HEL MD Set Up Outside

This truck has a freakin' laser on it.

U.S. Army photo

Named by someone who clearly hated Maryland, the High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD) hit 90 incoming mortar rounds and UAVs with a 10 kW laser in November and early December during tests at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. HEL MD has been in development since 2011 (though the laser and truck separately have been in the works for years), and this successful demonstration suggests laser warfare may be getting closer to reality.

Military lasers are the latest evolution in "not getting killed" technology. Defense and offense in war tend to be cyclical--for a while, weapons are very good getting through to their targets, but then someone invents better armor, which works until a new weapon is made. Since the advent of gunpowder, really, offensive weapons have outmatched defenses. It's simply easier and cheaper to fire many relatively inexpensive explosives at a target than it is to fire pricey guided missiles to stop attacks in midair. Israel's Iron Dome system, probably the best known missile-intercepting system right now, regularly fires $40,000 missiles to stop $1,000 rockets.

HEL MD's Laser

The laser weapon of the High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator up close.

Jason B. Cutshaw, US Army

Lasers may level the playing field a bit. They move at the speed of light, which means they can hit an airborne object almost as soon as that object is detected. Mortar shells, cheaper even than the $1,000 rockets, are still more expensive than the approximately $1 it costs to destroy them with a laser. The U.S. Navy plans to test a similar laser, mounted on the USS Ponce, in 2014, which could be useful against swarming boat attacks or incoming missiles.

The HEL MD fired a 10 kW laser at several targets, successfully "engaging" mortar shells and drones. In the future, it should be able to engage cruise missiles, rockets, and artillery. While the use of "engaging" indicates that the laser isn't quite ready to destroy targets, the targeting tools attached to the laser are the real success story, as they managed accurately aim the laser at moving targets.

Future plans for the HEL MD include tests with a 50 kW laser and then a 100 kW laser. If these are successful, and the laser proves feasible, it's possible that enemies trying to fire explosives at American troops in the future will find their attacks halted in midair.

Mammal Noses in Infrared

Lund University Mammalian Rhinarium Group

This collection of cute schnozzes illustrates an interesting fact: Some mammals have warm noses, while others maintain cooler ones. Can you guess which of the above noses belongs to which animal? The answers are at the bottom of this post. The images were made with an infrared camera, and the darkest parts represent 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius), while the lightest parts are a little more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

The pictures come from scientists at Lund University in Sweden, who recently began studying a specialized mammalian nose structure called the rhinarium. “We want to know what mammals can do with specialized nose tips,” Lund zoologist Ronald Kröger tells Popular Science. Many mammals—including cows, deer and dogs, but not humans—have rhinaria, which, unlike human noses, are wet and hairless. The interiors of rhinaria also probably differ from human noses in their nerve connections, Kröger says. With respect to temperature, he and his colleagues are examining how keeping rhinaria cool helps animals.

The newly established nose research group hasn’t published any scientific papers yet. The group is currently writing papers based on research performed over the last year, Kröger says.

Previously, he researched animal vision, but got curious about rhinaria when his dog touched him with its cold nose, which made him wonder about its unusual temperature. “I thought, this is so interesting, we have to know more,” he says.

The animals above are:

Row 1: dog, horse, sheep, pig, cat, goat
Row 2: rhesus monkey, rat, kinkajou, rabbit, cow, degu
Row 3: zebu, ring-tailed lemur, meerkat, harbor seal, moose, raccoon dog
Row 4: polecat, arctic fox, lynx, raccoon, common eland, human

Bonus: Check out this time series of a dog’s nose as it falls asleep (top row) and awakens (bottom row). Dogs keep their noses wet and a few degrees cooler than body temperature while they’re awake. When they rest, however, the nose becomes drier and warmer.

Dog Nose in Infrared

Lund University Mammalian Rhinarium Group

 

The Dark Streaks

Nature Geoscience / Alfred McEwen et al.

The intrepid Mars rover Curiosity has already confirmed that water once flowed on Mars, but that it's long since dried up. Still, that doesn't mean there's not flowing water now, too.

NASA data has long supported the idea that a seasonal, briny water may be flowing on the Red Planet. In 2011, scientists noted that landscape formations showing up in the planet's warmer months were caused by flowing water--or, at least, that was the "best explanation for these observations so far." Now, the Mars Reconnoissance Orbiter has spotted more of those "dark, finger-like features" near the Martian equator, offering tantalizing evidence of briny water--or some other liquid substance--that appears in the winter but evaporates in the warm season. 

Flowing water on Mars, of course, hasn't yet been confirmed, and there are competing theories on what, exactly, the formations could mean. (There's even been some theories put forward that there's no liquid at all, and the formations are caused by winds.) But finding water moving today could fundamentally change our understanding of the environment on Mars, and it's our best bet at finding life still lurking under the surface. 

NASA Chamber A

NASA

NASA’s vacuum chamber, upgraded to test the James Webb Space Telescope, can subject anything within its 400,000 cubic feet to the unyielding and deadly conditions of deep space while maintaining the scrubbed conditions of a clean room. Behind the 40-ton door, Chamber A can reach 11 Kelvin, making it the coldest place on Earth.

Canary

Canary

The Canary home security system is the first that can adapt to one’s daily habits. It integrates data from a wide-angle HD camera, infrared motion sensor, temperature and humidity sensors, and microphone to distinguish an intruder from your excitable dog. The whole thing packs into a sleek shell the size of a Morton salt container. $199

Illustration of a Cloud of Water Molecules Heated 600 Degrees Celsius

Oriol Vendrell/DESY

It may only work on tiny amounts of water, but it should be the fastest transfer of energy to water on Earth. Scientists have figured out how to heat about one billionth of a liter of water 600 degrees Celsius in one trillionth of a second, according to a new paper.

Their idea is to zap the water with short, intense bursts of terahertz radiation, which are electromagnetic waves that are between microwaves and infrared light in wavelength. For less than a millisecond, the water should remain at its original density before the molecules fly apart. In that time, scientists should be able to record any chemical reactions they might try to trigger with the intense heat, according to DESY, the German research group in which the water-heating technique’s developers work.

The researchers, a team of three, haven’t put their method to the test yet. They’ve just published a paper in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition describing their idea. The method should enable physicists to do experiments about thermal reactions, such as how heat triggers molecules to recombine to form new substances, according to DESY.

To record such small, swift reactions, the researchers will need ultrashort x-rays. A facility is coming to Hamburg, Germany, home of DESY, that will provide just that. The European X-ray Free-Electron Laser facility, now under construction, will create x-ray flashes short enough to record the different stages of chemical reactions. Its board expects the facility to be ready by 2015.

[DESY]

Strobe Training

Courtesy of Peter Friesen, @NHLCanes

If you're training for a marathon, you might consider hooking on some ankle weights to provide push-back, making the training more difficult but getting you up to speed faster. Makes sense. One thing that makes less sense but still weirdly works? Blinding yourself and then playing some hockey. 

Researchers from Duke University recently strapped stroboscopes onto players from the NHL's Carolina Hurricanes, giving them a view that quickly oscillated between transparent and opaque (and got them ready to daaancepaaaarty). Then the researchers had the team run some drills.

Turns out, the same idea as applies to vision and sports. Previous studies with athletes have shown that training with similar eyewear could improve vision and speed reactions to moving objects, but before now it hadn't been tested in a real setting. The Duke study tested the Hurricanes players at their 16-day pre-season training camp. A group of six were given tasks before and after training to measure performance--forwards were given a shooting challenge, and defensemen a passing challenge. (Another group of give, the control group, got the regular ol' training.) The trial group with the stroboscopic glasses showed a noteworthy improvement when stacked up next to the control group. 

So should every team immediately start semi-blinding their players during practice? Well, no, calm down. This was a very, very small pilot study (there aren't that many players on the Hurricanes, after all), so it might be a leap to start trying it out. But also, you know what? Giving these to players during actual games could make things interesting, too.

Her

Scarlett Johansson plays the voice of a software program in the movie Her.

Popular Science

The film Her, which opens across the country this month, tells a love story between a man and some software. It may seem far-fetched, but researchers say it’s plausible. If so inclined, they could stitch together existing systems into one irresistible romance algorithm. Here’s how a lovebot could seduce you.

Curiosity

A program that asks lots of questions stays more in control of the conversation and is more likely to produce convincing, relevant replies. Software that attempts to answer a person’s questions risks revealing just how little it knows about the world (and human emotions)—ruining the effect. That’s why inquisitiveness is one of the most common and successful cheats for chatbots, dating back to Eliza, a program built at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the ’60s. Its persistent queries were modeled on those of a therapist.

Smarts

In order to be able to hold a real conversation, computers have to be intelligent enough to both ask and answer questions. IBM’s Watson, which defeated humans on Jeopardy! in 2011, is one of the smartest programs around. It can understand conversational language, draw from external and internal knowledge bases, and process 500 gigabytes a second. (Watson currently works in health care, finance, and retail.) But for romance to truly blossom for most people, computers will need to get even smarter than that.

Allure

Studies show that people will divulge more about sensitive, personal topics (such as drug use or sexual activity) to a computer than to a researcher. Machines can also coax humans into being polite with them. In one study, people were interviewed by a computer and then asked to rate its performance. They rated it better when they input their scores on that same computer rather than on a separate terminal or on paper—as if the computer had feelings. A program that elicits both unconscious behaviors—confessing and being kind—would be formidable.

Director Spike Jonze on the set

Warner Brothers

Spike Jonze On Chatbots

A single film can come from many sources of inspiration, but part of the idea for the movie Her came 10 years ago, when writer and director Spike Jonze was interacting with an online chatbot. More specifically, it came midway through the conversation, when things got weird. “You’re not very interesting,” the bot told him. The filmmaker wasn’t charmed, but he was intrigued. Instead of seeming blandly, vaguely human, Jonze says, “it was sassy and had an attitude and a point of view of the world.”

This article originally appeared in the January 2014 issue of Popular Science.

The Internet Of You

Paul Lachine

When people describe the Internet of Things, they’re referring to a network of Web-enabled devices that speak to one another. In the home, that could mean a phone that talks to a garage-door opener or a thermostat that talks to motion detectors. While these smart devices might represent someone’s preferences (I want my lights to glow blue), they don’t necessarily represent needs (I’m tired, I’m hungry, I’m drunk). For a heater to know we’re cold or a vending machine to know that we need an apple and not a bag of Funyuns, those devices need to talk directly to us. And for that to happen, we’ll need a wearable network of gadgets, an Internet of You.

Much of the groundwork is in place already. Inexpensive health and fitness monitors are gaining in popularity. More than 100 million sensors were sold worldwide in 2012, and that number will rise to more than half a billion within five years, according to the technology research firm ON World. Nike alone boasts 18 million users on its Nike+ network, which includes the FuelBand tracker and a sneaker line. And there are dozens of other kinds of monitors out there, including bottles that record our water intake and forks that warn us when we’re eating too fast.

Wearable screens are proliferating too. The Pebble smartwatch, which displays e-mail and text notifications, raised more than $10 million from backers on Kickstarter. Samsung recently debuted the Galaxy Gear, a watch that runs on Android and therefore syncs easily with sensors and other accessories. (Apple even hired one of the key engineers behind the Nike FuelBand, so an iOS smartwatch probably isn’t far behind.) And then there’s Google Glass, which puts information just above eye level. 

The combination of personal monitors and connected screens will form the backbone of a new system. The next step is to take the user out of the loop and connect our personal data to the world around us. In September, Nissan introduced the NISMO smartwatch concept, which provides a glimpse of the possibilities. The device uses biometric data, such as heart rate, to tell users whether they’re too tired—or too wired—to drive. One day, a car’s internal computer could tap into that same data. Given a driver’s anxiousness, sleepiness, or drunkenness, the car could modify its performance—or disable itself entirely. Rather than ask you to make data-based decisions, your own personal Internet will make them for you; all you will have to do is show up.—Corinne Iozzio

A Cholesterol-Reading Smartphone Add-On

Several researcher groups have made prototype diagnostic apps and add-ons for smartphones, like this one. The market for these is difficult, however.

Cornell University

Engineers at Cornell University have developed an app—plus a little snap-on device—that allows users to check their cholesterol levels with their smartphones. It’s a nice bit of engineering, and in a video, made by Cornell, the system looks appealing and easy to use.

But, considering the hurdles an idea like this would have to overcome before it could be marketed in the U.S, I would say it’s hardly worth pursuing as a straightforward product. The only serious health app I really want to see for a smartphone? A pregnancy-test app. (I'm not talking about "health apps" that track simpler things such as users' heart rate, physical activity, or even sleep. I can see how there's a market for those.)

I don’t mean to pick on this Cornell lab’s work, which is one in a long line of diagnostic apps that have come out in the past few years. It just happens to be something that’s garnered some attention lately, although not as much as previousapps, perhaps because of some of the things I’ll talk about. In addition, there could be good reasons to pursue this work, intellectually. I think it’s disingenuous to pretend it’s a viable app as is, however.

Let’s first take a look at some of the roadblocks to a cholesterol-reading smartphone app getting anywhere near regular users. There’s the fact that at-home cholesterol tests are already pretty affordable, costing anywhere from about $14, for a paper-strip test, to $125, for a hand-held electronic device that offers separate numbers for users’ LDL, HDL and triglyceride levels. So why would people buy this instead? Even if a university lab is able to make a smartphone device that’s comparable to the latter for much less than $125, the price may rise again by the time the device undergoes licensing with a company and U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval.

That brings us to the next major roadblock. A device like this would fall under the FDA’s purview, which means its developers will have to provide a high standard of data proving the device works. Are they prepared to do that? Is it worth it? The health app market grew for a while without FDA oversight, but the agency has since indicated it’s tightening the reins. In 2011, it published guidelines for the industry. This year, it sent its first letter to a smartphone health app company, requiring India-based Biosense Technologies to provide data proving its urinalysis system is accurate.

Yes, smartphones are super powerful little computers and it’s amazing the vast majority of Americans have them. But just because you can do something on them doesn’t mean you should.

Considering all the challenges facing current and future health apps, I can think of only one category of app that is worth pushing through to market in the U.S.: Apps that provide health information for which privacy is so crucial, a user might not want to go to a doctor or pharmacy for it... yet is not so sensitive that users really ought to see their doctors. Yes, what I’m thinking of is a pregnancy-test app, preferably one that works without an add-on device users would have to buy (because then how is it different from a drugstore pee stick?). An at-home sexually transmitted infection test—excluding HIV, which is life-altering and should come with professional counseling—might be a good candidate, too.

I’m not sure this is even scientifically possible, especially without the add-on. But, engineers of the world, that is what I want and, I would guess, the only thing that would truly be worth making.

The original camp built by the Wright brothers in Kitty Hawk in 1900.

Popular Science archives

On December 17, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright took their famous first flight in Kitty Hawk, N.C. After four years of experimentation, the brothers became the first to fly a "heavier-than-air machine with a pilot on board."  This article, which details the birth of the flying machine, was written by John McMahon for the September 1925 issue of Popular Science. 

When Orville Wright announced last spring that he would present to an English museum the pioneer airplane in which he and his brother Wilbur made historic flight on December 17, 1903, there was quite a stir in this country and abroad. President Coolidge hoped that the machine might be kept at home. There was promise of Congressional action, both to retain patent models in America and to investigate Mr. Wright's charge that the Langley relic in the National Museum at Washington had been refurbished improperly, manipulated and labeled to support a priority claim.

We can wait for Congress to clear up the Langley matter, which, after all, is a question of "might have" or "afterward also" rather than "did fly first." Meanwhile it is interesting to have a bit of light thrown on the yet obscure details of the "Wright brothers' independent and marvelous achievement. Their story, despite world-wide publicity, is still to be told. One reason for this is the death of Wilbur, the elder brother, in 1912.

Orville piloting the flight at Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903.

Popular Science archives

The young bicycle men of Dayton, Ohio, had been discussing the problem of flight for about three years when the first real idea came to them in June, 1899. They had spent Sundays lying on their backs beside the Miami River, hoping to learn something from the stately maneuvers of hawks and buzzards in the blue overhead. Then came that first real idea, which was Orville's—to obtain lateral balance by hinged wings.

"The hinge is a good idea, but not practical," agreed the brothers after debate. This was their judgment as expert mechanics.

The bicycle shop that the young men conducted was kept open late evenings to cater to the trade of factory employees. Wilbur was on duty one night in July, some weeks after the hinge concept had been argued and seemingly discarded.

A customer came in. If he had asked for tire tape, a wrench or a pump, the course of history might have been changed. But this customer asked for an inner tube for his bicycle tire. That tube was packed in a rectangular pasteboard box. Wilbur held the empty box by its ends while the customer examined the contents. Wilbur's hands were inclined to be nervously active. He looked down and suddenly realized what he was doing with an empty box—twisting it—warping it. What was this? Can't hinge wings? Never. But you can warp them! Eureka!

Read the rest of the story in the September 1925 issue of Popular Science magazine. 

Emperor Penguin Huddle

Like annoying (yeah, I said it) people at ball games, emperor penguins do the wave. Like so:

The waves happen when the penguins huddle together, a behavior that helps them stay warm in an environment that can reach -50 degrees Celsius (-58 degrees Fahrenheit) with winds up to 200 kilometers per hour (about 120 mph). Thousands of individuals can gather together in a huddle. And once in a while, someone moves. That triggers shifts throughout the system that researchers see as waves. Now, a team of researchers from Germany and France has figured out the mathematics of these waves, as you do.

Penguins react to the movements of the birds immediately around them, the researchers found. That is, a penguin will step forward when he sees the bird in front of him step forward. Meanwhile, that step entices the penguins behind him to step forward. A shifting penguin will also make the individuals in front of him step forward and so on until the front of the line. Multiply these adjustments by thousands of penguins, and you get the penguin wave.

Other researchers have found that flocks of (flying) birds and schools of fish work similarly. Although human observers may see complex patterns in the flocks and schools that flash by, any individual animal doesn’t have an overall idea of what the group looks like; he’s just focused on reacting to the movements of his neighbors.

To test their ideas, the penguin researchers wrote a mathematical model of huddles, then compared the model’s results with timelapse recordings they made of emperor penguin colonies living near the French Antarctic research base Dumot d’Urville, and its German counterpart, Neumayer III.

Here's what they found:

• Any penguin anywhere in the huddle can start a wave. It only takes a step, though the speed at which the wave propagates depends on how big of a step the instigator takes.
• Penguins like to stay about two centimeters apart from each other. Each penguin’s insulating feather layer is about 1.2 centimeters thick, so the researchers think it’s likely that penguins only like to touch each other slightly in a huddle, so that they’re close together, but they don’t crush their natural insulation.
• Two nearby huddles with waves propagating through them can merge, a phenomenon researchers found both in their model and in their penguin videos.

There are still some mysteries to penguin huddles. For example:

• Why do wave-initiators initiate waves in the first place? (Is he just shifting his weight? Who knows?)
• Why is there usually a 30-second or longer delay between waves, during which everyone stands still?

The researchers published their work today in the New Journal of Physics.

Humped Bladderwort Trap Entrance

This carnivorous plant consumes microscopic organisms that get caught in its mouth.

Igor Siwanowicz

For the tenth year in a row, miscroscope and camera manufacturer Olympus sponsored a light microscope photography contest, and the results are stunning. The winner, pictured above, is an aquatic carnivorous plant, photographed with many smaller microscopic plants inside its open trap.

The results show a strange, brilliant, and rarely seen world, all lit-up and magnified in the name of science.

Click here to enter the gallery.

And, in case you missed them: here are the winners from 2012 contest. 

Human beings! Clothes-wearers! Folks who maybe drank some milk right out of the jug one time and spilled it all over themselves but okay it was Saturday night and no one was around and whatever it's not like people have any right to judge others for what they do in their own homes! 

Rejoice! Your salvation is nigh.

On Kickstarter now is a shirt called Silic, which repels liquids. If the videos are to be believed, it looks rad. Spill a bunch of soda on your shirt, and it bounces right off.

The shirts are woven with a hydrophobic silica, also known as silicon dioxide. "Self Cleaning Clothing With Hydrophobic Nanotechnology," as the Kickstarter says, might be a vague enough claim to cause some concern, but we've definitely seen similarly cool stuff with aerosol sprays, so it's not too much of a stretch to think this could work with clothing.

How the shirt actually feels, along with how long it retains its properties (the team says 80 washes) might require a closer look. But it's designed by a former designer for the Vera Wang Collection, and definitely looks better than a shirt with an orange juice accent stain.

[Kickstarter via Huffington Post]

The Milky Way

ESO/C. Malin

A new study provides evidence that our own home galaxy actually has four major spiral “arms,” instead of two. Can I just point out this is 100 percent more arms than our latest understanding of the shape of the Milky Way?

The evidence comes from the Red MSX Source survey, headquartered at the University of Leeds in the U.K., and was published last month in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Astronomers had previously thought the Milky Way had four arms, but in 2008, data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope pointed to just two major arms.

"It isn't a case of our results being right and those from Spitzer's data being wrong. Both surveys were looking for different things," Melvin Hoare, a University of Leeds physicist who was part of the new study, said in a statement. "Spitzer only sees much cooler, lower mass stars, stars like our Sun, which are much more numerous than the massive stars that we were targeting."

The Milky Way’s Massive Stars

The red spots in this illustration show young, massive stellar objects are distributed in four major arms in the Milky Way. The black bulls-eye shows Earth’s location.

J. Urquhart et al. Background image by Robert Hurt of the Spitzer Science Center

The Red MSX Source survey systematically searches for young, massive stellar objects. It saw those objects clustering into four major arms. On the other hand, Hoare and his colleagues think that cooler, lower-mass stars predominate in the two Milky Way arms Spitzer confirmed because they’re drawn there, away from the locations where they originally formed, by those arms’ greater gravitational pull.

Young, massive stars are found in all four arms because they have shorter lifespans than cooler stars, and thus end up staying where they’re formed, Hoare said. All four arms are capable of forming massive stars.

[University of Leeds]

E-ZPass Toll Road

Bobby Hidy/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Tollbooth plazas aren’t the only locations that scan car tags like the E-ZPass. One wary driver in New York City, known to the Web as Puking Monkey, recently modified his car tag to moo like a cow when activated.

“I drove around [Manhattan] and realized, Wow, this is being read everywhere!” says the man, an engineer who works in the healthcare industry. He asked Popular Science not to disclose his identity for fear of reprisal by his employer, plus the risk of being banned by E-ZPass.

E-ZPass is a device that drivers can buy in 15 states to zip through tollbooths across the country, usually without stopping. More than 24 million tags—and growing—exist in the U.S. alone. Each “listens” for a wireless signal broadcast by an electronic reader. When that signal is strong enough, a tag draws power from an onboard battery to broadcast its serial number back to the reader. The reader then relays the information to a computer server to bill the customer linked to the tag.

Unbeknownst to most E-ZPass users, however, the tags can be activated and read almost anywhere. As noted by Kashmir Hill at Forbes, and confirmed by Nicholas Mosquera, a spokesmen for the New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT), the agency has silently scanned tags for years to monitor the flow of New York City traffic. But Mosquera also says the agency scrambles the serial numbers to anonymize vehicles and their owners.

“[The data] are the basis for the thousands of routine traffic reports broadcast daily on the news,” Mosquera wrote in an email to Popular Science. “This technology…allows engineers to identify traffic issues and respond with signal changes.”

However useful or noble the intent, as Hill points out, the fact “that E-ZPasses will be used as a tracking device outside of toll payment, is not disclosed anywhere…in the terms and conditions.”

Puking Monkey’s interest in vehicle tracking was sparked by the license plate readers that police use, whose scrutiny drivers cannot opt out of. But he says E-ZPass somehow hits a nerve. “Everybody has it,” he says. “People think, I use E-ZPass to pay my tolls, not to be tracked.”

The lone engineer hopes his project raises awareness that cars are monitored a little more closely than one might think. To that end, he’s teamed up with the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), which says it is filing a Freedom of Information Act with New York’s DOT to gain a clearer understanding of how the E-ZPass data is used.

“The public has a right to know what happens with information that the government collects about them,” says Nathan Vogel, legislative counsel for the NYCLU. “It would be important to make sure that this information can’t be re-identified. It’s important to know if law enforcement is ever using this information, and how this information is being shared with other agencies.” (A spokesperson from the New York City Police Department told Popular Science that the agency does not use data collected from E-ZPass.)

Like Puking Monkey, the NYCLU’s chief goal is to make more people conscious of how data are collected from their car tags. “We hope that, by working with Puking Monkey on this E-ZPass issue, we can help people understand how everyday technologies like this can also expose information that they don’t want to share,” Vogel says.

Questions of surveillance aside, Puking Monkey’s hacked E-ZPass isn’t too difficult to replicate if you’ve ever wielded a soldering iron. Use the following directions to make your own E-ZHack: a modified car tag that reveals when it’s scanned via a slight draw of power from its battery.

WARNING: This project could ruin your transponder and violate your car tag service provider's terms of service. Rotary tools and soldering irons can seriously maim or injure if used incorrectly and without adequate safety gear. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!

The E-ZHack

Instructions courtesy @pukingmonkey and adapted for voice, clarity, and length.

Time: About 3 hours
Cost: About $55 (including the $25 price of an E-ZPass unit)
Difficulty: 3 out of 5

Materials

Barring a few items, almost everything below can be purchased at an electronics hobby store (Puking Monkey says he boughthis at RadioShack):

• C1: 10 uF capacitor 272-1025 - $1.49
• C2 : 0.01 uF capacitor 272-1065 - $1.49
• L1: rectangular red LED 276-0008 (optional) - $2.49
• L2 : rectangular green LED 276-0009 (optional) - $2.49
• R1 : 100 ohm resistor 271-005 - $1.49
• R2 : 470 ohm resistor 271-009 - $1.49
• R3 : 470K ohm resistor 271-1133 - $1.49
• R4 : 220 ohm resistor 271-011 - $1.49
• R5 : 100K ohm resistor 271-1347 - $1.49
• R6 : 330 ohm resistor 271-012 - $1.49
• R7 : 570 ohm resistor 271-1116 - $1.49 (optional)
• S1 : toggle switch 275-0634 - $3.49 (optional)
• U1 : LM324 quad operational amplifier 276-1711 - $2.49 (Note: RadioShack sells operational amplifiers made by both Texas Instruments and National Semiconductor. The LM741, by National Semiconductor, is not sensitive enough. Go with the Texas Instruments LM324.)
• U2 : LM555 timer 276-1723 - $1.99
• piezoelectric buzzer 273-059 - $3.99
• 3 AAA battery holder 270-095 - $2.49
• small perf board
• 3 AAA batteries
• plastic glasses case (optional)

Schematic

E-ZHack Schematic

@PukingMonkey

Instructions

1. Case. Carefully cut through the seam of a car tag’s plastic case with a rotary tool (this could take an hour). Clip the internal battery’s negative lead once it’s opened up.

2. Circuit bypass. Wire the shunt resistors R1 (100 ohm) and R2 (470 ohm) to the severed leads from the battery. These resistors will allow the current to pass into the circuit from your E-ZPass.

@PukingMonkey

3. Amplifier. Attach the resistors to the negative input (−) from an operational amplifier, U1. The operational amplifier reads the voltage drop across the resistors when your tag is transmitting. The higher the voltage drop, the more power the tag is using.

4. Timer. Now you’re ready to hook up a 555 timer (U2) to the positive input (+) of the operational amplifier. When your tag transmits using battery power, the voltage drop will trigger the timer. The shunt resistors R3 and R4 set the reference voltage—i.e. the output from your E-ZPass when it is not transmitting (the output drops below the reference voltage when the tag is active). “I figured it out by going through tolls and measuring the voltage drop across the shunt resistor,” says Puking Monkey.

E-ZHack Perf Board

What the circuit should look like when it is attached to a perf board.

@PukingMonkey

5. Sound. A piezoelectric buzzer will sound the alarm when a scan drops the voltage. Set your 555 timer to ensure the buzzer goes off for the amount of time you want. You’ll be using a capacitor (which stores electric charge), C1, and another shunt resistor, R5, to control how long the tone is. Increasing the resistance in R5 causes your capacitor to charge more slowly, says Puking Monkey, which makes the buzzer stay on longer. “If you just want it for one second use a 100K ohm resistor,” says Puking Monkey. “If you want it to go off for about 5 seconds, replace R5 with a 470K ohm resistor.” The other capacitor, C2, sits on the 555 timer’s control voltage pin to make sure the buzzer stays on for a consistent amount of time.

6. Light. Connect your piezoelectric buzzer to the output of the timer and to the red LED, L1. Use shunt resistor R6 to limit the current from the buzzer so your LED doesn’t burn out.

7. Power. The internal E-ZPass battery is 3.6 volts, and the buzzer needs 3 to 20 volts—but it can’t hinder the E-ZPass’s circuit or else it won’t work. So use three AAA batteries to power your circuit. (This way, you can avoid wearing down the E-ZPass battery and can keep paying your tolls.)

E-ZHack Layout

The complete custom circuit attached to an E-ZPass circuit board. The extra batteries keep the purple E-ZPass battery from wearing down.

@PukingMonkey

8. Extra light (optional). You can add a green LED, L2, to light when the battery is working. Use shunt resistor R7 to keep the LED from burning out. The toggle switch, S1, can turn the LED off when you are not driving, and connects to the positive lead of the AAA batteries. With this additional LED you can tell when the AAA batteries have worn down, but it will also drain your them faster according to Puking Monkey:

“Without R7 and L2 and you left the device turned on constantly the typical AAA batteries would last about two weeks. With R7 and L2 this drops to about 5 days. With the switch, if you only turn it on when you drive, even with R7 and L2, if you drive for 1 hour in the morning [and] 1 hour in the evening, then your batteries should last you two months. S1 only turns off the alerting circuit, NOT the E-ZPass itself, it will still operate at a toll even is S1 is off.”

9. Final circuit. Close up your tag: solder the wires and use electrical tape to hold the case together.

Puking Monkey explains:

The positive lead of the 3 AAA batteries connects to:

• S1 (a)

The negative lead connects to:

• negative end of L2
• negative lead of the buzzer
• negative end of L1
• pin 1 of the 555
• C2 (a)
• negative end of C1
• pin 11 of the 324
• R4 (a)
• R2 (a)
• R1 (a)
• negative end of E-ZPass battery

Solder all of the above plus:

• S1 (b) to R7 (a)
• S1 (b) to pin 4 of the 555
• S1 (b) to pin 8 of the 555
• S1 (b) to R5 (a)
• S1 (b) to pin 4 of the 324
• S1 (b) to R3 (a)
• wire from the e-zpass circuit board to R1 (b)
• R1 (b) to R2 (b)
• R2 (b) to pin 2 of the 324
• R3 (b) to pin 3 of the 324
• R3 (b) to R4 (b)
• pin 1 of the 324 to pin 2 of the 555
• R5 (b) to pin 7 of the 555
• R5 (b) to pin 6 of the 555
• R5 (b) to the positive end of C1
• pin 5 of the 555 to C2 (b)
• pin 3 of the 555 to R6 (a)
• R6 (b) to the positive lead of the buzzer
• R6 (b) to the positive end of L1
• R7 (b) to positive end of L2

10. Placement. You can stick the modified E-ZPass to the windshield, or on the dashboard standing up. It will not work if you place it with the battery pack facing up on the dashboard (the battery pack and new circuit cover the internal antenna). Alternatively, if you don’t want to bother with the E-ZPass case, just move your circuit, E-ZPass tag and batteries into a plastic glasses case. The glasses case can rest on the dashboard or be Velcroed onto the windshield.

Incorrect Placement

Don’t put a modified E-ZPass in this position, as the batteries will block the transponder.

@PukingMonkey

Correct Placement

The proper way to position a modified E-ZPass on a dashboard.

@PukingMonkey

11. Test. Drive through a tollbooth lane that accepts cash or electronic tags to test your hack. If the transponder doesn’t work, pay with cash—and inspect your circuit for defects against the schematic.

E-ZHack In A Glasses Case

It may be easier to ditch the E-ZPass case and place the circuitry in a plastic glasses case. Drill holes for the switch, the LEDs, and for the piezoelectric buzzer to sound off. Use velcro to secure everything inside the case.

@PukingMonkey

12. Hide. If it works a little too well everywhere, you can prevent unwanted scans by stowing your tag in its original anti-static foil bag and pull it out only at tollbooth plazas.

Lodgepole Pine Forest, Yellowstone National Park, 1965

Lodgepole pine forests, such as this one, are vulnerable to infestations of the mountain pine beetle. The dead trees in this image, however, are an expected feature of a healthy, nearly mature forest of this type.

Image in the public domain

Aldo Leopold described the burning of wood as re-releasing the sunshine the tree depended upon to grow. In his poetry, he touched on a bit of scientific truth: Plants pack in plenty of energy, about half as much as coal. People don’t often think of burning trees to make electricity, however, in part because in many regions of the world, groups are trying to protect the trees and forests.

But what if the trees are dead already? In a new program, the U.S. Forest Service is fueling a biomass power plant in Colorado with trees killed by a pest called the mountain pine beetle, Greenwire reports. The program will also send trees to the plant that are not yet infested, but are in danger of catching and spreading the problem. The Eagle Valley Clean Energy plant will burn 250 tons of wood daily for the next 50 years, Greenwire reports, creating electricity for the residents of the small town of Gypsum.

Since the late 1990s, Colorado has had to deal with unusual numbers of beetle-killed pine trees. Mountain pine beetles are native to North America and normally infest some trees every year, but warmer winters have meant their populations are now unusually high. The current infestation is expected to leave behind 6.6 million acres of dead trees, the Denver Post reports. That increases the risk of wildfires starting in pine forests and spreading to nearby homes.

Supporters say the beetle trees-to-biomass program is environmentally friendly, but not all groups agree. Biomass power plants do use a renewable fuel, but nevertheless contribute to global warming because they put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Even a pine tree burned in a forest fire does not release as much carbon as a pine tree burned in a power plant, Niel Lawrence, a National Resources Defense Council lawyer, told Greenwire. Some environmental groups, such as the council, are also worried about the Forest Service encouraging logging for biomass plants.

[Greenwire]

NIgeria's GULMA Drone

Vanguard

Behold the GULMA. Unveiled by Nigerian President Jonathan Goodluck on Monday, the GULMA is the country's first locally designed drone. The drone bears a passing resemblance to the Falco ES used by the United Nations, and it should function in much the same way: as a flying eyeball to help a conventional military fight criminal and guerilla groups. This is the face of drone proliferation, and as arms races go, it's pretty mundane.

According to Nigerian Air Marshal Alex Badeh, the name GULMA comes from a word in the Hausa language that means "gossip." It's a clever name the drone is a tool of reconnaissance, surveillance, and intelligence gathering. It's less fly-on-the-wall and more whispers-in-the-wind.

And gossip GULMA must. Nigeria faces several conflicts within its borders where drones would be very useful. In the north, Nigeria is wrestling with the Boko Haram Islamist insurgency, which operates in a rural area with mountains and forests sometimes offering shelter. In the south, armed militants hide out in the largely impenetrable and difficult-to-patrol swamps of the Niger Delta. Both groups have threatened the stability of Nigeria over the past decade. Boko Haram remains a persistent threat, and violence by militants in the delta could flare up for the upcoming 2015 elections. 

Military drones are at their most useful fighting against insurgencies and armed militants in otherwise difficult-to-patrol places. Faced with internal threats, it makes sense that Nigeria is trying to build its own tools for defense. The GULMA is directly inspired by three Aerostar drones, which operated in Nigeria until they were grounded by problems getting spare parts. According to Badeh, the total cost of developing the GULMA, as well as training 15 pilots, was less than $3.5 million.

[Vanguard]

Space School

Cody Pickens

I took a job at Popular Science in 2006, fresh from a yearlong stint as a health and fitness editor. On my first day, in a story meeting, I confidently and casually praised the life-extending virtues of resveratrol, a compound found in red wine I’d been reading about that morning, and suggested we run a story about it. At that point, I’d mostly worked in publishing environments where the staff simply nodded at the ideas of the highest-paid person in the room. But no one was nodding. Instead, they were silent.

“Resveratrol is unproven,” Martha Harbison, our senior editor, told me flatly. I opened my mouth to speak, but she was already laying out, in a rising voice, the rickety case I was about to make, and then she dismantled it point by point. She’d seen enough hype, and damned if she was going to foist it on our readers. The staff of Popular Science, it turned out, held its work to a higher standard: yours.

I’ve spent the past seven years trying to meet that standard. Your demand for reliable reporting means nothing goes to print without an exhaustive internal and external vetting process. Your appetite for understanding how things work means we query the inventors we profile until they can plainly describe the guts of their creations. And your impatience with hype means we fight to avoid oversimplification and dramatization while making sure the stories we run are universally understandable. 

In pursuit of those standards, I’ve experienced amazing things firsthand. Companies have handed me dozens of primitive, often brilliant prototypes—phones, projectors, a drone—months and sometimes years before the public saw them. I’ve wandered up to and into rockets, million-dollar cars, robotic fighter jets. This month, I discovered my limitations via a high-G spaceflight simulation. 

And so it’s difficult to say good-bye. I’m leaving Popular Science to become the science and technology correspondent for Al Jazeera America, a new cable-news channel.

The central satisfaction of working in media is the opportunity to continually learn new things, and a job in television offers me a world of new things to learn. But the central satisfaction of working at Popular Science has been the people I worked with—and you, the people I worked for. My consolation is that I’ll carry your standards with me into this new role and all I do from now on. Thank you for an incredible seven years. And thank you, as ever, for reading Popular Science.

Click here to read the January 2014 issue.

Can You Make One Of These?

Jesse Lenz

How much is a liver worth? For someone on a waiting list for a transplant, that might be hard to tally. But one nonprofit is now saying it’s willing to pay a specific price for a bioengineered one: $1 million.

The Methuselah Foundation is offering the prize money to the first research group to make a liver that is able to go into a “large mammal, enabling the host to recover in the absence of native liver function and survive three months with a normal lifestyle,” according to the prize’s website. The winner has to complete this feat by December 31, 2018.

The liver award, officially called the New Organ Liver Prize, is meant to draw attention to a field of science Methuselah Foundation officials think is understudied, David Gobel, the foundation’s CEO, said in a statement. Methuselah Foundation officials have been working on their New Organ Prize for some time, with announcements in 2010 and again earlier this month. The prize site talks about the long waiting list for donated organs. If man-made organs were available, nobody would have to wait, or die waiting.

The foundation, a charity based in Virginia, looks for donors and hosts prizes related to anti-aging research. A decade ago, it garnered some attention around its founding by computer scientist Aubrey de Grey, who had some provocative, but untested, ideas about longevity. Since then, the organization has awarded money to different scientists for research done in mice—essentially, for finding things that make mice live longer, with the idea that these are clues to what might make people live longer in the future.