d be out of luck. There is no GPS in a world in
which Albert turned to music.3
Finally arriving at his sister’s place, he’s dawdling on the
Einstein’s Ideas Take Shape
FROM THOSE 1905 INSIGHTS, SO MUCH TECH
lawn with his six-year-old nephew when the inquisitive
tyke suddenly asks, “What’s the sun made of?” Brad isn’t
sure, but his know-it-all sister answers, “Iron, dear.” And as
far as anyone knows, she’s right; without E=mc2 as a
guide, the English astronomer Cecilia Payne was not
inspired in 1925 to reexamine the notion that the sun con-
sists mostly of iron and not hydrogen.
Back in the kitchen, Brad’s sister laments that she
recently missed out on making a bundle—worried about
risk, she declined to follow a friend’s stock tip. In our
world, she might have hedged against major losses by buy-
ing options to sell the stock at a fixed amount higher than
the purchase price. But the equations that banks use to
derive the value of options grew out of Einstein’s 1905
work on Brownian motion.4
Brad heads home. After stepping onto the porch for a
cigarette—he stopped smoking indoors a few years
ago5—he scans his video collection. He puts on Star Wars,
pressing STOP after the scene in which Luke runs out of
bullets fighting the storm troopers.6 Bored, he crouches in
front of the television and flips through the channels.7
Finding nothing on, Brad picks up a current issue of
POPULAR SCIENCE. The magazine, which first reported the
possible existence of beaver-like creatures on Mars in its
May 1930 issue,8 has another article on the subject. Much
of our knowledge of the Red Planet’s surface comes from
robotic probes like the recent Mars rovers, which are pow-
ered by photovoltaic panels.9 The lack of solar panels has
meant much less Mars data, rendering the beaver theory
difficult for scientists to refute. What really catches Brad’s

THE FUTURE
Solar panels
Bar-code scanners Photons in sunlight Digital cameras Pharmaceuticals Options pricing Brownian sieves
The lasers that read free electrons from Charge-coupled Einstein’s work on Einstein’s equations These microscopic
product codes are atoms in embedded devices convert the random motion underlie the Black- devices would act
narrow beams of semiconductors; incoming photons of molecules helps Scholes model, like molecular
photons; in 1917 electric fields in the into electrons, then chemists control which helps traders change sorters, sep-
Einstein described panels channel the create digital images molecular interac- predict future fluctua- arating, say, viruses
one way to generate electrons, creating based on the pixels’ tions to create new tions in financial from other blood
the photons. current. charge. compounds. markets. components by size.

L I G H T Q U A N TA BROWNIAN MOTION

74 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005 ILLUSTRATIONS BY PETER STEMMLER

 THE BACKSTORY
1. Einstein showed that light travels in
bundles called quanta, which are at
the heart of the light-emitting diode.
When electrons in a semiconductor-
based diode move from one side to
another, they shift to a less excited state,
releasing energy in the form of photons.
Channel these, and you get a bright,
long-lasting light source.

2. In 1917 Einstein demonstrated that

when a photon comes into contact with
an atom, it can trigger a chain-reaction
release of additional photons from
local atoms. This phenomenon provided
the theoretical basis for the laser. With-
out lasers, the data in Web pages would
trudge along copper telephone lines in-
stead of sprinting through fiber optics.

3. Einstein’s special theory of relativity

shows that seconds tick by slower for
satellites because they’re moving so
much faster than ground receivers.
Meanwhile, the general theory of rela-
tivity, which Einstein finalized in 1916,
says that the decrease in gravitational
pull at altitude speeds the flow of time for
satellites. To keep GPS accurate, engi-
neers adjust the satellites’ internal clocks.

4. The unexpected financier showed that

water molecules bouncing around like
pinballs caused the seemingly random
motion of pollen in water. Derivations of
those equations also describe the fluctu-
ations of a stock’s price.

5. A common kind of smoke detector

contains the radioactive element ameri-
cium 241, which decays according to
E=mc2. Radiation from the breakdown
ionizes air molecules to create a smoke-
sensitive electric field. In a world without
smoke detectors, musicians constantly
pass out drunk, drop lit cigarettes, and
set their homes ablaze.

6. Devoid of even the cinematic notion

of the laser, George Lucas must arm the
characters in his epic films with guns.

THE FUTURE 7. Yes, Einstein has touched the lives of

even couch potatoes. Remote controls
GPS Spintronics Atomic bomb PET scanners
rely on infrared LEDs.
GPS satellites must Relativity could speed Others split the Radioactive atoms
adjust for relativistic computing by en- atom, but Einstein’s injected into patients 8. Apparent canals observed on Mars
effects: The satellites’ abling data storage famous equation decay in the brain, led imaginations to run wild: water,
velocity slows time in an electron’s orien- revealed the poten- resulting in gamma life . . . beavers.
relative to receivers tation, which can take tial: Multiplying even rays. By tracking
on the ground, but at many values, rather a tiny bit of matter those rays, the scan- 9. Sunlight kicks electrons in photo-
the satellites’ alti- than its charge, which by 90 quadrillion ner shows which voltaic panels out of their orbits; chan-
tude, gravity speeds can be only positive (the c2) packs a parts of the brain neling the electrons generates power.
time up. or negative. serious punch. are in use.—G.M.

S P E C I A L R E L AT I V I T Y E = MC 2

POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005 75

 100 YEARS OF EINSTEIN
eye, though, is an article on the possible existence of
tiny particles called “atoms” . . .
OK, that’s a step too far. Although it’s startling to
recognize just how wide-ranging Einstein’s influence
was, you’d have to have a tremendous lack of faith in
humanity to believe that if he hadn’t made his seminal con-
tributions to theoretical physics in 1905, no one else would
have come up with them. Historians of science agree that
in Einstein’s absence, other thinkers would have formu-
lated the theoretical underpinnings of digital alarm clocks,
broadband Internet access, GPS, DVDs and the charge-
coupled devices in digital cameras [see “Einstein’s Ideas
Take Shape,” page 74]. Someone else would have figured
out that the sun is mostly hydrogen. This magazine would
still be reporting on NASA-controlled rovers, not resilient
beavers roaming Mars.
But don’t go ripping down your Einstein posters just
yet. There’s one big idea that would have had
a very different fate if Einstein had turned to
Developing the theory of relativity
“took Einstein eight years
and nearly killed him.”
the violin: the general theory of relativity, published in
1916. More on that in a moment. For now, let’s return to
the 1905 breakthroughs.
In some cases, Einstein was only a few years ahead of
the curve. The French mathematician Henri Poincaré was
close to developing equations for the special theory of rel-
ativity, which says that nature’s laws are the same whether
you’re moving at a constant speed or standing still. Ein-
stein himself said he believed that the scientist Paul
Langevin would have gotten there before long. So our GPS
satellites wouldn’t be hopelessly inaccurate.
Another paper from 1905, on the behavior of atoms,
known as Brownian motion, was an inevitable theoretical
step; Einstein just got there first: “[He] confirmed a picture
many already believed to be true—that matter was made
up of atoms, and heat was the motion of these atoms,” says
physicist Michael Fowler of the University of Virginia.
Einstein’s work on the nature of light—the notion that
light comes in particles, not just waves—would also have
emerged with time, according to John Rigden, a physicist
at Washington University in St. Louis—although confir-
mation might have been delayed until 1923, when Arthur
Compton’s x-ray experiments provided undeniable evi-
dence. And what of the world’s most famous equation,
E=mc2, which describes the equivalence of matter and
energy and gave rise to the atomic age? Surely Einstein
owns that? Actually, according to Peter Galison, a Harvard
University science historian, that’s not necessarily true
[T POPSCI Great moments of other superproductive
ON THE WEB scientists: popsci.com/amazingyears. ] equipped with only pencil and paper, solved some of the
76 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005
either. Poincaré was also taking steps toward E=mc2.
e But no need to trash Einstein’s legacy just yet. Let’s
return to the general theory of relativity. General rela-
tivity describes how gravity distorts the shape of space.
It demands an active cosmos, one that’s expanding or con-
tracting, not the stationary universe that was favored pre-
Einstein. The big bang theory, black holes, gravity waves—
all grew out of general relativity. It is “superhuman,” says
Galison’s colleague Gerald Holton, “and unlikely to have
been achieved by someone else.” There were no clues, no
experimental results to puzzle over. But Einstein wanted
physics to be simpler, and to that end, he couldn’t let rela-
tivity stand as it was in 1905. At that point, the theory
applied only to stationary or uniformly moving reference
frames. It didn’t account for acceleration. When Einstein
realized, in a stroke of insight in 1907, that gravity and
acceleration were equivalent—that a freely falling person
wouldn’t feel his own weight, that he would be free from
gravity’s pull—he forged the first links in the chain of ideas
that would enable him to apply relativity to
the cosmos. The next steps didn’t come easi-
ly. He had to learn an entirely new kind of mathematics, for
starters (Riemann geometry). Developing the theory of rel-
ativity “took Einstein eight years and nearly killed him,”
says Clifford Will, an astrophysicist at Washington Univer-
sity.
When Einstein did recover, his greatest contributions to
science were behind him. But he still had a few things left
to give the world. (And I’m not talking about witty, sharp,
deep, inspirational or confusing statements, although there
are plenty: See “Test Your EQ,” page 78.) Experimental
results proved the validity of general relativity in 1919, and
by the 1920s Einstein had become a superstar. Initially he
was a reluctant celebrity, but as the years passed and his
fame grew, he embraced the role, becoming an important
voice in the peace and human rights movements. He was
even asked to be the second president of Israel.
Cultural historians have attempted to trace Einstein’s
influence on poetry and literature, but they’re missing the
point. Einstein’s work is itself a form of art. When physi-
cists speak of his papers, they use words like “elegance.” Of
Einstein’s paper on special relativity, Rigden says, “The
world would be no different [without it] in the same way
that the world would be no different if we did not have The
Magic Flute of Mozart or the paintings of Monet.”
What Einstein accomplished 100 years ago remains a
landmark in human thought—proof of the potential of the
mind. Over a period of six months, one individual,
most pressing mysteries of nature—all in his spare time.

TEST YOUR EQ e (EINSTEIN QUOTIENT)
PHYSICIST, PACIFIST, PHILOSOPHER. FATHER, HUSBAND, CITIZEN. OUR
EINSTEIN QUIZ IS DESIGNED TO SEPARATE THE MAN FROM HIS MYTHS
1 Place these items in ascending order,
from 0 to 3:
?
A » Number of countries of
which Einstein was a citizen
B » Number of Nobel Prizes he won
C » Number of U.S. presidents he met
D » Number of wives he had
2 Which of the following does not exist?
A » The Einstein Ring
B » Einsteinium
C » The Einstein Tower
D » The Prince Einstein piercing
3 Match the theory to the object or con-
cept that is most closely associated with
it [one point each]:
A » Photoelectric effect i » Tensor
B » Special relativity ii » Photon
C » General relativity iii » Atom
D » Brownian motion iv » Time
4 To what did Einstein attribute his
unruly shock of hair?
A » Romantic troubles
B » Dense gray matter
C » His mother
D » World Wars I and II
5 How long was the interval between
Einstein’s conception of the idea
and his publication of the paper
describing . . . [one point each]
A » The special theory of
relativity (E=mc2)
B » The general theory of
relativity (gravity)
i » 1–2 months
ii » 6 months–1 year
iii » 1–3 years
iv » 5–10 years
6 Which of Einstein’s inventions found
the most commercial success?
A » Compass for submarines
B » Hunchbacked airplane wing
C » Silent refrigerator
D » Automatic camera
CHECK YOUR ANSWERS: PAGE 111. TALLY YOUR SCORE AND RATE YOURSELF ON OUR EINSTEIN SCALE.
78 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005
100 YEARS OF EINSTEIN
7 True or false [one point each]. Did
Einstein . . .
A » Fail mathematics in school? 1–4 POINTS
B » Not wear socks?
C » Have mistresses?
D » Never learn to drive?
E » Have his brain removed
after his death?
F » Father two children who
became physicists?
Einstein’s aphorisms are almost as
famous—and diverse—as his equa-
tions. Each of the following pairs of 5–8 POINTS
quotes includes one by Einstein and one
by a prominent contemporary. See if
you can recognize Einstein’s words.
8 Einstein and Mahatma Gandhi
A » “There is only one road to
true human greatness: the road
through suffering.”
B » “It is unwise to be too sure of one’s
own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded
that the strongest might weaken and the 9–12 POINTS
wisest might err.”
9 Einstein and Pablo Picasso
A » “We should take care not to make
intellect our god; it has, of course, power-
ful muscles, but no personality.”
B » “I am always doing that which I
cannot do, in order that I may learn how
to do it.”
10 Einstein and James Joyce
A » “Mistakes are the portals of 13–16 POINTS
discovery.”
B » “Whoever undertakes to set himself
up as a judge of truth and knowledge is
shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.”
11 Einstein and Bertrand Russell
A » “Many people would sooner die
than think; in fact, they do so.”
B » “The attempt to combine wisdom and
power has only rarely been successful,
and then only for a short while.”
17–20 POINTS
ILLUSTRATIONS BY PETER STEMMLER
 100 YEARS OF EINSTEIN

WANTED :
e
THE NEXT EINSTEIN Every branch of science has at some point been confronted by a daunting question
Energetic, original
that stumps progress for years, even decades. How did the continents form? What
thinker needed causes fever? Is there intelligent life beyond Earth? Solutions may accrue incremen-
immediately for tally or arrive in a flash of inspiration. Sometimes it seems they are destined never
long-term project. to come at all. Here are four disciplines in need of a modern-day Einstein.

1
Unique opportunity. » COSMOLOGY
Salary: modest, WHERE WE ARE NOW In 1998 astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding
ever faster over time, driven by a mysterious force they dubbed dark energy.
with chance of Is dark energy the result of countless virtual particles being created and
$1-million Nobel destroyed in empty space? Will it eventually rip spacetime apart, or might it
wither away? Physicists have no clue.
Prize supplement Calculations show that empty space should bubble with virtual particles, theoretical
By JR Minkel objects that produce so much energy that they should have blown the universe apart

80 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005


long ago. Since this hasn’t hap-
pened, theorists had figured
that the energy of some of
those particles must perfectly
cancel the energy of the rest,
leaving space as calm as flat
soda. Yet observations, based
on the brightness of distant ex-
ploding stars, show levels of
dark energy that are tiny but
not zero. If the virtual particles
thought to inhabit space are
truly the source of dark energy,
it’s a conundrum: They should
produce either huge amounts
of dark energy or none at all.
“We really, totally are in the
dark,” says theoretical physicist
Lawrence Krauss of Case West-
ern Reserve University.
TASK FOR THE NEXT EINSTEIN
Explain what dark energy is.
MOST PROMISING APPROACH
The so-called anthropic principle
holds that different parts of the
universe each have dark energy
of a particular strength and that
we just happen to live in, and
hence observe, a part of the uni-
verse with a low level of dark
energy. If that sounds like a cop-
out to you, you’re not alone. The
anthropic principle makes no
predictions, Krauss says, and
thus goes against the grain of
four centuries of physics, during
which theories have ultimately
won out or lost based on how
their predictions matched the
world. To build support for the
anthropic principle, physicists
must show that dark energy
could take on different values
and then calculate the odds that
it would have the value that
astronomers measure.
2» GENOMICS
WHERE WE ARE NOW Experts have
identified most of the genes in
the strands of DNA curled
inside our cells, but between
those genes are long, ap-
parently nonsensical stretches
known as “junk DNA.” This
wilderness makes up as much
as 98.5 percent of the human
genome. But recently, as the
intricacies of gene functioning
have become clear, geneticists
have begun to wonder
whether junk DNA might have
some subtle purpose, such as
influencing when genes are
turned on and off.
Last May a team at the Uni-
versity of California at Santa
Cruz found that humans and
rodents share nearly 500
identical sequences of junk
DNA. If that DNA were truly
useless, it should have become
garbled by random mutations
over evolutionary time. Many
of the conserved sequences
cluster near genes that are
crucial for embryonic develop-
ment, and others may be caus-
ing nearby genes to ramp up
protein production. A few hun-
dred sequences are just a drop
in the junk-DNA bucket,
though. “It’s frustrating
because there’s so much of it,
and there seems to be at least
some that’s fairly tightly con-
served between species,” says
Alan Guttmacher, deputy
director of the National
Human Genome Research
Institute. “It’s an attractive tar-
get to try and understand.”
TASK FOR THE NEXT EINSTEIN Find
out what junk DNA does, or
ascertain that it is useless.
MOST PROMISING APPROACH
The National Human Genome
Research Institute’s new project,
Encode, will probe junk DNA’s
possible functions—in part by
comparing the genomes of var-
ious mammals to reconstruct
their evolutionary history.
3» CLIMATOLOGY
WHERE WE ARE NOW Current simu-
lations of the global climate
break the world into a grid and
ask how the temperature, wind
and moisture of each square on
the grid affects its neighbors.
These simulations ably predict
the activity of big atmospheric
features, such as jet streams,
but they fumble when it comes
to finer details, such as the for-
mation and behavior of clouds.
That’s an important omission,
because clouds both reflect light
and trap heat, so they could
add to or diminish global
warming.
The updrafts of air that form
clouds are only hundreds of
meters across, whereas the
smallest units of climate models
are some 200 kilometers wide.
Calculating interactions among
smaller units requires more
power than today’s computers
possess. Climate experts expect
to have the computer power to
solve the cloud problem in a
few decades, but they want
answers now. “It’s the single
largest uncertainty in predicting
climate change,” says Chris
Bretherton of the University of
Washington.
TASK FOR THE NEXT EINSTEIN
Model clouds more accurately.
MOST PROMISING APPROACH
Though as yet untested, simula-
tions of life-size clouds dotting
an Earth that’s one tenth its true
dimensions promise to yield
realistic climate data. Such
models require one thousandth
the computing power of a full-
scale model of global cloud
cover, says Bretherton, who
took part in the research. “That
brings the cost down to some-
thing we can do with a power-
ful university computer.”
4» NEUROSCIENCE
WHERE WE ARE NOW Scientists
know how memories form:
When something noteworthy
happens, certain brain cells
branch out and connect to one
another. If the event is intense
and long-lasting enough, the
connections, called synapses,
become durable. If not, the
memory is lost (which explains
why an inopportune interrup-
tion will keep you from memo-
rizing a phone number). From
there, though, things get more
mysterious.
Recent work by neuroscien-
tist Karel Svoboda of Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratory
in New York reveals that 40
percent of the synapses in a
mouse’s brain change over
the course of a few weeks.
Still, the mouse retains earlier
memories—but scientists don’t
know how. Perhaps memories
migrate to new groups of brain
cells or become stored in some
more efficient way. “How can
we have a memory that lasts
for years when the underlying
synapses are no longer there?”
ponders Karim Nader, a neuro-
biologist at McGill University.
“I’ve got no clue.”
TASK FOR THE NEXT EINSTEIN
Learn how memories are stored.
MOST PROMISING APPROACH
Observe brain cells’ changing
connections in living animals.
One new technique is to mani-
pulate a mouse’s genes so
that its brain cells produce
a green fluorescent protein
when they’re active. Peering
through a microscope, investi-
gators will then be able to
track changes in brain cells
and synapses as the animal
uses its memory, simply by
following the green signal. ■
POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005 81
 g
d
i n e

i
v c
y
t o
r

SCIENTISTS ARE TRIUMPHANT

OVER EXTRAORDINARY NEW
IMAGES FROM SATURN AND
ITS MOONS—RIVERS OF METHANE,
ICE VOLCANOES, FEROCIOUS
STORMS AND MORE Cassini
BY MICHAEL MOYER
THE PENETROMETER WAS THE FIRST THING TO HIT.
The stick-like probe on the bottom of the
Huygens lander punched aside a hard pebble •
made of water ice on the surface of Saturn’s
•
largest moon, Titan, and sliced down through
five inches of soft, muddy material. Scien-
tists watching from Earth were ecstatic—the
probe was not expected to survive the land- Huygens
ing—but at the same time puzzled: If Titan
really was, as they suspected, much like a
young Earth, where were the liquid oceans
predicted to cover the surface? Where was
the methane rain that served as analogue to
Earth’s H2O? Suddenly, minutes after landing, the
first clue emerged, as the craft began to sink into the
» CASSINI AND HUYGENS, THE PIGGYBACK PROBE
For seven years and two billion miles, the Cassini space-
craft carried the Huygens lander up to Saturn. Last December,
six months after Cassini began its four-year study of Saturn, it
soil as if perched on quicksand.
released Huygens—a probe the size of a Volkswagen Beetle—
Huygens’s landing on Titan and what it revealed on a trajectory toward Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. When
about that unknown world is the most dramatic suc- Huygens entered Titan’s atmosphere 21 days later, it relayed
cess of the Cassini-Huygens mission, now finishing pictures and data back to Earth through Cassini.

82 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005


STORMS AND WAVES
It has enchanted astronomers for centuries,
but Saturn close-up looks wholly new
» BETTER THAN EVIAN
In this UV image of the
rings, blue regions are water
ice; red, empty space. Scien-
tists can’t explain how the ice
stays 99 percent pure though
bombarded by meteorites.
• •
» DRAGON STORM
Scientists think that this
storm [upper right], which
flares up and recedes every
few months, creates electri-
cal eruptions that may
cause powerful radio bursts.
• •
» SMOKING GUN
As the moon Pan orbits
around Saturn, its gravita-
tional pull creates waves in
Saturn’s rings. This image
provided the first confirma-
tion of the effect, seen at left.
SATURN IN HI-DEF
This natural-color image is
the most detailed ever made
of Saturn. Scientists tiled
together 126 separate
images taken through red,
green and blue filters to cre-
ate this single view.
» SHADOW PLANET
Saturn is seen here in
the shadow cast by its rings.
Blue streaks appear where
the rings are thin and ab-
sorb only red light. The
moon Mimas floats at right.
its first year of touring Saturn and its 34 known moons.
But surprises like this have been the norm, not the excep-
tion. In its travels, the Cassini spacecraft has discovered an
atmosphere blanketing a moon that shouldn’t be able to
hold one, mountain ridges that dwarf the Himalayas, and
evidence for short-lived rivers of methane on Titan. For
every mystery Cassini solves, it finds 10 more puzzles for
scientists to explore.
No one could be sure, for instance, what Huygens—
•
a lander built by the European Space Agency and ferried
to Titan by NASA’s much larger Cassini—would land on.
Titan’s thick, nitrogen-based atmosphere is opaque, imper-
meable to all but radar and infrared light. It is also satu-
rated with methane, the principal component of natural
gas. Scientists believe that the methane on Titan plays the
role that water does on Earth: raining out of clouds; cre-
ating rivers, lakes and oceans; then evaporating to form
more clouds. The concentration of methane in the atmo-
sphere is so high that many scientists expected there to be
enormous seas covering the moon’s surface.
Although Huygens’s first radar images of Titan showed
what appeared to be dark rivers flowing into a sea, images
from the moon’s surface showed the “sea” to be more like
a barren desert, empty and dry save for the occasional ice
pebble. But when the craft started to sink, scientists real-
ized that the surface is actually marshlike—suffused with
•
FLY ME TO
34 MOONS
One was a comet, another makes
rings. But every moon is strange
RR
•
Cassini has also found surprises on several of Saturn’s
other moons (four of which the spacecraft discovered).
Images of icy Iapetus show a moon composed of materials
that are among the brightest and darkest in the solar
system. The bright regions are highly reflective water ice,
but researchers don’t know what covers the areas that are,
as Spilker describes them, “as dark as Xerox toner.” And
nothing on Iapetus is so puzzling as the thin, sharp moun-
tain ridge dividing the moon in two. This “belly band” juts
almost 12 miles above the moon’s darkened plains and
runs for 500 miles along its equator. If Iapetus were scaled
to Earth size, aircraft would not be able to fly over the ridge,
which would stand more than 110 miles tall.
A March flyby of Enceladus, another icy moon, revealed
a thin atmosphere—strange for a moon that’s less than a

liquid methane that has been absorbed by the soil. The heat
of Huygens’s batteries boiled off some of the liquid
methane beneath the spacecraft.
Yet the methane absorbed into the surface isn’t enough
to account for all the rain that has poured down onto
P R E C E D I N G PA G E S , C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P : C O U R T E S Y N A S A / J P L / S PA C E S C I E N C E I N S T I T U T E ( 4 ) ; C O U R T E S Y N A S A / J P L / U N I V E R S I T Y
quarter the diameter of Earth’s moon and thus without
enough gravity to hold an atmosphere in place. Scientists
theorize that Enceladus’s atmosphere steadily drifts away
but is continually replenished by ice volcanoes or geysers.
Cassini will scrutinize these and other moons, follow the

Titan’s surface over millions of years. Where did the
rest of the methane go? “That, perhaps, is one of the
biggest puzzles,” says Linda Spilker, deputy project scien-
tist for the Cassini mission. Maybe, she ventures, the
amount of methane on Titan isn’t constant—something is
pumping additional methane into the atmosphere.
O F C O L O R A D O ; C O U R T E S Y S T E V E H O B B S / N A S A ; T H I S PA G E : C O U R T E S Y E S A / N A S A / J P L / U N I V E R S I T Y O F A R I Z O N A
changing of the seasons, and watch the rings from high
above the planet’s poles. If the spacecraft holds together,
its mission may be extended to 2010 or beyond. Until
then, you can get updates at saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. ■
Michael Moyer is a senior editor at POPULAR SCIENCE.

•
TEN
MINUTES
TO
TITAN
How does a
R
R
wet moon turn
arid between
descent and
landing?
» VIEW FROM THE TOP
During its descent, Huygens shot this radar
mosaic of Titan’s surface. The dark areas look like
» TOUCHDOWN ON TITAN
Once Huygens landed, though, it didn’t spot
any liquid methane. Instead it found chunks of water
rivers emptying into a sea [at the bottom of the ice. Scientists speculate that the ice forms during the
• picture; the bright object is a cloud of ammonia].
The image seemed to confirm that Titan is a moon
eruption of “ice volcanoes,” geyser-like fissures
shooting water into the -290°F atmosphere. One
covered with flowing liquid methane. ongoing challenge is to locate the missing methane.

• •
84 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005
 •

» YIN-YANG MOON
Iapetus is one of the
oddest objects in the solar
•
system. The moon is made
of ice, its white surface visible
in the top half of this image
and ringing many of the
craters. One hemisphere of
the moon, though, is covered
with a fluffy, porous, almost
black material that scientists
can’t identify. Because it
occurs on only one side of the
moon, the material was prob-
ably deposited there from
elsewhere in space, but no
one knows by what. A huge
mountain ridge encircles the
planet, making it look like a
giant walnut.

» CRATER-FREE CRUST
When Voyager flew
by Enceladus 25 years
ago, the paucity of
craters on this moon led
scientists to believe that it
might not have any sur-
face features at all. But
Cassini ’s closer look
reveals a network of fis-
sures crisscrossing the

»
surface. These faults
imply that the surface is
shaped by tectonic
forces, such as volcanoes
or geysers. They also
might produce the gases
that give petite Enceladus
an atmosphere and that
create Saturn’s E ring.
THE RING-STEALER
Tiny Prometheus occasionally passes
close enough to Saturn’s multistranded
F ring to steal some of its icy material—
creating gaps or kinks in the strands.
Near the top of this image, you can see
traces of Prometheus’s last pass.

» LOST COMET
C O U R T E S Y N A S A / J P L / S PA C E S C I E N C E L A B

Cassini first flew by Phoebe, Saturn’s most distant

moon, last June. Researchers think that Phoebe’s strange
orbit (it rotates in the opposite direction of Saturn’s other
moons) suggests that it could be a comet captured by
Saturn’s gravity many millions of years ago.

»
[ ]
DIONE AND THE STORMS
This true-color image shows the
moon Dione with Saturn in the back-
T POPSCI Touch down on Titan
with this short movie of
ground. Look closely and you can
ON THE WEB images taken during
the descent of Huygens: popsci.com/cassini.
see several oval-shaped storms in
Saturn’s atmosphere.

•
POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005 85
 POPULAR

HOW 2.0
HACKS, UPGRADES, PROJECTS, GRIPES, TIPS & TRICKS
T scıence

INSIDE BEAT L.A. TRAFFIC 88 • COVER EVERYTHING IN GOLD 90 • DRAW WITH GPS 94 • TRACK YOUR SLEEP 94 • BUILD A WI-FI ANTENNA 96

5 THINGS ...
YOU CAN DO WITH GOOGLE’S
GMAIL THAT MAKE IT THE
BEST FREE E-MAIL SERVICE
1 JOIN AN EXCLUSIVE CLUB
Gmail is still in beta, so you’ll
need an invitation from a mem-
ber to open an account. Don’t
know one? Visit the Gmail Invite
Spooler (isnoop.net/gmail) to
score one of the spare invites
donated by current Gmailers.

2 USE IT FOR STORAGE

With your account’s massive
two gigabytes of space, you can
mail yourself file attachments up
to 10 megabytes each, or just
download the Gmail Drive shell
extension (viksoe.dk) to mount
your account like a hard drive
and drag files into it.

3 LABEL EVERYTHING
While most e-mail services force
you to file everything in folders,
Gmail gives you labels. The
difference: A message can have
multiple labels (for example,
“joke” and “mom”). You can
even set up filters to automati-
DEPT: GEEK GUIDE INVESTIGATOR: MIKE HANEY TECH: Mac Mini projects cally assign labels upon arrival.
COST: $500 and up
Mac of All Trades TIME: One hour and up 4 SEARCH, DON’T DESTROY
No surprise: Gmail has superior
Want a Mac in your living room? How about your search ability baked right in. So
car? Apple’s tiny and affordable Mini does it all DABBLER MASTER it encourages you to throw all
your e-mail into one big pile
and search by sender, subject,
The most amazing thing about Apple’s new Mac Mini isn’t its diminutive size, although you can’t help date or content to pull up the
but be surprised at how small it is when you see it in person (about the size of a stack of five CDs). Nor is messages you want. You can
it the price, although it is the first Mac to break the $500 barrier (provided you supply your own display, even use complex search strings
keyboard and mouse). The most amazing thing is how an entry-level computer aimed at grandparents that combine categories, such as
“from:Jon label:family in:any-
and switchers (PC users migrating to the Mac) has ignited the geek community into thinking outside the
where before:2005/5/21.”
6.5-square-inch box. Within hours of the Mini’s announcement—weeks before it started shipping—the
Web was abuzz with riffs on all the things one could do with such a small and cheap Mac, and Mini- 5 GIVE IT A NEW LOOK
dedicated Web sites such as 123macmini.com and modmini.com began popping up soon thereafter. Finding Gmail’s design aesthetic
One of the most popular ideas to emerge was using it as a living-room computer for recording TV a bit austere? Use Firefox and
“skin” the site however you
and storing and playing back movies, music and photos. It even inspired an ad hoc group of pro-
please with a custom style
grammers to begin working feverishly on a Mac equivalent to the Media Center Edition of Windows sheet. Download new styles
XP. Called CenterStage, the customizable, open-source app will provide a 10-foot interface to navi- from persistent.info/archives/
OLIVER WOLFSON

gate your media with a remote control. (Follow the group’s progress at centerstageproject.com.) Mean- 2004/10/05/gmail-skinning,
while, car tuners noticed that the Mini fit nicely in a glove box, kicking off a flurry of sleek “car-puter” or learn CSS (style sheets for
Web pages) and tweak the site’s
installations. Sound like fun? On the next page you’ll find details on what you need for these two proj- appearance any way you like.
ects and a couple others, as well as instructions for cracking open the Mini for home upgrades. >> —MERLIN MANN

POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005 87


T
HOW 2.0| GEEK GUIDE
THE LIVING-ROOM MAC
Why: To have a stable and
virus-immune machine for stor-
ing, recording and playing TV,
DVDs, MP3s and digital photos.
Parts and labor: For simple
playback, you can plug the Mini
into your TV using a DVI cable
and into your stereo using a 1/8-
inch-jack-to-RCA cable. To add
DVR functionality, you’ll need
an external TV tuner such as the
EyeTV ($330; elgato.com) or
EvolutionTV ($280; miglia.com).
(You can also send video to your
Mac from your Series 1 TiVo—
find details at popsci.com/h20.)
Until CenterStage goes public,
your only option for a 10-foot
interface is to add another box
called the EyeHome ($200;
elgato.com), which comes with
its own remote control. If you
don’t care about the interface,
pick up a Digital Media Remote
($30; keyspan.com) or set up
Virtual Network Computer, and
control your Mini from any
Palm, PocketPC or Java-enabled
cellphone. Directions are at
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VNC.
[ ]
H2.0 ON
THE ROAD
Tech for the Traveling Life
Driving home during rush
hour in Los Angeles is like
wading blindfolded and
earplugged through a pool
of piranhas: You know
there will be problems, you
just don’t know how bad
the bites will be.

a touchscreen LCD in the dash dual-output 140-watt regulator

to play DVDs and MP3s, edit ($100; carnetix.com)—it can
Word docs, or surf the Web supply juice to both the Mini and
outside your local Wi-Fi hotspot. your monitor straight from the
Parts and labor: In-dash touch- car’s battery. Finally, control it all TRAFFICGAUGE
screen LCDs run $275 and up; with software called i3 ($25; $80 + $7/month;
trafficgauge.com
the two most popular makers i3team.com), a customizable
TECH: Traffic-info device
are Xenarc (xenarc.com) and interface designed specifically ROADWORTHY: Definitely
THE IN-CAR MINI Lilliput (lilliputweb.net). You can for easy navigation on small
Why: To have full computing power the Mini straight from touchscreens. Be inspired by For less than $100,
power on the go. Stash the Mini your cigarette lighter, but a bet- other people’s installations and the TrafficGauge solves
in the glove box and attach it to ter option is the Carnetix P1900 learn more at macvroom.com. that. The PDA-like device
shows a fixed map of a
regional freeway system.
TWO MORE COOL MINI PROJECTS Web Host: Instead of paying a monthly fee to a hosting serv- Currently it only works in
ice, host your Web site on your Mini using pre-loaded tools such as FreeBSD and Apache Web Server. L.A./ Orange County and
Excellent tutorial at mundy.org/blog. Phone Switchbox: With an open-source tool called Asterisk, your Seattle, but 20 more cities
Mini can be a call center for both VoIP and traditional phone lines with dozens of features, including an are planned. When traffic
automated attendant, voice-response menus and your own hold music. Download it at asterisk.org. is light, paths on the dis-
play look clear. As condi-
1. Set the Mini upside- tions worsen, they fill with
down on a soft lines that are either solid
surface. Insert thin (slow) or blinking (stop-
putty knives between
and-go). Data is updated
the metal and the
every four minutes during

I L L U S T R AT I O N S : O L I V E R W O L F S O N ; P H O T O G R A P H S : J O H N B . C A R N E T T
plastic on each side.
Pry the knives out- peak times, beamed from
ward harder than you regional transit authorities
think you should. After by radio signals, so there
some scary cracking
noises, the tabs hold- are no dead zones. Foot-
1 2
ing on the case will ball, baseball or basketball
release and the bot- icons pop up when a game

» Upgrading the Mini « Unlike larger Macs, the Mini isn’t designed for
easy home upgrades. Fortunately, Apple’s
tom will pop up.

2. To replace the
is nearby. The simple map
doesn’t scroll, you can’t
prices for point-of-purchase upgrades are pretty reasonable. For instance, you RAM, pull the tabs on zoom for details, and only
can double your hard-drive size from 40 gigabytes to 80 for only $50, add inter- each side away from freeways are covered. The
nal Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for $100, and swap in a DVD-burning SuperDrive for the RAM stick until it upside? Nothing to mess
another $100. Installing these parts yourself requires major surgery for very little pops up. Carefully
place the new one in with while driving. The sole
cost savings. Beefing up the Mini’s paltry 256 megabytes of RAM, however, is an button turns on a dim yet
the slot, and push
ideal DIY job. It’s easy, it doesn’t void the warranty, and you can save about $200 down hard until the functional backlight.
buying a one-gigabyte stick from a third-party vendor (check dealram.com). tabs lock in place. TrafficGauge doesn’t
make the congestion disap-

[T ]
pear, but it helps me out-
POPSCI Are you a switcher? Find the best products for new Mac users at popsci.com/h20.
ON THE WEB smart the worst of it. And
that’s a start.—XENI JARDIN

88 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005

T
HOW2.0| GRAY MATTER
DEPT: GRAY MATTER INVESTIGATOR: THEODORE GRAY ELEMENT: Gold
PROJECT: Gilding
Make Everything Golden COST: $60
TIME: One hour
Using sheets so thin they’re measured in atoms, you
can cover anything with a lasting coat of pure gold DABBLER MASTER
Malleable things can be ham-
mered thinner without break-
ing; ductile things can be
stretched thinner without snap-
ping. Every material has its
limit, but with gold, that limit is
just a few hundred atoms
thick. Gold is the most mal-
leable and the most ductile of
all metals. A cube of it about
21/2 inches on edge could be
beaten out to cover an entire
football field (at a cost of
LEFT: Progressively thicker forms
of gold [clockwise from the
gilded home-run baseball]: two-
millionths-of-an-inch gold leaf;
one-thousandth-of-an-inch foil;
a one-gram slice; a 10-gram
ingot; a one-ounce ingot; and a
nugget, chain and bar.
roughly $68,000, plus beat-
ing fees). Gold this thin is
called gold leaf, and the
ancient art of applying it for
decoration is called gilding.
How thin is gold leaf? Using
my steel rolling mill, I can
make gold foil about one thou-
sandth of an inch thick, similar
to aluminum foil. Thin, sure,
but gold leaf is nearly 500
times as thin as that. Only then
does it become affordable
enough and flexible enough to
be used almost like paint to
cover finely detailed carvings
or anything else you want to
be shiny for years to come.
To make gold leaf, start
with gold foil, interleave a
few dozen squares of it with
layers of special vellum (so
CHARLES SHOTWELL (3)
the foil sheets don’t stick to
one another), and beat the
heck out of the stack with a
16-pound hammer for many
hours, turning the squares into
larger squares of thinner foil.
 1. Mini rolling
1 2 mill squeezes
one gram of gold
into foil, which
is still about 500
times as thick as
gold leaf.
2. Gold leaf held
to a squirrel-
hair brush by
static electricity,
ready to be
applied.
Then cut the sheets in quarters, Or the proper vellum, or the skill. To gild a home-run base-
restack them, and pound them family secrets handed down ball, I used commercially pre-
out again. The malleability of over generations. Making pared gold leaf from an art-
gold is what allows the sheets gold leaf is, like other ancient supply store. The process is
to just keep getting thinner and arts, not quite the garage proj- simple: Paint the object with a
thinner without splitting. (OK, I ect it might seem.) sticky liquid called gold size,
admit, I tried and failed at this. Gilding, on the other hand, lay the sheets of gold leaf on,
Just haven’t got the arm for it. is not a particularly difficult and rub them in. The catch is
the part where you try to pick
MELTING POINT: 1,948°F BOILING POINT: 5,173°F
up the leaf. Don’t even think
Au KNOWN SINCE: Antiquity
USES: Jewelry, electrical contacts, currency
TOTAL AMOUNT MINED THROUGHOUT HISTORY: Enough to make a
about using your fingers—this
stuff is more like a soap bubble
Gold than a sheet of metal and will
79 cube 60 foot on edge, or enough to gild Indiana
start wrapping around your fin-
gers and then tear the instant
you try to unwrap it. Brushes
known as gilders’ tips, made of
red-squirrel hair (none of that
gray-squirrel crap, mind you)
are used to pick up the sheets
by static electricity. It takes a
delicate touch, but at $2 per
four-inch-by-four-inch sheet,
you’re motivated to learn fast.
Gold leaf instantly welds to
itself. Overlapping layers fuse
together invisibly when rubbed
in, so even if you’re sloppy, the
end result will look smooth. It’s
OK to touch it with your fingers
at this point because the gold
size will hold it in place.
Gilded objects survive from
5,000 years ago (think King
Tut’s mask), proving that gold
is impervious to air, water,
alkalis and most acids, no
matter how thin it is.
Read more about Gray’s
scientific pursuits at
periodictabletable.com.
 [ ]
T
HOW2.0| TECH LESSON YOU 2.0
At the Intersection of
Technology and the Body
DEPT: TECH LESSON INVESTIGATOR: PHILLIP TORRONE TECH: GPS drawing
TOOLS: GPS receiver,
Tracing Your Steps free software
COST: $100 and up
As promises go, Sleep-
tracker’s is a pretty big one:
By overlaying GPS data on a satellite map, you can While you slumber, a
make massive drawings all over the land DABBLER MASTER motion sensor in the watch
detects the increased body
Like crop-circle makers and Christo before them, Jeremy Wood and Hugh Pryor are artists who use movement that accompa-
the landscape as their canvas, tracing miles-long drawings around the British countryside on foot or nies lighter sleep. You set a
by car. Their paintbrush is a portable GPS receiver that records their coordinates every few seconds, window of time (say, half
creating a huge connect-the-dots pattern. Later they export that data to a PC, where custom-designed
software called GPSograph reveals the shape of the path they traveled.
Sometimes the patterns are naturally occurring—the pair’s first GPS drawing was of a fish they
noticed on a map of central England. Others are planned in advance, including the eight-mile-high
dollar sign Wood and his brother drew in Las Vegas [inset below] and the game of tic-tac-toe they
played in Hollywood. Wood and Pryor didn’t invent GPS-based art—it’s been around since at least
the mid-1990s, when the receivers went portable—but they have inspired others to follow in their foot-
steps. Their site, gpsdrawing.com, displays contributions from fellow GPS artists all over the world.
Follow the instructions below to tromp out your own masterpiece, then send it to h20@time4.com SLEEPTRACKER
and we’ll post it to a special gallery at popsci.com/h20. $150; sleeptracker.com
TECH: Sleep monitor
DOES IT WORK? Maybe,
but not for me

an hour) during which

you’d like to wake up, and

MAKING YOUR OWN
GPS DRAWING
I used a wrist-worn GPS receiver from
Garmin, the Forerunner 201, to draw
the large “H20” in Seattle [above], but
any GPS receiver that lets you dump
data to a PC should work. The soft-
ware that comes with this unit is called
Logbook, so that’s what I’ll refer to in
the steps [right]; most programs will
have similar options.
P H O T O G R A P H : J O H N B . C A R N E T T; P H O T O I L L U S T R AT I O N S , F R O M T O P : C O U R T E S Y P H I L L I P T O R R O N E ; C O U R T E S Y J E R E M Y W O O D
the alarm will go off when
you’re closest to wakeful-
ness, reducing the foggy
feeling that comes from
clawing your way out of
deep REM sleep. If it fails to
sense lighter sleep within
the window, the alarm
sounds at the end of it.
The Sleeptracker is
based on real sleep science,
EXHAUSTING ART: and on paper, it seems rev-
It took Torrone olutionary. My results over
five tries and 12 a month of wearing it, how-
hours to draw this
ever, were not. Most of the
“H20” in Seattle.
time, I snoozed until the
INSET: An eight-
alarm sounded at the end
mile-high dollar
sign on the streets of the window. Frequently I
of Las Vegas slept right through its alert,
which was too quiet (and
ONE Install USAPhotoMaps (free at jdmcox.com), which downloads often buried under a pil-
the aerial maps from a free Microsoft service. low). The few times it did
TWO Look at a map, plan your route, and run, drive, or cycle with wake me “correctly,” I still
your GPS receiver in tow. felt groggy.
THREE When you get home, import the GPS data to Logbook. Choose Perhaps my sleep
Data Preview to see the path you took and how well it approxi-
patterns aren’t rhythmic
mates the shape you were aiming for. If you’re satisfied, export
enough, disturbed as they
the data as an .xml file (File > Export to XML).
FOUR Open USAPhotoMaps and import the data (File > Import > are by travel, kids and
Forerunner Logbook), and save it as a .csv file. deadline stress. With a 30-
FIVE In the USAPhotoMaps menu, go to GPS > Tracks > Display, day money-back guaran-
and select the .csv file you just saved. tee, I’d say it’s worth trying.
SIX You should see the aerial map with your path overlayed. But I wouldn’t toss my cof-
fee machine.—STEVE CASIMIRO

94 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005

T
HOW2.0

YOUR GEAR
TECH SUPPORT Although it sports only an infrared or serial connection (no
modern Bluetooth or USB stuff), my paperback-size, battery-
HEY, READERS: Contribute to this page by sending your favorite tips,
gear suggestions, and questions for the Geek Chorus to h20@time4.com. operated SiPix A6 Pocket Printer goes everywhere I go. I plop
it down next to my laptop (it can also print from a PDA) to print
anything I need in an instant—schedules, boarding passes,
maps and directions, coupons—at 400dpi resolution. SiPix
ASK A GEEK SCOTT FULLAM doesn’t even sell the thing anymore, but you can get one on
eBay for less than $20.
—Mike Masnick, editor of the blog techdirt.com

THE TIP SHEET

CUSTOMIZE THE WEB
Q: What’s the best DIY antenna for Greasemonkey is an amazing plug-in for the Firefox

I L L U S T R AT I O N : A L E X N A B A U M ; P H O T O G R A P H S , F R O M T O P : J O H N B . C A R N E T T; C O U R T E S Y S C O T T F U L L A M
browser that lets you use scripts to alter the way Web

extending my Wi-Fi network? pages are displayed. For instance, you can remove
ads from gizmodo.com or automatically add a
“play” button to every MP3 link on a page. Learn
A: You’ve probably heard of the Wi-Fi antennas made from old
Pringles cans, but those are tricky to build and often require
special connectors and soldering. A much easier option is a parabolic
more at greasemonkey.mozdev.org.—H2.0 staff

YOUR OWN HANDWRITTEN FONT

reflector antenna. You can whip one together using an old shoe box, tape Put that personal touch back in your Word docs and
and some aluminum foil in about 30 minutes, and it will double or triple e-mail with a font made from your own handwriting.
the range (in a single direction) of just about any wireless access point Just print the template at www.fontifier.com, and write
with an external stick antenna. It works by simply creating a large surface each letter, number and symbol. Then scan and upload
area that the antenna uses to receive and transmit signals. the page, and the site will generate your font. Preview
First, cut two parabolic curves from it before purchasing ($9).—Nigel Powell
cardboard, and cut a hole at the focal
point of each just big enough to fit over
your access point’s antenna. (Down-
load a template at popsci.com/h20.)
These curves keep the reflector in its
T THIS IS BROKEN
IT ALSO PREVENTS HUMAN REGISTRATIONS
proper shape. Next, cut a piece of
cardboard roughly nine inches square,
and cover one side with aluminum foil. Shape the square sheet over the
two curved pieces, foil facing in, and tape everything together. Try to
get the reflector to fit to the parabolic curve closely, as deviations of
even a quarter of an inch can reduce its effectiveness. Finally, slide the
completed apparatus over your access point’s stick antenna.

SCOTT FULLAM, a former Apple engineer and toy designer (he once made Barbie
speak), is the author of Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks ($30; O’Reilly). See more examples of things broken at thisisbroken.com.

96 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005


POPULAR
scıence
FACTS, ANSWERS, ODDITIES & ENTERTAINMENTS FOR A MONTH OF SCIENCE
[INTERGALACTIC COMMUNICATIONS]
Tele-spamming Our Alien Brethren
CONVINCED THAT NO ONE ON EARTH
will buy your musty old futon? Feeling
alone in the universe? Why not try
hitting up an alien civilization to assuage
your Earthly woes! Two privately owned
satellite companies—Deep Space Com-
munications Network (DSCN) in Cape
Canaveral, Florida, and TalkToAliens.com
in central Connecticut—are spearhead-
ing the civilian data race into space. The
inaugural transmission involved beam-
ing reams of Craigslist.com’s want ads to
the awaiting heavens.
To test the market for its technology,
DSCN held an eBay auction in February
for its first satellite transmission into
deep space. Craigslist CEO Jim Buck-
master placed the winning bid of
$1,225, then handed the reins to the
global Craigslist community. The free
online message board, which hosts
more than five million postings a
month, provides a forum for roommate
98 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005
FYI
T
IS THERE ANYBODY
OUT THERE? Two compa-
nies offer to send your
voice, image and text
messages to awaiting ETs.
searches, dating ads and, yes, a place to
flog your old couch. For several months,
a check box on the posting forms
allowed users to indicate whether they
wanted their message sent into space.
Although Buckmaster’s bid secured
airtime for only 75 words and five pic-
tures or five minutes of video, Craigslist
negotiated for a higher volume after the
site received more than 10,000 space-
bound postings within the first 24
hours. By early March, Craigslist had
more than 24 million words and pic-
tures flagged for transmission.
On March 11, broadcasting at a fre-
quency of 5.945 gigahertz, DSCN sent
a 23-minute transmission into space.
More than 138,000 postings were sent
during this session; the second and
ALEX NABAUM
final transmission was scheduled for
mid-May, to correspond with NASA’s
launch of the space shuttle Discovery.
With Craigslist footing the bill
 T
FYI

through May, faithful message posters Despite the jokes and criticism— a day for other life-forms,” Lewis says,
could scour the cosmos for everything some fear that the radio pollution and naming the SETI Institute in California,
from green alien girlfriends to Cubs– intergalactic spam might anger other, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico,
White Sox tickets to undiscovered possibly belligerent, civilizations—both and the Parkes Radio Telescope in Aus-
worlds up for grabs (“I claim your Knight of TalkToAliens.com and DSCN tralia, “isn’t it logical that other intelli-
planet in the name of Earth. Surrender president Jim Lewis say they believe gent life-forms are doing the same?”
or die,” wrote one jokester). Visitors to there is a possibility of reaching other Feeling garrulous or have a velvet
Slashdot.com suggested other creative planets populated with intelligent life. Elvis you simply must sell? Check out
postings, begging for “a ride off this “If you consider all the organizations talktoaliens.com or deepspacecom.net.
rock” (“Ecosystem failing . . . pick up at we have on Earth monitoring 24 hours —AMANDA MACMILLAN
Long. 118.20193, Lat 33.85908, Earth”)
and parodying dubious real-estate post-
ings: “For sale: **Diamond in the
rough.** Third planet from Sun . . .
Good starter planet for young, carbon-
based species . . . Small hole in ozone
layer. Aboriginal biped humanoid
species infestation can easily be
removed with genetically engineered
plague or runaway nanotech ‘accident.’ ”
If you missed out on this collabora-
tive message in a bottle, private ven-
tures are now providing the service to
individuals as well. DSCN will soon
accept text, with either five pictures or
five-minute video messages for $99
and will include a certificate confirm-
ing broadcast specifics such as to
where and at what time the transmis-
sion went out. And TalkToAliens.com,
a service founded by members of the
Civilian Space eXploration Team—
a group that, last May, sent the first
civilian amateur rocket into space—
currently sends e-mails ($20) and real-
time phone transmissions ($4 per
minute) into deep space. The company
is developing ways to send videos,
pictures and instant messages.
TalkToAliens.com messages are broad-
cast at 2.43211 gigahertz, a similar fre-
quency to that used by cordless phones
and wireless networks. “It is commonly
used on Earth, so if any intergalactic
entity is already listening in, they
should be aware of this portion of the
spectrum,” says company president
Eric Knight. But unlike your cellphone,
which broadcasts at low power and in
all directions, TalkToAliens.com beams
messages in a tightly focused beam
directly to the core of the Milky Way.
Focusing the beam greatly enhances
the distance it can travel and still
maintain a decent signal strength,
increasing the chances that a faraway
civilization might be able to pick it up.

[BEACH READING]
Nuclear Science
Before the Bomb
BEFORE THE
FALLOUT:
From Marie Curie
to Hiroshima
by Diana Preston;
Walker & Company;
416 pages; $27
THE NIGHT BEFORE THE FIRST ATOMIC
detonation, in the New Mexico desert
on July 16, 1945, Enrico Fermi calmly
took bets from his Manhattan Project
colleagues on whether the explosion
would ignite the atmosphere. Although
nothing so dramatic happened—casu-
alties were limited to several thousand
luckless frogs—the Trinity test marks
the point at which science and politics
fused into a single global uncertainty.
As historian Diana Preston shows in
Before the Fallout, this decisive moment
could scarcely have been imagined 50
years before. Her deeply researched
story begins with Marie Curie, whose
finding that a uranium ore called pitch-
blende was more radioactive than pure
uranium led her to discover radium.
Curie did her work in a leaky wooden
shed, treating 10 tons of ore to extract
the tenth of a gram needed to prove
that radium was an element. In the
process, she determined that the energy
released by radium was atomic. But
the public, unconcerned with such
subtleties, was impressed mostly by
the crystal’s eerie blue glow.
Soon radium was lauded as a miracle
drug, used to treat cancer and birth-
marks alike. There was even a radio-
active toothpaste, for a radiant smile.
In the midst of this mania, serious re-
search continued, often with resources
more sparse than those available to
poor Mme. Curie. Finding himself
stranded in a German internment
camp during World War I, English
T
FYI
physicist James Chadwick ran experi-
ments on beta particles using radium
toothpaste as his radioactive source.
World War II changed everything in
a flash. Concerned that the Nazis might
make an atomic bomb, the U.S. govern-
ment dumped $2 billion into the biggest
research program in history. “[J]oy in
pure scientific discovery,” Preston writes
with characteristic insight, “created a
beautiful science which was suddenly
transmuted into a wartime sprint for the
ultimate weapon.” Within that beautiful
science was the core of the bomb, bound
to explode given proper conditions. It
was the ultimate gruesome experiment.
And in August 1945 in Japan, the world
first saw the terrible implications of the
atomic age.—JONATHON KEATS
[ASTRONAUT ANTICS]
Risky Business
ASTRONAUTS HAVE A CERTAIN AURA
of derring-do—tough risk-takers defy-
ing nature and death to explore the

realms beyond Earth’s atmosphere. But
for the last eight months before a
spaceflight, those astronauts are more
coddled than children are by an over-
protective mother. You see, NASA wants
to safeguard the training, time and
money invested in each person headed
to space, and that means expressly for-
bidding astronauts from engaging in
any high-risk activities for almost a year
before their scheduled takeoffs.
Astronauts are given a list of taboos.
Airplane, motorboat and motorcycle
racing, snowboarding, skiing and sky-
diving are all verboten. Kent Rominger,
chief of the astronaut corps at NASA’s
Johnson Space Center, warns that the
COURTESY WILL KIPLING, UC BERKELEY
policy is open-ended and that new
restrictions can be instated at any time.
It may seem strange that NASA
would consider these earthly pastimes
too dangerous for men and women
whose day jobs entail orbiting Earth
at 17,500 mph. But for NASA, the
consequences of losing an astronaut
to injury are severe.
“It’s pretty easy to say how much
T
FYI
money has been invested in the train-
ing of an astronaut,” says David Ropeik
[SMILE-INDUCING SCIENCE]
of the Harvard Center for Risk Analy-
sis. “But there are other costs: a substi- Press Release
tute astronaut, his training, delays in
the launch, and countless other factors
of the Month
we could figure in.” FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
NASA has never postponed a flight at Berkeley: “Researchers find three
because of injury, but there have been major beetle groups coming up one
some close calls. “I’ve got guys that testicle short.”
have climbed Denali, guys who race Really curious to read more about
dirt bikes, who ski and fly private air- the monorchid (one-testicled) beetles?
planes,” Rominger says. The current See www.berkeley.edu/news/media/
shuttle crew is no different. Comman- releases/2005/03/03_beetles.shtml.
der Eileen Collins’s vehicle of choice is
a motorcycle, while Mission Specialist
Andy Thomas prefers mountain bik-
ing. And although these activities
aren’t so much more dangerous than
the tasks involved in the training
itself—scuba and underwater exercises,
300mph landing practice in modified
jets, emergency-bailout scenarios—the
training “returns a benefit,” Ropeik
says, “and so they are risks worth tak-
ing. As are the flights themselves.” DROPPING THE BALL Some beetles, like this
—AMANDA MACMILLAN Onypterigia tricolor, have only one testicle.
(CONTINUED FROM PAGE 71)
comes and goes, but there is no sign
of him. About 20 miles away, he is
actually flying in circles, struggling
with one final problem: a stuck nose
landing gear. The fluid in a small hy-
draulic actuator froze during its three
days’ exposure to high altitudes, and
it takes a few minutes of flying in
warmer air to nudge it down and lock
it in place. That done, he heads for
Salina.
Fossett has been at the controls for
more than 66 hours. Can he manage
the now-featherweight craft on his crit-
ical, concentration-demanding final
approach? Surging adrenaline is his
ally, but fatigue and disorientation
may take away his edge if split-second
reactions to trouble are required.
At last, GlobalFlyer’s wide yet
extremely thin profile materializes low
on the horizon to the north. He lines
up on Runway 17, with one of his two
108
drag chutes deployed to slow the air-
craft down. His engine has been at idle
for nearly 300 miles—GlobalFlyer has
been gliding since Colorado.
With a distinctive whine-whoosh,
generated by both the idling engine
and the airplane’s elegant aerody-
namics, Fossett streaks past the
media viewing stand beside the run-
way and touches down at 1:50 p.m.,
after a flight of 67 hours, 1 minute
and 46 seconds. He’s flown 19,880
miles, only 17 miles more than was
needed for the record. GlobalFlyer
weighs 5,326 pounds, 1,515 pounds
of which is the remaining fuel—
enough for another 2,990 miles. Fos-
sett taxis GlobalFlyer to the hangar,
where Karkow and Branson stand
waving giant checkered flags. Fans
cheer, and the national and interna-
tional media scramble for position.
Fossett climbs out, waving. Address-
ing the crowd by loudspeaker, he is
typically minimalist in his manner:
“I’m a really lucky guy—I got to
achieve my ambition,” he says before
thanking his team and supporters.
When handed an enormous bottle
of champagne, he gingerly pops it
open and takes a swig. Branson swipes
the bottle from Fossett, shakes it up,
and chases him around in big circles,
with the triumphant pilot grinning ear-
to-ear as he finally succumbs to the
dousing. Several minutes later, when
Fossett comes over to speak with jour-
nalists, he runs his hands through his
champagne-soaked hair and scratches
at his three-day beard. His face is
gaunt, weary, and he looks, somehow,
transformed. He has a rugged edge to
him, and the confidence of a man who
just flew a jet airplane all the way
around the world, alone, and is now
blithely telling the tale.
At the press conference the next
day, he tackles again the persistent
question of why. “Maybe a person has
to be another pilot to appreciate this,
but a pilot loves to fly,” says Fossett,
who claims that he could have flown
another 24 hours at the controls. “Long
distances, crossing oceans and conti-
nents—it was an epic adventure: fly-
ing all day long, all night long, and
doing all the flying myself.” ■
Eric Adams is POPULAR SCIENCE’s avia-
tion and automotive editor.
POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005
HOW EINSTEIN ARE YOU?
ANSWER KEY TO THE QUIZ ON PAGE 78

1] (1 point) C, B, D, A
Although Einstein was a
citizen of three countries
(Germany, Switzerland
1–4 POINTS and the U.S.), married
twice, and won the 1921
Nobel Prize in physics, he
never met a U.S. president.
2] (1 point) D The Einstein
Ring is a gravitational lens
in which the image of the
5–8 POINTS distant object forms a com-
plete circle around the
closer object. Einsteinium is
a synthetic element discov-
ered in 1952. The Einstein
Tower is an observatory in
Potsdam, Germany.
9–12 POINTS
3] (4 possible points)
A, ii; B, iv; C, i; D, iii Gen-
eral relativity, Einstein’s
theory of gravity, made
heavy use of then long-
forgotten mathematical
objects called tensors.
13–16 POINTS
4] (1 point) C He said he
inherited from his mother
his temper and his hair,
both of which were diffi-
cult to control.
5] (2 possible points)
Special theory: i; General
17–20 POINTS
theory: iv
6] (1 point) A Although the
refrigeration pump Einstein invented with Hun-
garian physicist Leo Szilard found modest suc-
cess when applied to nuclear power plants, the
gyroscopic compass he developed in the
1920s with German engineer Hermann
Anschütz-Kaempfe was quickly adopted by
virtually every navy in the world. Einstein used
his proceeds from that device to help col-
leagues escape the Nazis.
7] (6 possible points) A: False Einstein was a
gifted child; math, science and music were his
best subjects. B: True He was excluded from
Swiss military service for (among other things)
“excessive foot perspiration.” C: True He had
multiple affairs. D: True. E: True His brain was
removed after his death and before he was
cremated. It was sliced into about 240 pieces,
and over the years it has been studied by vari-
ous researchers. F: False None of his five chil-
dren followed his career path.
8] (1 point) A 10] (1 point) B
9] (1 point) A 11] (1 point) B

POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005 111

 POPULAR

LOOKINGBACK
scıence T

FROM THE POPULAR SCIENCE ARCHIVES

MAY1934 OTHER NEWS FROM THE MAY 1934 ISSUE

Getting Loopy
Airplane-inspired amusement-park rides of the 1930s
spawned some of today’s theme-park favorites
Devalued stocks, raging unemployment and weakened national pride plagued the 1930s,
but POPSCI escaped the Great Depression with a focus on fun inventions. A ride that “gives
thrill seekers topsy-turvy sensations, comparable to those of looping the loop in a plane”
graced our May 1934 cover, half a century after the roller coaster first appeared in American
amusement parks. A giant steel arm swung this four-passenger car like a pendulum until
momentum took over, hurling riders around a full loop. A year later, experimental-aircraft
designer Lee Eyerly secured a patent for a similar design made from his surplus of airplane
parts—materials that were in low demand during the Depression. Spin-offs of his wildly NEW MASKS
popular “Loop-o-Plane,” which later grew another arm and swung two cars, still delight riders KEEP BULLS CALM
at theme parks today. [For a look at tomorrow’s rides, see page 56.]—AMANDA MACMILLAN Thanks to cattle blinders being tested in
England, “vicious bulls may no longer be
a menace to passers-by,” we wrote. The
masks blocked the animals’ sight so that
they would remain docile around people.

NICOTINE GIVES
CIGARETTES THEIR KICK
Smoking is enjoyable because nicotine stimu-
lates adrenal glands and releases sugar in
the body, Yale University scientists found in
1934. It would take another 54 years for the
U.S. surgeon general to acknowledge the
drug’s addictive power.

HOOVER LEADS TEAM

OF EARLY CSI AGENTS
Bureau of Investigation chief J. Edgar Hoover
embraced forensic advances in wiretapping,
fingerprinting and chemical analysis to
solve a rash of kidnappings and murders
in the 1930s. One technology used wax
and sulfuric acid to detect gunpowder on
a suspect’s trigger finger.

Photocopy Permission: Permission is granted by POPULAR SCIENCE® for libraries and others registered with
the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) to photocopy articles in this issue for the flat fee of $1 per copy
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