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FOR THE NEW ENERGY FUTURE,WE NEED TO TURN MORE IDEAS INTO ACTION.

The world needs more energy and less CO2. To meet that challenge, we need to turn bright ideas into workable solutions – and then make those solutions a reality.

We’re working on a range of innovative projects. Some are still on the drawing board – like developing ways to produce fuel from algae and straw. Others are already being delivered to our customers in many parts of the world – like cleaner-coal technology.

At the same time, we are making our existing fuels cleaner and more efficient, and working on technology to manage CO2 emissions.

To find out how Shell is helping prepare for the new energy future, visit www.shell.us/energytalk





THE TREBUCHET A catapult with attitude. Falling weights or a

pivoting arm supply the extra oomph. Combine it with

a customized sling for the winning fling.

THE CATAPULT

Seriously old school, the ancient Greeks used

to put these in play. Go for the gold and let ‘er rip

with customized springs and winches providing

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THE AIR CANNONCall in the big guns. This bad boy is armed with high-pressure gas that pushes the

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november ’09

POPSCI.COM

contentsthis month’s guide to innovation and discovery

FEATURES

VOLUME 275 #5

POPULAR SCIENCE 05

#�the future of space

42 DEEP-SPACE BOOT CAMPHow do you prepare someone for a

grueling journey beyond low-Earth

orbit? Take a look inside NASA’s new

training program, with the first cohort

of astronauts being groomed for long-

haul space missions. By Dawn Stover

#�POPSCI lab rat

62 PERSONAL CHEMISTRYEvery day, we’re exposed to thousands of man-made molecules, some of which stay in our bodies for decades. How are contaminants in your kitchen affecting you? The new science of biomonitoring tracks these chemicals and what they mean for your health. By Arianne Cohen

#�The Green Dream

68 CLEARLY EFFICIENTLearn from POPULAR SCIENCE’s staff photographer as he constructs a home packed with affordable, environmentally friendly innovations. This month: installing custom, energy-efficient windows. By John B. Carnett

#�POPSCI INNOVATORS

49 BRILLIANT 10Meet POPSCI’s annual selection of the brightest young researchers in the country. They’re helping to keep us healthy, prevent disasters, and make green

energy cheaper than coal. Lucky for us, our future is in their capable hands.

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NASA’s Lunar

Electric Rover during

tests in Arizona



$�MEGAPIXELS

14 Turkeys stuck at the U.S. border; brain electrodes.

$�WHAT’S NEW

19 RECREATIONVenture into the wild with an air-shock snowmobile.

20 THE GOODSA wrench that ratchets; a cellphone made from corn.

22 AUTOThe futuristic cars that could reinvent GM.

24 COMPUTINGMultitouch screens on PCs of every size and shape.

$�HEADLINES

33 MEDICINEA medical-isotope shortage delays millions of health tests.

34 DISASTER TECHProtecting skyscrapers from earthquakes.

36 THE CHECKLISTHow to fix the Large Hadron Collider.

39 EXPERIMENTSSee what survives the Mars torture chamber.

$�HOW 2.0

71 YOU BUILT WHAT?!A real-life replica of the videogame Lunar Lander.

74 REPURPOSED TECHCreate your own e-book reader from an old tablet PC.

76 GRAY MATTERGrinding a mix of metals to make showers of sparks.

78 ASK A GEEKWhat to look for in a host for your Web site.

$�FYI

80 Could Stallone beat a T. rex in arm wrestling?

$�OTHER STUFF

08 FROM THE EDITOR

11 THE INBOX

100 THE FUTURE THEN

CONTENTS

06 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009

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Look at the Stars Inspired by our fully loaded backyard observatory [What’s New, page 26]? See a gallery of the finest amateur astrophotographers’ work and more info on setting up your own camera, at popsci.com/astrophoto.

Gear of the Year It’s almost that time again—time for POPSCI’s annual Best of What’s New list, cataloging the year’s most impressive new tech. We want to hear about your favorite innovations this year in the realm of science and technology. Tell us at popsci.com/bown2009readers.

DIY Kindle Get step-by-step photo instructions for building our DIY Kindle project, at popsci.com/DIYkindle.

REGULARS

NEW SLIDESHOWS AND FEATURES

NASA’S NEW SUIT The Constellation Program isn’t just rockets. After reading about Constellation astronaut training in this issue, take a closer look at their new-and-improved space duds: popsci.com/spacesuit.

POPSCI.COM

Windows 7 Is Here At long last, Microsoft’s successor to Windows Vista was just released, and with it a slew of fresh hardware taking advantage of its new features. Take a tour of the computing gear bringing about the bright future of the Windows PC, at popsci.com/windows7.

14

34

19

GOT QUESTIONS? Send them to [email protected]. We’ve got answers!



TALK ABOUT MAN AND

MACHINE BECOMING ONE.

INTRODUCING THE NEW 2010 MUSTANG.

THERE ARE THOSE WHO CUSTOMIZE THEIR MUSTANGS AND MAKE THEM THEIR OWN.

THEN THERE’S DANIEL VERLARDE. SEE HOW HE UNLEASHES HIS MUSTANG SIDE

BY TAKING CUSTOMIZATION TO A WHOLE NEW LEVEL AT THE2010MUSTANG.COM.



From Here to There


WHEN THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION announced its vision for space explo-ration in January 2004, NASA’s budget was clearly insufficient to the task. Yet NASA continued to pursue the hardware necessary for a base on the moon and a human voyage to Mars, even in the face of mounting evidence that (for instance) the International Space Station will pass its

2016 retire-by date before Ares I, NASA’s ferry to the station, enters service. The rhetoric/reality gap has become a chronic credibility problem for NASA.

In September, the White House received the Augustine Committee’s long-awaited report on the country’s options for human spaceflight, which concluded that within NASA’s $18-billion annual budget, “no plan . . . permits human exploration to continue in any meaningful way.” The panel came up with scenarios for travel

beyond low-Earth orbit that would require the Obama administration to pony up an additional $3 billion or so a year. In this economy, that’s hard to imagine.

So where does that leave us? I think we’ll extend the functioning life of the International Space Station to at least 2020. We’ll keep the space shuttle flying well beyond next year, to bridge the gap in our ability to fly humans to low-Earth orbit and to serve as a platform for the development of the agency’s next heavy-lift rocket. NASA will help foster private space companies’ ability to get astronauts to the ISS, so that the agency can set its sights on more-distant targets. It will begin planning human rendez-vous with asteroids and other interim destinations, building to the big kahuna several decades hence: human bootprints on Mars.

The astronauts in this year’s class will spend months on the ISS, and they might make one of those interim asteroid-hops leading up to the main event—but it’s highly unlikely that any will make the giant leap to Mars. And yet nine young Americans—including POPSCI Bril-liant 10 honoree Kate Rubins [see page 49]—are eagerly embarking on the gruel-ing training regimen we detail in our cover story [page 42]. Amid all the uncertainty about NASA, it’s inspiring to see some of the nation’s most accomplished young scientists still chasing the stars. MARK JANNOT

[email protected]

THE RHETORIC/

REALITY GAP

HAS BECOME

A CHRONIC

PROBLEM

FOR NASA.

FROM THE EDITOR

JOH

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Editor-in-Chief Mark JannotDeputy Editor Jacob WardCreative Director Sam Syed

EDITORIALExecutive Editor Mike HaneyFeatures Editor Nicole DyerEditorial Production Manager Felicia PardoCopy and Research Director Rina BanderSenior Associate Editors Lauren Aaronson, Doug Cantor, Bjorn Carey, Seth Fletcher, Martha HarbisonAssociate Editor Corinne IozzioAssistant Editor Susannah F. LockeEditorial Assistant Amy GeppertEditor at Large Dawn StoverContributing Technology Editor Steve MorgensternContributing Editors Eric Adams, Theodore Gray, Eric Hagerman, Joseph Hooper, Preston Lerner, Gregory Mone, Rena Marie Pacella, Catherine Price, Dave Prochnow, Jessica Snyder Sachs, Rebecca Skloot, Mike Spinelli, Elizabeth Svoboda, Kalee Thompson, Phillip Torrone, James Vlahos, Speed WeedContributing Troubadour Jonathan CoultonEditorial Intern Carina Storrs

ART AND PHOTOGRAPHYArt Director Matthew CokeleyPhoto Editor Kristine LaMannaStaff Photographer John B. CarnettSenior Designer Stephanie O’Hara Contributing Artists Kevin Hand, Nick Kaloterakis, Graham Murdoch, Bob Sauls, Paul Wootton Photo Intern Jack ForbesProduction Intern Jodi Tong

POPSCI.COMDigital Content Director John MahoneyDigital Content Manager Taylor HengenAssociate Web Editor Paul Adams

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Chairman Jonas BonnierChief Executive Officer Terry SnowChief Operating Officer Dan AltmanChief Financial Officer Randall KoubekVice President, Consumer Marketing Bruce MillerVice President, Production Lisa EarlywineVice President, E-Media Bill AllmanVice President, Digital Sales & Marketing John HaskinVice President, Enterprise Systems Shawn LarsonVice President, Human Resources Cathy HertzVice President, Corporate Communications Dean TurcolBrand Director John MillerPublishing Consultant Martin S. WalkerCorporate Counsel Jeremy Thompson For service anytime, please use our Web site: popsci.com/ customerservice. You can also call 800-289-9399; for Canadian and foreign, please call 386-597-4279. Or you may write to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235.

THEFUTURE

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iii�Get the electrifying answer and challenge your friends at sciencechannel.com/headgames.

WHAT’S THE AVERAGE LENGTH OF A LIGHTNING BOLT?

Surprising video. Tricky questions. Cold hard cash. Hosted by Greg Proops.HEAD GAMES

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The paper used for this magazine comes from certi-fied forests that are managed in a sustainable way to meet the social, economic and environ-mental needs of present and future generations.

HACK ATTACKSThe technology, cost and stand-off safety of unmanned warfare is seductive—but I worry that a clever software attack on our communications and positioning software could bring down our Air Force in one keystroke. Ronald A. BarkerMishawaka, Ind.

WAR ON WORDSI’ve enjoyed your magazine for many years but found your last issue distasteful. “Point. Click. Kill” is a horrific headline. You are promoting the notion that we can kill anyone, anywhere, as we please. That is not a step forward but 100 steps backward. I prefer to read publications that explore innovations in saving lives, not killing them.David G. HuebnerVia e-mail

CorrectionsIn The Future Then [Sept.], we referred to Hellcats as the fastest jets of their time. Hellcats were propeller-driven, and not the fastest aircraft.

In “The Next Grid” [July], we wrote that Southern California Edison supplies power to Los Angeles and San Diego. According to a

spokesperson, the company services “most of Southern California’s coastal, inland, desert and metro communities,” but not those cities.

The “water-walking shoes” mentioned in FYI [Sept.] are a concept, not a product. Wavewalk does, however, sell a kayak for stand-up paddling (wavewalk.com).

Our September back-to-school

issue scouted the country’s most

talented college-bound inventors,

explored the best ways to score

a free education online, and

discovered hands-on science

courses for adventurous students.

Eric Hagerman’s cover story “Point.

Click. Kill” earned both praise and

criticism for its reporting on the

future of unmanned fighter planes

and the shortage of pilots to fly

them. Want to join the conversation?

E-mail us at [email protected].

THE INBOX [email protected]

NOVEMBER 2009 POPULAR SCIENCE 11







POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009

RO

Y T

OFT

A trio of turkeys peacefully gobbles corn-

meal on a cattle ranch in northern Mex-

ico. But a fence may cut off the chuck-

wagon. Last February, Roy Toft, a fellow

at the International League of Conserva-

tion Photographers, photographed these

turkeys for an ILCP project documenting

wildlife around the first few hundred

miles of the 18-foot metal wall that the

U.S. Department of Homeland Security is

building along the border. Defenders of

Wildlife, a Washington, D.C.–based non-

profit partnering with ILCP, predicts that

the wall could interfere with the habitat

or migration (and therefore the feed-

ing and mating opportunities) of some

40 endangered and threatened species,

including jaguars and ocelots. “I started

the project in hopes of broadening our

discussion of [the wall’s] environmental

factors,” says ILCP member Krista Schlyer,

who recruited Toft for the project. This

month, Toft’s work will be exhibited for

the U.S. Senate. BY CARINA STORRS

FOWL LINETHE U.S.-MEXICO FENCE PROTECTS THE BORDER BUT COULD ENDANGER ANIMALS

BORDER PATROL The U.S.-

Mexico border fence could

affect turkey populations if

the birds cannot fly over an

18-foot enclosure to find addi-

tional food sources.

the must-see photos of the month

14

A trio of turkeys peacefully gobbles corn-

meal on a cattle ranch in northern Mex-

ico. But a fence may cut off the chuck-

wagon. Last February, Roy Toft, a fellow

at the International League of Conserva-

tion Photographers, photographed these

turkeys for an ILCP project documenting

wildlife around the first few hundred

miles of the 18-foot metal wall that the

U.S. Department of Homeland Security is

building along the border. Defenders of

Wildlife, a Washington, D.C.–based non-

profit partnering with ILCP, predicts that

the wall could interfere with the habitat

or migration (and therefore the feed-

ing and mating opportunities) of some

40 endangered and threatened species,

including jaguars and ocelots. “I started

the project in hopes of broadening our

discussion of [the wall’s] environmental

factors,” says ILCP member Krista Schlyer,

who recruited Toft for the project. This

month, Toft’s work will be exhibited for

the U.S. Senate. BY CARINA STORRS

THE U.S.-MEXICO FENCE PROTECTS THE BORDER BUT COULDENDANGER ANIMALS

BORDER PATROL The U.S.-

Mexico border fence could

affect turkey populations if

the birds cannot fly over an

18-foot enclosure to find addi-

tional food sources.

the must-see photos



POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE

See more amazing photos at popsci.com/gallery.

15

See more amazing photos at popsci.com/gallery.




THINKING CAPTINY SURFACE ELECTRODES COULD HELP PARALYZED PEOPLE MOVE

Bundles of microelectrode wires fan

out over a small area of a human brain.

These electrodes were placed by neuro-

surgeons at the University of Utah to see

if they could detect precise brain activity

associated with motor movements. To

their surprise, the hair’s-width micro-

electrodes, originally designed to study

epilepsy, picked up the firings of small

groups of neurons despite being merely

set on the surface of the brain. Previ-

ously, this fine tracking was possible only

by inserting wire probes directly into

brain tissue, a potentially risky maneuver

because, though thin, the probes can

still damage nerve cells during insertion.

Now the researchers are testing designs

that cover more of the brain’s surface.

“Our goal is to develop something [that

sends signals to a robotic arm] that will

be implanted into paralyzed patients and

give them some control to interact with

their environment,” says Bradley Greger,

a professor of bioengineering who over-

saw the work. BY CARINA STORRS

CO

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KELLY

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POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 17

See more amazing images at popsci.com/gallery.

ON YOUR MIND Doctors placed these 40-

micron-wide electrodes onto the brains of

patients who were already having part of

their skulls removed to study epilepsy.



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tech that puts the future in the palm of your hand

26The ultimate setup

for stargazers


24iPhone-like laptops

—from Microsoft

30Clean your clothes

with plastic

SHOCK OF WINTERThe 2010 snowmobile season, which begins this month, will

see daredevils in places they couldn’t reach before: in deeper

powder, on remote cliffs, squeezing between trees. That’s

because the first full air-suspension sled swaps the usual

heavy steel coils for air-filled shock absorbers, creating a

smoother, 20-pounds-lighter machine. Riders can easily

steer the FX Nytro MTX SE 162 with their weight, glide it

nearly drag-free through powder, and unstick it from drifts.

Engineers from Yamaha and Fox Racing Shox

developed a rear shock that holds enough air to support a

snowmobile’s force yet still fits into the tight quarters near the

tracks. They took a skinny air cylinder and tacked on a small

external tank, boosting the volume by 30 percent but increasing

the shock’s girth at only one end. Users can adjust the pressure

inside with a simple bicycle-like pump, injecting more air for

heavier riders or a stiffer, faster ride, and releasing air for

lighter riders or a cushier ride. The result is more fun for more

people, on trails or off.–Mark Anders

YAMAHA FX NYTRO MTX SE 162

ENGINE: 4-stroke, 1049cc

HORSEPOWER: 130

SHOCKS: up to 14 in. travel

PRICE: $12,600

GET IT: yamaha-motor.com

AN AIR-SHOCK SNOWMOBILE LETS ADVENTURERS EXPLORE MORE TERRITORY




THE

By Corinne Iozzio

GOODS12 MUST-HAVE PRODUCTS

WHAT’S NEW

ALL IN YOUR HEAD

Even when it’s noisy, this

Bluetooth headset will only

pick up your voice. In loud

conditions, its mics can turn

off, and a vibration sensor

on the earbud re-creates

your voice from sound waves

transmitted through your jaw.

Motorola Endeavor HX1 $130;

motorola.com

PLAY IT COOL

This desktop

gaming PC shape-

shifts to keep from

overheating. Five

vents on top of the

Aurora ALX open when

its internal fans speed

up, helping air circulate to its

core. Alienware Aurora ALX

From $1,000; alienware.com

TRICK GRIP

This wrench combines the best of

open-ended designs and closed

ratchets. It fits into tight spots

like an open wrench does, and a

spring-loaded button inside the

head allows it to swivel back and

forth without letting go of the

bolt, like a ratchet. Craftsman

Dual Ratcheting Wrench (set of

eight) $100; craftsman.com

WEB VIDEO

WONDER

Watch Web videos on your

TV without a PC. This mini-

computer connects to your

network and TV to let you

browse and stream 300,000 free

videos—including 6,000 in high

definition—from ABC, CNN and

more, all from the comfort of

your couch. WebTVPlug

$100; webtview.com

ROLL WITH IT The Transroller handles skinny

loads better than ordinary dollies

do. A clamp inside tightly grips

boards of up to 1,000 pounds,

and its wheels separate to

stay balanced as weight

increases. Transroller

$300; transroller.ca

SNAKE EYES

Find and document leaks inside

walls or under the floor. The

Spector snaking monitor takes

photos and video in tight spots

using a 1.3-megapixel camera

and LED light on a three-foot

bendable arm. Milwaukee

Tool M12 M-Spector AV

$400; milwaukeetool.com




POPS

CI PI C

K O

F T

HE M

ON

TH

FRAME SHIFT

The 10.4-inch touchscreen

Vizit is the first digital

frame to receive and

send photos over a

cellular network. You

can also use VizitMe.com

to send shots to friends’

frames. Vizit $280 plus

monthly subscription;

isabellaproducts.com

APPS GO WIDE

Archos’s 500-gigabyte tablet is

among the first nonphone Android

devices. Apps designed for its

larger, five-inch screen, like the

ebuddy chat client, can have

wider layouts and larger buttons

than on Android smartphones.

It also has an HDMI port to send

HD video to your TV. Archos 5

Internet Tablet $500; archos.com

LIGHT ENTERTAINMENT

The trim new PlayStation 3 has shed

nearly three pounds. And thanks to

an update to its powerful processor

and more-efficient fans, the 120-

gigabyte Slim also uses 10 percent

less power and runs cooler than its

bulky 80-gigabyte predecessor, without

sacrificing any of its performance.

Sony PlayStation 3 Slim $300; us.playstation.com

MEASURE UP

This cup ensures exact

measurements. An internal scale

and computer chip convert the

weight of five ingredients—water,

milk, flour, sugar and oil—to

cups, fluid ounces or milliliters.

Taylor Digital Measuring Cup

and Scale $35; taylorusa.com

CORN-FED CALLING

Forty percent of the Reclaim is

made from corn instead of the

petroleum used in most plastics.

Its bioplastic begins as corn sugar,

which becomes a resin that's

molded into the back and battery

cover. Samsung Reclaim

$130; sprint.com

PERSONAL PAPARAZZO

Meet your new event photographer. The Party-

shot cradle pivots 360 degrees around and

24 up or down while a docked Sony camera

scans the room for faces. When it sees one,

the cradle stops, the camera snaps, and then

it starts searching again. Sony Party-shot

$150; sonystyle.com



WHAT’S NEW AUTO

GM’S COMEBACK TRAILSNEAK

PEEK

FOUR MORE GM HOPEFULS

WHAT A LEANER, GREENER GENERAL MOTORS WILL LOOK LIKE

We the people already own 61 percent of General Motors.

Now GM has to convince us to buy another stake in it: a new

car. Fresh from bankruptcy, the company’s survival hinges on

cranking out appealing designs that Americans want today.

That means fewer supersized pickups and SUVs and more

efficient cars and crossovers—a fleet for an age of volatile gas

prices and a federal requirement that cars get 35 miles per

gallon by 2016. Here are the key models GM will offer in the

next few years.—Lawrence Ulrich

CADILLAC CTS COUPE

On Sale: summer 2010

With GM down to four brands—Chevy, GMC, Buick and

Cadillac—it’s up to Caddy to win some battles in the brutal

luxury arena. GM’s contender is the two-door CTS, which

adopts nearly all the good stuff from the acclaimed CTS

sedan: a direct-injection 3.6-liter V6 with 304 horsepower,

edge-of-seat handling and Lexus-like interior refinement.

Since some luxury buyers still care more about rpm than

mpg, a forthcoming CTS-V version will strike fear into Benzes

and BMWs with its 556-horsepower supercharged V8.

CHEVROLET CRUZE

On Sale: spring 2010

GM has struggled to deliver

a small car that can go toe-

to-toe with affordable city

cars like the Honda Civics and

Toyota Corollas of the world.

The 2011 Cruze should put up

a fight. This five-passenger

sedan features an optional

turbocharged 1.4-liter, 140-

horsepower engine that could

top 40 miles per gallon.

BUICK REGAL

On Sale: 2010

Less generic, less geriatric—

that’s GM’s plan for the Buick

brand. The second half of

2010 marks the return of the

Regal name. The midsize

sedan will closely mimic the

Regal now sold in China,

itself a reworked version

of Europe’s sleekly modern

Opel Insignia. Expect a frugal

four-cylinder engine and the

optional turbocharged 2.8-

liter V6 that currently drives

the Cadillac SRX. After the

Regal, Buick is expected to

unveil a midsize crossover.

CHEVROLET SPARK

On Sale: Late 2011

With wedgy styling and

a motorcycle-inspired

instrument cluster, the Spark,

a little hatchback that’s the

antithesis of the “old” GM, is

aimed at the younger set. Yet

anyone may be intrigued by

the price—roughly $12,000 to

start—and the fuel economy:

better than 40 mpg in

combined city/highway driving.

CHEVROLET

ORLANDO On Sale: 2011

In a post-SUV age,

maximizing interior space

while minimizing fuel

consumption is paramount.

The Chevy Orlando takes its

design cues from compact,

European-market minivans

like GM’s popular Opel Zafira.

Built on the Cruze platform,

the Orlando carves out

space for seven adults, with

second- and third-row seats

that fold flat. It will probably

be available with 1.8-liter and

turbo 1.4-liter gas engines.

CO

UR

TE

SY

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OT

OR

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3)

POPSCI.COM22 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009





WHAT’S NEW COMPUTING

CLO

CK

WIS

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OP: C

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FU

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; C

OU

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MSI; C

OU

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LEN

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O; SC

REEN

SH

OT: C

OU

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MIC

RO

SO

FT

THE TREND

Multitouch screens, which

can register more than

one finger-press at a

time, will let computers

trade keyboards and

mice for simple strokes

and pinches. The models

shown here are just the

start. Nearly every major

PC maker will introduce

touch-y designs of various

shapes and sizes in the

coming months.

WHY NOW

Microsoft Windows 7, which

launches October 22, is

the first major computer

operating system designed

to work with multitouch

displays. Because it

incorporates the software

code needed to understand

your gestures,

manufacturers can now

include these screens more

easily than ever before.

HOW YOU’LL

BENEFIT

Use your fingers instead

of a mouse in almost any

program; for instance,

pinch to zoom out in Google

Earth, or drag a finger to

scroll through a Web page

in Firefox. Developers are

also beginning to build

applications that use touch

in new and more-creative

ways—such as in 3-D

design programs that let

you morph virtual products

with a twist—so that

formerly complicated tasks

will become as easy as a

tap.—Amanda Schupak

TECH

TREND

PCS GET HANDYMICROSOFT’S NEW OS BRINGS IPHONE-LIKE MULTITOUCH TECH TO COMPUTERS

� THE TABLETLose the keyboard entirely with a laptop whose display spins

and folds to hide the keys. You can use a stylus to write or draw

precisely, since the 13.3-inch screen includes both a flesh-

sensing capacitive layer and the same electronic-pen-based

layer used by graphic artists. Don’t worry about penmanship:

Windows 7 boasts better handwriting recognition. Fujitsu Life-

Book T5010 with Multitouch Option From $1,860; fujitsu.com

��THE DESKTOPA 21.5-inch widescreen display makes it easy for even

big fingers to hit their mark. Tap where you want to enter

text, and up pops Windows 7’s virtual keyboard, which

you can enlarge to take advantage of the big screen.

Poke at letters using either your fingers or the end of

a pencil, since the camera-based optical touchscreen

can detect when any opaque object comes in contact.

MSI Wind Top All-in-One PC From $730; us.msi.com

��THE LAPTOPThe T400s looks like an ordinary 14.1-inch

laptop, but a touchscreen frees you from

the tiny cursor. For instance,

you can rearrange

two photos at once by

dragging them, or party-

goers can point at a song they want to

hear. Its capacitive screen senses the electrical con-

ductivity of fingers and even recognizes up to four touches at a time.

Lenovo T400S with Multitouch Option From $2,000; lenovo.com




5",&��53"$,4�'3&& �7*4*5�@ 888�&.64*$�$0.�1014$*

Get up to 25 music downloads free with a 7-day eMusic trial subscription. Offer available to first-time eMusic customers only located in the USA. Your free trial expires 7 days after registration. Certain songs will not be available during free your trial. Internet access, registration, and credit or debit card required. Limited time offer. Your subscription remains free until you exceed your free trial credits or your free trial expires. Offer and eMusic's prices are subject to change without notice and are subject to eMusic's terms of use. eMusic and the eMusic logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of eMusic.com Inc in the USA and other countries. All Right Reserved. eMusic is not responsible for products, services, or claims made by Popular Science.

*1/2 price claim is based on (1) eMusic’s most popular Monthly Basic Plan (24 songs for $11.99) and assuming that all monthly downloads are utilized, and (2) other download stores’ price of $0.99 a track.

.64*$�5)"5μ4�0''�5)&$)"354�"5�13*$&4

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WHAT’S NEW RECREATION

MY SPACE

What a heavenly year for stargazers. We’ve had a spectacular solar eclipse in

Asia, a clutch rescue of the Hubble Space Telescope, and the surprising crash

of a comet into Jupiter—discovered, no less, by an amateur astronomer. Try

the gear below to find the next marvel yourself.—Eric Adams

FULLY

LOADED THIS BACKYARD OBSERVATORY LETS YOU SEE MORE STARS THAN EVER BEFORE

EYEPIECE

Add this eyepiece to

your scope to see

an entire galaxy at

once. Its steeply

curved lenses offer a

100-degree apparent

field of view, double

the norm. It’s also the

first eyepiece that’s

waterproof and filled

with nitrogen, so it

won’t fog up or develop

mold inside. Explore

Scientific 14mm

100° Eyepiece $500;

explorescientific.com

MOUNT Keep your scope steady anywhere. The MiniTower Pro,

at five inches wide, is the most portable mount that can secure a

35-pound scope atop a tripod. The handheld controller lets you turn

it precisely, or the motor, GPS and computer chip can direct the

scope themselves. iOptron MiniTower Pro $1,300; ioptron.com

SOFTWARE This app turns your iPhone or iPod into a celestial

tour guide. Browse through its database of 2.5 million stars, or

let it identify constellations as you hold the latest iPhone up to the

sky—it uses the 3GS’s built-in GPS, accelerometer and compass to

determine what it’s pointing at. Starmap Pro $19; star-map.fr

CAMERA Track star movement or meteor flybys

even when not at your scope. This weatherproof fish-eye

camera sits outside to constantly save photos and video

of the entire sky. The image sensor, tuned to the stars’ dim

glow, snaps sub-megapixel shots to store hundreds for time-

lapse photography. It beams pics to the Web over a Bluetooth or

wired link to a computer. SBIG AllSky-340C $2,200; sbig.com

TELESCOPE

The design first used

by Galileo 400

years ago this

year—which

bends light with

lenses, not

simpler mirrors

—still produces

the sharpest images

available to amateurs.

This modern version

uses a six-inch lens for

wide views, but costs

half as much as others,

thanks to efficient

glass manufacturing.

AstroTelescopes 152-

mm Giant Wide Field

Refractor From $800;

handsonoptics.com

BR

IAN

KLU

TC

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71%

89%

VGU00565A ©2009 Pfi zer Inc. All rights reserved.

Doctor portrayal.

You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit www.FDA.gov/medwatch or call 1-800-FDA-1088.

The hardest part about having ‘the talk’ is getting those first few words out. Here are some ideas to help you break the ice when your doctor asks how everything’s going:

The Direct Approach: “I have trouble sometimes in bed. Could it be ED?”

The Indirect Approach: “Is it true age affects sexual performance?”

The Silent Approach: Just hand this ad to yourdoctor, he’ll take it from there.

Need Some Ideas on How to Open Up to Your Doctor?

Your Doctor Talks to Men About ED Every Day Your doctor will tell you that there is something you can do about your erectile dysfunction (ED). In fact, millions of men over 40 have already taken the first step and talked to their doctor about ED. And so can you.

Important Safety Information

I thought at my age therewas nothing I could do about it, then I had

‘the talk’ with my doctor.

We know that no medicine is for everyone. Don’t take VIAGRA if you take nitrates, often prescribed for chest pain, as this may cause a sudden unsafe drop in blood pressure.

Talk with your doctor first. Make sure your heart is healthy enough to have sex. If you have chest pain, nausea, or other discomforts during sex, seek medical help right away.

As with any ED tablet, in the rare event of an erection lasting more than four hours, seek immediate medical help to avoid long-term injury.

In rare instances, men who take PDE5 inhibitors (oral erectile dysfunction medicines, including VIAGRA) reported a sudden decrease or loss of vision, or sudden decrease or loss of hearing. It is not possible to determine whether these events are related directly to these medicines or to other factors. If you experience any of these symptoms, stop taking PDE5 inhibitors, including VIAGRA, and call a doctor right away.

The most common side effects of VIAGRA are headache, facial f lushing, and upset stomach. Less common are bluish or blurred vision, or being sensitive to light. These may occur for a brief time.

VIAGRA does not protect against sexually transmitted diseases including HIV.

Please see Important Facts for VIAGRA on the following page or visit viagra.com for full prescribing information.

For free information, including questions to ask your doctor, call 1-888-4VIAGRA (1-888-484-2472).

Did you know half of all guys over 40 have some form of ED? Here are some numbers to keep in mind from a recent survey of men with ED:

Running the Numbers

To learn more about VIAGRA for the treatment of ED, and ED in general, visit viagra.com today. You’ll find an online sexual health quiz, videos of guys with ED who’ve had the VIAGRA Talk and other helpful information.

Over 20 million men have already had their VIAGRA Talk. Isn’t it time you had yours?

Tell Me More

of men were anxious about talking to their doctor about ED.

of men felt relieved after talking to their doctor.



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Uninsured? Need help paying for Pfizer medicine? Pfizerhas programs that can help. Call 1-866-706-2400 or visit www.PfizerHelpfulAnswers.com.



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WHAT’S NEW HOME TECH

DRY CLEANINGWHAT’S

NEXT

IN RELATED NEWS: APPLIANCES THAT KNOW WHEN TO RUN

Soon your washer could make financial decisions.

GE’s upcoming Demand Response appliances

communicate with the electric company, so they

can choose to run at lower wattage when energy

demand is high. That can reduce the need for more

power plants and, as utilities begin to charge more

during peak hours, save consumers cash.

The appliances depend on new home electric

meters, in development by some local utilities, that

contain a cellphone chip or other long-distance

transceiver to download citywide energy-use infor-

mation. The meters route this info to home refrig-

erators, washers and microwaves outfitted with

shorter-range transceivers, such as low-power radio

chips. The appliances can then run at full blast

during the cheapest periods and ramp down, or

even turn off, during expensive periods; customers

can override the settings if they really need to nuke

dinner. GE is now conducting trials with Louisville

Gas and Electric. Look for Demand Response

appliances, as well as widespread time-of-use

pricing, in 2011 or 2012.—Sarah Parsons

A WASHING MACHINE THAT SWAPS WATER

FOR DIRT-BUSTING PLASTIC

COOL MONEY A Demand Response fridge can

delay a defrost cycle until electricity is cheap.

How to Clean

Your Clothes

with Plastic

Nylon beads sit in the outer of two nested

drums. When both drums rotate, the absorbent

beads fall through the mesh of the inner

drum to tumble with your laundry, where

they dislodge and trap dirt. After the wash

cycle finishes, the outer drum stops moving

and centripetal force pushes the beads back

through the mesh into the outer drum, where

they await your next mess.

FR

OM

TO

P: B

RIA

N K

LU

TC

H; PA

UL W

OO

TTO

N; C

OU

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GE

Clean your clothes without putting

them—or your utility bills—through

the wringer. Xeros’s prototype washing

machine uses 90 percent less water

than ordinary models, which also

eliminates energy-intensive spin cycles

and dryer blasts.

The machine replaces all but one

tenth of the usual water and about one

third of the usual detergent with 0.1-inch

plastic beads, reusable for hundreds of

washes. The beads are made of the same

nylon as many carpets, because the pro-

perties that make nylon easy to stain also

make it a great scrubber: Its polarized

molecules attract soil, and in the humidity

created by a little water, the polymer

chains separate slightly to absorb grime

and lock it into the beads’ cores.

Xeros aims to put machines in

commercial laundries next year,

where they will use eight gallons

of water instead of 80 for each

45-pound load. They

may be cleaning your

favorite T-shirts

at home within

several years.

—Jill Singer






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to impress her.

He was a

hardworking farm boy.

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headlinesdiscoveries, advances and debates in science

An earthquake-proof

skyscraper

34The Martian torture

chamber

39

POPSCI.COM NOVEMBER 2009 POPULAR SCIENCE 33

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UN

IVER

SIT

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F M

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The Chalk River nuclear reactor in Ontario

doesn’t sell a watt of electricity. Never has.

But when it sprang a leak and shut down

this spring, it threw a multibillion-dollar

industry into crisis. Before it broke, the reactor

produced nearly two thirds of the U.S. supply

of molybdenum-99, or Mo-99, the isotope

behind 16 million critical diagnostic medical

tests each year. In July, things got worse: The

Dutch reactor that supplied the remaining

third shut down for a month of repair work.

Nuclear imaging is used on tens of

thousands of patients every day to take pictures

of their hearts, lungs, kidneys, bones, brains

and other organs. Doctors inject isotopes

into a patient and use a radiation-sensitive

camera to locate blood clots and tumors or to

diagnose seizures, among other things. Mo-99

is critical for about 80 percent of all nuclear-

medicine tests because as it decays, it releases

a daughter isotope called technetium-99m,

which is energetic enough for the camera to

see, but its short, six-hour half-life means

it conveniently decays to practically nothing

after 24 hours. Unfortunately, Mo-99 can’t be

stockpiled for more than a few days.

With the two main reactors down, Mo-99

became scarce. “We were getting 10 percent

of what we normally get,” says Michael

NUCLEAR DROUGHT

MEDICINE

A DWINDLING SUPPLY OF MEDICAL ISOTOPES MEANS PATIENTS MIGHT NOT GET THE TESTS THEY NEED

!!! !!!AUGUST 2 Scientists confirm the first case of a person infected with HIV from gorillas, proving that new strains of the virus can jump to humans.

Graham, president of the Society of

Nuclear Medicine. “We had to cancel and

postpone tests throughout the country.”

Doctors resorted to procedures that were

less effective or that exposed patients to

higher radiation levels. Some tests, such as

one that tracks the spread of cancer from

breasts to lymph nodes, have no substitute,

forcing patients to wait in line or do without.

Just five reactors supply 95 percent

of the world’s Mo-99, and they’re all past

their prime. A nuclear reactor’s average

life span is 40 to 50 years. Chalk River is

52 years old. The Dutch reactor—which

came back online in August—is 47. The

other three, in France, South Africa and

Belgium, are 42, 43 and 47, respectively. In

1996, Canada boldly tried to replace them

all with its own two-reactor facility, called

MAPLE, that would pump out enough

Mo-99 to supply the whole world. Other

reactor-builders, figuring they would be

The LHC’s restart

repair list

36

LEFT IN THE DARK Without

Mo-99 isotopes, doctors can’t

perform lifesaving diagnostic

tests, such as SPECT scans

[left], which help locate

tumors. One plan is to retrofit

the University of Missouri

Research Reactor [below] to

make Mo-99, but that won’t be

completed until 2012.




HEADLINES

DISASTER TECH

PARTING THE WAVESBURIED RINGS PROTECT BUILDINGS FROM EARTHQUAKES

crushed by MAPLE’s massive output, stayed

out of the isotope-making business. But

MAPLE engineers found a set of flaws in

the reactors, and last spring, after spending

$600 million—several times the project’s

budget—Canada officially killed it. “That

was our big ‘oh, sh-t’ moment,” says Steve

Mattmuller, chief nuclear pharmacist at

Kettering Medical Center in Ohio. “We were

right back where we were 20 years ago, but

now our reactors were 20 years older.”

Since the MAPLE debacle, two long-

term solutions have been put into motion.

The nuclear-power firm Babcock &

Wilcox plans to build a facility to supply

half the U.S. Mo-99 market. And this

summer, Congressman Edward Markey of

Massachusetts introduced a $163-million

bill for domestic Mo-99 production, some of

which could be used to retrofit a reactor at

the University of Missouri that could fill the

other half. But neither project are likely to

be done before 2012.

The Mo-99 supply is back to 70

percent, but not for long. The Dutch

pushed January’s six-month maintenance

shutdown back to the spring in hopes that

the Chalk River reactor will be back up

by then, but the repairs are so extensive

that the Canadian government might shut

!!! AUGUST 6 Obese people have 8 percent less brain tissue, neurologists find, increasing their risk of Alzheimer’s. AUGUST 16 NASA confirms the comet Wild 2 contains glycine.

The earliest known attempt at earthquake-proofing dates

to the sixth century B.C., when builders in modern-day

Iran inserted stone blocks between a structure and its

foundation to reduce vibrations. Today’s engineers buffer

buildings with metal springs, ball bearings and rubber

pads, all designed to sop up the energy from seismic

waves. This summer, a team of physicists at the University

of Liverpool in England and the French National Centre for

Scientific Research tested a different strategy: redirect the

waves altogether. Instead of absorbing tremors, a shield

buried around a skyscraper simply reroutes them, like

water running around a boulder.

The design consists of a concrete-and-plastic plate

of concentric rings that encircles the foundation. The

materials are arranged from stiffest to most flexible from

the outer ring to the innermost. Waves follow the path of

least resistance toward stiffer rings and bend away from

the foundation as they pass through the plate. Computer

simulations show that it could protect against the most

destructive 70 percent of waves that travel horizontally in

the soil from the epicenter. In theory, “this could protect

any structure,” says Michael Tantala, a civil engineer and

earthquake expert at Tantala Associates in Philadelphia.

Engineers will probably combine traditional dampeners

with the plate because it doesn’t protect against all types

of waves, yet it could be particularly useful in areas where

waves traveling horizontally are more destructive, such as

parts of Seattle and San Francisco. “Everything around the

building will be devastated,” says Sebastien Guenneau, one

of the plate’s developers, “but the building itself will stay

still.” Next year, engineers will test a two-foot-wide model

of the design, and the tech could be on both new and old

buildings as early as 2014.

—CARINA STORRSG

RA

HA

M M

UR

DO

CH

HOW TO HIDE A BUILDING

FROM SEISMIC WAVES

INSTALLATION Workers

bury the plate [A] within at

least the top three feet of

soil—where most horizontal

quake waves travel—around

the foundation, leaving a

three-foot gap between the

underlying bedrock [B] and the

plate so the plate can vibrate

as waves pass through.

DETOUR During an earth-

quake, waves in the soil [C]

move through the concrete

and plastic plate, the rings

of which become stiffer

farther out from the core.

Waves travel more easily

through hard materials,

much as it’s easier for a

person to run on a road

than on mud. Each

time the wave hits a softer

layer, a bending force deflects

it from its path toward a stiffer

ring away from the building.

EXIT About halfway around

the plate, the bending force

weakens, and the waves’

forward momentum propels

them on their original

path [D].

C



WITHOUT MO-99, MEDICINE MAY AGAIN BECOME A DANGEROUS GUESSING GAME.


Chalk River down for good. With the two

largest suppliers out, the world will again

be forced to scrape by.

As Mo-99 production trickles, certain

procedures may once more become the

high-stakes guessing games that they

were before radioactive diagnostics.

During this summer’s drought, Jim Ponto,

chief nuclear pharmacist at the University

of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, had to put

patients on a weeks-long waiting list. One

of his patients opted to skip a Tech-99m

procedure that would measure the spread

of her cancer and minimize the extent of

surgery. She couldn’t bear waiting a week

for the test and instead went straight to

the operating room. Cases like hers make

Ponto nervous. “The cancer could spread,”

he says, “and the doctor would never

know it.”—PAT WALTERS

!!! The amino acid is the first ingredient for proteins found in a comet. AUGUST 18 Mathematical models suggest that the best way to thwart a zombie attack is a swift offense.

A

B

D




CO

UR

TESY

CER

N

HEADLINES

THE CHECKLIST

Before scientists can put the Large

Hadron Collider back to work this

month solving the mysteries of

particle physics, the LHC’s engi-

neers face critical repairs to the

$5-billion device. First up: Fix the 53

superconducting magnets trashed

in September 2008 when a power

cable broke, causing the magnets to

warm above their –458˚F operating

temperature and lose conductivity,

or “quench.” Then pipes for helium

coolant melted, further damaging

the magnets. Here, the other key

upgrades and a few of the thousand

chores still to go.—CARINA STORRS

FIXER UPPER

�

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LHC engineers

install new

superconduct-

ing magnets to

bend protons

around the

17-mile

collider.

!!! OCTOBER Japan’s Cyberdyne plans to finish delivery of 100 HAL robotic exoskeletons for disabled people.

Drill eight-inch relief valves into half of the 1,232 dipole magnets

that steer the proton beam around the track, to allow for a con-

trolled pressure release in case of another leak.

Install a new quench-protection system, which is 1,000 times

as sensitive as its predecessor and shuts off the accelerator if it

detects an abnormal voltage increase—an indicator of a heat spike.

Search for and eliminate electrical faults between the magnets

—especially where the cables join—which could increase elec-

trical resistance, causing the cables to overheat and melt.

Cool the entire 17-mile track back down to –458˚F with liquid

helium. (Engineers brought the sections up to room temperature

so they could work inside the tunnel.)

Ramp up the current in the magnets from a couple hundred amps

to 6,000 over a few weeks. During this time, test the quench-

protection system by intentionally overheating the magnets.

Perform the final machine check, covering some 10,000 items,

such as the systems that inject the proton beam into the collider

and extract it within 1/5,000 of a second if a magnet fails.

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HEADLINES

KEV

IN P

IEPER

/AP P

HO

TO

Tired of Jack Frost knocking out your

power? Victor Petrenko, an engineering

professor at Dartmouth College, has

developed de-icing technology that could

save power lines from ice storms.

Until now, the only answer to fro-

zen lines has been to hope that they

don’t break or pull down poles under

the weight of the ice. A single ice storm

in early December left more than 1.25

million people in Pennsylvania, New Eng-

land and New York shivering in the dark

after ice storms snapped power lines.

Petrenko’s trick is to increase the

electrical resistance in cables, some-

thing engineers usually avoid because

it causes lines to lose energy as heat.

Attached to each end of a line, his device

switches the wires inside from a stan-

ICE BREAKERA POWER LINE THAT SHEDS HEAVY ICE

dard parallel

layout to a series

circuit. In nor-

mal conditions,

the cable works

like a standard

power line, but

flipping the line to series increases

resistance, and the wires generate

enough heat to shed the ice. The pro-

cess takes 30 seconds to three minutes

and saps less than 1 percent of the

electricity running through the lines.

Utility companies could switch the

lines remotely, and Petrenko says

swapping in his cables would cost

less than repairing ice damage.

This summer he tested the technol-

ogy between two transmission towers

near Orenburg, Russia; China is

considering the device to protect its

$170-billion investment in expanding

its energy grid. This fall, Petrenko will

test a modified version of the tech on

an Audi A8 that he expects will de-ice

its windshield in two to four seconds.

Later, he’ll apply the tech to airplane

wings, which could reduce delays

and crashes. “A plane that could shed

ice in seconds,” he says, “would be a

much safer way to fly.”—JEREMY HSU

COLD SNAP Using electric-

ity to melt the ice off power

lines could save millions of

dollars in damages.

INVENTION OF THE MONTH



FR

OM

TO

P:

ISTO

CK

; SH

AR

KLET T

EC

HN

OLO

GIE

S (

2)

HEADLINES

SAVING SKINA MATERIAL BASED ON SHARKSKIN

STOPS BACTERIAL BREAKOUTS

INSPIRED BY NATURE

A whale’s skin is easily glommed up with barnacles, algae,

bacteria and other sea creatures, but sharks stay squeaky-

clean. Although these parasites can pile onto a shark’s rippled

skin too, they can’t take hold and thus simply wash away. Now

scientists have printed that pattern on an adhesive film that will

repel bacteria pathogens from hospitals and public restrooms.

Patented by Sharklet Technologies, a Florida-based biotech

company, the film, which is covered with microscopic diamond-

shaped bumps, is the first “surface topography” proven to

keep the bugs at bay. In tests in a California hospital, for three

weeks the plastic sheeting’s surface prevented dangerous

microorganisms, such as E. coli and Staphylococcus A, from

establishing colonies large enough to infect humans. Bacteria

have an easier time spreading out on smooth surfaces, says

CEO Joe Bagan: “We think they come across this surface and

make an energy-based decision that this is not the right place

to form a colony.” Because it doesn’t kill the bacteria, there’s

also little chance of the microbes evolving resistance to it. Hey,

it’s worked for sharks for 400 million years.

That’s good news for hospitals, where infections from drug-

resistant superbacteria like MRSA, a potentially fatal strain of

staph, are becoming commonplace. Bagan hopes to stick the skin

on nursing call buttons, bed rails, tray tables and other surfaces

by next year. Pending FDA approval, the shark pattern could be

manufactured directly onto bacteria hotbeds like catheters and

water containers by 2012. First, though, look for Sharklet on high-

touch surfaces like door handles in restaurant restrooms around

the U.S. later this year—a welcome extra line of defense against

those who forget to wash their hands.—ARNIE COOPER

SLIPPERY WHEN WET Similar to

the texture of sharkskin [top],

Sharklet’s three-micrometer-wide

diamond-shaped pattern [bottom]

prevents bacteria from taking root.



CO

UR

TESY

DLR B

ER

LIN

/IN

STIT

UTE O

F P

LA

NETA

RY

RESEA

RC

H

In a Berlin basement sits a small torture chamber. The air

inside the hermetically sealed steel chest consists of a choking

95 percent carbon dioxide, some nitrogen, and traces of oxygen

and argon. The pressure within is 1/170 that on Earth, and the

thermostat is set to –50˚F—in other words, a nice afternoon

on Mars. Experiments at the facility regularly subject some of

Earth’s hardiest creatures to this hell, and they do just fine.

This August, several dozen scientific institutes combined

forces to test a variety of Earth species in Mars-like conditions.

Identifying life-forms that can survive on another planet, what

mechanisms they use to do so, and what by-products they leave

behind will give scientists a more specific idea of what to look for

when searching for E.T., says Jean-Pierre de Vera, a biologist at

the German Center for Aeronautics and Space Research (DLR),

where most of the experiments are carried out.

At press time, the scientists had tested Deinococcus

radiodurans, a bacterium known for its radiation tolerance,

Xanthoria elegans, a lichen that thrives in Antarctica and low-oxygen

conditions, and Bacillus subtilis, a comparatively ordinary bacteria

LIFE IN A BOXEARTHLY ORGANISMS UNDERGO TESTS IN

MARS-LIKE CONDITIONS

HEADLINES

found in soil around the planet. “I was astonished that organized,

symbiotic communities such as lichens [which consist of fungi

and photosynthetic algae or bacteria] can survive,” de Vera

says. After 22 days, 80 to 90 percent of the lichens were not only

alive but active—it seems that complex life-giving processes

can happen off-planet. For one thing, de Vera says, “this is the

first evidence that organisms might conduct photosynthesis on

Mars.” Next he plans to investigate whether methane-producing

bacteria, which could account for Mars’s methane clouds, can

make it on the planet.—REINHARD KARGL

DEEP FREEZE Bacteria

survive despite cold

temperatures inside

this Mars simulator.

EXPERIMENTS



POPSCI.COM 40 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009

HEADLINES

FAST LANE TO MARSA NEW ION ENGINE COULD SLICE THE TIME IT TAKES TO GET TO THE RED PLANET

SPACE TECH

CR

AIG

BEN

JAM

IN

Six Europeans recently wrapped up

105 days in an isolation chamber with

no TV, no showers, and lots of pre-

cooked food, to test the stresses of a

journey to Mars. Real Marstronauts

might not have to suffer through all

that. A new ion engine, which shoots

charged particles to create thrust,

could get them to the Red Planet in

just 39 days.

In theory, there’s no better way of

getting between planets than an ion

engine. The engine in NASA’s asteroid

probe Dawn fires electrons at xenon

gas to convert those atoms into posi-

tive ions, which fall onto a positively

charged screen that repels the ions

out of the engine.

The problem is power. For exam-

ple, Dawn runs on three ion engines,

each of which puts out a steady, but mea-

sly, one third of an ounce of thrust. (Each

engine on a Boeing 777 churns out about

100,000 pounds of thrust.) This is great

for long, unmanned missions—it took

16 months to propel the probe to Mars—

but it’s not ideal for humans looking to

spend as little time in transit as possible.

NASA is retooling its engine for triple the

thrust, which could get a probe to Mars

faster, but it’s still too slow for a large

spaceship heavy with crew and gear. If a

little more thrust is good, a lot more is

better. The Texas-based aerospace com-

pany Ad Astra’s VASIMR engine creates

a thicker ion stream by shooting radio

waves, rather than electrons, at argon

gas. Then, the engine’s superconducting

magnets fling the ions to generate 50

times as much thrust.

In July the company demonstrated

the ion-making step, and next month it

will fire up the 200-kilowatt machine at

full power—almost strong enough that

four such engines could drive a manned

moon voyage. Running on solar power,

that trip would take six months, but Ad

Astra has a plan for speeding the engine

up for Mars: nukes. Unlike NASA’s cur-

rent engine designs, which cannot handle

megawatts of power, Ad Astra could scale

up VASIMR to run on a 200-megawatt

nuclear reactor. That, says Tim Glover,

the company’s director of development,

gives VASIMR an edge: “Would you rather

pull a trailer with a couple of bicycles, or

with a car?”—CARINA STORRS

FIRED UP The VASIMR ion engine [right and bottom left] ejects charged particles for thrust. This summer, tests [upper left] showed

that the engine could generate ions. Nuclear-powered ion engines could bring astronauts to Mars in just 39 days.

!!! NOVEMBER A FedEx hub in New Jersey plans to begin drawing 30 percent of its electricity needs from its rooftop solar array, the largest in the U.S.



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THE FUTURE OF SPACE




THAT SINKING FEELING Astronaut Peggy A.

Whitson [background] prepares for the

weightlessness and claustrophobia of space

in the Hydrolab water tank at the Gagarin

Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia.

DEEP-

CAMPBOOt

WHAT DOES IT TAKE

TO PREP HUMANS FOR

A TRIP TO AN ASTEROID

OR A MARTIAN

MOON? STARVATION?

ISOLATION?

RECYCLING FECES

FOR FOOD? NASA’S

NEWEST ASTRONAUTS

BEGIN A GRUELING

TRAINING REGIMEN

THIS FALL TO FIND OUT

BY DAWN STOVER

SPACE




is a crucial time for the agency to fundamentally reevaluate how it prepares its new recruits for the rigors of deep space. Plans call for the construction of a new crew capsule called Orion to replace the space shuttle in 2015, plus two rockets and a lunar lander. This suite of hardware, known as Constellation, is billed as the Swiss Army knife of space exploration, capable of flying to multiple destinations and performing multiple missions. And that’s what NASA expects of these future astronauts, too. They will be trained as jacks-of-all-trades who can do experiments on the ISS, erect an outpost on the moon, or collect samples from an asteroid that’s hurtling through space. They are NASA’s first new astronaut class in five years, the first chosen since the Constellation development program began, and the first ever to be chosen

Three test pilots. Two flight surgeons. One molecular biologist. A flight controller, a Pentagon staffer and a CIA intelligence officer. These are the nine people chosen by NASA to be America’s next astronauts. Late this summer they reported to Houston along with two Japanese pilots, a Japanese doctor, a Canadian pilot and a Canadian physicist who will train alongside NASA’s class of 2009. Call them the lucky 14.

Selected from more than 3,500 applicants, NASA’s new astronaut candidates arrive at a pivotal moment in the history of human space exploration. The agency’s bold ambition is to rocket humans beyond the International Space Station for the first time in more than 40 years. The question is when. In September, a panel of space experts and former astronauts chaired by former Lockheed Martin chief Norman Augustine told the White House that a budgetary boost of an estimated $3 billion annually would allow NASA to develop the necessary spacecraft to take astronauts to the moon, near-Earth asteroids and ultimately to Mars. Anything less, the committee concluded, would delay a moon landing until at least the late 2030s.

Whether NASA gets extra financial support from Congress or not, now

THE OBSESSIVES

“IF YOU LOSE YOUR SENSE OF HUMOR ON THE WAY TO MARS, YOU’RE FINISHED.”

solely for long-duration missions in space. NASA isn’t just tasked with reinventing its hardware; to get beyond low-Earth orbit, it must reinvent its astronauts.

tough and cheerful

Like the astronauts before them, recruits will take an outdoor survival course in Maine, spend up to two weeks living in an underwater lab, endure altitude chambers, and struggle through flight mechanics. But for deep space, astronauts will need new training entirely, perhaps including spending weeks, even months, in confinement and isolation.

A trip to Mars will take humans so far from home that Earth will look no bigger than a star. The distance is so great that in a September New York Times op-ed, Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, went so far as to propose that, to save fuel, astronauts



THE FUTURE OF SPACE


perhaps shouldn’t come home at all. Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, an ardent believer in the colonization of Mars, has also floated this idea. For a trip that long, intense psychological preparation is critical.

The Mars Society, a space-advocacy group, has conducted a series of simulated Mars missions involving 80 crews at a

desert station and a dozen crews at an even more remote Arctic base. Robert Zubrin, the society’s president and author of The Case for Mars, recommends that NASA conduct experiments to see which astronaut teams work well together when tasked with field exploration in adverse conditions for N

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months on end. “You put them through missions, and you see who is tough and cheerful and team-spirited,” Zubrin says. “If you lose your sense of humor on the way to Mars, you’re finished.” One of the most important lessons learned during the field missions is that some people perform well on one team but not on another. “It’s because of the mix,” he explains.

Jason Kring, an assistant professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University who studies the human factors of spaceflight, agrees with Zubrin that intensive training here on Earth is a must. He also suggests that NASA include a clinical psychologist on the crew to help mitigate potential conflicts. “What to us would be a minor problem in an office environment can become a big deal after six to eight months with the same people,” he says.

NASA is already making efforts to screen more carefully for psychological flaws, after the meltdown of Lisa Nowak, the shuttle astronaut who goes on trial next month for attempting to kidnap a fellow astronaut’s girlfriend. It’s not hard to imagine how such instability could sink a space mission.

While everyone in the class of 2009 has an advanced degree in engineering, science or math (“extensive experience flying high-

DOCK AND ROLL An artist’s

rendering of NASA’s Altair lunar

lander approaching the Orion crew

capsule after a lunar mission

FLYING HOME A cutaway view of the proposed 16.5-foot-wide Orion crew capsule. It will carry up to six astronauts.

Docking hatch

Cargo bay

Window

Display and controls

RIGHT RIDE? An expert White

House panel recommends that

NASA seek cheaper alternatives

to the Ares I rocket [illustrated

here], designed to carry astro-

nauts to low-Earth orbit.




THE FUTURE OF SPACE

performance jet aircraft” was also a plus), the most sought-after quality was the ability to play well with others. Today, an astronaut with the right stuff is someone who does not get frazzled or grumpy when he spends seven months trapped in a flying office with co-workers who may not even speak his language—an office in which his and his companions’ recycled sweat and urine is a beverage, the toilet clogs, and a serious mistake means they all could die.

Of course, astronauts will need extra preparation for the physical challenges too. During the trip itself, they will be subjected to high doses of radiation, raising their odds of getting cancer later in life, and they will lose bone density. “The worst-case scenario would be a Mars crew that steps off the vehicle and their bones are too brittle to hold their weight,” Kring says. He suggests that NASA may eventually need to create

With its sights set on deep space, NASA has

tasked Oceaneering International to develop

the first new space suit since the shuttle “jet

pack” of the 1980s. For lunar missions, the

Constellation Space Suit System, or CSSS,

will come in two configurations: one that the

astronauts will wear aboard the spaceship

during launch, landing and spacewalks; and a

second configuration designed to be worn on

the moon’s surface. The two suits will share

many components, such as boots, legs, gloves,

and cooling and communications systems.

The big challenge is designing a system for

handling solid waste in the event that the crew

capsule loses cabin pressure and the astronauts

have to spend an extended period, even days, in

their suits while the problem is repaired.

For long missions in deep space, astronauts

must maintain their own suits, learning

beforehand how to fix every port and sensor on

them. “When you strap in for the real mission,

you should feel like you’re home,” says Jim

Buchli, the program manager for the CSSS at

Oceaneering. “There should be no surprises.”

—Dawn Stover, with additional

reporting by Carina Storrs

What Do You Wear in deep space?

a new category of astronauts trained for “ultra-long-duration” missions. “Thirty-six months in space is a lot different than six months,” he says.

new school

Preparing for even a space-station or lunar mission takes several years. The 2009 class won’t be full-fledged astronauts until 2011, and they won’t fly their first space missions until at least 2014. “The intent of basic training is to get folks up to the proficiency they need to begin mission-specific training,” says Duane Ross, NASA’s manager for astronaut candidate selection and training.

Unlike the 12 astronaut classes selected in the past three decades, which were divided into a caste system of pilots and mission specialists, NASA’s newest class will be known simply as

“astronauts.” Flying Orion is expected to be much less complicated than flying the shuttle. Many of the ship’s functions will be automated, recalling the days when Chuck Yeager called the astronauts “spam in a can.” Although the Orion missions will involve a crew of up to six instead of Apollo’s three, for long periods they will just be along for the ride. The glass cockpit interface, for instance, will have one tenth as many switches as Apollo.

Learning to pilot the space shuttle was in many ways the centerpiece of past astronauts’ training. The shuttle is “an incredibly complicated beast,” says Pam Melroy, a former shuttle commander who recently became director and deputy program manager of the Space Exploration Initiatives program at Lockheed Martin, the contractor building Orion. Recruits spent 54 weeks on shuttle systems during their two-

Think of the new astronaut suit as a wearable spaceship, complete with a toilet

JOINTS

Reinforced

carbon fiber

locks out debris

and dust

HELMETS

Padded for

rough landings;

equipped with a

microphone to

allow for wireless

communication

with crew

and ground

control

OUTER LAYER

Insulates against

temperatures

250ºF above

or below zero;

protects against

micrometeoroids

NI C

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year basic training, Ross says. Astronauts flying Orion won’t have to land on a runway, so the class of 2009 will instead spend more time learning things like Russian (since Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft will temporarily be the only ride to the ISS after the shuttle retires) and practicing extravehicular tasks in the world’s largest swimming pool. On the other hand, Orion will be a much smaller vehicle than the shuttle, so it will have less built-in redundancy. That means astronauts may have to spend more time training for equipment failures, Melroy says.

As with the shuttle, Orion astronauts will practice ascents in a full-motion simulator that forces them to make quick decisions about whether or not to abort a mission. They will also use simulators to learn how to dock with the ISS and how to fly the new lunar lander, Altair, down to the moon’s surface. The lunar-lander simulators

for the Apollo missions looked like flying bed frames, Melroy says, and all of them crashed during training. “I think we’re going to have to do a little better than that,” she says.

Engineers are still working on the designs for Orion and Altair but, as in the Apollo days, astronauts are involved in the process at every step. Already astronauts have been invited into mock-ups of the crew capsule to see whether they can fit comfortably in the seats and reach the controls. “By the time astronauts actually get in and start using the mock-up, they’re already very familiar with it,” says Olivia Fuentes, the exploration-development laboratory section manager for Lockheed Martin.

Further down the road, astronauts will begin preparing for surface operations on the moon and, potentially, N

ASA

[continued ON page 83]

asteroids. A swimming pool can simulate the weightlessness of the ISS but not the moon’s gravity—one sixth of Earth’s. “We’re going to have to mix the water training with

training on how to walk on the moon again, as well as on the Martian surface,” Kring says. The Apollo astronauts practiced their moonwalks in the Partial Gravity Simulator, an adult-size Johnny Jump Up suspended from the ceiling, and future astronauts may use an improved version of a gravity simulator called the “pogo.” Asteroids and Martian moons may require still more training facilities, and both destinations will demand a revamped space suit that can be worn for days [see “What Do You Wear in Deep Space?” facing page].

Mind the Gap

NASA’s tentative plan is to retire the shuttle in 2010, but the Augustine committee estimates that Orion won’t fly until at least 2017, leaving a seven-year gap during which time no NASA manned spacecraft will take to the skies.

BUGGING OUT Astronauts

test a prototype of a six-legged

lunar buggy at Moses Lake

in Washington.

“A MARS CREW COULD STEP OFF A VEHICLE WITH BONES TOO BRITTLE TO SUPPORT THEIR OWN WEIGHT.”



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WE HAVE A CREDO AROUND HERE: The future will

be better. It may sound optimistic in light of our wheez-

ing environment and limping economy, but then you

haven’t met the Brilliant 10, POPSCI’s annual selection of

the nation’s most promising young researchers. They’re

10 powerful reasons to look on the bright side. Take

materials scientist Ting Xu. She’s using nanotechnol-

ogy to craft solar cells that are more energy-efficient

and eco-friendly than oil or coal. John Rinn is unlock-

ing the secrets of RNA to keep us healthier, a vital step

toward solving our health-care woes. Jerome Lynch

is making smart sensors for bridges that spot struc-

tural flaws before disaster strikes. And not one of these

geniuses is over 40. The world is facing some pretty

big problems, we admit, but with these talented minds

tackling them, can you blame us for feeling hopeful?

NOVEMBER 2009 POPULAR SCIENCE 49POPSCI.COM



BRILLIANT 10 Astronomy

Marla Geha has different job titles depending on who’s asking.

“If I’m on a plane, I tend to be a physicist,” she says. “Then

nobody wants to talk to me.” When she feels the need to impress

someone, she’s an astrophysicist. And when she doesn’t mind a

two-hour conversation, she tells them she’s an astronomer.

Geha is, in fact, all three. Now a professor at Yale, Geha

spends her days (and, of course, nights) trying to identify faint

galaxies that probably formed earlier than the Milky Way.

Simulations of the Milky Way’s evolution predict that there are

about 1,000 such formations. When Geha came on the scene five

years ago, astronomers had found just 11 of them. She and others

believed that more existed, hidden from view because the galaxies

THE STAR CHASERBrilliant because: She’s discovering nearly invisible galaxies circling our own, and the mysterious dark matter that dominates them

THE ENERGIZERBrilliant because: She transforms molecules into mini hard drives with massive storage capacity

Name: Ting Xu Age: 35

Affiliation: University of California, Berkeley

Biomaterials

Last fall, Ting Xu, a professor of

materials science at the University of

California at Berkeley, was suffering

from headaches so severe that doctors

worried she might have a brain tumor.

But one neurologist suggested a simpler

cause. How about cutting back on the

16-hour days in the lab, sleeping, and

maybe even eating at normal times?

Xu has since eased her work

schedule, but she’s no less productive.

Earlier this year she co-authored a paper

describing a new technique for coaxing

tiny polymer strands to self-assemble

into 10 trillion cylinders with precise

patterns. The method could lead to

discs the size of a quarter that store 175

DVDs’—7 terabits—worth of data. Then

she tweaked the technique so it could be

used to build a range of nanoparticle-

based devices—super-efficient

photovoltaic cells and energy storage

systems, and higher-resolution flexible

displays. Xu is smart, diligent and

knowledgeable, says polymer physicist

Thomas Russell of the University of

Massachusetts, but more important,

“she has imagination.”

And a youthful one at that. She loves

the Transformers. She’s a devotee of

Tom and Jerry—watching the warring

cat-and-mouse duo helps her think. Like

her cartoon heroes, Xu, a native of China,

has always been restless. She played

volleyball and ran track growing up, but

neither wore her out. Her father would

offer to boost her allowance if she could

sit for more than 15 minutes at a time.

He never had to pay, and that energy

continues to drive her today.

After reporting on the self-assembly

method, which she created with Russell,

Xu immediately

saw greater

potential.

The strands,

she realized,

could serve

as minuscule

cranes to

arrange

even smaller building materials and

manufacture things like ultrasmall

electronic devices and paper-thin,

printable solar cells. In her most recent

work, Xu combined the self-assembling

polymers with nanoscopic particles. By

forcing these particles to assume the

underlying order of the polymers, she

managed to get trillions of them to line up

exactly as she wanted.

Xu hopes the work will give solar cells

a competitive advantage over fossil fuels,

for one thing, but she won’t be resting in

the meantime. She’s constantly hunting

for new ideas and designing experiments

with the hope of surprising herself, not

just confirming existing theories. “It’s

important to think about science in a

perpendicular way, not a parallel way,”

she says. “Otherwise you end up painting

other people’s houses.”—Gregory Mone


Name: Marla Geha Age: 35

affiliation: Yale university

were made mostly of dark matter, the term for whatever it is

out there that emits no light but somehow accounts for 90 to 95

percent of the universe’s entire mass.

In the quest to solve the so-called missing-satellite problem,

Geha pored over digital maps of the sky, looking for areas with

unexpected concentrations of stars. Then she painstakingly

measured the velocity of each star. To her amazement, she

found that the stars were moving too quickly for their size—

tantalizing evidence that dark matter might be tugging on them.

So far, Geha and her team have discovered 14 galaxies. She

hopes to find enough to verify the reigning theory of how the

universe formed, and perhaps along the way help other fields

fully define dark matter. “Astronomers and particle physicists

don’t talk to each other much,” she says. In the future, she’ll be

the one starting the conversation.—Doug Cantor



RISING STAR A few of Marla

Geha’s galaxy-hunting tricks:

velocity calculations, 3 a.m.

e-mails, and superstitious rou-

tines to ensure clear skies.

AMONG GEHA’S BIG FINDS: MANY DWARF GALAXIES ARE MADE ALMOST ENTIRELY OF DARK MATTER.




“IN MY LAB THERE’S NO CRITICISM, ONLY REFINEMENT.”

HELPING HANDS Dennis

Hong created the humanoid

CHARLI to better study our own

biomechanics.





BRILLIANT 10 robotics

In 1977, a six-year-old boy visiting Los Angeles from South

Korea saw Star Wars for the first time. He gaped at the curious

locomotion of R2-D2 and the human-robot interactions of C-3PO,

and as he flew back home, Dennis Hong remembers, “I knew I was

going to build robots for the rest of my life.”

Hong was born in California, but when he was three, his

father, an aerospace engineer, moved the family to Seoul for a

job. Hong lived there until his sophomore year of college, when

he transferred to the University of Wisconsin, and went on to grad

school at Purdue University. “All of it was mechanical engineering,

focused on robotics,” he says.

Today, Hong runs Virginia Tech’s Robotics and Mechanisms

Laboratory, which has produced a robotic hand that’s dexterous

enough to handle an egg, a pole-climbing snake ’bot for

construction inspections, and a momentum-propelled, three-

legged robot, among other projects.

“When I joined VT, people thought robotics should be all about

intelligence,” Hong says. Instead, he chose to focus on mechanical

systems found in nature. “We’re not copying nature; we’re using

its principles,” he explains. The design of the three-legged robot,

THE ROBOT MAKERBrilliant because: He builds sophisticated robots that don’t just copy biology—they improve on its most elegant and efficient principles

THE MENTAL MESSENGERBrilliant because: His engineering achievements will let people with disabilities control machines

Name: Adam Wilson Age: 28

affiliation: Wadsworth Center,

New York State Department of Health

Biomedical Engineering

Last April, Adam Wilson became the first

person to send a telepathic message—on

the social-networking site Twitter. “USING

EEG TO SEND TWEET,” he wrote, referring

to the electroencephalograph he used

to record electrical signals in his brain.

Wearing a red skullcap embedded with

electrodes wired to a computer, he

spelled out his missive by focusing on

letters flashing before him on a screen.

Beyond extrasensory tweets, Wilson’s

deeper ambition for the technology is to

help people who have lost the ability to

communicate, whether from a stroke or

a spinal-cord injury. He’s now developing

powerful brain-machine interfaces that

attach electrodes to the cerebral cortex,

the wrinkled tissue just beneath the

skull, where they pick up stronger brain

signals than the EEG technique he used

in the Twitter experiment. Partly inspired

by his fascination with music—Wilson

has played the guitar since the seventh

grade—his new system taps a brain region

that controls

response

to auditory

stimuli,

allowing

people with

neurological

disorders

to control a

computer cursor simply by thinking

about the sound of a cellphone ringing.

His next challenge is to engineer

seamless wireless systems that could

one day decipher complex thoughts—

perhaps well enough to help his idol,

physicist Stephen Hawking, whose

struggle with muscular dystrophy has

left him almost fully paralyzed, open

doors or steer his wheelchair with

thoughts alone. Says Wilson, “I would

love to work with him.”

—melinda wenner

Name: Dennis Hong Age: 38

affiliation: Virginia tech

for instance, looks unnatural, yet it mimics the momentum of

the human gait. To move forward, its hub flips over, causing

one leg to swing between the other two. The robotic hand is

controlled by compressed air, varying the strength of its grip

without the use of other motors, in the same way human grip

relies on elastic ligaments to help the fingers curl.

His lab’s latest effort is a humanoid called CHARLI,

for Cognitive Humanoid Autonomous Robot with Learning

Intelligence. It serves as a research platform for the study

of human locomotion and a contender in Robocup 2010, a

tournament in which robots compete in soccer matches.

Ultimately, Hong hopes to engineer robots that move with

the grace and adaptability of humans. The key, he believes, is

uninhibited research. In Korea, Hong recalls, “I grew up in an

environment of people being afraid or ashamed to speak up. In

my lab there’s no criticism, only refinement. You want to put a

nuclear reactor in your robot? Fine, let’s pursue that.”

Leading by example, Hong has an organized way of putting

his own least-inhibited ideas to use. “Next to my bed, I have a

notebook and a pen,” he says. “Every night, I see lines, colorful

things in my head. I wake up at 4 a.m., jot down everything. In

the morning, I type it into my database of ideas. When funders

want this or that, I look for a match.”—Jacob Ward




Genetics

John Rinn has a long history of bucking convention. Growing up,

skateboarding and snowboarding took precedence over school—

he attended four high schools in four years, only graduating

because his mother promised him a car. He went to college at

the University of Minnesota because it seemed like an excuse

to party and hit the slopes. But bedridden with a snowboarding

injury after his sophomore year, Rinn had a revelation, inspired by

the uncompromising architect Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The

Fountainhead. “What could I do that I cared that much about?” he

asked himself. He began immersing himself in biology classes and

realized that he not only had an aptitude for science, but he actually

enjoyed it. He pulled mostly A’s and soon discovered the thing that

would inspire his future career: RNA.

Science hasn’t dimmed Rinn’s rebellious side. He’s already

upending the way biologists think about the human genome.

Though similar to DNA, RNA has always been considered DNA’s

helper; its best-known job is turning genes into proteins. Some

of it was even thought to have no function at all, the equivalent

of cellular junk. But in 2003, as a graduate student at Yale, Rinn

discovered thousands of new types of RNA, called large intervening

THE RULE SHREDDERBrilliant because: A dropout skate rat turned ace biologist, he’s proving that “junk” RNA is a potential linchpin of human health

Every now and then, an innovation so vital

comes along that it’s hard to imagine how

we got along without it. Think seatbelts,

antibiotics, fire hoses. Now add André

Platzer’s KeYmaera, software that helps

computer-controlled safety systems avoid

catastrophic errors.

Now a computer scientist at Carnegie

Mellon, Platzer grew up in Germany,

where he became, of all things, an

accomplished ballroom dancer. “I won

a few tournaments,” he says. “But I was

fascinated with computers, and that

began to take up my time.” In 2006, as a

professor at the University of Oldenburg

in Germany, he began investigating how

autopilot systems could fail. When he

discovered that there were no models

that could test more than a handful of

conditions, he built KeYmaera. Prior to

it, a collision-avoidance proposal for

the Federal Aviation Administration

would have told two close planes with

intersecting flight paths to each hang a

right turn, fly

a half circle,

and make

another right

turn to avoid a

collision. When

KeYmaera tested

what would

happen to the

planes at varying airspeeds, altitudes and

trajectories, it found that, in rare cases,

the protocol could actually put planes on

a collision course. Platzer fed alternative

scenarios into KeYmaera until it verified a

safer fly-around maneuver. His software

has also made potentially lifesaving

corrections to models of Europe’s high-

speed train systems and adaptive cruise

control in cars. “Before you spend $1

billion on a system,” he notes, “it’s good

to make sure that it works.”—Bjorn Carey

CRASH TEST ANTI-DUMMYBrilliant because: His software makes travel on planes, trains and automobiles safer

Name: André Platzer Age: 30

affiliation: Carnegie Mellon University

Mathematics

Name: John Rinn Age: 33

affiliation: Harvard university/Beth

Israel Deaconess Medical Center

non-coding RNAs, or LINCs, and later proved that they play more

than just a supporting role in regulating genes—they appear to

direct the entire show. At the time, the notion was considered

contentious, even ridiculous. “It was the same thing again—‘what

you’re passionate about is stupid,’ ” Rinn says. “Classic science

was not ready for this. Almost nobody was ready for this.”

He silenced his critics in 2007 when he showed that one of

the LINCs serves a vital function in human cells. He dubbed it

HOTAIR, a wry nod to the fact that so many scientists thought his

field of research was full of it. The molecule delivers proteins to

a crucial cluster of genes and helps regulate immune response,

cancer growth, and fat and stem-cell production, among other

things. “If we can unravel their code, we can engineer these

molecules to bend the genome to our will,” Rinn says. “That

would be a totally new facet for therapeutics and human health.”

High-functioning RNA isn’t his only discovery. In 2006, he

answered a long-standing biological question: How do cells

know where to go and how to behave? By comparing the genes

expressed in cells around the body, he uncovered a kind of

genetic ZIP code that orients and redirects cells.

He’s still hunting for LINCs, hopeful that they will reveal

cellular secrets. Ultimately, Rinn loves genetics for the same

reason he loves snowboarding: “I want to take something old,

twist it, and get something new out of it.”—m.w.

BRILLIANT 10

CO

UR

TESY

KEN

AN

DR

EY

O/C

AR

NEG

IE M

ELLO

N U

NIV

ER

SIT

Y



“CLASSIC SCIENCE WAS NOT READY FOR THIS.”

COLORING OUTSIDE THE LINES

John Rinn at his laboratory in

Boston, sketching the

mysterious workings of RNA




MULTIFLASKER When she’s not

doing research or training for

NASA, Kate Rubins manages her

nonprofit, Congo Medical Relief,

which she created to deliver

medical supplies to Africa.




Virology

As a kid, Kate Rubins dreamed of being an astronaut and

figured flying fighter jets would be the best way to get to NASA.

She even went to space camp at age 12 to get a head start on

her training. Then she learned the disappointing news that, at

the time, the pilot job was off-limits to women.

Secretly, her parents hoped their daughter would choose

a safer career, but by high school Rubins had already set

her sights on another perilous profession: hunting killer

viruses. And this time, there was no glass ceiling to hold her

back. Rubins published her first paper on HIV in 1999 as an

undergraduate at the University of California at San Diego. In

2001, while a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University, she helped

the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases

create the first animal model for testing smallpox, a scourge

that killed millions before its eradication in 1980. Rubins’s work

has made it possible to study how the virus evades the immune

system in living tissue, a major step toward new medicine and

vaccines should terrorists somehow get their hands on one

of the two known smallpox samples. It’s this ability to make

positive changes in the world that motivates Rubins. “We have a

responsibility as researchers to help people,” she says.

After smallpox, Rubins quickly shifted her attention to

another scourge, monkeypox, which is now reaching epidemic

proportions in Africa. A cousin to smallpox, the virus is

endemic to monkeys and rodents, but it can jump to humans

during the slaughter or consumption of bush meat, causing

facial boils, blindness and even death. During her tenure as a

Whitehead fellow at MIT, Rubins spent months in the remote

jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo, eating the

THE FLYING VIRUS HUNTERBrilliant because: She uncovers the genetic secrets of deadly viruses, and now she’s taking her science smarts to space as an astronaut

Name: Kate Rubins Age: 31

affiliation: Whitehead

Institute, Massachusetts

Institute of Technology

“WE HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY AS RESEARCHERS TO HELP PEOPLE.”

occasional meal of grubs (her motto: “If people serve it, I eat

it”), trying to figure out why the disease appears to be spreading

so quickly. The region’s underdeveloped health infrastructure

makes infection rates hard to pin down, but an uptick in the

number of cases suggests the virus is gaining strength.

To track the genetic evolution of monkeypox, Rubins and her

team collect and analyze DNA samples from volunteer patients.

Because traditional genetic-sequencing techniques can take

weeks and often churn out incomplete results, she helped develop

a faster, more accurate method. Typically, scientists extract

monkeypox from patient samples and grow the virus on human or

monkey cells. The problem is that the virus can evolve in response

to its growth medium, so the final population of viruses may bear

little resemblance to the ones that are infecting people in Africa.

Rubins’s idea was to skip the tissue-culture step and instead rely

on a new high-powered DNA sequencer to amplify all the genetic

material. She then devised laboratory protocols and algorithms

to sort the monkeypox from the human cells. The entire process

takes less than five days and generates what Rubins calls an

“obscene” amount of genetic data on the virus.

Today, the Air Force no longer bars female fighter pilots. The

policy changed in 1993, but by then Rubins had already moved

on. She’s never been the type to sit around waiting for the tide

to turn. This fall, while her team continues its work in Africa,

Rubins will finally get the chance to live out that childhood dream

when she joins NASA’s 20th astronaut class, training to becoming

one of the first people to fly the shuttle’s successor, the Orion

[see page 42]. Selected from thousands of candidates, she says

her full-throttle hobbies of skydiving and scuba diving, not to

mention her ability to thrive in dangerous places, set her apart.

When asked if she’s nervous about the prospect of flying a new

spaceship to the moon, Rubins smiles calmly. “Not at all. I want

to be the first person to fly it, right? I’m just thrilled.”

—Nicole Dyer

BRILLIANT 10




BRILLIANT 10 Anthropology

Nate Dominy found his calling on a college research trip to

Costa Rica with his anatomy professors. A football player for

Johns Hopkins University, Dominy was assigned the physically

demanding task of catching small, drugged monkeys as they fell

out of trees. “You have this moving target, completely unconscious,

and you have a net in your hand,” he explains. When he went back

again the next summer, he found himself thinking about more

than just how the monkeys fell, and began helping to decipher the

monkeys’ eating habits by studying their teeth. “I got this quick

introduction to the importance of food and diet in thinking about

the adaptation and behaviors of primates and humans,” he says. “I

just loved every minute.”

Ten years after his transformative experience studying food

and teeth, Dominy is now a trailblazer. As an associate professor

of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, he

works to answer one of anthropology’s biggest questions: How did

modern humans evolve from our ape-like ancestors?

Dominy argues that food played a crucial role, and he recently

helped solve a decade-long mystery about its role in evolution. In

1999, scientists analyzed the tooth fossils of our three-million-

THE TOOTH SLEUTH Brilliant because: His exploration of ancient eating habits is helping to crack the mystery of human evolution

Name: Nathaniel Dominy

Age: 33 affiliation: University

of California, Santa Cruz

MASTER OF THE SMALLBrilliant because: He’s tapping the strange powers of nanotechnology to detect cancer

Name: Michael Strano Age: 33 affiliation:

massachusetts Institute of Technology

When Michael Strano was a postdoctoral

fellow at Rice University, his mentor

gave him some simple advice. “He told

me, ‘Look at areas where disciplines

intersect,’ ” Strano says. Eight years later,

he is a tenured professor at MIT and one

of the world’s leading researchers of

quantum-confined materials, a field of

nanotechnology that has the potential to

transform cancer medicine, solar power,

electronics and more.

Quantum-confined materials derive

their power from their small size. For

example, a single layer of carbon atoms,

known as graphene, behaves nothing

like normal carbon. In a conductor such

as a copper wire, electrons simply inch

along. In graphene, however, electrons

move at nearly the speed of light. “It’s like

a little particle accelerator,” Strano says.

Graphene could make the ultimate solar-

panel conductor; it’s highly conductive,

highly affordable, and so thin that it’s

transparent to light. “It’s the thinnest

conductor we can

ever imagine,”

he says.

He is

particularly

fascinated by the

medical potential

of carbon

nanotubes. The

tiny structures emit near-infrared light

that passes harmlessly through human

tissue. Injected into cells, they could be

used as biological sensors so sensitive

they could detect a single molecule of a

potentially harmful chemical.

Considering Strano’s big to-do list, it’s

a little shocking to learn that he also has

three kids under the age of five. Doesn’t he

need downtime? “Science pretty much is

my hobby,” he says.

—Seth Fletcher

year-old primate ancestors, Australopithecus africanus, for

chemical patterns that reveal dietary habits. Their findings

suggested that grass, and the animals that ate grass, were

a staple meal. But the size and shape of the fossils indicated

something quite different—that our ancestors spent more time

munching hard, brittle foods, such as highly starchy grass bulbs.

Dominy believes that these caloric veggies may have been

the fuel of evolution, delivering enough energy to let us outwit

carnivores, invent smarter ways to endure the elements and,

eventually, populate the planet. In 2007 he uncovered additional

evidence in support of this theory, showing that the teeth of

ancient and modern African mole rats that survive entirely on

bulbs have identical chemical profiles to our ancestors.

This year, Dominy hopes to crack another mystery: Why

are some human populations taller than others? In October he

traveled to Uganda to collect DNA from two pygmy tribes, the

Twa and the Sua, who are on average less than five feet tall. He

believes that short stature could help people navigate dense

jungle and stay cooler. No one has ever tested this idea, and

when he talks of it, Dominy sounds both excited and slightly

incredulous that no one’s jumped on it before. “Body size is

central to survival. It affects the kinds of things we eat, how we

reproduce, our metabolism,” he says. “Here we are in 2009, and

we still don’t know why it varies so much.”—m.w.

Chemical Engineering



“BODY SIZE IS CENTRAL TO SURVIVAL, YET WE DON’T KNOW WHY IT VARIES.”

NO BONES ABOUT IT

Nate Dominy’s research is

shining light on the role

of food in human evolution.





BRILLIANT 10 ENGINEERING

Jerry Lynch is proud of his profession. He likes to point

out, for instance, that the U.S. has more than 600,000

bridges, and that failures are extremely rare. “We have a

very, very good track record,” he says. “We’re a diligent

bunch, civil engineers.” But when something does fail,

seriously bad things happen—like when the I-35W bridge

collapsed in Minneapolis in 2007 and killed 13 people

due to faulty gusset plates used to join load-bearing

beams. It’s these catastrophic failures that motivate

Lynch, an engineering professor at the University of

Michigan, to think incessantly about how things come

together and how to keep them from coming apart.

THE BRIDGE WHISPERERBrilliant because: His bridge sensors can catch structural flaws invisible to human eyes

NAME: Jerome Lynch AGE: 34

affiliation: University of Michigan

intervals or on

command from an

inspector, a small

microprocessor can

send an electric

current through

the conductive

carbon nanotubes embedded in the sheets, while electrodes

gauge electrical resistance to detect strain, corrosion, load and

dozens of other indications of stress. Hotspots are displayed on

a computerized map of the bridge. Lynch doesn’t know yet how

much each sensor will cost, but just the fact that they’re wireless

“WOULDN’T IT BE GREAT IF WE COULD SEE BRIDGE FAILURES AHEAD OF TIME?”

His solution to structural failures like the one that befell

I-35W bridge is a “sensor skin” that continuously monitors

weak spots and alerts inspectors to problems before they

become dangerous. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could see big

structural failures coming ahead of time?” he says.

Today, the few bridges in the U.S. that have any kind

of sensors usually only track seismic activity, largely

because it’s so expensive to wire a bridge with enough

equipment to monitor multiple threats. “The Golden

Gate Bridge is over a mile long,” Lynch says. “The

special conduit needed can be $10 a foot, and one sensor

can cost thousands.” So instead, engineers typically

rely on visual inspections at two-year intervals.

Lynch’s sensors attach to wireless nodes that

communicate with other nodes on the bridge, process the

data on their own, and relay potential problems back to the

local inspector’s office using a cellular data connection. Each

sensor consists of polymer sheets up to a foot square and just

a few microns thick that cover key structural elements, like the

gusset plates that gave way in Minneapolis. At programmed

will make them cheaper to deploy than today’s sensors and will

eliminate the costs associated with unnecessary inspections.

Lynch knows about using time wisely. The Queens, New

York, native earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in civil

engineering from Stanford University and then went back

and got another master’s, in electrical engineering. After

9/11, he launched a company to build wireless infrastructure

sensors and left it to teach at Michigan, where he was

named Professor of the Year his second year on the job.

“Dr. Lynch is probably the most regarded scholar among

his peers in such an early stage of a career,” says Kincho

Law, a professor of structural engineering at Stanford.

Lynch’s sensing skin will leave the lab next year for testing

on three highway bridges in Michigan and three bridges in Korea.

And he is already working on a paint-based version that could

be applied to anything that needs monitoring, from airplanes to

pipelines, as well as a version that would make its own power

from the vibrations of whatever it’s painted on. “There’s an

inherent uncertainty in visual inspections,” Lynch says. “We need

better tools to keep an eye on things.”—Mike Haney

POPSCI.COM

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AM






POPSCI LAB RAT

personal

1-Hydroxypyrene

2-Hydroxybenzo[c]phenanthrene

1-Hydroxychrysene

9-Hydroxyfluorene

di-n-butyl phthalate

ortho-xylene

cyclohexane

butyl benzyl phthalatemeta-xylene

monobenzyl phthalate

deca bde




Every day we’re exposed to thousands of man-made chemicals, some of which seep into our bodies and remain there for decades. What that means for our health, we don’t fully understand—but our writer subjected herself to a battery of new tests in search of answers BY ARIANNE COHEN

Chemistry

methyl isobutyl carbinol

ethyl benzene

triclosan

diethyl phthalate

naphthalene



LOTIONSPHTHALATES

Often listed on

labels as “fra-

grance,” phthalates

may cause repro-

ductive disorders.


longer in aggregate, so we must be doing something right,” says Brian Buckley, the laboratory director at the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute at Rutgers University. Still, we do know a few unnerving things. One, all American adults carry around hundreds of synthetic chemicals in their bodies. Two, as a study published in the British Medical Journal in 2004 put it, “many synthetic chemicals have intrinsic hormonal activity,” and hormonal disruptions carry a high likelihood of causing disease. And three, according to the same study, “it is clear that environmental and lifestyle factors are key determinants of human disease—accounting for perhaps 75 percent of most cancers.”

In response to these concerns, in recent years scientists have begun testing the population’s chemical loads in the same rigorous manner that they’ve been testing the environment for decades. This science—called biomonitoring—is slowly helping us understand what our chemical-filled world is doing to us.

I am a paranoid and curious person, and I’ve been following environmental-exposure studies for years. Over time, I developed

Let’s start with the bad news: You are saturated with man-made chemicals, some of them toxic. Today’s exposure began when compounds in your shampoo and shaving cream seeped into your skin cells, and during your morning coffee, when you drank chemicals that were released into your brew as hot water ran against the plastic walls of your coffeemaker. It continued all day as you touched industrial chemicals in packaging, or walked through pesticide-sprayed lawns, or cooked dinner on nonstick pans. This very minute, your skin is probably touching a piece of clothing or furniture that was doused in protective chemicals to make it resistant to microbes, fungus or water. Tonight, there’s a good chance you’ll curl up in sheets treated with flame retardants.

Some of these chemicals can stay in the body for decades, and in numerous studies over the past eight or so years, environmental toxins have been linked to everything from early puberty to cancer. David Servan-Schreiber, a founding member of Doctors Without Borders in the U.S. and a cancer researcher who survived the disease himself, summarized our predicament in the New York

Times last year. “Since 1940, we have seen in Western societies a marked and rapid increase in common types of cancer,” he wrote. Since 1974, leukemia and brain cancer rates in children have risen by 28 percent. The federal government began regulating environmental toxins with the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, but in a way, that’s when the real trouble began. The act established a weak system for chemical testing and regulation, but it also grandfathered in any previously produced chemicals, to the tune of more than 60,000 free passes. To Servan-Schreiber, surveying the situation 32 years later, the culprit was clear: “Reducing exposure to many of the well-characterized chemical carcinogens abundant in our modern environments (pesticides, estrogens, benzene, PCBs, PVCs and bisphenol-A from heating liquids in plastic containers; alkylphenols in cleaning products; parabenes and phthalates in cosmetics and shampoos, etc.) would contribute to lessen the cancer risk.”

Of the 85,000-plus industrial chemicals now registered with the federal government, most are completely unstudied. That doesn’t mean they’re all going to kill us, of course. “We’re living

a morbid curiosity about how many chemicals were lodged in my body. Would I learn how to detoxify? Would I learn that I’m screwed? Would the information be useful at all? In any case, I decided to undergo the most comprehensive testing available to find out.

Last december, I lay on a clinic bed in Buckley’s laboratory at Rutgers. A nurse named Rosalind swabbed my arm in preparation for the Ironman of blood testing. My presence had caused a stir in the lab. They had agreed to take the blood samples I needed for my experiment, but it was far from standard procedure. To get a sense of what I was asking for, think of a lab as a restaurant. I was ordering 150 different dishes—one of everything on the menu—and each would require 10 to 30 complex steps to make. In addition to Rosalind, two other nurses stood by, studying pages of instructions from Quest Diagnostics and Axys Analytical, the labs that would later be analyzing my blood for chemicals including flame retardants, pesticides, plastics and metals.

where Toxins

come fromNot all brands contain the chemicals listed here, but enough do that informed shopping is important.

[See more tips on page 66.]

PAINT

AND

VARNISHVOLATILE

ORGANIC

COMPOUNDS

VOCs, as they’re

known, cause eye,

nose and throat

irritation, and

chronic exposure

may damage the

central nervous

system, kidney

and liver. Look

for low- or zero-

VOC paint.

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OLDER

NONSTICK

COATINGSPFOA

Associated with

testicular, liver

and pancreatic

cancers.

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Rosalind picked up a needle, and the two nurses positioned themselves to grab vials as quickly as my arm could fill them. As I wondered what all that blood would reveal, my mind wandered to memories of a summer childhood ritual: standing in the bathroom in my bathing suit as my mother slathered me with thick layers of sunblock, pausing to let the greasy lotion soak in. Then she’d reach for another canister. “Shut your eyes.” This was my signal to clamp my eyes tight, stop breathing, and turn in a circle while my mother hosed me down with bug spray.

Rosalind read aloud: “OK, ladies. Now we are going to ‘Remove 14 size-large vials of blood from the patient, or as much

as is safe.’ ” She looked up. “OK?” It was the beginning of my experiment,

designed to mimic research conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s primary source for information on exposure to industrial chemicals in the population. In the late 1970s, the agency began searching for

That’s only a fraction of the few thousand chemicals produced in large quantities, but it’s also a major leap from several decades ago, when there was lead in the gas, asbestos in the walls, and no official effort to figure out whether these things were causing harm. To choose the chemicals it will test for, the CDC publishes a notice in the Federal Register soliciting recommendations from scientists. After the suggestions flood in, it gradually narrows the list, choosing chemicals that are widely distributed and suspected of causing harm. Practical concerns rule out searching for more than a few hundred chemicals. “There’s a limit if you’re getting just a few tubes of blood,” says Jim Pirkle, deputy director of

science for the CDC.The NHANES survey begins when

the CDC uses a computer algorithm to select 15 counties nationwide. Surveyors appear on the doorsteps of 800 to 1,600 people in each county and interview them, and around a third of the finalists—5,000 or so

exposure to heavy metals like lead and cadmium. Since then, the CDC has periodically conducted a census of American bodies called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). The agency uses the data for many things, ranging from children’s growth charts to obesity statistics—and, since 2001, to produce a study called the National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals. The next such report, due out late this year, will include data on the prevalence of 228 of the most common environmental toxins.

people nationwide—are ultimately screened. The agency takes measurements on height, weight, body-fat levels, blood pressure and heart rate, among other things. It does an oral-health exam, a bone scan and a vision test. The study participants fill out questionnaires on diet, sexual behavior and drug use. And yes, they also give copious amounts of urine and blood. The results are anonymous, although participants get a copy, along with a toll-free number to call for help understanding them.

Unless the CDC shows up at your house, it’s just about impossible to get this kind of testing. Until the past few years, chemical-exposure testing was available only in research labs, where academics focused on specific families of chemicals, using expensive techniques like gas chromatography and mass spectroscopy. “It really wasn’t available to the public-health community, or to groups of people who figured they might be exposed to pesticides or other agents, because no one had the hundreds of thousands of dollars to open labs and do the testing,” says environmental-exposure researcher Michael McCally, a senior scientist at Physicians for Social Responsibility in Washington, D.C. The technology has slowly moved into specialized commercial labs, but it’s still wildly expensive to access it. My

MOST OF THE CHEMICALS IN USE TODAY ARE UNTESTED AND UNREGULATED.

COSMETICS PARABENS, PHTHALATES, LEAD

A variety of chemicals found in certain cosmet-

ics have been linked to maladies ranging from

hormonal disruptions and infertility to heart

disease and various cancers.

COFFEE-

MAKERSDECA BDE

A toxic flame

retardant in

plastic can leach

into your brew.



SUNSCREEN

OXYBENZONE

Absorbed through the

skin, this compound

may cause hormonal

disruptions.


surrogates for other chemical exposures or lifestyle practices.” “There are almost no smoking guns,” Buckley says. “True

smoking guns usually happen in occupational contamination, where a high percentage of people in a factory come down with, say, lung cancer. Everything else is just estimate or conjecture.”

As for product safety testing, it’s far rarer than you might think. The Food and Drug Administration requires pharmaceuticals to be rigorously tested before entering the marketplace, but although the cosmetic industry conducts tests on animals for skin rashes and allergic reactions, those tests, overseen by an industry organization called the Cosmetic Ingredient Review, aren’t mandatory.

Cosmetics and general products are rarely, if ever, tested for long-term health effects, let alone potential effects on a fetus. All those air fresheners and cleaning products and perfumes that are sprayed liberally in the air you breathe? Never tested.

If evidence appears that a chemical might be harmful, it’s still tough to get

testing would cost me more than $4,000, and that was with Quest agreeing to do much of the blood analysis for free.

The CDC’s Report on Environmental Exposure doesn’t declare any chemicals harmful or safe. “It’s not their job,” Buckley says. “There are people at the National Institutes of Health who do that stuff, and the ATSDR”—the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, created by Congress with the Superfund act of 1980—“and there are epidemiologists, and all of us academics who spend our whole lives interpreting what the CDC puts out.”

Studies on the connection between environmental disease and chemicals have proliferated since the CDC published its first exposure report. Still, the field is young, and such is the state of the art that my makeshift test would give me only raw data about the chemicals in my body; it wouldn’t tell me anything about the likelihood that a particular chemical would give me cancer. I’d have to assemble a personal posse of experts—

those people who spend their lives interpreting CDC data— to help me understand the results.

as i arranged the follow-up to my bloodwork, the inherent difficulty of biomonitoring research became clear. Researchers have uncovered plenty of associations between toxins and diseases, and they’re uncovering more all the time. But it’s nearly impossible to quickly and definitively link an individual chemical to a specific disease without knowingly poisoning test subjects. It’s staggeringly hard to prove causation in a system as complicated as the body, particularly when a fetus exposed to a chemical might not show any sign of harm until it becomes an adult. In one study, men who lived in an agricultural area of Missouri were 40 percent less fertile than city-dwellers. Knockout punch for pesticides, right? Wrong. The British Medical Journal study cites this research as a classic example of the difficulty of linking chemicals to disease. “Although these new findings are suggestive, for none [of the findings] is the mechanism of the chemical’s effect self evident,” the researchers wrote. “This leaves doubts as to whether the measured chemicals are the real culprits or are

SOAPPHTHALATES, TRICLOCARBANS

(IN ANTIBACTERIAL SOAP)

Certain chemicals found in bar soap are asso-

ciated with hormonal disruptions that may

increase the risk of reproductive

problems and cancers.

SHAMPOO PHTHALATES,

PARABENS,

1,4-DIOXANE

These additives are

linked to hormonal

disruptions.

Q�Vent your gas stove outside to avoid releasing polycyclic hydrocarbons,

created by incomplete combustion, into your home, says Shelly Miller, an

air-pollution researcher at the University of Colorado.

Q�Use minimal carpet and drapery. “Carpets can be a reservoir

for all sorts of particles,” Miller says.

Q�Use a HEPA filter on your vacuum to keep captured particles from

escaping back into the air.

Q�Look up cosmetic and cleaning products on the Environmental

Working Group’s “Skin Deep” database (www.ewg.com), which

rates more than 50,000 products on a scale of 0 (safe) to 10 (haz-

ardous). A “data gap” rating lets you know whether the conclusion

is based on comprehensive safety data or industry research.

what you can doWe actually do have a lot of control over the chemicals we’re exposed to in our homes, where they are 1,000 times as likely to be inhaled as outdoors. Here’s how to start purifying your environment.

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CHARRED

MEAT

POLYCYCLIC

AROMATIC

HYDRO-

CARBONS

Caused by incom-

plete combustion,

some of these

chemicals are prob-

able carcinogens.


it off the market. Our regulatory system treats chemicals the same way our judicial system treats people, maintaining that they are innocent until proven guilty and trying them one by one. “Chemical-regulation policy deals with individual chemicals, not families of chemicals,” McCally says. That makes banning potentially harmful chemicals inefficient, because typically, if a single molecule has health effects, all its very similar cousins,

known as congeners, may as well. “Each congener is a different chemical, so you spend 10 years in court for each,” he says.

My test results may be the most confusing things I’ve ever received in the mail. I expected to rip them open and find a variant of the routine bloodwork I get from my doctor, complete with a little thumbs-up icon next to good cholesterol results. Instead, over four months I received six individual spreadsheets that said things like “2,3,7,8-TCDD UN 3373 L12090-1 WG27842 30.8g (wet) pg/g (wet weight basis) <.0065 spiked matrix WG27842-102 % Recov 78.3.” Gibberish to me.

My interpretation team was made up of three experts: McCally, Buckley, and Leo Trasande, director of the Mt. Sinai Center for Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research in New York and a lead investigator on the federally funded National Children’s Study, which will ultimately set benchmarks for toxic exposures among our most chemical-sensitive population.

chemicals are classified by the EPA as probable carcinogens, and they can stay in the body for 25 years, but scientists still don’t understand how potency and length of exposure relate to illness.

I’m carrying above-typical levels of residue from nonstick coatings like Teflon, specifically one called PFOA that

is associated with cancer. “Preliminary studies suggest that even low-level exposures can be problematic,” Trasande says.

I’m loaded with nitrate. “This is principally from processed foods, and there’s a cancer risk associated,” Buckley says.

I also have typical levels of exposure to plastics and plasticizers like phthalates, which add flexibility to soft plastics and vinyl and stability to creams and washes. “They’re ubiquitous,” McCally says. Phthalates are linked to reproductive disorders, and it’s unclear what exposure level could be considered safe.

Lastly, my levels of the notorious bisphenol-A, or BPA, an estrogenic compound found in plastic and plastered all over the news for the past two years, are typical. BPA has entered my system every time I’ve ever taken a swig

I started by calling Trasande. When I read him the first incomprehensible line from my results, he laughed. “I don’t know what that means,” he said. “Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin is nasty stuff. But I would need to also see the benchmarks.” I found the latest NHANES benchmarks and called him back. After going through the rest of the results with my panel, we arrived at a verdict: I am full of chemicals.

My levels of dioxins and furans, older chlorinated chemicals that are usually released into the air by manufacturing and garbage incineration, are above population averages. Industrial releases have decreased 80 percent since the 1980s, yet I’m still full of them because dioxin exposure is the gift that keeps on giving. The body stores dioxin in fat cells and occasionally releases it into the blood, recirculating the same chemicals throughout the body. These have been linked to reproductive disorders, cancer and other maladies.

My levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons—the result of incomplete combustion, these are commonly emitted by stoves and charred meat—are typical for the population. Some of these

FISH

MERCURY

Fish can soak up

mercury from

environmental

pollution, and

when you eat

them, you get it

too. Mercury can

be highly toxic,

damaging the ner-

vous system and

possibly causing

birth and develop-

mental defects.

PLASTIC

BOTTLESBISPHENOL-A

(BPA)

BPA may cause

hormonal and

reproductive

problems.

[continued on page 84]

THE VERDICT FROM MY EXTENSIVE BLOOD TESTING: I AM FULL OF CHEMICALS.

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the green dreamone man’s mission to build an eco-friendly, affordable home

CLEARLY EFFICIENT

WITH THE EFFICIENT pre-fab panels that make up the walls of my home, it’s vital

that I don’t let all the heat—and my budget—escape out my 47 windows. So the fact that I had my heart set on sleek aluminum frames instead of wood or vinyl posed some challenges.

Residential aluminum windows tend to be inefficient because metal is far more conductive than wood, al-lowing significant heat loss, so they’re mostly used in warmer climates. Com-mercial models use thicker frames with a strip of insulating resin as a thermal break between the interior and exterior. But the extra materi-als and complicated design raise the price, and commercial makers aren’t

Biltite Evolution—for the past two years. His frames use four insulating tech-

niques: two types of plastic thermal breaks, air pockets to help prevent con-densation and three panes of glass with argon trapped between them. Since these don’t need to be as robust as commercial windows, Gordon uses thinner-walled alu-minum, which keeps the price down, and dealing directly with the manufacturer (Gordon) cuts out the standard distributor markup. My total bill is around $55,000.

A simulation of the window design run by an independent testing lab showed that it would be 50 percent more efficient than a vinyl window, with a U-value (a measure of how well it conducts heat) of 0.21, low enough to qualify for an energy tax credit.—John B. Carnett

set up for small residential orders. I got an astonishing quote of $137,000 for a mix of casement, fixed and slider models.

Then my architect found Tom Gordon, who runs a 16-person custom window-making shop in Rhode Island. Gordon has been designing an affordable, efficient residential aluminum model—the

CUSTOM-MADE ALUMINUM WINDOWS SAVE MONEY AND ENERGY

STAGE #4:

HOUSE: 3,500-square-foot,

four-bedroom contemporary

LOCATION: Greenwich, N.Y.

PROJECT: Install energy-efficient

aluminum windows

COST: About $55,000

TIME TO INSTALL: About a week

ECO-ADVANTAGE: Less heat loss than

standard aluminum or vinyl windows

THE SPECS

PETER B

OLLIN

GER

JOHN B. CARNETT,

POPSCI’s staff photogra-

pher, is using the latest

green technology to

build his dream home.

Follow his progress in

every issue, and visit

popsci.com/greendream

for tips, videos of the

build, and John’s blog.



AIR POCKETS A type of weather-stripping known as a fin seal,

made of a synthetic material called wool pile, lines the perimeter

of the sash and creates air pockets that stop cool air from reach-

ing the inside and causing condensation in the winter.


Four More Green Windows and DoorsGreenest glass

Soon your windows could

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being tested on commercial

buildings in California and

could trickle down to homes

as early as 2011. solar.tm

next: turning the roof into a living garden

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UV-Free Window

Huper Optik’s Ceramic 30

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From $7 per square foot;

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what’s inside?Biltite Evolution

Windows

GLASS Three panels sepa-

rated by pockets of argon, a

common window insulator,

add up to 1.5-inch-thick

panes, twice as thick as stan-

dard residential windows.

THERMAL DEBRIDGING

Two narrow channels in the

interior frame are filled with

urethane, which cures in

place. Then the aluminum in

the bottom of the channel is

cut away, leaving a urethane

bridge that’s less conductive.

THERMAL STRUTS

Pairs of ¾-inch strips made of

a strong glass-fiber-reinforced

plastic called polyamide

bridge the interior and exte-

rior aluminum frames to keep

heat from traveling through

the aluminum.



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JON

ATH

AN

WO

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(2)


how 2.0tips, tricks, hacks and do-it-yourself projECTS

76The metals that make

the most sparks

GAME PLANNING

Iain Sharp spent

months gathering

parts from the Web,

garage sales and

his own collection of

junked electronics.

74Make an e-book reader

out of an old tablet PC

After hearing about preparations for the 40th

anniversary of the moon landing at Kennedy Space

Center last year, British engineer Iain Sharp decided

to develop a tribute of his own. His offering, a remake

of the 1979 Atari game Lunar Lander, in which players

try to settle a module onto the moon’s surface, is

a complex mix of scrapped PCs, fishing line, inkjet

printer motors and miniature space vehicles.

To enhance the retro look, Sharp suspended the

lander from a moving carriage with the fishing line.

As the line unspools and the lander descends, the

player turns a modified car steering wheel to rotate

the module and then hits a button to fire the “rockets”

and push the craft in the direction it’s pointing. The line

spools up, and printer motors shift the carriage along

a track, carrying the lander across the moonscape.

Sharp tested magnets as a means of measuring

successful touchdowns but found that they pulled the

lander right to the target, making the game too

easy. Instead he installed touch sensors to

measure when the craft hit the ground and

wrote software that estimates its exact

position based on how far the motors

moved in the course of the game.

Still, the game, which is installed at

the Southwold Pier in Suffolk, England,

doesn’t demand perfection from its

players. “You can get away with a few

little mistakes,” Sharp says, “which is kind

of like the real thing.”—Gregory Mone

THE CLASSIC VIDEOGAME LUNAR

LANDER IS TRANSFORMED INTO THREE DIMENSIONS

OVER THE MOON

We review all our projects before publishing them, but ultimately your safety is your responsibility. Always wear protective gear, take proper safety precautions, and follow all laws and regulations. THE H2WHOA CREDO: DIY CAN BE DANGEROUS.!

[turn the page to see how it works]

YOU

BUILT what

?!

What to look for before

choosing a Web host

78



HOW IT WORKS

YOU BUILT WHAT ?! [continued from preceding page]

WARNING Apollo-style electrical gauges

display speed and fuel levels, and turn

red if you take too long or drop too fast.

TOUCHDOWN Powered by a cable con-

nected to the carriage above, a servo motor

housed in the gray box rotates the lander.

#�MISSION CONTROL

A science-fiction-sounding mission opera-

tor delivers flight directives, such as “Land

more slowly!” Sharp provided the narra-

tion at first but then recruited British radio

personality Emma Freud to do it instead.

In exchange, Sharp promised to build her a

version of his first “real” arcade game—a

mash-up of the classic game Pong and exer-

cise bikes, called Cyclepong.

#�BRAINS

A pair of old PCs, bought for about $30,

translates the input from the controllers—a

button that controls thrust and a steering

wheel—into the lander’s movements. Sharp

wrote the software and, despite its school-

science-project appearance, the game is J O

NA

TH

AN

WO

RTH

(3)


#�TIME: One year #�COST: $800

very responsive: The main PC sends instruc-

tions to the motors 50 times per second.

#�GAMEPLAY

The computer measures success by the land-

er’s descent rate and its final position relative

to the targets. Three successful landings earn

players one of a variety of vintage-looking

pin-on buttons featuring Apollo-themed

images. But neglect to fire the rockets in a

timely fashion to slow the lander down at a

safe pace, and you’ll drop too fast and crash.

Crooked landings, measured by how much

the servo motor that rotates the lander has

moved, are also considered failures. Red

LEDs flash and the game’s speakers blare

sounds of explosion, letting everyone around

you know that you’ve disappointed the nation.

HAPPY LANDINGS Fishing lines

spool down from a wooden

frame on the track above the

moonscape, controlling the

lander’s ascent and descent.

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HOW 2.0


1 YOUR COMPUTER

Access your desktop from wherever you

take your iPhone, with Jaadu ($25; jaadu

vnc.com). Or control your computer from

across the room with Mobile Air Mouse

Pro ($6; mobileairmouse.com), which

uses the accelerometer in the iPhone to

turn it into a mouse you wave in the air

like a wand.

2 YOUR HOME

Turn on lights, set the thermostat, shut

off the sprinklers, and monitor motion

sensors in your house even when you’re

away, with Indigo Touch (perceptive

automation.com), an application that’s

compatible with Insteon and X10 home-

automation components.

3 YOUR CAMERA

See through your Canon DSLR’s lens

even when it’s pointed at you. For an

easier self-portrait or to shoot from

awkward angles, DSLR Camera Remote

($25; ononesoftware.com) puts shutter

control, shooting settings and a live view

of the frame on your iPhone’s screen.

4 YOUR CAR

Check out geekmyride.org for details

on how one hacker hooked his Mazda

RX-8’s computer to a Linux computer

he installed in his trunk and created an

iPhone-optimized Web interface to con-

trol the door locks, windows and ignition.

A cellular modem keeps the ride online

all the time.

5 YOUR MOOD

Try daily affirmation projects, like making

a “savoring album” by snapping iPhone

pictures of uplifting moments, with Live

Happy ($7; livehappyapp.com). Based on

psychological research, the activities are

designed to boost happiness. If that fails,

the Insult-O-Matic ($1; insultapp.com) can

raise your spirits by slinging disses at any-

one within earshot.—Amanda Schupak

THINGS5

YOU CAN CONTROL WITH YOUR IPHONE

An easy-to-install station

from the company that sets

the standard in quality.

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HOW 2.0

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POPSCI.COM

I tried to love Amazon’s amazing e-ink

electronic book reader, the Kindle, I

really did. But I wanted a device that

had full color and a higher-resolution

display and that didn’t limit the con-

tent you can view on it. So instead of

shelling out $300, I decided to make

my own version using a tablet PC

—basically a computer with a stowable

keyboard (or no keyboard at all) that

you mainly control with a stylus and

touchscreen. It doesn’t have the long

battery life or always-on connection

for downloading books and magazines

that the Kindle offers, but with a few

system tweaks and the addition of

some free software, it does everything

else the Kindle does. Plus, unlike

Amazon’s gadget, it lets me read any

comic book or magazine in color, and

doesn’t require an extra fee to read

blogs and download PDFs. And since

tablets never quite caught on with

consumers, they’re available by the

truckload on eBay for about half the

cost of a Kindle.—Phillip Torrone

A DIY KINDLETURN A SECONDHAND TABLET PC INTO A

FULLY FUNCTIONAL E-BOOK READER

#�time: 1 HOUR #�cost: about $200

#�easy hard

3. LOAD

Install reader software like

Calibre (calibre.kovidgoyal

.net), Adobe’s PDF reader

(get.adobe.com/reader)

and ComicRack (comicrack

.cyolito.com). Also try Zinio

(zinio.com) so you can view

digital editions of magazines

like POPSCI. Install RSS read-

ers such as FeedDemon (newsgator.com)

to download news with the tablet’s Wi-Fi

connection. (If your tablet has Bluetooth, you

can also connect through your cellphone.)

And bookmark newspaper sites like the

New York Times Article Skimmer version

(prototype.nytimes.com/gst/articleSkimmer)

and sites like Project Gutenberg (gutenberg

.org) for no-fee, copyright-free books.

2. FORMAT

Strip down Windows XP

by removing programs

you don’t need (check out

extremetech.com or

lifehacker.com for help).

Next, go to Control Panel

and then Display to change

the look of the system.

Choose “high contrast/

white” for the background, and increase

the size of the icons so you can tap things

easily with the pen. You can even make

the interface black and white to look more

Kindle-like. Use the D-pad mapping software

included with the tablet or the reader apps

to change button functions—for example,

I mapped Page Up and Page Down to be

“next page” and “previous page.”

1. BUY

Hit eBay to find cheap tablet PCs. Look

for older models like the Motion M1400

or Fujitsu Stylistic. Expect to pay around

$200 for a fully functional one, or a little

less if you’re willing to fix it or get missing

parts elsewhere.

BUILD AN E-READER

REPURPOSED

TECH

4. READ

Sit back and enjoy. I’ve read

more classics and PDFs

lately than I ever expected.

Now my girlfriend and I

sit around for hours with-

out talking to each other,

transfixed by electronic

text. Perhaps this wasn’t

the best idea after all.

MEDIA DARLING With a tablet

PC, you can take full-color

digital editions of magazines

like POPSCI everywhere you go.




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MIK

E W

ALK

ER

SPARK FUNAN ELEMENTAL RECIPE

FOR CREATING GREAT

SHOWERS OF SPARKS

HOW 2.0GRAYMATTER

Anything that creates sparks is shooting fine particles of burning metal that could damage your eyes. Always wear eye protection when grinding.


Metals can be classified by hardness,

malleability and conductivity. One qual-

ity you won’t find listed in the reference

books is sparkiness.

A delicate balance between flam-

mability and hardness determines which

metals spark. For example, magnesium

is a famously flammable metal, but

grinding it produces no sparks because

the energy needed to cut chips from the

soft metal is not enough to heat them to

their ignition point.

Although iron is much less flamma-

ble, it’s so hard that separating chips of

it heats them to the point that they catch

fire and burn brightly as they fly off. The

true champions of sparkiness, however,

are the lanthanides—the elements from

lanthanum (57) to lutetium (71). They are

even more flammable than magnesium

yet also hard enough to generate large

amounts of heat when they are ground.

Lighter “flints” aren’t made of flint

but rather a mix of lanthanides, with iron

added to tame the excessive sparkiness

of the other elements. Lose the iron,

and you have the pinnacle of sparkiness:

Mischmetal (German for “mixed metal”)

contains lanthanum and cerium, with

smaller amounts of other lanthanides.

Blocks of it are often used in movie

special effects. For example, a scene in

which a car blows a tire and drags on its

rims needs a stream of sparks coming

off the wheel, so a block of mischmetal

is strapped on for spectacular effect.

Ironically, modern aluminum wheels

are nonsparking, so the only place this

still happens at all is Hollywood.

—Theodore Gray

HOT SHOWER When a

grinder is applied to

mischmetal—a com-

bination of various

elements—it produces

copious quantities of

big sparks.

ACHTUNG!

TAILGATERS BEWARE The author

tows a block of mischmetal along

the road, turning his minivan

into a fire-shooting menace.



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HOW 2.0

DA

VE H

ELFR

EY

Three words:

Reliability, flexibility,

simplicity. No

matter what, you

want a Web host

that never goes

offline, so make sure it guarantees

uninterrupted uptime. Beyond that,

you’ll first need to identify the features

you want your site to have. If all you

require is yourname.com and an easy

way to post text and images, try a free

service like Wordpress.com. It offers

automated site design, a choice of 76

JAKE LUDINGTON answers many more tech questions at jakeludington.com.

GOT A QUESTION FOR OUR GEEK CHORUS? SEND IT TO US AT [email protected].

themes, and the ability to add and edit

pages with the click of a button. For

additional basic functions, such as a

personalized e-mail domain, look at

super-cheap options like GoDaddy.com.

For more-specialized applications like,

say, creating a database for tracking

Little League statistics, look for hosting

solutions in the $7-to-$10 monthly

price range. Dreamhost.com and

Bluehost.com use Wordpress’s simple

HOW DO I PICK A COMPANY TO HOST MY WEB SITE?

system for adding text

and photos, and have

unlimited storage, custom

database support, FTP access

(handy for home PC backups), e-mail

discussion lists, video file streaming

and online photo-gallery software. Also

consider paying for a host that lets you

install shopping-cart software and run

advertising on your site, which could

more than offset the fee.

ASK A

GEEK



HOW 2.0

*orig

inal

ly p

oste

d on

evi

lmad

scie

ntis

t.com A MINI TOOTHBRUSH ROBOT

1 .

2.

3.

Cut off the head of a toothbrush with angled bristles, and apply foam tape to the back.

Get a pager motor (try goldmine-elec.com), solder two wires to it, and connect a coin battery.

ALL THE FUN OF A HYPERACTIVE PET,

WITHOUT THE SHEDDING

HAVE AN IDEA FOR A 5-MINUTE PROJECT? SEND IT TO US AT [email protected].

Stick the motor and battery to the tape, and watch the robot merrily frolic about.

ALTUSE.COMInstead of tossing your old coffee grounds

in the trash, try using them to fertilize your

plants. While you’re at it, ball up some old alu-

minum foil and put it in your dryer—it actually

makes a great fabric softener. Altuse.com

features these and hundreds of other helpful

user-submitted household hacks. Not only are

most of the solutions environmentally friendly,

they can also save you money.

WEB SITE OF THE MONTH

THE WEBCYCLE

FR

OM

TO

P: LU

IS B

RU

NO

(3);

CO

UR

TESY

MA

TT G

RA

Y

Be the fittest Internet addict at your next meet-

ing. British audio engineer Matt Gray and video

programmer Tom Scott hooked up a laptop to

an exercise bike. As you pedal more quickly, the

software increases your bandwidth, letting you

surf faster—if you can use a mouse and keyboard

while biking, anyway. The builders put sensors

in the pedals and added a microcontroller that

counts the number of rotations and sends the

data to the computer. Find details at mattg.co.uk.

PROJECT OF THE MONTH

SIT AND SURF

The Internet

speed varies,

depending on

how fast the

rider pedals.



sometimes you just need to know

FYI

“First, we’re assuming that the T. rex won’t just eat the person, right?” asks Jack Conrad, a vertebrate

paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Right. This is

a sanctioned match, and killing your opponent is strictly against the rules. “Doesn’t matter,” Conrad says. “There’s no chance that any human alive could win.”

The T. rex’s arms might have looked wimpy, but they were extremely strong. Each was about three feet long and, based on the size of the arm bones and analysis of the spots where muscle attached to the bone, they were jacked. “The bicep alone—and this is a conservative estimate—could curl 430 pounds,” Conrad says. Even the beefiest humans max out at around an embarrassing 260 pounds.

Surely an Over the Top–era Sylvester Stallone would put

QTyrannosaurus rex

had puny arms. Could

a human beat one in an

arm-wrestling match?


Lucas Saladin, via e-mail

WA

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up a good fight? “Not even Lou Ferrigno in his prime would stand a chance,” Conrad says. “They didn’t just have big biceps. Their chest and shoulder muscles were huge too. They had huge arms and shoulders—bigger than my leg. They had the strength to rip a human’s arm right out of its socket.”

There is a chance, however, that your competition might not be able to put all that beefy muscle to use. There are dozens of hypotheses about what the T. rex used its arms for, Conrad explains, but the ones taken most seriously involve pushing itself up if it was lying on its belly, tossing big chunks of meat into its mouth, or holding onto females during what scientists suspect was a very vigorous mating routine. These ideas are favored because such actions required Barbie doll–like up-and-down motions of the arm, and fossil evidence indicates that the dino king was incapable of rotating or twisting its arms. “The T. rex probably couldn’t have done the arm-wrestling move,” Conrad says. “So maybe you could get him on a technicality.”—BJORN CAREY

What would happen if I ate a teaspoonful ofwhite dwarf star?Robert Schulzetenberg, via e-mail

“Everything about it would be bad,” says Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at Adler Planetarium in Chicago, beginning with your attempt to scoop it up. Despite the fact that white dwarfs are fairly common throughout the universe, the nearest is 8.6 light-years away. Let’s assume, though, that you’ve spent 8.6 years in your light-speed car and that the radiation and heat emanating from the star didn’t kill you on your approach. White dwarfs are extremely dense stars, and their surface gravity is about 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. “You’d have to get your sample—which would be very hard to carve out—without falling onto the star and getting flattened into a plasma,” Hammergren says. “And even then, the high pressure would cause the hydrogen atoms in your body to fuse into helium.” (This type of reaction, by the way, is what triggers a hydrogen bomb.)

Then you’d have to worry about confinement. Freeing the sample from its superdense, high-pressure home and bringing it to Earth’s relatively low-pressure environment would cause it to expand explosively without proper containment. But if it didn’t blow up in your face—or vaporize your face, since the stuff’s temperature ranges between 10,000˚ and 100,000˚F—and you somehow got it to your kitchen table, you’d be hard-pressed to feed yourself: A single teaspoon would weigh in excess of five tons. “You’d pop it into your mouth and it would fall unimpeded through your body, carve a channel through your gut, come out through your nether regions, and burrow a hole toward the center of the Earth,” Hammergren says. “The good news is that it’s not quite dense enough to have a strong enough gravitational field to rip you apart from the inside out.”

It probably wouldn’t be worth the trouble anyway, Hammergren laments. White dwarfs are mostly helium or carbon, so your teaspoonful would taste like a whiff of flavorless helium gas or a lick of coal. But if you’re desperate for a taste of star, you don’t really need to travel 8.6 light-years—your fridge is full of the stuff. Most of the elements that make up our bodies and everything around us were formed in the cores of stars and then belched out into the universe over billions of years. Basically everything you eat was once part of a star. Might we recommend some star fruit?—B.C.

ISTO

CK

LIGHT MEAL A teaspoon of

super-dense white dwarf star

would rip through your stomach.





[continued FROM page 47]

And that leaves the agency trying to predict the future.

You don’t pick astronauts for today’s needs, Ross says. “You make your best guess about what’s going to be happening five years from now.” The class of 2009 is one of NASA’s smallest, and that’s a reflection of limited chances to fly in the future. Shuttle astronauts could expect to make several missions during their careers, but with a smaller vehicle, NASA will have fewer astronauts in space. Like many of the Apollo astronauts, the new recruits might make only one or two flights in their entire career.

So why become an astronaut at all? Astronaut recruit Kate Rubins [also a 2009 Brilliant 10 honoree; see page 57] has heard that question before. When she told her peers about her new career path, some of them questioned it, wondering why anyone would want to become an astronaut now. NASA’s future is so uncertain and everything in space seems to be in constant need of repair. Who wants to rocket 255 miles into space to fix a toilet? Aren’t you a tenure-track molecular biologist at MIT? Naturally, Rubins sees things differently. Through her eyes, NASA has an unprecedented

opportunity. Many experts consider the ISS a training ground for more-ambitious adventures in space, and now that the facility is nearly complete, NASA may soon be free to turn its resources toward the next big chapter in its history: manned exploration beyond the ISS. The agency is already building a new ship for the job, rocket technology has never been more affordable, thanks to epic strides made by the private space industry, and increasing environmental threats to the planet make human outposts in space sound more and more like wise investments.

Today’s astronauts may take fewer flights, but the ones they do take could make history. It’s possible that someone in the 2009 class will be the next to set foot on the moon, or the first woman to ever do so. Some of them could even become the first to visit an asteroid.

Now is the perfect time to start preparing them for the trip.

Editor-at-large Dawn Stover has been

writing about NASA since 1987.

DEEp-SPACE BOOT CAMP

THE FUTURE OF SPACE



POPSCI.COMPOPSCI.COM

from a water bottle—which I did a lot of as a teenager, training five hours a day as a swimmer.

The overall takeaway is not soothing. “The core message is that we are all exposed to a wide array of chemicals in the environment, as you have been,” Trasande says. “And what little we know suggests cause for concern. And equally concerning is what we don’t know.”

As I spent days decoding spreadsheets, one uplifting fact became clear: I tested notably clear of the majority of pesticides, fungicides and metals that I would most likely ingest outdoors. In fact, with the exception of the dioxins and furans that I and the rest of the country picked up decades ago, I was probably exposed to most of the chemicals in my body indoors—which means more of this is under my control than I thought.

“It doesn’t take a lot of something released indoors to cause exposure,” says Kirk Smith, a professor of global environmental health at the University of California at Berkeley, who taught me the Rule of 1,000: Anything released indoors is about 1,000 times as likely to be inhaled as something released outdoors.

Over the next decade, as the cost of chemical-exposure testing continues to drop, it will probably become more widely available for consumers. But is it worth it? Not according to Trasande, who suggests lifestyle changes over testing. “I wouldn’t advise routine body-burden testing for people,” he says. It’s expensive and invasive, and so far there’s not much that can be done with the knowledge such testing produces. “It’s important to understand that right now, what people can do is proactively reduce their exposure.” That means changing

your lifestyle to avoid as many suspect chemicals as possible.

There is, however, only so much you or I can do. Approximately 1,000 new chemicals are added every year to the 85,000 already on the federal registry. As Jane Houlihan, the senior vice president for research at the nonprofit watchdog organization Environmental Working Group, testified in Congress last year, “Companies are free to use almost any ingredient they choose in personal-care products, with no proof of safety required.” Houlihan argues that the FDA should claim the authority to oversee cosmetic safety, by requiring registration and testing of products and ingredients, making public-health-injury reports mandatory, and enforcing safety requirements—which is the way the agency oversees pesticides and food additives.

There are movements afoot to reform the Toxic Substances Control Act to look more like European Union regulations, which allow the banning of families of chemicals. Most notable is the Kids-Safe Chemical Act, which would empower the EPA to require safety testing of baby products before their release.

Still, any attempt at regulation has to reckon with the fact that there’s no going back to a chemical-free world—we’re far beyond that point. “The presence of these industrial chemicals in your bloodstream or tissues is not normal,” McCally says. “Your grandfather didn’t have these.” He pauses to recalibrate. “It’s a consequence of the chemical environment that we live in, and it’s a new normal. We’re just trying to figure out what that is.”

Arianne Cohen, author of The Tall Book,

wrote about high-tech triathlete Andy

Potts in the August 2008 issue.


[continued from page 67]

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vibrations that captured the feel of spaceflight—

as well as hundreds of potential malfunctions.

POPULAR SCIENCE magazine, Vol. 275, No. 5 (ISSN 161-7370, USPS 577-250), is published monthly by

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Beginning in 1978, NASA started choosing astronauts based on Earth-bound

skills, such as engineering and medicine, that qualified them to perform

experiments and to work outside the shuttle. Many of the students were

strictly mission specialists, with duties that included overseeing the emer-

gency medical supplies or operating a robotic arm that moved satellites in

orbit. They all shared a few unusual bits of training, however. They had the

unnerving experience of practicing repairs using nitrogen-jet propulsion, a

program in 1984 that was determined to be too risky and retired that same

year. Astronauts also curled up inside a “rescue ball,” an escape pod piloted

by a jetpack-wearing compatriot. The ball was deemed impractical but is now

used to evaluate astronauts (presumably by terrifying them). Read about the

training of tomorrow’s astronauts on page 42.—Carina Storrs

FEBRUARY 1982

FUTURE THENfrom the popular science archivesTHE

FLOATING THROUGH: MORE ASTRONAUT-TRAINING STORIES THROUGH THE YEARS

Space Specialists

See allof POPSCI’s

137 years

at popsci.com/archives



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Popular Science, November 2009