Introducing Québécois inventor Yvon Martel's most recent creation: this... thing. It's an electric sled/wagon/snow-chainsaw, and based on the video accompanying it, it works surprisingly well.
Called the MTT-136 (for My Track Technology, and, I can only presume, the 136th iteration), it weighs about 280 pounds and can haul a person or cargo for 130 miles on an eight-hour charge. Also: really fun to watch it shear through snow.
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The U.K.'s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council posted this video of a nightjar, which is a bird that is really damn good at hiding. Look under your desk. Look behind your bed. Look above you now--right now. No nightjar? Wrong.
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For the past five years, Dave Lange has handled all FedEx shipments that require a chartered plane, coordinating deliveries of the big, weird, and extra important. His techniques put your stamps and envelopes to shame.
Popular Science: When the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago renovated in 2008, you flew its seven whales to a host aquarium. So how does a whale travel?
Lange: Each one is in a metal container, which has a sling, where the whale sits. The box isn’t completely filled with water; there’s just enough to keep the animal moist.
PS:If you’re moving many animals together on a plane, how do you decide where to put each one?
Lange: The plane has to be balanced, so they have to be in certain positions. But you still want everyone to be calm during the flight: You don’t want to put stallions next to mares. That’s not a good idea.
PS:What’s the craziest delivery you’ve ever done?
Lange: I had to arrange my first panda charter in 13 days, which is a really quick turnaround. We were moving two panda cubs from the U.S. to China and didn’t get approval from the Chinese government until two days before we operated.
PS:And the biggest one?
Lange: The heaviest shipment we did—it set a record for FedEx—was a famine-relief charter from Paris to Nairobi. We carried almost 218,000 pounds of high-protein bars, which could feed 4,000 people for two weeks.
PS:What are you working on now?
Lange: Our next shipment is two planes carrying 77 horses from Liege, Belgium, to Doha, Qatar. You never know what you’re going to get at this job. It could be anything.
This article originally appeared in the February 2014 issue of Popular Science.
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Like scrubbing bathtubs? Neither do we, so cut the required elbow grease with a power scrubber. Drill through the center of a circular tub brush. Then drive a threaded bolt through the hole so the threaded end pokes out of the handle. Add a washer and secure it in place with a nut. Pop the end of the bolt into the drill head, tighten the grip, and enjoy cleaning the bathroom for once.
Dentists polled by the Chicago Dental Society say they’ve treated patients who tried to self-administer a root canal using power tools—tried being the key word.
WARNING: Always wear gloves and safety glasses while drilling. And when we say something is a bad idea, we mean it.
This article originally appeared in the January 2014 issue of Popular Science.
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Here's a roundup of the week's top drone news, designed to capture the military, commercial, non-profit, and recreational applications of unmanned aircraft.
Drone Repairmen
Santa Fe Aero Services, a northern New Mexico-based aircraft maintenence shop, recently partnered with Robotic Skies, a newly launched Albuquerque-based drone repair network. By making a network of repair sites, Robot Skies wants to making sharing drone schematics and technical information, so mechanics can quickly learn how to fix the machine someone just brought in for healing. The end goal? Find aircraft mechanics who are already working, and prepare them for a future of repairing robots.
Demonstrations Filmed
For several months, protesters gathered in city squares in Ukraine, specifically in the capital of Kyiv (or Kiev, if you favor the Russian). The origins of the protest, and its evolution toward the fiery scene below, are complicated. This footage, captured by a drone, shows a wall of fire on one side of the protester's camp in Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Kyiv's central square.
In another video from the protests, a green laser is pointed at a media drone, trying to blind its camera.
Baseball Documentarian
The Washington Nationals have a drone. Or at least, they're using one to film promotional images of the team from overhead. This is technically a commercial use of drones, which the FAA still hasn't approved of, but maybe a lovable baseball team will have more legal luck than journalists.
Dubai Delivery
This week's gimmick drone is an identification card-delivering robot from Dubai. Here we have all the hallmarks of a gimmick drone video: smartphone ordering, laptop control, inflight cameras, frequent jump cuts, and a view on the ground. This robot does have the benefit of realistic cargo; ID cards are small, and the drone could easily carry one in an internal compartment. Which is great, until a strong gust of wind lets someone steal your identity.
Hawaii Debates Drone Law
This week, the Hawaiian Senate advanced a bill to regulate unmanned aircraft. Here are some of SB 2608's key provisions:
- Except as provided under this part, it shall be unlawful for any law enforcement agency, state or local public agency, person, or entity to use an unmanned aircraft to gather information, including but not limited to images, photographs, or recordings.
- the law enforcement agency shall destroy all information collected by the unmanned aircraft no later than thirty days after such information is collected unless the information is necessary for and relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation or pending criminal trial
- any court that has issued a search warrant permitting the use of an unmanned aircraft, an extension or modification of such warrant, or denied an application for such warrant during the previous calendar year shall report to the judiciary the number, kind, and duration of search warrants or search warrant extensions applied for, granted, modified, or denied
This bill is really great at restricting drone use by law enforcement: stored information can only be kept for 30 days unless it's related to a trial; for most uses police need a warrant to fly a drone (exceptions are missing persons, disaster relief, and counter terrorism); and all police drone warrants are reviewed at the end of the year. The problem is that, as good as this bill is about restricting drone use for police, it's stricter for everyone else. As written, law enforcement are the only ones allowed to fly a drone that takes pictures or record film. Everyone else, be it a company, journalist, or a kid playing with a flying camera, is out of luck.
Dogfights? More like Dronefights
Next week, DARPA is holding a conference in northern Virginia to start tackling the problems of future air-to-air battles. DARPA wants the military and industry to figure out "Distributed Battle Management," or how to organize a sky with both manned and unmanned aircraft fighting alongside one another.
Did I miss any drone news? Email me at kelsey.d.atherton@gmail.com.
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Today in the I-probably-could've-thought-of-that tech sub-category: Volvo will let package delivery employees into customers' cars, because it sucks trying to be home when a package gets delivered.
Instead of the more straight-forward route of arming every UPS driver with a crowbar, Volvo is using a "digital key" to give package-wielders temporary access to customers' trunks. When checking out online, customers will soon be able to select car delivery as an option; the car's location is sent to the delivery person, and a temporary digital key is issued so they can open the customer's trunk. The customer can track when the car is opened and closed through messages sent to a mobile device. The process, called "Roam Delivery," will officially debut later this month at the Mobile World Congress conference.
Clever, right? The tech has been here for a while already, as The Car Connection points out, but now Volvo is pulling together GPS and On Star-type wizardry and applying it to a different field.
It's not clear if customers using the service will have to agree to some kind of liability clause (what happens if you insist your package didn't make it to your car?), but, hey, it sounds better than having to track down the package yourself after a sorry-we-missed-you notice gets hammered to your door.
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As great as Google Maps is, if you need to be directed to somewhere really specific--as in, a specific room in a specific building on a specific street--it stumbles. Not too long ago, we predicted that crowdsourcing would bring mapping indoors, and go figure, Google is leading the charge: the tech giant has unveiled a prototype smartphone that uses sensors to constantly map the world around it, giving everyone (customers and Google) more detailed maps.
Called Project Tango, the prototype is a 5-inch Android phone that monitors its position and orientation as it travels in your pocket; after moving around enough, it develops a 3-D view of your world: your house, the coffee shop you visit, that one bar down the street. Google has 200 of the devices, and will start shipping them out to developers this month.
If you're not concerned about the privacy issues that arise from having a self-surveiling, room-scanning machine on your person, this is a great idea: the next logical step for mapping is to direct people to ever-more precise places, and making it happen through existing tech like motion-tracking cameras and depth sensors is clever problem-solving. (If you are concerned about those issues, well, that's another story.)
No word yet on when the phone might get into consumer hands, although between this and its modular smartphone concept, Project Ara, Google's Advanced Technology and Projects group, responsible for both, has a lot on its hands.
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Laboratory studies of “animal hypnosis” were fairly common in the 1970s and the 1980s. One paper defined its subject as “a state of prolonged, reversible immobility which is brought about by different types of sensory stimulation and is characterized by passivity and lack of responsiveness.” The researchers go on to give an easy method for producing this phenomenon: Just hold the animal in a fixed position on its back or on its side until it stops moving. When you release your grip, the animal will persist in a trancelike state, unresponsive to other stimuli and somewhat impervious to pain.
This is not so much a case of animals being hypnotized as playing possum. Going limp while under threat makes predators lose interest and move on to other prey. “The name ‘animal hypnosis’ implies a lot of things,” says Gordon Gallup, Jr., a psychologist at the State University of New York at Albany who started working on this behavior among chickens in the 1960s, but the connections are mostly superficial. In fact, the “hypnosis” label has fallen out of favor; most researchers now describe the state as one of “tonic immobility.” Still, the catatonic state appears to be widespread in nature, and it’s been observed not just in chickens but in rabbits, guinea pigs, sharks, ducks, alligators, and Fijian ground frogs, among other animals.
This article originally appeared in the March 2014 issue of Popular Science.
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Brett Doar tried architecture, drove buses, and edited films before carving out a career designing absurdly intricate Rube Goldberg machines. His latest project: a kinetic sculpture made of toys and household objects to advertise GoldieBlox, a construction set for girls. Here’s how Doar orchestrated his unique living.
How did you start out?
I was always building little toys. One was a spring-powered gun that launched sharpened coat-hanger pieces. I sent that to someone as a thank-you after a job interview, and he said, ‘You need to think of this as art.’ That was the moment I started to take it seriously.
What was your big break?
The band OK Go put out a call for someone to build a Rube Goldberg machine for their music video. My friend saw it and said, ‘If anybody should do this, it should be you.’ At first, the project was a free-for-all, but then I became a lead designer.
Do you plan everything out first?
I rarely start with sketches. Sometimes it’s just getting a bunch of parts and getting on the floor and trying to see how they talk to one another. You have a conversation with the materials. I’ve never danced, but to me it feels like dance; you’re doing this little choreography with motion.
How do you feel about this being your career?
It’s hilarious. It’s surprising. And the living is variable.
This article originally appeared in the March 2014 issue of Popular Science.
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Martian colonization is a risky proposition. So risky, in fact, that a group of Islamic leaders in the United Arab Emirates issued a religious ruling saying Muslims should not go to the Red Planet. The General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment (GAIAE) ruling compares a Mars mission to suicide, and says that those who attempt it can expect the same consequences in the afterlife. In fact, GAIAE went so far as to claim that those seeking to escape God's judgment on Mars would be unable to do so, saying: "This is an absolutely baseless and unacceptable belief because not even an atom falls outside the purview of Allah, the Creator of everything."
Martian colonization is certainly dangerous. NASA's Curiosity rover has found water in Martian soil, but it also found toxic chlorine gas. There are promising signs of flowing water, though that's still uncertain. Even if space travelers had sufficient food, water, and heat, the confined spaces and isolation of a Mars colony would be really bad for colonists' mental health. Plus, high levels of radiation would likely make Martian humans quite sick. On top of all of this, the nearest non-colonist humans will be anywhere from 34 million to 250 million miles away, making any rescue mission difficult, if not impossible.
Private Mars colonization organization Mars One still thinks the journey is worth it. Today, they issued a response to GAIAE, citing the Quran and the specific example of Ibn Battuta, a 14th century explorer.
"And among His Signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the variations in your languages and your colors: verily in that are Signs for those who know." (Quran 30: 22)
The Muslim world has a rich tradition of exploration. The verse from the Quran above encourages Muslims to go out and see the signs of God’s creation in the ‘heavens and the earth’. The most influential example of this was the Moroccan Muslim traveller, Ibn Battuta, who from 1325 to 1355 travelled 73,000 miles, visiting the equivalent of 44 modern countries. Among the countries Ibn Battuta visited were Russia, Afghanistan, India, the Maldives, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and China.
Mars One continues, imploring the imams to rescind the ruling, and instead think of the risk to humanity posed by not colonizing Mars.
If we may be so bold: the GAIAE should not analyze the risk as they perceive it today. The GAIAE should assess the potential risk for humans as if an unmanned habitable outpost is ready and waiting on Mars. Only when that outpost is established will human lives be risked in Mars One's plan. With eight successful consecutive landing and a habitable settlement waiting on Mars, will the human mission be risk-free? Of course not. Any progress requires taking risks, but in this case the reward is 'the next giant leap for mankind'. That reward is certainly worth the risks involved in this mission.
Mars One respectfully requests GAIAE to cancel the Fatwa and make the greatest Rihla, or journey, of all times open for Muslims too. They can be the first Muslims to witness the signs of God’s creation in heaven, drawing upon the rich culture of travel and exploration of early Islam.
Read more about Mars One here.
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New research, however, seems to supports its use. In a study published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, scientists exposed developing chicken embryos to extracts of viper venom. As you can probably imagine, pure venom quickly killed them, and caused obvious hemorrhaging when a venom-soaked disk was applied to the embryo's surface. When the venom was mixed with sufficiently high levels of mongoose plant root before being applied, however, none of the embryos died, and there was no sign of hemorrhaging. These embryos were chosen because they are easy to handle and observe, are similar to humans on a molecular level, and prevent causing suffering in higher mammals, the study noted.
The study suggests that some chemical in the plant, also known as Ophiorrhiza mungos, is neutralizing the venom. The scientists are working to isolate that compound.
The researchers used venom from Russell's viper (Daboia russelli), which is responsible for the most snakebite deaths in southern India. The World Health Organization estimates that at least 100,000 people die from snakebites each year.
Modern medicine turns to antivenom to treat snakebites, which usually consists of antibodies derived from animals like sheep that have been exposed to venom. But these can cause side effects like swelling and allergic reactions, are often in short supply, and notoriously expensive. Hospital bills for bite treatments can exceed $100,000, at least in the U.S.
Study author Anaswara Krishnan, from India's Kerala University, said scientific validation of traditional cures are important, since these treatements can't be pursued at modern hospitals without such evidence in hand. “Despite the widespread use of modern serum therapy, a lot of people in southern India prefer traditional Ayurvedic medicines to treat snakebites because they are known to be effective, have fewer side effects and have cultural acceptability,” she told SciDev.net. They are currently pursuing clinical trials, and hope to use a formulation of the mongoose plant to treat snakebites.
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How old are you? Are you of retirement age yet? If so, in your lifetime, an island has been reborn, sand grain by sand grain.
Between 1945 and 2010, a sediment deposit in the Pacific Ocean grew to become a "fully vegetated and stable island," two environmental scientists report this month. The island birth occurred in the Nadikdik Atoll, many of whose islands were destroyed in a typhoon in 1905 that left all but two Nadikdik residents dead. (The survivors drifted on coconut logs for 24 hours before rescue crews came.) Since then, the healthy reef in the atoll has thrown up coral bits and sand to remake itself.
The sediment deposit grew in area from about 17,000 square feet (1,546 square meters) to about 89,000 square feet. In addition, several small islands in the atoll merged to form one landmass. Many of the islands have been moving, some of them more than 300 feet in 61 years. That means they're moving about as fast as a redwood tree sapling grows. These islands—once inhabited; still not far from islands that have cities and houses and cars—practically seem alive.
This study of the Nadikdik islands helps scientists better predict what will happen to Pacific islands when sea levels rise in the future, the study's authors, Murray Ford and Paul Kench of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, wrote in their paper. Nadikdik Atoll, also known as the Knox Atoll, is part of the Marshall Islands. That island nation has already seen trouble from rising seas. Sea level increases by about seven feet (2.2 meters)2.2 millimeters* a year in the Marshalls. High tide now brings the ocean right up to people's doorsteps, one former Marshall resident told me in 2011. ClimateWire recently reported that many Marshall Islanders are moving to the U.S., while others don't want to acknowledge their home may one day be uninhabitable.
So Nadikdik's growth happened during serious sea level rise, which is pretty cool. There's no guarantee that will keep other Marshall Islands above water in the future, however. Ford and Kench aren't sure what forces are making the Nadikdik islands grow. They suspect that the coral reef around the Nadikdik Atoll plays a major part. Because nobody has lived in the atoll since 1905, the reef is likely very healthy and thus able to grow islands right out of the sea.
*An embarrassing mistake! My thanks to our Facebook commenters for catching this.
[Geomorphology via the BBC]
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Metal, despite being one of the most ubiquitous building materials, isn't something we see in 3-D printing too often. (Seriously: we've got pizza before small-scale, consumer steel printing.) But software company Autodesk, working with Dutch designer Joris Laarman, created a new system that could make the process at least a little more affordable.
The project, MX3D-Metal, uses custom software and an off-the-shelf robot arm to lay quick-cooling molten metal down in strands. The metal cools down fast enough that it can be manipulated into forming long, detailed pieces, like what you see here.
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The bill was aimed at clarifying the definition of the term "air pollutant," and would exempt "natural" gases and prevent state standards for carbon dioxide below 500 parts per million, which is far above the current level, near 400 ppm. But the bill hit stumbling blocks, such as the "undeniable" evidence that naturally-occurring radon (and xenon and cyanide) pose a threat to human health. Those pesky facts.
"We are short of carbon dioxide for the needs of the plants," said Anderson. "Concentrations reached 600 parts per million at the time of the dinosaurs and they did quite well," he added. Anderson, who was incredibly once designated as Wyoming's biology teacher of the year, obviously has a generous definition of "doing well," at least when it concerns an extinct type of animal whose existence hinges on an acceptance of science (which doesn't evidently extend to climate science). He may also be confused about the differences between dinos and humans.
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9 billion people: Earth's population by 2050
41 percent: the portion of people treated for cat bites who were diagnosed with depression, according to a study of 1.3 million health records
12 to 14 hours: the length of time a newly discovered marsupial spends violently mating. Most of the males die from internal bleeding and tissue damage before the resulting offspring are born.
130 miles: the distance this electric snow-chainsaw can haul a person on an eight-hour charge
2018: the year this supersonic plane, which will have a livestream of the outdoors instead of windows, is set to launch
$50: the price of a printed circuit board that lets you create electronic music from any object (see more geeky toys from the 2014 Toy Fair here)
8 percent: the propulsive efficiency of a bat
$16,000: the cost to turn a 1988 Ford Fiesta into a Transformer
20 miles per hour: the top speed of a bike retrofitted with this electric rear wheel
14,000 people: are killed by the gut infection Clostridium difficile per year. Poop transplants can help.
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On December 1 of last year at around 7:20 a.m., a speeding commuter train bound for New York City careened off its tracks, killing four and injuring 59. Popular Science is based in New York, so for us the accident was particularly scary, and we all waited eagerly for an explanation. An investigation soon revealed that the train had approached a sharp bend in the track at 80 mph, nearly three times the advised speed. And then an all too familiar detail emerged: The engineer had nodded off at the controls.
Of the body’s primary functions, sleep is the one we most often take for granted. On average, Americans sleep about an hour less than they used to in the 1940s, and 43 percent say they’re routinely under-slept. We get up a little earlier, we drink caffeine throughout the day, and then we fall asleep to the light of the TV with a phone by our side. In our age of hyper-productivity, sleep has been reduced to an obstacle, a challenge to be overcome. Thomas Edison, who changed how we sleep forever when he commercialized the lightbulb, summed it up when he said, “Sleep is a waste of time, a heritage of our cave days.”
The trouble is, it’s not. Scientists have now shown that lack of sleep correlates to higher incidences of heart disease, cancer, and other maladies. It can make us irritable, obese, anxious, and depressed. And then there are societal costs. The meltdowns at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were caused, in part, by sleep-deprived operators, as was the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and the oil spill from the Exxon Valdez. In the U.S., sleep-deprived motorists account for an average of more than 80,000 accidents a year.
Given the broad implications of sleep—or lack thereof—we asked writer Brooke Borel to investigate the topic for this month’s cover story. What she found is that sleep science is having a bit of a renaissance, fueled by new imaging techno-logy and data analysis tools. Neuroscientists can now peer deeply into the slumbering brain, revealing a more complex and delicate system than we ever knew existed. Regular folks, too, can hack their sleep in ways never before possible. Aided by fitness monitors and mobile phones, they can track their nightly sleep patterns and adjust behavior accordingly. (Yes, there is an app for that.) They can also use software to make screens less blue—which promotes sleepiness—time naps for maximum impact, or help avoid hitting snooze in the morning.
If the strength of science is its ability to separate facts from beliefs, sleep is an ideal subject. We might believe that we can make do with less sleep, but the facts say otherwise. Perhaps we should start listening to them.
Enjoy the issue.
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The common screw may not have been screaming for a makeover, but consider its shortcomings: stripped heads, tedious pilot holes, endless bit swapping. The company Outlaw has developed a new fastening system that cures all those headaches and could unseat the Phillips head as the bench standard.
Three tiers of hexagonal recesses in the screw head provide 18 points of contact with the Outlaw bit. (A standard Phillips head has only four.) More contact means better grip, which makes the bit less likely to slip and strip the fastener. Shorter Outlaw screws have two recesses (12 contact points) but the same hexagonal shape.
As you drive a screw, small ridges on the underside of the head helps cut a shallow groove into the work surface. The extra space allows the screw head to rest flush with the surface instead of on top of it.
Forget predrilling pilot holes. Outlaw screws have extra-sharp self-drilling tips, so they can bore their own way through wood.
Outlaw’s corresponding screwdriver bit has a three-tiered hexagonal tip that matches any of the company’s screws. Because the bit makes more contact with a given fastener, it’s able to hold onto screws more firmly and drop fewer of them.
This article originally appeared in the March 2014 issue of Popular Science.
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It happens. You're on the road, at night, maybe you're in the left lane, and a driver screeches up behind you, tailgating, high-beams flashing, to coax you into the other lane. What if you could get sweet, bright revenge?
Well, here is your neon sign telling you: DO NOT FIND A WAY TO DO THIS. That would be dangerous. Although there is a way to do this, it's just a proof of concept.
Okay? Okay.
A savvy DIY-er created the LuxBlaster, an Arduino-based mini-robot that can detect the strongest point of light in its view, and beam light back if the source reaches a certain threshold of brightness. This could (theoretically!) teach those drivers a lesson.
The creators has the instructions available online, but again, don't take it on the road.
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The world’s largest and deepest underwater-walking robot, the 1,400-pound Crabster CR200, was designed to scuttle along the seafloor like a monstrous crustacean. Its possible vocations include scientific explorer, commercial surveyor, and treasure hunter. In fast currents too dangerous for scuba divers, it steadies itself on six legs by putting its head down, raising its rear, and facing the flow head-on. It has 11 cameras, including an acoustic one to see through cloudy, turbulent waters. Engineers at the Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology held Crabster’s first underwater trial last summer. This spring, they plan to test it at maximum depth (656 feet) and then head to the Yellow Sea to help archaeologists excavate 12th-century shipwrecks.
This article originally appeared in the February 2014 issue of Popular Science.
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