This infographic comes courtesy of the folks at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, whom we imagine know what they're talking about. Still curious about some of the things you see in the graphic? You can read Popular Science's reporting on the mind-controlled exoskeleton that helped make the first kick, as well as the latest official World Cup ball.
As the climate shifts, rivers will both flood and dry up more often, according to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Shortages are especially likely in parts of the world already strapped for water, so political scientists expect feuds will become even more intense. To track disputes worldwide, researchers at Oregon State University spent a decade building a comprehensive database of international exchanges—-both conflicts and alliances—over shared water resources. They found that countries often begin disputes belligerently but ultimately reach peaceful agreements. Says Aaron Wolf, the geographer who leads the project, “For me the really interesting part is how even Arabs and Israelis, Indians and Pakistanis, are able to resolve their differences and find a solution.”
This article originally appeared in the June 2014 issue of Popular Science.
The recipe for creating a habitable planet turns out to be surprisingly simple: Just add water—and atmospheric gases. Mars has both, relics from four billion years ago when the planet was warm and wet. “When it comes to Mars, and only Mars, the notion of terraforming is no longer in the realm of science fiction,” says NASA astrobiologist Chris McKay. Humans could warm the planet and restore a thick atmosphere in a matter of decades, but producing breathable levels of oxygen would take 100,000 years with today’s best technology: plants. New inventions could, in theory, speed that along too. “Living off the land is going to be essential for long-term human explorers beyond Earth,” says Laurie Leshin, a geochemist on the Mars Curiosity team. “We have to figure out how to do this stuff.”
The temperature on Mars hovers around -80°F, but we could raise it by introducing greenhouse gases. “We know how to warm up planets,” McKay says. “That’s what makes terraforming Mars possible.” Martian soil holds the building blocks of perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and we could build factories to extract them using high heat. Pumping PFCs into the Martian atmosphere would kick-start warming, and as the planet’s surface thawed, it would release carbon dioxide frozen into the polar ice caps and soil. That gas would then accelerate warming by trapping reflected solar energy, just as it does on Earth.
Today, the Martian atmosphere is only about 1 percent as thick as Earth’s, but scientists believe it was once much thicker. Building it to 30 percent would be enough to keep water in liquid form. In November, the Maven satellite will sample the planet’s upper atmosphere to find out how its gases escaped. If CO2 reacted with elements on Mars’s surface, locking it in soil, that would bode poorly for terraforming. The same fate would likely befall any we release, says Bruce Jakosky, Maven’s lead scientist. But if ultraviolet rays or solar wind destroyed gases or blew them away, building an atmosphere may be possible. Those processes were more powerful in the past, when the sun was younger.
The Red Planet may look parched, but multiple missions confirm it contains plenty of water. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged features near the equator that suggest flowing water during the spring and summer. Orbital radar indicates there may be huge reservoirs of frozen water underground. In fact, the Curiosity rover verified Mars contains about two pints of water in every cubic foot of dirt. “There’s water beneath your feet in most places,” Leshin says, “and it’s convenient because it’s right there at the surface.” Once the deposits melt, the liquid could be collected in reservoirs for drinking and farming. Eventually, a water cycle would support plants and prompt Martian rain.
This article originally appeared in the June 2014 issue of Popular Science.
In 1965, as a part of a NASA-funded project, a woman lived for six months in rooms flooded with a few feet of seawater. For a roommate, she had an adolescent male dolphin.
The project is now old history, but it's received a bit of renewed attention lately in the British media. A new documentary about the project, called The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins, premiered at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival June 11. The documentary will play again on BBC4 on June 17. On June 7, The Observer published a long feature on the story.
There's one detail about the project that's notorious. The woman involved, Margaret Howe Lovatt, lived with Peter the dolphin to get to know him in-depth and to try to teach him to talk to her. Eventually, she began taking care of his frequent sexual urges manually, so that they wouldn't disrupt his language lessons. In a clip BBC published on YouTube, Lovatt, now 97, explains:
I don't even know what to say now. I will say this: As strange as this is, there is actually plenty about the lab where Lovatt worked that is nearly as strange. NASA's rationale for partially funding the lab is just one of those head-scratchers. The space agency thought that dolphin-communications research might help people discover techniques for talking with aliens, should the need arise one day. Dolphins are intelligent, social creatures that live in a totally different environment and have a totally different language. Sounds just like aliens, right?
I must give you some warnings about the end to this story. It's tragic. The lab violated good animal-welfare practices in several ways. And research into teaching dolphins to talk to people never got very far.
NASA stuck a World Cup soccer ball into some of its aerodynamics testing chambers because why not. NASA is not involved in developing or testing the ball, so these demonstrations were really just for fun.
The demos put some cool visuals to what Popular Sciencepreviously reported about this year's ball, which was made by Adidas and named the Brazuca. The Brazuca is a very smooth ball with its stitching hidden deep inside. That means that when it's kicked, it keeps the airflow close to its surface, ensuring that the ball moves in a true, predictable arc:
However, at certain speeds, the airflow around every soccer ball becomes more erratic and unpredictable. If a player kicks a ball at just that speed, with little or no spin, the ball's arc becomes unpredictable. This phenomenon is called knuckling. During the last World Cup in 2010, players complained that that year's ball handled strangely. It turned out that that the 2010 ball, named Jabulani, knuckled when kicked at about 50 mph—a typical kicking speed for World Cup players.
Brazuca's design ensures that the ball knuckles not at 50 mph, but about 30 mph. Typical, polygon-tiled soccer balls also knuckle around 30 mph.
Of course, spinning the ball changes its aerodynamics. Here's NASA's demonstration with a typical soccer ball in a water-filled chamber (The green lines are created with dye):
[NASA]
Here's a roundup of the week's top drone news: highlights from the military, commercial, non-profit, and recreational applications of unmanned aircraft.
Police Drones Prepare For The Cup
In preparation for the World Cup in Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian police used a drone to hunt a notorious gang kingpin. The drone used was an Israeli-made Heron, and key to finding the kingpin was an onboard infrared camera. According to Brazilian officials, the drone allowed for a safer capture than would otherwise have been possible in the hostile favelas, which Brazilian police attempted to pacify before the eyes of the world turned to Rio.
Critiquing the Law
Writing in MIT newspaper The Tech, law professor Henry H. Perritt Jr. and helicopter pilot Eliot O. Sprague argue that the Federal Aviation Administration is going about regulating drones in the wrong way. Perritt and Sprague says that this is most clear in the agency's treatment of small drones, the kind hobbyists and consumers can buy for a few hundred or thousand dollars. They write:
Taking another five years to go through every line of the 500 pages of existing federal aviation regulations to mold the details of existing requirements for manned aircraft is not the right approach. Manned airplanes and helicopters cost anywhere from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars. Rules for their flight are implemented through professional pilots, mechanics, and directors of operations who have designed their careers around manned aircraft.
Instead, the FAA must recognize microdrones for what they are: inexpensive consumer products that put strikingly useful technologies within the reach of almost everyone.
The U.S. legal system knows how to regulate consumer products. Lawn mowers can’t be sold unless they comply with basic Consumer Product Safety Commission requirements for guards and deadman controls. Smartphones and Wi-Fi points of presence are excluded from the market unless they meet FCC requirements that avoid interference with other spectrum users.
The crux of their argument is this: Rather than making anyone who buys a small drone comply with elaborate and complicated regulations, the compliance should instead be built in at the point of manufacture.
Lasers To Fight Drones
In the future, the United States might send military forces against a foe that uses flying robots. In this hypothetical future war, what's the best way to shoot down enemy drones? Lasers, of course! Freaking. Lasers. The project, known as Ground Based Air Defense (GBAD) comes from the Office of Naval Research, and it's been in the works for quite some time. The reason for using lasers is mundane: Lasers are cheaper than other ways to shoot things out of the sky, so they're a perfect fit for the relatively inexpensive drones they'll be fighting. On Wednesday, the Navy announced it had finished awarding contracts to develop this laser, which puts us one step closer to a war where Marines use lasers against robots. The future, man.
Assisting Firefighters
A volunteer firefighter team in Sheboygan, Wis., formed a volunteer drone squad. The "Sheboygan County Autonomous Search & Rescue Team" got its start after a firefighter acquired a cheap commercial quadcopter that can be piloted by smartphone. The drone carries a camera underneath, and with a flight time of about 20 minutes, it can give rescue workers an overhead view of a situation before they have to go in. Thermal imaging here is especially helpful, as infrared cameras see where the fire is before human eyes can.
Turn A Paper Airplane Into A Drone
With an app, a signal receiver and motor, and a piece of paper, it's possible for anyone to make a simple drone in seconds. Thanks to a kit made by PowerUp3.0, the drone steers with a rudder behind the propeller. It's one of the purest "just a toy" drones out there, and it looks like an utter delight to fly. Watch one get made and flown below:
Did I miss any drone news? Email me at kelsey.d.atherton@gmail.com.
2016: year by which a French team hopes to finish an ambitious ocean-going laboratory that would rival the Starship Enterprise in scope
4 hours: battery life of a jetpack for divers
31 days: time Fabien Cousteau will spend living in the undersea research habitat Aquarius
100 percent: portion of untreated water that contained morphine in a recent study
100 feet: height by which water levels at Lake Mead, the largest drinking-water reservoir in the U.S., have dropped in the past decade (another 50 feet, and the first intake pipe will start sucking air)
43 pounds: amount of electronic waste generated each year for every human on the planet
1.1 million: number of plastic particles per square kilometer in Lake Ontario, according to a recent study (Illinois is now the first state to ban microbeads, small plastic bits often found in cosmetic products)
36 percent: the packing density of small, rigid particles
30 billionths of a degree: precision of a thermometer made from light
46 percent: portion of the world's population that watched the 2010 World Cup
12.6 terabytes: data traffic that attendees of this year's World Cup are expected to create (more World Cup numbers here)
150 kHz: frequency of the calls of the highest-pitched species ever recorded
The Great Melt: This animation of images taken over time by NASA satellites shows Arctic sea ice declining for the past 30 years. The year to year rate of decline 11.5 percent per decade. Via The Bridge. Image Credit: NASA/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio
Global warming is remaking the Arctic, with changes like ice-free sea lanes across the Arctic Ocean in summer, or no-longer-so-eternal permafrost on land, unprecedented in human history.
How much one laments or celebrates these changes probably depends on where one's values fall across a scale extending from “untouched wilderness” at one end to “lucrative oil field” at the other. But it's indisputable that they're creating new opportunities for scientists to learn more about the region than they've been able to in the past--and a new sense of urgency.
“The Arctic in the Anthropocene: Emerging Research Questions,” is a report by the National Research Council that tries to identify the questions brought on by the Great Arctic Melt. It was released last month in pre-publication form.
I've only skimmed the surface of this report so far, but already can tell it has a lot to offer. Stephanie Pfirman, an environmental scientist at Barnard College, Columbia University, who co-chaired the committee that created the report, spoke with me briefly about it as well.
If you haven't heard the word “Anthropocene” before, it is a recently-coined name for the current period in Earth's history, when human actions are having a planet-scale impact. Putting the word “Anthropocene” in the report's title, Pfirman told me, was a way to expand its scope beyond the typical confines of scientific reports about global warming and the Arctic. “Anthropocene is about more than just human influence on the planet,” she said. “It's also about human interactions, ingenuity, and capacity to solve problems.”
The sections on the “evolving Arctic” and the “connected Arctic” cover relatively well-identified questions, known unknowns that include: How do and will the new levels of heat in the Far North change weather patterns in other parts of the world? And as the region's geopolitical importance increases, can Arctic native peoples gain greater political power, and a new degree of self-determination?
More novel are the sections that ask questions about the “hidden Arctic,” as in “what we may find now that we have access to new areas, new technologies,” says Pfirman, “but also what we may lose forever”; the “managed Arctic” of unprecedented expansion in the land and other resources available to human inhabitants of the region; and the “undetermined Arctic” of uneven research funding, spotty monitoring tools, and other barriers that complicate efforts to study and understand the changes.
The Arctic's own special qualities seem to have propelled the report's cross-disciplinary framing of the questions. Breaking through old boundaries that have divided disciplines may be more important than ever, because the Arctic is changing so fast, we're unlikely to have many second chances at fixing mistakes.
“The need for actionable Arctic information has never been greater,” said Pfirman. “Whether or not they have the information, people are making decisions now.”
TAMBOPATA, PERU -- In a remote area of the Peruvian Amazon lives a type of spider with a peculiar habit: It builds a spider-shaped "decoy" in its web out of dead insects and other detritus, and which resembles an arachnid much bigger than itself. The idea is that these spider-shaped web additions scare away predators, but nobody knows for sure. Only discovered less than two years ago, scientists know little about these marvelously strange web-weavers, so when I got an opportunity to go to Peru and learn more about them--amongst other bizarre animals that reside here--I booked a flight from New York without a second thought.
The spiders live near the Tambopata Research Center in Peru's wild Madre de Dios region. To get here you have to fly through Lima to Puerto Maldonado, a rambling mining town through whose streets run an anguished torrent of motorbikes, with single motos improbably carrying entire families at a time. Then it's a 45 minute bus ride to the town of Infierno (translation: "hell"), followed by a seven hour boat trek up the Rio Tambopata.
Once you pass the Malinowski ranger station, where visitors must sign in, civilization drops away for good, with caimans and capybara (the world's largest rodent) taking up stations on the banks. Along the way, you enter the Tambopata National Reserve, which covers more area than the land mass of Rhode Island and is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, with, for example, more than 1,200 butterfly species alone.
When I arrive at the center, more than 60 hours after my flight left the states, I meet Lary Reeves, a University of Florida entomologist and graduate student I've come to follow around. Lary wears a white shirt with a smattering of small holes, sports heavy stubble, glasses, and a head lamp--275 lumens, strong enough to spot an Amazon bamboo rat from a football field away, easy--who's just returned from a walk to find spiders. His enthusiasm is palpable. With him is Aaron Pomerantz, a graduate student from Florida who has come for 10 days to help gather data on spiders, who is friendly and inclusive. "Welcome to the jungle," Reeves says. We all share a Cusquena, a ubiquitous Peruvian beer that nevertheless tastes delicious, before going to see a fist-sized tarantula that lives in a nearby hole.
The next day, we set out into the forest. A five minute walk away, we find the first decoy, a relatively well-made one that looks like spider, albeit with six legs. Upon getting close, the web's inhabitant pulls some strings and makes the spider-like decoy appear to waggle, in a kind of dance. The spider is a puppeteer.
During the eight days that I am here, Reeves and Pomerantz locate and photograph scores of these spiders, and I helped find a few too. To spot one, you walk slowly through the jungle with your headlamp beam on, even at high noon; the canopy darkens the forest more than you'd expect, and the light helps pick out the delicate white webs and their salt-and-pepper decoys. Along the way you slog through a chorus of different sucking and slurping mud varietals, and if you get too close to the river you can sink knee-deep. Luckily when this happened to me, Pomerantz was there to lend a hand. The air is thick with moisture, leading to a perpetual but not unpleasant sense of perspiration, real or perceived, but it is not overly hot. Even though it's the beginning of the dry season, it rains on and off most of the days of my stay.
The decoy-building spider is thought to be a species in the genus Cyclosa, and Reeves and colleagues plan to formally describe the species, though it remains nameless. This Peruvian Cyclosa species was found in September, 2012, by entomologist Phil Torres. Six months earlier while researching butterfly diversity, Reeves discovered a similar spider in the jungles of the Philippines that likewise makes spider-shaped decoys in its web, albeit of a slightly different shape. The two only found out about each other's discoveries months later, and now Reeves has shifted his research to the Peruvian Cyclosa, since, among other reasons, it is easier to get to--all things being relative. Earlier this year, filmmakers found another species in Madagascar that appears to make a decoy in its web. And there is another species called Cyclosa mulmeinensis that makes pseudo-decoys, although these blobs are not as convincing or impressive as those of the newfound spiders. The finds are the first of their kind; this behavior hadn't been previously recorded.
"Why this is going on on separate continents and hasn't been reported until [recently]--I have no idea how people have not done this before," says Reeves, who is also a graduate fellow with the National Science Foundation.
I've come here with many questions, some of which I have a vague idea about, having followed the story since its inception; as to others I am clueless. But a good place to begin: Why do the spiders build these decoys in the first place? The working hypothesis is that these spider shapes fool and scare away damselflies, which feed on small spiders but avoid larger ones. These insects, in the family Pseudostigmatidae, are the largest damselflies in the world. To the untrained eye, they resemble dragonflies.
"Our working hypothesis, which we plan on testing, is that the Cyclosa makes a decoy spider that is larger than the size of spiders Pseudostigmatids will take, thereby gaining some protection from being eaten by these spider specialists," says Ola Fincke, a collaborating researcher at the University of Oklahoma and "the world expert on helicopter damselflies," as Reeves puts it.
Over the course of my trip, and Reeves's month in the jungle, he goes about laying the groundwork to test this hypothesis, and makes several interesting discoveries. First, Reeves devised a method to collect the webs (which he doesn't want to share in detail for proprietary concerns) that he will use in the future to collect the animals and their silken firmaments and expose them to damselflies. The idea is to see if the winged creatures pluck more spiders from webs where the decoys have been removed--that would provide evidence that the decoys are indeed meant to scare off the insects.
A big part of the trip has also involved the seemingly mundane task of photographing the spiders and their webs. But it is in the painstaking work that discoveries emerge--and hanging out with Reeves and Pomerantz, who are mad for understanding the intracices of animal life here, especially the infinite strangeness of small beasts like spiders--nothing seems banal. There are also a seemingly endless variety of animals to spot and identify, and distractions provided by visitors like macaws. At one point an ornery, curious scarlet macaw flies onto Reeves's shoulder, and begins gnawing at the tooth of a Spinosaurus aegyptiacus (a type of dinosaur) on his necklace. I can't help but be reminded that these birds are in fact dino descendants, and to hear their depraved calls--hauntingly doleful, or just as often angrily strident--one could mistake them for Jurrasic Park velociraptors.
One afternoon, Reeves and Pomerantz are photographing the spiders, this time back in the "lab," which isn't really a laboratory but a messy room full of equipment used by researchers with the Macaw Project, who have been studying the habits and health of the area's macaws and parrots here at the research center for decades. (The lab's recesses house such treasures as a sloth preserved in a vat of formaldehyde.)
Pomerantz empties the contents of a vial, containing a Cylcosa and its decoy, onto a white Plexiglass sheet placed between two large wooden seats. Beneath it a flash is perfectly positioned, sitting atop a tarnished metal dish, to ensure optimal distance from the sheet for best photo quality). Reeves takes aim with his Canon 7D, which boasts a powerful macro lens. From time to time Pomerantz gently corrals the spider with the tip of a small paintbrush, to prevent it from running off this white plane so Reeves can get a good shot.
"Wait a second," Reeves says as he snaps a photo of a spider and zooms in on the camera's screen. "That's a male!"
This is a surprise. Before, Reeves and colleagues had only found females making these decoys. In other members of the family Araneidae (the taxonomic family that includes orb-weavers), once males are sexually mature, "they pretty much hang out in the webs of the females" and steal food, rather than making complex webs of their own he adds. And sometimes they become the females food. They are also usually much smaller than females. These male Cyclosa, which can be spotted by their hairy "punching bags," or pedipalps, are not much smaller than females. The largest females are just under 1 centimeter in length.
There's another discovery when the pair photographs what they'd thought were spider eggs laying within the decoy.
"Those aren't eggs," Reeves says as he zooms in on the photo he's just taken. "They're spiderlings."
"I was going to say--that looks oddly like a spider for an egg," Pomerantz says.
While it's not unusual for spiders in this family to lay eggs in their stabilimenta, the technical name for these web decorations, the spiderlings usually make a break for it shortly after hatching. These appear to have hung around for a while longer.
To learn more about the web-building activities of this species, Reeves and Pomerantz place a couple in two newly-devised observation boxes that force the spiders to build webs parallel to the clear plastic sides, perfect for viewing by humans. Much to their surprise, one of the Cyclosa spiders builds a spiral "P" shape when the decoy is removed from its web, that looks shockingly like the Peruvian "P" that adorns much of the country's tourist paraphernalia (and also resembles the tail of this monkey geoglyph found amongst the Nazca Lines). Why they do this remains unknown. Perhaps the spiders are just patriotic.
Reeves has also found out that the spiders don't tolerate artificial stuff in their webs. Just to see what would happen, he puts glitter (colored blue and orange, representing the University of Florida) into the animals silken home--but the crafty spinster cut out all of that garbage.
When it was first reported in late 2012, the story received a fair amount of attention, and Reeves thinks that's because of the "romanticized idea behind it," that "people are thinking these spiders are so clever [that] they're building these structures that look like larger spiders."
But it's not like the spiders are "looking at another spider and designing it based on that--this design is just what has been selected for--in that way it's ingrained into their DNA and which translates into their behavior," he says. "Spiders that have these more spider-like-looking decoys are more successful than those who don't. It's not the spider itself, it's evolution--that's the amazing thing."
"The spiders are dummies," Reeves continues, using term he often applies to his beloved arachnids, with bemused affection, "but at the same time they are smart enough to make the decision to know what should and shouldn't go into that structure. Like when we offered them glitter," he adds.
Soon, my time in the jungle is drawing to a close. On the last night that we are both there, Reeves is still up photographing insects after the electricity in the center has turned off. "I'm going to take a photo, alright?" I say, as to not freak him out by approaching in the dark. He consents and laughs, his attention trained on his insect photo subject. Earlier, he'd been photographing a brightly-colored fungus beetle, for project called Meet Your Neighbors, that's "dedicated to reconnecting people with the wildlife on their own doorsteps--and enriching their lives in the process," according to the group's mission statement.
It will be awhile before Reeves and co. will be able to sort through all of the data and photographs they have collected. When he returns to the jungle before long, he will explore the eating habits of damselflies, to see if and how much Cyclosa's decoys protect them. There is always the possibility that the decoys have another function, for example to lure parasites/predators of larger spiders, all the better to eat. But Reeves thinks that's unlikely.
Only the future will tell. As is often the case with fieldwork, obstacles are an everyday occurrence (for example, time and circumstance didn't allow for studying "silk-henge," small webby towers built by an as-yet-unknown type of spider, perhaps to defend eggs against wasps). The team doesn't yet have a permit to collect the spiders, but is working to get one. "If we had a lab specimen it would go a long way," Reeves says. Until then, the jungle is an open book, albeit not one that provides easy reading. Reeves--and Pomerantz--will be back.
At first glance, the bright red shipping container that sits by the side of the road in a slum outside Johannesburg doesn’t look like something that could transform hundreds of lives. Two sliding doors open to reveal a small shop counter, behind which sit rows of canned food, toilet paper, cooking oil, and first-aid supplies. Solar panels on the roof power wireless Internet and a television, for the occasional soccer game. And two faucets dispense free purified drinking water to anyone who wants it.
Created primarily by Coca-Cola and Deka Research and Development, the New Hampshire company founded by inventor Dean Kamen, the container is meant to be a kind of “downtown in a box”: a web-connected bodega-cum-community center that can be dropped into underdeveloped villages all over the world. Coke calls it an Ekocenter. It’s a pithy name, but it masks the transformative technology hidden within the container.
Inside the big red box sits a smaller one, about the size of a dorm fridge, called a Slingshot. It was developed by Kamen, the mastermind behind dozens of medical-equipment inventions and, most famously, the Segway personal transportation device. Kamen is the closest thing to a modern-day Thomas Edison. He holds hundreds of patents, and his creations have improved countless lives. His current projects include a robotic prosthetic arm for DARPA and a Stirling engine that generates affordable electricity by using “anything that burns” for fuel. The Slingshot, more than 10 years in the making, could have a bigger impact than all of his other inventions combined.
Using a process called vapor compression distillation, a single Slingshot can purify more than 250,000 liters of water per year, enough to satisfy the needs of about 300 people. And it can do so with any water source—sewage, seawater, chemical waste—no matter how dirty.
For communities that lack clean water, the benefit is obvious, but to realize that potential, the Slingshot needs to reach them first. Which is where Coke comes in: The company is not just a soft-drink peddler; it is arguably the largest, most sophisticated distribution system in the world. That’s important because the scale of the water crisis the world faces is unprecedented.
Water seems so abundant it’s easy to forget how many people don’t have a clean source of it. According to the World Health Organization, nearly a billion people lack ready access to safe drinking water, and hundreds of thousands die every year as a result. Many more fall terribly ill.
Plenty of water-purification tools exist, of course—chlorine tablets, reverse-osmosis plants—but they all have drawbacks. Either they’re not adequately portable; they require replacement parts that can be hard to come by; or, most vexing of all, they remove only certain kinds of impurities, leaving others to poison the unwitting.
Kamen calls the global water crisis a “Goliath” of a problem, which suggests that he is David. He offers a quick refresher on biblical lore: David, it bears remembering, defeated Goliath with a slingshot.
“In my life, nothing is ever simple or easy,” Kamen says. “I didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘Wow, there’s a global water problem. I think I’ll work on that.’ ” He’s sitting in his office in an old brick mill building by the Merrimack River in Manchester, New Hampshire. A life-size cardboard Darth Vader leans against one wall, and a wooden chair painted to resemble a seated Albert Einstein sits among a circle of leather swivel chairs. Photos of Kamen’s various helicopters (he’s had a number over the years and occasionally flies to Deka from his hilltop estate) hang on the wall while outtakes from his dad’s work as an illustrator for Mad Magazine and Tales from the Crypt decorate the hallway outside.
When we first sat down, I asked Kamen a simple question: How did you get interested in the water crisis? The answer turned into a highlights tour of his career, before he became famous or wealthy. Kamen is a natural storyteller, and his narrative unspools at high speed. Now 63, he grew up in Long Island, New York, and he ended up leaving college to start his first company, AutoSyringe, in 1976, to address a problem he’d heard about from his brother, a medical student: Certain patients needed such frequent treatment that trips to the hospital prevented them from living productive lives. Kamen’s solution was the world’s first wearable infusion pump, which administered doses of medication automatically. It was a hit, and Kamen sold AutoSyringe to Baxter International, a health-care company. He was just 30 years old.
Suddenly a millionaire, Kamen moved to Manchester and started Deka (derived from his first and last names). With a few exceptions, such as the now ubiquitous Segway, much of the company’s work has focused on medical innovations that solve lifestyle problems. One such project, begun 20-some years ago, was a machine to reinvent dialysis for patients with failing kidneys. Baxter International had built a device to do what’s called peritoneal dialysis, which involves filling the abdomen with a sterile saline solution and using the body’s own membranes to filter the blood. It’s less traumatic than hemodialysis, which requires passing blood through an external filter, but the contraption was noisy and bulky. The company asked Kamen to refine it.
We’d empty half the hospital beds in the world if we just gave people clean water.
Called HomeChoice, Kamen’s design was small enough to fit on patients’ nightstands and quiet enough that they could sleep while it worked. The machine required a lot of purified water, however—many gallons a day per patient—and that wasn’t cost-effective. Kamen’s instinct: Invent a medical-grade water purifier, so that patients could use water from their faucets as the base for their dialysis solution. He knew that existing purification systems, mostly based on filtration, weren’t exacting enough to meet his needs, so he looked to distillation. In Kamen’s eyes, distillation was magical in its simplicity. “The sun will evaporate the water out of an open latrine, and it will leave behind all of the bioburden, Cryptosporidium, and Giardia,” he says. “It will even separate the water from the arsenic and hexavalent chromium in a chemical waste site.”
As is so often the case, innovation, when it strikes, is an obvious-in-retrospect connection between seemingly disparate ideas. Kamen’s unique brand of genius is that he can recognize those connections and see their potential where others can’t.
But fitting one of the planet’s most elegant systems into a home appliance is not without its challenges. For his distillation machine to work, it would need to boil many gallons of water per hour, and that would require more energy than everything else in a typical U.S. home combined. So Kamen and his engineers exploited another basic scientific principle. To vaporize, water must get hot, and to do that, it absorbs energy. When the vapor condenses back into liquid, that energy gets released. If the team could recycle it, Kamen reasoned, they’d have a much more efficient process. They designed a “counterflow heat exchanger” that would run cool incoming liquid past superheated distilled water that had been vaporized and compressed. The difference in temperature would simultaneously cool the outgoing water and flash-boil the incoming liquid. All they would need is enough energy to get some water boiling and a little extra energy to power a compressor.
Kamen leans forward and grins as he ties the first chapter of his story together. “We said, ‘Wait, we can build a device that could take any input water, whether it’s got bioburden, organics, inorganics, chrome . . .and we can make pure water come out? We can put it in somebody’s house and make a supply of water for injection that would meet the U.S. Pharmacopeial standard, on less power than a handheld hair dryer, and we could make a thousand liters a day?’ ” Imagine how valuable that could be.
As the plan for his water purifier took shape, Kamen found himself thinking a lot about disaster relief. Whenever an earthquake or tsunami struck, aid organizations would request clean water before anything else because local supplies were tainted with sewage or chemicals. Kamen thought, “I’ve been trying to make a box small enough that you could carry it around for mobile dialysis, and it makes 250 gallons a day—that would be enough for a hundred people in a crisis.” More to the point, why not use the machine to help entire villages, or even nations, with persistent water needs?
“There are nearly a billion people in the world that get up every morning and their primary goal is to find water,” Kamen says. “Many travel great distances to find water that won’t kill them. And sadly, hundreds of thousands of times a year it does kill, mostly kids.” With Kamen’s purifier, people could just stick a hose in their dirty laundry water, a polluted river, or even their own toilet pit, and crystal-clear, microbe-free water would stream out of the machine.
The question was how to get the purifiers mass-produced and into the hands of those who needed them. Kamen started by approaching global aid organizations. Jim Scott, who works in business development for Deka, says the groups simply weren’t set up to scale the technology. “I think it’s probably very daunting if you’re an organization that doesn’t do that,” he says.
The medical and pharmaceutical companies Kamen had worked with over the years weren’t much better positioned to help. They had infrastructure in developed nations but not in the 100-odd countries where he hoped to see the technology deployed.
Frustrated, Kamen had another obvious-in-retrospect insight. “You talk to people that travel a lot and they say, ‘If there’s one thing you can buy anywhere in the world, it’s a Coke.’ You know the joke: A guy takes three weeks climbing to the top of Mount Everest; he gets to the top and buys himself a Coke. So I thought, Coke is something you drink, and they have coolers that are about the size of our machine, and they have bottling partnerships around the world. I’m going to go and try to convince them to do this.”
Coke’s response to Kamen’s unorthodox overture: Glad to hear from you, but how about doing another project first? That was in 2005, and one of the company’s challenges at the time was to develop a better soda fountain. Kamen teamed up with Nilang Patel, the former head of Coke’s research lab. Drawing from medical equipment Kamen had developed to precisely administer insulin and chemotherapy drugs, they created the Freestyle. The freestanding dispenser combines concentrated ingredients stored in small cartridges (as opposed to five-gallon bags of syrup) with carbonated water and sweeteners to create as many as 100 different drinks.
By 2009, the Freestyle was in production, and Kamen reminded Coke about the handshake deal to pursue what he was by then calling the Slingshot. In the interim, though, Coke had gotten a new CEO and chairman, Muhtar Kent. Kamen feared he’d have to “grovel and beg” for support, but, he says, “within a couple of minutes of meeting Muhtar, I realized he’s not like an accounting guy; he’s a big-picture, global thinker.
“ ‘Dean,’ he says to me, ‘if we can make the water, why can’t we do other things too?’ ” Providing clean water could be the cornerstone of what’s known as a bottom-of-the-pyramid strategy for developing markets. By providing the poorest people in the world with new technologies, services, and opportunities, a company can help lift them out of poverty and transform them into viable customers. Hence, the Ekocenter concept took shape as a companion to the water purifier, at least in some markets.
“We believe Coca-Cola’s business can only be as healthy as the community it is part of, so the well-being of the community is important to our long-term strategy,” says Derk Hendriksen, the general manager of the Ekocenter program. Notably, the company won’t directly profit from the program; each “downtown in a box” will operate as a standalone business run by a local entrepreneur, typically a woman, selected and trained by Coke. (That the soda giant enjoys an image boost in the process goes without saying.)
In 2011, Coke and Deka sent 15 Slingshots to Ghana for a six-month field test where they provided clean water to five rural schools. In fall 2013, Coke and its partners announced a goal to place up to 2,000 units (either standalone Slingshots or Ekocenters) around Africa, Asia, and Latin America by the end of 2015. “The commitment we made is to provide 500 million liters of safe drinking water to communities in need on a yearly basis,” Hendriksen says. That would translate into improving the lives of 500,000 people a year.
Kamen, being Kamen, sees the current goals of the Coke partnership as the first step toward a much larger one. “Fifty percent of all the people in the developing world suffer from waterborne pathogens,” he says. “We’d empty half the beds in all the hospitals in the world if we just gave people clean water.” The Slingshot won’t be the solution for all of those people, Kamen says, but he sees no reason not to strive for that.
One way he might extend the reach of the Slingshot is to pair it with his energy-efficient Stirling generator, another longtime passion project. Rather than by internal combustion, a Stirling engine works by expanding and contracting a gas in a closed system by heating and cooling it. The concept dates from the early 1800s but never found much practical use. The engine in Kamen’s generator requires nothing more than waste, leaves, or some other flammable material for fuel; a test unit in Bangladesh ran for six months on cow dung. Combined with a Slingshot, the Stirling generator would enable the purification of water anywhere, regardless of access to the electric grid or a bunch of solar panels on an Ekocenter.
This is crucial because many of the places that lack clean water also lack reliable electricity. Kamen has already established a relationship with NRG Energy, the same company that supplies solar panels to the Ekocenters, to discuss development. “We can bring base power to more than a billion people,” he says. That’s more than twice the number of people he could help with Slingshot alone and nearly a quarter of the global population. Of course, it would never occur to Dean Kamen to stop there.
Education: Dropped out of college
Company: Deka Research and Development
Why you’ve heard of him: He developed the Segway, along with dozens of medical devices
Passion: He founded FIRST, which sponsors student robotics competitions. Last year, 350,000 kids (and 28,800 robots) participated globally.
The system needs only enough energy to start the first boil, and a little more to power the compressor and pump. That’s supplied by an outlet or a solar panel; all the subsequent boiling and cooling self-perpetuates.
One: The user places a hose in any dirty water source—say, a polluted river or well—and a small pump draws the fluid into a boiling chamber. As the water reaches roughly 100°C, it turns to steam, which leaves behind any pollutants. They flow out of the chamber via a separate hose.
Two: The steam rises into a compressor, which squeezes it and thereby raises its pressure and its temperature by about 10°C more. The high-pressure vapor now has a higher boiling point, which means it can condense back into water at a temperature greater than 100°C.
Three: A counterflow heat exchanger runs the superheated water past the incoming flow of dirty water. The process heats the incoming water and cools the hot water to room temperature. That distilled water is ready to drink, while the dirty water vaporizes and begins the process all over again.
This article originally appeared in the June 2014 issue of Popular Science.
A new bionic pancreas for people with type 1 diabetes is showing promise in early field tests. So far, it's deftly handled ice cream binges and kids at camp, Bloomberg reports.
"The performance of our system in both adults and adolescents exceeded our expectations under very challenging real-world conditions," the device's lead engineer, Ed Damiano of Boston University, said in a statement.
Like a natural pancreas, Damiano's device automatically monitors wearers' insulin levels. When needed, it administers doses of insulin and glucagon, two hormones that healthy pancreases make to regulate people's blood sugar levels. In other words, the bionic pancreas does automatically what type 1 diabetes patients have to do manually, far more frequently than any person could—every five minutes, 24 hours a day. The device is about the size of a cellphone and people wear it on the outside of their bodies.
People with type 1 diabetes don't make insulin like typical people do. (Those who have advanced type 2 diabetes—the far more common type, that usually arises from poor diet—may also not make enough insulin. This artificial pancreas, however, is designed only for type 1 diabetes.) If type 1 diabetes patients don't keep measuring and managing their blood-sugar levels with insulin injections, they can have serious complications. But it's hard for people, especially kids, to check their blood sugar as often as they're supposed to. It's also impossible for them to do so while they're sleeping, leading to hours-long stretches when patients' blood-sugar levels are out of whack.
Several research groups have looked into making bionic pancreases to automate the check-and-inject process. Last year, Popular Sciencereported on a similar, but simpler, auto-monitoring device that got U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval. Challenges to making a really effective, convenient device include figuring out when to best inject glucagon, or whether to use it at all. Now, the standard is for type 1 diabetes patients to give themselves insulin injections only, but some scientists think glucagon could help bionic pancreases work more effectively. It's also an ongoing challenge to figure out how a bionic pancreas should deal with the many normal things that people want to do that dramatically affect their blood sugar levels—everything from eating carbohydrate-heavy meals to serious exercise, such as long-distance running.
Damiano and his team found their device controlled blood sugar levels better than conventional monitoring in 52 adults and adolescents, Bloomberg reports. Among the testers were young adults under the age of 20 at a summer camp for kids with diabetes. The testers each used the device for five days, some putting it through its paces. "Some kids were having ice cream sundaes and French fries and forbidden foods, just to see if the device could handle it," one 76-year-old tester tattled to told Bloomberg. ". . . the bionic pancreas handled it."
Damiano and his colleagues want to do larger trials, which they will need to get FDA approval for the device. The researchers will publish their current results in the New England Journal of Medicine.
A team of engineers has built a prototype tracker for a different kind of football than what's in the news right now. The tracker overcomes one major difference between American football and soccer—the fact that in football, sometimes you have a half-dozen big guys pile on top of the ball.
Goal-line technology, like what the World Cup uses, relies on cameras set up around the field to watch where the ball goes. The cameras don't exactly have X-ray vision, however, so they're a no-go for pileups. On the other hand, with the new prototype tracker, "you can actually have all 22 people jump on top of the football," says David Ricketts, an engineering professor at North Carolina State University who worked on developing the system. "You can see right through the players and see the football directly."
Ricketts and his colleagues' system includes hardware that sends out signals from inside ball itself. Sensors arranged around the field then triangulate the ball's position from the signals they pick up.
It's not a new idea to have a ball broadcast its position on the field. Ricketts and his team tried to bring the idea closer to reality by using a type of signal that's safe, yet unobstructed by human bodies. Players' bodies would interfere with GPS and RFID signals, Ricketts tells Popular Science. So the engineering team, including researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research, decided to try something called magnetoquasistatic fields. (Disney is interested because it owns ESPN, who wanted to see if this is feasible, Ricketts says.)
The football's emitting components create a magnetic field that moves very slowly, which is why it's called quasi—or seemingly—static. The slight movement helps sensors detect the field, and thus locate the ball.
One major challenge to using magnetoquasistatic fields is that when they contact the ground, they're absorbed and re-emitted, creating unwanted signals the sensors pick up. Ricketts and his team wrote an algorithm to remove the effect of Earth from the signals their sensors read.
The North Carolina State University team has played with Ricketts' and his colleagues' system. Still, the system needs some improvements before it's feasible for real games. It needs to be more accurate. For now, it can track a ball on a football field within about two feet of its actual location. For the system to be useful to umpires and game-watchers, it needs to be accurate within about half a football's length. Teams might also want the emitting device in the football to be smaller and lighter. These kinds of improvements will need to wait for a commercial lab, however.
Meanwhile, Ricketts' academic team plans to continue to research magnetic fields for tracking objects. Besides ball tracking, Ricketts imagines other uses for this technology. It could track people's gestures for games, devices, or giving feedback to athletes. It could also help companies keep tabs on boxes and inventory.
Lurking in a fuzzy image currently circulating on Chinese forums is the outline of what could be Japan's first home-grown stealth fighter. Given the image quality, it could also be a soft-focus tube of toothpaste, but accepting that it's a plane, it is likely Japan's long-in-development Mitsubishi Advanced Technology Demonstrator-X (ATD-X).
Mitsubishi started development on the ATD-X in 2007, when it became apparent that the United States was unwilling to sell Japan its F-22 Raptor stealth air superiority fighter. While the project faced budget cuts, a mock-up was displayed at aviation conference in 2008. As of 2011, the first demonstration flight was scheduled for 2014, and the development appears to be on schedule.
The fighter itself won't be designed for major production, but will instead allow Japan to figure out what they want their stealth fighter to do, and how to do it. In that way, it's similar to America's X-47B unmanned aerial combat vehicle, another high-tech demonstration that foreshadows future military designs but will not itself see service. Early speculation is that the ATD-X, and any fighters based on it, will be manned and carry an array of advanced radar for detecting other stealth aircraft.
If a fighter is developed from the ATD-X, it is likely that it will enter service sometime in the 2030s, as a replacement for Japan's current F-2 fighters and likely purchased F-35 stealth fighters. While the United States has led the world in developing aircraft that are almost impossible for radar to see, stealth is unlikely to remain solely an American enterprise. Most notably for Japan's security concerns, both China and Russia are working on stealth fighters.
If this grainy photo is indeed the Advanced Technology Demonstrator-X, it fits into a pattern of Japan gradually building up an assertive and capable military, despite constitutional limitations on aggressive military force.
Two of the scientists involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 have been knighted as part of Queen Elizabeth II's list of Birthday Honours. Professors Tom Kibble and Tejinder Virdee, both of Imperial College London, were integral to the discovery of the elusive particle, albeit in different ways.
In 1990, Virdee (and several colleagues) came up with the idea behind the CMS, one of the detectors used in crucial experiments conducted at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN that detected the Higgs boson. Virdee played a significant role in constructing the device and gathering data, spearheading a team of over 3,000 people from 40 countries as they troubleshot issues and invented new technologies.
Kibble's work in the mid-1960s helped bring about the discovery of the Higgs boson almost 50 years later. His most notable contribution was the development of the Higgs mechanism, which explains why the particles have mass. Physicist Peter Higgs, after whom the particle is named, believed that the Nobel Prize that he received should have been shared with Kibble because his contributions were so significant.
Virdee was among the many to revel in Kibble's recognition. He told BBC News: "Brilliant. I was hoping Tom would be recognized. I'm very, very happy for him, and I'm sure we'll have a glass of champagne when next we meet."
Virdee seemed pleased that his and Kibble's decades of work had been honored by the queen of the Commonwealth. "It has taken a very long time [to prove them] and it's great to have recognition for the experiment [CMS], as well as the theory," he told the BBC.
If you need a refresher, here's a simple explanation of the Higgs-Boson.
The World Cup has drawn more than rabid soccer fans to Brazil. A team of filmmakers are on the ground in Rio de Janeiro documenting the science behind the games, including an exoskeletal kick-off, the genetics of competition, and even the biochemistry of diehard spectators.
Imagine Science Films' new series, "Field Work: World Cup," puts these and other cinematic explorations on display. Each of the six short films in the series will debut here on PopSci.com in the coming weeks.
To start things off, we present Amor. Here's how Imagine Science Films describes the flick:
Loyal soccer enthusiasts will defend their team to the end; even in the threat of potential injury. What is it that inspires this epic feeling of diehard love and loyalty? As the stadium pulsates with excitement, fan behavior is highly influenced by the environment. In a large group, the individual disappears only to be encompassed into something much larger. But is this amor?
Amor gets to the heart of these questions with local molecular biologist Dr. Franklin Rumjanek, from the Center of Health Sciences at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Watch the mini-documentary below.
This article was created in partnership with Imagine Science Films.
There are no genetically engineered animals sold for human consumption right now. The only candidate that's anywhere close, AquaBounty's fast-growing GM salmon, seems to have stalled in its approval process, in spite of positive scientific reviews finding AquaBounty fish safe to eat and safe for the environment. As you might guess, the lack of genetically modified meat on the market isn't because of a lack of technology. It's because of politics—GM foods are deeply unpopular, and GM food animals especially so.
Still, I was surprised at how far along the development of GM meat is after I read this new feature from the biologists' magazine The Scientist. There are many labs around the world working on making animals that are engineered to grow faster, resist disease, or provide people with extra nutrients. Research projects underway include goats whose milk is designed to prevent deadly diarrhea in children and chickens in which bird flu viruses don't reproduce. In spite of public opposition and a lack of funding, GM meat research has continued to advance.
One major trend: Scientists have developed incredibly precise techniques for genetic engineering. For example, they're now able to change just one base pair in an animal's DNA code—one pair of letters in an animal that has billions of such pairs. Needle, haystack, etc., etc.
With these new tools, some are hoping they can engineer animals that are more appealing to the public. How? They're making animals whose genes are similar to those found in closely related, unmodified animals. So, instead of giving pigs mouse genes, scientists could make domestic pigs with genes normally found in wild pigs. The end result would be engineered pigs that farmers could have made through generations of careful breeding, geneticists argue. Science just zooms to the final result faster.
Have these scientists never read the comments on an article about GMOs/been on Facebook? I don't think those who don't wish to eat GM foods will find GM pigs-with-pig-genes any better than pigs with mouse genes. But hope springs eternal among genetic engineers, apparently.
However you may feel about genetically modified foods, we thought you would enjoy this foray into the science of it all. Check out The Scientist for more.
Within policy circles, people often bandy about the term “water-energy nexus.” Like most wonk-speak, it’s a rather complex way to express a simple relationship. Energy production requires a tremendous amount of water, almost on par with irrigated agriculture. And water production needs a lot of energy, for pumping, treating, and transportation. They’re interdependent. And therein lies the problem. We asked the U.S. Department of Energy’s Michael Knotek, the deputy under secretary for science and energy and a scientist himself, how to plan for a future in which we’ll demand a lot of both.
Why worry about the water-energy nexus anyway?
If you look around the world, the water-energy nexus is the first thing foreign governments talk about, particularly in developing countries. Over the next 40 years, we’re going to have a growing population and an evolving climate system. So we’ll be facing, almost in real time, a continually evolving set of challenges.
That could create big issues geopolitically. If you want to know where the big conflicts in the world are going to occur, you go to places that are right at the edge today. Take, for example, the parts of India and China that are currently dependent on very few sources of water. They could be impacted heavily by climate change. As the population grows and their economic productivity goes up, they’re going to be much closer to being at the crisis point than we are. Much closer.
What about here in the U.S.?
The western United States has similar issues. How are we going to manage water needs when the population’s growing and the climate models say the region will face serious problems? We have to prepare the whole country to deal with that. It may turn out that we have to move a lot of water around this country sometime in the next 30 to 50 years.
“We may have to move a lot of water around this country in the next 30 to 50 years.”
Where do we start?
The first thing we need to do is to look at the big challenges. Those go all the way from the materials underlying new technologies to systems analysis. But we also need enough data and data-management systems to understand the water-energy interface across this country. Once you understand it, the question is, What are you going to do about it?
What is the DOE doing about it?
We have a tech team around water-energy, which cuts across all of our programs. It also intersects with our national laboratory system. Desalination is big on the energy-for-water side of things. We’re also looking at new power systems for the thermo-electric cycle—for example, supercritical carbon dioxide as opposed to steam as a driver for the turbines on power plants.
Most renewables, except for hydropower, don’t need much water at all, if any. And there’s a lot of recovered, or produced, water that turns out is very usable. In the case of fracking, where this water can be an issue, people have to learn how to use it again or treat it in another way.
Where does climate change fit in?
If you have a more climate-impacted world in the future, you’re going to have more droughts and floods. So everything is going to have to be hardened against extreme weather. That’s just going to be a feature of all our systems. Look at what happened with Hurricane Sandy. Whether it was or was not a climate change event is arguable, but what it did do was demonstrate the vulnerability of coastal populations and infrastructure. It just went in there and caused a mess.
What more can we do?
I’ve been working on the problem of new energy systems for 40-plus years. The mindset has always been that if you can understand the problems, you can solve them. But you’d better understand them first. And you’d better get a sense of urgency. We have to start preparing for the future. We can no longer just whistle past the graveyard.
This article originally appeared in the June 2014 issue of Popular Science.
"We put cameras on everything that moves," says John Downer, the producer and director of Wings3D, a unique wildlife movie that's in theaters today, distributed by BBC Worldwide.
In the 2011-2012 series Earthflight, he placed cameras on trained birds, providing a totally unique POV (don't worry, no birds were hurt). In 2013, Penguins: Spy in the Huddle, part of Downer's successful Spy wildlife series, drew more than 9 million viewers. He used more than 50 robotic spy cameras, cameras disguised as penguin egg, an underwater penguin cam, a fluffy chick cam, and animatronic life-sized penguins (there were a few courtship fails, and even a fight in which a real penguin took off a robotic penguin's head).
He's used elephants as his cameramen as well, when filming tigers in India for Tiger: Spy in the Jungle.
He wanted to film tigers in a way that had never been seen before. He realized they were comfortable around elephants, so his crew rode on elephants. He knew that elephants liked to carry logs, so his crew put a camera on the end of a tree trunk. Downer says it was like having "a nature-made steadicam." As the elephants moved, the shots panned smoothly.
Wings3D relies on the science of avian imprinting, using trained birds, including a vulture, to capture scenes while the team flies alongside in a microlight aircraft. The imprinted birds consider the pilot to be a parent. The team also created a robotic vulture glider and attached a GoPro to a bald eagle, vulture and a fish eagle.
And, in a stunning spectacle of pink, the team used octocopters to fly over the world's largest concentration of flamingos (2 million of them, in Kenya's Lake Bogoria) and also to film wildebeest in the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya.
Having raised his own duck using imprinting, Downer knows that, when working with animals, there's only so much directing he and his team can do. "The animals are still wild," he says. While filming in New York City, the snow geese reacted to the sensory overload and took off to Brooklyn. Fortunately, says Downer, the birds had trackers on them, and before they could hit up Shake Shack, they were retrieved.
Wings3D is narrated by David Tennant and showing in selected theaters (see which ones here) today, June 17.
June may be wedding season among American humans, but for other members of the animal kingdom, it's a different—perhaps related—time of life. In the springtime is when many animals give birth. For the Smithsonian's National Zoo, that means seeing the fruits of its breeding programs. The zoo has added 31 baby animals to its ranks in the past few weeks.
That sounds like a lot of babies to us here at Popular Science, but it's not an unusual number. "It's pretty typical for all zoos, especially ones that are participating in AZA [Association of Zoos and Aquariums] conservation programs," Don Moore, the National Zoo's senior scientist, tells me. So check out your local zoo—it has probably experienced a baby boom, too.
Conservation programs specify different goals for breeding zoo animals, depending on the status of the species. For some species, zookeepers try to keep their population numbers healthy within captivity. For certain endangered species, biologists seek to make babies they can later introduce into the wild. For example, hundreds of zoo-born black-footed ferrets—an endangered American mammal that eats prairie dogs—have been reintroduced to the wild. Committees of experts meet as often as yearly to decide on AZA Species Survival Plans for each of about 600 species.
"The human population is growing so big that conservationists can never stop trying to maintain species either in captivity or in the wild," Moore says.
The survival plans can include some surprising methods. A few years ago, the plan for black-footed ferrets included artificially inseminating some females with the cryogenically frozen sperm of a male that had died years ago. The current black-footed ferret population is descended from just 18 individuals discovered in Wyoming in 1980, after scientists thought the species had gone extinct. Such a small number of ancestors leaves the ferrets vulnerable to genetic diseases. But the male to whom the frozen sperm belonged was not closely related to living ferrets at the time. Scientists thought his DNA would be a valuable addition to the gene pool.
Another aspect of zoo breeding is animal matchmaking. During conferences, their keepers meet and try to set up their charges with compatible partners. "Animal curators know all of their animals, who is likely to breed with whom, who's behaviorally compatible," Moore says. "It's not only humans that have to go dating."
Now that you've learned the science, it's time to enjoy the squee. Check out some of the endangered babies born to the National Zoo this year in the gallery.
