Propane Tank

Jessie Eastland aka Robert DeMeo

Propane, the gas that fuels your barbecue (and perhaps one day your car), may soon have a new, renewable source.

Researchers in Finland and England developed a genetic process that puts E. coli bacteria to work producing the flammable compound. They altered the bacterium’s metabolism so that it it churns out propane gas.

Propane is itself considered an environmentally friendly fuel under the Clean Air Act, because it breaks down into carbon dioxide and water when it burns. However, until now the gas has been produced only as a byproduct of the refining and processing of other compounds such as natural gas and petroleum, both of which are fossil fuels with serious environmental downsides.

This is not the first push for renewable methods of producing hydrocarbon energy. In May, researchers with the US Navy flew a model airplane with kerosene derived from sunlight and seawater.

Readout From an Emotion-Reading Google Glass App

© Fraunhofer IIS/Jens Garbas

Sometimes people are hard to read. Why not leave all that work to a computer? Perhaps you could use this experimental app that works in Google Glass. Aim Glass's camera at a person's face and the app reads the human's facial expression and tells you to what extent the person is feeling happy, sad, angry, or surprised. As a bonus, the app guesses the person's age and gender. Evaluating whether you want to hit on that person is still up to you.

Kidding aside, an app like this could help people with conditions, such as autism, that makes it hard for them to read emotions. The app is supposed to work entirely on Google Glass' CPU, so it doesn't need to send the images Glass records to the cloud. That means the app could work when the glasses don't have a data connection, which is nice. It could also keep the images the glasses record for the app more secure—the images are supposed to stay on the device and never enter the cloud.

A video demo of the software shows a prototype of the app on a laptop. The app, and the demos, all come from Fraunhofer, a German applied research institute.

Over the past few years, engineers working for several universities and companies have tried to make emotion-reading algorithms. Some are already on the market. Usually, the idea is that such algorithms could go into software for marketing departments (How is this new ad making viewers feel?), or into adaptive computer games (How is this level making players feel?). It's also a step toward loading the ability to read people's emotions into robots. It would certainly behoove a customer service robot, for example, to be able to sense frustration and confusion in people's faces.

Making a face-reading algorithm for private individuals to use is an unusual, but not unheard-of, idea. The market for this may not be large at present—in addition to needing the software, potential buyers have to be able to afford Google Glass—but perhaps what's especially useful here is knowing that this kind of computing can be miniaturized to something as small and light as Google Glass. That means it could show up anywhere.

Advanced Navy Strike Fighter Concept Art

Boeing

The Department of Defense wants future generations of fighter aircraft to come with copilots already installed. According to the U.S. Naval Institute, both the Navy and the Air Force want their next generation air superiority fighter to have Artificial Intelligence. From USNI:

The F-X is a fighter conceptin development to replace the Air Force’s current top dog, the stealthy F-22 Raptor, which is designed to outfight any other plane in the sky. However, the Raptor is expensive to produce, and it also suffered in some test dogfighting scenarios. Adding AI could free the pilot's mind to focus more on fewer tasks, giving them a cognitive advantage in battle.

Boeing’s Phantom Works are developing the F/A-XX Advanced Navy Strike Fighter to replace their own F/A-18 Super Hornet (or, more accurately, to replace the F-35C, which will replace the F/A-18 Super Hornet). It’s based on aircraft carriers, which are notoriously challenging to land on. The Navy’s own X-47B experimental drone has landed on an aircraft carrier successfully and autonomously, so adding a computer co-pilot to a naval craft could help there too.

Bringing the artificial intelligence inside the cockpit is one major way robots will fly alongside humans in fighters of the future -- but it’s not the only one. Last month, the Navy’s X-47B flew in formation with the F/A-18 Super Hornet, with robots and humans teaming up in separate vehicles. By the 2030s, humans with robot copilots could fly alongside robots remotely controlled by humans.

0.4 Percent Spider Silk, 99.6 Percent Silkworm Silk

Yoshihiko Kuwana et al., PLOS One, 2014. CC BY 2.5

This silk scarf and vest have a nice drape and pretty color, but that's not why everyone here at Popular Science covets them. No, we're wishing they were ours because they're made of super-strong, transgenic spider silk. Functional and good-looking! Our favorite.

The clothes were woven from silk produced by silkworms with a spider gene engineered into them. A mix of spider and silkworm proteins actually emerges from the spinners in the silkworms' mouths. The resulting hybrid material is made up of less than 1 percent spider proteins, yet it's 53 percent tougher than regular silk, according to the research team, five scientists from Japan's National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences and Shinshu University.

Scientists have long known spider-silk proteins are exceptionally strong. Dragline silk, the stuff spiders use to make the spokes of their webs and to dangle creepily from ceilings, is five times stronger than an equal-sized thread of steel would be. Researchers have thought about using spider silk for everything from surgical thread to bulletproof vests. There's no reason to make a cute scarf from spider silk, of course, but the Japanese team members wanted to demonstrate they could harvest their product and feed it into the same machines silk factories use.

Why not get the silk directly from spiders, instead of it putting it through a silkworm first? Spiders don't make a lot of silk at once and they're cannibalistic, so it's hard to maintain a spider farm. Silkworms, on the other hand, have been domesticated over thousands of years. They produce voluminous silk cocoons and they're easy to raise indoors. A silkworm that makes spider proteins could be a gentle little biological silk factory, spinning out a super-strong product.

In recent years, a number of labs have created genetically engineered silkworms that spin part-spider silk. However, this is the first time we've seen anybody produce and harvest enough of the material to weave it into something wearable.

In this research, scientists made copies of the genetic code for one dragline protein from Araneus ventricosus spiders. The researchers inserted the copies into the DNA of Japanese silkworms. They performed genetic tests on their worms to show the caterpillars truly did have spider genes and they performed strength tests on the raw silk.

Eventually, they made enough engineered silkworms that they were ready to kill the worms in their cocoons, harvest the silk, dye the silk threads, and knit the threads into cloth, just like silk factories do.

The researchers are now planning to try to raise their genetically engineered silkworms at commercial farms, the Japan Times reports. They published their scientific work last week, in the journal PLOS One.

A glimpse into the world's largest smog chamber.

Courtesy University of California, Riverside

It’s not easy to make a cloud indoors, but students at the University of California, Riverside are certainly trying. They’re using the Atmospheric Processes Laboratory—the world’s largest indoor smog chamber—to learn precisely how clouds form. 

Led by atmospheric scientist Akua Asa-Awuku, the students inject aerosol-forming compounds and water vapor into the Teflon-lined, two-story-tall chamber. Black lights and a 200-kilowatt Argon arc lamp simulate the sun; factors like temperature, pressure, humidity, and heat can be altered to mimic various conditions. More than 30 instruments—many built by students—help measure the aerosols’ chemical and physical characteristics as they attract water to form cloud droplets. 

Because aerosols are the greatest source of uncertainty in climate models, the findings may refine our understanding of climate change. Other college students, meanwhile, use the lab to study air quality, generating data that helps set federal and state emissions standards.

38: percentage of freshmen at four-year universities who planned to major in a science or engineering field in 2010

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

Read the rest of Popular Science’s education feature.

Myfawny Williams studied the genetics of Themeda triandra, a type of grass native to Africa.

Courtesy Julia Wood

In 1946, my mother, Myfanwy, was 16 and going to school in Cape Town, South Africa, when she wrote a letter to Albert Einstein that changed her life forever. She shared her dreams of becoming a scientist, describing how she and her best friends would stay up late to study the stars. To her amazement, he responded with an encouraging note. She wrote again, this time confessing that he’d been corresponding with a girl. He replied a second time, saying he didn’t mind that she was a girl—and that most importantly, she shouldn’t mind. At the time, men and women were not yet seen as equals, and my mother really struggled with being a girl and yet wanting to become a scientist. But she gathered that if the Albert Einstein didn’t care, she shouldn’t either. 

In 1948, it wasn’t the norm for a woman to go to a university, but my mother did anyway, and she ended up getting a degree in genetics. She was the only woman in her class and the only student to graduate with honors. She then went on to work with a world-renowned biologist to help restore the native grasslands around South Africa. Growing up, she was a great inspiration to me. I felt that because of her it was truly possible to make a difference. I followed in her footsteps and went to a university to study zoology and botany, and I currently work as a conservationist in Cape Town. 

My mother had this belief that I could become anything I wanted. And I can’t help but think that because Einstein believed in her, she found the strength to support my own dream of becoming a scientist.

In 1946, Myfanwy (Tyfanny) Williams wrote to Albert Einstein asking for his autograph. Scans courtesy of the Albert Einstein Archives:

 Einstein, of course, responded—but with a notable error:

Myfanwy was delighted when he responded thoughtfully, but pointed out the goof:

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

Read the rest of Popular Science’s education feature.

Classic Leg Prostheses.

If a new technique can prove its worth, it could send these clunky ball-and-socket prostheses the way of the dinosaurs.

Cpl Richard Cave RLC (Phot)/MOD

There are a lot of fancy, high-tech prosthetics out there. Some can read electrical signals from the nerves and muscles of the remaining tissue, while others even interface with the brain to read a person’s intentions when she, say, wants to reach for a chocolate bar. There are also computerized exoskeletons that can turn a quadriplegic into a soccer player.

Those concepts are super cool, but they’re also super futuristic. As in, they probably won’t be available to regular people for a few decades. For now, the most common leg prosthetic is essentially a peg leg with a simple cup-shaped socket placed over the stump (or “residual limb," if you want to get technical). Those types of limbs tend to be uncomfortable; they cause chafing and alter the biomechanics of walking in ways that put strain on the back and other body parts.

A group of researchers at University College London has developed what may turn out to be a better idea. In a clinical trial that just wrapped, they implanted 20 amputees with prosthetics that interface directly with the patient’s skeleton. Voilà, the chafing disappears, and patients get a lot more tactile feedback than regular prosthetics.

"[M]y ability to know where [my foot] is improved dramatically because you can feel it through the bone,” Mike O’Leary, an above-the-knee amputee who participated in the trial, told the Guardian. “A textured road crossing, I can feel that. You essentially had no sensation with a socket and with Itap you can feel everything." (“Itap” is the name of the prosthetic, standing for Intraosseous Transcutaneous Amputation Prosthesis.)

What’s really neat is how the researchers prevent infections from developing between the metal and the flesh. The prosthetic limbs are modeled after deer antlers, which have porous bone beneath their surface; the pores help soft tissue invade the bone and seal off the interface between skin and bone, so dirt and bacteria can’t get in. Itap uses a similar porous design in the area where the skin and prosthetic meet, allowing soft tissue to invade the metal.

If the data from the trial looks good, the limb could be deployed soon in specialist clinics across the U.K., and hopefully the U.S.

However, the latter may prove to be a particular challenge, according to a 2013 paper by Mark Pitkin from Tufts University. “The DSA [Direct Skeletal Attachment] procedure is still not allowed by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States,” he writes, “even though there are a substantial number of amputees, including US Veterans, who would benefit and whose quality of life would improve from DSA.”

If they expect to get past the FDA, the researchers will have to show that their prosthetic attaches safely to the bone and keeps out infections. 

Itap Design.

M.Pitkin/Journal Of Biomedical Materials Research

In certain circles, the term "Maker" has come to mean "do-it-yourself enthusiast." And NYC Makers, the biennial show at the Museum of Arts and Design, does feature a few projects that would look right at home in a dedicated hackerspace. 

But at MAD, the definition of a maker has expanded to include artists, artisans, and more. In one room, sculptures sit side-by-side with a shipping box specially designed to protect delicate objects during transit. Scratch-and-sniff wallpaper adorns the stairwells, and security guards wear knitted vests designed by a fashion house. Other featured pieces include moonshine, huge blown-glass terrariums, podcast episodes, and even a room decorated as a "nightclub environment." 

If you're looking for the type of DIY projects you might find at MakerFaire, NYC Makers may disappoint. However, it does showcase the astonishing variety of stuff that New Yorkers are creating every day. And if you want to skip the entry fee, check out the DIY-flavored pieces in this gallery of photos. NYC Makers runs until October 12.

Receiving a Brain Message

Carles Grau et al., PLOS One, 2014. CC BY 2.5

So a team of neuroscientists sent a message from the brain of one person in India, to the brains of three people in France, using brainwave-reading equipment and the Internet. Yes, really.

The process is slow and cumbersome. It also doesn't make use of any bleeding-edge technology. Instead, it puts together neurorobotics software and hardware that have been developed by several labs in recent years. We're not predicting that this will have practical applications, or society-changing implications, any time soon. Still, it's pretty amusing that somebody did this, and we're here to give you the step-by-step instructions on how.

To wit:

1. The emitter—we're using the vocab and italics from the original paper because they are awesome—wears an EEG cap on her scalp that records the electrical activity in her brain. The cap communicates wirelessly with a laptop that shows, on its screen, a white circle on a black background.

2. The emitter translates the message she wants to send into an obscure five-bit binary system called Bacon's cipher, which is more compact than the binary code that computers use.

3. The emitter now has to enter that binary string into the laptop using her thoughts. She does this by using her thoughts to move the white circle on-screen to different corners of the screen. (Upper right corner for "1," bottom right corner for "0.") This part of the process takes advantage of technology that several labs have developed, to allow people with paralysis to control computer cursors or robot arms.

4. The emitter's binary message gets sent over the Internet, yay.

5. The receivers sit inside a transcranial magnetic stimulation machine that's able to send electromagnetic pulses through people's skulls. The pulses make the receivers see flashes of light in their peripheral vision that aren't actually there. In addition, the machine has a robotic arm that's able to aim at different places on the receivers' skulls. The results are phantom flashes (called phosphenes) that seem to show up in different positions in the air, which is not spooky at all, no.

6. As soon as the receivers' machine gets the emitter's binary message over the Internet, the machine gets to work. It moves its robotic arm around, sending phosphenes to the receivers at different positions on their skulls. Flashes appearing in one position correspond to 1s in the emitter's message, while flashes appearing in another position correspond to 0s.

7. We don't know how the receivers keep track of all that flashing. Perhaps they take notes using a pen and paper.

Whew, that's a lot of work to give your friends a holler. The research team, including neuroscientists and engineers from universities and startups in Europe and the U.S., understandably sent only two messages in this manner: "hola" and "ciao." Imagine trying to send "bonjour" or "good morning."

The team published its work in August in the journal PLOS One. It is there you can find this super-amazing graphic of the experimental setup:

Brain-to-Brain Messaging Setup

Carles Grau et al., PLOS One, 2014. CC BY 2.5. Click here to see the image larger.

Exo Labs Model 2 Camera attached to a light microscope

Exo Labs

Exo Labs Model 2 Camera

The Model 2 camera attaches to any standard microscope and captures high-res images of the field of view. An app streams images to an iPhone or iPad so that students can annotate and measure the object they’re observing. 

littleBits Popular Science Super Bundle

The mini circuit boards made by littleBits snap together with magnets. The Popular Science Super Bundle, available this fall, includes the company’s new cloud module, which allows users to connect projects to the Web, plus an Arduino. 

ThingLink

This platform provides tools that allow users to create interactive experiences for images and videos. Both teachers and students can design features like clickable notes, links to resources, and even online “exit” quizzes and assignments.

LEGO Mindstorms Education EV3

A color-sorting robot, created through LEGO's EV3 kit.

LEGO

Scratch 2.0

Students young and old can develop animated visualizations and simulations that illustrate a wide variety of different scientific and technology concepts. Along the way, users get a good understanding of basic programming and coding.

SimCityEDU: Pollution Challenge

The first game in the SimCity-EDU series turns middle school kids into urban planners. Six missions challenge them to balance a city’s environmental concerns with the economic needs of its citizens. Teachers get a related lesson plan.

Raspberry Pi

A credit-card sized computer comprised of a single board, Raspberry Pi is a way for tech-novices to grasp computer science -- both hardware and software. Just hook it up to a monitor and keyboard start working on any kind of electronics project. 

MaKey MaKey Invention Kit

Using MaKey MaKey to play Super Mario using a Play-Doh controller

MaKey MaKey

Hummingbird

This particular robotics kit eschews cold, lifeless metal for soft and colorful cartoony looks. Kids who might be too wild to handle delicate equipment can still enjoy the wonders of robotics with Hummingbird's durable kit and common crafts materials.   

Printrbot

3D printers are making their way into classrooms everywhere. Printrbot goes one step further and offers lesson plans and project designs that helps teachers get their students excited and motivated about mathematics, physics, and technology.

A version of this article originally appeared in the September 2014 issue of Popular Science.

Read the rest of Popular Science’s education feature.

If you are a scientist handling deadly pathogens, it's time to clean out your freezer. The National Institutes of Health has declared September National Biohazard Stewardship Month, after two recent incidents involving dangerous diseases in laboratories.

The NIH wants labs to check up on their stocks of infectious agents and toxins and review safety practices. This comes after a dangerous summer for pathogen research. In June, workers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Prevention were accidentally exposed to live anthrax bacteria. Then, in July, decades-old vials of live smallpox virus were found in a freezer in Maryland amid 327 vials of dengue, flu and other dangerous pathogens. Experts say there is precedent for finding lost smallpox vials and there are likely more out there.

In a memo to NIH safety officials and associated laboratories, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the NIH, wrote, "These events potentially put individuals at risk, undermine public confidence in the research enterprise, and must be addressed to prevent their reoccurrence."

Biological samples in a freezer.

Nick Smith/ALSPAC via Wikimedia Commons

The NIH is not the only institution calling for more stringent attention to safety standards. In August, Dr. Timothy J. Donohue, president of the American Society for Microbiology, said in an open statement to members that, "Simply put, I think it is good 'laboratory housekeeping' to review what microbes we each have in the lab, inventory them, and use appropriate methods to deposit in an approved collection or destroy any cultures that are no longer needed by our labs."

While labs that receive money from the government are obligated to follow regular NIH safety protocols and their state and local health policies, National Biohazard Stewardship Month is not mandatory.

Ryan Bayha, Senior Analyst for Biosecurity and Biosafety Policy at the NIH, says he does not believe there has been a slip in safety practices in institutions that handle smallpox, anthrax or other dangerous diseases.

"It's an unfortunate confluence," he said. "Recent events are teachable."

NIH officials say the month is primarily about paying closer attention to rules scientists already follow.

Wild Boar

Flickr CC by 2.0

In Germany, boar meat is considered a delicacy, consumed in various forms such as salami and boar leg. But now, German restaurant-goers may want to rethink ordering boar the next time they dine out (and it’s not because of boar taint).

According to the Telegraph, recent testing in the state of Saxony has revealed that more than one-in-three wild boar in Germany are so radioactive that they're considered unfit for human consumption. Boar carcasses are not supposed to exceed radiation levels of 600 becquerels per kilogram, but in the past year, 297 out of 752 boar tested in Saxony have su this safe amount. Some boars have even tested dozens of times over.

The illuminating trend is thought to be a lingering effect of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, one of the worst nuclear power plant accidents in history. More than 28 years ago, a reactor exploded at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet-run Ukraine, releasing radioactive particles into the atmosphere. The contamination was so widespread that experts have estimated between 4,000 and 93,000 extra cancer deaths have occurred as a result of Chernobyl, though the actual tally may never be known.

Saxony is approximately 700 miles away from the Chernobyl site, but various weather conditions helped the radioactive particles spread far into Western Europe, contaminating much of the ground soil. And, since wild boar dig through soil for food, they are particularly affected by this contamination. They also eat underground mushrooms and deer truffles, which are known to store radiation.

Apparently, researchers have been cataloguingthis pattern of boar radioactivity for some time, and they don’t believe it’ll go away any time soon. Experts predict it may be another 50 years before boar radiation levels return to normal, the Telegraph notes.

In the meantime, Germans should keep an eye out for any boars exhibiting super powers.

Refrigerator for a Quantum Processor

Part of the cooling unit that keeps the D-Wave Two's processor near absolute zero

NASA Ames / John Hardman

Google apparently wants to try its hand at making its own quantum computing hardware. The company announced in its research blog that it's launching a project to make quantum processors that use superconductors.

Google is already involved in quantum computer research through the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab. Lab members now run their experiments on a D-Wave Two device, the world's only commercially available quantum computer. (It's not even certain whether D-Wave Twos truly act as quantum computers, although a number of tests have found they do.) Google researchers will continue to work with researchers at the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, which includes scientists from NASA and universities, the blog announcement says.

Computer scientists think quantum computers could be especially good at optimization problems, which include problems that would be of interest to Google's current products. Image recognition—which Google Image Search uses to recognize what's in pictures from visual information, not just text tags—is an optimization problem.

However, quantum computers haven't yet proven faster than classical computers at solving the same puzzles. Theoretically, they should be many times faster. But they are such early-stage products, they have little memory and are vulnerable to outside disturbances that erase their unique properties. So there's plenty of space for improving the hardware.

Peter Thiel outlines his start-up philosophy in Zero to One, which will be published in September.

Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Four years ago, billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel announced the Thiel Fellowship, a two-year start-up accelerator for young science and tech prodigies. The program awards 20 kids under age 20 $100,000 each to pursue world-changing innovations and businesses. The one caveat: They have to drop out of school to get it. The unorthodox program did not go over well with many. Larry Summers, former Harvard president and U.S. Treasury secretary, told attendees at a conference last October that it was “the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy in this decade.” He called the fellowship “meretricious in its impact and the signals that it sends to a broader society.” 

Thiel, a 46-year-old tech prodigy himself, has never hewed to convention. He co-founded PayPal in 1998, and in 2004 became the first outside investor in Facebook. He then sank his wealth and business acumen into global venture-capital and hedge funds, which have invested in such startups as SpaceX, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Spotify. Thiel, in other words, has a long history of backing winning entrepreneurs, and now he’s betting on the potential of his fellows. Some 500 teenagers apply each year for a slot. “These people are phenomenally talented,” he says, “so I think this subset will make a very big difference in the years and decades ahead.” 

A college education, Thiel argues, is grossly overpriced and contributes to a national student-debt burden that now exceeds $1 trillion. He’s not aiming to fix the U.S. education system, but says he is challenging the assumption that college is the only route to success. “How did we ever get to the place where we have a one-size-fits-all society?” he says. “I think we need more diversity, some genuinely different paths for people.” 

Certainly some of the more than 80 Thiel fellows excelled far more outside the classroom. Take, for example, Thomas Sohmers, who abandoned high school last year as a 17-year-old junior in Hudson, Massachusetts. “I was an absolutely horrible student,” he says. He let some grades slip to a D while spending most of his time at MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nano-technologies, where he had started working as an intern in eighth grade. During his fellowship, Sohmers and his MIT mentor co-founded REX Computing, a start-up that develops energy--efficient, high-performance microprocessors to power servers and supercomputers. 

His trajectory isn’t unusual. The Thiel program allows fellows to pursue independent projects while connecting them to a network of mentors. Nearly 60 fellows have turned those pursuits into companies and nonprofits in fields such as synthetic biology, aerospace, and neural prosthetics. Collectively they have raised more than $100 million in funding. 

Thiel wants more self-motivated, talented kids to have more avenues to chase their dreams, and he praises initiatives such as Y Combinator and Techstars, which both offer seed money and mentorship opportunities. “We want to be a part of a broader effort to think about how we as a society can accelerate innovation and progress,” Thiel says. 

Some universities have taken offense. “I don’t like it,” says Bill Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. “We shouldn’t pay people to drop out of school.” Such accelerators have reframed the quest for higher education—and colleges have noticed. “We’re not losing students to Stanford or Harvard,” Aulet says. “Our competition is places like Thiel or Y Combinator.” 

Schools, in turn, have begun to offer more support to entrepreneurs on campus. MIT, for example, has been building a summer program called Global Founders’ Skills Accelerator. It awards up to $20,000 to teams of students, recruited internationally, that meet mutually agreed upon project milestones. Harvard, Stanford, and Yale have also expanded their entrepreneurship programs. 

Even Thiel acknowledges that college probably offers more opportunities for many kids. In fact, he taught a class on entrepreneurism at Stanford, his alma mater. And some of Thiel’s fellows have gone back to school. Eden Full, now 22, returned to Princeton after developing SunSaluter, a device that helps solar panels track the sun. Now a senior in mechanical engineering, she juggles running a nonprofit with her coursework. “The Thiel Fellowship changed my life, but so has Princeton,” Full says. “I would not be the person I am today without both of these experiences.”

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

Read the rest of Popular Science’s education feature.

New Giant Tanks

The answer, it turns out, is "War Brutes."

Popular Science

In 1935, Popular Science announced the age of the tank with these words: “Fast, powerful land battleships may speed up the net war by preventing trench stalemates, or even make war an impossibility.” While the second half of that prediction failed to materialize, 75 years ago this week, the first part became crushingly real as a German offensive, spearheaded by 2,000 tanks, entered Poland. Warsaw would surrender just 27 days later. Here’s how Popular Science covered the development of the tank in the years between its debut in World War I to its horrific triumph in the second World War.

In World War I, tanks first appeared as weapons exclusive to the allies. Invented by the British, they had their debut in 1916, and other allied nations made their own to join in. Germany, on the receiving end of tank offensives, was slow to develop armored gunwagons of their own. When the German tanks emerged, Popular Science was unimpressed. A 1918 story titled “German Monsters--Clumsy Copies of the French Tanks” finds that the tank's great weight, weak motors, thin armor, and flat surfaces all make it vulnerable, not just to heavy weapons, but to mere rifle shot.

A post-war story, published in 1919, asks, “Can We Beat Our Swords into Plowshares?” It proposed turning old tanks into tractors, with further conflict nowhere in sight.

Or Tanks To Tractors

Popular Science

Popular Science looked at how nations were “Getting Ready for the Next War” in 1927. While death rays and submarines that launched dirigibles never came to pass, tanks were clearly part of the arsenal of the future. But no one quite knew just what shape those tanks would take:

Greyhound Tank

Popular Science

The 1920s and 1930s were ripe for experimentation in tank design. Tested in 1929, a U.S. Army Greyhound tank hit a top speed of 42.55 miles an hour over rough ground. The Greyhound’s speed was impressive, but its design made it ill-suited for war. Open-topped, its armament was limited to a gun in a small swivel at the tank’s front, with additional firepower coming from weapons fired by the crew over the top of the tank.

Another inaccurate prediction merged airplane and tank -- both revolutionary World War I military technologies -- into one future vehicle. “Flying Tanks...War’s Deadliest Weapon” from 1932 sees a future of armored assault vehicles falling like anvils from the sky. From the article:

While winged tank design remains firmly an artifact of the past, occasionally there are attempts to make tanks light enough to drop from airplanes but still strong enough to fight in battle. The U.S. Army started looking into one as recently as last year.

Deadlier Than A Flying Car

Popular Science

Such was the power of tanks on the psychic imagination of military commenters that they imagined such a deadly weapon might itself make war obsolete. From our 1935 story “New Giant Tanks: Peacemakers or War Brutes?”   

Tanks In The Spanish Civil War

Popular Science

In the 1938 story “How Good Are The New War Machines?”, Popular Science looked at “test tube conflicts [that] put the latest weapons on trial.” One of the most important of these was the Spanish Civil War, fought between the democratic Republic of Spain and the fascist Nationalists. Crucially, both sides had powerful foreign backers, with the Republic supported by the USSR and the Nationalists backed by Germany. In Spain, both Soviets and Nazis tested their tanks in battle:

Another dangerous enemy of the tanks was the land mine, exploded remotely or by direct contact. A five-pound TNT mine put any tank out of action.

The lessons learned in Spain would go on to influence tank doctrine and design in both Germany and Russia, and in turn, shape how World War II was fought. Neither nation, however, came up with an effective way to protect tanks against roadside bombs.

In fact, the danger to tanks from a small explosive, then called TNT and today known as an IED, is one that persists to this day, with DARPA announcing last month a contest to make future tanks safer. In doing so, modern tank designers will wrestle with the competing needs of speed, armor, and firepower that have challenged tank designers since these machines first rolled into battle. Of course, history offers plenty of bad ideas for modern tank designers to copy:

A Venezuelan Armored Car

This is...not a great tank design.

Popular Science

And it looks like some are already doing so.

This gamechanger can take a beating.

Photograph by Brian Klutch

For decades, football players have worn rigid, unyielding helmets that protected the skull but did little to prevent concussions. To address this shortcoming, Riddell built a smarter helmet. Available to NFL and college teams, and soon youth and high school players, the new SpeedFlex is designed to diminish the impact forces of a hard hit. It will also alert coaches on the sideline if a blow was powerful enough to potentially cause a head injury. At a time when the sport has been hammered with bad news, this might be a game changer.

Flex panel

At the crown of the helmet, a flexible panel that has a polycarbonate shell attaches with a living hinge. It is padded with polyurethane and synthetic rubber and can depress up to a quarter of an inch, dispersing the force of an impact. 

Face mask 

Most face masks attach to the helmet at a player’s brow, but SpeedFlex’s attaches at the sides. The configuration diffuses any force around the helmet, away from one central area. The stainless-steel mask is also designed to flex.

Chin strap 

If a high school player loses his helmet, rules require him to sit out a play. Riddell’s ratchet-lock will make such incidents almost impossible. Unlike buckles or snaps, its guided tooth mechanism works more like snowboard bindings.

Data Collection

Sensors in the helmet collect data on impact force, linear or rotational acceleration, and location. If the hit put the player at risk of a concussion, the information is sent to a handheld device that alerts the trainer on the sidelines. 

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

Solar Activity From August 1st, 2010

NASA, via Wikimedia Commons

What’s the fastest way to understand space? According to NASA, it’s listening to the music of the spheres displayed as actual music. A program that converts astronomical data into sound is letting researchers blaze through years of data with ease. At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, University of Michigan doctoral candidate Robert Alexander listens to audio files made from satellite data. The Wind spacecraft sits between Earth and the Sun, and records changes in the Sun’s magnetic field. Here’s how that becomes sound:

This mostly translates to white noise, but when there’s something anomalous, Alexander can hear it happen and make note of where in the file it happened. And Alexander isn’t the only one using data this way. In fact, he’s training other physicists who study the sun how to be active listeners. A similar project, onomatopoetically dubbed "PEEP," wants to use sound as a monitoring tool, turning network activity into a gentle chorus of bird sounds, interrupted by frog croaks at the first sign of trouble.

Listen to a reverse shockwave headed toward the Sun below, and read more at NASA:

A Map Of Maer Island In The Torres Straits.

Popular Science

An Expedition To The Coral Reefs Of The Torres Straits

Alfred Gouldsborough Mayor was a Renaissance man. He was trained in physics but later became a pioneer in marine biology, noted for his studies of jellyfish and corals. He was also a gifted artist and a zoology enthusiast, with a passion for hunting. It has been said that few field naturalists could claim to have visited as many truly exotic locales as Mayor, and in our September 1914 issue, he narrated his adventures in visiting the Torres Straits off the coast of Australia. The lively account describes his interactions with the locals, the fascinating animals he encountered, and even a taste of the local cuisine:

Scientists Attempt To Explain Heredity

When Darwin published his theory of evolution by natural selection, he had no idea how traits were actually passed down from one generation to another. It was a question people were still grappling with in 1914.  

“In the same environment one egg becomes a chicken and another a duck; one becomes a frog, and another a fish, and another a snail,” human evolutionary biologist Edwin Grant Conklin wrote in Popular Science. “Since these differences may occur in the same environment they must be due to differences in the germ cells concerned."

“There is much evidence that the factors for all sorts of alternative characters are associated with the chromosomes.”

World War I Begins

A collection of essays examine the intersection between war and science. Popular Sciencetook a staunch anti-war stance: “Everywhere the energies of men are diverted from scientific and social progress to destruction.”

1st Division Boys, World War I

Library of Congress

You can read the entire September 1914 issue of Popular Sciencehere.

Cancer vs. Organoid

Slides of a patient’s tumor (right) and of an organoid made from that tumor (left).

Dr. Yu Chen

When it comes to treating cancer, all tumors are not created equal. Within every cancer type – whether it be in the bone or the breast – each patient has a unique set of mutations that cause their cells to be cancerous. That means therapies need to be personally tailored to each individual in order to be most effective.

Hoping to make this kind of personalized medicine a reality, researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center have successfully grown six functioning prostate cancer ‘organoids’ outside the body. Derived from biopsies of patients with metastatic prostate cancer, the tiny organic 3-D structures are comprised of thousands of cells, grouped together and organized like an organ. Their tissues are also highly similar to the biopsy samples from which they came, making them almost like tiny replicas of prostate cancer in a petri dish. The researchers hope to use these organoids as tools for testing new cancer drugs in the future.

According to Dr. Yu Chen, the lead researcher on the project, organoids are relatively new to medicine but are proving to be promising for research, as they mimic human organs. “We have all different kinds of cells in our body, but within each organ, there are also multiple cell types,” Chen, an assistant attending physician at MSK, tells Popular Science. In the lab, organoids continuously generate these different cells, just on a much smaller scale.

Chen says that with his lab's cancer organoids, the cells are a bit more monotonous, since the cells in a tumor are mostly the same. However, each cancer organoid is unique from one another, containing the distinct mutations from each patient’s cancer.

Now the idea is to create a whole lot of these tiny prostate cancer organoids, to determine which medicines work best for different subsets of patients. “If we have the mutations from a large number of patients, this will help us discover which mutations correlate to drug sensitivity or drug resistance in the laboratory,” Chen says, who noted that the organoids could be used to test multiple drugs at the same time.

Meanwhile, experts predict that more and more patients will have their cancer genomes sequenced in the future, revealing which mutations are turning their cells against them.  And with the information gleaned from organoid testing, researchers will be able to know which mutations respond better to certain treatments, making therapy options a lot more personal.

The researchers published their findings in the journal Cell.

Three British soldiers in trench under fire during World War I

Library of Congress

The first post in our "Remembering The Great War" series comes from the September 1914 issue of Popular Science, which is the first time the magazine discusses the war in Europe. In a series of essays, scientists probed various aspects of war, and came down strongly in favor of peace. “Everywhere the energies of men are diverted from scientific and social progress to destruction,” we wrote. Essay topics included the futility of war as a means of creating peace (by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie), the (im)morality of war (by philosopher William James), and even speculations that sending a nation's fittest men to be slain in war could lead to the degeneration of society. The latter essay was authored by the noted ichthyologist, eugenicist, and peace activist David Starr Jordan, who wrote,

(For context: Eugenics, or the idea that societies could improve themselves by weeding out people who are  genetically "less fit", was a concept that was accepted by many scientists in the early 1900s. The idea later lost steam as scientists realized that harmful mutations are naturally introduced into the population all the time ... and after forced sterilizations, euthanization, and mass murder made eugenics seem a lot less beneficent.)

The most compelling essay from the September 1914, excerpted below, was written by psychologist James McKeen Cattell (originally in 1912, and republished for this issue) and explores the relationship between war and science.

Science And The International Good Will

By James McKeen Cattell for Popular Science, April 1912. Republished September 1914.

Science with its applications has been one of the principal factors leading to peace and international good will. Science, democracy and the limitation of warfare are the great achievements of modern civilization. They have advanced together almost continuously from the beginnings of the universities of Bologna, Paris and Oxford in the twelfth century to their great triumphs in the nineteenth century and the present promise of their complete supremacy. It may be urged reasonably that science is the true cause of democracy and that science and democracy together are the influences most conducive to permanent and universal peace.

The applications of science in industry, agriculture and commerce, in the prevention of disease and of premature death, have abolished the need of excessive manual labor. It long ago became unnecessary for the great majority of the people to be held in bondage in order that a few free citizens might have education and opportunity, and slavery has been gradually driven from the world. The vast progress of scientific discovery and invention in the nineteenth century has reduced to a moderate amount the daily labor required from each in order that all may be adequately fed, clothed and housed. The death-rate has been decreased to one half; the ensuing lower birth-rate has freed nearly half the time of women and reduced proportionately the labor of men. The period of childhood and youth may be devoted to universal education, and equality of opportunity can be given to all. It is no longer needful to depend on a privileged class to conduct the affairs of government and to supply men of performance. Those selected from all the people as most fit can be given the preparation and opportunity needed to enable them to become leaders, and every one can take an intelligent share in political affairs and in appreciation of the higher things of life.

In giving us democracy science has made its greatest contribution to the limitation of warfare. It must be admitted that a democratic people may be inflamed into a mob mad for war; but this is not likely to happen in the case of a war of policy or of aggression. In the past wars have been more often due to the ambitions, difficulties and intrigues of kings and princes than to the passions of the people, and the decrease of wars has been largely a result of the establishment of constitutional governments and of the legalization of the methods of conscription and taxation. If a declaration of war or an ultimatum leading to war were subject to a referendum, the vote being taken not too promptly, and if the estimated cost of the war were collected in taxes in advance, there would not be many wars.

We are still far from having a true political and social democracy. The production of wealth has increased rapidly; but we have not learned to distribute it justly or to use it wisely. The education supplied by our schools is inadequate and inept. We may be confident that a complete democracy will be the strongest force for peace that the world has seen. Even now the great mass of the people, most of them having some education and some property, are the true guarantees against wanton war. A king can no longer summon his nobles and the chiefs gather together their retainers to invade a foreign country. A war which, with' its accompanying pestilence and famine, would reduce the population of a country to one half, as in the case of the thirty years' war, is now almost inconceivable. And this we owe to social and political democracy, which in turn we owe to science.

As a result of scientific progress and invention, the law of Malthus has been reversed. The means of subsistence increase more rapidly than the population. The sinister voluntary limitation of childbirth, which may give rise to racial deterioration and actual depopulation, is unnecessary. As population increases under a given condition of culture, the number of men of genius and talent competent to make the labor of each more efficient increases in proportion; as their inventions are of benefit to all, the means of subsistence tend to increase as the square of the population. As the level of education and culture is raised, and as democracy is perfected, so that each is given opportunity to do the work for which he is fit, the wealth and means of subsistence increase still more rapidly. The law of Malthus and the law of diminishing returns, like the law of the degradation of energy, may ultimately prevail, but not in any future with which we are concerned. The population of a civilized country, in which science is cultivated, need not be limited by famine, pestilence or war. Over-population and the need of expansion by conquest are obviated by democracy and science; the cause of war which may be regarded as inevitable and legitimate is thus abolished. In providing adequately for the subsistence of an increasing population, science has made a contribution to peace the magnitude of which cannot be easily overstated.

German Zeppelin

Wikimedia Commons

Science has given us democracy, it has given us ample means of subsistence, it has given us commerce and intercommunication, and these three achievements are the principal factors which have lessened warfare and will eventually lead to its complete abolition. Other contributions of science, though less momentous, are by no means unimportant. Warfare is now in large measure applied science, and this tends towards its decrease. Wars between nations with scientific equipment and savage and barbarous peoples are no longer waged on equal terms and are of short duration. The extermination, despoliation and subjugation of the non-Caucasian races may be the world's great tragedy, and in so far as some of these peoples are able to adopt our science there will be a readjustment which may be written in blood or may be a triumph of common sense and justice. However this may be, the invincibility that science has conferred on the western nations has made them safe from attack and invasion, and while it may on occasion have led to wanton aggression, it has, on the whole, limited warfare. If we call to mind the centuries of invasion and threats of invasion by North-men, Ottomans and Saracens, we can appreciate the value of the means of defense which science has given to the civilized nations.

The making of warfare an applied science by the western nations and by one eastern nation has tended also to prevent war between nations so equipped. When war is a game of skill rather than of chance, it is likely to be' undertaken only after careful consideration of the conditions and consequences. The cost is enormous and must be carefully weighed. The interests of the money lenders are usually on the side of peace and become increasingly so as war continues. If war does occur between two great nations it is likely to be of short duration. It can not drag on through tens of years as formerly. Its horrors are also reduced; non-combatants are not so much concerned, and soldiers suffer less from disease—far more dreadful than violence—owing to the shorter duration of wars and to hygiene, medicine and surgery. It may be hoped that science has accomplished, on the whole, more for defense than for aggression; torpedoes, mines, submarines and aeroplanes are more effective for protection than for attack. The cost of modern armaments is so immense that this in itself will lead to their limitation and to the settlement of difficulties otherwise than by appeal to arms.

There is a psychological aspect of modern scientific warfare, which tends to discredit it. The heroism and the bravery, the excitement of personal contact and the exhibition of personal prowess, the romance and the occasional chivalry, are largely gone. Men cooped up in battleships or displayed like pawns on the field are not much greater heroes to themselves or to others than workers in a mine exposed to nearly equal danger. Officers under constant instructions from the seat of government and telegraphing their orders from a point of safety fall to the level of ordinary men of affairs. Tin soldiers will not forever stir the imagination of children in the nursery. Providence is on the side favored by the money lenders and having the best organized commissariat. War becomes brutal and disgusting; at its best like the business of the hangman, at its worst like infanticide.