Popular Science April 2013

ON THE LAST Sunday before this issue went to press, the lights went out at the Super Bowl. I sat there, gaping, with a drink in my hand, as the ads, the field, Phil Simms, and one of the biggest televised events went dark in front of 108 million viewers. And then I put down the drink and got on the phone. The editors immediately went to work sorting things out. Was this a failure of Entergy, the local utility? Had the incredible power demands of the Super Bowl outstripped the rebuilt infrastructure of post-Katrina New Orleans? And was this the most damning evidence yet that the country needs the fabled smart grid we've been weighing all these years? We interviewed everyone we could find who'd been affected by the…

Kudos for publishing Dan Baum's comprehensive railroad safety article [“Derailed,” February 2013]. It provided a perspective that is easily lost when the events involved are widely dispersed in time and place. Doug KoehlerMarshfield, Wis. Railroads are by far the safest, most efficient, and most environmentally friendly mode of transportation. Why not do a story on 18-wheelers? Studies have shown that if big trucks paid road-use taxes commensurate with the expense of maintaining roads due to truck traffic, much of the freight that goes by truck would go by rail instead. That cargo could be shipped more safely, more cheaply, and with less environmental impact. John ShominLiberal, Mo.…

In the rainforests of South America, squirrel monkeys and capybaras would never meet. While squirrel monkeys live in trees up to 60 feet high, capybaras—the world's largest rodents—dwell along river banks. But at the Beekse Bergen Safari Park in the Netherlands, the two species have shared an enclosure for eight years now, and they seem to be friends. The monkeys ride and groom the capybaras. They even eat and play together. Interspecies relationships are more frequent between captive animals, says behavioral ecologist Marc Bekoff. Because keepers feed them, they can spend time getting to know their enclosure mates instead of foraging for food. In 2005, a similar arrangement at a zoo in Japan went sour when a capybara mauled a monkey to death. But Bekoff says that, for the most…

Projecting a large image in a small room is almost impossible, an unfortunate result of how most projectors work. In them, light passes from a bulb though a colored LCD panel and diffuses across a room. The farther back the projector, the more the light spreads, expanding the image; for example, a standard projector 12 feet from the wall produces a 100-inch picture. To create the same image from less than two feet away, engineers at LG used lasers instead of a bulb in the new Laser TV HD projector. The stronger, less-diffuse light is easier to manipulate at short distances. The projector alters images in two ways. First, its processor runs the picture data through algorithms that expand the bottom corners of the image to compensate for the severe…

In January 2009, General Motors unveiled the luxury cousin of the Chevrolet Volt—the Cadillac Converj concept. Yet almost immediately, GM started sending mixed signals. One moment the Converj was approved for production; the next it was on hold. Finally, at the most recent Detroit Auto Show in January, GM revealed the car the Converj had become: the 2014 Cadillac ELR. The two-door plug-in hybrid pairs a powertrain pulled straight from the Volt with Cadillac styling and a high-toned interior. The car is scheduled to go into production late this year. But it's still unclear how committed to it GM actually is. At the Detroit show, group vice president Bob Ferguson insisted that the ELR will be built only in very limited numbers. But if drivers embrace the car, GM executives…

Fifteen years ago, Lego released the Mindstorms Robotics Invention System, and amateur roboticists went wild. With it, they could snap together motorized creations that they could program with an intelligent brick. Since then, the Mindstorms online community has shared more than 17,000 designs—as varied as automatic toilet flushers and bumper cars—and started robotics leagues and engineering curriculums. This summer, Lego will release the EV3, the first Mindstorms update in seven years. The kit will allow builders to create tens of thousands of new robots, all of which will be smarter, faster, and more responsive than before. 1 Intelligence upgrade The heart of the EV3 is an upgraded processing brick. A 300-megahertz processor runs up to 10 times faster than its predecessor, so the brick can control more appendages and monitor…