Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2015 i Popular Science

Of all the movies to come out this year, none has been more highly anticipated by the editors at Popular Science than Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Seems like every day I hear someone talking about it. The other morning I arrived in the office only to find our photo director, Thom Payne, flying a Millennium Falcon drone over everyone’s desks. Somebody else had a drone X-wing (which, for the record, fl ies like a rock). I know we’re putty in some Disney marketer’s hands—and I’m OK with that As we sit around and obsess over all things Star Wars—Harrison Ford for the win!—one topic keeps coming up: the return to practical effects. In the age of green screens and CGI everything, director J.J. Abrams made a considered decision to…

The IceCube telescope sits inside a cubic kilometer of ice a mile beneath the South Pole. Its 5,000-plus light sensors detect subatomic particles called neutrinos—100,000 of them a year. This summer, researchers found neutrinos that pulsed with 1,000 times the energy of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. Such particles can only come from beyond our solar system, says Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and IceCube’s principal investigator. The discovery could provide a better understanding of black holes and exploding stars, which are thought to have launched the neutrinos. “We had no guarantee these cosmic neutrinos would exist,” says Halzen. “It reveals a new way to study the sky.” STEPH YIN 400,000 Number of Olympicsize pools the ice block could fill…

INNOVATION OF THE YEAR HTC Vive WALK IN A VIRTUAL WORLD Virtual reality is not that real if you can’t walk around and interact with the world. The HTC Vive is the first virtual-reality system to offer that level of immersion. It uses two (or more) base stations to track your position as you move around a room. Hand controllers let you grab objects in the virtual world (and throw them across the room, if you want). The Vive is powered by the new digital gaming distribution service, SteamVR, which was built by gaming powerhouse Valve. That means you’ll likely see VR versions of iconic games such as Portal and Half Life in the near future. For now, Vive is still a developer edition, but HTC promises that the headset…

Amazon Echo HAL FOR YOUR HOME For a long time, artificial intelligence existed only in science fiction. Then it started to creep into industrial computers and even phones. Now, it’s coming to your home—and it’s coming in the form of a speaker. The Amazon Echo acts as an intelligent hub for the house, linking together other smart appliances with a voice interface. Once set up, it listens passively at all times. When someone says the wake word—Alexa—it snaps into action. For now, those actions are limited to simple operations, like reciting your calendar events, queuing up your favorite playlist, relaying weather or sports scores and, of course, ordering household items from Amazon. But those tasks won’t remain simple for long. In June, Amazon released the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), opening…

In July, the New Horizons spacecraft zipped past Pluto at more than 30,000 miles per hour. But other than snapping our first close-up views of the dwarf planet, what was the point of this decade-long trip? We asked Cathy Olkin, the mission’s deputy project scientist, what we can learn from Pluto and its moons—and where New Horizons is going next. 7,750 New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, in miles, during its flyby Popular Science: Why is Pluto so important? Cathy Olkin: Pluto is the best known of the Kuiper Belt objects, the bodies that inhabit the outer solar system. Think of the Kuiper Belt as the deep freeze of the solar system, or the attic where you put all of the pieces left over from its youth. By looking at…

Tesla Motors Powerwall NOW YOU CAN SUPERCHARGE YOUR HOME You’ve invested in solar panels to harvest energy from the sun, but without daisy-chaining an array of car batteries, you've got no way to store it. With the Powerwall, Tesla used its expertise manufacturing lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles to provide a sleek alternative. The 210-pound wall-mounted battery can store surplus energy from solar panels. But it can also automatically bank electricity from the grid during off-peak times, when rates are lowest. That way you can power your home—or charge your Model S—for pennies even when electricity is in highest demand. The company makes a 7 kWh battery for daily use, and a 10 kWh version that can double as a backup generator. From $3,000 WindStream Technologies SolarMill An Alternative-Energy Powerhouse…

WARNING: Don’t get milk—or any other liquids—on the circuit or battery. STATS Time 2 hours Cost $55 Difficulty • • • • • In 2007, electrical engineer Jay Silver discovered how to turn anything into a musical instrument. While tinkering with an electronicorgan kit, he accidentally spilled lentils on the kit’s circuit, which produces musical notes. “As I was trying to dry it out,” he says, “I noticed the noise was changing.” He realized that touching the device shifted the sound. The next day, Silver took the circuit to the summer camp where he taught and showed the campers how it worked. When it came in contact with conductive objects, they acted as extensions of the device: Users could touch the object to create different sounds, like pressing the keys…

It might seem daunting to build a solar- powered house in Massachusetts instead of, say, Phoenix. But MIT engineers tackled the challenge with a brazen concept, which we featured on our cover in March 1949. The Dover Sun House relied on several vats of Glauber salts, or sodium sulfate, placed throughout the living quarters. (Our illustrator depicted them as a fanciful “heat bin” in the attic.) The salts melt at 90 degrees Fahrenheit and store energy more efficiently than water. The system, devised by chemist Mária Telkes and architect Eleanor Raymond, channeled the sun’s warmth to the sodium-sulfate tanks, which meted out heat on cold or overcast days. It worked better in principle than in practice: Tenants were chilly in winter, and the tanks tended to leak. They moved out…

Over time, languages naturally change. In the past, cultural collisions caused by slavery, exploration, and war have pushed them even further, says Columbia University linguist John McWhorter. Today, new forces are at play. Languages are transformed by technological advances that transcend borders and redefine how we communicate— and with whom. “Today there are six or seven thousand languages worldwide. Over the course of the next century, there are going to be only about six or seven hundred. The more-common languages will eat up the ones that are geographically isolated or spoken by only a few people. Technology and globalization play a big role in this shake-up. The amount of media that we can listen to and watch nowadays was unthinkable 50 years ago. Increasingly, instead of attempting to learn foreign…

HIGH-SPEED AUTONOMY Programming a robot to fly itself through unexplored caverns is daunting enough, but Astrobotic’s navigation and perception algorithms need it to “think” at 20 mph. That requires the drone to have a largely unprecedented degree of decision-making without any human input. AERIAL MOBILITY The Martian atmosphere is 100 times thinner than Earth’s, making rotors ineffective. Researchers are instead exploring CO2-powered thrusters, which would enable a drone to make the sharp turns necessary in unmapped tunnels. RECHARGING SYSTEM When the vehicle’s thrusters run out of pressurized CO2, it could land and use an onboard isotope generator (or solar panels if it’s outside the caves) to power a compressor that pulls fuel from the atmosphere. GROUND GAME The drone could catapult through Mars’ low gravity (about 38 percent of Earth’s)…

Star Wars: The Force Awakens doesn’t hit theaters until December 18, but it already has a breakout star: BB-8, the endearing ball droid that made its debut in the movie trailer this summer. Rather than rely on computer graphics, director J.J. Abrams asked the film’s creature-effects (CFX) team to create an actual BB-8 in the form of cleverly engineered props. We spoke with Matt Denton, electronic design and development supervisor, and Josh Lee, senior animatronic designer, about the inspiration and inner workings of the most iconic science-fiction robot in years. Popular Science: How was BB-8 conceived? Josh Lee: It was J.J.’s idea. We first saw it as a sketch on a napkin that had been scanned and emailed over to us. It caused a lot of head-scratching about how we…

August Home August Smart Lock NEVER LOSE YOUR KEYS AGAIN The August Smart Lock unshackles your home from the tyranny of physical keys. The 3-inch cylinder fastens to the back of an existing deadbolt, leaving the outside appearance of your door unchanged. Once attached, a Bluetooth signal from your smartphone can flip the mechanism to unlock the door. A guest with a smartphone and an August app can enter once you’ve granted them access. No more passing out hard-copy keys, which are much harder to revoke—and easier to lose. The Smart Lock lets you pick days and times for guest entry, so the dog walker can get in only during lunch hours, or your weekend Airbnb guests lose access once their stay is over. If your guests don’t have smartphones,…

Twitter Periscope A BROADCAST NETWORK OF YOUR OWN The cameras in our pockets have granted amateurs all sorts of powers to reinvent themselves—first, as photographers and then as YouTube stars. Now with Periscope, anyone can become a broadcaster as well. The app makes live streaming events like the Black Lives Matter protests, raging wildfires, or even office antics as simple as pressing a button. The stream is accessible to anyone who also has the app installed on their mobile device. In the hands of journalists, Periscope has broadcast videos from the Syrian refugee crisis, putting a human face on a global crisis that for many is happening out of sight. Inevitably, it has also prompted privacy concerns and put more than one business model in jeopardy: Periscope was a popular…

Albedo100 Light-Reflective Spray PAINT THAT CAN SAVE YOUR LIFE When it comes to safety, staying visible at night is critical for runners, walkers, and cyclists. That's why Swedish startup Albedo100 has developed a reflective spray that can be applied to clothes and bike parts. The spray is invisible during the day but shines like a highway street sign at night when it comes under the glare of headlights. The spray is benign, so it doesn’t damage materials or hurt your skin, and lasts about a week before wearing off. There's even another version of the spray that’s safe enough to put directly on your pet’s fur. Albedo100 released both versions of the spray earlier this year, and a third that works especially well on metals will be out by the…

Engineers Ryan Sipes and Joshua Montgomery wanted their makerspace in Lawrence, Kansas, to be more intuitive. So they borrowed an artificial-intelligence system from other makers and used it to do simple tasks, such as controlling the lights or playing music. Then they realized they could create a better one—and sell it. After several months, eight versions, and countless 3-D-printed prototypes, the team produced a completely open-source device: Mycroft. Users speak commands to the physical interface, which then controls devices like smart locks or speakers, posts to social media, and performs dozens of other tasks. An Arduino board and Raspberry Pi 2 make up the bulk of the hardware, and the team plans to release its code. As developers add their own functions, Sipes hopes the AI will grow smarter over…

Origins Certain kinds of bacteria shield themselves from the attacks of other microbes by producing a biofilm—a water-repellent layer that acts like a microbial raincoat. Researchers isolated a protein responsible for biofilms, BslA, from Bacillus subtilis, a bacteria found in dirt. Execution When ice cream warms, the fat and sugar separate (like oil and vinegar). This causes trapped air bubbles to escape and ice crystals to melt. When scientists added BslA to ice cream, the fat and sugar remained mixed, so the matrix of ice and air stayed in place longer. The ice cream scooped normally but dripped more slowly as it warmed. Future No word on palatability yet. “I keep fighting the people in my lab to let me taste it, but so far I haven’t,” says biomolecular physicist…

No longer will fumbling with a cellphone or reaching for a radio dial dangerously distract drivers. In October, BMW debuted the world’s first-ever gesture control in a car, allowing drivers to answer calls, use navigation, and adjust audio, all with conductorlike hand waves. That makes everyone safer. It also hints at the potential for hands-free driving. If that weren’t innovation enough, in U.S. models, BMW also took up to 190 pounds off the car’s weight, and improved fuel efficiency, by using carbon fiber in the chassis. That helps make the frame stiffer, which enhances performance. Luxury details also make the car feel like it belongs in a pricier class: Massage seats for rear passengers are helpful on long rides, LEDs in the moon roof mimic a starry sky, and programmable…

European Space Agency Rosetta COMETS FINALLY GET THEIR CLOSE-UP For the first time in history, humans put a spacecraft in orbit around a comet and, in another first, landed on it. The European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft traveled 10 years and nearly 4 billion miles to Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. Once it arrived in November 2014, the Philae lander descended to the comet’s surface, bounced, and came to rest in a dark area near the edge of a crater. Unable to recharge through its solar panels, Philae went into hibernation—but not before transmitting data about 67P’s makeup, internal structure, and wealth of organic molecules. As the comet hurtled toward the sun, the Rosetta orbiter stuck with it, observing as its frozen gases warmed and escaped into space. This data should provide valuable…

Merck Sharp & Dohme VSV-EBOV PREVENTING THE NEXT PANDEMIC A new vaccine usually takes six to 10 years to go through clinical trials. The Ebola vaccine took only 10 months. When the West African outbreak was declared a global health emergency in August 2014, the World Health Organization fast-tracked the process. The vaccine, made by swapping proteins from Ebola into another virus, triggers an immune response that protects people from contracting the actual disease. To test its efficacy, health workers in Guinea used a “ring strategy” around the 100 confirmed Ebola cases in the country. First, doctors vaccinated roughly 4,000 adults who had come into contact with the infected patients. None got Ebola. For a control group, they vaccinated another approximately 3,500 people three weeks after identifying the latest infection.…

U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory RICE THAT FIGHTS GLOBAL WARMING More than half the global population relies on rice as a regular part of their diet. But rice paddies have a downside for the planet too: They produce as much as 17 percent of the world’s total methane emissions. So Christer Jansson, a plant biochemist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, spent the past 10 years developing SUSIBA2, a genetically modified rice plant that emits almost no methane. Splicing a single barley gene into common rice, his team found, changed the way the plant handles photosynthesis: Instead of sending carbon to the roots, to feed the bacteria that produce methane, the plant directs it toward the grain and leaves, increasing the starch level and yield. “It’s a…