Fecal bacteria, magnified 10,000x

Fecal transplant is increasingly accepted as a medical treatment for some diseases.

Eric Erbe, digital colorization by Christopher Pooley

It's not often we encounter a story that begins with a line like this:

“AS THE SUN set over Lake Eyasi in Tanzania, nearly thirty minutes had passed since I had inserted a turkey baster into my bum and injected the feces of a Hadza man – a member of one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer tribes in the world – into the nether regions of my distal colon.”

The guy behind this essay, Jeff Leach, is part of a multi-national scientific research team that by his account has been living with the Hadza, hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, for over a year. They have collected hundreds of samples from humans, animals, and the environment in order to observe how the microbial communities in and around the Hadza change with the dramatic seasonal weather shifts in East Africa: six months of near-steady rain followed by six dry months.

The question driving the research is “what a normal or healthy microbiome might have looked like before the niceties and medications of late whacked the crap out of our gut bugs in the so-called modern world,” Leach writes.

The Hadza are contemporary people, Leach writes, not an undiscovered stone-age civilization. But they're excellent subjects for this research because they still live on plant and animal foods that humans have hunted and gathered for millennia, and their use of western medications is extremely limited.

The health impacts of what lives (or doesn't) in our guts are getting increased attention in Western dietary and medical circles -- and eating foods containing "probiotics" just scratches the surface. Recent research suggests that use of antibiotics may be fundamentally altering our gut biomes for the worse, increasing rates of allergies, asthma and weight gain. In one recent lab study, introduction of genetically altered gut bacteria prevented mice from getting fat. In another, artificial sweetners altered gut microbes and contributed to obesity and other metabolic disorders in mice, and some correlation to the same effect was found in people.

But, as the saying goes, more research is needed.

As for fecal transplants, they're no longer career killers in polite medical conversation. Swapping poop from healthy to sick persons is now an up-and-up treatment for curing chronic gastrointestinal disease. The launch of the OpenBiome fecal transplant bank in the U.S. earlier this year seems to signal that the technique is going mainstream.

As for Jeff Leach, he describes his primary scientific motivation for self-administering a fecal transplant as testing the hypothesis "of microbial extinction, something I believe we all suffer from in the western world and may be at the root of what’s making us sick." The biggest change Leach and his girlfriend have noticed since the transplant is that he's passing a lot less gas. 

Read the rest of his very readable, informative and down-to-earth essay: (Re)Becoming Human: what happened the day I replaced 99% of the genes in my body with that [sic] of a hunter-gatherer.

Neriid Flies

Scientists at UNSW Australia have studied neriid flies and discovered a new form of non-genetic inheritance.

Russell Bonduriansky

Even after a breakup, past boyfriends can still have a hold over your future relationships (usually by providing a negative point of comparison). But for some types of flies, ex-lovers can pop up in a much more permanent way – by passing on traits to another male’s offspring.

That’s right: It’s possible for a female fly’s children to resemble a previous sexual partner, rather than the male that fertilized her eggs.

Discovered by researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia, the phenomenon represents a new form of non-genetic inheritance. The idea that such telegony is possible was first proposed by Aristotle, and was a popular theory of heredity in the 19th century, but it was discredited when scientists discovered what genetics was all about.

According to lead researcher Angela Crean, a post-doctoral fellow in the school of biological sciences, the researchers came across this discovery after noticing an interesting paternal effect in their neriid flies. They found that what they fed the fly fathers could influence their offspring’s size. “If we make big males, they produce larger offspring,” says Crean.

But what they didn’t know was how this trait was passed on to the kids. Did it come from a gene carried over on the sperm itself or was it something within the seminal fluid. Crean explains that sometimes it’s possible that something else within semen can influence an offspring’s traits.

“The entire ejaculate has a whole bunch of other things in it; only 5 percent is the sperm itself,” she tells Popular Science. “The sperm is what fertilizes the egg, but you have all these sugars and proteins and fluid that carry that sperm. And we know it can carry things like STDs and lots of other things like peptides.” Crean sites an example of a known sex peptide carried by semen that can influence a female fly’s behavior, causing her to lay more eggs and reducing her wiliness to mate with other males.

The researchers suspected that something like this peptide could be causing the sizing effects seen in the offspring. So the team decided to create a group of large and small male flies, by feeding them different diets when they were larvae. They then mated these diverse-sized males to immature females (so they could not produce eggs).

Then when the females were mature, the researchers re-mated them to either a big or small male and studied the resulting offspring. That’s when they found that the offspring’s size was determined not by their fathers, but by their mothers’ previous mates.

This means that an unknown molecule in the males’ ejaculate could remain within the female, somehow influencing the development of her kids. Crean says the discovery complicated everything they know about how variation is transmitted between generations, which is what drives their research. She notes it’s possible that such a scenario could be seen in other species as well.

“There are a lot of old wives’ tales and very anecdotal evidence and rumors that this sort of thing happens from animal breeders,” Crean says. “But I’m not aware of any scientific evidence that shows this.” And as for such an effect occurring in humans, Crean says it’s nearly impossible to prove, as you can’t do these types of manipulative experiments on people. But she’s not keeping her mind closed: “There is a possibility.”

The researchers published their work in the journal Ecology Letters.

Moon Boots Are Back.

GE, Android Homme, and JackThreads released the Missions, limited edition sneakers commemorating the moon landing’s 45th anniversary this year. The soles’ thermoplastic rubber adds flexibility and increased absorption. Price $196.90.

Sam Kaplan

40,000 Years Ago

Determining when humans began wearing shoes relies on the fossil record. One theory based on anatomical changes in feet date the first shoe-wearers to Paleolithic times.

1790

A British inventor ushers in the era of modern shoelaces. Tying things with strings wasn’t new, but until then, shoes were largely fastened with buckles or buttons.  

1844

Charles Goodyear files a U.S. patent for vulcanization, which processes natural rubber into a durable product. The process paved the way for rubber-soled shoes. 

1858

Lyman Reed Blake patents a sewing machine that can affix shoe uppers to soles. Later improved and called the McKay stitcher, it sped the shoe production process dramatically. 

1916

The United States Rubber Company announces Keds, the first mass-produced shoe marketed as a “sneaker.”

1978

Nike founder Bill Bowerman patents his waffle-soled running shoe concept. The design provided better traction. 

2013

New Balance and Nike announce the first mass-produced athletic shoes with 3-D printed soles, kicking off a new age in customized footwear.

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

California State Capitol

Laws happen here, sometimes.

PeteBobb, via Wikimedia Commons

A California bill that would require police to obtain warrants before using drones for most purposes was vetoed by Governor Jerry Brown this week. While the bill contains exceptions for emergency situations, wildfires, coordinating traffic accident first responders, and environmental disasters, it does rule out police using drones for routine traffic stops or other searches, without getting a warrant a first. 

In a statement, the Governor said he was returning the bill to the legislature unsigned because, “the bill's exceptions, however, appear to be too narrow and could impose requirements beyond what is required by either the 4th Amendment or the privacy provisions in the California Constitution.” As Brown phrases it, the spelled-out exceptions in the bill provide stronger privacy protections than the Bill of Rights, and in turn, create greater obstacles for police, beyond what the constitution requires.

But with this veto, Brown leaves a major issue of drone privacy unsettled.

Presently, there are several overlapping authorities on drone law. The first is the FAA, which has a responsibility for the safety of the skies. While their roadmap puts the start of drone integration into air traffic at 2015, presently they’ve only allowed exceptions for drones that fly on “sterile” film sets or the empty spaces of Alaska. Without further guidance from the FAA, many states have proposed (and some have adopted) rules governing drone use, often with warrants required for searches and exceptions for life-or-death emergencies. Local authorities and government bodies, in turn, have sometimes interpreted the existing laws on their own, and poorly.

Had it been signed, California’s bill would place the most populous state, and one with a burgeoning drone industry, squarely in the camp of states that require police to use warrants before most drone flights. Without the guidance of legislation, drone use in California by government agencies and others will remain legally ambiguous, making it all the more likely that courts, with their limited knowledge of technology, will ultimately decide the future of drones.

(GIF cut from video by Alex Schueth)

There is something new under the sun.

Gavin Pretor-Pinney hopes a wild, turbulent cloud he calls "undulatus asperatus" (literally: volatile waves) will emerge as a rare addition to the first new edition of The International Cloud Atlas in four decades. Its strange features are visible as the formation rolls over Lincoln, Nebraska in the time-lapse above.

Pretor-Pinney founded The Cloud Appreciation Society, whose online manifesto asserts that "clouds are unjustly maligned" and pledges to "fight 'blue-sky thinking' wherever we find it." His organization collects images of clouds from amateur photographers who contribute from all over the world, and maintains an impressive online collection. He tells The Verge that he began to notice that the clouds in one small group of photos did not match any known formation. He decided to push for recognition of these clouds as a new type. He passed his findings on to researcher Graeme Anderson, whose paper on the cloud was an important step on the road to official recognition—a step that requires approval from the World Meteorological Organization, whose members edit the Atlas. Anderson defines undulatus asperatus as:

If included in the new cloud atlas, undulatus asperatus will be the first addition since cirrus intortus made the cut in 1951.

Images Included In Anderson's Research

Graeme Anderson

Training Ebola Contact Tracers

CDC

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced yesterday that a patient with Ebola has been identified in the U.S. He apparently got infected while in West Africa, boarded a plane before he had any symptoms, and then visited a U.S. hospital when he fell ill. He's now getting care at a hospital in Dallas.

If you're one of the 300-plus million people who live in the United States, there's a vanishingly small—but not non-zero—chance you may have been infected by this person. How can you know for sure? Well, you'll get a knock on your door from somebody called a tracer.

The tracer will be part of the major technique with which U.S. officials plan to keep Ebola from spreading in America. The technique is called contact tracing. It's a generations-old idea, it's pretty unglamorous, but it works. "There is no doubt in my mind that we will stop it here," U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Thomas Frieden told reporters yesterday during a conference call. Experts outside of the CDC agree. Contact tracing has also appeared to have helped control outbreaks in Nigeria and Senegal. Unfortunately, other challenges keep it from working perfectly in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, where Ebola is an epidemic.

Here's how contact tracing works—and what to expect if, one day, you find yourself getting traced.

What is contact tracing?

Doctors caring for the Dallas patient will (or already have) speak to everyone with whom he had direct contact while he had the symptoms of Ebola, but wasn't yet staying in a hospital isolation room. In this case, four days passed between when the patient first developed symptoms and when doctors placed him in isolation. Anyone who might have contacted the patient's bodily fluids during that time is at risk for having contracted Ebola. Dallas officials think 12 to 18 people are at risk.

Tracers must track down and visit each of these direct contacts, every day, for 21 days. Twenty-one days is the longest possible time that somebody could harbor Ebolavirus, but not show symptoms. "By then, if they're not sick with Ebola, they're not going to get sick with Ebola," Daniel Bausch, a physician and researcher who studies infectious diseases at Tulane University, tells Popular Science. Those who stay in the clear for 21 days are off the contact list.

During their visits, tracers ask the traced people how they're feeling. Tracers may ask the traced contacts to take their temperature every day and record it. Tracers, who are often recruited from the community, don't need any special medical training. They submit their findings to trained epidemiologists, who decide what to do next.

What happens if a traced contact gets sick?

If the traced person reports having a fever or headache—the early symptoms of Ebola—he or she will be isolated. She might not have to go to the hospital right away, especially if her living situation is pretty isolated already. (Think "my own house" versus "dorm.") After all, she might not have Ebola. Plenty of diseases, such as colds and flus, also cause fever and headache.

Officials may ask the headachy contact to simply stay in her house or bedroom while they test her blood for Ebola. If she tests positive, then they'll take her to an isolation unit in a nearby hospital.

Officials will also then have to start the whole contact tracing process all over again for all of the new case's contacts.

Who counts as a traceable contact?

Family who housed the original Dallas patient during his four infectious days definitely count. Briefer contacts, such as store clerks, probably don't, unless there's reason to believe those people touched the patient's bodily fluids, Bausch says.

The patient entered the U.S. on a commercial flight, but U.S. health officials will not be calling folks who shared his flight, Frieden says. The patient did not have symptoms during the flight, and people with Ebola can't transmit the virus while they don't have symptoms.

Contact Tracing In A Nutshell

presentation slide from Community Health Care Association Of New York State

Why should a traced person cooperate with the authorities?

Not all traced people do. They could leave the house when they've been told not to. They could go stay in another city without telling their tracer. Or they may wish to cooperate, but may be difficult to find, for example, if they don't have a fixed address.

In this case, people should have one good motivation to cooperate, Bausch says. If they are infected and are traced, they can get swift treatment. While there's no cure for Ebola, those who are infected can get "supportive treatment," such as a hydrating IV, to help them recover. Supportive treatments aren't considered cures because they don't kill Ebolavirus, but they boost the chances that the body's immune system will.

There are also some experimental Ebola-killing drugs available. It's not clear how widely available those would be if more people in the U.S. get sick with Ebola, but Frieden says officials are discussing experimental treatments with the Dallas patient's family and hospital.

Has the U.S. ever used contact tracing before?

U.S. health authorities have previously traced the contacts of people with tuberculosis and with Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS.

Contact tracing around the world was instrumental in eradicating smallpox.

In the future, if some kind of deadly swine or avian flu lands in the U.S.—expect contact tracing.

Why will it work here, but not in countries where Ebola is an epidemic?

Authorities are trying to conduct contact tracing in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, but it's harder there. Contact tracing is labor-intensive, and there are many more people infected in West Africa. The U.S. has only one infection so far. Many West African residents are also harder to reach than the average American. They may live hours away, in rough country, or they may live in slums with no set address. They may also not want to cooperate with tracers, out of fear and suspicion of healthcare workers. CNN reported on the challenges of contact tracing in West Africa last month.

Experts are confident contact tracing will work as expected in the U.S. The U.S. has plenty of resources to track all those people and Americans are likely to cooperate with tracers.

Could Ebola land in the U.S. again?

It could. Airports operating flights between Ebola-endemic countries and the U.S. screen travelers before they fly. However, as Frieden explained, "As long as there continue to be cases in West Africa, the reality is that patients travel, individuals travel, and as appeared to happen in this case, individuals may travel before they appear to have any symptoms."

If the disease lands again, this whole contact tracing thing will start all over. 

Hammad Akbar

The CEO of InvoCode, which makes StealthGenie

via Twitter

“When I first heard the news, I was doing cartwheels,” says Cindy Southworth, a technology expert at the National Network to End Domestic Violence. “But my official statement is ‘Yippee! One down and 400 to go.’  There’s a long list of really vile products right behind StealthGenie that need to be investigated and taken down too.”  

Many app makers claim that their software is to be used for legal purposes, to monitor children or consenting employees.  But whatever the marketing materials say, companies make a lot of money selling to people, mostly men, who want to spy on a romantic partner.  In 2013, while celebrating the acquisition of the company’s millionth customer after two years of operation, the surveillance app mSpy announced internal survey results: 50 percent of its clients were using the product to spy on a romantic partner, and 74 percent of its clients were male.  As originally reported by Ars Technica, the DOJ indictment notes that the StealthGenie business plan predicted that 65 percent of potential customers would use the tool to spy on a romantic partner.  Southworth has obtained marketing materials touting the surveillance features of the HelloSPY app, which also features a picture of a man aggressively holding onto the arm of a woman who has visible abrasions on her face.

Domestic Violence

In an image from HelloSpy marketing materials, a man aggressively holds a woman with visible injuries

via HelloSpy

And then there are the known cases in which stalker apps have abetted murder.  In 2011, Simon Gittany of Sydney, Australia used a surveillance app called MobiStealth to intercept text messages and emails sent by his Canadian ballerina girlfriend Lisa Harnum to friends.  Once he discovered she was ending the relationship, Gittany threw Harnum off of a 15th-floor balcony. In 2012, police discovered that MobiStealth was also the tool by which Cid Torrez of Miramar, Florida, spied on his estranged wife Vilet and learned that she had a new boyfriend. Though Torrez claims to have no knowledge of his wife’s whereabouts, Florida prosecutors are trying him for murder.  She disappeared without a trace on March 31, 2012, and neither she nor her body has ever been found.

StealthGenie, the app whose manufacturer was arrested on Saturday, can conceivably be used for legal purposes.  The Washington Postreports that, in the trial, the government will need to show that the product is “mainly” for the surveillance of adults unaware of the fact that they are being monitored.

“You have to prove the whole business model, is ‘We’re helping you commit a crime,’ ” Danielle Citron, a University of Maryland law professor, told the Post. “That’s a hard sell.”

For the anti-domestic violence advocate Southworth, the stealth mode of the apps is the feature that must be made illegal.  If the person has consented to have the phone monitored, why does the app need to be operating invisibly in the background of the phone?

“There’s no need for it to be in stealth mode,” says Southworth.  “The phone carriers have some family safety products that you help you locate your child  – you get a text message, and your phone vibrates that says ‘Mom is locating you.’ That’s transparency, that’s visible, it’s aboveboard.  The fact that these manufacturers work really hard to be hidden, it’s clear what the intent is.”

On Friday, September 26, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order authorizing the Federal Bureau of Investigations to take the StealthGenie website offline temporarily.  On Sunday, the company sent an email out to clients saying that the site “is down for maintenance and will be back in few hours.”  As of this writing, the site remains down.

Researchers from the University of Southern Denmark say they’ve invented a crystal that pulls oxygen out of the air and even water. Apparently, just a spoonful of the stuff can suck up all the oxygen in a room. 

The Oxygen-Absorbing Material.

U. of Southern Denmark

But what’s more remarkable is that the crystal can later release the oxygen when exposed to heat or low-oxygen conditions. In a press release, study author Christine McKenzie likens it to the hemoglobin in our blood, which uses iron to bind and release oxygen in the human body. 

If the substance lives up to its promises, it could have a lot of really cool applications—for example, feeding high concentrations of oxygen into hydrogen fuel cells, and lightening the load for lung patients who have to lug around heavy oxygen supplies. Also, scuba divers could potentially leave their tanks at home, says McKenzie. “A few grains contain enough oxygen for one breath, and as the material can absorb oxygen from the water around the diver and supply the diver with it, the diver will not need to bring more than these few grains."

The study was published in Chemical Science.

*If you must know, the chemical name of the salt is written out as [{(bpbp)Co₂^II(NO₃)}₂(NH₂bdc)](NO₃)₂ * 2H₂O, where “bpbp” stands for 2,6-bis(N,N-bis(2-pyridylmethyl)-aminomethyl)-4-tert-butylphenolato, and “NH₂bdc^2” stands for 2-amino-1,4-benzenedicarboxylato). Don’t ask us how to pronounce all that.

A cup of joe

Julius Schorzman, Wikimedia Commons

Alexithymia, derived from Greek for “no words for feelings,” is a personality trait characterized by difficulty recognizing and showing emotions. “Someone with alexithymia might say they have a stomachache when they are actually experiencing grief,” wrote Mike Lyvers in an email to Popular Science.

Lyvers is a psychologist at Bond University and the author of a recent study that found a link between coffee guzzling and alexithymia. It's unclear what genetic or environmental factors cause a person to have alexithymic tendencies, but researchers are fairly confident it's the character trait that creates a caffeine-craver, and not the other way around.

Lyvers and his colleagues surveyed 106 university students about their caffeine consumption habits and had them complete a series of questionnaires that measured their susceptibility to anxiety and alexithymia, among other psychological indicators.

They found students who scored high on the test for alexithymia consumed almost twice as much caffeine per day as others. Alexithymic students on average ingested around 500 milligrams of caffeine daily, which is equivalent to drinking three and a half cups of coffee. The study speculates their desire to get wired may stem from the cognitive-enhancing properties of caffeine -- but at the potential cost of heightened anxiety, which a lot of alexithymics suffer from. 

Alexithymia is associated with a cohort of other behaviors, some of which are less benign (and less tasty) than coffee drinking.

“A significant subset of alcoholics and drug addicts are alexithymic, and this seems to be associated with worse treatment outcomes,” said Lyvers. He thinks that if scientists gain a better understanding of how and why alexithymia is correlated with mind-altering substances like alcohol, drugs and caffeine, then maybe we can find more successful ways to treat addiction in alexithymics.

Lyvers says he is now working on a study of caffeine expectations and alexithymia, which could provide insight on what drives individuals who struggle with expressiveness to reach for that extra cup of coffee.

Gut Jabber

Christine Daniloff/MIT, based on images by Carol Schoellhammer and Giovanni Traverso

People who dread the sharp stab of an injection at the doctor's office may be in luck. A team of researchers from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have developed a capsule coated in needles for patients to swallow, enabling the delivery of drugs directly into the stomach lining.

The prickly pill is meant to overcome a significant obstacle to drug delivery. Medicines made from large protein molecules usually cannot be packaged as pills, because the digestive system would break them down, just like it does to the protein in food. This innovation could allow doctors to more efficiently dose patients with large antibodies -- such as those used in cancer treatment -- vaccines, and other drugs, which would normally have to be injected under the skin. 

According to a press release, the model pills were used in trials to deliver insulin to pigs. Made of stainless steel, the pills contain a pool of insulin in the center and hollow needles on the outside, which pump insulin into the stomach, intestines, and colon over the course of a week. The capsules are as big around as a shirt button and about as long as a thumbnail, making them about the size of a large vitamin.

And fear not for the mouth and throat. The pill goes down coated in a material that dissolves in stomach acid, sparing sensitive inner flesh from getting pricked. When the researchers opened up the pigs after the trials, they found no internal damage. However, they do hope to move toward sugar-based needles in future models to reduce the risk of injury even further.

Saving skin from the painful jabs of a syringe -- while worthwhile in and of itself -- is not the only goal of the invention. Injection is an effective but imperfect means of drug delivery. The human body does not always absorb large molecules from drug injections, but in the pig experiments, the insulin in the capsule had a greater effect than insulin shot under the skin, potentially improving upon this issue.

The researchers say the next step is to refine the device so that inner muscles can squeeze out its contents like a tube of toothpaste -- allowing for more control over timing.

Drug Delivery Action

The needles can be hollow, delivering the drug as the gut squeezes (top,) or solid, breaking off along the way to lodge in the tract and squirt healthful chemicals (bottom.)

Carol Schoellhammer and Giovanni Traverso

Measure Here

Closeup of the interior of the scanning tunneling microscope at Princeton University

Princeton University, Office of Communications, Brian Wilson

There's a particle that physicists theorize exists that acts simultaneously as both matter and antimatter. Whoa! The particle is called the Majorana fermion, and a team of physicists is announcing today that it's seen some evidence of its existence.

The announcement is part of a recent flurry of research aimed at finding Majorana fermions, including studies that have found other evidence of the particles' existence. Majorana fermions are exotic particles, or particles with unusual properties that at least some physics theories predict should exist. Often scientists don't have direct evidence of certain exotic particles. Examples include the particles that may make up dark matter, or surprising finds in particle colliders such as the one at CERN. Among the exotic particles in the universe, Majorana fermions may be among the easiest to create and detect, the New Journal of Physics reports. It's no wonder many groups are working on it. 

In addition to being cool, and confirming some physics hypotheses, the discovery of Majorana fermions may one day help with the creation of quantum computers. University of California-Santa Barbara physicist Alexei Kitaev has predicted that Majorana fermions may be used as a qubits, or the quantum equivalent of bits in a conventional computer, because they are stable.

Majorana fermions are predicted to appear in materials called topological superconductors. In this recent work, a team of physicists from Princeton University and the University of Texas at Austin created a topological superconductor by creating single-atom-wide chains of iron atoms on a piece of pure lead. Team members used a two-story-tall scanning tunneling microscope housed at Princeton to map their chains. At the ends of the chains, the team detected zero-energy states—a sign of Majorana fermions.

They published their work today in the journal Science.

October 1939

Popular Science

In this Throwback Thursday we look back 75 years to to our October 1939 issue. War was just breaking out across the world, and superior American creativity seemed like the solution to all our worries. Back in those days our magazine explored many of the same themes that excite us today-- covering news, science, and cutting-edge technology, while imaginging the world of the future. Of course, some of our expectations were more accurate than others.

Uncle Sam Arms Against The World

Map Of Defenses

Popular Science

Though the United States was still a few years away from firing its first shot in World War II, Popular Science was already anticipating America's entry into the war. Here's how one of our editors imagined the response to a hypothetical attack:

A surprise attack came of course—though at Pearl Harbor (labeled "Hawaii" on the map above), not the Panama Canal. The Japanese attempted to wipe out the American Pacific fleet rather than bottle it up in the Atlantic. Still, the story pretty much nails how emerging weapons and technologies would shape the war.

Defenses On Land And Sea

Popular Science

The Hurricane House Of Future Past

In a less prescient piece on disaster preparedness, our reporter wrote about a plan for rotary houses designed to withstand hurricanes. The teardrop-shaped dwellings would spin on a central axis like a weather vane to present their most aerodynamic, least vulnerable end to battering storms.

The two-story structure offered a novel approach to weathering weather, but as far as we can tell it never went into production. Perhaps plywood and sturdy walls are the best solution after all.

The Hurricane Home

Click here to expand this amazing invention.

Popular Science

Please Tell Me You Washed Your Hands Afterward

Long before smallpox and ricin poison started turning up in the backs of several lab freezers, we wrote about the early days of buying and selling deadly pathogens.

Vials Unchecked

Popular Science

We don't know what "reasonable prices" are in this situation, and are just a bit disturbed by the cotton ball stoppers on the vials and the bare hands and face on the lab worker pictured.

Driver, Texas Ranger

One of our reporters spent some time with the Texas Rangers and noticed some interesting changes in the frontier force. The days of firing revolvers from galloping horses were gone—replaced by sub-machine guns fired from a speeding car.

That's One Way To Do It

Popular Science

First, Do Some Harm?

An attempt to find the cause of heart attacks (then thought to be a byproduct of a gassy digestive tract) produced this alarming illustration. It was a different era in medical ethics, we suppose.

Time To Find A New Doctor

Popular Science

Run Out And Buy This

Last, but not least, we thought this contraption, dubbed "Goofybike," was worth a second look. Someone get Schwinn on the line?

The 'Goofybike'

Popular Science

To read the full October 1939 issue, click here.

Johnny Dronehunter

A still from "Johnny Dronehunter," an ad for shotgun silencer maker SilencerCo. In the ad, the protagonist shoots down a bunch of drones with a shotgun like so many clay pigeons.

SilencerCo

Shooting down a small drone is hard. But determining whether people should be allowed to do so may prove more difficult still. A man in New Jersey fired a shotgun at his neighbor's drone, and as the quadcopter crashed to the ground, the incident raised new legal challenges about when and if it’s okay to shoot a robot.

Police arrested the New Jersey man, charging him with “Possession of a Weapon for an Unlawful Purpose and Criminal Mischief”. In this case, courts might find that, by firing the shotgun at the drone, the man is guilty of destruction of property. The use of force is often only legally permissible to prevent a physical threat, and a wandering drone, like a trespassing cow, is inconvenient but not an imminent danger.

Courts might rule that a trespass by drone is unlike a trespass by a pet. Drones can carry cameras, so a drone flying into a backyard isn’t just trespassing, it’s a threat to privacy. It’s also possible to put a weapon on a small drone and attack someone, even if it hasn’t happened yet. If a person shot down a drone because they believed themselves to be in danger (or actually were in danger; state laws differ), and not just because it was annoying them, then it’s possible that self-defense is a valid justification.

The law is unclear here, and there isn’t a lot of direct precedent for people shooting down a flying camera robot, which means the future of drone law could hinge on one annoyed New Jersey man and a shotgun.

Knee surgery for athletes

For every microfracture success story, like 10-time NBA All-Star Jason Kidd, there’s a Greg Oden, right, a former number-one draft pick who, after three surgeries (like the one depicted above), played in only 21 percent of games over six seasons.

Illustration by Graham Murdock

The stress of repetitive jumping makes NBA players particularly prone to painful, even career-ending cartilage lesions. For decades, microfracture surgery—pricking holes in the knee bone to stimulate tissue regrowth—was the gold-standard repair. But the fibrocartilage that forms is stiffer than the knee’s hyaline cartilage, impeding a return to elite play. “So many new procedures coming out are superior,” says orthopedist Joshua Harris, who studied microfracture’s impact on the NBA. Here’s how three of them work.

 The Substitute that Delivers

To fix a lesion, doctors use osteochondral autograft transplant surgery (OATS) to transfer cartilage from a non-load-bearing section of the patient’s knee. Riley Williams, director of the Institute for Cartilage Repair at the Hospital for Special Surgery, says that unlike microfracture, this method implants the collagen-rich hyaline necessary to continue competing at the highest level. After undergoing OATS, 75 percent of athletes under age 25 maintained the same level of physical activity, compared to 37 percent who had undergone microfracture.

The New Last Resort

Used to treat large injuries, autologous chondrocyte implantation (ACI) involves harvesting cartilage from the patient and culturing the cells in a lab for several weeks. The new cells are then placed on a biodegradable matrix and glued to the damaged area. The two-step process requires open surgery and up to a year of rehab, which dissuades some athletes. “It’s difficult to convince people that an ACI is their best option,” says orthopedic surgeon Andreas Gomoll at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, even though it’s a more durable fix than microfracture.

The Next-Gen Implants

Though not yet available in the U.S., matrix-induced ACI (MACI) and NeoCart both show great promise in Europe. MACI is essentially a one-step ACI: Because it’s completed during a single surgery, rehab time is minimal. Similarly, NeoCart, which is undergoing FDA trials, implants collagen on a biodegradable scaffold. Some studies have shown that non-athletes who underwent NeoCart recovered faster than microfracture patients. “Once good cartilage products become available, microfracture could become obsolete,” says Charles Roth of the Andrews Institute for Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine.

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

Oh give me a home...

U.S. Department of Agriculture, via Flickr CC By 2.0

The America bison (whose scientific name, we’re delighted to report, is Bison bison bison) used to roam across the prairies by the millions, but hunting culled them to near extinction. Bison have since bounced back, often by interbreeding with cattle. Yellowstone’s population of 5,000 bison is the largest and most genetically pure, but it has a problem: Although the 145 bison to be given away have a clean bill of health, many of the park's bison are carrying a disease that devastates livestock herds. 

Brucellosis is caused by the bacteria Brucella abortus, so named because it causes cattle to miscarry their fetuses. The disease has been eradicated in 48 states … everywhere except Wyoming and Montana, where 50 percent of Yellowstone’s wild bison may be infected. That’s something that makes local cattle farmers understandably nervous. 

Since 2005, Montana has quarantined the bison inside the park to keep them away from livestock, and the park has attempted to lower the prevalence of the disease in wild bison. Part of the plan included culling diseased bison from herds, and another part used calves that tested negative for Brucella to establish a small disease-free population that was kept segregated from untested bison. 

Although a 2011 study said that the measures have not been successful in reducing the prevalence of brucellosis in the overall population, there hasn’t yet been a documented case of transmission between Yellowstone bison and livestock.

The program did manage to establish a Brucella-free herd in a research facility, and over the last few years, bison from that population have occassionally been given away to start new herds on public lands and Native American territories. A study published this spring confirmed that the quarantine procedures worked, and the segregated bison were Brucella-free. Now the park is ready to give away a new installment of healthy bison. 

Conservationists hope eventually the iconic animals will once again roam freely (and safely) across the grasslands of the American Midwest.

Grand Forks Police Qube Drone

Kelsey D. Atherton

Here's a roundup of the week's top drone news: the military, commercial, non-profit, and recreational applications of unmanned aircraft.

Drunk Bust

North Dakota is one of the first states to practice using drones. In 2001, with the help of a drone on loan from Customs and Border Protection, North Dakota police arrested a cattle thief. Now, the police department in Grand Forks, North Dakota used a drone to find a truckload of underage drinkers who fled into a cornfield after being pulled over for drunk driving. With the drone, police found two of the four teens within 25 minutes, and did so at night. The Qube drone they used has an infrared camera, which is especially useful for finding people in cornfields after dark. Still, the drone can’t do everything. The two other teens were caught later, without drone assistance.

Volcanic Eruption

The Bardarbunga Volcano in Iceland erupted in August of this year. Volcanos, what with the smoke, ash, and seering hot lava, are dangerous. They also look really really cool, which makes drone-mounted cameras an ideal way to get a clearer view. In this video montage, DJI quadcopters reveal closeups of the eruption at Bardarbunga:

New Drone For Old War

This week, the United Kingdom deployed a Watchkeeper drone to Afghanistan. Watchkeeper is a surveillance platform that can fly for 16 hours at a time and travel at speeds of over 100 miles an hour. The drone, first ordered in 2005, was supposed to fly in 2010, but delays kept it from the field. Now, it joins the U.K. forces in Afghanistan only months before they are set to withdraw.

Wearable Robots

Project Nixie is a competitor in Intel’s “Make it Wearable” design contest. The drone is meant to be worn around a person’s wrist. With a gesture, the user can release the drone, which will fly out, take a picture of the user, and then fly back towards them, where the user can snag the Nixie from the sky and reattach it to her wrist. If Nixie works, expect even more amazing selfies from mountain climbers.

Drones And The Law

In New Jersey, a man shotgunned a trespassing drone out of the sky, and was arrested for it. A trespassing frisbee or a wandering pet certainly wouldn't pose the kind of threat that justifies a shotgun response, but hobbyist drones can carry cameras (and weapons, too, potentially). At present, it’s likely the law will treat drone trespasses like that of any errant toy, but in the future courts or legislatures might decide differently.

In California, Governor Brown vetoed a bill that would clarify how drones can legally operate in the Bear Republic. The bill would have set narrow boundaries for how law enforcement could use drones without obtaining a warrant first, and Brown objected to these requirements as going beyond what is required “by either the 4th Amendment or the privacy provisions in the California Constitution.” With the veto, questions of what are legal uses for drones in California remain unsettled.

Democracy Documentarians

Following an announcement by the Chinese government that Hong Kong’s 2017 elections would be more limited than previously promised, protests broke out in Hong Kong, which enjoys privileges unique within China thanks to the terms of their 1997 handover from the British Empire to the Chinese government. The protests are massive, and have been met with a large police response. Just how massive are they? Crowd estimation is imprecise, but there are other ways to convey the scale. This drone footage, flown above the protesting crowds in Hong Kong, captures a vast sea of people, likely in the hundreds of thousands. Watch the video below:

Did I miss any drone news? Email me at kelsey.d.atherton@gmail.com.

The Tier One Team

From left, Brian Binnie, Doug Shane, Mike Melvill, and Peter Siebold on White Knight. In the background, SpaceShipOne awaits its final two flights.

Photograph by John B. Carnett

Ten years ago this week, commercial spaceflight took off when a private spaceflight company won the Ansari X Prize: a space competition that was offering a $10 million reward to any non-government organization that could create and fly a reusable manned spacecraft. The rules of the game were simple: design and build a vehicle, then pilot it to the edge of space—100 kilometers up—twice within two weeks.

Twenty-six international teams participated in the competition, but the $10 million prize ultimately went to the Mojave-based Tier One project, created by aerospace engineer Burt Rutan and funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Tier One made two successful flights of its vehicle SpaceShipOne—the first on September 29, 2004 and the winning run on October 4. The win was a considerable victory, both for Rutan and for private spaceflight in general, demonstrating to hopeful visionaries everywhere that space travel was attainable outside of the government sector. In November 2004, a month after the competition was over, Popular Science ran the following profile of the Tier One team.

Spaceman

Burt Rutan has spent three decades cultivating a tiny corps of test pilots capable of making the jump to suborbital space.

Photograph by John B. Carnett

The New Right Stuff

By Eric Adams

A tiny blue-and-white rocket plane glides 44,000 feet above the Mojave Desert. Test pilot Brian Binnie, wearing a helmet and a navy blue flight suit, is focused on the cockpit's digital instrument display, stealing only quick glances out the vehicle's 18 little round windows. With the flip of a switch, he fires the rocket motor, igniting nitrous oxide and rubber. The effect is instantaneous and violent: Binnie gets slammed with four Gs as his craft shoots forward like a Sidewinder missile.

In the mission-control center, engineers study flight data on their monitors. Outside, friends and family members stare at a small, white streak of rocket exhaust in the sky. The engine is barely audible, a remote blap-blap-blap-blap-blap—but faster, like someone blowing a raspberry into a megaphone some distance away.

The force of the 15,000-pound-thrust rocket motor cranking a 4,500-pound vehicle jolts Binnie six inches up from his seat (the seatbelt arrangement is inadequate, the engineers later realize), causing him to inadvertently yank on the control stick. The force also sloshes fuel to the rear, pushing back the center of gravity. The result is a frighteningly aggressive climb that threatens to put the vehicle on its back. Binnie uses slight trim adjustments to nudge the nose down—any stick inputs would be excessive at this speed—and the rudder pedals to minimize rolling. Suddenly, silence. The powered phase of the 18-minute-long flight lasts only 15 seconds, just long enough to test the engine before gliding home.

When the motor shuts down, Binnie, a former U.S. Navy test pilot who can land a fighter jet on an unlit aircraft carrier in the dead of night without breaking a sweat, is relieved that it's over. But it's not. The decelerating vehicle goes through another cycle of whip rolls and bucking. 

Binnie endures that, but the worst is yet to come. Adrenaline still coursing through his veins, he glides down to Mojave Airport, lines up on the runway, and drops the landing gear. The wings start wobbling, and Binnie's instincts tell him that the plane is about to roll over. He releases pressure on the stick to try to stop the rolling, but that causes him to drop faster. When he tries to flare before touchdown, it's too little, too late. He hits the runway, hard, and the left gear collapses. SpaceShipOne skids down the runway, veers into the sand, whips around, and comes to rest sideways in a giant, distinctly unglamorous cloud of dust.

That was December 17, 2003, the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers' breakthrough at Kitty Hawk and a fitting day for SpaceShipOne's first powered flight. Designed by visionary aerospace engineer Burt Rutan, SpaceShipOne is the key component of a $25-million space program financed by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen. It is the leading contender for the $10-million Ansari X Prize, which will go to the first civilian team that can launch a three-person vehicle into suborbital space twice within a two-week period. Not only is Rutan's radical spaceship the first viable private spacecraft, but the men he's chosen to fly it constitute the world's first private astronaut corps—veteran test pilots who are grappling with an exceedingly challenging vehicle on its first running starts toward suborbital flight, and experiencing all the drama you'd expect in an experimental program of such ambition.

Practicing For Perfection

Brian Binnie trains in the SpaceShipOne simulator. Fellow test pilot Peter Siebold created the simulator, as well as the spacecraft's avionics software.

Photograph by John B. Carnett

Time Is Running Out

After the landing, Binnie unhooked himself from his seat, his parachute and his radio gear, popped off the cockpit door, and climbed out, his feet sinking into the sand. It's a place aircraft don't belong. The marvelous, hard-working SpaceShipOne deserves the firm support of tarmac, with an uneventful landing as the reward for a tough flight. And the pilot deserves a triumphant, though nonchalant, walk-around inspection of the vehicle.

Instead Binnie stood there in the blistering sunlight, surveying the damage to his once-pristine ship, collecting his thoughts while he waited for the emergency vehicles and support trucks to drive down the runway. In the sky, two chase planes circled, along with White Knight, the mother ship that had carried SpaceShipOne aloft. All were flown by Binnie's fellow test pilots, including two other would-be astronauts: veteran Mike Melvill, a supremely confident South African who is considered one of the best pilots in the world, and Peter Siebold, a young aeronautical engineer who never imagined he would one day be poised on the verge of spaceflight. Binnie was lucky the damage to SpaceShipOne wasn't worse, and that he wasn't injured, but still he struggled with the implications. How did this happen? Would it jeopardize the program? And the inescapable question: Did he, in full view of his respected colleagues, just lose his chance to become an astronaut?

"It was devastating," Binnie, a 51-year-old father of three, recalls. "But Burt was the first to get to me. He dusted me off, looked at the ship, and said, 'That's no problem. It's a plastic airplane! We can fix that in a few weeks.' He tried to lift my spirits at a time when they really needed lifting." Rutan's reassuring words were true—the damage was minimal, requiring just a few weeks for Scaled Composites, Rutan's company, to repair—but in the race to pilot the key X Prize spaceflights, Binnie lost points that day. While the event was downplayed publicly, its effect on the program was tremendous. First, it caused tension among the pilots. Most of them, and many engineers at Scaled, felt that the accident resulted from an understandable misinterpretation of new flying qualities, generated by modifications made to the vehicle prior to the flight. Melvill, though, was vocal with his opinion that Binnie's landing trouble was pure pilot error. "He flat didn't fly the airplane," he says. "He just flew it straight into the ground, like what you would do when flying an F-18 onto the deck."

Aim High

Veteran test pilot Mike Melvill earned his astronaut wings on June 21, 2004, after an eventful powered climb and a hair-raising descent into Earth's atmosphere.

Photograph by Dan Chavkin

But the bigger problem was the kink it inserted in the team's race toward X Prize victory. Now it was no longer just a question of whether the vehicle could do the job. It was a question of whether the pilots could, whether the team Rutan was creating—the modern counterparts of Alan Shepard and John Glenn, just as adventurous and accomplished, though without the shiny silver suits and the flashy Corvettes—could bring the plane safely home when it mattered most. Rutan and flight-test director Doug Shane, himself a test pilot in the program (though not of SpaceShipOne), had to contend with the fact that the clock was ticking on the X Prize, the cash component of which expires at the end of the year. If this were a longer-term program, Binnie's landing would have barely mattered—incidents like this happen all the time in flight testing—but a similar accident could end the X Prize run.

In the months since Binnie's flight, SpaceShipOne has beenflown only four times: twice by Siebold, who has also had bumpy landings in the vehicle, and twice by the 63-year-old Melvill, who earned his astronaut wings on June 21 when he became the first person without government backing to soar above Earth's atmosphere.

As this article went to press, the team was scheduled to attempt the two X Prize flights on September 29 and October 5, but the decision about who would pilot SpaceShipOne still hadn't been made. Rutan wants desperately to give Siebold and Binnie their astronaut wings, both because they have worked so hard on the program and because he needs more astronauts on his staff. Rutan's space program is, after all, called Tier One, and if he has a Tier Two in the pipeline, which he undoubtedly does, he'll need experienced astronauts onboard. Siebold and Binnie are much younger than Melvill, and thus more likely to be around when Rutan's next-generation, possibly orbital, vehicle is ready. But the immediate reality was the $10 million at stake, and whether it would be more prudent to give one or both of the X Prize flights to Melvill, who has aced all his landings. With the risks Rutan took in designing SpaceShipOne about to pay off, he was now forced to decide how much risk he was willing to take in choosing the pilot.

The Pilot Pool

The audacity of Rutan's design is what draws these pilots in. SpaceShipOne is actually three vehicles in one—a glider, a rocket and a spacecraft. It uses different controls and configurations for each phase of flight, including a dramatic upward "feathering" of the wings to automatically position the vehicle for reentry, like a shuttlecock. The transition from one mode to another, as well as nearly every second of flight within each mode, requires extreme skill in an aircraft as twitchy as this, the kind of hands-on piloting that modern space shuttle commanders and Soyuz cosmonauts rarely experience during their mostly automated launches, orbital maneuvers, reentries and landings. Fortunately, Rutan has spent nearly three decades creating a small but exceptionally talented cadre of test pilots, men who have flown some of the most unusual vehicles ever created, from oddly configured high-performance recreational airplanes and around-the-world record-setters to secret military projects and scientific research aircraft. Several of the pilots have flown experimental airplanes by riding on top of them, as if on a horse. They've been in deadly flat-spins, had vital components break off, and been completely out of control—but they've never been killed. None have even had to hit the silk, parachuting to safety as one of Rutan's weird inventions blasts a smoking hole in the desert.

Now Rutan is making the huge jump from aircraft to spacecraft, tapping those who know his vehicles best to pilot them into a realm that is entirely new for Scaled. It's the same approach NASA took at the dawn of the U.S. space program more than 40 years ago, when it recruited the Mercury Seven from military flight-test ranks. It was a time when flying was more seat-of-the-pants and less controlled by computers and bureaucracies than today. This new generation of private astronauts in many ways mirrors those test-pilots-cum-astronauts of the 1950s and '60s: aggressive, highly skilled and competitive, but also deeply loyal to the mission at hand, and fallible.

SpaceShipOne, which is loosely modeled on the X-15—a rocket plane that flew to the edge of space in the 1960s, often with future astronaut Neil Armstrong at the controls—is an extreme handful even for an expert pilot. Binnie has thousands of hours of hardcore military flight-test experience, plus a stint flying another would-be spacecraft, the company Rotary Rocket's exceedingly challenging (and now mothballed) Roton, a giant traffic cone with rocket-propelled helicopter blades at the top. Although Binnie is one of the most recent additions to the Scaled team, having joined in 2000, he's had more formal training than his colleagues, thanks to his military background.

Window Office

SpaceShipOne astronauts get a fragmented view of the world through 18 porthole windows.

Photograph by Dan Chavkin

He was chosen for the December 2003 test flight because he had the most experience with supersonic aircraft and had overseen the rocket motor's initial testing. His problematic landing hasn't detracted from his skills as a test pilot, proven over his long career and displayed in abundance in the 18 minutes leading up to the touchdown. But it was a bad place to get into trouble: 10 seconds from touchdown in an unpowered aircraft, with precious little room for correction. That's not to say that Melvill and Siebold haven't had major scares of their own in SpaceShipOne. They've just been luckier in their timing.

Melvill—the enthusiastic, bespectacled grandfather who has very little formal flight-test training outside Scaled but who rules every cockpit he's ever been in—was in the pilot's seat during an unpowered flight in September 2003. SpaceShipOne suddenly did a backflip in midair, tumbling out of control. To recover, he jammed the stick forward and attempted to trim the nose down, which made things worse. He had forgotten that the vehicle's tail is designed to keep the nose pointed down, exactly the opposite of a normal aircraft. It was a misjudgment equal to Binnie's, but from which Melvill had plenty of time to recover. Rutan's aerodynamics experts fixed the problem with a larger tail, which they tested by mounting it in front of a Ford F-250 pickup truck and racing down the taxiway at 90 mph.

Melvill came to Mojave in 1978, after building one of Rutan's kit planes, a Long-EZ, and flying it across the country just to show it off to its designer. Impressed, Rutan hired him on the spot as a business partner and brought his wife, Sally, on as an administrative aide. Melvill remains a part-owner of Scaled Composites and has flown every aircraft Rutan has designed. He is one of Rutan's oldest and closest friends, and the bond of trust they share is unbreakable. When Melvill had his second incident in May of this year—during a powered flight to 211,400 feet, his instrument display went out, but he continued on when many pilots would have cut the motor and returned to the airport—Rutan defended him against criticism he received. "Mike flew to the actual powered goal even though his guidance system had quit," Rutan says. "In some places, that would get a test pilot fired. In this case, I thought it was a positive, that Mike could hang in there and press on."

It was, Rutan says, one of the main reasons he chose Melvill for the first suborbital flight in June. That flight cemented the viability of Rutan's vision, as well as Melvill's street cred. When the ship hit the top of its 300,000-foot arc, Melvill experienced three minutes of weightlessness. He admired the view of southern California, and popped out a handful of M&M's that he had placed in his pocket the night before. They floated in front of his face until the ship began its nearly vertical plunge back into the atmosphere. With the wings feathered up, the sound and fury became intense. "I was flabbergasted by the acceleration into the atmosphere," he says. "It felt like a hurricane. It was the most frightening part of the flight. There's a lot of creaking and groaning, and the ship was vibrating so badly that I couldn't even read the displays."

Melvill's voice is brusque and deep, in a manner that reflects his confidence as much as does the precision of his actions in the cockpit. It's what you'd expect from a seasoned test pilot of this caliber. But what you don't expect is his disarming willingness to admit fear, or the thinly veiled tenderness with which he approaches his wife's increasing trepidation about his profession. Before each flight, Sally pins a tiny silver horseshoe—a gift she received from Mike when she was 16—to his flight suit for luck. "She's been absolutely terrified during these flights," he says. "The last two really freaked her out. But it's only a lack of knowledge that causes that fear, and you can't fix that. There's no way I can explain it all to her."

Extra Training

Peter Siebold and Chuck Coleman in front of Coleman's Extra 300, which is used to practice reentries.

Photograph by Dan Chavkin

Comradery Despite Competition

Melvill's selection as the pilot for the first and most historic suborbital flight was not unexpected, given his experience. But it was still hard news for Binnie and Siebold. "If someone said they weren't disappointed at not being selected, they'd be lying," says Siebold, a 33-year-old aeronautical engineer and father of two young children. "We're in competition, whether we like it or not. The fact is that we all would love to be doing these flights, but there are only a limited number of them, and three pilots."

At Scaled, Siebold has been allowed to meld his two greatest passions—flying and computer technology—into a career. He's an avid child of the computer age, and it was he who led the development of the elaborate flight simulator for SpaceShipOne, the first one Scaled has ever designed and built from scratch, as well as the avionics software for the actual vehicle. Sitting in a darkened room just off Scaled's main hangar floor, the simulator is a full-scale mockup of the cabin—with a carbon-fiber seat, instrument display and full array of porthole windows, each one outfitted with a monitor to display realistic views. It has been used as both a training device and an engineering tool, a way of testing and verifying design changes to the actual spaceship.

I climb into the cockpit while Siebold sets up my flight. As he taps away at a computer keyboard behind me, I wonder out loud about the disorienting array of windows (multiple porthole windows help to strengthen the fuselage) and about how a pilot can possibly keep his bearings with such a jigsaw puzzle of views. Siebold assures me that your brain pieces everything together and that you get used to it. It was through one of these windows that Siebold watched Binnie's landing back in December when he was the pilot of White Knight, which has a cockpit almost identical to that of SpaceShipOne (a deliberate measure Rutan took to help with pilot/astronaut training). "I was in a turn over the airport and saw the whole thing," he recalls. "All I could do was imagine how I would have felt in that situation. Test pilots are made out to be super-human, with superior piloting skills. We're doing our best, but there are still things that are out of our control. We hope that our training has covered them and that our instinctual reaction is the right one. But it isn't always."

He climbs into the back of the simulator to talk me through my flight. As we ascend, clouds pass slowly below us. It's peaceful, hanging there beneath White Knight. But with the push of a button, Siebold drops me. The nose tilts down, and the screens fill with brownish terrain seven miles below. I pull back on the stick and fire the rocket motor. Suddenly the ship pitches up. I struggle to keep it on something resembling a straight line, but I quickly tumble out of control. Siebold resets the simulator, and I do it again, with marginally better results—I manage to last until the engine cuts out at 160,000 feet, from which I coast to more the 250,000 feet, where the screens become black, with stars visible and Earth's horizon below. I feather the wings, reenter the atmosphere, and glide back to Mojave, where I crash into the dirt after overshooting the runway. I have only a few hours of flight training, but I know enough to recognize an extreme challenge when I see it. Add sustained G-forces and violent buffeting, and I might be able to appreciate how hard this thing is to fly.

Siebold's simulator has been critical to all three pilots' training in the past two years, and remains so as the two X Prize flights approach. But the simulator can't help with landings, which must be rehearsed in an actual aircraft because much is dependent on the motion of the vehicle and the presence of real groumd cues. Practice flights in SpaceShipOne are not an option—it costs several hundred thousand dollars for each flight, eating into the X Prize take-home money—so the pilots train in other aircraft.

The challenge is enormous, and the tension is ratcheting up as the prize deadline approaches. The atmosphere in Mojave is somewhat reminiscent of the days leading up to NASA's manned Mercury flights, when the original seven astronauts were vying for the title of first American in space. And as in 1961, if anything goes wrong, it will be in front of a huge audience. "The whole project went totally different from what I expected," Siebold says. "There [is] a lot more emotion than I ever thought there could be."

There is also a lot of danger, and perhaps that's why Rutan's test pilots remain comrades as well as competitors. In the final weeks before the prize flights, Melvill helped Binnie practice his landings by taking him up frequently in his Long-EZ plane, which nearly perfectly simulates the descent rate of SpaceShipOne on its final approach. The two pilots even created a template for the cockpit that simulates the spaceship's restricted field of view.

"I've been out with Mike in the Long-EZ, and flying White Knight to stay acclimated to the cockpit and the systems," Binnie says. "There've been a lot of signs of encouragement from everybody—you know, don't despair."

Mercury Seven

America's first astronauts, right off the the flight line. NASA's original manned space program featured a bunch of buzz-cut fighter jocks known as the Mercury Seven. Burt Rutan's new astronaut corps is equally macho, but a bit more, well, bookish-looking.

NASA