Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2017 i Popular Science

GRAND AWARD WINNER 2017 When passengers finally board one of Rocky Mountain Construction’s new “ raptor track” coasters next spring, they’ll climb into single-seat cars, open airon either side as they whip around turns and loops at speeds up to 50 miles per hour. Instead of riding atop a pair of tracks, riders of thrill sleds like RailBlazer or Wonder Woman Golden Lasso will sit astride a 15-inchwide steel rail, making it feel almost as if they’re riding on the track itself: no janky rocking back and forth— just smooth, precise speed. Amusement-park engineers get a sweet experience too because the single-rail design uses less steel; it’s less expensive, needs fewer supports, and can fit into a fraction of the precious real estate that a coaster of a similar length…

“WE’RE ABOUT TO HAVE A KID, AND I DON’T THINK SHE’S ever going to get her driver’s license,” says Scott Kubly, director of the Seattle Department of Transportation. “Based on where we are technologically, there just won’t be a need.” In August, right before Kubly went on paternity leave, his agency released a 48-page report titled “The New Mobility Playbook” (complete with 147 pages of appendices). In it, SDOT presents a comprehensive plan for dealing with a future in which cars autonomously pilot passengers to work right alongside the city’s buses, trains, and taxis. Seattle isn’t alone in thinking this way. The Boston Consulting Group, which helps Fortune 500 companies—including an undisclosed number of automotive manufacturers—understand business challenges coming down the road, sees a semiautonomous future unfolding, like, now. “It…

GRAND AWARD WINNER 2017 With 28 engines firing together in a coordinated, cacophonous symphony of rocket fuel, the Falcon Heavy lifts off with 5 million pounds of force—more than any ship since the retired ’70s-era Saturn V—and twice the payload weight of any other modern spacecraft. Those thrusters equate to three space-cargo-hauling Falcon 9 rockets and will tote tens of thousands of pounds of satellites, a solar sailing spacecraft, and eventually two lunar tourists. The side boosters burn first and land back on Earth, while the center engine makes the final push out of the atmosphere. The more hardware SpaceX can recover, including that last stage, the cheaper (and cheaper) the flights become. Success in these early missions will prove that this is the ship with the horsepower, reliability, and…

Mako combat drones can accompany U.S. Air Force fighter jets on missions, kind of like robotic wingmen. They can fly around 700 mph, almost the speed of sound, and you control them from a special tablet. I was on the Mako design team at Kratos, which is a military UAV-maker. We wanted to build it for use with a simplified interface so any enlisted soldier could fly one without the expensive pilot training you need for most unmanned aerial vehicles. Even though I was on the software team and I’m not a pilot, I was the one who spent hundreds of hours in the simulator. I found every quirk inside and out. When it came time for them to pick an operator, I was kind of the last one standing.…

As someone who’s been remodeling homes for about 20 years, I can tell you it’s not a predictable 9-to-5. When you start tearing down walls, you never know what you’re going to find. I’ve seen total electrical chaos, where people spliced together wires and just wrapped it all up in insulating tape, popped it behind some drywall, and clearly forgot about it. Handling that kind of wiring is obviously dangerous, but the scariest part is not knowing how much more is still hiding. You’re going: “Is there any of it that we’re not going to find? Because we’re not tearing down every wall.” You don’t want to leave a newly remodeled home riddled with fire hazards. And creative plumbing might not be as liable to burn your house down, but…

That smart cooker, which we’ve nicknamed the Millennial Oven, perfectly follows the trajectory of innovation over the past 30 years. It’s built around bedrock technologies—convection cooking, image recognition, microprocessors, compact cameras, wireless radios—but elevated by the addition of an anyone-proof interface. We’ve seen this story time and again since 1988, the year Popular Science editors first anointed 100 products as the Best of What’s New. The cultural shift over those years is remarkable. Thirty years ago, science and tech were the domains of enthusiasts: audiophiles, mechanics, and IT gals MacGyvering together the components for makeshift local networks. Today, specialized ideas—like printing wirelessly or blasting into space—have rocketed into the mainstream. Because of that shift, by today’s standards, many of the first BOWN winners are just plain wonky. Two classes of…

While Microsoft and Sony compete to see who can fit more computing power into their machines and app developers look for places to cram microtransactions, Nintendo has built a system that bridges the gap between home and on-the-go play. The key to the Switch is a 6.2-inch, capacitive HD touchscreen sandwiched between a pair of removable controllers. The setup has its own battery and storage, so you can play Zelda on your lunch break just like you would in your living room. Each motion-sensitive Joy-Con can act as an independent controller for impromptu Mario Kart multiplayer battles. 01 WARMTONE RECORD PRESS VIRYL TECHNOLOGIES An automated record press Vinyl albums are selling better than they have since the early ’90s, so it’s about time the production process caught up. This $195,000…

1933 ARCH SUPPORT To provide orthopedistapproved arch support, the Posture Foundation gave its PF Flyers a “magic wedge.” The goal: to evenly distribute a wearer’s weight to reduce strain and related injuries. 1960 STICKY SOLE The first shoe designed expressly for running, the New Balance Trackster had roadgripping, shockabsorbing ridges— which the company claimed staved off shin splints—on its soles. 1974 WAFFLE GRIP Running on varied surfaces demands traction and bounce. Protruding nubs on the Nike Waffle Trainer gripped like spikes and also absorbed shock from ground impacts. 1969 CUSHION COMFORT The Onitsuka Tiger Corsair offered supercushy soles made of springy plastic. The material was thicker toward the heels of the shoes, which helped to relieve strain on the Achilles tendon. 1987 LIGHT TREAD By the ’80s, hefty padding was…

If someone showed you a fidget spinner at the beginning of 2017, it would have seemed weird and exotic. By now, you—and the rest of the world—are sick of these little hunks of plastic and ball bearings. During its rise and fall, the humble spinner made some fascinating waves. Chinese factories rushed to ramp up production, drawn in by how cheap and easy the little time-wasters are to make. Street vendors and independent sellers on platforms such as Amazon and eBay sold them by the thousands; apps sprung up to simulate the spinner experience; YouTube videos of spinner tips and reviews racked up hundreds of millions of views. Teens loved them; most school districts hated them. Freshman business students will study their trajectory for years to come. In the end,…

Boeing’s Starliner space capsule is supposed to start ferrying astronauts to the International Space Station in 2018. I’ve worked on the program for a little more than six years. My main job is to make sure the craft and the space suit we’re designing work well together. Sometimes that means I get to test it out for myself. One of the first things I worked on was waste management— specifically, figuring out how astronauts will relieve themselves when they’re stuck in the suit, either on the launchpad or while waiting to reach orbit. Initially we tried out a system, worn like underwear, that can wick waste fluids from the body. We didn’t know if it could pump all the urine it captured into a bag and keep it there so…

We wanted to create a wirelessly charging mouse back in 2013, but we ran into a lot of roadblocks. One thing was figuring out how to get enough power from a single USB connection to a charging pad, and then getting the mouse to pick up that juice as it moved over the surface. Another challenge was latency. We had linked several electrical coils under the pad’s surface, but it took up to a second for the mouse to switch among them as you used it. You can’t have that kind of interruption in charging. And then there was the pad’s layered construction, a sort of sandwich of components. That required lamination to hold it all together. In the first prototype, we actually applied the lamination with a baker’s rolling…

Planes That Let Everyone Board at Once ASSISTANT EDITOR SARA CHODOSH ASKED Boarding is the most loathed aspect of air travel. Why must departing and arriving passengers utilize the same single-file aisle? Plus, every extra minute a plane sits on the ground, the airline loses money, says Ron Barrett, an aerospace engineer at the University of Kansas. His students hatched a solution: The plane’s cabin becomes a mobile pod that attaches and detaches from a center spine. Upon landing, a plane sheds its inbound pod and connects the outbound one. A big hitch? Infrastructure. Airports would need to massively remodel. A Vaccine for Dental Cavities ASSISTANT EDITOR CLAIRE MALDARELLI ASKED Candy-packed kiddie molars and responsible adults alike all get cavities. The culprit is the bacterial strain Streptococcus mutans. Once latched…

Tumors are sly. To survive, the cells bypass our immune systems by retaining similarities to healthy cells. But they also have differences. Over the past decade, researchers have targeted these unique traits to re-enlist the body’s department of defense. Immunotherapies train our own systems to detect those distinct variances. This year, that effort took a huge leap: The FDA approved Kymriah, the first human gene- edited therapy for cancer. The treatment modifies a patient’s T cells (specialized white blood cells) to add a receptor that locates the malignant ones so the killer T’s can attack them. In trials, 83 percent of patients were in remission after three months. One reason Kymriah works so well is that it’s the most customized method to date: The modified cells are specific to both…

GRAND AWARD WINNER 2017 Extreme skiers who climb steep, chairlift-less slopes only to swoosh back down them contend with a unique problem: The long skis they’ve strapped to their backpacks make the ascent even more dangerous because the planks can get in the way of a swung ice ax or catch on an obstacle. Slovenian ski-maker Elan solved this difficulty by creating skis that do something simple but awesome: They fold in half without compromising performance. The key to the system is the 2-foot-long aluminumalloy base plate that swivels out of the way to let the skis fold, and locks them solid and flat when they’re extended. Folded, they take up only about 3 feet on adventurers’ backs. Or, for the resort and après-ski crowd, they’ll fit easily inside the…

Derek Dorresteyn and Jeff Sand didn’t found Alta Motors to create a green dirt bike. They set out to make a fast one: a race bike. Building a race engine is a pain. You often have to take it apart multiple times to dial in maximum speed. Because Alta opted for an electric motor instead of the usual petrol-fueled symphony of whizzing metal, engineers could tune for top performance with software—lines of code instead of elbow grease. This moto doesn’t even need an oil change after a race. But that motor, which puts out 40 horsepower and 120 foot-pounds of torque, is only the first lap of innovation on the Redshift. The bike’s frame is a work of industrial art: Coolant flows through channels cast into the metal instead of…

GRAND AWARD WINNER 2017 Web videos, meal-delivery services, and smart appliances are trying to lure reluctant cooks (ahem, millennials) back into the kitchen with promises of quick, easy meals. Among the latter is the $1,495 June, an intelligent convection cooker that makes crucial decisions for you. Pop in a tray of food, and a camera built into its ceiling recognizes the grub. Based on what it sees, the oven heats to a preset temperature and sets an automatic timer; for tricky proteins like chicken breast and salmon, a digital thermometer double-checks doneness. Six carbonfiber elements maintain a uniform temperature within the oven to avoid hot-spot surprises or soggy bottoms. When it launched this past December, June had 50 different foods in its recipe bank, including vegetables like broccoli and frozen…

Some people might be a little surprised when they walk up to our gate at Boston Logan International Airport and we don’t ask for a boarding pass. JetBlue just rolled out a new facial- recognition device for our Aruba-bound flights there. You just look at the thing, it takes your picture, recognizes you from your passport photo, and you get to walk on board. In my experience, flyers tend to think this process is pretty cool. A few passengers—mainly the ones who are constantly flying down to their Caribbean timeshares—are already used to it. And it’s not much different than posing for selfies, which we all do all the time anyway. Little kids especially love it—when they can actually use it. The camera is 5 feet off the ground, so…

Lead-acid batteries start car engines so well that we’ve used them in pretty much the same way for more than a century. Everyone always figured something clean and new would eventually come along to replace them. Instead, the demand for lead-acid just keeps growing. But recycling all those old batteries requires smelting, where you melt lead to remove impurities. It’s dirty and costs a ton. You have to heat the lead to near its boiling point to get the right chemical reaction , and some of the lead evaporates, releasing pollutants that elude even the finest filters. In 2013, we finally found a new way: using a chemical bath and electricity to purify the lead at room temperature. The day I presented our prototype to an industry conference, I had…

In the past 30 years, we’ve moved from doing single theaters to entire themed entertainment environments. We had one wealthy client who requested a theater surrounded by a replica Tuscan village with a private restaurant and pizzeria. Today people want the IMAX treatment. I work with IMAX to create these massive wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling screens just like you’d see in a full-size theater. They require one 4K projector and four surround-sound speakers. These things start at $200,000 just for the AV hardware. Then it’s another $120,000 for design, engineering, and installation. Only the most wealthy people have enough space for the full IMAX experience. That comes with a pair of 4K projectors and a much bigger screen, big enough to replicate the cinema experience. It can cost $2 million. We…