Discover November 2013

Readers, Take Your Best Shot Fresno Air Defense In the July/August issue, Linda Marsa’s book excerpt, “Breathless” (page 79), took a close look at the health effects of air pollution in California. Your recent article on air pollution, which referenced Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley of California, was essentially correct. However, it may have given the impression that Fresno is unlivable, which is far from the truth. The city is home to 500,000 living, breathing people, and the county some 900,000 souls. We are not all suffering. I ride my bike nearly every day and have yet to suffer any ill effects despite being well beyond retirement age. We are close to Yosemite and Sequoia national parks, a number of mountain lakes and rivers, and the Pacific Ocean is…

Sneak Previews By now, you’ve probably heard a fair bit about the latest “comet of the century,” Comet ISON, the sungrazer that, by the time you read this, will be about 10 million miles from Mars. If our best hopes are confirmed, ISON will be spectacularly visible in a few short weeks. Or will it? Right now, a spate of ISON-will-bea-dud stories are making the rounds in the media. The element of unpredictability that naturally accompanies events like ISON makes a few of my astronomer friends nervous, but to me uncertainty only adds to the excitement. And flare or flop, ISON is undeniably fascinating, as our editor at large and Out There blogger Corey Powell demonstrates in our cover story. So consider “The Life and Death of Comet ISON” (page…

CLEARING THE AIR A laser beam illuminates the heavens from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer in Chile. Although the desert skies here are nearly transparent, air currents still disrupt the steadiness of a high-magnification view, resulting in a fuzzier image. To cancel out the atmosphere’s effects, the laser creates its own artificial star 56 miles up. By seeing how the atmosphere alters the appearance of that simulated star, astronomers can deduce what it is doing to the light from real stars. A computer can deform the telescope’s mirror to offset the distortion. — ERNIE MASTROIANNI, PHOTO BY ESO/B. TAFRESHI (TWANIGHT.ORG) 10 The First Underwater Floodgate System 12 Super Fly: Hybrid Airship Aims High Ask Discover: No Brain, No Pain? 14 Solar Threads Nano Antennas for Tiny Machines…

Working at a small college in the shadow of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. and its iconic dirigibles in the late 1990s, computer systems technician Robert Rist was deep into building a blimp-like model with his young son. But as simple as working blimps seemed, Rist had trouble getting his model airborne. An engineer by nature if not by training, he realized putting wings on the inflatable craft might do the trick. When he sketched his idea for Brian Martin, a friend and coworker who had studied shipping methods in a business class in college, a lofty vision emerged: They could launch a FedEx-like shipping revolution, powered by airships that slashed air freight costs and reached less-accessible regions. Before long, the budding entrepreneurs had formed Ohio Airships. The centerpiece…

Q I have often read that surgeons can operate on a person’s brain without anesthetic since the brain has no pain receptors. What, then, is a headache? — Laurie Goffman, Palm Desert, Calif. A Neurosurgeons can operate without applying anesthetic to the brain itself because it has no pain-sensing nerves. Outside the brain, however, you’d better be numb. It’s a given that a surgeon will use local anesthesia on the sensitive area of cranial incision on the skin, says Dimitris Placantonakis, a neurosurgeon at New York University. And the dura mater — the thick membrane surrounding the brain but beneath the skull — “is filled with pain receptors,” so that gets a dose, too. In general, only everything underneath the dura is pain-free. So what’s a headache? “That’s the million-dollar…

A drained smartphone battery often sends us hunting for the nearest outlet, if there even are any. But within a decade, we might be wearing the outlet. In a world of fabrics infused with the power of the sun, recharging could be as simple as plugging devices in to our clothes. Helping this potential future along, chemist John Badding and his colleagues at Pennsylvania State University recently embedded solar cells within flexible wires that can be woven into fabric. The wires assume the same basic arrangement as a common type of rooftop solar cell, which contains a negatively charged layer, a positively charged layer and a neutral layer sandwiched between them. When photons (light particles) from the sun smash into the outer layer of the rooftop cell, they initiate the…