It's like stopping a bus from 160 mph on a wet road. That's how the engineers behind the Bloodhound SSC—the British land-speed record car designed to break the 1,000-mph barrier—described the task of stopping their creation once it's finished breaking the sound barrier. This video describes the immense forces that will act on the brakes as they slow the Bloodhound to a stop. While most of the retardation will be done by air brakes and parachutes, a set of car-like disc brakes still have to haul it down from 160 mph to a standstill on the slippery earth of South Africa's Kaksken Pan.
At that speed, the car's steel wheels will still be spinning at 10,000 rpm. During testing, a set of carbon rotors from a jet fighter shattered under the stress during a half-speed, 5,000-rpm test. Engineers switched to steel rotors from AP Racing, which managed to absorb 4.6 kilowatts of energy on a test stand without failing although the Bloodhound team hasn't spun them up to the full 10,000 rpm just yet.
Royal Air Force pilot Andy Green will probably be thankful for strong brakes when he tries to surpass his own land-speed record in South Africa next year. He reached 763.05 mph in October 1997, driving the Thrust SSC, but now Green has his eyes on the 1,000-mph mark. To get him there, the Bloodhound SSC will employ both jet and rocket power, as well as specially-constructed steel wheels (no rubber tires here) that are extremely thin to reduce friction.
The cylindrical hohlraum at the National Ignition Facility.
Dr. Eddie Dewald
In 1934, two American physicists theorized that if one could make two photons collide, the collision would produce two positron-electron pairs—and thus convert light into matter. If proven in a lab, the process would be a pure demonstration of Einstein's theory of relativity, E=mc2, which states that the mass of an object is also a measure of its stored energy. At the time the scientists—Gregory Breit and John A. Wheeler, physicists at New York University—devised their hypothesis, there were no scientific tools available to demonstrate it, so the pair was left only with a theory, a very sound theory known thereafter as the Breit-Wheeler process, until technology could catch up.
Exactly 80 years later, that time has finally arrived: theoretical physicists at Imperial College London have stumbled, quite by accident, upon a method that will demonstrate Breit and Wheeler's theory. In a study published this month in Nature Photonics, the team describes how, while researching problems related to fusion energy, they realized that by firing high-energy lasers into a hohlraum—a tiny, gold can that absorbs laser radiation and symmetrically re-radiates it as x-rays—scientists could create a "photon-photon collider," successfully spinning matter particles off of high-energy photons.
The theory could be demonstrated within a year.
Since the people who devised the experiment deal only in theoretical physics, and since the actual procedure will require a large team of experimenters, Pike's team is currently in the process of gathering other researchers to properly see the experiment through. He says it could be completed "within a year," depending on how quickly the team can secure one of only about 10 laboratory facilities in the world that contain the equipment needed to perform the experiment: both short-pulse laser capabilities and either a hohlraum or some other mechanism to generate a large number of x-rays. The process involves a formal, peer-reviewed proposal that must be greenlit by a committee from the facility based on its thorough presentation, personnel expertise, and ultimate importance to science. They likely won't have a problem with that last one—when successfully conducted, this experiment will have realized, in its purest form, a process crucial to the understanding of both gamma ray bursts and the first few minutes of the formation of the universe.
"The Breit-Wheeler process [has been] so elusive because the number of light particles required to see it is very high," lead researcher Oliver Pike tells Popular Science. "Trying to collide two photons using two high-energy light beams has, to date, not worked, [because] it is very difficult to generate dense and narrow beams of the energies required to detect the process. Our approach was different. Laser-heated hohlraums have been used for decades, and high-intensity lasers have been able to accelerate electrons to the very high energies required to generate the light beam for about 10 years. I just don't think that anyone had thought of using a hohlraum as a tool to study fundamental physics before."
This isn't the first time light has been converted into matter: in 1997, Stanford's linear collider used a different process that involved large numbers of photons interacting with the help of a high-powered electron beam and an electric field that provided the energy needed to collide the photons to produce matter particles. The Imperial College London team's experiment, by contrast, uses the energy of the two colliding photons themselves—it'll be the first time light has been converted into matter in a total vacuum, thus making the process much easier to observe.
"The idea of creating a photon-photon collider is one that has long interested physicists," says Pike. "Many different particles can be produced in photon collisions, so such a collider could potentially be used to study fundamental physics with a very clean experimental approach. [It] could be used as an antimatter source—useful in PET scanning, for example—as equal numbers of electrons and positrons are formed, but there are much easier and more efficient ways of creating antimatter than this. Applications [of the process] may arise in the future, but at the moment, the main draw of this experiment is certainly academic: observing a very simple process for the first time."
While modern technology finally makes it possible to conduct the Breit-Wheeler process for the first time, Pike says they'll have only just begun to scratch the surface of its capabilities; as lasers become more powerful over time, scientists will be able to produce more and different particles than just positron-electron pairs. He says their initial discovery, though accidental, was ultimately an inevitable scientific advance.
"This process is a little odd in that, theoretically, its validity is not really in any doubt," he says. "It's just that in the past we haven't had any way of detecting it, whereas closely related processes—like the annihilation of an electron and positron into two photons—were seen decades ago. If we hadn't published this work, I'm sure someone at some point in the future would have made efforts to observe it."
The lead author of two controversial stem cell papers has agreed to retract some of her work, Nature News reports.
The papers, published in January, claimed to have found simple ways to transform regular cells into stem cells. An easy supply of stem cells would be a boon to both stem-cell research and to any future treatments that use the cells, so both scientists and journalists were excited about the papers.
Some outside scientists soon noticed the papers had problems, however. Critics wondered if some of the data were made up, or manipulated to look better. The institute where the papers’ lead author works as a research scientist, RIKEN of Tokyo, investigated the author, Haruko Obokata. In April, a RIKEN committee found Obokata guilty of “scientific misconduct.” Another RIKEN committee will decide her punishment, Nature News reported at the time.
Now, the obvious next question is: What should happen to the papers? When scientists are found to have cheated in their research, the scientific journal that published the research will often issue retractions. Retractions flag problematic papers for scientists in the future, who might otherwise think the papers are true and honestly written. Often, all or most authors have to agree to a retraction.
In March, one of the scientists who worked with Obokata, Teruhiko Wakayama of the University of Yamanashi, told Reuters he wanted to retract the papers. At the time, another prominent team member, Charles Vacanti of Harvard University, did not agree. The others didn’t issue opinions publicly.
Now, newspapers in Japan are reporting Obokata has agreed to retract one of her two papers. It’s not a clear admission of wrongdoing: The paper that RIKEN found Obokata cheated on is not the one she reportedly agreed to retract, Nature News reports.
Waco CG-4A Hadrian Glider Rendered By Dassault Systèmes
In the background is the old blueprint. The ink did not keep well for posterity, and has run together making it hard to read.
Dassault Systèmes
The June 6th, 1944 invasion of Normandy by British, American, and Canadian allied forces was the largest invasion in history. In the 70 years since then, it turns out we've forgotten most of the engineering that actually made it possible. 3D software design firm Dassault Systèmes set about to apply the computer tools of today, which they use to design modern airliners and cars, to recreate the past. The ambitious project that started modeling machines from D-Day this year and wants to have the full equipment of the invasion modeled by 2019, in time for the invasion's 75th anniversary.
Why redesign the old machines? Because here was a moment where engineering skill under pressure truly changed history. "Engineering people are here to make the dream come true," Mehdi Tayoubi, a Strategy VP for Dassault Systèmes told Popular Science, before continuing, "but then the world was in a nightmare. And the solution was to remove the nightmare, to come back to the dream. They were leaving the nightmare."
The Glider In Simulation
Dassault Systèmes
The team selected three technologies to recreate. Two of these directly carried troops into battle. They were the Waco CG-4A Hadrian glider, which silently carried troops into battle and beyond German lines, and the Higgins Boat, which carried troops from ship to shore in D-Day and allowed them to directly storm the beaches. What is left is under water, and is eroding after 70 years under water. "Everything that has been made with wood," Tayoubi says, "like the Waco glider or the Higgins boat. We don't have any more 100 percent original Higgins boats left in the world. Even the big boats in the water are starting to disappear." If they waited till the 100th anniversary of the invasion, 30 years from now, there might not be enough left to piece together a digital reconstruction of the boats.
The third technology Dassault chose to design was the Mulberry harbor. Among the biggest challenges of the invasion was supplying the force once they'd established a beachhead. The harbor was built in parts across England, and then floated across in parts and assembled on the beach out of pontoons and flexible steel roads. "They were going to bring up a harbor to a place there was no harbor, and this was the first time in history where this had been done. And this harbor was the most active harbor in the world for a long time. Floating pontoons had to be invented for Mulberry B," Tayoubi said.
For all three technologies, Dassault Systèmes scanned under water, using 3-D mapping tools to gather information on the harbor, boats, gliders, and other wrecked artifacts. These, combined with what was left of original blueprints, made it possible for the team to set out rebuilding the designs, and the scans will allow them to recreate more pieces of invasion technology in the future.
Mulberry Harbor
One of two artificial harbors created for D-Day, Mulberry harbor was built in England and floated over to Normandy to serve as a re-supply port for the invasion force. The other harbor was damaged by a storm shortly after the invasion.
Dassault Systèmes
The project starts with a trip to the sea and a frustrated dad. Tayoubi explains:
It started with one guy on my team coming back from a weekend on the coast and he was looking at the sea and trying to explain the big day that happened and what the harbor looked like to his wife and his children, and he came back to me and said it was very hard to explain. Can you do something for that? And we began to think about a 3-D reconstitution, and then once you have that there are multiple ways to experience it.
Exploring Mulberry Harbor In A 3-D Cave
This cave, combined with goggles and handset, allow a person to explore the harbor in a virtual reality environment.
Dassault Systèmes
One of the ways to experience this was the creation of a 3-D cave. Once the harbor was reconstructed, it could be experienced through a virtual reality room where a person is able to walk in the harbor. Tayoubi calls it a "traveling time machine," and sees it as a future education device to explain the invasion to future generation.
All this and more is documented in NOVA"s "D-Day's Sunken Secrets" special below. The episode airs May 28th at 9 pm on PBS.
Illustration by Katie Peek; Original maps courtesy ADS All-Sky Survey, ADSASS.org
In late 2013, a group of astronomers in the U.S. and France made a new kind of sky map, which charts the how intensely scientists have studied features in the heavens. To build the map, they analyzed a million references to celestial objects in a NASA database of journal articles. Astronomers can use the online version—Astrophysics Data System All-Sky Survey—find data on their targets. The team is also launching a citizen science project later this year to incorporate archival images in the interactive tool. In the meantime, the map already reveals the most intriguing parts of the universe.
This article originally appeared in the June 2014 issue of Popular Science.
In the daily hubbub of current “crises” facing humanity, we forget about the many generations we hope are yet to come. Not those who will live 200 years from now, but 1,000 or 10,000 years from now. I use the word “hope” because we face risks, called existential risks, that threaten to wipe out humanity. These risks are not just for big disasters, but for the disasters that could end history.
Not everyone has ignored the long future though. Mystics like Nostradamus have regularly tried to calculate the end of the world. HG Wells tried to develop a science of forecasting and famously depicted the far future of humanity in his book The Time Machine. Other writers built other long-term futures to warn, amuse or speculate.
But had these pioneers or futurologists not thought about humanity’s future, it would not have changed the outcome. There wasn’t much that human beings in their place could have done to save us from an existential crisis or even cause one.
We are in a more privileged position today. Human activity has been steadily shaping the future of our planet. And even though we are far from controlling natural disasters, we are developing technologies that may help mitigate, or at least, deal with them.
Future imperfect
Yet, these risks remain understudied. There is a sense of powerlessness and fatalism about them. People have been talking apocalypses for millennia, but few have tried to prevent them. Humans are also bad at doing anything about problems that have not occurred yet (partially because of the availability heuristic– the tendency to overestimate the probability of events we know examples of, and underestimate events we cannot readily recall).
If humanity becomes extinct, at the very least the loss is equivalent to the loss of all living individuals and the frustration of their goals. But the loss would probably be far greater than that. Human extinction means the loss of meaning generated by past generations, the lives of all future generations (and there could be an astronomical number of future lives) and all the value they might have been able to create. If consciousness or intelligence are lost, it might mean that value itself becomes absent from the universe. This is a huge moral reason to work hard to prevent existential threats from becoming reality. And we must not fail even once in this pursuit.
With that in mind, I have selected what I consider the five biggest threats to humanity’s existence. But there are caveats that must be kept in mind, for this list is not final.
Over the past century we have discovered or created new existential risks – supervolcanoes were discovered in the early 1970s, and before the Manhattan project nuclear war was impossible – so we should expect others to appear. Also, some risks that look serious today might disappear as we learn more. The probabilities also change over time – sometimes because we are concerned about the risks and fix them.
Finally, just because something is possible and potentially hazardous, doesn’t mean it is worth worrying about. There are some risks we cannot do anything at all about, such as gamma ray bursts that result from the explosions of galaxies. But if we learn we can do something, the priorities change. For instance, with sanitation, vaccines and antibiotics, pestilence went from an act of God to bad public health.
1. Nuclear war
While only two nuclear weapons have been used in war so far – at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II – and nuclear stockpiles are down from their the peak they reached in the Cold War, it is a mistake to think that nuclear war is impossible. In fact, it might not be improbable.
The Cuban Missile crisis was very close to turning nuclear. If we assume one such event every 69 years and a one in three chance that it might go all the way to being nuclear war, the chance of such a catastrophe increases to about one in 200 per year.
Worse still, the Cuban Missile crisis was only the most well-known case. The history of Soviet-US nuclear deterrence is full of close calls and dangerous mistakes. The actual probability has changed depending on international tensions, but it seems implausible that the chances would be much lower than one in 1000 per year.
A full-scale nuclear war between major powers would kill hundreds of millions of people directly or through the near aftermath – an unimaginable disaster. But that is not enough to make it an existential risk.
Similarly the hazards of fallout are often exaggerated – potentially deadly locally, but globally a relatively limited problem. Cobalt bombs were proposed as a hypothetical doomsday weapon that would kill everybody with fallout, but are in practice hard and expensive to build. And they are physically just barely possible.
The real threat is nuclear winter – that is, soot lofted into the stratosphere causing a multi-year cooling and drying of the world. Modern climate simulations show that it could preclude agriculture across much of the world for years. If this scenario occurs billions would starve, leaving only scattered survivors that might be picked off by other threats such as disease. The main uncertainty is how the soot would behave: depending on the kind of soot the outcomes may be very different, and we currently have no good ways of estimating this.
2. Bioengineered pandemic
Natural pandemics have killed more people than wars. However, natural pandemics are unlikely to be existential threats: there are usually some people resistant to the pathogen, and the offspring of survivors would be more resistant. Evolution also does not favor parasites that wipe out their hosts, which is why syphilis went from a virulent killer to a chronic disease as it spread in Europe.
Unfortunately we can now make diseases nastier. One of the more famous examples is how the introduction of an extra gene in mousepox – the mouse version of smallpox – made it far more lethal and able to infect vaccinated individuals. Recent work on bird flu has demonstrated that the contagiousness of a disease can be deliberately boosted.
Right now the risk of somebody deliberately releasing something devastating is low. But as biotechnology gets better and cheaper, more groups will be able to make diseases worse.
Most work on bioweapons have been done by governments looking for something controllable, because wiping out humanity is not militarily useful. But there are always some people who might want to do things because they can. Others have higher purposes. For instance, the Aum Shinrikyo cult tried to hasten the apocalypse using bioweapons beside their more successful nerve gas attack. Some people think the Earth would be better off without humans, and so on.
The number of fatalities from bioweapon and epidemic outbreaks attacks looks like it has a power-law distribution– most attacks have few victims, but a few kill many. Given current numbers the risk of a global pandemic from bioterrorism seems very small. But this is just bioterrorism: governments have killed far more people than terrorists with bioweapons (up to 400,000 may have died from the WWII Japanese biowar program). And as technology gets more powerful in the future nastier pathogens become easier to design.
3. Superintelligence
Intelligence is very powerful. A tiny increment in problem-solving ability and group coordination is why we left the other apes in the dust. Now their continued existence depends on human decisions, not what they do. Being smart is a real advantage for people and organisations, so there is much effort in figuring out ways of improving our individual and collective intelligence: from cognition-enhancing drugs to artificial-intelligence software.
The problem is that intelligent entities are good at achieving their goals, but if the goals are badly set they can use their power to cleverly achieve disastrous ends. There is no reason to think that intelligence itself will make something behave nice and morally. In fact, it is possible to prove that certain types of superintelligent systems would not obey moral rules even if they were true.
Even more worrying is that in trying to explain things to an artificial intelligence we run into profound practical and philosophical problems. Human values are diffuse, complex things that we are not good at expressing, and even if we could do that we might not understand all the implications of what we wish for.
Software-based intelligence may very quickly go from below human to frighteningly powerful. The reason is that it may scale in different ways from biological intelligence: it can run faster on faster computers, parts can be distributed on more computers, different versions tested and updated on the fly, new algorithms incorporated that give a jump in performance.
It has been proposed that an “intelligence explosion” is possible when software becomes good enough at making better software. Should such a jump occur there would be a large difference in potential power between the smart system (or the people telling it what to do) and the rest of the world. This has clear potential for disaster if the goals are badly set.
The unusual thing about superintelligence is that we do not know if rapid and powerful intelligence explosions are possible: maybe our current civilisation as a whole is improving itself at the fastest possible rate. But there are good reasons to think that some technologies may speed things up far faster than current societies can handle. Similarly we do not have a good grip on just how dangerous different forms of superintelligence would be, or what mitigation strategies would actually work. It is very hard to reason about future technology we do not yet have, or intelligences greater than ourselves. Of the risks on this list, this is the one most likely to either be massive or just a mirage.
This is a surprisingly under-researched area. Even in the 50s and 60s when people were extremely confident that superintelligence could be achieved “within a generation”, they did not look much into safety issues. Maybe they did not take their predictions seriously, but more likely is that they just saw it as a remote future problem.
4. Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology is the control over matter with atomic or molecular precision. That is in itself not dangerous – instead, it would be very good news for most applications. The problem is that, like biotechnology, increasing power also increases the potential for abuses that are hard to defend against.
The big problem is not the infamous “grey goo” of self-replicating nanomachines eating everything. That would require clever design for this very purpose. It is tough to make a machine replicate: biology is much better at it, by default. Maybe some maniac would eventually succeed, but there are plenty of more low-hanging fruits on the destructive technology tree.
The most obvious risk is that atomically precise manufacturing looks ideal for rapid, cheap manufacturing of things like weapons. In a world where any government could “print” large amounts of autonomous or semi-autonomous weapons (including facilities to make even more) arms races could become very fast – and hence unstable, since doing a first strike before the enemy gets a too large advantage might be tempting.
Weapons can also be small, precision things: a “smart poison” that acts like a nerve gas but seeks out victims, or ubiquitous “gnatbot” surveillance systems for keeping populations obedient seems entirely possible. Also, there might be ways of getting nuclear proliferation and climate engineering into the hands of anybody who wants it.
We cannot judge the likelihood of existential risk from future nanotechnology, but it looks like it could be potentially disruptive just because it can give us whatever we wish for.
5. Unknown unknowns
The most unsettling possibility is that there is something out there that is very deadly, and we have no clue about it.
The silence in the sky might be evidence for this. Is the absence of aliens due to that life or intelligence is extremely rare, or that intelligent life tends to get wiped out? If there is a future Great Filter, it must have been noticed by other civilisations too, and even that didn’t help.
Whatever the threat is, it would have to be something that is nearly unavoidable even when you know it is there, no matter who and what you are. We do not know about any such threats (none of the others on this list work like this), but they might exist.
Note that just because something is unknown it doesn’t mean we cannot reason about it. In a remarkable paper Max Tegmark and Nick Bostrom show that a certain set of risks must be less than one chance in a billion per year, based on the relative age of Earth.
You might wonder why climate change or meteor impacts have been left off this list. Climate change, no matter how scary, is unlikely to make the entire planet uninhabitable (but it could compound other threats if our defences to it break down). Meteors could certainly wipe us out, but we would have to be very unlucky. The average mammalian species survives for about a million years. Hence, the background natural extinction rate is roughly one in a million per year. This is much lower than the nuclear-war risk, which after 70 years is still the biggest threat to our continued existence.
The availability heuristic makes us overestimate risks that are often in the media, and discount unprecedented risks. If we want to be around in a million years we need to correct that.
Anders Sandberg works for the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford.
Earlier this month, we published John Steinbeck's 1966 letter to the editor of Popular Science, in which the Nobel-prize winning author made the case for creating a NASA for the oceans. Steinbeck wrote a second article for Popular Science the following year, about a much lighter topic: camping. In the essay below, titled "Camping Is For The Birds," Steinbeck contrasts the idyllic imagery of motorhome advertisements ("A glowing wife is cooking something delicious just as the father brings a two-pound rainbow trout to the net") with what he describes as the reality of camper trips ("It rains. The kids get to fighting. You are trapped in a small, smelly, miserable box.") Read this article as it originally appeared in our May 1967 issue.
When the editors of Popular Science asked me to set down some observations on camping, I felt a certain reluctance, the same kind of hesitance I have for stepping on a butterfly I know is going to lay the eggs that make the worms that eat up my cabbages.
The present American passion for moving about in motorized caravans is surely interesting as an ethnic development, and to the gadget manufacturers highly profitable, and as far as I can see results in little permanent damage beyond divorce and bankruptcy.
It is presumed that because I have done some camping and have written about it that I must approve of it. This is not necessarily so, though I do understand the universal urge. Polluted air, hysterical traffic, the pressures of crowding and competition, the fears of age and failure under stress, the relentless nervous drive to get ahead or just stay even, and on top of these the demands, the confusion, the noise, and, finally, the gray disappointment in the rewards after all the frantic effort—all these are bound to raise in weary souls a dream of simplicity and peace, a folk memory of man close to nature and of a nature dear and kindly toward man.
The dream is inevitable. Thoreau said it and did it, and every last raddled one of us wants it. If Thoreau found that in his time "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," what would he have said of our time, when Pandora and Pandemonium are going steady. But so strong and sweet is the dream of escape to our personal Walden Pond that we are reluctant to inspect the dream for fear that it may turn out to be a dream.
Anyone who doesn't prefer a good bed in a warm room to lumpy pine boughs and a sleeping bag that feels like a plaster cast is either insane or an abysmal liar.
For X millions of years our species camped because we had no choice. We followed the food supply, living in caves, brush piles, hollow trees, or under the dried skins of animals. Only when we learned to plant and store crops, and to control and domesticate food animals, had we need or reason to build a house, and then a hamlet, and then a city; and that great advance happened very recently in our history. Meanwhile we have a built-in memory of the good, old, simple millions of years of our prehistory and no conception of the misery, the discomfort, and the danger that were man's constant neighbors. It is true, however, that one night in the open, in rain or snow, with no hot-dog stand in sight, nor any of the other modern conveniences we take for granted, will revive that old and terrible memory in any novice nature lover.
Camping is, and should be, a way of doing something you couldn't do in any other way. Anyone who doesn't prefer a good bed in a warm room to lumpy pine boughs and a sleeping bag that feels like a plaster cast is either insane or an abysmal liar. And so we try vainly for the best of both worlds—the so-called simplicity of nature plus the comfort of a modern apartment— hence the great and increasing interest in the caravan, the mobile home, the camper top, and the wheelborne penthouse.
I've done it all ways. Once, following the crops, I had an old bakery truck with a mattress on the floor. It was pretty nice in there when it rained, sitting on the bedding, heating a can of beans over a Sterno flame. Much later, when age had further impaired my judgment, I toured the country with Charley. But then I had as much comfort as I could pack into a small space, and I did the camping routine because it was the only way I could see and hear what I wanted to. In the process, I guess I made nearly every mistake possible. This gives me the right to offer advice to the new camper, and I don't for a moment believe that he will any more listen to my words of wisdom that I would have.
The dream. Everyone has seen the slick advertising of beautiful new camping equipment. "Sleeps four," the copy says, or "sleeps six."
Don't you do it! If you can't resist the urge to go camping, go alone or with one companion you love dearly and with the certain knowledge that the love affair will not survive the trip. The wise and ancient adage—never leave the city limits with a friend—holds double for camping.
Six people in one outfit no matter how shiny and new is too grisly to contemplate. The picture shows a sunny meadow littered with buttercups across which a lovely little stream rushes to find its home in a deep blue lake. A glowing wife is cooking something delicious just as the father brings a two-pound rainbow trout to the net. The children, little angels, wait patiently for their dinners after which they go immediately to serene beddy-bye dreams.
The actuality. Don't believe it. It rains. The kids get to fighting. You are trapped in a small, smelly, miserable box, with a pride of horrible children and a husband-eating wife. The land beside the road is posted, the game warden is watching. You have looked for hours for some place where you are allowed to pull off the road and you finally settle for a camp city with an entrance fee of five dollars which has all the natural simplicity of a city slum. Right away your dog tangles with the dog next door, and next door is so next that you can't get out of your car.
By the time you've settled the quarrel with the neighbors, your kids are making a sound like whooping cough. The beds are wet and there isn't any television. Your lovely wife, trying to heat three cans of corned beef hash, has spilled the alcohol and the truck is on fire.
Togetherness. Sleeps six, my eye! No marriage, no family can survive three rainy days cooped up in a camper. Your teenage daughter is in deep mourning for the steady she had to leave behind, which makes her less than civil. Your older son has his transistor radio turned on full to drown out the 300 other transistors howling on all sides, no two on the same station. Togetherness gets to be a pretty crummy institution with murder stalking the edges.
But suppose you have taken only your beloved out in your camper. She is a good little scout who loves to feel the rain on her face, who adores the wind in her hair in a convertible. She will peel to the bone with sunburn and laugh gallantly.
In this romantic situation you will soon learn some basic truths: The center of the American home is not the hearth. It is the bathroom. Take a dame out of reach of facilities and you are in trouble. I have seen many campers and, with one exception, the sanitary facilities wouldn't keep a romance going for a weekend.
It rains. The kids get to fighting. You are trapped in a small, smelly, miserable box, with a pride of horrible children and a husband-eating wife.
You will learn further that the good little scout is afraid of nothing in the world except getting her hair blown or wet, that for women, the peace and inner security once found in church are now sought out and found under the dryer, and the confessor is a creamy-voiced character whose upper register edges into the soprano. Mark Twain once described women as "lovely creatures with a backache." Well, nothing can bring out the backache like a camping trip.
The Kleenex Curtain. You will find to your surprise that every night finds your expensive rig parked at a motel with twin beds, hot water, and a flush toilet. No matter how you may lust for simplicity, just try running out of Kleenex. The Russians have the Iron Curtain, the Chinese the Bamboo Curtain, but we surely have the Kleenex Curtain.
I'm not trying to discourage the camping instinct, but I think you should consider some of the known hazards. If your camper is mounted on a truck bed, the ride is rough. With a quick traffic stop, everything not tied down will fly through the air. You can't use the car radio or heater in the back or living end. If you cook with bottled gas you aren't allowed in a tunnel. You have to find a bridge.
The lovely sylvan turnouts with barbecue pits and picnic tables maintained by the states for rest and quiet are not for you at night. A state trooper will roust you out before you can make up a bed.
The state and national parks have nice places to camp, with toilets and showers for a small fee. There you may find people from your own state or your own town, and thus be protected from anything new and strange.
If, however, you are bruised and a little raw from the discotheque tempo of our enlightened culture—go camping, but go alone. Find a pleasant place and then find the owner and get his permission to stop there, even if you have to pay him. And, finally, stay there. Don't try to find a better place. You may get to read some of the books you hadn't time for. When it rains, it is lovely—if you are alone. And when the sun comes out, it is pleasant to lie on your belly in the meadow, to refresh your memory of grass and of the tiny flowers that bloom in microscopia. Then you may discover that ants have to work hard for a living, too, and before long that chlorophyl is a definite soporific.
A week or so of this may mend your defenses and send you back into the fight refreshed and rearmed—or it may bore the hell out of you. But don't believe in ads. Find out for yourself.
This article was originally published in the May 1967 issue of Popular Science magazine.
David Shale has filmed and photographed ocean life for nearly four decades. But capturing images of such unusual creatures involves equally unusual challenges. "Most of [the animals] have mucus on them, so everything sticks to it; it would look like blobs of mud." Read the full story, and see a gallery of Shale's work, over at Popular Photography.
A simulator lets students practice coding a robot to find a green target.
Courtesy EDX
Mastering robots in the company of professors doesn’t require a classroom. Or even pants. EdX, a remote-learning site run by Harvard and MIT, offers dozens of free online courses, including one called Autonomous Mobile Robots. We audited a class to see what it entailed. Here’s how you, too, might pick up the skills to program bots that can navigate and map a room.
Lectures: Instructors from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich walked us through key concepts in a series of web videos, including robotic locomotion and obstacle detection.
Homework: After each lecture, the instructors assigned a problem set covering the material and encouraged any overachievers to try additional exercises.
Courtesy EDX
Simulator: The additional exercises involved a downloadable simulator, which allowed us to control a virtual robot named Bob. We coded in MatLab and Octave to help Bob avoid obstacles in its virtual environment.
Office hours: If students got stuck, they could log in to an interactive forum that connects them directly to professors and study buddies around the world.
This article originally appeared in the June 2014 issue of Popular Science.
SpaceX will reveal its first manned spacecraft at 7 PM (PDT) tonight. The Dragon V2 capsule is designed to carry humans to the International Space Station, and may eventually free NASA from its reliance on the Russian space program.
An earlier version of the Dragon capsule already proved its mettle as a cargo ship. In 2012, it became the first private spacecraft to deliver supplies to the ISS. Its arrival also marked the first time since the space shuttles’ retirement that a U.S. ship made an ISS delivery.
Since the shuttles were grounded, American astronauts have needed Russian Soyuz spacecraft to take them into orbit. But this situation became precarious in the wake of action in the Ukraine. Earlier this month, NASA cut ties with almost all of their Russian collaborations, with the exception of running the ISS.
Despite Russian threats, it’s unlikely that they would abandon the Soyuz taxi service and its $457.9 million price tag. But Americans are still eager to find an independent method of space travel. And private companies like SpaceX are their best bet.
While the upgraded Dragon is ready for its close-up, it’s nowhere near ready to take off. The first manned test flight is still a few years away.
SpaceX will reveal its first manned spacecraft at 7pm PDT/10pm EDT tonight. The Dragon V2 capsule is designed to carry humans to the International Space Station, and may eventually free NASA from its reliance on the Russian space program.
An earlier version of the Dragon capsule already proved its mettle as a cargo ship. In 2012, it became the first private spacecraft to deliver supplies to the ISS. Its arrival also marked the first time since the space shuttles’ retirement that a U.S. ship made an ISS delivery.
Since the shuttles were grounded, American astronauts have needed Russian Soyuz spacecraft to take them into orbit. But this situation became precarious in the wake of action in the Ukraine. Earlier this month, NASA cut ties with almost all of their Russian collaborations, with the exception of running the ISS.
Despite Russian threats, it’s unlikely that they would abandon the Soyuz taxi service and its $457.9 million price tag. But Americans are still eager to find an independent method of space travel. And private companies like SpaceX are their best bet.
While the upgraded Dragon is ready for its close-up, it’s nowhere near ready to take off. The first manned test flight is still a few years away.
You can watch the unveiling right here starting at 7pm PDT/10pm EDT.
Mechanized suits, alien apes, dinosaur robots -- this summer's blockbusters are brimming with scientific-sounding conceits. But is there any real science to back them up? While you watch, here's something to chew on (besides the popcorn).
Edge of Tomorrow
Courtesy Warner Bros.
DIGITAL EFFECT: AN ALIEN-BLASTING EXOSKELETON
In Edge of Tomorrow, exoskeletons play a critical role in humanity’s desperate last stand against alien invaders. It would be easy to assume the futuristic systems are digital illusions, mapped to the actors’ movements, but they’re actually elaborate props. The modeler, Pierre Bohanna, made each suit from 350 to 400 discrete components that together form a fully articulating device. The materials include standard nylon, high-grade aluminum, and a lightweight polymer created specifically for the film. “It’s not a costume,” Bohanna says, “it’s a machine.”
Unfortunately for the actors, the humans power the suits, not vice versa. They had to sprint through battle scenes lugging 72 to 132 extra pounds. “These things were incredibly hard work, and all of the actors and stunt guys had to do boot camp in them,” says Bohanna. That sweat on Tom Cruise’s brow? It’s real too.
Drax the Destoyer: superstrength in green, human form
Illustrations by Ryan Kirby
WOULD ADVANCED, INTELLIGENT EXTRATERRESTRIALS LOOK ANYTHING LIKE US?
The Answer: There’s nothing mysterious about Hollywood’s love affair with humanoid aliens. It’s easier to throw prosthetics and face paint on actors than it is to fabricate (or animate) menageries of wildly inhuman characters. But if we apply lessons from our own evolution to other worlds, then filmmakers might not be so far off.
According to Stuart Sumida, a biologist at California State University at San Bernardino who served as a consultant on Guardians of the Galaxy, an alien advanced enough to master space travel would need to have a large brain. “If you have a big brain, you need a way to protect it,” Sumida says. That means a skull, which rules out whole taxonomies of worms, slugs, and other potential invertebrates. And because exoskeletons would become untenable as they scale up in size, collapsing under their weight in all but the lowest gravities, insects can be reasonably ruled out. Throw in the ability to manipulate tools, and our otherworldly companions start to look pretty familiar.
But even with prominent brains, bones, and dexterous appendages, there’s no reason to assume that distant species would look like slight variations of us. “The fact that we have four appendages is an accident of evolution,” says Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. “Most of the critters on our planet have six.” Natural selection could produce aliens with a more efficient physiological layout: Instead of walking on two legs, for example, which enables humans to hold babies and tools while on the move, an extraterrestrial might have more speed and stability on four or more lower limbs. They could have more arms for manipulating tools, ground-hugging postures to better hide from predators, or any number of features that don’t mesh with the Wookiees, Klingons, and other near-humans that make up science fiction’s interspecies melting pot.
Inspired by Guardians of the Galaxy
The Plot: After stealing a mysterious orb from the wrong guy—an alien hell-bent on galactic domination—a group of criminals become unlikely heroes. Although the swashbuckling sci-fi flick is part of Marvel’s combined cinematic universe (along with The Avengers), most of its larger-than-life characters aren’t superhumans but humanoid aliens.
Sci-Fi Debut: H.G. Wells’ 1901 novel, The First Men in the Moon, features the dwarfish, insectoid Selenites, who wear clothes, use tools, and don’t take kindly to visits from Earthlings.
Andy Serkis uses motion capture to reprise his role as the head ape, Caesar.
David James/20th Century Fox
DIGITAL EFFECT: ULTRA-REAL APES
New Orleans in mid-July is no place for a chimp. The sweltering, mosquito-assaulted set of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is a minor marvel of engineering, a three-story habitat with interlacing tree trunks, recessed rooms and passages, and a flowing aqueduct that’s turned the ground level into a swamp of pooling water and sucking mud. The filmmakers call it Ape Village, and it really does look like something hyperintelligent, domineering apes might construct. Until, that is, you notice the dozens of motion-capture cameras dotting the structure, and the guys in gray full-body suits, broiling in the merciless sun and steamy humidity. They’re the sweatiest, most miserable make-believe chimps imaginable.
And then they start to move. Two of the gray suits scramble up the sides of the habitat, grabbing camouflaged handholds, without the benefit of safety harnesses or mats. They leap between set elements like trained acrobats, which, in fact, they are. While Rise of the Planet of the Apes (released in 2011) relied on stunt people, the sequel to the sci-fi reboot has cast Cirque du Soleil performers. “Instead of a VFX [visual effects] guy trying to make up what it would be like for a chimpanzee to fly from limb to limb, now we have guys that can actually jump the 20 feet,” says producer Dylan Clark.
From a VFX standpoint, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes isn’t a single leap of faith but a series of them. The first movie redefined what was possible with performance capture, turning Caesar, a chimp played by Andy Serkis, into a believable full-computer-generated (CG) character. Dawn features a much larger cast of apes, and their expanded screen time makes for a much bigger challenge. Standard procedure for performance capture is to confine actors to indoor green-screen environments and rely solely on head-mounted cameras to film their actions. For Dawn, VFX supervisor Joe Letteri decided to gather data on an outdoor set by surrounding the actors with constellations of small motion-capture cameras.
David James/20th Century Fox
The cameras track LED-lit balls Velcroed to the actors’ suits and reflective markers applied to their faces. “Then we use a learning algorithm to give us the best guess of what all the points of the face are doing in three dimensions,” Letteri says. The result is performance capture that’s extremely detailed and flexible, as multiple cameras pick up nuances of expression and chemistry between actors that might otherwise be lost. With more data at their disposal, animators can imbue the entire supporting cast of 3-D–modeled primates with the same uncanny flicker of intelligence that made Caesar an instant CG star.
It’s this mixture of practical and digital, human and inhuman, that will make or break Dawn. Because unlike the monsters, mutants, and other VFX-enhanced flights of fancy populating sci-fi flicks, apes (even smart ones) aren’t imaginary. “We want the chimpanzees to act and look and be photorealistic,” Clark says. “We want this movie to feel real. If we pull this off, it’ll be supercool.”
Caine Wise: part wolf, part human, all speed
Illustrations by Ryan Kirby
WOULD COMBINING HUMAN AND ANIMAL DNA CREATE SUPERPOWERED BEINGS?
The Answer: The filmmakers of Jupiter Ascending augmented human characters with animal genes to make them more physically imposing. In reality, human-animal hybrids have never been people with animal traits but, rather, animals tweaked to host or benefit from human biology. The first documented example occurred in 2004, when the Mayo Clinic injected human stem cells into fetal pigs, creating swine with human blood in order to study how viruses jump between species. Last year, neuroscientists at Stanford University boosted the intelligence of mice with human brain cells. In both cases, researchers sidestepped any actual genetic engineering by simply introducing foreign tissue and letting it take root.
In theory, similar experiments on humans could yield incredible results, such as modifying photoreceptors to enable catlike night vision, or borrowing a newt’s ability to regrow amputated limbs. But even if blithely injecting human fetuses with feline or amphibian cells weren’t an ethical black hole (and it absolutely is), the brute-force approach could easily backfire: The body’s immune system typically attacks alien tissue. The Stanford team avoided rejection by permanently suppressing their subjects’ immune systems, a solution that would leave humans vulnerable to catastrophic disease and infection.
According to Randy Lewis, a biologist at Utah State University, the problem with chimeric enhancements is their complexity. It’s one thing to flip a single protein, as he did to create transgenic goats that produce spider-silk protein in their milk. But adding complex traits like strength or regeneration? “To do that requires a tremendous amount of genetic engineering,” says Lewis. Until scientists achieve a profound understanding of human and animal genomes, superhuman hybrids will remain little more than a cinematic confection.
Inspired by Jupiter Ascending
The Plot: The universe is filled with human-animal hybrids and ruled by an intergalactic monarchy (news to Earthlings). When an unassuming janitor is targeted for assassination, a part-human, part-canine mercenary comes to her rescue.
Sci-Fi Debut: The Beast Folk lurching through H.G. Wells’s 1896 novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau, are created through grisly surgical experiments.
Courtesy Warner Bros.
DIGITAL EFFECT: GRAVITY-DEFYING ACTION
The most technically challenging scene in Jupiter Ascending shows the movie’s hero (Channing Tatum) zipping through the city in antigravity boots, fleeing a spaceship in pursuit of his cargo (Mila Kunis). “Most people will probably think it’s digital, but it’s not,” says VFX supervisor Dan Glass. Rather, the sequence features stunt doubles suspended from a helicopter as it banks through Chicago’s urban canyons.
Glass’s team had only 15 minutes a day to film the scene—a tiny window of predawn light—so they created a camera capable of squeezing more photography into each shoot. Mounted to the nose of a helicopter, the six-camera rig (called the Panocam) could capture nearly 180 degrees of footage. By stitching together multiple overlapping angles, the filmmakers could effectively pivot and swing through the action in postproduction, regardless of the helicopter’s actual flight path. Not surprisingly, the innovation quickly attracted the attention of other directors. “That rig is now used on most of the movies that followed us,” says Glass.
Dinobot: hatches, then unfolds into a formidable warrior
Illustrations by Ryan Kirby
WOULD ROBOTS BENEFIT FROM BIO-INSPIRED REPRODUCTION, AS OPPOSED TO SIMPLE REPLICATION?
The Answer: The giant alien robots in Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise aren’t built in factories. They’re grown in egglike pods and referred to as hatchlings, and they exhibit the kind of physical and behavioral diversity that implies something closer to biological reproduction than mass assembly. Just as no two humans are identical (with the exception of twins), each Autobot and Decepticon is unique in character and form, whether it’s a humorless tractor-trailer or a hot-tempered Tyrannosaur.
The Transformers, in other words, seem to be products of evolutionary robotics, a burgeoning field of research that applies biological principles to the creation and behavior of robots. Rather than simply engineering a bot to perform a given task, such as moving toward a light, researchers can plug that goal into a computer program and let genetic algorithms automatically breed a variety of designs. And since those algorithms mimic nature, modeling the effects of mutation, selection, and other biological processes, the designs they produce are often surprising. “The computer will evolve machines for us that have shapes we would never have thought of,” says Josh Bongard, an evolutionary roboticist at the University of Vermont. Even with very few parts and motors at their disposal, bots born from algorithms have eked out efficient locomotion from such varied forms as an undulating fish and a shuffling pyramid.
In other words, robots that evolve, whether by gestating in eggs or via genetic algorithms, could benefit from the same diversity and convenient mutations that make some living species so resilient. But just as unchecked Transformer reproduction could be bad news for any humans caught in the inevitable crossfire, machines could be dangerous too, Bongard cautions, if they were to evolve without strict guidance. “Self-reproducing robots would, by definition, be a runaway process,” he says. “They could surprise us in unpleasant ways.”
Inspired by Transformers: Age of Extinction
The Plot: The fourth installment in the Transformers series continues the story of a race of robots at war with itself. Joining the battle this go-round is the species’ most exotic specimens yet, the Dinobots.
Sci-Fi Debut: Karel Capek’s 1920 play, R.U.R., ends with a pair of factory-built lovers seemingly destined to become the new, world-populating Adam and Eve.
Beast: a brilliant biochemist with a feline physique
Illustrations by Ryan Kirby
CAN MUTATION REALLY SPAWN MONSTERS, SUPERPOWERS, OR ANYTHING ELSE THAT COULD CONQUER EARTH?
The Answer: Science fiction has long relied on mutation as an evolutionary shortcut. Sometimes it’s the work of external forces, as with the atomic testing that gave rise to Godzilla in the original 1954 film, and the glowing “ooze” that turned garden-variety turtles into man-size martial artists. At other points it’s a naturally occurring hiccup, like the “X-Gene” that allowed superhumans to manipulate brain waves or magnetic fields. The common thread is speed: Within a single generation, the protagonists are transformed.
It’s an interpretation that’s correct in spirit: Genes can mutate spontaneously or be manipulated in the lab to create new traits. Take, for example, the ability of most adult humans to process lactose in dairy products. Researchers believe this mutation, a kind of gastrointestinal superpower, began in Europe some 7,500 years ago. The sudden change led to a significant long-term benefit for our species, enabling us to add a range of nutritional options. While humanity owes a debt to that mystery mutant, cheese-eating is a minor ability compared to the laser beams and claws erupting from X-Men.
Bruce Demple, a biochemist at Stony Brook University, cites more dramatic examples of single mutations—“the kind of things that screenwriters might think about,” he says. “But mostly you see these things in experimental settings.” With targeted chemical mutagens, geneticists have pulled off feats both impressive, such as increasing the circumference of macaque monkeys’ thigh muscles by 15 percent, and flat-out disturbing, like making legs sprout from the heads of fruit flies. Researchers have also used radiation to increase random mutations.
But the difference between these lab-grown mutants and their Hollywood counterparts comes down to luck. Movie characters didn’t just win the mutation lottery once, gaining a single incredible ability without chemicals or radiation mortally fraying their DNA. They won again and again, packing on good traits, dodging bad ones, and transforming into creatures that would normally require multiple generations and countless failed attempts. In reality, the road to monstrous success would be paved with the corpses of almost-Godzillas and near–Ninja Turtles.
Inspired by Godzilla, TMNT, X-Men: Days of Future Past
The Plots: Godzilla clashes with even more malevolent titans, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fight crime in (and under) New York City, and the X-Men send Wolverine back in time to prevent a robot uprising. In all three films, mutation unleashes the organism’s inner badass.
Sci-Fi Debut: Radiation exposure transforms The Metal Man of Jack Williamson’s eponymous 1928 short story into the progenitor of today’s fictional mutants.
Optimus Prime rides to the defense of human civilization in Transformers—a lucky break.
Courtesy Paramount
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: HUMANS VS. ALIENS, LIVE ACTION
Let’s assume the worst: that aliens exist, and they’re invading our humble home world. What sort of high-tech weapons would a desperate human race rush out of the lab and into battle? We asked Suveen Mathaudhu, a program manager and materials scientist at the U.S. Army Research Office, what we could plausibly throw at such a doomsday scenario.
EXOSKELETONS
Combat exoskeletons, like the ones in Edge of Tomorrow, could enable infantry to carry increased firepower, Mathaudhu says. Guns that would normally generate too much recoil for the human body could instead be mounted on the suit, distributing that force throughout the frame. Today’s exosuits are too power-hungry to be effectively fielded, but the use of titanium, magnesium, and other ultrastrong, ultralight alloys could reduce their energy consumption. “You’re going to have lower fuel usage because you’re not carrying around a steel exoskeleton,” Mathaudhu says.
BIOWEAPONS
If the common cold can repel Martian occupiers in The War of the Worlds, why not hurl even more virulent, weaponized bugs at the enemy? Although bioweapon stockpiles are in short supply (with very good reason), Mathaudhu is confident that geneticists could synthesize whatever new plagues seem useful. “If we assume that life evolved similarly in other parts of the universe, wherever these creatures came from, our tools may work similarly on them,” he says. The technology that has revolutionized genetic analysis, allowing for whole-genome sequencing of human DNA, could also enable a precision pathogen of last resort.
GROUND DRONES
When push comes to shove, we’d shove robots onto the front lines. “If we were forced into some sort of Apollo moment by a massive war, the majority of the efforts would go toward unmanned ground vehicles and robotics,” Mathaudhu says. A robot army might be less versatile than a living one, but the bots would excel as cannon fodder during the early stages of conflict, providing intel on alien weapons and tactics before being blown to bits. “The hesitation to put a soldier in the field against an unknown threat would be countered by robotic technology,” Mathaudhu says. Who needs nerves of steel when your soldiers are made of it?
This article originally appeared in the July 2014 issue of Popular Science.
Videogames may seem like the last place for fruitful work in biotechnology, but Stanford University bioengineer Ingmar Riedel-Kruse has reinvented 1980s classics to enlist living microbes. His custom electronics and augmented-reality software coax microorganisms to play key roles in Pac-Man, Brick Breaker, and other reimagined 8-bit titles. Here’s a look at how Riedel-Kruse’s rig works.
1) Micro-avatar
Riedel-Kruse uses single-celled protozoans called paramecia that typically live in ponds. Changes in an electrical field can cause some species to alter their steering (a behavior called galvanotaxis). The microbes selected for the videogames swim toward electricity using cilia that cover their bodies.
2) Remote-control microbes
A shallow, thumbnail-size chamber with a glass bottom corrals the paramecia. Electrodes lining the chamber’s edges are wired to a controller with an omnidirectional button. Pushing it left, for example, induces an electric field that guides the paramecia like a remote-controlled swarm toward the left electrode.*
3) Live broadcast
Each paramecium appears as a speck to the naked eye, but a webcam paired with a 5x-to-10x magnifying lens displays the microorganisms clearly on a monitor. The camera is fixed above the chamber, with LEDs for illumination.
4) Virtual interface
Object-detecting software turns the physical setup into a game by locating paramecia as they move around the chamber. Meanwhile, a video overlay enables the organisms to interact with digital images. In the game PAC-mecium, microbes “eat” pellets as they swim past them, and in soccer they “kick” the ball when they come into contact with its cartoon image.
Time: 60 hours
Cost: $60
* Hobbyist Geva Patz made his own version of Riedel-Kruse’s gaming console with laser-cut acrylic, pencil lead, and copper tape. It uses an electroencephalogram headset for a controller, allowing players to direct microbes with their thoughts.
This article originally appeared in the June 2014 issue of Popular Science.
Virgin Galactic is in the clear, so to speak. The commercial spaceflight company has signed an agreement with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration that lays out how the company will work with federal officials and New Mexico’s air traffic control to clear airspace for its launches. The company hopes to send its first customers to suborbital space by the end of this year, Space.com reports.
The flights will take off from Spaceport America in the desert in southern New Mexico. Customers will go aboard a craft called SpaceShipTwo, which we’ve watched undergo construction and meet milestones such as its first independent flight. Virgin Galactic already has agreements with U.S. agencies for test flights, but this is the first official agreement for its commercial launches.
These are "ear binoculars." Pan across a view of the city, in this case Newcastle, and the headphones play pre-recorded sound from the area where you're looking. So it's an illusion -- but also a very good opportunity to make someone think they've overheard a crime, in my opinion.
Although the previous version of the Dragon capsule was flightworthy enough to deliver supplies, its life support system wasn’t reliable for human passengers. Dragon V2, on the other hand, will be able to carry seven astronauts for seven days.
When the capsule reaches the ISS, it will dock with the station autonomously. Unlike its predecessor, it won’t need the ISS’s robotic arm to reach out and grab it.
And this isn’t the only improvement. To land back on Earth, version one slowed its speed with parachutes before splashing into the ocean. This is now a backup technique for the new capsule (because the V2 can use its engines to land propulsively).
“You’ll be able to land anywhere on Earth with the accuracy of a helicopter,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced at the unveiling. “Which is, I think, something that a modern spaceship should be able to do.”
The Dragon V2’s landing ability will make it quickly reusable, an ability Musk hopes will cut the cost of space voyages. “As long as we continue to throw away rockets and spacecraft, we will never have true access to space. It will always be incredibly expensive.”
So how much will reusability reduce prices? According to Ars Technica, NASA pays Russia about $71 million per astronaut for trips to the ISS. Musk thinks he can drop that number to $20 million or less.
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.
Bottle Service? More Like Robottle Service
What's more luxurious than having a bottle of alcohol delivered to your table at a restaurant? Having a robot deliver that bottle, of course! At the Marquee Dayclub in Las Vegas, groups who have spent more than $20,000 on liquor can get their next round flown to them. Which makes a great party story, for anyone capable of remembering it afterward.
Drones Are The Hot New Home Accessory
In an interview with Vanity Fair, media personality, businesswoman, and convicted felon Martha Stewart talked about the delights of having a drone at home:
Another thing Stewart is enamored of these days is her drone. “It has a little camera. You connect it to your iPhone, and you can control it with your iPhone, and it flies all over my farm and takes pictures,” she said. “It takes wonderful aerial photographs.” The lifestyle queen says there have been no mishaps with the gadget; it has not scratched her car or broken a window. Although she admits she only uses it outdoors. “You can use it inside also, but I don’t, because it can bang into stuff.”
Resupply On The Fly
The Office of Naval Research wants an app that can summon a drone to bring supplies to troops. Unlike the remotely piloted drones commonly used for targeted killing, these supply drones would fly autonomously, arriving at the drop point and releasing cargo before heading home.
The Marines already have some experience with this. Two unmanned and autonomous K-Max helicopters delivered 3.2 million pounds of cargo to marines in Afghanistan over the course of 16 months. While the K-Max resupplied military bases, this new app-and-drone combination would bring smaller portions of vital goods, like ammunition, food, or medical supplies, to the troops in the field.
Marine K-Max Optionally-Manned Helicopter.
Cpl. Justin M. Boling, USMC
Drone War On Hold
While drones are not the only weapons America uses for targeted killing, they are certainly the best known. And yet they've been oddly absent for the past five months, with no recorded strikes in Pakistan. Hayes Brown has more on the halt:
Earlier this year, January marked the first month since December 2011 where no missiles were launched from American unmanned vehicles at targets in Pakistan. That month has now turned into five, marking the longest period without strikes since the peak of the campaign to target leaders of Al Qaeda hiding in Pakistan’s western territory in 2010.
Mountain Monitors
The Himalayan mountains are tremendously important as a source of water for much of Asia. They're also very tall and dangerous to traverse, which means tracking glaciers in the mountains is a task better assigned to drones.
The drones record the elevation of the retreating glaciers, and that data is used by scientists to improve computer models. The models help scientists determine what the changing monsoon season could mean for countries that depend on Himalayan water. Below, you can watch a video about the project. The drones show up around the 4-minute mark.
This is how a planetarium show would look with sign language narration provided in a heads-up display.
From "BYU Signglasses Project" by Austin Bailach on YouTube
About seven years ago, a summer camp for deaf kids visited the planetarium at Brigham Young University in Utah. An American Sign Language interpreter sat on the floor with the kids to translate the show’s narration. The kids would lean back to watch the stars on the domed ceiling of the planetarium, but then they would have to pause and shift their attention down to catch the narration. Up, down, up, down. The show took nearly twice as long as it does with spoken narration only, and it wasn’t exactly the magical, transporting experience planetarium shows can be.
“I have a cousin who’s deaf, so I actually thought through this ahead of time,” Jeannette Lawler, the planetarium’s director, tells Popular Science. Still, even with all her planning, “I was really dissatisfied with the quality of the show I presented.”
So, she began talking with other planetarium directors. Some told her they used captions for deaf visitors. That won’t work for kids who are just learning to read, she pointed out. Then the director at another Utah planetarium thought of using head-up displays that could beam an ASL narration right in front of the kids’ eyes. It was a prescient notion; it would be years before Google announced its Glass project. But Lawler recognized a good idea when she saw one. She recruited BYU computer scientist Michael Jones to develop software to go with head-mounted displays and launched a research program, bringing kids in to test Jones’ apps, as well as different devices. They’ve tested everything from rugged headsets originally designed for soldiers to Google Glass.
Now, Jones and students in his lab have designed their first planetarium app. They’ve gathered kids’ responses to wearing head mounted displays, which they’ll present at a conference in June. They also hope to recruit teachers who teach deaf kids to try head-up displays in their classrooms this fall. Jones has even come up with an idea for a computer vision-based head-up display app that could help deaf kids learning to read. The app would recognize when kids point to an unfamiliar word in a book, then pull up a video of an ASL speaker giving a definition.
"Imagine a deaf surgeon using the glasses to read/understand what others around him are saying while he's performing the surgery."
In the future, head-mounted displays could help deaf students in everything from English class to biology lab. Crucially, they eliminate the need to look back and forth between an interpreter and a lab demo or diagrams on the blackboard.
Tyler Foulger, a BYU undergraduate who helped translate for Jones and his focus-group kids, has run into this problem before. “Last year, I took a molecular biology lab with an ASL interpreter. When the instructor was explaining or demonstrating how to perform a certain task, I had to continually shift my attention from my interpreter to the instructor. This caused me to miss out on some of the important things that were said,” he says. I don’t know ASL, so Foulger and I talked on Google chat. “I was often behind,” he says. “I believe the glasses we're developing will help combat that problem.”
Foulger, who plans to apply to medical school, has more ambitious ideas for the glasses, too. “Imagine a deaf surgeon using the glasses to read/understand what others around him are saying while he's performing the surgery.”
For now, the Jones and his colleagues use pre-recorded videos of ASL speakers to narrate. In the future, Jones envisions making apps like this that could stream video from an interpreter to display wearers. That’s what would be needed for a surgeon, or even just for teachers who don’t want to have to pre-record everything they want to say. Jones and his students have set up a proof of concept of this streaming idea. For now, their prototype requires a hookup to a laptop.
Does this mean we’ll see a bunch of Google Glasses on kids in 2020? Not quite. So far, Lawler and Jones’ research has found that no device on the market today is exactly what deaf kids need. Some are too big and heavy for kids to use. Google Glass is light and comfortable, but it’s not perfect, either. For one, it shows things to the side of the user’s field of view. Focus groups say they prefer to see their interpreter right in the middle of their field of vision. Glass also works primarily with voice commands, a no-go for the majority of the deaf community.
Jones’ lab has just starting designing their own glasses for kids. But maybe they won’t have to. “There’s new stuff coming out all the time,” Jones says. “With a little patience, somebody else might solve the problem for us.”
This is an artist’s interpretation of Kepler-186f, a potentially Earth-like exoplanet.
NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-CalTech
It’s difficult to send people far into space. Why not send bacteria instead? That’s the simple foundation behind one decidedly out-there idea for sending humans to live on other planets in the future.
“Our best bet for space exploration could be printing humans, organically, on another planet,” Adam Stelzner, the Curiosity rover’s lead engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said during a conference this month. In a truly wonderful story, Motherboard talked with Stelzner and Harvard University biologist Gary Ruvkun about the idea. Here’s how it would work:
Humans assembled from those genomes colonize the new planet.
Clearly, there’s a lot to work out still. Motherboard looked into several experts’ thoughts on filling in the blanks. 3-D printing came up.
While all this is wild speculation, Ruvkun, one of the idea’s first proposers, pointed out it’s not necessarily crazier than thinking about colonizing space in the first place.
$71 million per astronaut: amount NASA pays Russia for trips to the International Space Station (Elon Musk says he can drop that figure to $20 million with the new, reusable Dragon V2 capsule)
