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JULY 2004 popsci.com
 CONTENTS
JULY 2004 VOLUME 265 #1

“So how do you actually do it? How do you ruin a machine that Porsche
Founded in 1872 will charge you $30,000 to replace? You take a deep breath and start.”
PROJECT PORSCHE p. 76
tech
13 What’s New
The MiniDisc revamped; digital music
storage showdown; hi-tech travel gear;
computerized crash-test dummy; garage
of the future; 20 hot new products

83 How 2.0
BUILD Pinky: cardboard robot that sees
GROK Perfecting your digital photos
EXPERIMENT Collecting magnetite
65 13
O N T H E C O V E R : J O H N M A C N E I L L ; I N S E T: L U I S B R U N O . T H I S PA G E : C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P L E F T: B O B S A U L S / F R A S S A N I T O & A S S O C I AT E S ; G R E G O R H A L E N D A ; J O H N B . C A R N E T T;

TECH SUPPORT Hacking LED flashlights

news
31 Headlines
NANOTECH Potential pollution hazard?
GEOLOGY Nationwide quake tracking
ROBOTICS Exoskeleton baby steps
FLIGHT X-43A smashes speed record!

stories
45 POPULAR SCIENCE’s 2004 Design
Competition We asked top design
firms to invent a 21st-century CARE 45 74
package. From artificial stars to whale-
KENN BROWN AND CHRIS WREN; STEPHEN ROUNTREE; TOMER HANUKA; JOHN MACNEILL; JAMESON SIMPSON

saving AUVs, here are their strange

and provocative proposals.
By Steven Henry Madoff

56 Whooshhh! An innovative aero-

dynamic design tweak could lead to
supersonic business jets and bombers
freed from that troublesome sonic
boom. By Bill Sweetman

65 Saturn Unveiled The incredible

Cassini probe begins its four-year tour of 56 20
Saturn and its moons. Here, your foldout
guide to the mission. By Dawn Stover

74 Project Porsche How a passionate,

compulsive car enthusiast restored a
broken-down road racer to gold-plated
glory. By Stephan Wilkinson

depts.
4 From the Editor 6 Contributors
8 Letters 26 Man and Machine 94 FYI
120 Looking Back 92 32
P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4 3
 FROM THE EDITOR

Editor-in-Chief Scott Mowbray

Deputy Editor Mark Jannot

CARE Packages— Design Director Dirk Barnett

Features Editor Emily Laber-Warren
Science Editor Dawn Stover

And Our Big Win!
MORE YEARS AGO THAN I CARE TO REVEAL—OK, IT WAS 1970,
and I was 11—my family lived in Surakarta, a cultured city in the mid-
dle of the Indonesian island of Java. My father, a physician, worked
for the relief organization CARE. He taught medicine and helped
administer three local hospitals. CARE was a low-cost operation
that relied in part on donations of medical equipment and drugs.
One day several large crates arrived from a major American hospi-
tal. Possessing a keen interest in the apparatus of medicine, I was
eager to help unpack the loot, which was vitally needed by the
under-equipped hospitals in my father’s charge.
It was a farce. We uncrated medical textbooks so old they would
have posed a hazard to patients tended to with their advice; some
of the moldy clunkers predated the discovery of antibiotics. There
were medical machines designed to deliver vibration or electro-
magnetic therapy of the sort still advocated by quacks. There were
long-expired medicines. There were ivory-handled optometry tools
of 19th-century vintage. It was as if we were rooting around in the
deepest cobwebbed corner of a hospital basement.
Actually, that’s likely not far off—the hospital had cleared out this
stuff and donated it, possibly with good intentions, possibly as
a cynical tax break. It was the sort of thing you learned to laugh at,
because your father laughed at it. Tidak apa-apa, as we’d say in
Indonesian about a lot of things: It doesn’t matter.
But of course it did matter, and does. Giving technology to com-
munities in need is fundamental to the modern idea of aid. Tech-
nology is both agent and symbol of the power of modernized nations.
It can be administered wrongly in a million ways.
The idea of the transformative power of the technological gift
fueled our first design competition, the results of which are pub-
lished in this issue (page 45). We asked internationally known de-
signers and thinkers to choose a community in need, then prescribe
a fix in the form of a “technological CARE package for the 21st cen-
tury.” We also encouraged them, in the tradition of this magazine,
to look slightly beyond the technological horizon, and speculate
about how emerging technologies might help. The range of solu-
tions offered will surprise you. The range of communities in need
might, too—it includes you, it includes all of us.
I’M DELIGHTED TO REPORT THAT AT THE 2004 NATIONAL MAGAZINE
Awards in May in New York, POPULAR SCIENCE won the General
Excellence award for magazines with circulations of 1 million to
2 million. The “Gen Ex” award is the highest honor a magazine can
receive. Our editorial team has been working for more than two
years to create the finest magazine of its type in the country. It’s
been gratifying, to say the least, to have that work honored.
Senior Technology Editor Suzanne Kantra Kirschner
Senior Editor, What’s New Eric Hagerman
Aviation & Automotive Editor Eric Adams
Managing Editor Jill C. Shomer
Senior Associate Editors Nicole Dyer, Michael Moyer
Associate Editor Gregory Mone
Assistant Editors Mike Haney, Martha Harbison
Assistant Editor, Best of What’s New Joe Brown
Deputy Art Director Hylah Hill
Assistant Art Director Josh McKible
Designer April Bell
Photo Editor Kristine LaManna
Staff Photographer John B. Carnett
Editorial Assistant Barbara Caraher
Web Producer Peter Noah
Consulting Editor Jeffrey Rothfeder
Graphics Consultant John Grimwade
Contributing Design Editor Chee Pearlman
Contributing Automotive Editor Stephan Wilkinson
Far East Contributing Editor Dennis Normile
Contributing Editors Dan Carney, Rebecca Skloot,
Bill Sweetman, Charles Wardell
Contributing Futurist Andrew Zolli
Contributing Artists Mika Grondahl, Jason Lee, John
MacNeill, Garry Marshall, Stephen Rountree, Bob Sauls
Editorial Intern Christina Bryza
Art Intern Peter Oumanski
POPULAR SCIENCE PROPERTIES
Publisher Gregg R. Hano
Advertising Director John Tebeau
Vice President & General Manager Steve Belanger
Executive Assistant Chandra Dwhaj
Northeast Advertising Office: Manager Howard S.
Mittman (212) 779-5112, Jill Schiffman (212) 779-
5007, Mike Schoenbrun (212) 779-5148
Ad Assistant Brenda Charles
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(312) 832-0626, Megan Williams (312) 832-0624
Ad Assistant Mickey Preston
Los Angeles Advertising Office: Manager Dana Hess
(310) 268-7484, Ad Assistant Mary Infantino
Detroit Advertising Office: Manager Donna Christensen
(248) 988-7723, Ad Assistant Diane Pahl
San Francisco Advertising Office: Manager Amy Cacciatore
(415) 434-5276, Ad Assistant Sarah Needleman
Southern Regional Advertising Office: Manager Dave
Hady (404) 364-4090
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 Mike Saperstein, Daniel
Vaughan
Events and Promotion Manager Christy Chapin Ellinger
Creative Services Designer Mary McGann
Marketing Coordinator Eshonda Caraway
Advertising Coordinator Evelyn Negron
Consumer Marketing Director Barbara Venturelli
Senior Planning Manager Margerita Catwell
Consumer Marketing Managers James Cahn,
Erik Hass, Sara O’Connor
Senior Production Director Laurel Kurnides
Production Assistant Shawn Glenn
Prepress Director Lisa Szymanski
Prepress Manager José Medina
Publicity Manager Hallie Deaktor
President Mark P. Ford
Senior Vice Presidents James F. Else, Victor M.
Sauerhoff, Steven Shure
Director, Editorial Development Scott Mowbray
Director, Corporate Communications Samara Farber
Mormar
JAKE CHESSUM

SCOTT MOWBRAY
CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SUBSCRIPTIONS
scott.mowbray@time4.com 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
4 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
 CONTRIBUTORS
FROM “ADAPTIVE
CAMOUFLAGE” TO “ZIPS”
Your guide to this month’s POPSCI

ADAPTIVE CAMOUFLAGE PAGE 94

BONEYARD 61
BRONZE-AGE FACTORY 26
CASSINI-HUYGENS 66
CRASH-TEST DUMMY 18
CULTURAL ASSIMILATION 54
ELECTRIC SOCKS 120
ELECTROLUMINESCENT STRIPS 48
ELEGANT LITTLE FIGHTER 62

Inspired by the containers filled with Spam and other surplus food items that ELVISH MAGIC 94
were sent to Europe at the end of World War II, POPSCI asked prominent architects, ETCH A SKETCH 90
designers and artists to identify a community in need and design a solution in the
form of a high-tech, 21st-century CARE package (page 45). On the whole, the FAT-FANNIED BUREAUCRAT 80
proposals offer smart and imaginative solutions; we’ve featured a few of our FREEZERATOR 18
favorites. Projects ran the gamut from the earnest (providing safe drinking water)
to the inventive (protecting whales from high-intensity sonar tests) to the bitingly GREAT TRAGEDY 78
satirical (a pop-culture bomb dropped on people “about to be liberated by HUMBLE OFFICE WORKER 49
the United States”). The POPSCI Design Challenge was spearheaded by CHEE
PEARLMAN (left), design journalist and director of the design consultancy Chee HYPERION 66
Company, and STEVEN HENRY MADOFF (right), a contributing editor of ARTnews
KATHMANDU 16
and a managing partner of the consulting group 5ive. Most of the entries feature
cutting-edge technology—the only spam involved is the kind that arrives digitally MAGNETITE 90
over the Internet—but are informed by an ethical lens. Says Pearlman, “Design
humanizes technology.”
MANY LONG NIGHTS 83
MARITAL BLISS 76
MONGOLIAN DAZZLERS 80
If POPSCI science editor DAWN STOVER seems a tad space- NANO-POLLUTION 31
obsessed (her latest story about NASA ran in April), it might
be because she works from a log cabin in rural Washington
OCEANS OF GASOLINE 72
and, unlike her New York colleagues, can actually see the OVERPRESSURE 59
stars. This month, Stover describes the Cassini mission (page
PAL OF THE USA 54
65), due to arrive at Saturn on July 1. “Scientists don’t know
much about Saturn,” she says, “not even enough to argue.” PINK-OBSESSED ROBOT 83
QUIET SUPERSONIC PLATFORM 60
Illustrator JAMESON SIMPSON drew a water-purification,
remote-communications unit (page 46) conceived for the REPTILE REAR 58
POPSCI Design Challenge as a cure-all of sorts for people REVERSE OSMOSIS 55
living in third-world poverty. Simpson knows firsthand the

LUIS BRUNO AND CHEE PEARLMAN PHOTOGRAPHED BY JOHN B. CARNETT

ROYAL LAND BARGE 28
perils of poor sanitation: During a recent stint in India he fell
desperately ill from tainted water. “Bacteria were jumping RUSTICLES 42
out of the woodwork,” he says. “I had to leave—or die.” SILICON JUNKYARDS 50
TOMER HANUKA’s jittery, color-soaked, graphic-novel style SMOG 72
is informed by a childhood obsession with DC comics. SOLID CHUNK OF BRASS 13
On page 92, he illustrates an ultrabright flashlight with
a humorously gruesome, comic-book-worthy image. Hanuka, STIRLING ENGINE 46
whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, is SYNTHETIC STAR 48
co-creator—with his twin brother and fellow illustrator
THUNDEROUS DOUBLE BANG 58
Asaf—of the comic book Bipolar.
ÜBERINVESTOR 60
LUIS BRUNO, who shot the crash-test dummy on page 18,
VERSATILE F-5 120
uses minimal lighting and props to create naturalistic still
lifes. “It’s not like I wing it,” he says. “But I want to keep it WHALE BEHAVIOR 53
simple.” Bruno, whose work has appeared in Fortune, uses WOODY ALLEN OF RODENTS 96
a digital camera, but his heart is in the past. “I really love the
old processes, the sharpness that glass plates give,” says YODA 94
Bruno, “but I use digital because it is so much faster.” ZIPS 68

6 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
 LETTERS
LETTERS@POPSCI.COM
“Claims”
Adjustments
I just finished reading your article “106 Science
Claims and a Truckful of Baloney” [May]. I found it to
be very informative. This story should serve to
remind all of us of an excellent rule of thumb that
transcends many aspects of life, whether they are sci-
entific, financial or personal: If it sounds too good to
be true, then it most likely is.
Patrick Lussenden
Auburn, Wash.
I found your article on science
claims very interesting. But why
stop there? The back pages of
your magazine are filled with
many dubious claims, including
a golf club’s secret metal, a four-
minute-per-day exercise machine,
the toughest glue on planet
Earth, an aphrodisiac aftershave
additive, and too many male
enhancement aids to count.
Whose side are you really on?
Paul Davis
Tujunga, Calif.
I’m a retired poultry farmer, and
I have a few comments about your
“106 Science Claims” article by
William Speed Weed. First, the
FDA does not regulate the poultry
CORRECTION
An article about the Core77 Design
Challenge in the May “What’s New”
section incorrectly stated that the
Cetus diving suit could cause decom-
pression sickness if a diver held his
breath and ascended quickly to the
surface. In fact, the suit is only in-
tended for surface breathing; the risk
of decompression sickness is marginal.
8 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
industry. FSIS (Food Safety and In-
spection Service), a branch of the
USDA, does. A little clarification as
to what FSIS describes as “natural”
would have benefited Mr. Weed’s
story. “Natural” means the poultry
has no artificial ingredients or
added color, and is only minimally
processed—meaning the process
has not fundamentally altered the
raw product. Other labeling is
added to poultry to convey the
barnyard image, like “free-range,”
“hormone free,” or “antibiotic free.”
These labels are also regulated by
FSIS. Mr. Weed should also realize
the reason that the birds’ toes,
claws and beaks are clipped. No
matter how much room chickens
are given, the birds will fight and
peck at each other. This leads to
scratches and dead birds. Scratched
skin does not sell well on the mar-
ket, as few people like a blemish.
In fact, toes and beaks are taken off
with microwaves these days: This
causes the toes or beaks to fall off
after a few days with no blood and
less stress to the animal.
I think Mr. Weed brought up
some very good points in his article
regarding labeling, but he should slow
down and do a little more research.
Matthew Stone
St. Augustine, Fla.
Although I enjoyed and agreed with
most of Speed Weed’s evaluations, the
item claiming that yeast and gluten
are different was lacking in medical
knowledge. I have a friend who has
Celiac disease, a severe gluten allergy.
She makes her own bread from rice
flour. In yeast manufacture, the yeast
is grown in a culture that may
include cereal flour. The gluten
remnants in those brands of yeast
would make my friend very sick.
Ron Peterson
Ogden, Utah
Carry Luggage, Don’t Ride It
I was amused to learn the Core77
Design Challenge #3 Grand Prize
Winner was the Transporter, a self-
propelled piece of luggage that one
can ride like the Segway [“Faster,
Smarter, Better,” What’s New, May].
Seems to me that with something
like 60 percent of Americans either
overweight or obese, this kind of in-
vention is yet another example of
exactly what we don’t need.
y
(LETTERS, CONTINUED)
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 LETTERS
This American Tourister–carrying
Luddite will continue to burn a few
calories by simply walking in the
airport. I promise not to stick my
umbrella in the spokes of one of
these contraptions as it whizzes by.
Scott Fazekas
Stuttgart, Germany
Dynojet Dyno-Mite!
While reading “Setting Loose the
Horses on Dyno Day” [Man & Ma-
chine, May], I was surprised that
while giving the general background
for dynamometers, the author seems
to be heralding the idea that Dyna-
packs are superior to drum dynos.
In my experience, Dynojet dynos
(drum type) are far superior.
Although Dynojets do require the
car to be strapped down, and the car
can theoretically come loose, they
offer a more accurate measure of true
wheel horsepower for several reasons.
First, Dynapacks (as stated in the
article) provide resistance via some
viscous fluid which opposes the mo-
tion of the axle (not the wheels). After
a few dyno runs, the temperature of
the fluid can increase greatly. This
can change the viscosity of the fluid.
This is very important, because
viscosity is one of the main variables
used by the Dynapack in the calcula-
tion of horsepower and torque.
Secondly, the Dynapack requires
the removal of the wheels. Therefore,
true wheel horsepower (what is trans-
ferred to the ground) cannot be
measured. The weight, diameter and
rotational inertia of the wheels do
have an effect on the horsepower, since
the engine has to rotate them also.
Kevin Hassell
Raleigh, N.C.
Author Stephan Wilkinson replies:
There are many variations that affect
any ordinary dyno (short of a hugely
expensive test cell of the sort a vehicle
manufacturer would have), so arguing
about whether one type or another is
superior is largely irrelevant. Humidity,
temperature, operator technique, tire
heat and growth at speed (in the case
of a drum-type dyno) and a variety of
other factors cause substantial varia-
tions in results. A drum or axle
dynamometer is really only effective as
a tool to assess an individual engine’s
effectiveness on a given day at a given
time under identical conditions but
different tuning states. Regardless of
the type of dyno, horsepower and
torque readouts are only comparative
indications, not graven-in-stone num-
bers. One substantial advantage of
the Dynapack, nonetheless, is that it's
portable enough to take to the track
for on-site racecar tuning.
“Now” Please, Not “Next”
Fantasizing on what might happen is
not what I expect nor what I seek in
POPULAR SCIENCE [“Best of What’s
Next,” May]. You seem to be catering
to the lowest common intellectual
denominator. What has happened to
in-depth articles? Self-fixing cars,
cloning kits and brain spas are
no-brainers for me. Give me a break.
Frederick E. Conron
Cap-Rouge, Quebec
_FROM THE BLOGS
Last month, over 250 Web logs
linked to popsci.com. A sample:
Best of What’s Next_
A neat speculative article from POPULAR
SCIENCE. I should start reading magazines
like this again; it helps to see the bigger
picture when you get mired in all the
details involved with science.
posted by Andy Y. Lin
Monkey Kingdom News and Rants
web.mit.edu/andylin/www/blog
106 Science Claims_
POPULAR SCIENCE reports on the “scientific
claims” made all around us, and investi-
gates to see just how “scientific” they are.
An amusing piece. We can understand
that advertisers lie, and will continue to do
so to make money. But, perhaps we are
affected by the pervasiveness of this trend
more than we would initially like to think.
How many people regurgitate these
claims as fact? How long until the reitera-
tion becomes fact in a person’s mind?
posted by Jen Palmer, Kali Is My Copilot
kaliismycopilot.blogspot.com
How 2.0_
A big wheel for big spenders: Innovative
monowheel design features counter-
weight and no front wheels. Very cool.
I want this, bet you will too.
posted by Jim Bonfield, Eyeballfarm.com
eyeballfarm.blogspot.com
 INSIDE: SAVVY TRAVEL GEAR 16 • WORLD’S SMARTEST CRASH-TEST DUMMY 18 • GARAGE OF THE FUTURE 20

What’sNew
$1,900 BUYS YOUR VERY OWN BRASS BAND
SONY ANSWERS THE IPOD STRATEGY WITH A MASSIVE MINIDISC FORMAT.
Thought MD was dead?
Think again. Sony just
upgraded it. With its new Hi-
MD format, you can record
45 hours of music on a single
1GB disc—and the blanks
cost a measly seven bucks.
Effectively, that means unlimit-
ed storage, putting Hi-MD
players on a freshly competi-
tive footing with fancy-pants
jukeboxes like the iPod and
sleek flash-memory audio
devices. And by launching the
Qualia 017 (at right) last
month, Sony is trumpeting a
commitment to sexy design as
well. The $1,900 Hi-MD player
is machined from a solid
chunk of brass, ostensibly for
durability (fewer seams),
realistically because it’s cool.
(There are more affordable Hi-
MD players too.) Still, know-
ing which type of player best
suits you means knowing
how they store digital music.
For that answer, check the
chart on the following page.
—SUZANNE KANTRA KIRSCHNER
STYLING BY STEPHANIE BASRELIAN

The pleasantly hefty Qualia 017

features silicone-gasketed brass earbuds
said to boost bass and clarify treble. NEXT PAGE: 3 WAYS TO STORE TUNES
PHOTOGRAPH BY GREGOR HALENDA POPULAR SCIENCE J U LY 2 0 0 4 13
What’sNew SHOWDOWN: PORTABLE MUSIC

THE MEDIUM IS THE MUSIC

LET US COUNT THE WAYS YOU CAN STORE YOUR DIGITAL TUNES.

HI-MD

1 2 HARD DISK DRIVE FLASH MEMORY

FOR EXAMPLE Filling your Hi-MDs takes a few
scant moments with Sony’s MZ-
NH1, sitting pretty in its combi-
nation USB 2.0 cradle and bat-
tery charger.
The Samsung Napster Yepp
YH-800, one of the first micro
jukeboxes that links to a music
service.
3
The Nike Philips MP3Run packs
in an FM radio and provides
time, distance and pace data on
demand via a Bluetooth sensor
you wear on your shoe.

VITALS Takes 1GB Hi-MD discs; 1.5GB hard drive; 2.25 x 256MB internal flash memory;
3.25 x 3 x 0.59 inches; 2.25 x 1 inches; FM tuner;10- 2.8 x 2.8 x 1.1 inches; 12-
in-cord remote. $400; hour rechargeable battery. hour rechargeable battery.
sony.com $300; samsungusa.com $350; nikerunning.com

INSIDE THE TECH

LASER

CONTROL GATE
PLAY
THIN OXIDE LAYER
WRITE HEAD
PLAY FLOATING GATE

PLAY

C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P L E F T: C O U R T E S Y S O N Y; C O U R T E S Y S A M S U N G ; C O U R T E S Y N I K E ; J A S O N L E E
RECORD
SWITCHING
LAYER SENSOR
READ HEAD
MEMORY
LAYER MAGNETIC IRON- RECORD
RECORD OXIDE PARTICLES

RECORD A red laser creates nonreflective
bumps on a flat, reflective data
track on the memory layer. It
creates bumps smaller than
it can read.
The write head moves over a
spinning platter coated with
magnetic iron-oxide particles to
polarize them in a sector on one
of tens of thousands of tracks.
A positive charge applied to the
control gate of a transistor pulls
electrons through a thin oxide
layer into the floating gate, cre-
ating a negative charge there.

PLAY The “switching” layer, when
heated with a red laser, magni-
fies the memory layer below it.
Nonreflective bumps =0s;
reflective spaces = 1s.
The read head detects the pres- When a voltage is applied to the
ence or absence of a magnetic control gate in read mode,
charge and converts it into the electron-filled floating gates are
1s and 0s we love so much. read as a 1; neutrals are 0s.

MAX CAPACITY 1GB 40GB* 8GB

AVG. PRICE PER MB $0.01 less than $0.01 $0.05

CLAIMED LIFESPAN 30-plus years 5-plus years 50-plus years

WHO WANTS IT The music enthusiast who’s The audio pack rat who’s going The gadget lover who wants the
always swapping out tunes and to pamper a device that stores smallest and lightest audio play-
needs a durable device. his entire music collection. er with some aesthetic mojo.
*Based on the commonly used 1.8-inch disk drive

14 POPULAR SCIENCE J U LY 2 0 0 4
What’sNew OUTFITTER

WHY SWEAT SUMMER TRAVEL?

ONE-OF-A-KIND GEAR TO PREP YOU FOR LANDING— THE FIRST TRUE
GLOBETROTTER
WHEREVER THAT MIGHT BE.

You love your digital camera, but can you find a fresh SD card in Kathmandu?
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1
why bother locking your luggage if the security folks at LAX are likely to clip it any-
way? The answers to such wandering quandaries lie, of course, in technology. From
stitchless surf trunks to truly interactive digital guidebooks, we’ve wrangled six innova-
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creature and e-mail them to your friends. Stores 150 images. $110; bushnell.com /4/SONY PHOTO VAULT/When you max out your digital
camera’s memory, you can transfer the images via USB or Memory Stick to 200MB mini CD-Rs with this 8-ounce burner/player. Connects to
a TV for slideshows. $200; sony.com /5/RIP CURL CODE: STL/Instead of stitching the seams of its new board shorts, Rip Curl laser-cuts the fab-
ric to prevent fraying and then glues the edges together under high heat and pressure. No thread, no rash. $55; ripcurl.com /6/IFODOR’S
TRAVEL GUIDE/Download these electronic city guides to your PDA, tap your location on a map, and the software generates walking directions
to shops, hotels, sights, clubs and restaurants (which you can search by price and cuisine). It’s the first such digital guide to merge comprehen-
sive guidebook information with Mapquest-like usefulness. $20 for each of 10 cities, including London, New York and Rome. fodors.com

TAP-AND-FIND GUIDE

5 6
NO-CHAFE
SHORTS

4
LUIS BRUNO

DIGITAL PHOTO BURNER

16 POPULAR SCIENCE J U LY 2 0 0 4
What’sNew THE BREAKDOWN

TOUGH DOESN’T
MEAN STUPID
WHAT’S TO PROTECT
INSTRUMENTATION HEAD
WorldSID takes up to 212 Head injuries
YOU FROM A DEADLY sensors, head to ankle, that account for half of
measure acceleration, force all side-impact fatal-
SIDE IMPACT? THIS GUY. and deflection. Internal ities. The seamless
memory boards store 64 construction of his
As any 9-year-old with a Lego channels of data at 1,000 skull is revolution-
times per second. The ary—it eliminates
set can tell you, it’s easy to results go to five internal unnatural splitting.
build things for destruction. The chal- data-collection boxes.
lenge for grown-ups designing crash-
test dummies is to create something
highly technical that can recover from
one collision to be used in the next.
“We don’t break bones,” says Steve
Moss, technical director of First Tech-
nology Safety Systems, which is
just starting production of the World
Side Impact Dummy, or WorldSID.
“Everything is required to deform the
way a human would, without break-
ing like a human does.”
Developed over 12 years by
designers on four continents, World-
SID is the first internationally accepted
side-impact crash-tester. He arrives as
pressure increases on car makers to
address side-impact safety. And
at $250,000 fully loaded, he’s no
cheap date.—AMY GOLDWASSER

PELVIS
The main impact point RIBS
for the lower body. A load
cell between the head of Instead of the old single-
the femur and the hip shell cage, he has one shoul-
socket can predict fracture. der rib, three thorax ribs and
two in the abdomen—
invaluable for gauging organ
injuries. Each rib is made of
superstrong, superelastic nick-
el titanium and bonded with a
tar-like damping material to
simulate the mushy combo of
bones and organs. The ribs
deflect 75mm, because if
yours move 50mm, you’re
dead. All of his parts
are made to exceed
human fatality
thresholds by
50 percent.

LEGS
ANKLES Bones are aircraft-grade aluminum sheathed in
Double-axis ankles give him human dense vinyl “flesh.” Except for the legs, average
range of motion. Foot and leg injuries tend male height is constant around the world; Japan-
LUIS BRUNO

to require years of rehab. ese men are slightly shorter from the waist down.

18 POPULAR SCIENCE J U LY 2 0 0 4
What’sNew

❯
HOUSE OF THE FUTURE

YOU’RE THE MASTER;

THIS IS YOUR UNIVERSE S
TOMORROW’S SMART GARAGE IS
READY TO OBEY YOUR EVERY WHIM.
S S
The garage of the future will still shelter your car
and serve as a place to store
S
your lawn mower and other
indoor-outdoor equipment. But
according to visionaries we inter-
viewed at organizations ranging
S
from the Ultimate Garage to the
TOUCHSCREEN
Electric Power Research Institute, in 10 years your DISPLAY 3
garage will also be a savvy service center. Multiple
power systems will ensure that your house con-
RFID LABEL
sumes—and generates—energy as efficiently and MAKER 5
inexpensively as possible. A team of robots will CAR 2
automatically take out the trash, accept and sort
S DIAGNOSTIC
Q CENTER
deliveries and trim your lawn—but only if it needs it. Q
And sensors will valet park your vehicles and keep S Q
tabs on their condition. All you’ll have to do is sit
back and enjoy the ride.—CHARLES WARDELL ENERGY 9 Q S Q
CONTROL CENTER Q
S S S
8 FUEL CELL
CAR TECH Pull up to your garage, press the park but-
ton, and infrared beams help your car guide itself into
the bay correctly [1]. Once parked, your car transmits
data wirelessly to a diagnostic station in the garage
[2]. The system’s display tells you when it’s time for
S
regular maintenance—like a 300,000-mile tune-up—
and warns you if something needs attention, present-
ing all your options. If you’re handy, use the touch- S
screen [3] to display your car’s manual, and order 13 EDGER
parts if necessary; it will then walk you through the 14 LAWN MOWER
repair. If you’d rather not sully your mitts, beam the WITH AERATOR
diagnosis to your repair shop for an estimate. The
mechanics can use their own computers to do a more
in-depth remote diagnosis and notify you if and when
you need to bring it in. A handheld camera lets you
send visual as well as electronic information.
K
SMART STORAGE Shelves [4] have built-in scales to
keep track of how much fertilizer, grass seed and
other lawn-care products you’ve used. They automati-
cally scan Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags in
product labels as items are removed and replaced, 11 IRRIGATION SYSTEM
and update the inventory on your home computer. An
RFID label maker [5] lets you inventory the contents of
your own storage boxes so you know exactly where
you stashed the holiday decorations. To maximize
storage space, all these boxes, as well as bikes, boats plies it. If it’s a blue-sky day and nobody’s home, the solar energy powers a
and other recreational toys, are stored on the second reformer, which extracts hydrogen from water; the hydrogen is stored safely
story with the help of an electric lift [6]. in a subterranean tank [10]. As a last resort, if it’s cloudy and your fuel cell’s
out of hydrogen, the controller finds out through the Internet which utility
HOME POWER SYSTEM Your home will still be con- has the lowest rates at that instant, and draws from the grid.
nected to the grid, but it will also include two of its
own power-generating systems: a photovoltaic roof YARD CARE The irrigation system [11] goes online to check National Weath-
array [7] that can deliver energy directly to your home er Service reports and municipal water restrictions, using the information to
and a hydrogen fuel cell [8]. A central controller [9] decide when to water. A small army of robotic lawn maintenance tools can
coordinates these systems. When the sun is shining make decisions based on the same data, and automatically groom your
and you need power, the solar rooftop system sup- yard accordingly. You’ll have single-function bots like a yard vacuum [12]

20 POPULAR SCIENCE J U LY 2 0 0 4
 7 PHOTOVOLTAIC ROOF ARRAY

ELECTRIC LIFT 6 SMART

SHELVES
4
1
PARKING TRASH BOT 15
SENSOR

DOOR BOT

12 YARD VACUUM

10 HYDROGEN
TANK

and edger [13], as well as a mower that
takes attachments such as an aerator [14].
The bots rest on their charging stations
between jobs.
TRASH BOT A robotic trash can [15] sits on
a charging station by the back door to the
house. It has an automated routine to
wheel itself to the curb on collection night.
y
POPSCI CONCEPT
DOOR BOT Think of the door bot as a robotic
gopher. It stashes packages from the delivery
guy. Once he keys in a one-time code and
leaves your packages in a double-secure stor-
age bay, the bot scans the embedded RFID
tags and automatically puts the boxes on the
correct shelf or in the fridge (or freezer). It
finds and retrieves items for you from the
second-floor storage room. And it fetches and
puts away your tools.

(HOUSE OF THE FUTURE CONTINUED ON PAGE 22)

INFOGRAPHIC BY KENN BROWN AND CHRIS WREN POPULAR SCIENCE J U LY 2 0 0 4 21

What’sNew HOUSE OF THE FUTURE, CONT’D

COOL GARAGE TECH—TODAY

TURN THE CAR CLOSET INTO A BRIGHT FIX-IT BAY.

C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P L E F T: C O U R T E S Y S - K FA C O M ; C O U R T E S Y F R I E N D LY R O B O T I C S ; C O U R T E S Y L I T R A C O N G M B H ; C O U R T E S Y G L A D I AT O R G A R A G E W O R K S ; C O U R T E S Y S O L A R C E N T U R Y; C O U R T E S Y B A U M T O O L S U N L I M I T E D
You may have to wait a decade or two for your garage to automatically
diagnose your car’s ills, but the array of technology below only seems futuris-
tic. It’s quite possible today to demystify the Check Engine light on your car’s
dashboard and schedule your lawnmower to trim your yard automatically.
Here’s how to do all that and more.—CHARLES WARDELL

1 S-K FACOM STRAP WRENCH
2 OTTOSCAN DIAGNOSTIC SOFTWARE
3 SOLAR CENTURY C21 ROOF TILES
TOOLS
Whether your oil-filter wrench uses
a gripping strap or a cuff vaguely
shaped to fit the can’s flats, it’s no
match for an over-tightened unit. S-K
Facom’s strap wrench gets the job
done with a meaty, ratcheting handle
and stainless-steel strap that you can
tighten using a knob on the heel of
the wrench—hugely useful in tight
quarters. Besides, the Ferrari
Formula 1 team uses nothing but
Facom tools. $25; facom.com
DIAGNOSTIC SYSTEMS
Save yourself a pricey trip to the car
dealer the next time that hectoring
Check Engine light flashes red. With
Ottoscan software, a Pocket PC and
a cable that attaches to your car’s
onboard diagnostics port, you can
read more error and performance
data than you’ll ever know what to
do with. $389-495, depending on
PDA model; www.baumtools.com
POWER GENERATION
Solar roofing panels don’t have to be
hideous, as evidenced by U.K.-based
Solar Century’s C21 photovoltaic roof
tiles. Except for a slight bluish tint, they
look like a traditional roofing slate.
And unlike most other solar panels, the
electric links between tiles are so sim-
ple that any roofer—not just a solar
panel specialist—can handle the job.
Enough tiles to provide half the power
for a 1,400 square-foot home cost
about $14,000. The break-even point is
a decade or two. solarcentury.com
REFRIGERATION
The extremes of ambient temperature
that would melt ice cream or freeze
soda in a typical refrigerator don’t faze
Gladiator Garagework’s Freezerator. It
keeps food frozen even at 110°F. And if
temperatures fall below 32°F, heat strips
lining the 21-cubic-foot interior keep
your drinks from turning to ice. The top
compartment freezes and refrigerates.
$1,300; www.gladiatorgw.com
LIGHTING
Dull as cement? Not any more.
LiTraCon’s concrete blocks have hun-
dreds of glass fibers running through
them to brighten dark spaces. Lay the
blocks over a bed of electrical lighting
and you’ve got a disco floor. Developed
as a student project at Royal University
College of Fine Arts in Stockholm, the
blocks are currently being tested to see
if they can be manufactured on a large
scale. If so, they’ll be available State-
side by year’s end; plan to spend a
lot. Litracon.com
LAWN CARE
Forget about mowing the lawn this
summer. Instead, stake a wire around
the perimeter of your yard, and let the
Robomow RL1000 trim away inside its
pen. The electric mower autonomously
returns to its docking station to charge
using an onboard navigation system,
and you can set it to do the work
automatically on a schedule you
determine. Touch-sensitive bumpers
help the bot avoid obstacles. $2,000;
friendlyroboticsusa.com

6 ROBOMOW RL1000
NEXT INSTALLMENT_In September we’ll
explore the ergonomically perfected work center that
will be your future home office.
4 FREEZERATOR 5 LITRACON CONCRETE

22 POPULAR SCIENCE J U LY 2 0 0 4
What’sNew MUST-SEE TECHNOLOGY

THEGOODS
2O SERIOUSLY HOT PRODUCTS THAT (ALMOST) SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

Kiss Pure Java Mean Data

& Tell Bodum Granos Omron Karada
OraQuick >> In addition to having Scan Scale
Rapid HIV-1 a professional-strength >> Measure
Test >> The pump, this machine weight and body
first rapid HIV expels stale water fat, sync the scale with the
test to ana- after each brewing pedometer and feed the
lyze saliva, cycle so your espresso ugly truth to your PC. Japan
recently FDA- is always made with only. $175; omron.com
approved, is fresh H20. $500;
99 percent bodumusa.com
accurate.
Get results in
20 minutes.
Price not set;
orasure.com

Carpenter:
Know
Dial-A-Traction Thy Walls
Land Rover Terrain Zircon OneStep
Response System MultiScanner
>> Turn a console >> Stud finders
dial to one of five compute density by
driving conditions bouncing current
and the 2005 LR3 through walls. This
tweaks the suspen- one uses two sen-
sion, 4WD system A Shot in the Dark sors to triangulate
and traction control. Fujifilm QuickSnap Smart Flash >> Flip a switch to widen the stud’s center—
A first. Price not set; the aperture and slow shutter, improving low-light snaps. A a unique feature.
landrover.com flash diffuser eliminates bright spots. $15; fujifilm.com $55; zircon.com

Detroit’s Green Monster Indoor Links

Jeep 5.7-liter HEMI V8 QMotions-Golf Con-
>> The biggest guzzler troller >> Use real clubs
for the ’05 on the virtual course in
Grand Cherokee EA Sports’ new Tiger
can also act like Woods game: Optical
the smallest: It Have It Your Way sensors wired to a
shuts down Gamester Phoenix Revolution tethered ball read
four cylinders >> Lefties rejoice! All four control your swing and
when cruising, elements of this PS2 joystick tell the computer
using 20 percent are modular, so you can arrange how it should fly. A
less fuel. Price not them however you like. $25; first. PC only. $250;
set; jeep.com gamesterusa.com qmotions.com

24 POPULAR SCIENCE J U LY 2 0 0 4
 Equal Opportunity Heads-Up Display
Speakerphone Ambient Executive Dashboard
Polycom Sound- >> A cellular network feeds data
Station 2W on weather, traffic and NASDAQ
>> Battery-powered to this analog desktop display.
speakerphone lets $130; ambientdevices.com
you use your cell’s
hands-free jack
for conference Margarita Master Svelte Sub
calling any- Jenn-Air Attrezzi Blender Soundmatters SUBstage
where you get a >> It holds more than most Subwoofer >> This 3.1-
signal. A 2.4GHz transmit- (72 ounces), oversize inch, digitally amplified
ter that plugs into your land- blades devour ice, and woofer produces bass as
line allows it to work at the motor is unusually solid as most 14-inch analog
home too. Price not set; powerful. Que sum- models.100 watts. $300;
polycom.com mer. $200; jennair.com soundmatters.com

Hide ’n’ Speakers

Philippe Starck/Cassina Music Image
Sofa System >> Since not
everyone wants A-V gear
on display, this couch con-
ceals your rear-channel
speakers and subwoofer
within its upholstery.
Hide your projector in
a pop-up rear com-
partment. $18,500;
cassinausa.com

Boo-Boo Bling-Bling
Curad Silver >> Bits of silver in the pad
kill bacteria by attacking a variety of
their enzymes. With this approach, the
germs are less apt to build up resistance.
$4; curadusa.com

Cell Booster Club Pro

Digital Antenna Power- Taylor Made r7Quad TP Driver >> Fight hook or slice by changing the
max DA4000SBR club’s weight distribution. Four ports accept 12
>> Bring wireless dead bolts of varying weight. 883 combos
zones to life. A roof in all. $1,000; taylormadegolf.com
antenna pulls in and
amplifies weak signals.
(Doesn’t work with
Nextel service). $560;
Tight and Light
Cannondale Six13 >> Cannon-
Light Saber digitalantenna.com
dale uses an angioplasty-like
Gerber Nautilus >> bladder to mold carbon-fiber
A spring-loaded tubes to the frame’s aluminum
LED pops out and Whiter Noise joints from the inside. $4,400
illuminates your Tide Buzz >> Tide and Black & Decker made as shown; cannondale.com
work area, so you a stain-removing contraption that soaks
can use the light soiled duds in a
and a tool on the sound-conducting
knife at the soap and pounds
same time. them with ultra-
O-ring-sealed sonic waves to
electronics. Stain- scrub out the gunk
less steel hard- from the inside of
ware. $60; the fabric. $50;
gerberblades.com stainbuzz.com

POPULAR SCIENCE J U LY 2 0 0 4 25
 MAN &
MACHINE
BY STEPHAN WILKINSON
HARD, FAST, SHINY OBJECTS &
WHY WE LOVE THEM
IN 1998, THE
Group bought Rolls-Royce and its
subsidiary marque Bentley for $750
million, after a fierce bidding war with
BMW. Months later, it was revealed that
for $65 million, BMW had made an end
run and snookered away the rights to
the Rolls-Royce name—arguably the
only valuable asset in the whole deal.
All VW ended up owning after
spending so much was a Bronze Age
Rolls/Bentley factory in Crewe, Eng-
land, and the second-rate—in many
eyes—Bentley brand (what were Bent-
leys, other than stealth Rollses with
different grilles?).
I was among the know-it-alls, a
group that included many business
and car magazine editors, who snick-
ered that VW CEO Ferdinand Piech
26 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
Fuddy-DuddyBrand
SpawnsLuxuryRocket
What goes 0-to-60 in 4.7 seconds, looks like a crouching cat
and may, at 150 large, be a bargain of auto technology?
VOLKSWAGEN had let himself be head-faked by
BMW. Piech was said to be a rude,
arrogant, pushy blowhard, a classic
“couldn’t happen to a nicer guy” dupe.
But a funny thing happened on the
way to market. When BMW introduced
the first German Rolls-Royce early in
2003, we saw in the new Phantom a
huge, enormously expensive car that
undeniably had . . . presence. It pushed
a Grecian-temple grille the size of a card
table. But the car lacked grace and suf-
fered from styling flaws that suggested
the heavy hand of a committee.
VW, meanwhile, was late out of the
gate. It had spent a lot of time and
money hugely upgrading the old Crewe
factory and making substantial mods
to Bentley’s aging Arnage, a pocket bat-
tleship of a sedan that benefited greatly
from VW-engineered suspension and
turbocharging tweaks. In the mean-
time, VW had spent many millions of
pounds and three years on a victory in
the 2003 Le Mans endurance race with
a Bentley-branded racecar, the Speed 8.
It was the first Bentley win in 73 years.
I got a ride in a Speed 8 four months
after that race, suiting up and jamming
myself into the left seat—it is an Eng-
lish car, after all—alongside team driver
Tom Kristensen, a 36-year-old Dane
who is just slightly handsomer and
vastly faster than Brad Pitt. Kristensen
EDWIN FOTHERINGHAM
has been on a Le Mans–winning team
five times. This is not a record, since
two other drivers have won five. But
only Kristensen did it in just seven
tries. He is also the only driver with
four consecutive wins.
MAN &
MACHINE
It used to be that the best endurance
racers were strokers, skilled at going
just fast enough and coddling the
equipment. No more. Today, you’re
going flat out pretty much the whole
24 hours at Le Mans, and one of the
reasons Tom enjoys giving rides in
the 600-plus horsepower, 215-mph
Speed 8 is that it reveals to civilians
what punishment a good racer endures
in his or her office. The G-forces are
sharper than anything I’d imagined.
I doubt that any fighter pilot undergoes
such rapid G onset from side to side
and fore and aft, and certainly none
So here’s the bottom line:
Someday soon, we may look back upon Rolls-
Royce as a 21st-century flameout.
experiences those stresses virtually non-
stop for two and three hours at a time.
As with any modern racecar, what
really stuns you is the unearthly grip
of its brakes. The engine yowls like a
tortured tiger, the acceleration is fierce
enough to verge on uncontrollable and
Kristensen makes constant course cor-
rections almost before the mini slides
begin. But the primary sensation is
that we’re all gonna die because we’re
still doing 150 and a 90-degree left is
six car lengths ahead.
So it turned out that Herr Piech of
VW had serious plans for Bentley. Con-
firmation that he knew exactly what he
was doing came with the appearance of
the 2004 Bentley Continental GT. This
beauty is in fact the single biggest per-
formance-car bargain on the market.
A Bentley bargain? Are we sniffing
too much oxymoron gas here? Well,
consider first that the Continental GT,
a two-door coupe, is a true four-seater.
I’ve ridden in sedans with less back-
seat room and comfort than the Conti-
nental GT affords. It’s by far the fastest
four-seater on the planet.
Then consider that the Continental’s
furnishings—superb leather, museum-
Test the flexibility of the Stephan Wilkinson brand at manandmachine@time4.com.
PIECH PRIZE: The 2004 Continental GT
quality wood, weapons-grade metal-
work—make the interior of even a
$120,000 Porsche 911 Turbo seem
positively industrial by comparison.
Nor does it hurt that the GT is
utterly beautiful, from its mesh-grilled
face to arrogant rear haunches like
those of a big, crouching cat.
Put all this together with the fact
that you get a 552-hp car that will do
198 mph and 0-to-60 in 4.7 seconds,
and you have a $149,990 bargain. (In
fact, I drove a production Continental
that had officially been timed at
206 mph, though Bentley chooses to be
conservative in its claims.)
So here’s the bottom line: Someday
soon, we may look back upon Rolls-
Royce as a 21st-century flameout, a
brand that had no markets into which it
could credibly expand. BMW can make
super-luxurious Rolls-Royce sedans,
super-super-luxurious Rolls limousines
and maybe—to be daring—a four-seat
cabriolet. That’s about it, though.
Nobody wants a Rolls-Royce racecar,
supercar, roadster, coupe, wagon or
“inexpensive” entry-level Rolls. Yet
that’s all within the purview of Bentley.
(Alas, it could even build an SUV and
get away with it.) And of course it can
also do the limos. Indeed, Bentley
recently built for the Queen of England
a special state limousine. It comes with
COURTESY BENTLEY MOTORS
a button on the dash that sets the cruise
control to exactly 4 mph—the march-
ing speed of the guardsmen who pro-
ceed alongside the royal land barge. ■
 H E AD L I N E S
Discoveries, Advances & Debates in Science and the World
INSIDE
EARTH WATCH
Geologists’ tech attack
on North America.
ENVIRONMENT
I, SOLDIER Sizing up the
NANO-POLLUTION:
military’s new robotic
uniform.
THE TITANIC Once a ship-
wreck, now a scientific
NO TINY ISSUE?
treasure trove.
FUTURE NEWS Obesity in
the year 2024.
Scientists say ultrasmall man-made particles are toxic to animals. What about us?
In 1941, researchers at Johns
Hopkins Hospital made an
unsettling discovery: Inhaled
nanoscopic particles could
travel into the brain. When
chimps and rhesus monkeys
breathed air laden with
poliovirus cells, some of the
particles followed the path
normally reserved for smell
signals, thwarting the protec-
tive blood-brain barrier.
Polio has since been con-
F R O M T O P : K E N N E T H E WA R D / B I O G R A F X / P H O T O R E S E A R C H E R S ; C O U R T E S Y E VA O B E R D Ö R S T E R
0.5 nanometers
GOOD FOR INDUSTRY. . .
TICKER /// 04.13.04 MARS ROVERS REBOOT NASA OUTFITS SPIRIT AND OPPORTUNITY WITH SPECIAL SOFTWARE PATCHES THAT SHOULD KEEP THE TWINS RUNNING FOR
tained, but lifeless specks the
same size or smaller will be
churned out by the ton in
coming years as nanotechnol-
ogy becomes an industrial
mainstay. Though the nano
boom will likely yield count-
less commercial benefits—
ultraprecise drug delivery
systems, improved supercon-
ductors—it could also give
way to an insidious form of
air pollution. Mass produc-
FISHING FOR ANSWERS
New synthetic materials like
these dome-shaped carbon
molecules measure less than
one billionth of a meter in
diameter. The tiny particles
may be small enough to
lodge inside the brain tissue
of largemouth bass, accord-
ing to new research from tox-
icologist Eva Oberdörster,
who says her results warrant
further investigation.
. . . BAD FOR BASS?
JULY
2OO4
tion will likely bring environ-
mental exposure, and experts
are now examining the
potential for toxic nanoparti-
cles (objects typically smaller
than one billionth of a meter)
to end up inside plants, ani-
mals or people.
The potential impact of
nanoparticles on marine life
concerns Southern Methodist
University toxicologist Eva
Oberdörster, who recently
completed a study involving
captive large-mouth bass.
Oberdörster exposed the fish
to various concentrations of a
dome-shaped molecule called
Carbon-60. After two days,
signs of an immune response
to the invaders were found
inside the fishes’ livers. Evi-
dence suggests the molecules
may have even breached the
cells protecting the brain and
central nervous system.
Carbon-60 is part of a fam-
ily of precision-engineered
nanoparticles called fuller-
enes, named after architect
R. Buckminster Fuller, famous
for his geodesic domes. The
structure of the molecules
and their resistance to heat,
among other properties, make
them suitable for use in fuel
cells, high-temperature lubri-
>
P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4 31
 HEADLINES

H GEOLOGY

cants and other products that

SEISMIC STAKEOUT
Tech-savvy researchers gear up to revolutionize earth science.
could wind up in landfills, says
nanochemist Vicki Colvin, director To anyone studying how continents evolve, North America offers the ultimate
of the Center for Biological and tectonic smorgasbord. From the rifting in the Basin and Range to the fault
Environmental Nanotechnology at zones along the Pacific coast, nearly every major geological process is in
Rice University, where fullerenes progress in the western United States alone. Until now, scientists have strug-
were first discovered. gled to assemble the big picture from patchy details, chasing old earthquakes
But not all fullerenes are toxic, like detectives on a cold case and drawing deep conclusions (literally) from
Colvin points out. The type used surface data.
in the fish study lacked the pro- Technology has finally caught up with geology, however, and over the next
tective coating often applied to five years researchers will deploy EarthScope, a multidisciplinary effort to
fullerenes to render them non- understand the forces that shape and shake the world’s land masses. Partially
toxic to living tissue. “Fullerenes funded by a $200 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the
have extremely stable surface project will generate detailed geophysical models using two vast new sensor
coatings,” she says. More than networks: “Bigfoot” will take seismic readings at thousands of locations
nationwide while the second, a swath of GPS units and strainmeters blanket-

[
“MAYBE MOST NANOPARTICLES ing the West, will measure rates of deformation. In addition, a 2.5-mile bore-
ARE HARMLESS. OF COURSE, WE hole already being drilled deep into the San Andreas fault will put key instru-
DON’T KNOW THAT,” SAYS TOXI- ments right where earthquakes begin. “It’s the largest undertaking in the
COLOGIST GÜNTER OBERDÖRSTER.
“WE NEED TO FIND OUT.” history of solid earth geoscience,” says EarthScope director Gregory van der
Vink, who expects the endeavor’s sweeping data collection to revolutionize the
merely shellacking the sphere, the field. “Geologic time will be days, not millennia.”—JOSHUA TOMPKINS
coating process chemically bonds
the surface material to the carbon.
Colvin adds that fullerene pollu-
tion will likely pale next to the
Drill site
nanoscopic airborne pollution
already in existence, from the car-
bon particles in car exhaust to the
manganese oxide in welding San Andreas fault
fumes. “We’re exposed to multi-
ton quantities of incidentally cre-
ated nanoparticles,” Colvin says.
Oberdörster’s father, Günter
Oberdörster, director of the Uni-
versity of Rochester’s EPA-funded
Particulate Matter Center, has
FAULT ZONE OBSERVATORY Future borehole:
probed the toxicity of those inad- 31 cm wide and
vertent particles for years. His 4 km long
Halfway between San
most recent research project Francisco and Los Angeles,
shows that rats, like monkeys, researchers are drilling a
may be subject to contamination boomerang-shaped shaft
by inhaled ultrafine particles via across California’s notorious
the olfactory tract, a pathway also San Andreas fault, eventually
found in humans. aiming for a depth of four Recent
Günter Oberdörster cautions kilometers. Reinforced with earthquakes
against alarm, too: Nanoparticle cement, equipped with an
toxicity is not a given. “Surface array of sensors and designed
for 20 years of monitoring,
chemistry is very important,”
the borehole will return the
STEPHEN ROUNTREE

he says. “Most of the engineered first-ever samples from the

nanoparticles may be harmless. actual gouge—the rock being Side tunnels
Of course, we don’t know that. We pulverized inside the fault.
need to find out.”—JOSHUA TOMPKINS

ANOTHER FIVE MONTHS /// 04.14.04 SICK AT SEA CORNELL UNIVERSITY RESEARCHERS PRESENT OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE THAT THE WORLD’S MARINE LIFE IS CONTRACTING A

32 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
 EARTH IN 3-D
EarthScope scientists hope to secure funding
for a satellite employing Interferometric Syn-
thetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), a technology
already in use on several European satellites,
to perform meticulous 3-D mapping of large
areas. Accurate to the millimeter and repeated
once every few days, the scans would track
continental surface displacements and aug-
ment the findings of EarthScope’s land-based
strainmeters and GPS devices.
ROAMING “BIGFOOT”
To gather the detailed nationwide seismic data
that experts have long sought, 400 seismome-
ters will be installed across the western United
States during the next five years, and then
incrementally moved eastward to new sites
every 18 months until data from 2,000 loca-
tions have been obtained. The goal for the
array, nicknamed Bigfoot, is to obtain coast-
to-coast readings at intervals of 70 kilometers.

GPS antenna

Backup
batteries and
Solar panel
electronics
Vault-encased Station brace
INSIDER VIEW OF PLATE TECTONICS broadband (10–15 m depth)
seismometer Level bedrock
A network of 175 strainmeters, which gauge Internet
the subtle compression and expansion of satellite
underground rock formations, will combine
with 775 precision GPS receivers to track the
maelstrom of bending and buckling that
slowly roils North America from the Rockies
to the Pacific. One hundred of the GPS units
will remain portable for targeting localized
areas of interest.

PLATE BOUNDARY
OBSERVATORY
PORTABLE SEISMIC SITE LOCATION FOR
KEY LEGEND: OBSERVATORY FUTURE SEISMIC
OBSERVATORY SITES OBSERVATORY
Permanent
Inactive
Active

GREATER VARIETY OF DISEASES /// 04.21.04 MONEY TALKS ENGINEERS AT THE CALIFORNIA-BASED TECHNOLOGY COMPANY BEEPCARD ANNOUNCE THAT THEY HAVE DESIGNED >
P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4 33
 HEADLINES

H
Q&A: EUROS ON THE MOON
BERNARD FOING, CHIEF SCIEN-
TIST, EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY

PERSPECTIVE

FREAKISH SPEED, BY THE NUMBERS

NASA’s X-43A scramjet hits Mach 7 and won’t stop there.
5,000 MPH Approximate top speed clocked by the X-43A hypersonic
scramjet aircraft on March 27 POPSCI: Tell us about
720 MPH Relative speed of sound Europe’s lunar ambitions.
11 SECONDS Approximate duration of the X-43A’s powered flight BERNARD FOING: Our
15 MILES Distance traveled first priority is SMART-1,
2 HOURS Estimated flight time from New York to Hong Kong the first-ever European
traveling 5,000 mph Moon probe, which we
1 MILLISECOND Time the X-43A engine takes to generate thrust expect to reach lunar
orbit by November. The
2,200 MPH Previous record for a jet aircraft
probe will help us test
1,350 MPH Average cruising speed of Concorde jet
miniaturized instruments
4,000°–4,500°F Temperature inside a scramjet engine
and a new deep space
2,500°–2,700°F Melting point of steel
ion propulsion engine
6,750 MPH Anticipated speed of NASA’s third and final X-43A that is 10 times more
hypersonic aircraft, scheduled to fly this fall
efficient than classic
chemical propulsion.
SOURCE: NASA
And after SMART-1?

C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P : C O U R T E S Y E U R O P E A N S PA C E A G E N C Y; C O U R T E S Y B E N & J E R R Y ’ S ; C O R B I S ; C O U R T E S Y M AT T H E W P O E S E
One possibility would be
a rover mission in 2012
to prospect for ice. The
next phase is the deploy-
ment of an international
robotic village, to create
a permanent infrastruc-
ture with life-support
systems and habitats.
We’re looking at a crew
BEN & JERRY SOUND WAVES ECO FRIDGE of ten staying for 100-
day rotations.
President Bush has been
GREEN INNOVATION
criticized by some for
CHILLING WITH SOUND WAVES, NOT FREON pursuing the go-it-alone
approach to space
An eco-hip acoustic fridge debuts. But is anyone listening?
exploration. Agree?
For the sake of the scoop, Ben & Jerry’s managed to do what no refrigerator Even if the United States
manufacturer has: jolt into development the world’s most eco-friendly ice-cream has dominating techno-
freezer. Unveiled for Earth Day 2004 at a Manhattan scoop shop, the chiller logy and budgets for
relies not on greenhouse gases but on sound waves to keep the precious stuff space exploration, inter-
cold. Research on thermoacoustic refrigeration limped along for 20 years or so national cooperation can
until the ice cream duo forked over $600,000 to a Penn State team, which be fruitful for all.
made the prototype in two years. The freezer is an ordinary deli cabinet piped Which country do you
to a 14-inch-high canister with soundproof stainless steel walls. A loudspeaker think will put the first
pumps sound waves (at 190 decibels, louder than a rocket launch) into the person on the Moon in
canister, expanding and contracting helium gas inside. The pressure changes the new millennium?
chill the icebox as efficiently as a conventional freezer. Cool? Sure. But even I expect the next lunar
with investors now vying to make the technology commercially viable, the long- crew will be international.
PHOTO CREDIT TK

standing reign of cheap, functional ozone-polluting fridges won’t be trumped And I should hope it will
anytime soon. “Historically, environmental friendliness doesn’t sell,” says Penn include a European.
State acoustician Matt Poese. But don’t tell that to Ben & Jerry’s. The company —INTERVIEW BY JAMES VLAHOS
will test and promote the rig at its Vermont tour facility this summer.—LAURA ALLEN

A CREDIT CARD THAT AUTHENTICATES TRANSACTIONS THROUGH A VOICE-RECOGNITION CHIP /// 04.29.04 CITY OF TOXIC ANGELS THE AMERICAN LUNG ASSOCIATION’S 2004 STATE >
36 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
 HEADLINES
H ABUGGYCAVITYFIX
RADICAL DENTISTRY
Can genetically engineered bacteria cure tooth decay?
Kids get cavities. Dentists fill
them. It’s a fairly old arrange-
ment, but it may soon come to
an end if cavities go the way of
smallpox. Jeffrey Hillman’s com-
pany, Oragenics, has patented a
simple swab of bacteria that when
wiped across a set of teeth will
(allegedly) grant a lifetime of pro-
tection from tooth decay. By this
fall, Hillman, a dental researcher
at the University of Florida, will
begin testing the new strain on
15 to 30 volunteers.
Normally, bacteria called Strep-
tococcus mutans grow on human
teeth and convert sugar into lactic
COURTESY JEFF HILLMAN
acid, which rots enamel. Hillman
engineered a strain of S. mutans
that doesn’t produce lactic acid;
instead, it carries an antibiotic
that helps it displace the indige-
nous cavity-inducing strain. “The
dentist will apply our bacteria and
then tell the patient to go home
and eat sugar,” Hillman says. As
luck would have it, Tootsie Rolls,
lollipops, et al. help to colonize
the new strain, but instead of cre-
ating a cavity the sugar helps
form a tooth security guard, thus
revolutionizing the practice of
modern dentistry. “I think that’s
a fair way to put it,” says Kenneth
Burrell, senior director of the
American Dental Association
Council on Scientific Affairs. But
there could be a hitch with the
FDA: Hillman is not sure whether
patients can transfer the new
strain to others with, say, just a
kiss. Hillman is confident there
[A] WITHOUT THERAPY
[B] WITH THERAPY
THREE OUT OF FOUR RATS AGREE
“IF THERE WAS A MARKET FOR PRE-
VENTING CAVITIES IN RATS, I’D BE
A MILLIONAIRE,” HILLMAN SAYS.
(A) RAT TEETH COLONIZED WITH
A STRAIN OF S. MUTANS, ALSO
NATIVE TO HUMAN TEETH. (B) RAT
TEETH WITH HILLMAN’S NONLACTIC
ACID PRODUCING STRAIN. THE
RESULTS ARE OBVIOUS: ONE RAT
NEEDS MAJOR DENTAL WORK.
will be no “horizontal transmis-
sion,” but just to be sure, the
spouses of Phase I testers will be
monitored. If the strain stays put,
it could go commercial within
five to six years.—MICHAEL ROSENWALD
>
 HEADLINES

H
THE POPSCI OPINION POLL
BASED ON 5,200 RESPONSES POSTED
TO POPSCI.COM FROM 4/7 TO 5/7

NEXT-GEN MILITARY MAN LAST MONTH

WE ASKED:
WEARABLE MACHINES
A gas-powered robotic uniform inches closer to the battlefield.
SHOULD THE
UNITED STATES
CONTINUE TO
The military garb designed by mechanical engineer Homayoon Kaze- INVEST IN A
rooni at the University of California, Berkeley, is anything but standard NATIONAL
issue. Kazerooni’s 90-pound battlesuit, dubbed BLEEX for Berkeley
Lower Extremity Exoskeleton, consists of a pair of robotic legs and
MISSILE
backpack-like frame. Wearing the prototype, a soldier can haul up to 75 SHIELD?
Cell drops

extra pounds with little effort. BLEEX is still a far cry from the super-
human combat gear envisioned by the Defense Advanced Research [NO]

41
Projects Agency, which is funding the research. But BLEEX 2, due out
in late 2005, should be faster, lighter and more limber.—TREVOR THIEME

1POWER SOURCE
BLEEX runs on gasoline,
which is housed in a small
%
one-gallon tank in the
backpack. It provides two
hours of both hydraulic
[YES]

59
1
power for locomotion and
electric power for sensors
and computer parts. Gas
sound dicey? Kazerooni
says it’s the only fuel with
sufficient power density.
%

2 MAN IN THE SUIT

“There is no joystick,
keyboard or steering
2
wheel,” says Kazerooni.
“The pilot becomes part of
the exoskeleton.” Just step
in and start walking—no
training required. Not yet
suitable for dodging bul-
lets, BLEEX has a speed of 3 4
4 BODY LAN

B L E E X C O U R T E S Y U C B E R K E L E Y; I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y G A R R Y M A R S H A L L
just two steps per second. More than 40
sensors are spaced THIS MONTH’S
throughout BLEEX’s
OPINION POLL:
3 CUSTOM FIT
Using human gait
analysis, Kazerooni
robotic legs to gauge
the direction in which A REVAMPED
designed the exoskeleton the legs are being SPACE
to possess the same mass pushed. Data is gath- SHUTTLE IS
ered by a nearby
distribution and range of
computer module SLATED TO
motion as its human pilot.
Now limited to a slow and relayed through LAUNCH NEXT
march, BLEEX should be a “body LAN” to a MARCH. DO
central processing
squatting and climbing
center in the back-
YOU HAVE
stairs within two years.
pack. A control algo- FAITH IN THE
rithm then calculates MISSION?
how the pilot is mov-
ing, and commands WHAT DO YOU THINK?
the leg actuators to POPSCI.COM
follow in stride.

OF THE AIR REPORT RANKS LOS ANGELES AS THE AMERICAN CITY WITH THE WORST AIR QUALITY /// 06.10.04 CELLULAR ONE THE FIRST-EVER SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY CONFERENCE >
40 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
 SHRINKAGE DEPT.
THE MICRO BARBER
Chemist turned stylist etches 3-D text onto human hair.
Yes, that’s the word—“Hair”—
written delightfully, absurdly,
on a human hair. This whimsical
3-D microsculpture comes from
the head of John Fourkas, a
chemist at Boston College. The
letters look as imposing as the
“Hollywood” sign under an elec-
C O U R T E S Y C H R I S T O P H E R N . L A F R AT TA
tron microscope, but they’re only
10 microns tall—about 1/10 the
width of the hair. Fourkas care-
fully sculpted each letter from
thousands of tiny baked “bricks”
of Plexiglas, some as small as 120
nanometers in width.
To make his sculpture, Fourkas
bathed the hair in a liquid Plexi-
glas resin, then hardened the
resin with infrared laser light,
“cooking it—sort of like you cook
an egg white and it hardens,” says
Fourkas. By moving the laser
around point by point, he can
build any shape he likes. When
he’s done, he washes away the
remaining liquid.
Fourkas envisions making
molds with his technique so that
one could stamp out thousands of
such tiny structures at a time. But
more than just an artsy parlor
trick, this technology has the
potential to yield supersmall 3-D
electronic devices, such as induc-
tor coils for cellphones. In a few
years, Fourkas would like to etch
100 microns
FINE PRINT: JOHN FOURKAS USED
AN ULTRAFAST INFRARED LASER TO
ETCH TINY LETTERS ONTO THE SUR-
FACE OF A SINGLE STRAND OF HAIR.
a car’s VIN number into every
chip of its paint, or perhaps tag
explosive chemicals with serial
numbers. “I don't think what we
did on the hair was particularly
useful, but it shows that you can
build 3-D microstructures on
fragile materials without destroy-
ing them.”—WILLIAM SPEED WEED
 HEADLINES

H MARINE ARCHAEOLOGY

WHAT’S EATING THE TITANIC ?

The world’s most famous sunken wreck becomes a boon for deep-sea microbiologists.
Oceanographer Robert Ballard is returning to the Titanic, but it’s not the same sunken ship he found in 1985.
The deep ocean has been steadily dismantling the once-great cruise liner, and scientists say the process is
unlike any they’ve ever seen. “Even if we could stop it, I wouldn’t,” says forensic archaeologist Charles Pelle-
grino. “The Titanic is becoming something that belongs to biology.”
The ship has proved an incredible draw for deep-sea life—Pellegrino says it’s like “a giant culture medium
that fell out of heaven.” After the Titanic plunged 2.5 miles beneath the Atlantic Ocean in 1912, local mol-
lusks quickly began devouring any organic material, including most of the soft woods, as bacteria steadily
consumed the ship’s steel. Originating in the seabed and upstream hydrothermal vents, the bacteria have
burrowed into cracks, consuming iron (400+ pounds a day) and excreting rust to form so-called rusticles—
icicle-like housings that drape from the steel sections of the wreck. The feasting is so aggressive, scientist
Roy Cullimore of Droycon Bioconcepts estimates 50 percent of the Titanic’s steel will have been recycled
back into the ocean within 200 years. Not to be outdone by rusticles, other critters (including tourists) are
steadily chomping away at the ship too. Here, your guide to the wreck’s undoing.—GREGORY MONE

THE CULPRIT

Mollusks
+ THE SITUATION
Ejected from the
seabed when the
+ DESTRUCTIVE HABITS +
Teredo worms
munched on softer
STATE OF AFFAIRS
By the time scientists
arrived to survey the
+ END IN SIGHT?
After cleaning their
plates, the Teredo
and micro- Titanic first struck woods, while microor- ship, only the hard
organisms bottom, they set to ganisms ate some woods, such as worms moved on—
the worst is done.
+ + + +
work immediately. clothes and textiles. mahogany, remained.

Floating downstream Thriving on the sulfur Bacteria have sucked The bacterial colonies
from hydrothermal in steel, bacteria also over 1,000 tons of are blooming, and
Bacteria vents in spore form, extract iron for hous- iron from the ship—
bacteria found a new ing and spew out the once-flat steel plates half of the steel could
be gone by 2204.
+ + + +
Eden in the Titanic. excess. are now rippled.

The Titanic settled in a Salt corrosion eats Water pressure inten- Some suggest sal-
harsh environment, away at the hull while sified as the ship sank, vaging specific parts
The 2.5 miles below gravel from icebergs imploding sections of
elements icebergs passing overhead rains down the stern. Salt corro- of the Titanic to save
from inevitable decay.
+ + + +
overhead. on the ship. sion works slower.

Lured by legend, Submersibles descend Careless piloting in NOAA has rules for
Tourists, profit and the popu- to the site using close quarters could proper behavior, but
pirates, larity of Titanic TV weights and, upon damage the fragile
explorers specials, people keep ascent, can damage hull, as did a minor lacks the authority to

+ + + +
going back. the hull or deck. accident in the ’90s. enforce them.

PREDICTION
TOP: MONIKA AICHELE; BOTTOM: JOE MORSE

HEADLINE FROM THE FUTURE BY DAVID E. CUMMINGS

2024 OBESITY CURED, FOR THE RICH
Ten thousand years ago, before the rise of deep-fried cheese sticks, starvation, not glut-
tony, was a leading cause of premature death. Today, our food supply has changed:
Famine is rare in most nations, but our eat-it-while-it-lasts genetic instincts remain the
same. The result: an epidemic of spare tires and saddlebags leads to more ill health
worldwide than any other cause. While new anti-fat drugs help the affluent Western
world slim down, obesity takes root in developing nations, where junk food is
omnipresent and affordable, but the drugs to resist it are not.—AS TOLD TO AARON CLARK
Dr. David E. Cummings is an obesity specialist and an associate professor of medicine at the University of Washington and Seattle VA Medical Center.

KICKS OFF AT MIT /// 07.01.04 EXPLOSIVE FUN! THE TRIPOLI ROCKETRY ASSOCIATION BEGINS ITS WEEK-LONG HIGH-POWERED ROCKETRY FESTIVAL IN GENESEO, NEW YORK

42 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
 A PROJECT INSPIRED BY WWW.CARE.ORG

For the 2004 POPULAR SCIENCE invitational design competition,

we chose the theme of “technological CARE packages for the 21st century.” What good, we asked,
might emerging technology do for global communities in need? We put the problem before inter-
nationally renowned designers, architects and thinkers. The results surprised and delighted us.
Whales, it seems, need noise-cancellation devices. Office chairs should morph, like Transformer
toys, into survival gear. Bombed-out villages need utility centers powered by wood or the turn of
a bicycle wheel. And cities need to gaze at newborn stars. By Steven Henry Madoff

THE 2004
POPSCI
DESIGN
COMPETITION

TheJury:
Janet Abrams Cameron Sinclair Jeff Speck Rodney Brooks Chee Pearlman

Abrams is a design writer Architect Sinclair is the Former city planner Brooks heads up the MIT Design Challenge director
and the director of the founder of the nonprofit Speck is the director of Computer Science and AI Pearlman heads Chee
Design Institute at the organization Architecture design for the National Lab, and is chairman of Company, a NYC-based
University of Minnesota. for Humanity. Endowment for the Arts. iRobot Corporation. design consultancy.

THE TECHNICAL ADVISERS: BRIAN BINGHAM, WOODS HOLE; DAVE CADOGAN, R&D MANAGER, ILC DOVER; DON EYLES, ENGINEER, DRAPER LABS; JAMIE GIL, ENGINEER,
ILC DOVER; DARIO GOUSSAL, CTO, TEL@BURO; JOE HERNANDEZ, CEO, INNOVATIVE BIOSENSORS; CHUCK HOBERMAN, FOUNDER, HOBERMAN DESIGNS; INSITU
GROUP; JOHN LEONARD, MIT; NICK MAKRIS, MIT; TOD RIEDEL, CO-FOUNDER, MILLENNIAL NET; RUSSELL SOUTHWOOD, CEO, BALANCING ACT; AARON THODE, UCSD;
SAM TOLKOFF, DIRECTOR (MANUFACTURE), BLUEFIN ROBOTICS; JUAN VITALI, ENGINEER, GEORGIA TECH.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN B. CARNETT P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4 45

 DESIGN CHALLENGE 2004
GRAND
PRIZE

CARE CUBE

WHEN WE DECIDED TO BUILD A

design competition around the

SWISS ARMY KNIFE FOR

idea of a 21st-century CARE
package, the idea was to move
well beyond the original 1945
template. Those simple boxes of
Spam, lard, cornmeal, powdered
A VILLAGE
CREATORS: ALEXANDER ROSE
milk and other American sta- AND DANNY HILLIS
ples saved the lives of many COMMUNITY: VILLAGES LACKING KEY INFRASTRUCTURE
starving Europeans after World PROJECT: PORTABLE COMMUNICATIONS, WATER PURIFICATION AND
War II. But soon after 1945, ENERGY STATION
CARE was air-dropping tools, In designing their “systematic infrastructure collapse syndrome CARE package,” Alexander
blankets and medicine as well. Rose and Danny Hillis considered that disaster inevitably leads to a need for three things:
Over the decades the concept of clean water, communications and power. Rose and Hillis’s aircraft-deployable station
international relief evolved to comes equipped with a water-purification unit, a computer and PDA-like networked com-
include transfer of expertise munication devices, and a Stirling engine and power generator. An induction hose sucks in
river water for purification. Users can borrow PDAs, which ping messages to one another
and technology and the encour-
and, when close enough to home base, into cyberspace. To make electricity, users either hop
agement of self-help in commu- onto a stationary bike and pedal, hamster-style, or they can burn wood, rice husks or other
nities in need. combustibles. Weather permitting, the station’s Stirling engine can also run on solar power.
The parameters for those
invited to participate in our
competition were left wide
open: We asked the entrants to
identify a community, define a
need (it could be “any urgent,
definable need: social, political,
cultural, domestic or interna- Retractable
Configurable
tional”) and then imagine a storage area sink
technological fix. The technol-
ogy itself should be extant or
within reasonable hailing
distance, and a matchmaking
service was offered: We would
pair entrants with experts in sci-
entific or technological fields
Induction hose
related to their concept.
When the folders, discs and Handheld
e-mail attachments arrived at communications
device
our offices early this spring, the
projects revealed in roughly
equal measures the influence of
CARE, the nightly news, Flo-
rence Nightingale and the 101st
Communications
Airborne Division. The judges area
encountered fleets of autono-
mous underwater vehicles to Flywheel
Lower
save sonar-assaulted whales; combustion
survivalist office chairs; deploy- box
able sweet-water systems; and a
Human - Inside
powered
bicycle
FOR INFORMATION ABOUT interface
CARE International and its foreign
aid missions, go to www.care.org.
Bicycle
Drive belt
Battery

46 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4 ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAMESON SIMPSON

 Antenna

Heat tube
heat tube

Adjustable
passive
solar
reflectors

Cube, landed
6 feet
and opened

P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4 47
2ND
PRIZE
URBAN
LODESTAR
BIRTH OF A NEW
CITY STAR

CREATORS: JULIAN LAVERDIERE AND

PAUL MYODA
COMMUNITY: CITIES AFFLICTED BY
LIGHT POLLUTION
PROJECT: SYNTHETIC STAR

The designers of the magnificent Tribute in Light

memorial for the World Trade Center turned
their attention to urban night blindness: the
blankness of the city skies. Urban Lodestar is a
light-emitting five-pointed star designed to float
serenely above a city center and pulse gently at
the same rate as a resting heart to calm the
city folk below. Lodestar hovers with the
aid of helium-filled polymer balloons; propellant
tanks and directional boosters
attached to a GPS-equipped
positioning system keep it
from going AWOL. During the
day, photovoltaic film panels
harness energy from the Sun
and store it in batteries; at
night, electroluminescent strips
in the shape of a star glow
with that stored energy.
Graphite composite struts pro-
PHOTO CREDIT TK

vide stability, and a battery-

powered xenon strobe creates
the pulsing effect. Intermittent green flashes
differentiate the Urban Lodestar from natural ce-
lestial bodies.
 DESIGN CHALLENGE 2004
HONOR-
ABLE
savagely satirical project called MENTION
PAL of the USA, for People SOTERIA
About to be Liberated by the CHAIR
United States of America, in
which the community receives a
“smart bomb” ordnance of iPods,

HAVE CHAIR, MIGHT

hot dogs and other Americana.
Some entries were dead serious,
some a mere provocation and
some a techno-poetic gloss on
the predicament of western SURVIVE
communities lost in their own
C O U R T E S Y O F J U L I A N L AV E R D I E R E A N D PA U L M Y O D A ; B A C K G R O U N D P H O T O G R A P H : C O U R T E S Y N A S A ; I N S E T S : C O U R T E S Y R O S E E T H E R I D G E ; R I G H T: C O U R T E S Y O F E C C O D E S I G N

machine-made fog.
Taken together, the CARE
packages mirror their creators’
first-world sense of technological
might: Membership has its priv-
ileges. Who else can afford to
consider electroactive polymers,
Technogel, woven-fabric electro-
luminescent displays and 3-D
scanners as aid? Yes, attention
was paid to basic needs—for
purified water, for example—but
it seems humanity also requires
sleeker portable communica-
tions devices, more and better
network access, more terminals
and displays, and all the power
sources to feed them, from solar
to steam to hypothetically effi-
cient Stirling engines.
The judges were experts
on design, technology and the
blurry line between fancy and
feasibility. They met around a
table at the magazine’s headquar-
ters to evaluate the entries. Epi-
thets shot back and forth, from
“technoporn” to “fantasy pro-
jections” to “commercial home
run.” There were plenty of practi-
cal questions: “Why do you need
connectivity in the same box
with water purification?” “Does
it allow people to create an econ-
omy or is it going to be a bur-
den?” “What happens when this
technology breaks down?” What
rumbled under the hood of the CREATORS: ECCO DESIGN
proceedings was not so much the COMMUNITY: NERVOUS HIGH-RISE OFFICE WORKERS
problems of specific technolo- PROJECT: EMERGENCY GEAR CHAIR
gies, it was a more philosophical In a time of terrorism the humble office worker feels exposed, a reserve soldier in a global
issue: In the real world, would war. Ecco’s designers equipped their simple-looking office chair with a fireproof hooded vest,
these technologies, these silicon first-aid supplies, rope and sharp-edged tools. Armrests double as crowbars or shovel han-
CARE packages, be real gifts or dles, and the chair back serves as a shovel. The hard-topped hooded vest sports a gas
simply more levers of influence mask, battery, embedded LED lamp, heartbeat sensor that transmits the victim’s location, and
FM radio for receiving safety instructions. If the building falls on top of you, just put on the
in the balance of power? vest, dismantle your chair, and try to dig your way out of the rubble.

P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4 49
HONOR-
ABLE
MENTION
RECYCLED
COM-TECH
21ST-CENTURY
PHONE BOOTH
CREATORS: ZAGO ARCHITECTURE
COMMUNITY: PEOPLE WITHOUT
COMPUTERS AND TELEPHONES
PROJECT: RECYCLED COMMUNITY
Solar panels TELECOM HUB

Nothing better represents the technology

divide than the silicon junkyards in devel-
oping countries such as China where
wealthy nations send their still-functional
but outmoded computers, cellphones and
other discards. People who live in these
areas might find such equipment useful, if
it could be combined and reconstituted in
helpful ways; instead it moulders, dead
and disconnected, leaking toxins such as
lead, mercury and cadmium. Zago Archi-
tecture devised a deployable communica-
tions center to connect remote communities
with the rest of the world. These centers
would be built from salvaged computer
and electronics components and would in-
clude a computer, a satellite modem, so-
lar panels and a satellite telephone. Such a
center would enable far-flung families to
communicate, students to supplement their
Shipping container studies, and heath-care workers to access
and folding canopy up-to-date medical information.

Monitor

CPU

Satellite modem

Printer

Keyboard
PHOTO CREDIT TK

00 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
 DESIGN CHALLENGE 2004
FINALIST
TECH TO THE RESCUE
War, the collapse of infrastruc- PACKAGING
ture and the necessity of port- THE PACKAGE
able, rapidly deployable tech-
nologies were givens assumed
by most of our Design Chal-

EXPANDABLE MEDIUM IS
lenge entrants, and none more
clearly than Alexander Rose
and Danny Hillis in their Swiss
Army Knife of a package, which
took the grand prize. Its nick- THE MESSAGE
CREATORS: IDEO DESIGN
name: the “CARE cube.” COMMUNITY: INTERNATIONAL AID WORKERS
“We were doing this post- PROJECT: EXPANDABLE, NETWORKED CONTAINER
9/11, and after the blackout that
hit the eastern seaboard last IDEO designers reasoned that to send a smarter CARE package, you need a smarter box,
one that can wirelessly signal its location and expand incrementally while protecting its con-
August,” says Rose, who is exec-
tents at any stage. Voilà, IDEO’s “expandable CARE package.” A lightweight, collapsible
utive director of San Francisco’s metal frame gives structural support, and an aerogel-filled inner bag protects the con-
Long Now Foundation, which tents and keeps them at constant temperature. To fill the package, simply expand the frame,
studies time and culture in up to place the goods inside the bag, zip it closed; then, using the integrated vacuum pump, evac-
10,000-year chunks. “It struck us uate air from the bag so it conforms to its contents, preventing them from rattling around
during transport. Along the aid chain, the container can be expanded or contracted if re-
that loss of infrastructure is the
quired. A readdressable, wireless digital display tag shows handling instructions, transit ad-
basis of ‘community in need,’ dresses, bar codes, icons, multi-language text and more. The container’s contents and
and this comes down to three destination can be monitored using a PDA or laptop in the field.
things: clean water, communica-
tions and power.”
They wanted to squeeze solu-
tions to these three huge needs
into a box six feet square, weigh-
ing maybe a ton. During the
three months they worked on
the project, Rose went on sab-
batical to Borneo, Laos, Cambo-
dia, Vietnam, the Philippines
and Thailand, along the way
exchanging e-mails with Hillis, a
computer scientist who has built
two prototypes of 10,000-year
C O U R T E S Y O F Z A G O A R C H I T E C T U R E ; R I G H T: C O U R T E S Y O F I D E O C O R P O R AT I O N

clocks for the Long Now Foun-

dation. The duo pictured a box
stocked with solar-powered cell-
phone-PDAs that keep pinging
other units until their users’
messages are picked up or make
their way to the Internet. The
box would feature configurable
LCD screens and software-
driven keyboards that could
shift easily between the alpha-
bets of different languages,
along with retractable sinks and
water-purification filters. A Stir-
ling engine, fueled by solar
reflectors or a combustion box,
would store energy. If either of
these power sources failed, a sta-
tionary bicycle could generate
electricity and give the user an
aerobic workout in the bargain.

P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4 00
 DESIGN CHALLENGE 2004
FINALIST
“The surprise for me,” Rose
recalls, “was how many commu-
nities where I was traveling POWER PLANT
could use this. No place had
water, power and communica-
tion at the same time. But what

BONSAI-SCALE ENERGY
was also interesting was how
quickly new technologies were
picked up. The key is service-
ability. If you can’t maintain the
technologies, they get junked as LESSON
CREATORS: ANTENNA DESIGN
fast as they arrive.” COMMUNITY: URBAN DWELLERS WITH GREEN LEANINGS
The powerful impact of obso- PROJECT: TINY, NATURAL, INDIVIDUALIZED POWER GENERATOR
lescence was on the mind of
another winner, Andrew Zago, One judge likened this concept to “Zen poetry.” Antenna Design’s project is a wee les-
son for power-hogging Westerners in the cycle of global energy. The “power plant”
whose firm’s Self-Contained combines genetic engineering and fuel cell technology into a windowsill power station.
Community Telecenter took an In a small terrarium, the user nurtures a tree that has been genetically engineered for rapid
honorable mention. “Toxic colo- growth, compact size and high leaf density. After several weeks, the nurturer turns con-
nialism” is the phrase that Zago sumer, chopping the tree into small pieces, mixing the pieces with water and leaving them
uses to describe the problem of to decay for at least a month. Methane given off during decomposition is fed into a
fuel cell, which produces a modest amount of electricity, enough to run, say, an iPod. The
global techno-dumping. Three
designers say the concept illustrates the notion that humans must care for something in
hundred and twenty-five million order to profit from it, and that they must be patient to get the benefit.
computers will become obsolete
this year in the United States
alone, according to the U.S. Envi-
ronmental Protection Agency,
and huge numbers of them will
add to an Everest of e-junk that
is strewn through China, India
and Pakistan. One infamous site,
the town of Giuyu, China, is a
poster child for environmental
disaster, with its dumping
grounds, poisonous smoke and
river choked by stripped and
melted computer parts.
Zago, whose architecture firm
is based in New York City and
Detroit, imagined a second life
for some of this discarded stuff.
“Obsolete is a relative term,” he
says. “There’s no end to the peo-
ple who can use things that were
called ‘blazingly fast’ a few years
ago that we’ve thrown away.” His
reconstructed computers and
satellite modems would, at least
in a symbolic way, reduce the
dumping while offering a way
onto the grid for the technologi-
cally impoverished. The plan
also addresses another problem.
COURTESY OF ANTENNA DESIGN

If a CARE package simply serves

its need and is exhausted—the
way a container of food is—then
it’s a one-way transmission. It
never gets at the more profound
issue for broken communities:

52 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
 EDITORS’
CHOICE
MARINE
MAMMAL RX

“HEADPHONES” FOR
CREATORS: CENTER FOR DIGITAL ARTS &
WHALES
EXPERIMENTAL MEDIA, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
COMMUNITY: WHALES IN THE PATH OF NAVY SONAR TESTS
PROJECT: UNMANNED SUBS THAT PROTECT WHALES AGAINST THE
DETRIMENTAL EFFECTS OF SONAR

Many marine biologists believe that Navy sonar tests, which blast ultra-high-intensity
sound waves through the world’s oceans, are responsible for mass beachings of whales,
dolphins and porpoises in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere. They theorize that the high-
1. AUVS DEPLOYED energy sound waves interfere with whales’ sonar-based communication and navigation sys-
tems, causing them to become disoriented, and that the sonar blasts ultimately may deafen
or kill the whales. In this project—the only one of
the bunch that was designed to benefit a non-
human community—a school of “active noise
reduction autonomous underwater vehicles
(AUVs)” would be deployed by an unmanned
aircraft in an area where the Navy’s low-fre-
quency active sonar array is being tested (1).
One AUV (not shown) would float on the sur-
face, staying in contact with the drone and
transmitting information to the other AUVs via
an acoustical modem. Using that information,
the swarm of AUVs below would locate a pod
of whales and swim with them (2). When the
first low-frequency sonar signal is detected, the
AUVs would gather in a grid pattern between
the whales and the signal origin and orient
their undersides toward the incoming pulses.
Transducers on the bottom of each AUV would
emit a cancelation signal, blocking the whale
pod from the sonar waves (3). In addition to
buffering the whales from disruptive sonar, the
AUVs would collect information on whale be-
havior and broadcast it to Navy and marine
biologists. When the sonar test is finished, the
2. AUVS MONITOR THE POD AUVs would gather to be collected (4).
C O U R T E S Y O F I A N I N G R A M , B R E T B AT T E Y, A N D S H AW N B R I X E Y

3. BLOCKING NAVY SONAR 4. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4 53
 DESIGN CHALLENGE 2004
FINALIST
how to build or repair a self-sus- PERSONAL
taining social network. Zago’s OCCUPATION
package, along with Rose and KITS
Hillis’s, proposes a route into
the network. Their charitable
machines create skills and work,

OCCUPIED?
encouraging local microecon-
omies in an unstable world.

FORGING CONNECTIONS TO
THE COSMOS CREATORS: SPRINGTIME-USA
BE HAPPY!
Broken communities, threats and COMMUNITY: PEOPLE ABOUT TO BE LIBERATED BY THE U.S.A.
instability are hardly confined to PROJECT: 21ST-CENTURY PROPAGANDA DEPLOYMENT
the third world. Terrorism on a
planet criss-crossed by digital The horrendous situation in Iraq highlights the thorny challenge of liberation by a superpower:
and transportation networks The liberated don’t necessarily buy into the program. Designer Tucker Viemeister and his team
responded with a savagely satirical take: deployment of “very smart bombs” that would rain
gives the concept of the global down token instruments of cultural assimilation. In this concept, autonomous surveillance sys-
village a new, darker meaning. tems watch foreign news broadcasts for any foment of anti-American sentiment to identify
Ecco Design’s Soteria office chair, areas in need of intervention. The geographical coordinates are beamed to airplanes car-
another honorable mention win- rying the smart bombs; the bombs explode and shower, not explosives, but small, flower-
ner, suggests this in its compact, like packages containing assorted bits of Americana (bottom). Each package (below) includes
a propeller that folds up into a “PAL of the USA” baseball cap.
double-duty frame.
The Soteria’s designers, Eric
Chan and Valerie Trauttmans-
dorff, say that what they imagine
office workers sitting on is
“more than a post-9/11 chair. It’s
for any disaster, not just terror-
ism.” Sure. But the attack on the
World Trade Center looms in the CONTENTS:
mind’s eye. Named after the
Lottery ticket/terror alert combo
Greek goddess of rescue, the
Soteria is cleverly crammed with Hot dog laced with
a fire-resistant helmet and jacket, nanotracking device
a back that becomes a shovel, an iPod loaded with “God Bless
arm that can break glass, and America“
sensors that track location, your Football (American)
heartbeat, smoke and heat. “If Bazooka bubble gum
something bad happens, what do
you need?” Chan asks. “Three
things: something to protect
your skin, something to help you
breathe, something to get debris
out of your way.”
The importance of connectiv-
ity and the networks shaped
many of the winning projects; in
y

(CONTINUED ON PAGE 102)

FOR OTHER ENTRIES, including

Hani Rashid’s Portable Wireless
Domicile, which plugs the über-
consumer into datastreams any-
COURTESY OF SPRINGTIME-USA

where, anytime; Office of Mobile

Design’s Hydra21 project, which
features linked habitation pods float-
ing at sea, in which people can live
isolated from foes and conflict in a
state of self-exile; and student entries,
go to popsci.com/exclusive.

54 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
 FINALIST
DEPLOYABLE
PURIFICATION
SYSTEM

H2O: POTABLE, THEN

PORTABLE
CREATORS: SMITH-MILLER +
HAWKINSON ARCHITECTS
COMMUNITY: AREAS LACKING
CLEAN DRINKING WATER
PROJECT: DEPLOYABLE FRESH-
WATER SYSTEMS

This inflatable unit acts as a water-filtration

station, emergency information display
and makeshift shelter. It has four layers.
The outermost one is a film of organic
light-emitting diodes that displays emer- AIR DROP
gency information. The next layer—a lat-
tice composed of multi-layered PVC tubes, INITIAL SETUP
thermoplastic resin, carbon fibers and
bladders, is inflated during installation
and provides structural integrity. The third
layer is a reverse-osmosis filtration sys-
tem. Salty or contaminated ground or river
water is filtered and desalinized in this
C O U R T E S Y O F S M I T H - M I L L E R + H AW K I N S O N

layer. Drinkable water from this layer

empties into the final layer—the water
collection bladders. When the bladders
are full of clean water, they can be re-
moved and worn as a vest for easy porta-
bility (far right). The system also includes
2,000 water purification tablets and 500
filters adaptable to a variety of faucets.
AFTER INFLATION
Plastic bladders filled with
clean water hang from the
interior of the desaliniza-
tion unit. People in need
of drinking water simply
pluck a full one, fold it
over their shoulders, then
wear it home like a vest.

P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4 55
 w h
o
o s

h h

h
h
h
THE NEXT
GENERATION

h h
OF SUPERSONIC
AIRCRAFT—
FROM
$100 MILLION
BIZJETS TO
HIGH-SPEED
BOMBERS—
DEPENDS ON
ONE THING:
SOMEHOW
QUIETING THE
BONE-RATTLING,
BABY-WAKING,
CAR-ALARM-
TRIPPING
SONIC BOOM.
THE SOLUTION?
A BIT OF
AERODYNAMIC
VOODOO.
BY BILL SWEETMAN
ILLUSTRATIONS BY
JOHN MACNEILL

Supersonic business jets will use aerodynamic shaping to minimize sonic booms. Don’t be
alarmed by the lack of windows: Cameras will send exterior images to the cockpit and cabin.

56 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
 h
h h
h
P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4 57
 a erospace engineer David Graham and his three standard F-5E from Fallon Naval Air Station in Nevada.
colleagues had a deadline, and a little brown Plotkin had reckoned that the comparison between the two
tortoise was putting it in jeopardy. In a few booms would be fair if the two fighters were more than 30 sec-
hours, as the sun rose over the Mojave onds and less than two minutes apart.
Desert on an August morning last year, two The second boom arrived on the lake bed with its usual
Northrop Grumman F-5E fighter jets would authority—a thunderous double bang (one for the front of the
come racing over the horizon. Flying 30,000 feet above aircraft, another for the aft) audible for miles—and the data
Harper Dry Lake and traveling at 920 mph, the airplanes was complete. “I definitely heard a difference,” Graham recalls.
would be trailing long sonic booms—the distinctive aural sig- That might be debatable. The two shock waves of each boom
natures of supersonic flight that ordinarily make high-speed were less than 1/10 of a second apart, and the team had not
passages over land impossible. even tried to alter the second half of the boom from the mod-
The engineers, all members of a Northrop Grumman–led ified airplane. But within moments, the engineers were view-
research team working to make those signatures significantly ing the two booms on a laptop computer perched on a car
less distinctive, expected the two booms would be different trunk. A blue line showed the pressure wave of the modified
from one another—a difference too slight to hear, even with F-5E; a red line represented the Navy fighter.
your ear cocked to find out whether a 30-year-old theory aimed It was a dead-on match for the predictions. Ken Plotkin,
at mitigating supersonic shock waves worked in the real, tur- who’d been in the boom business longer than anyone else pres-
bulent and bubbly atmosphere, but one big enough to be ent, danced a little jig. Graham says he saw tears in his eyes.
detected by the instruments in the back of their SUV. Plotkin placed a call to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
But this SUV, crammed with gear that had to be set out “It worked!” he said. The reply was calm: “I knew it would.”
across the lake bed, wasn’t going anywhere until the desert tor-
toise moved its reptile rear out of the way. The Bureau of Land THE AUGUST TEST FLIGHTS over the Mojave Desert have
Management’s instructions were strict: Startling the endan- answered a critical question about low-sonic-boom design:
gered animal could threaten its life. The predawn hours are the Engineers now know that they can predict how the sonic
male desert tortoise’s time to roam in search of water, food and boom develops as it travels from the airplane to your ear. That
female company. That is arduous
work, as every tortoise knows, and
sometimes a guy just needs a rest. It
was 15 long minutes before the
beast waddled on its way.
Finally on the lake bed, NASA
investigator Ed Haering supervised
the placement of the portable
instrument packages he’d designed,
each containing an ultrasensitive
Brüel & Kjaer 4193 microphone, in
an array about 2.5 miles wide.
Away to the north, Northrop test
pilot Roy Martin lined up his F-5E,
which Graham had disfigured until
Welko Gasich’s elegant 1956 design
was barely recognizable. Martin
pushed the stick forward and the
pelican-nosed F-5E began to pick
up speed in a shallow dive, acceler-
ating through the sound barrier.
Pointing the aircraft accurately
wasn’t easy. Graham, Haering and
Wyle Laboratories boom expert Ken
Plotkin had chosen dawn for the test
because, later on an August day,
thermals rise from the desert floor FROM “BOOM” TO “POP” Northrop Grumman engineer Charles Boccadoro, holding models
and the atmosphere gets turbulent. of the unmodified F-5E (left) and the reshaped fighter, says quiet supersonic flight is critical to
both military and corporate execs—it’s the only way to fly over land at Mach 2 undetected.
The chosen course put the rising sun
smack in Martin’s face. Squinting at
the instruments, Martin lined up and locked in the test speed— means there’s much less speculative risk involved in design-
JOHN B. CARNETT

Mach 1.36, 36 percent above the speed of sound. ing and building a low-boom airplane. Within a few years, a
The cone of the sonic boom trailed miles behind Martin’s low-boom X-plane could be paving the way for a supersonic
jet, and by the time the pressure wave swept across Haering’s business jet—surveys have consistently shown strong
array, he was slowing down, turning for a possible second run. demand for such an airplane, even at a $100 million price tag,
Down the course after him, trailing by 45 seconds, came a and Boeing and Gulfstream are known to have SBJ efforts

58 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
 under way—or a quiet supersonic
bomber, capable of sneaking into
enemy territory at high speed with-
out having its presence betrayed by
piercing sonic booms. There are
even signs that Lockheed Martin,
with its long history of flying air-
planes with capabilities that most
observers deemed unattainable,
could already be capable of build-
ing an operational supersonic busi-
ness jet, under development in a
code-locked vault and bankrolled
by an unidentified sponsor.
Major obstacles remain, however,
The results of Northrop Grumman’s
THE TEST August 2003 flights: The red line shows
the boom produced by a stock F-5E.
As the pressure wave expanded away
from the airplane, the strong shocks
from the engine inlets and wings migrated forward and aft to produce the classic
N-wave—a sharp pressure rise, a straight-line drop and another sharp rise to am-
bient pressure, all in 80 milliseconds. The ear hears the sharp rises, front and rear,
as a double bang. The blue line is the boom from the modified airplane. By adding
volume to the nose, the designers spread the pressure more evenly from nose to
midbody. As the shock wave expanded toward the ground, the added pressure
pushed back against the shocks from the inlet and wings. Result: The front spike
of the N-wave was flatter. (In this test, the designers did not modify the tail shock.)
Ultimately engineers will want the pressure change, known as overpressure and
measured in pounds per square foot, to measure between 0.3 and 0.5 psf, render-
ing it barely noticeable from the ground. (Concorde’s boom measures about 2 psf.)
1.4

including manufacturing engines 1.2

that are up to the task and can
1.0
lower their noise output to tolera-
ble levels during takeoff and land- 0.8
ing, and refining the quiet super-
0.6
sonic design to be more visually
acceptable than the admittedly 0.4
ghastly looking F-5E mod. But the 0.2
biggest challenge when it comes to
clearing supersonic flight for over- 0

land travel: Nobody knows how - 0.2

low is low enough for people on
- 0.4
the ground, whether the boom
UNMODIFIED F-5E
comes from an Air Force jet or a - 0.6
billionaire’s express ride. And that SHAPED SONIC BOOM
- 0.8 DEMONSTRATION F-5E
is ultimately a question of politics,
OVERPRESSURE, PSF

not engineering. - 1.0

Still, the final political hurdle
- 1.2
could be easy work, compared with
everything it took to get to it. It has - 1.4
-10 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
been a 30-year race that began with TIME, MILLISECONDS
the voice that Plotkin spoke to from
the Mojave lake bed, which be-
longed to Cornell’s Albert George.
George was Plotkin’s thesis adviser at Cornell in the late 1960s, a real aircraft, the method is not as precise as you need.”
when sonic booms were a hot issue. The Concorde supersonic Early in the 1990s, a solution to this problem came into
airliner and its Russian counterpart were flying, and Boeing sight, thanks to more powerful computers and computational
was designing a 300-foot-long, 1,800 mph monster. But these fluid dynamics, or CFD—the use of computers to model the
aircraft were hamstrung by their shattering booms. Working airflow around an airplane. With CFD, a design could be eval-
from pure acoustic theory, George had found a way to reshape uated much more quickly than in a wind tunnel, the results
the boom from the sharp-edged double bang into a soft, harm- could be analyzed in fine detail and modifications could be
less pressure wave. His colleague Richard Seebass—“Seebass made almost instantly.
would have come up with the theory about 30 seconds later,” But even if you could design an airplane according to
Plotkin says—built a mathematical structure behind it. The Seebass-George, there’s still a showstopper. The boom on the
result became the Seebass-George theory. ground is not the same as the boom next to the airplane. As
The researchers published their theory in January 1971. the pressure wave expands through the atmosphere, it
Congress scrapped Boeing’s supersonic transport two changes shape, with individual pulses flowing and blending
months later, and for more than 30 years the theory would together into the double bang that hits the ground. Seebass-
remain exactly that. The math was complicated: It worked for George says that proper design would prevent that from hap-
simple shapes but nobody knew how to use it to design a pening—but only in an idealized, stable atmosphere that pro-
practical airplane. If you tried, the only way to know if you’d gressed smoothly from near vacuum at supersonic cruise
got it right, even in part, was to test a model in a wind tunnel, heights to the thicker air at ground level. The real atmosphere
JOHN MACNEILL

observe mistakes, modify the model and test again—a long, is not like that—the air density is variable and the atmosphere
expensive effort with no real assurance that the next test full of turbulence and wind shears and the like—and it is too
would produce better results instead of different problems. big for any CFD to encompass. Many skeptics thought the
Seebass-George “is an ideal,” says Plotkin. “When you get into imperfections might be enough to invalidate the theory.

P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4 59
 To prove Seebass-George, it was clear you would have to
build the airplane and fly it, with a strong chance that it would
be a total flop, due to the vast quantity of unpredictable fac-
tors. The researcher who most people credit with devising a
solution to this dilemma is Domenic Maglieri. Long retired
from NASA, Maglieri’s experience with sonic booms is
unmatched. “I consider myself the world expert,” he says,
“because I’ve outlived everyone else.”
In the early 1990s, as NASA started to take another look at
supersonic transport airplanes, Maglieri realized that the only
way to answer the critical question—“Will the boom persist
with some stability, or will it go into an N-wave as it moves
A key to low-boom design is making
and engaged Richard Seebass, then at the University of
Colorado at Boulder, as a consultant. By 1998, the Skunk Works
team believed they had cracked the low-boom problems and
they teamed with Gulfstream on a supersonic business jet. The
two companies talked to potential customers, including
NetJets. Überinvestor Warren Buffett’s company had pio-
neered the business of selling shares in business airplanes and
already had hundreds of jets on order. If low boom worked,
NetJets was ready to buy.
This good news arrived just as the NASA supersonic trans-
port was shot down by pessimistic forecasts from Boeing.
But Lockheed Martin, Gulfstream and their friends can pull
strings on Capitol Hill, and the first
slice of money for new low-boom
research appeared in February 2000

THE MOD sure that the volume of the airplane—

which is what displaces the air and
causes the shock in the first place—
in the Pentagon’s budget. The
Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency’s Quiet Supersonic Platform
varies smoothly from nose to tail. On (QSP) project began the following
the F-5E demonstrator, the designers wanted to add volume to the nose. They could year. DARPA is not in the business of
not make the nose wider—that would have changed the airflow into the engine
inlets—so they made it taller. A subtle pinch in the belly fairing, just behind the
building corporate jets, so QSP’s goal
inlets, compensates for the volume and pressure added by the inlets and wings. was to develop so-called dual-use
The fairing ends abruptly at the airplane’s midpoint, tapering to a sharp edge technology for either a business jet
to clear the landing gear doors. (The graph painted on the side of the body was or a long-range supersonic bomber.
added before the test, which shows how close the data matched the prediction.) That brought Northrop Grumman
into the picture.

IT HAS BEEN SAID that there is a way

to identify an extroverted engi-
neer—he looks at your shoes when
2. Pinched mid-body he talks to you. But that most cer-
tainly does not apply to the enthu-
siastic, voluble and nattily dressed
1. Reshaped nose Charles Boccadoro, who took over
Northrop Grumman’s QSP program
in 2000. Previously, Boccadoro had
taken part in a study of future strike
aircraft, and concluded that the
QSP’s Mach 2 speed—about 1,320
mph—was the “sweet spot” for a
3. End of modification next-generation airplane.
The appeal of quiet supersonic
1) A wider nose modification would have affected airflow into the engines, so aircraft is evident now more than
added volume made the aircraft taller. ever, Boccadoro says. “Anti-access”
2) Subtle pinch behind inlets creates suction, compensating for higher nose mass. threats—from terrorism to mis-
3) Modification ends at airplane’s midpoint to clear the landing-gear doors.
siles—will mean that U.S. forces will
be based farther from war zones.
“You’re not going to bring hundreds
of short-range fighters into the the-
away from the airplane?”—was a flight demonstration. ater,” Boccadoro notes. But subsonic bombers like Northrop’s
In 1993, Maglieri put forward a plan to make boom-reducing own B-2 take so long to fly from distant bases that they can’t
modifications to a Firebee 2, a supersonic pilotless target respond quickly, while ultrafast hypersonic vehicles would be
drone. When money got tight, the program was canceled, as difficult to maintain even if they can be built. With stealth, alti-
was a NASA plan to modify a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird spy tude and speed, a Mach 2 bomber “can fly day in and day out.”
plane for similar tests. But the people who had built the SR-71 Boccadoro wasted no time in signing on Eagle Aeronautics
at Lockheed Martin’s famed Skunk Works were secretly taking and Wyle Laboratories to his QSP team—and thereby gained
a new look at low boom. In the mid-1990s, the Skunks hired exclusive access to Maglieri, Plotkin and Juliet Page, who had
JOHN MACNEILL

low-boom expert John Morgenstern from McDonnell Douglas been a key member of the High Speed Civil Transport team at
McDonnell Douglas. Their influence was crucial, says designer
Sonic booms and human ears at www.popsci.com/exclusive
Jim Kerswell. “DARPA had some extremely aggressive goals,”
he says,“and everyone was looking for some magic mechanism

60 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
 to suppress the boom.” Researchers were proposing everything Adds Maglieri: “Shaping wasn’t really what the test was all
from plasmas to supersonic biplanes. “Ken, Domenic and our about. It was a matter of proving that the effects of the shape
in-house people all agreed that some of the things that were would persist in a real atmosphere, at a real distance.”
proposed either didn’t match the laws of physics or weren’t With a few precious hours left on their aging test airplane,
robust,” says Northrop’s Steve Komadina, current QSP pro- the team secured funding for a series of follow-up tests to see
gram manager. “They might work directly under the airplane whether the results could be reproduced under different con-
but not off to the side.” The solution was clearly shaping, using ditions. The flights were made in January 2004, when cooler
computer-enhanced versions of the Seebass-George theory. temperatures opened the speed envelope to Mach 1.45, and
At that point, Maglieri revived his idea for a Firebee-based made it possible to fly as late as 1 p.m. and still get good data.
demonstrator—but everyone knew there were disadvantages, The weather was perfect. “We got very lucky, nine days in a
the foremost being that unmanned test vehicles tend to crash row,” says Haering. The F-5E ran like a new Honda, and the
a lot. Aerodynamicist David Graham had another idea: team logged 21 more flights.
Northrop Grumman’s own F-5E fighter. As Northrop test pilot Haering launched a sensor-equipped F-15 to probe the shape
Roy Martin was passing Graham’s cubicle, the engineer but- of the boom and borrowed a Blanik sailplane from the USAF
tonholed him and asked what he thought of flying an F-5E test pilots’ school to pick up measurements 6,000 to 8,000 feet
with a heavily modified nose. Martin had only two conditions: above the ground, clear of eddies and turbulence. Plotkin
Don’t make the front fuselage wider (it could affect airflow designed a “push-over” maneuver, which would focus the boom
into the inlets) and leave the main landing-gear doors alone on a selected area of the ground, as might happen when an air-
(the procedure for belly-landing an F-5E is simple: Don’t). plane turned: Once again, the result matched the theory. “We
Graham’s team spent 16 months designing a new nose for got to see the Plotkin dance of joy again,” says Graham.
the F-5E, struggling with everything from inlet spillage—a
side effect of supersonic flight that pushes air that can’t be TODAY THE NORTHROP GRUMMAN team is looking for a
swallowed by the inlet forward, creating shock waves near the museum home for the research airplane and, like other compa-
nose—to gaping differences between the Lockheed Martin, nies, is looking to the next stage. Boccadoro detects increasing
Northrop and Boeing code used to formulate the boom- Air Force interest in a supersonic bomber, and half a dozen
shaping modifications. The team slogged away through most companies are looking at supersonic commercial airplanes.
of 2002 without getting much closer to a flight test. “The final They include Gulfstream—which has developed a swing-wing
design was identified as 24B4, if that gives you any idea of design and a telescopic swordfish-like nose spike that breaks up
how many we went through,” says Graham. and weakens the forward shock wave—Lockheed Martin and
In December 2002, DARPA hosted a meeting in Hunting- Boeing. The potential market is enormous, says Harvey Maclin,
ton Beach to review the proposed F-5E modification. Plotkin, a manager of advanced technology marketing and government
Maglieri and the Northrop Grumman team got together in a programs for GE Aircraft Engines. “NetJets will tell you that
room before they met with NASA and DARPA, and “we asked they’d order 100 supersonic business jets right away,” he notes,
ourselves, ‘Are we there?’” Graham recalls. The final design quoting a number of forecasts that put the market for super-
was a gross modification, a giant pelican beak, but the team sonic business jets at close to 500 aircraft, even at a price
decided that it would work. Now Northrop Grumman could approaching $100 million apiece.
start modifying the test airplane—a Navy F-5E. It had flown Most people agree that before either the Pentagon or NetJets
7,200 hours and the Navy was ready to ship it to the boneyard. kicks off a full-scale development program, there will have to be
Northrop Grumman secured a 50-hour life extension. an X-plane, an all-new airplane designed to achieve a
One worrisome problem: The time required to modify the low-boom signature. That will take money. “The technology is
F-5E pushed the first flight tests into the summer, when high in great shape,” says Maclin, “but we don’t have the resources
temperatures would make the air more turbulent and increase today to accomplish it.” NASA is formulating plans for an X-
the local speed of sound, putting the plane that would be modified over
Mach 1.4 target out of reach. “The its lifetime to demonstrate a series
good news was that our drag predic- IT AIN’T PRETTY, BUT IT WORKED Designers of the of technologies, according to Peter
modified F-5E weren’t trying to eliminate the sonic
tion was right on,” Martin says. “That Coen, who heads a new supersonic
boom, but prove that aircraft shaping can lessen
would get us to Mach 1.3.” General this signature of supersonic flight. vehicle team at NASA’s Langley
Electric gave its blessing to a “throt- Research Center in Virginia. Its
tle push” on the tired J85 engines, on first mission would be to prove to
condition that nobody would use the Federal Aviation Administra-
them again. The modified airplane tion and the public that today’s out-
proved reliable and straightforward right ban on supersonic commer-
C O U R T E S Y N O R T H R O P G R U M M A N C O R P.

to fly. Plotkin says now that no one cial flight could be replaced by a
who has worked with the Seebass- limit on boom intensity.
George theory ever doubted it—and The engines, in particular, will
the straight-out-of-the-box success of require special attention. The main
the August 27 tests and the almost engine makers—General Electric,
uncanny match between prediction Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney
and theory was worth performing a —are studying supersonic cruise
dance over. “There were still people engines for military and civil air-
who said you’d never get those craft. Key challenges: Civil engines
results in the real world,” he says. have to be quiet on takeoff and

P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4 61
 THE FUTURE
Executives of tomorrow will fly in sleek bizjets that will be seen—briefly—
from the ground, but not heard. None will have cockpit windows—the
needle shape of the fuselage will make designing windows for forward
visibility too complicated—so pilots will view the outside on LCD screens.

[NORTHROP GRUMMAN]
Northrop’s quiet supersonic business jet will in-
clude substantially improved shaping refine-
ments—no bulbous pelican noses as seen in its
F-5E test aircraft—that will quiet the sonic boom
much further than the 2003 test results.

[RAYTHEON]
Though 165 feet long, Raytheon’s
quiet supersonic jet will seat fewer
than a dozen people. The elongated
shape helps mitigate the sonic boom,
as does the up-angled wing.

[BOEING]
Boeing’s vision for a supersonic
business jet echoes its Sonic
Cruiser, a high-subsonic commer-
cial jet that was canceled in 2002.
Both aircraft employ a tail-forward
design with horizontal stabilizers
positioned near the nose.

landing (but military engines don’t) and supersonic engines
run at full blast all the time, making it hard to run several
thousand hours between overhauls.
Perhaps the furthest along is Lockheed Martin. Funded by
an unidentified sponsor, the company’s supersonic business
jet project has been under way since 2001. Program manager
Tom Hartmann won’t discuss the effort, except to give credit
to Seebass, who worked with Lockheed Martin before his
death in 2000. “When the history is written,” he says, “Seebass
will be the Orville and Wilbur Wright of low boom.”
performance and weight that would work. No demonstrator
was needed, the company suggested, just a new FAA rule
allowing limited supersonic overflight at a peak overpressure
of half a pound per square foot. The company—and its
unidentified sponsor—believes it can scoop a 500-airplane
market if the airplane gets airborne before its competitors.
By 2010, an X-plane or even a business jet prototype could
do something that 15 years ago most people would have con-
sidered contrary to the laws of physics: Fly at supersonic
speed without trailing a perceptible boom across the ground.
JOHN MACNEILL

A Lockheed Martin press release in November stated If that happens, a very ugly modification to an elegant little
matter-of-factly that their airplane’s low-boom technology had fighter will have been a crucial step along the way. ■
been demonstrated and that the aircraft design was “closed,”
meaning that the company had a combination of shape, size, Bill Sweetman is a POPULAR SCIENCE contributing editor.

62 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
 SATURN
UNVEILED It may not be faster or cheaper, but the spacecraft headed for Saturn
SEVEN YEARS AGO, the largest
and most expensive interplan-
etary probe ever built blasted
off from Cape Canaveral. It
was loaded with 12 advanced
scientific instruments, 72
aims to be better than anything we’ve flung across the solar system. pounds of plutonium to power
by DAWN STOVER them, and a capsule destined
to be jettisoned toward the
only other object in our solar
system protected by a nitro-
gen-based atmosphere. After
launch, the spacecraft began
its voyage through the void of
space and was promptly for-
gotten by all but a few scien-
tists and space enthusiasts.
Since then NASA has
launched the International
Space Station, a Mars orbiter
Text continues on page 72 >>

CASSINI REVEALED:
TURN PAGE FOR FOLD-OUT
>
ILLUSTRATIONS BY BOB SAULS/FRASSANITO & ASSOCIATES POPULAR SCIENCE J U LY 2 0 0 4 65
 2001–2004: Cassini traverses the void between Jupiter and Saturn at over 12,000 mph.

December 30, 2000: In Cassini’s fourth and final

flyby, Jupiter slings it toward Saturn. During the flyby,
Cassini studies Jupiter along with the Galileo spacecraft.

Second Venus flyby Saturn arrival

June 24, 1999 July 1, 2004

First Venus flyby Communications

April 26, 1998 antenna and radar

Launch
October 15,
1997

Jupiter flyby
Earth flyby December 30,
August 18, 1999 2000

PLANETARY SLINGSHOT
Sending Cassini straight to Saturn would have re-
quired too much fuel. Instead, Cassini exploited the
slingshot effect as it passed by Venus (twice), Earth
and Jupiter. When a craft passes around a planet,
the planet’s motion and mass whip the craft forward.

Radar bay
Visible and infrared
Magnometer spectrometer

Narrow-angle camera
Wide-angle camera Huygens probe
support
Infrared spectrometer

Cassini
e Tethys Enceladus Mimas gap C ring

A ring B ring
Main engine Nuclear power Orientation
generator thrusters
0.3 0.2 0.1 0

INSET INFOGRAPHICS BY JASON LEE

 CASSINI-HUYGENS TIMELINE

October 15, 1997: A April 26, 1998: Cassini June 24, 1999: Cassini swings past August 18, 1999: Cassini
Titan 4-B rocket lifts whips around Venus, Venus again for a second boost. flies 727 miles above Earth
the Cassini-Huygens getting a boost in speed during its third gravity assist.
mission from Cape from the planet’s gravi- This push rockets Cassini
Canaveral. tational tug. toward the outer solar system.

THERING
LEADER
> Though Saturn is arguably the most
spectacular body in the night sky, a
gas giant adorned with brilliant rings
and more than 30 moons of all sizes,
we know surprisingly little about it.
Despite a few brief flybys by ’70s-era spacecraft (Pioneer 11,
Voyagers 1 and 2), the planet remains a distant, mysterious glow.
All this will change beginning this month as Cassini—the largest,
most expensive and complex interplanetary spacecraft ever
launched—begins a tour of Saturn and its moons. Cassini will study
Saturn for four years instead of its predecessors’ mere days,
equipped with instruments at least 10 times as sensitive.
The heart of the tour begins July 1, when Cassini’s main engine
will fire for 95 minutes to slow down the spacecraft and insert it
into Saturnian orbit. “This is probably the riskiest event in the entire
mission, not counting launch,” says Bob Mitchell, Cassini’s program
manager. Though the detailed orbital plan hasn’t yet been set, the
next four years should bring 74 orbits around Saturn, with dozens
of flybys of its icy moons, and, if all goes well, enough discoveries
to hold us over until Cassini’s eventual successor arrives.

MARCHING THROUGH THE MOONS

Saturn has 31 known moons, some as small as 12.5 miles across, and Cassini will prob-
ably discover more on its mission. TITAN is Saturn’s largest moon—it’s nearly as large as
Mars—and the only object in the solar system other than Earth with a nitrogen-based
atmosphere. Scientists believe it may also be the only other object dotted with liquid
oceans on its surface. Another six midsize moons—MIMAS, ENCELADUS, TETHYS,
DIONE, RHEA and IAPETUS (2.2 million miles from Saturn, not shown)—are probably
made of water ice, though
scientists need to get a closer
look to be sure. HYPERION is
the largest irregularly shaped Earth’s Moon Mars
moon. Jean Dominique Cas- Rhea Dione
sini and Christian Huygens, Mercury
the European astronomers for Hyperion
whom the spacecraft and its Titan
probe are named, discovered
Millions of miles
Saturn’s five largest moons in
the 17th century. 1.0 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4
June 11, 2004: Cassini zips past Phoebe, a distant moon July 1, 2004: December 24, 2004: January 14, 2005:
orbiting Saturn. Tiny Phoebe may be a captured asteroid. Cassini fires its Cassini releases the Huygens enters
engine to slow 700-pound Huygens Titan’s atmosphere.
down, crosses the probe, which drifts If all goes well, the
rings, and begins toward the moon Titan probe will land 2.5
to orbit Saturn. for the next 22 days. hours later.

YOUNG RINGS, OR RECYCLE

Saturn’s rings, the planet’s dominant feature
its most puzzling. Their large size and brigh
the rings are young by planetary standards
of millions of years old. This might be becau
is constantly recycled by moonlets that accu
dust, then knock it loose. Scientists will use t
more about how the solar system was form
and dust much like Saturn’s swirled aroun
5 billion years ago, eventually coalescing in

Huygens
probe

THE BULK OF THE MISSION

Cassini is a monster, a spacecraft the size of a school bus though
immeasurably more complex. It stands more than 22 feet high,
weighs more than six tons, holds seven miles of cabling and relies on
more than 20,000 wire connections. This massive shell houses
Cassini’s 12 power-hungry scientific instruments and associated com-
munications equipment. There isn’t a lot of sunlight at twice the distance from the Sun as Jupiter, so
Cassini relies on plutonium for power. Three radioisotope thermoelectric generators convert heat
from the decay of 72 pounds of plutonium into electricity, then use the electricity to power the craft.
Once the instruments—including cameras, cloud-penetrating radar to map the surface of Titan, and
spectrometers to study the chemical composition of surfaces, atmospheres and rings—collect data,
three antennas will send up to 249 kilobits of it per second back to Earth.
 2005–2008: Cassini orbits Saturn more than 70 times, collecting data on its inner structure, rings and moons.

July 1, 2008: Running

out of propellant and
electrical power,
Cassini ends its pri-
mary mission.

When the probe slows

down to 900 mph, the
main chute deploys

ED? Huygens probe

e, are also one of enters Titan’s
htness imply that atmosphere at a
speed of more
s, only a few tens than 13,000 mph
use their material
umulate gas and
the rings to learn The front
med. Disks of gas heat shield
nd a nascent sun SPLASHDOWN is jettisoned,
and scientific
nto planets. ON TITAN measure-
On Christmas Eve 2004, the ments begin
Cassini orbiter will eject a 700-
pound daughter ship named Huy-
gens and send it toward Titan,
Saturn’s largest moon and one of
the most mysterious bodies in the
solar system. Titan is enshrouded
in a methane-and-nitrogen atmo- About 15
minutes later,
sphere five times as dense as the main chute is
Earth’s. Scientists think that some released, and a
of the methane might condense, smaller drogue
chute deploys
creating clouds that rain liquid
hydrocarbons at -180°C onto
Titan’s surface. If true, pools or
even oceans of the liquid might
pockmark the landscape. Huy-
gens will drop through the atmo-
sphere as cameras take pictures
that are expected to reveal an
alien landscape unlike anything
we’ve ever seen before.

The probe
may survive
the landing,
floating
if on liquid,
and continue
to transmit
data
(CONTINUED FROM PAGE 65)
and lander (both of which failed), the
doomed shuttle Columbia and the suc-
cessful Mars rovers Spirit and Oppor-
tunity. President Bush even announced
plans to send humans back to the
Moon. All the while, the forgotten
spacecraft continued to rack up miles,
about 2.2 billion of them, as it quietly
made its way across the solar system.
This month, the Cassini spacecraft
will finally arrive at its destination: the
ringed planet Saturn. And when it
does, it will steal our attention back
from the Moon, Mars and even Iraq—
at least for a few precious moments.
On July 1, Cassini’s main engine will
fire to slow down the spacecraft so
that Saturn can capture it as the plan-
et’s first artificial satellite. Cassini will
fly through a gap between two of Sat-
urn’s rings, then aim its cameras and
remote sensing instruments at the
rings as it passes above them. “These
pictures are probably going to knock
people’s socks off,” says Candice
Hansen-Koharcheck, a scientist at
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
which manages the Cassini mission.
With a mission price tag of $3.3
billion, Cassini is more than four times
as expensive as the Mars rovers Spirit
and Opportunity combined. Cassini is
the size of a school bus, while the Mars
rovers are only the size of golf carts.
And those rovers existed only in the
imaginations of NASA scientists when
Cassini began its long journey. Cassini
is the biggest, baddest mission ever
flown, not just because it has gone out
so far—about twice as far from Earth
as Jupiter—but also because of what it
will do when it arrives.
When Pioneer 11 and Voyagers 1
and 2 visited Saturn more than 20
years ago, each only whipped by on its
way out of the solar system. Cassini
will orbit Saturn 74 times over a four-
year period, studying this mysterious
planet from every angle. The space-
craft will train a dozen instruments on
the Saturn system—snapping pictures
of the planet and its stormy atmo-
sphere, mapping the surface of its icy
moons, studying the composition and
rotation of the rings to find out why
strange “spokes” form and dissipate,
and measuring the powerful magnetic
Tour a photo gallery of Saturn and its moons. See popsci.com/exclusive
72 POPULAR SCIENCE J U LY 2 0 0 4
SATURN’S LUNAR LAKES The dark spots
on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon and home
to the only nitrogen-based atmosphere in
the solar system besides Earth’s, may be
oceans of gasoline-like liquid. We won’t
know for sure until the Huygens probe
reaches Titan early next year.
field surrounding Saturn to learn
more about its inner layer of metallic
liquid hydrogen. Cassini will also drop
the Huygens probe built by the Euro-
pean Space Agency onto Saturn’s
largest moon, Titan, which may have
lakes of gasoline-like liquid hidden
beneath its smoggy atmosphere.
Titan is of special interest because it
is the only moon in the solar system
with its own atmosphere and clouds.
Bigger than Mercury or Earth’s moon, it
is the single largest unexplored piece of
real estate in the solar system. Titan’s
atmosphere, like Earth’s, is mostly
nitrogen, but the moon’s opaque brew
also contains a significant amount of
methane. Scientists believe that when
sunlight hits this methane, the light
catalyzes the gas to form a smog of
hydrocarbons. Because Titan is so cold,
some of the hydrocarbons condense
and rain onto the moon’s surface.
This primitive atmosphere may be
similar to what Earth’s was like before
living organisms began pumping out
oxygen. “The thing that makes Titan so
exciting to scientists is that they think
it probably looks a lot today like Earth
did 3 or 4 billion years ago,” says Bob
Mitchell, NASA’s program manager for
Cassini. “Therefore, it’s a good labora-
tory for understanding how life
began.” Scientists don’t expect to actu-
ally find life in this frigid world.
Rather, they’re looking for insight into
the seeds of life on ours.
The photos sent back from Titan
could reveal an “otherworldly” land-
scape like nothing we’ve seen on Earth
or even Mars, predicts Hansen-
Koharcheck, who can’t wait to see the
shots. She and other scientists, some
of whom started working on the mis-
sion as far back as 1982 (Hansen-
Koharcheck joined the project in 1990)
and have patiently waited for Cassini
to wend its way to Saturn, are now
growing as excited as a 7-year-old
on Christmas Eve. “From day one, we
were thinking about 2004,” says
Hansen-Koharcheck.
The fun begins even before Cassini
enters orbit. On June 11, the spacecraft
will fly within 1,240 miles of Phoebe,
one of the planet’s most remote moons,
for its first direct encounter with the
Saturn system. When that happens,
some 200 scientists around the world
will be hovering over their computers,
waiting for the first wave of data to hit
their screens. (Get real-time mission
updates at saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.)
“We really don’t know what we’re
going to find,” says Mitchell, voicing
a sentiment shared throughout the
Cassini team. Planetary scientists
already know enough about the Moon
and Mars to focus on very specific
questions—such as whether Mars
once had water on its surface—and
send spacecraft designed to answer
those individual questions. With Sat-
urn, however, we’re still at the recon-
naissance stage. That’s why NASA is
sending a multipurpose spacecraft
capable of painting a broad-brush pic-
ture of Saturn and its moons.
If Cassini is a big success, it may
further weaken NASA’s 12-year-old
“faster, better, cheaper” mandate, which
rarely hits on all three cylinders.
Already NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labora-
tory is laying plans for an even more
expensive “big science” mission: the
Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, a nuclear-
C O U R T E S Y E U R O P E A N S O U T H E R N O B S E R VAT O R Y
powered spacecraft that would search
for signs of life hidden on three of
Jupiter’s moons. The Jupiter mission is
still in the early design stages, and
won’t launch until 2012 at the earliest,
if at all. But if Cassini and Huygens
return shocking results from the outer
solar system, multibillion-dollar proj-
ects will begin to seem like a bargain. ■
Dawn Stover, POPSCI’s science editor,
joined the staff in 1986.
00 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
 P PROJECT PORSCHE
P
How do you completely disassemble a classic sports car
and rebuild it better than new?
You take a deep breath and dive in.

By Stephan Wilkinson
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN B. CARNETT

P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4 75
M
spilled oil, the air-conditioner hoses dangling loose, the Guards
Red paint cracked and faded where the Neanderthal PO (pre-
vious owner, in Porschespeak) had rigged a nose-protecting
y carefully wrapped Christmas bra and then never removed it. The driver’s door sagged half
present in 1998 was a $4.95 issue of Hem- an inch when opened, so he was probably fat as well, accus-
mings Motor News, the thick, pulp-paper tomed to using the door as a crutch.
monthly classified listing of collector cars. Perfect.
Even if it carries a 21st-century date, each I took the headlights out of their fender bowls to look for hid-
issue still looks like something you’d find on den rust. Ran a magnet all over the body to test for Bondo, the
the toilet tank of a 1950s Sinclair station restroom in Tucumcari, sandable plastic paste that body shops trowel over crash dam-
New Mexico. So was this a cheesy gift from my wife? Hardly. age they can’t be bothered to smooth. (The magnet would stick
“You look bored,” Susan laughed at my bafflement. “You fin- to steel but not Bondo, of course.) Parked the car so that the sun-
ished the addition to our house. You built an airplane. You’re light hit it at the right angle to give away bodywork ripples
playing around with models.” (No, no—the 1:48-scale plastic when I sighted along the fenders and doors. Checked the vehi-
kit kind, not the double-breasted variety.) “You need another cle identification number to find that the car had been built dur-
project,” she said. “Buy yourself a car to restore. A Ferrari. An ing the summer of 1983 in Stuttgart for the U.S. market—a very
Aston Martin like the one you had when you were a young late SC, one of the last of the breed. Checked the engine num-
stud. A Corvette, a Cobra . . .” ber to confirm that it was the correct engine for the year. Looked
Wow. I’d always wanted to restore a car, and my unfailingly for the dreaded spilled-acid corrosion under the battery tray.
perceptive partner, game for anything, was encouraging me to Jacked the car up and poked an awl at the bellypan in some
start at the top. Husbands who feel that permission to watch the famously vulnerable areas to check for rust-thinned metal . . .
Super Bowl is marital bliss don’t know what they’re missing. “I’ve never seen anybody do all that,” the dealer said—
But I didn’t want to get in over my head with an exotic car either admiringly or calculatedly, hoping to make me think I
that required expensive specialist help. A hard-core anal com- actually knew what I was doing.
pulsive, I’d always wanted to do that frame-off rebuild, totally I drove the thing around for barely five minutes simply to
disassembling a car, detailing every part and reassembling it to make sure it actually ran and tracked straight. No need to
. . . well, maybe not perfection, in this era of spare- check compression, valve leakage, gearbox
no-expense professional restorations worth more GOLD PLATED: Wilkin- crunching, shock stiffness or tire condition. The
than Monets, but at least to sanitary standards. son (opposite, in his tires were Sumitomos, a Japanese off-brand
driveway) spent more
I also wanted a car that would provide a rea- than two years on his famed only for their cheapness and excellent
sonable level of performance when I was done, frame-off rebuild of the adaptability for use as boat-dock bumpers. I had
not a 1950s classic that might have run strongly Porsche 911SC. He also no interest in any of the obvious things that used-
in fond memory—an XK 120, an MG TD, a Mor- spent $70,000—far car buyers concern themselves with, for all of
more than the car is
gan—yet would make me turn to my wheezy old worth. Previous spread: those components would be renewed, rebuilt,
Saab whenever I felt the need to exceed the speed Seeing the light at the replaced before the car ever ran again.
limit. So the choice was easy, particularly with my end of the tunnel. Ship it, I told the dealer. Put the thing on a
then-19-year-old car-enthusiast daughter, a Skip flatbed and send it to me. Oh, and how about a
Barber graduate, chanting, “POR-shuh, POR-shuh, POR-shuh” discount for not asking for a warranty? “Warranty?” he
in the background. I would seek out a restorable Porsche 911. laughed. “Warranty? No such thing, my man. You can bring
your mechanics, you can examine the car all you wish, you can
Ultimately, I found my car just 65 miles from drive and test and check, but you buy and it is yours. Don’t
home, in Long Island City, a shabby New York neighborhood come back. No warranty. No nothing.”
near LaGuardia Airport, amid sidewalks littered with broken Well, what the hell. It’s a project car, not a grocery-getter.
bottles, corner bodegas and stripped cars perched on milk
crates at every other curb. The dealer’s wares, though adver- Rebuilding a Porsche 911 engine is neither
tised in Hemmings as “exoticars,” were a motley collection of impossibly complex nor in any way counterintuitive. It can be
dreadful Jaguar Mark sedans, ugly entry-level Ferraris, Cobra done by anybody who has the time, tools, compulsiveness and
kit cars, decrepit Royces and Bentleys, poseur Panteras, neg- common sense to do the job in a scrupulously clean, careful
lected Porsches and phony fiberglass MGs. They were packed and organized fashion. Literally. Bruce Anderson, a respected
grille to bumper, fender to dusty fender in a dim, foul ware- Porsche technical expert, gives weekend-long, small-group,
house. The mechanical expertise of the place seemed limited hands-on workshops in suburban San Francisco on how to
to jumping dead batteries. rebuild Porsche 911 engines and transmissions. He once said
The car was a sad little rat. The mechanic started it, and it to me, “I can teach anybody with a pulse how to do it.”
idled smokily at a warm-up setting; the haphazard Porsche OK. So how do you actually do it? How do you ruin—which
threshing-machine clatter brought back memories. The inte- is essentially what you’re doing by taking it apart—a machine
rior was grungy, the driver’s leather seat split, the carpeting that Porsche will charge you $30,000 to replace? How do you
bunched and filthy, the glare shield terminally cracked, the do that and then somehow make it good as new again?
rear bulkhead paneling waterlogged and crumbling, loose You take a deep breath and start. Disassembling the engine
wires showing the harsh removal of an aftermarket amplifier
and a boom box speaker rig that had been parked crudely on From The Gold-Plated Porsche, by Stephan Wilkinson. Copyright © by Stephan Wilkinson.
the jump-seat cushions, the engine compartment slick with Published by arrangement with The Lyons Press, a division of the Globe Pequot Press.

76 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
is easy: You just undo nuts and bolts in what will quickly
become apparent is a logical order. (Starting at the top and
working down is a reasonable approach.) A word of advice,
though: Don’t trust to memory when segregating the parts as
you disassemble them. Put everything (and its fasteners) into as
many separate sandwich baggies as it takes, and it’ll take hun-
dreds. Mark each baggie with the name of the part; if you don’t
know what it is, just note its location, like “thingie that goes into
crankcase near engine serial number,” if what you happen to
have in your grimy hand is the oil-temperature sensor.
As you get deep enough into the engine to be removing
important reciprocating and rotating parts that you’ll be
reusing—connecting rods, pistons, wrist pins, rocker arms,
cams and the like—number them according to which cylinder
or side they came from and whether they were intake or
exhaust. Number the cylinder barrels and heads as well, but
don’t bother numbering the valves, which are going to be
reground or replaced anyway. If you buy new parts, number
them too, even if you’re simply assigning them permanently
to an arbitrary cylinder position.
Since marker-pen scribbles are too easily wiped away by a
variety of solvents, the best way to do this is with an electric
scriber or a Dremel tool chucked with a fine grinding point.
Scribe the number in a nonfunctional location—under the pis-
ton crown rather than on the piston skirt, say.
One other crucial tool that you’ll need during all this disas-
sembly is a parts cleaner. I once rebuilt a British Matchless
trials motorcycle using the kitchen sink of my rented Philadel-
phia apartment as a “parts cleaner,” but it wasn’t a good idea. My
landlady saw me off as I moved out several months later by
melodramatically yelling, “I hope great tragedy befalls you.” It
was a bit over the top, but a
novel farewell. (Oh, and by the
way, Mrs. Anselmi, you’ll be
delighted to hear that I did get
prostate cancer 30 years later,
if that’s what you had in mind.
But I do remain cured.)
A parts cleaner is simply
a metal tub full of solvent
—choose your poison, bio-
degradable or carcinogenic,
green or clear, soapily helpful
or deathly effective—with
a small electric pump that
recirculates the stuff and
pushes it out of a gooseneck TOYS OF THE TRADE: Wilkinson’s
sprayer so that you can favorite toy as a kid was his erec-
submerge and scrub-brush tor set. “I do love to take things
apart and put them back together
squeaky-clean even the big- again,” he says.
gest engine parts. For some-
body whose basic concept of engine rebuilding is “Clean it up
and put it back together again,” a parts cleaner was the altar
before which I daily did my mechanical ablutions.
One of the most important things to do to a disassembled
911 engine is to clean out all the oil galleries (passageways)
cast and machined into the block and crankshaft. This
requires a supply of “shop air”—the efflux of a compressor—
and a couple of spray cans of carburetor cleaner. The big main
oil gallery runs longitudinally through the right crankcase half
and is blocked by hammered-in metal plugs. The plugs need
78 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
to be removed—a tricky affair—and then replaced with new
plugs once the clean-out has been accomplished.
There are also six piston squirters to clean out, little nozzles
inside the cylinder spigots in each crankcase half that pump
coolant oil onto the underside of the piston each time it hap-
pens by. The intuitive thing to do is to spray into the nozzles
where they protrude from the block, but that’s a fool’s errand:
There’s a check valve inside each nozzle that allows oil (or, in
this case, carb cleaner) to flow out but not back in. You need
to stick the long plastic extension spout of the spray can as far
as possible down into the gallery feeding the nozzle.
All this lube-system cleaning is especially and enormously
important if you are rebuilding an engine that has suffered a
mechanical failure, or if the crankshaft was reground. Debris
from the failure, or the grinding, can be lurking anywhere in
the system. If you don’t get rid of it, there’s an excellent pos-
sibility of a catastrophic bearing failure within minutes of first
start-up. Instant doorstop.
On the first warm, sunny April day, after a mis-
erable winter, literally the first time our woodland plot was free
of the lingering, filthy remnants of the deepest snowdrifts, I
backed the Porsche out of the barn as it fitfully brapped and
snorted through its yet-to-be-tuned carburetors. Its tail was
aimed downhill straight at a small outcropping of sump-eating
rocks. I hoped the brand-new brakes would work as the fat rear
tires plopped out past the big sliding doors, off the raised barn
floor and onto the ground.
They did, and I cautiously backed and filled till the car was
headed toward freedom, away from two years of mechanical
surgery and intensive care. I needed to take it out on the road,
even if just for a few min-
utes. I had no license plates,
no insurance, no registra-
tion, no inspection sticker,
no nada. I didn’t even have
my driver’s license. But one
of the advantages of living
out in the country is a
spiderweb of untrafficked,
barely paved back roads
where the odds of running
into a local cop are infinites-
imal. And if I did, I figured
I’d just wave and floor it.
A week later, after several
increasingly casual forays onto my illegal loop of back roads, I
almost ran into the porky town-police Caprice cruising past
our driveway, probably for the first time in a decade. Fortu-
nately, I was on my way to the post office in a legal car. Had
the cop heard that some night rider in a fly yellow Porsche had
been rattling windows? I’ll never know. I thought of pulling up
and asking him but decided that was seriously pushing it.
When I bought the original oily red SC, the dealer in the
depths of Queens had said, “It’s required that you register the
car through me. I must send someone to the motor vehicle
bureau and they will pick up your license plates.” No, I said,
that wouldn’t be necessary. I wouldn’t be putting the car on
the road for a couple of years anyway, so there was no need
for license plates. He shrugged, glad to be done with it.
I popped the car’s title into our safe-deposit box and filed
 the bill of sale among my rapidly growing sheaf of restoration
receipts, but a thought continued to nag at me: When I try to
register this damn car, something is going to go wrong.
Indeed it did. The motor vehicle bureau lady in Newburgh
couldn’t have been nicer when I showed up in May 2001 to get
license plates so I could finally legally put the incomplete-but-
running little coupe on the road. “This looks like it’ll be a fun
car to have,” she said as I proudly showed her the photos I’d
brought of the restoration (in case there was some question
about why the car had been
off the road for two years). DISASSEMBLING THE ENGINE
Check, check, check went
her red-ink ballpoint on my
IS EASY: YOU JUST UNDO NUTS
filled-in application form. AND BOLTS IN WHAT WILL
Until the end—the absolute QUICKLY BECOME APPARENT IS
bottom of the back of the
page. “Uh-oh,” she said, “we A LOGICAL ORDER.
have a problem. The dealer
you bought the car from
needs to sign this form.”
“Good lord,” I said,“I bought
the car over two years ago. At
best he’s a 130-mile round-
trip away, at worst he’s retired
or gone out of business. I’ve
spent $70,000 on this project.
What do I do if I can’t find
him to sign it?”
Her five-days-a-week life as
a fat-fannied bureaucrat
behind a window grille was at
that moment complete, re-
warded as only a functionary’s lot can be. She smiled sweetly
and said, “You cry.”
I hope she’s kidding. I fear she’s not.
But I had a secret weapon.
Thirty years earlier, I had bought a rare and unusual Ducati
350 Desmo racing motorcycle from a dealer in Montreal.
Since I was the Ziff Davis Publishing Co.’s de facto “corporate
pilot,” I had the keys to its twin-engine Aero Commander. So
I flew the Shrike from New York up to Canada, bought the
bike, and loaded it into the leather-lined cabin where billion-
aire Bill Ziff usually sat.
It was one of those trips that a pilot looks back upon in his
old age and thinks, “How did I survive?” I’d taken most of the
seats out of the airplane before heading to Canada, and the
big, empty, rectangular corporate cabin afforded plenty of
room for the bike. My friend Russell Munson was my copilot,
and he and I tied down the motorcycle as best we could with
several lengths of rope attached to whatever seemed at the
time to be a substantial mooring but probably wasn’t.
Just south of Buffalo, Russ and I ran into an enormous line
of thunderstorms. It was 10 at night, and the lightning was
dazzling. Fortunately, we banked hard left soon enough to avoid
flying into the storms. If we hadn’t, the motorcycle would have
come loose instantly in the extreme turbulence and pounded
the airplane to death from inside, and almost certainly would
have killed a second friend who was sitting trustingly on the
floor of the cabin behind the bike, engrossed in a paperback.
I flew all the way east to Boston, getting ever farther from
New York, before finding an airport that the thunderstorms
80 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
hadn’t yet reached and landing to refuel. By the time I taxied
back out to take off from Logan International, the tower called
and, thank you Logan, said, “One-Five Uniform, I think you’re
gonna be better off holding on that taxiway a while. We’ve got
a humongous line of thunderstorms coming in from the west.”
I considered saying, “Negative, give us a right turnout and
vectors to the south, we’ll be on our way before they’re here.” It
was, after all, 2 a.m. and I was tired, grumpy and devoid of judg-
ment. (Nonpilots assume that control towers and air-traffic con-
trollers give orders, but they in
fact only advise, and unless it’s
against the law, the pilot can
buck their suggestions.) Fortu-
nately, the first gusts of the
approaching storm shook the
airplane convincingly enough
that I didn’t. We spent the next
20 minutes on that taxiway,
pointing the airplane into the
shifting gales while I throttled
the engines to keep it from
being blown backward by the
lashing rain and wind.
Ultimately, the silver-lamé
motorcycle arrived at West-
chester County Airport accom-
panied by three supremely
tired travelers and little paper-
work. I had a brand-new,
unregistered and probably ille-
gal motorcycle and a single
scrawled receipt. In French.
From the brief period when I was an anthropology major in
college, before I changed my nonhonors specialty to playing
with cars, I knew that explorers working in the Gobi Desert in
the 1930s often devised what they called “Mongolian dazzlers.”
These were mock documents covered with meaningless
imprints, calligraphy, sealing wax, rubber stamps and ribbons,
and they were used to stun border guards and customs offi-
cials into whatever submission was at that moment required.
So I made for my Ducati a Mongolian dazzler—a typed bill
of sale on fancy bond stock filled with be-it-known’s, sworn-
before-me’s and in-the-year-of-our-Lord’s. I covered it with
enough rubber stampings to satisfy a French douanier. It cer-
tainly satisfied Manhattan’s dreaded New York motor vehicle
office, which briskly issued me a title to the Duck. So I saw
Newburgh as no challenge.
I came back to the Newburgh motor vehicle bureau the next
Monday and slipped my “signed” form under the wicket. You
wanted the dealer’s signature? Hey, how’s this? You like that
flourish? Isn’t that interesting how he signed his name diago-
nally across the dotted line rather than upon it, just as he did
on the bill of sale? With a little practice, anybody can do it.
The Newburgh MVB lady bought it without a second glance.
Yet I still wonder. Is that exactly what she’d assumed I’d do but
couldn’t advise me to? Did she think I was dumb enough to
drive down to Queens and find the dealer, or did she figure that
a few strokes of a phony felt tip would satisfy the MVB gods?
I think she knew. ■
Stephan Wilkinson is POPSCI’s contributing automotive editor.
 YOUR LIFE ON TECH >

HOW2.O HACKS, UPGRADES,

PROJECTS, GRIPES,
TIPS & TRICKS

THIS MONTH •
•
Building a pink-obsessed robot 83
Beyond Google 83 Tweaking digital photos into perfection 88
• 5 THINGS. . .
YOU SHOULD USE INSTEAD
GROK
OGLE Tech Support: LED flashlight hack, reader tips, RoadWired RAPS pad, OF GOOGLE
BUILD This Is Broken 92
HACK • You 2.0: Contacts that shape eyes 85 The Luddite: Kodak EasyShare 87 TOPIX.NET
ACQUIRE 1 Like Google News but bet-
INTEGRATE • Collecting and purifying naturally occurring magnetite 90
EXPERIMENT • InfoGrid: Flash memory cards 90 ter. Topix monitors 6,000+
news sources and tags con-
tent for its 150,000 topic
pages. Input a zip code for
local news or search for,
say, “Jackson” and find
news pages dedicated to
Jackson, Missouri, or Jack-
son, Michael, plus articles
that contain the word.

SINGINGFISH.COM
2 You may not find any rare
Phish bootlegs, but Singing-
Fish will guide you to more
than 10 million free and
legal media files, including
movie trailers, music videos,
newscasts and music clips.

LII.ORG
3 Forget the risk of pulling
stats from a site posted by
Joe College Student. Every
page included in the search-
able Librarian’s Index to the
Internet (12,000 so far) has
been reviewed at least twice
by real live librarians.

SCIRUS.COM
4 Tap into more than 167 mil-
DEPT: You Built What? INVESTIGATOR: Jonathan Coulton TECH: Robot vision
COST: $200 lion science-related pages,
BUILD

EAT YOUR HEART OUT, AIBO TIME: Many long

nights
including content from jour-
nals and archives such as
NASA technical reports and
FINDINGS: Why buy a robot that follows a colored ball when
the U.S. Patent Office. Scirus
you can spend hundreds of hours building your own? Practical Popcorn
can filter out most nonscien-
tific sites, so search for
It’s midnight and I’m exhausted. For 200 hours, I’ve been caught in a mind-numbing “spears” to get a study of
loop: unplug, tweak code, compile, load, plug in, pause for sigh and brief prayer. Once asparagus DNA, not Britney.
again, I crouch on the floor and wave a pink ball in front of my half-built friend, whom
A9.COM
I’ve named “Pinky the Robot Who Follows a Pink Ball.” He doesn’t, and I’m crushed, but I 5 Amazon’s new search
can’t stop because I’m very close. So close that Pinky’s starting to creep me out a little. engine uses Google results
Anyone who can solder can build a robot from a kit, but take away the plans and the but adds über-useful extras.
parts you need and the know-how and now you’re living—scrounging the toolbox for Log in from any computer
brackets and switches, browsing that deserted section of RadioShack, dragging your bat- and view your search and
DENNIS KLEIMAN

click histories, or use the A9

tered brain through a thousand tiny victories. You’re a dreamer! A scientist! Even (what
toolbar to leave notes on
the hell) a genius! any page you hit, available
At least that’s the journey I imagined when I found a robotics vision system called the every time you revisit that
CMUcam on Carnegie Mellon’s toy robots initiative site (www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~cmucam). page.—KATE ASHFORD

P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4 83
H2.0 How 2.0 > You Built What?! // You 2.0

There I saw clips of robots fol-
lowing brightly colored objects
and knew I had to build one.
The folks at CMU pointed me
to acroname.com, where I
bought the camera, a few ser-
vos and wheels, and a micro-
controller called the BrainStem.
The CMUcam lacked writ-
ten instructions, so I spent the
first couple of hours looking at
a picture and soldering capac-
itors into the wrong holes. Then
I fed the BrainStem some simple
C code and modified the ser-
vos to give them 360 degrees
of motion. So far, so good: I
had eyes, legs and a brain.
The next step was to make
Pinky prefer pink. I knew the
theory: The BrainStem asks the
CMUcam what it sees, and
then directs the servos to move
the robot until the pink object
is in the center of the cam’s
frame. Apparently, this all hap-
pens over serial ports—but in
what language? How does a
serial port work? I was in way
over my head.
Panic. Desperation. Frantic
Googling. Finally, I stumbled
across a similar project on the
Acroname site, an orange-
obsessed robot complete with
posted code I could steal and
modify for my own pink-loving
purposes. Easy . . . except that
it didn’t work at all.
I’m ashamed to tell you how
long I tweaked and tested that
code until, many skipped meals
later, I discovered the single
troublesome line: some snippet
about the camera’s auto-gain
and white balance values. Dri-
ven by frustration and hunger,
I decided auto-gain and white
balance were stupid and just
deleted the line. I hooked
everything together, stuffed the
guts into the BrainStem’s card-
board box (note to self: find
new body before BattleBots
appearance) and put Pinky on
the ground to meet his destiny.
Pinky, however, seemed
more interested in thrashing
around nonsensically, then
scooting off under the couch.
The motor-control functions I
wrote had given him the equiv-
alent of an inner-ear infection
and a debilitating limp.
After several more hours of
trial and error, I got my first
glimmer of hope: During
one of our training sessions,
Pinky spun adroitly out of view
of the ball I was holding and
stopped dead in front of a
chair, head upturned. I thought
the battery had died until I no-
ticed that he was staring wist-
fully at my wife’s pink tote
bag, twitching back and forth
to get the best possible view.
Eureka. Pride welled up inside
me and spilled out in a single
tear. A little more code mas-
saging had Pinky juking and
weaving like a ball boy at
Wimbledon.
For $1,800 I could have
bought a Sony Aibo that does
the same thing (OK, it does
lots of other things too), but the
trick itself has little staying
power. I build robots for that
moment when the chaos crys-
tallizes into entirely expected
yet somehow surprising behav-
ior. Pinky’s not shiny and cute,
nor does he have a tail to wag,
but he represents many hours
of my sweating and swearing,
and for that, I love him.
Go to popsci.com/h20 to
download Pinky’s code and
learn more about his creation.

PINKY, SIMPLIFIED
Head servo mounted to camera board with
L-shaped bracket. The servo is glued to a
plastic tube that used to contain a bunch of
nails and screws, which are now more easily
accessible in a pile on my kitchen counter.

BrainStem microcontroller continually

polls the camera for the relative posi-
tion of the largest pink mass it sees
and directs the servos to move until
CMUcam, with real- the pink is centered in the frame.
time vision-processing,
can be made to
recognize any color, Cardboard-box body
but Pinky sounds trades durability for easy
better than Bluey. access to Pinky’s guts.

Wheels driven by
standard servos,
hacked for continual
rotation, controllable
with commands sent
from the programmed
BrainStem.

Nine-volt battery powers

CMUcam and BrainStem.
MCKIBILLO

Non-scuff chair pad for easy Pack of five rechargeable AAs

sliding on carpet or tile. powers servo motors.

84 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
 YOU
INTEGRATE

At the Intersection of
2.0 Technology and the Body

I HAVE SEEN my future, and it PARAGON CRT CONTACTS

was sharp and clear, which is
pretty amazing since I wasn’t
wearing my contact lenses or
glasses at the time. It’s thanks
to a new procedure that cor-
rects low to medium nearsight-
edness (and astigmatism to
-1.75 diopters) without scary
lasers and their slight but real
risk of permanent damage.
Paragon Vision Sciences’
C O U R T E S Y PA R A G O N V I S I O N S C I E N C E S
$1,500 initially, $300/year
thereafter; paragoncrt.com
TECH Lenses reshape your eye
while you sleep
DOES IT WORK? For me, wonderfully
doesn’t cover CRT, which runs
about $1,500 for the initial con-
sult and fitting and about $300
a year for new lenses after that.
The first few nights with the

corneal refractive therapy (CRT), contacts in were quite uncom-

approved by the FDA in 2002,
works by temporarily reshaping
your cornea with rigid gas-per-
meable contacts you wear while
you sleep. In the morning, re-
move the lenses and your eye
maintains its new corrected
shape all day. Most insurance
fortable, but never so much that
I couldn’t sleep. By night seven,
they didn’t bother me at all. Al-
though Paragon says it can
take two weeks for the correc-
tion to last until bedtime, my
vision was perfect all day after
only one week of wear.
Each Paragon CRT lens is unique, created from a digital map of
your cornea. The rigid contact squeezes your eye into 20/20
shape, which remains temporarily even after you remove the lens.
I already think CRT is life- vision even feels sharper than
changing. In the past week, I’ve when I’m wearing soft contacts
surfed, swum, mountain biked, or glasses. CRT is definitely
and run without blurry vision part of my foreseeable future.
or fear of losing a contact. My —STEVE CASIMIRO
 THE
INTEGRATE

Diary of a
Tech Resister’s Temptation
LUDDITE
EPISODE 3, PART II:
EDITING AND PRINTING PHOTOS
TUESDAY, P.M. After a few
weeks toting the Casio Exilim
EX-Z40, I’ve got plenty of pho-
tos. The next step: printing them
on the Canon i80 Bubble Jet.
WEDNESDAY, A.M. The compact
FROM TOP: GREGORY MONE; COURTESY CANON U.S.A.
editing programs, and I have
two already from Casio. Why,
again, do I need five of these?
THURSDAY, P.M. Open a shot in
Casio’s Photohands. Play
around with Contrast and
Brightness, activate Sharpness
and Noise Removal. Onscreen

i80 is easy to set up, but the it’s perfect. Hit Print. The result:
install CD gives me three photo- cartoonish colors and an image
so pixelated it looks like a bad
high-school art project.
FRIDAY, A.M. Know-it-alls at
work tell me I must have taken
CANON i80 PRINTER
$250, canon.com
KODAK EASYSHARE SOFTWARE
Free, kodak.com
BARRIER TO ENTRY: Too many soft-
ware options, most too complex
VERDICT: EasyShare is a breeze
For some reason, I like this sign for a Cambridge, Mass., carbon-
nanotube maker. Left: the best print I could muster from Photohands.
Right: the same image after a few simple tweaks in EasyShare.
low-res pictures by accident. Kodak EasyShare. Suddenly,
Sure, blame it on the Luddite. everything’s, well, easy. Clicking
SATURDAY, P.M. Switch to Enhance really does enhance
Canon’s poorly named Easy- the image. Final prints actually
PhotoPrint. The odd Digital Face look like the After side of the
Smoothing feature smoothes preview. My “low-res” pics are
nothing. The prints pass with now frameworthy. Lesson:
the grandparents, but none of Without user-friendly software,
them have their glasses on. the best camera and printer are
MONDAY, A.M. I download worthless.—GREGORY MONE
 H2.0 How 2.0 > Gray Matter // Info Grid

DEPT: Gray Matter INVESTIGATOR: Theodore Gray ELEMENT: Magnetite of paper with a magnet under-
PROJECT: Collecting, neath and watch the magnetite
UNCOVERING A NATURAL
EXPERIMENT

purifying magnetite; grains align themselves along

making magnetic the field lines that connect the
field lines
(MAGNETIC) ATTRACTION COST: Free
TIME: 30 minutes
magnet’s north and south poles.
Amazingly, the Mars Pathfinder
FINDINGS: A long walk on the right beach could reveal
lander used a setup like this to
magnetite hiding in plain sight. Dabbler Master
identify types of magnetic dust
on Mars. Of the likely compo-
You know that episode of underneath: Sand flowed off, directly on a strong magnet to nents there, only magnetite
Star Trek where Kirk is on some magnetite stuck. It’s still mined build towers and arches with forms visible field lines.
planet battling a lizard-man in South Africa and a few them (kids find this endlessly Pretty magnetic patterns,
and he just happens to find the other spots around the world. fascinating). A more scientific, while undeniably alluring,
ingredients for gunpowder After you purify your mag- or at least educational, applica- are not why magnetite is my
lying on the ground? Nature netite, try dropping particles tion is to sprinkle it on a sheet favorite element to collect from
doesn’t usually give up ele- the wild. Next month, I’ll re-
ments that easily, but there are veal the real reason, and how
26 Magnetite is a naturally occurring form of iron.
a few wonderful exceptions. it could have helped Kirk with
Take, for example, the many
seemingly ordinary white-sand
Fe
Iron
APPEARANCE Shiny metallic black NAMED FOR Magnes, the
Greek shepherd who discovered it on Mt. Ida
LARGEST DEPOSITS Sweden, Norway, Romania, Russia
his lizard problem. Provided,
that is, that he also had an
55.85 FOUND ON Nearly every white sand beach
beaches that actually contain Etch A Sketch.
quite a bit of black magnetite,
which is washed down from de- Collect, purify, play
posits in the hills and ground 1 Use a large mag-
into sand by water. (Ironically, net to pull the mag-
black volcanic beaches usually netite grains from
the sand.
contain little or no magnetite.)
2 To get rid of extra
Hold a strong magnet an sand and other de-
inch or two over one of these bris, run a smaller
beaches and magnetite will lit- magnet over the
erally jump out of the ground pile. (The plastic
bag just keeps the
onto the magnet. It’s hard to magnet clean.)
believe until you see it. Sand 3 Repeat Step 2 un-
1 2
and debris will come with the til your pile looks
magnetite, but you can purify more like the pure
3 4 magnetite (left pile)
it later by spreading it out on a
than the raw beach
sheet of paper and passing a sand (right pile).
magnet over it. 4 Magnetic field
Iron producers used a simi- lines, which connect
lar process in the first half of the north and south
poles. Sprinkle your
this century to mine the now- purified grains onto
protected magnetite-bearing a sheet of paper
beaches around Santa Cruz, with a magnet un-
California. The sand was derneath to create
a similar pattern.
dredged up and dumped onto
staircased sheets with magnets

• InfoGrid Flash Memory Cards

MAX STREET PRICE YEAR
NAME SIZE (MM) CAPACITY 128MB/512MB/1GB INTRODUCED DEVICE SATURATION TREND
CompactFlash 43 x 36 x 3.3 12GB $22/$64/$140 1994 Most common Flat
Secure Digital (SD) 24 x 32 x 2.2 1GB $33/$95/$270 1999 h
h
JEFF SCIORTINO

Memory Stick PRO 21 x 50 x 2.8 2GB $45/$116/$250 2003

SmartMedia 37 x 45 x 0.8 128MB $31/NA/NA 1995 i
xD-Picture Card 20 x 25 x 1.8 512MB $47/$160/NA 2002 Least common Flat

90 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
 H2.0

TECH SUPPORT
GROK

> ATTENTION H2.0 READERS: This is your page, full

of the feedback we get from you at h20@time4.com and through
the forums at popsci.com/h20. ASK A GEEK is your chance to
pick the brains of the Geek Chorus—H2.0’s panel of advisers
and tech wizards. THE TIP SHEET is a sampling of your best tips,
tricks and hacks. YOUR GEAR features the most drool-worthy
gadget you’ve bought lately (this month, we’re showing off one
of the cool case mods you sent us). Finally, THIS IS BROKEN gives
you one of our favorites from Mark Hurst’s site thisisbroken.com.

YOUR GEAR
The RoadWired RAPS pad is like a high-tech diaper for my
gadget menagerie, providing an extra layer of shock-
absorbing, corrosion-resistant protection for anything swad-
dled in its Velcro-
cornered folds. ($18;
roadwired.com)
—Cory Doctorow,
editor of boing
boing.net and ASK A GEEK: SCOTT FULLAM

Q: Can I hack a standard

author of the
novel Eastern
Standard Tribe.
flashlight to use LEDs, making
> The Tip Sheet
it brighter and longer-lasting? —Jacob Miller, San Diego, Calif.

Disposable no more
Ritz/Wolf Camera sells an $11, 25-shot, 1.3-megapixel
“disposable” digital camera, but with the right software
and a hacked USB cable, it’s possible to transfer the
images to your computer and reuse the camera. Instructions
at maushammer.com.—John Maushammer, Carrboro, N.C.
National Geographic’s updated MapMachine
Check out mapmachine.nationalgeographic.com for up to
16 views—including satellite, topographic, street and politi-
cal—of just about any location in the world. Search by city,
country or zip code.—Sree Sreenivasan, H2.0 Web Geek
A: Absolutely. A flashlight with at least three AAA, AA, C
or D cell batteries hacked to use three 2300-millicandela
LEDs will be as bright as an incandescent and last 5 to 10
times longer. Of course you can add up to 20 LEDs (as long
as they fit in the reflector) if you’re planning to, say, man a
lighthouse with the thing. Use a flashlight with more batteries,
get more life. You’ll also need a resistor for each LED: For a
three-cell flashlight, use 30 ohm resistors, 75 ohm for four cells,
130 ohm for five and so on. (Try digikey.com for the parts.)
Pics and detailed instructions are at popsci.com/h20, but
here are the basics: Trim the LED leads to about a half inch
(maintaining their relative lengths), and the resistor leads to
FROM TOP: TOMER HANUKA; COURTESY ROADWIRED

one-eighth inch on one end, 1 inch on the other. Solder the

short resistor leads to the long LED leads. Carefully break the
SCOTT FULLAM is H2.0’s
THIS IS BROKEN Hackmaster, and author of
the recent Hardware Hack-
ing Projects for Geeks ($30,
MICROSOFT’S VERSION OF USER OPTIONS
O’Reilly). Now a consultant
to consumer electronics
makers, Fullam has been a
toy designer (he once made
Barbie talk) and an Apple
engineer, and holds two
degrees from MIT.
Meet the rest of the Geek
See more examples of things broken at thisisbroken.com. Chorus at popsci.com/h20.
old bulb. Use a soldering
iron to heat the bottom of the
bulb case until you can push
a long resistor lead through
it, and clip the excess. Solder
the hanging LED lead to the
flange of the bulb case. Sol-
der the remaining LED/resistor
pairs in parallel to the first
and stuff them all into the
reflector. Now shine on, you
crazy diamond.

92 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4

SOLDIER OF THE FUTURE
BLENDING IN WITH
BRICK WALLS
A reader inquires: Is the military
developing uniforms that would make
soldiers invisible?
The perfect cloak of Frodo Baggins
is still far off, if not impossible, but
DARPA-funded researchers are work-
ing on a new kind of camouflage that
would fall only a few steps short of
elvish magic. According to Philip
Moynihan, a NASA engineer who
94 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
FACTS,
ANSWERS,
ODDITIES &
ENTERTAINMENTS
FOR A MONTH
OF SCIENCE
published a paper on the subject in
2000, so-called adaptive camouflage
would visually merge soldiers with
their surroundings—whether that’s
an urban backdrop or dense jungle
brush. The basic principle is simple:
Cameras would capture the scene be-
hind the uniform while embedded
displays would reproduce the image
on its front.
With combat shifting increasingly
to urban environments, the need for
adaptive camouflage is stronger than
ever. Today’s uniforms can be a haz-
ard: A soldier in desert fatigues
would stand out like a bull’s-eye
against a red brick wall. But the next-
generation suit would take on the ap-
pearance of the wall, allowing the
soldier to blend into the background.
In the same way that an enemy scan-
ning jungle brush might miss a sol-
dier in classic green-and-brown
camouflage, the uniform’s optical
trickery might cause an urban foe to
glance over the future soldier. “Some-
times it’s fairly easy to confuse the
human eye,” Moynihan says, explain-
ing that the real goal is not invisibil-
ity but simply buying a soldier extra
time to react.
DARPA isn’t exactly sewing to-
gether uniforms just yet—the project
is still in its very early stages, and de-
tails are scant. “They’re doing the re-
search,” Moynihan says, “investigating
the principles involved.” But Moynihan
has no doubts about whether adaptive
camouflage will be a reality for the sol-
dier of the future. “It’s just a matter of
when,” he says.—GREGORY MONE
GUEST TESTIMONIAL
FROM THE WORLD’S
OLDEST MOUSE
I’m lying in my cage half amused, half
depressed, mulling over my new title
as world’s oldest mouse. I turned four
this April. In your world, that means
about 136. That’s right: ancient. Even
my doctor, Richard Miller, a patholo-
gist here at the University of Michi-
gan Geriatrics Center, is amazed at my
longevity. Naturally, the PR folks want
to capitalize on my death-defying
existence, so they have nicknamed
me Yoda. Certainly catchier than my
given lab name, D053, but look or
speak like Yoda I do not.
You probably want to know the se-
cret. Do I hydrate frequently? Sleep a
lot? Actually, the trick is my clinically
short stature. I was born with a natu-
rally occurring gene mutation that
prevents my body from producing
normal amounts of growth hormone,
a chemical pumped out of the pitu-
itary gland in the brain. At 0.4 ounces,
I’m less than half the weight of a nor-
mal mouse. I’m also sterile. The up-
side to my hormone deficiency is
extreme life extension. Except for the
sterility and Napoleonic physique, Doc
N AT H A N F O X
Miller says I have a near perfect bill of
health. Together we have shown con-
FYI
YODA, THE WORLD’S OLDEST MOUSE,
cuddles with his faithful companion, Leia,
the buxom blonde who kept him warm.

clusively—in mice—that too much

growth hormone early on in life
speeds up aging and too little can
slow it down.
Despite our work, thousands of
middle-aged humans are lining up for
weekly injections of synthetic growth
hormone in the hopes that the chemi-
cal will restore their lean muscle
mass, sex drive, energy and countless
other vitals that wane with age and
flagging growth-hormone production.
Sex? Muscles? A little more stamina?
Don’t think I wasn’t tempted to juice
up too. But Doc Miller talked me out
of it. “There is no evidence that GH
administration has benefits that out-
weigh the risks,” he says, “and al-
though more research is still needed,
this mode of therapy is at present un-
justified and potentially dangerous.”
OK, I said, I get the picture.

COURTESY OF DR. RICHARD MILLER, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN MEDICAL SCHOOL

I’d like to say I’ve suffered for sci-
ence, but that wouldn’t be entirely
true. Thanks to my hormone defi-
ciency, which makes it hard for me to
stay warm, I enjoy the very close com-
pany of a full-figured young female
mouse, Princess Leia, whose sole job
is to maintain my body heat (see snap-
shot). I like to say I’m the Woody
Allen of rodents: undersized but
never without a lovely lady close by.
As for Leia, she’s quiet and sweet and
doesn’t seem to mind that I use her as
a living fur coat. Because my thyroid
is kicked and my metabolism is slow
(all courtesy of the gene defect) I’m
also naturally lazy; I rarely do any-
thing except cuddle. The sad part is
that I’ve outlived my nonmutant
loved ones, including two of Leia’s
FYI
predecessors, who typically expire
around age two.
These losses have been tough, but I
do take comfort in the fact that I’m
helping science unravel the mysteri-
ous connection between growth hor-
mone and aging. It’s still astounding
to me to think that a single genetic
mishap can inadvertently extend the
lifespan in mice by an average of 40
percent, and in my case, much more.
Imagine what it could do for humans.
As Doc Miller likes to say, “Curing one
disease at a time is a noble goal, but
it’s significantly less attractive than
learning enough about aging to indefi-
nitely postpone all diseases.”—AS TOLD
TO NICOLE DYER
Editor’s note: Yoda passed away just days
after this interview. Probable cause of
death: old, old, old age. He is survived by
his cage companion, Princess Leia.
BOOK OF THE MONTH
THE BEST-KEPT SECRET IN
SEISMOLOGY
Midwesterners be-
ware: Although you’re
assailed each year by
voracious tornadoes,
crop-flattening hail-
storms and searing
heat waves, it might
be wise to start worry-
ing about what’s going on below the
surface. But earthquakes are just for
Californians, right?
Wrong.
In the not-so-distant past, the re-
gion along the Mississippi River,
where Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee
and Arkansas rub elbows, has played
host to all sorts of seismic shenani-
gans. In the winter months spanning
1811 to 1812, the New Madrid earth-
quakes, so named because their epi-
centers were near the town of New
Madrid, Missouri, rattled the area
with quakes measuring 7.8, 8.0 and
8.2 on the Richter scale. And accord-
ing to Jake Page and Charles Officer’s
The Big One (Houghton Mifflin, $24),
a new book detailing the New Madrid
quakes and their effects, the devasta-
tion was widespread. Whole towns
disappeared under rising waters.
Trees exploded out of the soil. The
ground shook as far away as Mon-
treal. An estimated 1,500 people died.
The Big One promises big thrills and
largely delivers. The explanations of
earthquake pathology shine a clear
light on the science behind the New
Madrid quakes, and although the book
suffers from a lack of organization, the
authors’ eye to the future makes the
story a relevant and gripping read.
They estimate that if another New
Madrid were to rear its quaky head,
there would be an estimated $1 trillion
in damages and hundreds of thou-
sands dead across 24 states.
Which brings us to the burning
question of the modern Midwest-
erner: Is this going to happen again?
Well, eventually. New Madrid’s brand
of geophysical activity is known as
midplate seismicity because it occurs
near the center of a tectonic plate, not
the borderland where two plates grind
together. Scientists suspect that mid-
plate activity results from rising
FYI
magma plumes breaking through the
Earth’s crust, and while there are nu-
merous such rifts across North Amer-
ica, most are ancient and inactive.
New Madrid, on the other hand, has
experienced powerful quakes at least
three times in the past 1,500 years.
The prediction, which the authors
admit amounts to educated guess-
work, puts the chances of a “Son of
New Madrid” happening in this
century at 20 percent. Not an Earth-
shattering number, but enough,
perhaps, to warrant investment in
a seismic retrofit on your home. Or
a move to California.—MARTHA HARBISON
ASTRONOMY ONLINE
SURFING THE NIGHT SKY
Unless you live on a mountaintop,
miles away from civilization, with a
15-inch-wide telescope at your dis-
posal, you will have a hard time top-
ping the celestial view slooh.com gives
you. This new Web service affords
users real-time access to four tele-
scopes perched 7,900 feet above sea
level on the Canary Islands’ Mount
Teide. “We wanted to open up astron-
omy to people for whom the initial
setup cost, their location or the base
knowledge required was prohibitive,”
says Michael Paolucci, Slooh’s presi-
dent and founder. And Slooh—a play
on “slew,” astronomy speak for rotat-
ing a telescope—does a pretty good
job of meeting this goal.
While more knowledgeable as-
tronomers can schedule solo missions
and view whatever they want, those
who think “azimuth” is a Harry Potter
character can opt for group sorties.
These 10-minute tours take Slooh-
goers to the most interesting features
of that particular night’s sky. The site
has a video game look to it, with a
circular window revealing your celes-
tial view in the center and various
controls and bits of data spread about
the perimeter. You can capture snap-
shots, play suitably spacey new-age
music or opt for audio narration
SLOOH, A NEW WEB-BASED ASTRONOMY
tool, offers users access to high-powered
telescopes, providing a portal to the stars.
about what you’re seeing. You can
also zoom in on features of particular
interest and switch between different
telescopes. Eventually, users will be
able to vote on what they want to see,
but for now, Slooh’s staff astronomers
make the call. For $50, you get a year
of unlimited group missions and
15 minutes of solo time. For twice
that amount, you can stargaze alone
for up to 90 minutes. And the best
part may be that you don’t even need
to lose much sleep: The time differ-
ence allows stargazing from 5 p.m.
to 1 a.m. EST. Finally, something
wholesome for Internet addicts to
stare at.—JOE BROWN
(CONTINUED FROM PAGE 54)
the Soteria, it’s expressed by the inte-
grated i-Bean technology, made by Mil-
lennial Net, a Cambridge, Mass., and
Tokyo–based developer of wireless
sensor networks, which creates an office-
wide monitoring system that maps
every chair in the system.
The global village, the emerging ubiq-
uitous network and the definition of
community: These began to blur and
take on different shapes as the judges
made their way through the entries.
What do “community” and “need” mean?
There might, one entry suggested, be an
urgent need for CARE packages that
extends to other species. Community is
a social pattern among creatures, it does-
n’t matter which ones, and need is need.
Over a five-hour dinner at a Mexican
restaurant in Seattle last fall, with not a
small amount of tequila involved, Shawn
Brixey and his students at the DX Arts
Center for Digital Art and Experimental
Media at the University of Washington
102 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4
began to think about whales. The
expertise around the table ran from
acoustics to marine science and robotics.
Ian Ingram, Bret Battey and Brixey fell
into talking about controversial high-
intensity sonar signals—bursts of low-
frequency sound that the Navy is exper-
imenting with to seek out enemy subs.
Studies are tracking the danger these sig-
nals pose to whales, which may be dis-
tracted, deafened, even killed by a sonar
din that could drive them from the deep
in a panic, causing potentially fatal gas-
bubble lesions like the ones divers expe-
rience when they get the bends. Why not
give whales the equivalent of Bose noise-
canceling headphones? And so the con-
cept of Active Noise Reduction Autono-
mous Underwater Vehicles was born.
“Power, wealth, technology, maneu-
verability, the military and impact on
the environment are the essence of
what CARE is about,” Brixey says, “and
we thought an expansion of the con-
cept—though we knew it was a little
wild—would be to address other
species.” Brixey’s team envisioned drone
planes dispatching flocks of robotic subs
(known as autonomous underwater
vehicles, or AUVs). Turning in formation
beside their charges, they pump out
sound waves to counter the damaging
low frequencies. The idea earned the Edi-
tors’ Choice Award for its visionary
reach. But Brixey protests: “It’s not just
visionary. If the Navy wanted to make
the investment, they could do this in a
decade. Drones were used in Afghan-
istan and Iraq. The Navy has tons of
AUV research. We’re artists,” he says.
“You have to dream a little. But we’re
talking about functional machines. This
really isn’t pie in the sky.”
Leave it to Julian LaVerdiere and
Paul Myoda, whose whimsical Urban
Lodestar entry took second prize, to tack-
le pie in the sky. The need LaVerdiere
and Myoda identified was simple: For
city dwellers peering upward, who see
a haze of urban illumination instead of
the pinpricks of the stars, the yearning
and awe that the night sky has so long
inspired is lost.
“We wanted to fulfill unfulfillable
needs,” LaVerdiere says. “I’ve always
liked the aspirational elements of the
optimistic and absurd in Jules Verne.
Light has always had these associations
with both science and mysticism,
whether it be a candle or a laser, and we
were trying to wed them with this
notion of an artificial star—something
rehabilitative to bring back wonder and
raise our spirits.”
After reading back issues of POPULAR
SCIENCE and talking to people at NASA,
the artists conceived a pulsing, artificial
star floating 20 miles up. It would con-
sist of five high-altitude weather bal-
loons linked in a ring, holding aloft a
five-pointed star composed of electro-
luminescent piping and photovoltaic
cells that draw juice from the Sun. Sus-
pended from the rig on electrical cables
are a xenon strobe, battery packs and
navigational boosters.
LaVerdiere and Myoda, who met as
classmates at Yale’s art school in the mid-
1990s, are experts at raising spirits. They
designed the Tribute in Light at Ground
Zero, illuminated precisely six months
after September 11, 2001. Two enor-
mous high-intensity beams, ghostly and
majestic, rose up into the night, evoking
the vanished buildings.
One judge dismissed the Lodestar
project as “galactic TV”; another liked
the idea of using technology to address
a spiritual, or at least quasi-spiritual,
need. What LaVerdiere and Myoda
offer is a gratuitous act of technological
beneficence. Nothing tangible enters
the market economy. Nothing shouts
infrastructure collapse or pollution or
monstrous crimes. This is its winning
charm—a twinkling, xenon-powered
respite from technology through tech-
nology, as far from fear as disasters
are from dreams. ■
Steven Henry Madoff is a writer in New
York City. His book Christopher Wil-
marth: Light and Gravity will be released
in the fall by Princeton University Press.
 LOOKING BACK

MARCH1966
FROM THE POPULAR SCIENCE ARCHIVES

HOW THE SUPERSONIC F-5

GOT ITS GROOVE BACK
Northrop’s versatile little F-5 jet fighter made a comeback in
Vietnam; 40 years later, it’s being rediscovered again.
Lockheed helicopter stows its rotors.

In March 1966, we wrote that the Northrop F-5 supersonic fighter (below) had Other stories from the March 1966 issue:
been plucked from obscurity—it went straight from Air Force training grounds to
the war in Vietnam. The F-5 had been developed a decade earlier to replace
aging F-84s and F-86s in countries receiving U.S. military assistance; at home,
CAN PILLS MAKE YOU SMARTER?
Maybe, if you’re a rodent. Administering
though, it was eclipsed by “supersophisticated fighter-bombers” like the F-105 a magnesium compound to rats increased their
Thunderchief and F-4 Phantom. But the F-5s proved their worth when a squadron learning ability fivefold.
took flight in Vietnam. They “looked like toys,” one pilot said, but their small
size and maneuverability enabled them to follow ground troops into combat, ELECTRIC SOCKS WARM FEET
use sod fields as runways, and outfight faster aircraft. Recently, the F-5 has Heating coils were woven into these electric
been resurrected yet again—it’s being used to test aircraft designs meant to foot-warmers and connected by wires to bat-
suppress sonic booms (see “Whooshhh!,” page 56).—CHRISTINA BRYZA teries on the wearer’s belt. Ice skaters found
the socks useful; today, modified versions are
marketed to hunters.

BLADES STORED IN HELICOPTER

Lockheed designed a helicopter that could stop
its rotor blades and fold them into the fuselage
for fixed-wing flight. This one was never built,
but the desire for such a craft is evergreen
(witness the troubled V-22 Osprey).

FOUR-WAY RUBBER BAND

An H-shaped rubber band stretched four ways to
hold books, stacks of papers, phonograph
records and other odd-shaped packages.

SICK ROBOT
To train medical students, engineers at USC and
Aerojet-General Corp. developed a robot with
a pulse and heartbeat that simulated human
reactions to various maladies.

SUPERINSULATED BLANKET
The aluminized Mylar emergency blanket, now
ubiquitous in emergency kits around the world,
evolved from technology that was developed for
spacecraft insulation.

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120 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 4