Popular Science 2010-02 PDF

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february ’10
FEATURES
PopSci innovator
46 SCREEN QUEEN
The Future of engineering
Mary Lou Jepsen, the engineer behind
38 RENOVATING AMERICA
the “$100 laptop” initiative, has How can we build better bridges,
perfected an LCD screen that could highways and water mains? With new
finally mean the death of paper. tech, including superconducting power
By Lauren Aaronson lines, no-dig water pipes, and self-
healing pavement. By Adam M. Bright
uncommon knowledge
52 SCARY SCIENCE
To fear or not to fear: next-gen nukes,
cyborg beetles, and a drug that makes
you trust total strangers. We uncover
the truth behind creepy research.
By Jason Daley
ON THE COVER: NICK KALOTERAKIS; THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: PAUL WOOTTON; PETER BOLLINGER; COHERENT IMAGES; JOHN B. CARNETT
Fieldwork
58 THE MIND READERS
Neuroscientists can reconstruct
mental images—like the hamburger
you’re picturing—using a common
brain scanner and complex math.
Reading your thoughts may well
be next. By Lisa Katayama
The Green Dream

64 SWAPPABLE SWITCHES
Learn from POPSCI’s staff photog as
he constructs a home packed with
eco-innovations. This month: Radio- 46
controlled light switches to save
energy easily. By John B. Carnett
64
58
52
POPSCI.COM FEBRUARY 2010 POPULAR SCIENCE 03

CONTENTS
16
78 30
REGULARS
$!MEGAPIXELS
10 Above the Sahara Desert; inside the New Delhi subway.
$!WHAT’S NEW POPSCI’S BEST OF CES 2010
For details from Las Vegas, host to the world’s largest consumer-
15 COMPUTING electronics extravaganza, check out our guide to the newest gear and
An ultra-thin laptop based on high-end cellphones.
gadgets worthy of your attention at popsci.com/bestofces2010.
16 THE GOODS
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY LG; ISTOCK; COURTESY MICROSOFT; COURTESY VIN MARSHALL; INSET: ISTOCK; THEREDDRESS.CO.UK;
Boots with air shocks; a pocket-sized projector.
18 AUTOMOTIVE NEW SLIDESHOWS AND FEATURES
Tiny, fuel-efficient cars could make this the year of small.
21 HOME TECH How It Works: Project Natal
A laser-guided robot smarter than a Roomba. We visit Microsoft for a behind-
$!HEADLINES the-scenes look at how it taught
the Xbox 360’s controller-free
27 RESEARCH
Digitizing every known species to help identify new ones. gaming add-on, Project Natal,
to recognize even the smallest
28 THE FUTURE OF SPORTS human gestures. See our report
A camera system tracks baseball’s most complicated stats.
at popsci.com/natal.
30 ENGINEERING
The faster yacht with a giant rigid wing for a sail.
32 ANNOTATED MACHINE Mind Reading in Real Life
Shooting satellites into space—from a seaborne gun. Think the mind-reading machine in this month’s feature [page 58]
sounds too far-fetched? Think again. Go to popsci.com/mindreader
$!HOW 2.0 to see a video of the telepathy project in action.
69 YOU BUILT WHAT ?!
An air cannon sends pumpkins 3,700 feet.
Web Project: A Pneumatic
74 THEME BUILDING
COURTESY GILLES MARTIN-RAGET/BMW ORACLE RACING
Hot-Dog Cannon
DIY snow vehicles show winter who’s boss. Watch this sausage gun fire a
76 GRAY MATTER frankfurter 100 feet (really!), and get the
A battery that runs on air. scoop on how to build your own air-powered
78 ASK A GEEK weapon at popsci.com/pneumaticcannon.
How to score the best iPhone apps.
$!FYI Tech Buyer’s Guide iPhone App
80 How much cash can I get for my spare organs? Ready to cash in those holiday gift certificates? Download our free
mobile buyer’s guide to making smart purchases on HDTVs, netbooks,
$!OTHER STUFF digital cameras and more at popsci.com/buyersguideapp.
06 FROM THE EDITOR
09 THE INBOX
GOT QUESTIONS? Send them to fyi@popsci.com. We’ve got answers!
92 THE FUTURE THEN
04 POPULAR SCIENCE FEBRUARY 2010 POPSCI.COM

FROM THE EDITOR
THE
FUTURE
NOW
Editor-in-Chief Mark Jannot

Deputy Editor Jacob Ward
Creative Director Sam Syed
EDITORIAL
Executive Editor Mike Haney
Features Editor Nicole Dyer
Editorial Production Manager Felicia Pardo
Copy and Research Director Rina Bander
Senior Associate Editors Lauren Aaronson, Doug Cantor,
Picture the Bjorn Carey, Seth Fletcher, Martha Harbison

Associate Editor Corinne Iozzio
Assistant Editor Susannah F. Locke
Editorial Assistant Amy Geppert
Editor at Large Dawn Stover
Future
Contributing Technology Editor Steve Morgenstern
Contributing Editors Eric Adams, Theodore Gray, Eric Hagerman,
Joseph Hooper, Preston Lerner, Gregory Mone, Rena Marie Pacella,
Catherine Price, Dave Prochnow, Jessica Snyder Sachs, Rebecca Skloot,
Mike Spinelli, Elizabeth Svoboda, Kalee Thompson, Phillip Torrone,
James Vlahos, Speed Weed
Contributing Troubadour Jonathan Coulton
Editorial Interns Amina Elahi, Sandeep Ravindran
ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Art Director Matthew Cokeley
I’M WRITING THIS from a window seat on a flight from New York to Chicago, Photo Editor Kristine LaManna
Staff Photographer John B. Carnett
typing these words on a laptop whose backlit LCD screen is so blasted by the Senior Designer Stephanie O’Hara
Contributing Artists Kevin Hand, Nick Kaloterakis,
above-the-clouds sun that I’ve had to lower the shade to see what I’m doing. Graham Murdoch, Bob Sauls, Paul Wootton
Tucked into the bag at my feet is a device—the Amazon Kindle—with an Photo Intern Jack Forbes
Production Intern Reynaldo Lopez
E Ink screen that becomes clearer in direct light, but has no backlight at all, so POPSCI.COM
Digital Content Director John Mahoney
up goes the shade. Even more limiting, Digital Content Manager Taylor Hengen
DYNAMIC, SHARP, the Kindle is only suitable for display-

ing static text in shades of gray. In the
Associate Web Editor Paul Adams
BONNIER TECHNOLOGY GROUP
Group Publisher Gregg R. Hano
EFFICIENT two-plus years since the Kindle made
its debut, I have been asked repeatedly
Associate Publishers Wendi S. Berger, Anthony Ruotolo
Executive Assistant Christopher Graves
SCREENS WILL why we haven’t ported our magazine

Marketing Director Mike Gallic
Financial Director Tara Bisciello
SVP, Corporate Sales and Marketing Mark Wildman
to the Kindle, and I’ve occasionally had Northeast Advertising Office: Lauren Brewer,
OFFER US A to bite back intemperate replies, since
Susan Faggella, Taryn Guillermo, Sara Schiano
Midwest: Manager John Marquardt 312-252-2838
Ad Assistant Krissy Van Rossum
the answer seems so obvious to me.
TRULY NEW Because this is a magazine that prides
West Coast Account Managers Robert Hoeck 310-227-8963,
Bob Meth
Ad Assistant Kate Gregory
READING itself on using not only words, but

also photos, illustrations, graphics, and
Detroit: Manager Edward A. Bartley 248-282-5545
Ad Assistant Diane Pahl
Southern: Manager Jason A. Albaum 404-892-0760
EXPERIENCE. the carefully choreographed interplay

Classified Advertising Sales Patrick Notaro 212-779-5555,
Chip Parham 212-779-5492
Direct Response Sales Alycia Isabelle 800-280-2069
among them to communicate informa- Interactive Sales Manager Chris Young
Digital Sales Development Manager Brian Glaser
tion in the clearest, most dazzling fashion, to read POPULAR SCIENCE on an Sales Development Managers Alexis Costa, Mike Kelly, Kerri Levine
Group Director, Creative Services/Events Mike Iadanza
E Ink e-book reader would, in a word, suck. Director of Events Michelle Cast
Special Events Manager Erica Johnson
Vivid, ample-sized LCDs are too energy-hogging to be practical on Digital Days Coordinator Athos Kyriakides
an e-reading device, yet battery-sipping E Ink makes for an impoverished Marketing Art Directors Lindsay Krist, Shawn Woznicki
Promotions Manager Eshonda Caraway
magazine-reading experience. What’s an editor who’s seeking to pioneer Consumer Marketing Director Bob Cohn
Associate Directors Lauren Rosenblatt, Andrew Schulman
beyond-dead-tree delivery options for his magazine to do? Up until now, the Senior Planning Manager Raymond Ward
New Business Manager Cliff Sabbag
answer has been “Wait.” But as Senior Associate Editor Lauren Aaronson’s Retention Manager Connie Cotner
Single Copy Sales Director Vicki Weston
profile of screen-tech visionary Mary Lou Jepsen [page 46] makes clear, the Publicity Manager Amanda McNally
Human Resources Manager Kim Putman
moment is galloping toward us when dynamic, sharp, efficient screens will Production Associate Erika Hernandez
offer us a truly new experience reading not just books but magazines as well. Group Production Director Laurel Kurnides
Operations Director Mimi Rosenfeld
We’re preparing for that moment by designing versions of POPULAR
SCIENCE—all the same great content—optimized for those screens and
devices, so that when you’ve got your new
Chairman Jonas Bonnier
multipurpose tablet gadget with its vivid, Chief Executive Officer Terry Snow
Chief Operating Officer Dan Altman
low-power screen, you won’t need to ask Chief Financial Officer Randall Koubek
Vice President, Consumer Marketing Bruce Miller
why your favorite magazine isn’t there. Vice President, Production Lisa Earlywine
Vice President, E-Media Bill Allman
Vice President, Digital Sales & Marketing John Haskin
Vice President, Enterprise Systems Shawn Larson
Vice President, Human Resources Cathy Hertz
Vice President, Corporate Communications Dean Turcol
Brand Director John Miller
JOHN B. CARNETT
MARK JANNOT Publishing Consultant Martin S. Walker

Corporate Counsel Jeremy Thompson
mark.jannot@bonniercorp.com For service anytime, please use our Web site:
www.popsci.com/cs
Or you may write to
POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235

PLAVIX Rx Only Bleeding: You may bleed more easily and it may take you longer
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THE INBOX LETTERS@POPSCI.COM
Debating the Best

Considering that our Best of What’s New Awards
issue [December] boldly crowns the top 100
innovations of the year, it’s no surprise that the list
invariably draws heated debate. The 2009 picks
were as contentious as ever. More than one reader
took issue with our decision to award the Lexus
Remote Touch, a console joystick with a dashboard-
mounted screen to control everything from music to
navigation. “Anything that demands you
look away from the road to operate
it—even a high-mount video screen—
is a hazard,” wrote imajoebob on popsci
.com. Meanwhile, reader opinions were split on our
Grand Award winner in the computing category,
Wolfram Alpha, a smarter search engine that
provides answers in text, graph or map form. “At
this point, it is not ‘smart’ enough to
be helpful,” protested uffda. Feijiefu, a reader
who has been using Alpha for the past few months, BOOK OF THE MONTH
however, was “increasingly astounded by
In 1988, our contributing editor Rebecca
how useful and powerful a resource Skloot was in biology class when the professor
it is.” If there was one winner that garnered chalked the name Henrietta Lacks on the black-
board. The name, he told the class, belonged to
virtually unanimous praise, it was the Piper Aircraft a woman whose cancer cells populate nearly
PiperJet, a small jet that can reach the same every medical laboratory in the world and have
served as the basis for thousands of lifesav-
altitude as commercial planes and requires very ing discoveries [see FYI, page 81]. Yet little
little training to fly. William-sudo called it “a was known about Lacks herself—she died in obscurity in 1951,
at age 31. Skloot’s debut book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta
beautiful plane.” If animemaster had $100 Lacks, finally brings to light Lacks’s remarkable biography and her
million, it would be “on my list of things to get unsung contribution to science. Check it out at rebeccaskloot.com.
someday.” Chime in at popsci.com/bown.
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amazing [TKTS booth, Engineering Grand Award winner] service/subscribe or syndication,
@revkin Gotta say, one has to wonder if a 21-mpg (city)

Mercedes hybrid merits an award? [2010 Mercedes S400
The paper used for this
BlueHybrid, Auto Tech Grand Award winner] magazine comes from certified
forests that are managed in a
For licensing and reprints of sustainable way to meet the social,
@Zeblue_Prime Everyone should get this issue. It’s my POPULAR SCIENCE content, contact economic and environmental needs
fave of the year. #BOWN Wright’s Reprints at 877-652-5295. of present and future generations.

megapixels the must-see photos of the month
FEAR FACTORY The sun-parched

Tanezrouft Basin in Algeria is known
as the “Land of Terror.” This photo shows
some 1,500 square miles of the area.
10 POPULAR SCIENCE FEBRUARY 2010
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See more amazing photos at popsci.com/gallery.
SANDY, SALTY SWIRLS

A SATELLITE PEERS DOWN ON A HELLISH LANDSCAPE
In the Tanezrouft Basin of south-central Algeria, vegetation is sparse and sand is plentiful. Images like this one, taken by Japan’s
Advanced Land Observing Satellite, provide researchers with an easy look at hard-to-reach areas to survey natural resources,
monitor disasters, and track vegetation coverage. Such imagery allows scientists to determine which areas warrant an expensive
and difficult visit. The concentric shapes on the left are sandstone hills, rising above white salt flats. White rivers snake through
the rocks—the salt remains after being leached from the soil by the rare rainstorms that pass through the Sahara Desert. Prevail-
ing wind usually shapes sand dunes into curves or lines, but the yellow cluster of dunes, known as Erg Mehedjibat, grows upward
instead of horizontally, suggesting that this region may lack consistent directional winds. And that thin line in the upper right,
squiggling above the Erg? That’s the only road for miles. BY AMINA ELAHI PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY ESA
POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 11
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MEGAPIXELS
CORBIS
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See more amazing images at popsci.com/gallery.
TUNNEL
VISION
A RACE AGAINST TIME
TO COMPLETE A NEW
SUBWAY LINE
A worker stands inside one of the Metro
tunnels under construction in New Delhi,
India, in preparation for the Common-
wealth Games this October. To overcome
the challenges of a tight three-and-a-half-
year schedule and construction under-
neath a densely populated city, engineers
used 14 tunnel-boring machines (TBMs) to
dig the underground thoroughfare. One
of these machines completed the final
subterranean stretch last fall, covering
roughly 1,640 feet between two stations
on the Central Secretariat-Badarpur line.
The TBMs averaged nearly 27 feet a day
as they cut through the Delhi silt; while
they tunneled, the machines simultane-
ously installed four-foot-long precast rings
that were bolted together to prevent the
walls from collapsing. Before the tunnel
can be used, workers will fill and flatten
the bottom of the tunnel to lay tracks
later on and install electrical connections
and ventilation shafts that will extend to
the surface. BY SANDEEP RAVINDRAN
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANINDITO MUKHERJEE
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what’s neW tech that puts the future in the palm of your hand
18 20 21
Pint-size cars come Turn your living room A robotic vacuum
to the U.S. into a 3-D theater with laser vision
COMPUTER
ON CALL
A TAKE-ANYWHERE LAPTOP LASTS ALL
DAY, BECAUSE IT’S A PHONE AT HEART
Smartphones already act like mini
computers—they send e-mail, play YouTube,
let you shop on eBay. Now laptop makers are
getting wise. Instead of trying to create ever-
sleeker machines by shrinking ordinary
PC parts, they’re tacking bigger
screens and keyboards onto high-end
cellphone brains. Witness the three-
quarter-inch-thick, letter-paper-
size Lenovo Skylight, which surfs the
Web for 10 hours on a single charge.
It’s one of several new “smartbooks”
built around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, a
low-power phone chipset that has a 3G data
link and stays cool without bulky fans. Most
smartbooks, like the Skylight, run a version of
Linux or a mobile operating system, not Win-
dows, because Microsoft Office productivity
isn’t the point. The goal is always-on Internet,
reflected in the business model: Expect the
list price to plunge if you sign up
for a cell data plan, as your
laptop becomes as tied to
the airwaves as your phone.
—steve morgenstern
LENOVO SKYLIGHT
SIZE: 9.9 x 7.7 x 0.74 in.
WEIGHT: less than 2 lbs. PROCESSOR: 1 GHz
BRIAN KLUTCH
PRICE: $500 (est., before phone carrier

subsidy; data plan extra)
GET IT: lenovo.com
See more energy-efficient computers—fresh from

January’s Consumer Electronics Show—on page 25. FEBRUARY 2010 POPULAR SCIENCE 15
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WHAT’S NEW
Walking on Air Light Music

These boots keep pressure off Finally, multi-room audio
your heels. Their is as easy as screwing in a
polyurethane lightbulb. This system hides
midsoles are speakers behind LEDs made
injected with air to fit into any fixture, including
to absorb nearly recessed ceiling sockets,
one third more shock and wirelessly streams your
than other boots. Scarpa Mont tunes. Klipsch LightSpeaker
Blanc GTX $420; scarpa.com $600; klipsch.com
GOODSTHE
A DOZEN GREAT IDEAS IN GEAR

By Corinne Iozzio
Power Down
Show Off A laptop’s power brick sends
Rather than add the bulk of an onboard projector, a pico projector juice even when the device
add-on snaps onto the LG eXpo like a backpack and beams an image of up to 60 inches diagonal isn’t running. iGo’s adapter
onto any surface. LG eXpo with Mobile Projector $480; lge.com has a computer chip that
knows when a notebook is
idle, so it will stop sipping
wattage when it doesn’t
need it. iGo Green Laptop
Charger $100; igo.com
Mini Mechanic
The ecoRoute keeps tabs on
your engine. The 3.5-ounce
dongle connects to a car’s
diagnostic port to send info
about things like fluid levels to
an app on a GPS or phone via
Bluetooth. Garmin ecoRoute
HD $150; garmin.com
Dogfight Simulator
The Drone robot turns real life
into a videogame. Through
its iPhone app, you see what
it sees, and the software turns
real-life objects like trees and rocks
into targets you shoot (virtually) to up your score.
Parrot AR Drone Price not set; parrot.com

Night Watch
This clock does more than
wake you up; it also tracks
your sleep cycle. Together
with its iPhone app, the iA5
keeps a log based on when
you tuck in and wake up, so
you’ll know if you’re short
on zzzs. iHome iA5 $100;
ihomeaudio.com
Small Talk Lap Topper

The Sound Band is the most When watching a DVD on your
discreet Bluetooth headset you computer, this lap desk helps it
can find. Its stereo receivers sound and run better. The cushion
thread onto the back of your has speakers and a vented chamber
glasses, and micro-vibrations to let bass resonate, while a fan
from them turn your ears into keeps things cool. Logitech Speaker
speakers only you can hear. Lapdesk N700 $80; logitech.com
Hybra Sound Band
$100; hybratech.com
Store More
LG’s Blu-ray player is the first to add storage and let you save
streaming video. Its 250-gig hard drive holds 32 high-def flicks from
the Vudu service or your library. LG BD590 Price not set; lge.com
Book Browser Face-to-Face

This cellphone is the first in the U.S. to
The eDGe is the first e-reader to give you a full Web experience on its
handle two-way video calls. Simply face the
second, 10-inch LCD. For instance, video links on the E Ink side jump
lens and speak normally, and the Saygus
to its extra, faster screen. enTourage eDGe $490; entourageedge.com
software makes sure your video stream runs
smoothly—even over slow networks—to
another Saygus handset. Saygus VPhone
Price not set; saygus.com
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WHAT’S NEW AUTOMOTIVE
COMING
SOON
A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL

SOME OF THIS YEAR’S BIGGEST RELEASES ARE TINY, FUEL-EFFICIENT CARS
The Smart ForTwo microcar proved that some American car ford fiesta
buyers—more than 37,000 of them, according to parent company The Fiesta is already Ford’s best-selling model in Europe; now
Daimler’s latest sales calculations—like it small. And now, with the charismatic subcompact is coming here. The 2011 model
the EPA proposing average fuel-economy standards of 35.5 miles will have a 119-horsepower, 1.6-liter four-cylinder engine and
per gallon by 2016, more car companies will begin relying on pint- such options as the new PowerShift twin-clutch automatic
size transportation to make their fleets legal. That will require transmission and leather seats. With a claimed 40 mpg, it’s a
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY FORD MOTOR CO.; COURTESY MAZDA NORTH AMERICAN;
convincing far more than 37,000 drivers that tiny can be cool. thrifty alternative to pricier hybrids.
These four new cars are designed to do just that.—Mike Spinelli LENGTH: 13 ft., 4 in. EST. MPG: 40
COURTESY FIAT GROUP AUTOMOBILES; COURTESY GENERAL MOTORS
Chevrolet Spark Fiat 500 Mazda2

General Motors has long been notoriously In 2007, Fiat decided to chase the success Mazda hasn’t sold a subcompact in the
small-car averse, but the Spark, of the Mini Cooper with a chic update U.S. since 1985 , but it’s reversing course
positioned as a fashion-forward runabout of its Cinquecento, as the 500 is called later this year, when American buyers get
for the urban hip, is the company’s in Italy. A hit in Europe because of its their first shot at the sporty 2011 Mazda2.
attempt to show that it takes the small distinctive shape and copious accessories, Thanks in part to its fuel economy and
stuff seriously. GM hasn’t revealed many the 500 arrives in the U.S. next year as surprisingly generous passenger head-
details, but it says the Spark will hit a result of Fiat’s investment in Chrysler. and legroom, the Mazda2, already on sale
American dealerships in time for the 2011 It will probably come in a hatchback, a in Europe, was named 2008 World Car of
model year and cost $12,000. convertible, a wagon and a sports model. the Year by a jury of auto writers.
LENGTH: 11 ft., 11 in. EST. MPG: TBA LENGTH: 11 ft., 7 in. EST. MPG: 45+ LENGTH: 12 ft., 11 in. EST. MPG: TBA
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WHAT’S NEW HOME ENTERTAINMENT
IT’S ABOUT
TIME
3-D
COMES
HOME
ENJOY EYE-POPPING EFFECTS THE TV
We see depth when images from our left and right eyes merge into one; to
WITHOUT LEAVING YOUR COUCH re-create that in high-def, TVs must refresh the picture at least 120 times a
The 3-D thrill that swept movie theaters last second with alternating frames for the left and right eye, which tricks your
year is now headed for your living room. In brain into seeing only one image. Most new TVs are fast enough to do this,
the wake of a new Blu-ray standard for high- but to be 3-D-capable, TVs must include a converter chip and software to
definition 3-D, Panasonic, Sony and Samsung break down the signal and separate the left and right images. An infrared
are all releasing home-theater setups that can or radio beam syncs shutter glasses [below] with the screen to produce the
display 3-D movies in full high-def glory. Using final 3-D effect. Sony Bravia XBR-60LX900 Price not set; sonystyle.com
a combo of 3-D-capable Blu-ray players, TVs
and, yes, glasses, the systems are able to deliver
separate, full-screen, 1080p pictures to each
eye. The technique they use creates a picture as
vivid as in a movie theater without requiring a
major overhaul of TV technology. And within a few
years, a new cable television standard could even
bring live events like the Super Bowl right to your
TV in high-def 3-D.—Corinne Iozzio
FROM TOP: COURTESY SONY; INSET: FOCUS FEATURES/EVERETT COLLECTION;

THE BLU-RAY PLAYER
Blu-ray discs have plenty of room to store a separate 1080p #THE GLASSES
signal for each eye (that’s twice as much information as Active-shutter glasses, like those included in Panasonic’s system,
in a 2-D movie), as well as the coding necessary to specify rapidly block one eye at a time so that each eye sees only the frame
which image is meant for the left side and which for the meant for it. The glasses contain two small, black-and-clear LCD
right. 3-D-ready players use a special chip to interpret this lenses that darken or lighten when a radio or infrared pulse from
COURTESY PANASONIC; COURTESY SAMSUNG
info and send it to a 3-D-capable TV. Samsung BD-C6900 the TV (or an add-on emitter) signals that the image is changing.
Price not set; samsung.com Panasonic Active-Shutter Glasses Price not set; panasonic.com

WHAT’S NEW HOME TECH
TECH
REBORN A CLEAN, WELL-
LIGHTED PLACE
A VACUUM NAVIGATES LIKE ROBO-CARS DO—WITH LASERS!
Autonomous cars and military ‘bots find their way by using
lasers to make virtual maps of terrain. Neato Robotics’s XV-11
applies the same tactic to your messy living room. The robotic
vacuum uses smaller, cheaper lasers to scope out a
space and plot the quickest path to cover it.
So instead of wandering randomly and
bouncing off objects, like other
robot maids, it can devote
its battery to actual
vacuuming.
—Corey
Binns
How to Vacuum LIGHTING THE WAY In the

with Lasers next few years, this robo-
Before it starts its housework, the XV-11 vac’s navigational lasers will
spins its invisible-laser range finder, taking 4,000 show up in more home robots.
readings a second and measuring the distance
to all objects within 13 feet. It repeats this In Related News: Motor Mop
process from several spots until it knows the Evolution Robotics’s Mint robotic mop, due out by December, cleans floors with disposable wet
location of every obstacle in the room, be they or dry Swiffer cloths that attach to its underside, so there’s no dust canister to empty. What’s
walls, doorways or table legs. Using this mental more, even though the Mint doesn’t map out an entire room before it starts, it tracks where
COURTESY EVOLUTION ROBOTICS
map as a guide, the robot calculates an orderly it’s been to ensure that it covers every inch. A small beacon on a
route. It covers the perimeter and then vacuums
FROM TOP: BRIAN KLUTCH;
shelf beams two spots of infrared light onto the ceiling, and
back and forth in rows, skirting obstructions and the Mint uses these spots like GPS satellites, gauging and
constantly updating its map to avoid Fido’s quick- remembering where it is in relation to them. That
moving legs. Neato XV-11 All-Floor Robotic lets it return to objects it encountered on its first
Vacuum Cleaner $400; neatorobotics.com pass, circling them to snag trapped dust. Evolution
Robotics Mint Price not set; evolution.com

WHAT’S NEW GADGETS
COLD
SNAPS FIVE PHOTO ESSENTIALS CAMCORDER
Shoot your every twist
FULLY FOR WINTER WEATHER without worrying about the
LOADED Prone to wipeouts? Even if you end elements or blurry footage.
up face-down in a drift trying to Encased in watertight
tackle a double black diamond, this plastic, this Kodak is the first
adventure-ready gear will still be waterproof pocket camcorder
there to preserve the moment when to shoot in full 1080p, and its
you rebound for another run (or onboard image-stabilizing
when you hand it to your friends and software helps steady shaky
head back to the lodge). shots across rough terrain.
—Kathleen Davis Kodak PlaySport Video
Camera $150; kodak.com
MOUNT
Stay hands-free. Delkin’s suction-cup camera mount
is entirely rust-resistant and affixes cameras of up to
four pounds to any smooth surface, like a snowboard
or sled. The cup creates an airtight seal that holds
strong even when whipping around a racetrack at 200
mph. Delkin Fat Gecko Mini $40; delkin.com
LIGHT LOCATION TRACKER CAMERA

This 2.9-ounce headlamp shines farther Before you hit the slopes, sync this A setting on this Casio tells it to snap a
than most built-in camera flashes to GPS—the smallest of its kind—with picture every 10 seconds to catch mid-run
brighten up nighttime video and stills. your camera’s clock and tuck it into your action. And if it falls into the snow, your
BRIAN KLUTCH
Its white LED provides you with as much jacket. When you get back, its computer shots are safe: Its waterproof steel-and-
light as 200 full moons and illuminates software uses timestamps to figure out fiberglass casing lets it survive seven-foot
the trail as far as 114 feet ahead. where each shot was taken. GiSTEQ drops and an hour in 10 feet of water.
Petzl Tikka Plus2 $40; petzl.com PhotoTrackr Mini $70; gisteq.com Casio Exilim EX-G1 $300; casio.com
www.
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I used to think it was
just a phase, until I had ‘the talk’
with my doctor.
Your Doctor Talks to Men Important Safety Information

About ED Every Day
We know that no medicine is for everyone.
Actually, erectile dysfunction (ED) is more than Don’t take VIAGRA if you take nitrates,
just a phase. It’s a common medical condition often prescribed for chest pain, as this may
affecting millions of men just like you. cause a sudden unsafe drop in blood pressure.
But your doctor can help.
Talk with your doctor first. Make sure your
Doctor portrayal. heart is healthy enough to have sex. If you
have chest pain, nausea, or other discomforts
during sex, seek medical help right away.
Running the Numbers
In the rare event of an erection lasting more
Did you know half of all guys than four hours, seek immediate medical help
over 40 have some form of ED? to avoid long-term injury.
Here are some numbers to
keep in mind from a recent In rare instances, men who take PDE5
survey of men with ED: inhibitors (oral erectile dysfunction medicines,
including VIAGRA) reported a sudden
of men were decrease or loss of vision, or sudden decrease

anxious about or loss of hearing. It is not possible to determine
talking to their whether these events are related directly to
these medicines or to other factors. If you
doctor about ED. experience any of these symptoms, stop
taking PDE5 inhibitors, including VIAGRA,
Keys to Opening Up
of men felt relieved and call a doctor right away.
to Your Doctor after talking to
their doctor. The most common side effects of VIAGRA
The hardest part about having are headache, facial f lushing, and upset
‘the talk’ is getting those first stomach. Less common are bluish or blurred
few words out. Here are vision, or being sensitive to light. These may
some ideas to help you break occur for a brief time.
the ice when your doctor Tell Me
asks how everything’s going: More VIAGRA does not protect against sexually
To learn more transmitted diseases including HIV.
The Direct Approach: about VIAGRA for the Please see Important Facts for VIAGRA on
“I have trouble sometimes treatment of ED, and ED in the following page or visit viagra.com for full
in bed. Could it be ED?” general, visit viagra.com today. prescribing information.
You’ll find an online sexual health
The Indirect Approach: quiz, videos of guys with ED For free information, including questions
“Is it true age affects who’ve had the VIAGRA Talk to ask your doctor, call 1-888-4VIAGRA
sexual performance?” and other helpful information. (1-888-484-2472).
The Silent Approach: Over 20 million men have already

Just hand this ad to your had their VIAGRA Talk. Isn’t it
doctor, he’ll take it from there. time you had yours?
You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA.
VGU00565F © 2009 Pfizer Inc.
Visit www.FDA.gov/medwatch or call 1-800-FDA-1088. All rights reserved.

IMPORTANT FACTS

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WHAT’S NEW COMPUTING
THE TREND
POWER Efficient new laptops can run multiple programs without sucking extra
wattage. That’s because they pace themselves. Their processors can shut
down partially when the screen is static or when running simple tasks,
and ramp up to full steam when big programs call for it.
NAPPERS SAVE ENERGY WITH

WHY NOW
New Intel chips (Core i3, i5 and i7) improve on power-managing tricks found
in some larger machines. They use the smallest-ever transistors—only 32
nanometers—which snap into action so quickly that you won’t know the
CHIPS THAT KNOW difference between a chip that’s totally on and one that’s turned parts of
TECH EXACTLY HOW HARD TO itself off. And the tiny transistors leak less heat, saving energy that way too.
TREND WORK—AND WHEN TO HOW YOU’LL BENEFIT
TAKE A SNOOZE Expect a boost in your battery life, and your computer won’t bog down
when you fire up a resource-intense program, since the chip can
dedicate extra resources for a one-time speed bump.—Jamie Lendino
"THE ROAD "THE MEDIA CENTER

WARRIOR The Dell Studio 14 plays smooth high-
HP’s ProBook and its Intel chip def video even with several other
can simultaneously handle all of a programs running, since its processor
business traveler‘s tasks: running has the oomph to handle them all (or
Outlook, logging into a Web if only one program is running, part of
conference, chatting on Skype. the system sleeps). The Studio sports
It’s also equipped with mobile a 14-inch screen, HDMI connectivity
broadband for constant Web access and an optional Blu-ray drive. Dell
through your wireless carrier. HP Studio 14 (with Core i3, i5 or i7)
ProBook 6540b (with Core i3, i5 From $650; dell.com
or i7) Price not set; hp.com
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY DELL; COURTESY SONY; COURTESY HP
"THE
ULTRALIGHT
The battery life in Sony’s new Z
series is stellar for an ultraportable.
Add an optional extra-large battery
and, Sony says, the approximately
three-pound machine lasts up to 10
hours—helped along by its energy-
efficient Intel processor. Sony Z
Series (with Core i5 or i7) From
$1,830; sonystyle.com
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headlines discoveries, advances and debates in science
28 30 32
Taking the guesswork BMW’s winged A cannon for shooting
out of baseball stats America’s Cup yacht supplies into space
RESEARCH
TECHNO-TAXONOMY
DIGITIZING THE TREE OF LIFE COULD FINALLY IDENTIFY THOUSANDS OF NEW SPECIES
GO FISH To identify a
new species, scien-
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: CHIP CLARK/NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION;
tists like Richard Pyle

[above] and Quentin
Wheeler [left] must first
compare their finds with
hundreds of archived
specimens, like these
butterflies. Wheeler’s
plan for digitizing
archives could help
speed things up.
Over the past 20 years, Richard Pyle to satisfy curiosity; we need a clear This month, Wheeler and his
figures he’s discovered 100 new species understanding of species in order to collaborators at Microsoft and the
of fish. But he’s identified only one fifth best organize conservation efforts. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
of them. Pyle, an ichthyologist at Bishop Here’s the snag: To verify a new species, in Massachusetts applied for National
COURTESY JOHN L. EARLE; COURTESY CHARLES KAZILEK
Museum in Hawaii, isn’t a slacker—he a taxonomist must examine the type Science Foundation funding to create
spent hundreds of hours tracking down specimens—the preserved representative digital type specimens—“e-types”—for
those fish. It’s just that proving that a samples of every known plant and the more than one million known insects.
new species is unique can be as tough as animal—of each similar existing To generate an e-type, a curator will
finding it in the first place. species to document the differences. simply slide the bug into a custom-
“There are literally thousands Some animals must be compared with built scanner that will take 100 or so
of new species sitting in storage at hundreds of specimens, and those 20-megapixel images and stitch them
museums,” says Quentin Wheeler, a might be anywhere in the world. Many into a three-dimensional model using
renowned taxonomist and founder of are too fragile to ship. But Wheeler Microsoft’s Photosynth software. With
the International Institute for Species thinks he has a solution that could a dozen of these machines working
Exploration at Arizona State University. dramatically speed up the classification through the archives of the world’s
Identifying these species isn’t just and identification of species. natural-history [continued On page 29]
!!! NOVEMBER The first reported iPhone virus subjects users to a photo of pop singer Rick Astley. Future viruses are expected to be less benign. !!!

THE FUTURE OF SPORTS
FIELD VISION
A NEW CAMERA SYSTEM TRACKS FIELDERS FOR DEFINITIVE DEFENSIVE ANALYSIS
This could be the year that baseball- fast was the ball moving? In essence: every movement: the trajectory of the
stat freaks finally crack the “Derek How unlikely was it that he’d catch the ball, how far the fielder ran, and so on.
Jeter enigma.” A panel of coaches ball? This off-season, the broadcast-tech “After an amazing catch by an outfielder,
has awarded the New York Yankees’ company Sportvision will install a new we can compare his speed and route to
shortstop four of the past six Gold Glove player-tracking camera system into the ball with our database and show the
awards for fielding excellence. That ballparks that could finally help produce TV audience that this player performed
drives statisticians nuts, because nearly accurate defensive statistics. so well that 80 percent of the league
every statistical model ranks Jeter’s Sportvision’s FieldFX camera couldn’t have made that catch,” says
defense below average. But evaluating system records the action while object- Ryan Zander, Sportvision’s manager of
fielding is baseball’s hardest math. There recognition software identifies each baseball products. That information, he
are just too many unknowns in a play. fielder and runner, as well as the ball. says, will allow a much more quantitative
How much ground did Jeter cover? How After a play, the system spits out data for measure of exactly what is an error.
!!! NOVEMBER 13 NASA reports that its LCROSS satellite found 25 gallons’ worth of ice and water vapor at the moon’s south pole. NOVEMBER 17 Boeing uses a laser to
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HEADLINES
KEEPING AN EYE [continued from page 27]
ON THE BALL museums, Wheeler expects that the effort

could digitize all the insects in five years
Up to four cameras mounted on
and, with additional funding and projects, the
the light towers along each foul
line send a live feed to a com- rest of the world’s 1.8 million known species
puter, where object-recognition within a decade.
software identifies each player Every year, taxonomists introduce
and the ball and records their about 20,000 species. In the same period,
every movement as the play an estimated 30,000 vanish. At that rate,
unfolds. Here, a sample data the majority of Earth’s inhabitants could
stream from a pop fly to left field.
disappear before they’re known to science.
STEP 1: The Pitch Simply by making it easier to examine existing
The pitcher organisms, Wheeler says his project will help
delivers a bump the species description rate to 200,000
94mph four- a year—a clip that could make it possible to
seam fastball name the world’s commonly
that breaks estimated 20 million
seven inches unknown species
to the inside of the plate.
within 50 years.
Some
E-SPECIMENS
STEP 2: The Hit
The batter hits scientists, COULD HELP
the ball 91 mph
into the air at
however, think
even e-types
IDENTIFY
a 27-degree won’t get the SPECIES 10
angle, and it
travels 310 feet
job done fast TIMES AS FAST.
enough. Genetic
at a 30-degree angle from the third
testing, they argue,
baseline. Given the ball’s two-
second hang time and the fielder’s is the key. Leading this
position before the pitch, this could movement is Canadian
be a difficult ball to catch. evolutionary biologist Paul Hebert, who wants
to assign every species a DNA “bar code”
STEP 3: The catch based on variations in a gene that nearly all
The left fielder organisms possess. A new species would be
breaks to his identified not by its physical divergence from
left 0.5 second
existing type specimens but by the difference
after the ball is
hit, showing that
between its bar code and all the others.
he got a good Because the system is fast and cheap—the
jump on the ball. Sprinting at 21 technique requires basic laboratory skills and
mph, he covers 45 feet to snag the can process 95 samples in two hours for $10
ball—a play that only 5 percent of apiece—Hebert says it could uncover every
all outfielders could have made. unknown plant and animal by 2025.
But bar-coding is fast and cheap because
STEP 4: The tag it uses just one piece of one gene—and
The runner on
The tech could transform how teams that makes it prone to errors. In 2008, Pyle
first heads for
scout players and dole out contracts, and second, but the made a definitive distinction between two
it will provide more in-depth analysis fielder trans- new fish species, even though their bar
during broadcasts this summer. But fers the ball codes were essentially identical. “It’s a
it’s the stat junkies who are really from glove to blunt instrument,” Wheeler says of the DNA
salivating for the data. “We can pick out hand in 1.25 seconds (0.75 second system. “One gene just isn’t sufficient.”
systematically who’s good and bad, but is average, so this could indicate a Looking at actual specimens is an art, he
difficult play) and fires an 83mph
GRAHAM MURDOCH
there’s still guesswork with our models,” says. Plus, it’s fun. Although he admits that
throw to second. The runner is
says Wharton School statistician Shane moving at 18 mph—about league
someday it might be possible to define new
Jensen, who writes models for fielding average but not fast enough to species using only DNA, he doesn’t like that
stats. “We’ll certainly be able to settle beat out the excellent throw. idea much: “That would make taxonomy too
who’s the best shortstop.”—BJORN CAREY boring to be worth doing.”—PAT WALTERS
shoot down five UAVs in tests. NOVEMBER 21 The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act bans employers and insurers from discriminating based on genetic history. !!!
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HEADLINES
ENGINEERING
WINGED VICTORY
A YACHT WITH AN ENORMOUS WING FOR A SAIL COULD WIN IT ALL
AT THE AMERICA’S CUP RACE THIS MONTH
This year, the rules have all but disappeared for WING
competitors in the world’s oldest international The 7,700-pound wing includes a single piece that
trophy competition, the America’s Cup sailing rotates around the mast and eight flaps that
race. Motorized sails are fine, the single-hull rule catch or shed wind in different directions for
is out, and in the case of the BMW Oracle Racing thrust. Engineers claim that the wing—80 per-
team’s boat, even sails are optional. Instead, the cent longer than a Boeing 747’s—can achieve
largest wing ever constructed could catch enough twice the power of a soft mainsail.
wind to make the yacht the fastest yet.
Conventional fabric sails are unreliable. “Wind
speed and direction change by the second,” says
MAST
Fiber-optic sensors in the mast and
Mike Drummond, the design director for the BMW
hull reflect light differently when
Oracle Racing team. “The crew must constantly
stretched. A computer converts these
maneuver the mainsail to maintain maximum
changes into stress loads in real
speed.” A sail’s leading edge often ripples, partic-
time to predict material failures
ularly when tacking into the wind, increasing drag
and alert the crew if strong winds
and causing the sail to lose the airfoil shape that
could snap the mast.
helps propel the boat. In contrast, it takes just one
sailor a few clicks on a computer to immediately
swing the 190-foot-tall carbon-fiber-and-Kevlar SAIL
wing into position, where it will hold its shape A camera system
regardless of conditions. With the wing, Drum- photographs the soft sail,
mond says the 90-foot trimaran can sail up to 5 analyzes its shape and
percent, or about one knot, faster. height, and compares
In the months leading up to the February 8 race the measurements with
day, Drummond’s team noticed a few drawbacks past performance data
to the new design. In strong winds, where sailors to suggest the opti-
would normally shrink a soft sail, the one-size mal setup.
wing can grab too much wind and destabilize the
boat. And in choppy waters, the extra weight can
cause the craft to pitch front to back. “Still, overall,
it’s obvious that the boat goes faster,” Drummond
COURTESY GILLES MARTIN-RAGET/BMW ORACLE RACING

says. “We used to measure performance gains in
hundredths of a knot. Now we measure it in tenths
of a knot or more.”—COREY BINNS
SMART SAILING Electronic sensors feed 26,000 data

points every second—such as the wind speed, pitch
of the waves, and stress on the boat—to a computer
to calculate the optimum wing-sail configuration.
!!! DECEMBER 2 For the first time in more than eight years, the NIH approves new human embryonic stem cell lines for federally funded research. !!!

HEADLINES
HOW TO SHOOT
STUFF INTO SPACE
STEP 1: HEAT IT
The gun combusts natural gas in a
heat exchanger within a
chamber of hydrogen gas,
heating the hydrogen to 2,600˚F
and causing a 500 percent
increase in pressure.
ANNOTATED MACHINE
STEP 2: LET THE
READY,
HYDROGEN LOOSE
Operators open the valve, and the
hot, pressurized hydrogen quickly
expands down the tube, pushing
AIM,
the payload forward.
STEP 3: TO INFINITY
AND BEYOND
After speeding down the
RESUPPLY
A GIANT CANNON DESIGNED TO BLAST
3,300-foot-long barrel, the
projectile shoots out of the gun
at 13,000 mph. An iris at the end
of the gun closes, capturing the
hydrogen gas to use again.
SUPPLIES INTO SPACE ON THE CHEAP
John Hunter wants to shoot stuff Hunter wants to operate the
into space with a 3,600-foot gun. gun, the “Quicklauncher,” in the
And he’s dead serious—he’s ocean near the equator, where
done the math. Making deliveries the Earth’s fast rotation will help
to an orbital outpost on a rocket slingshot objects into space. A
costs $5,000 per pound, but floating cannon—dipping 1,600
using a space gun would cost just feet below sea level and steadied
$250 per pound. by a ballast system—would let
Building colossal guns has operators swivel it for different
been Hunter’s pet project since orbits. Next month, Hunter will
1992, when, while a physicist at test a functional, 10-foot proto-
Lawrence Livermore National type in a water tank. He says a
Laboratory, he first fired a full-size launcher could be ready Projectile
425-foot gun he built to test- in seven years, provided the Release valve
launch hypersonic engines. Its company can round up the $500
methane-driven piston com- million. Despite the upfront cost,
pressed hydrogen gas, which Hunter says he has drawn inter-
then expanded up the barrel to est from investors because his
shoot a projectile. Mechanical reusable gun saves so much cash
firing can fail, however, so when in the long haul. Just don’t ever
Hunter’s company, Quicklaunch, expect a ride in the thing: The gun
released its plans last fall, it produces 5,000 Gs, so it’s only
swapped the piston for a combus- for fuel tanks and ruggedized
tor that burns natural gas. Heat satellites. “A person shot out of it
JOHN MACNEILL
the hydrogen in a confined space would probably get compressed Combustor

and it should build up enough to half their size,” Hunter says.
pressure to send a half-ton pay- “It’d be over real quick.” Hydrogen gas
load into the sky at 13,000 mph. —AMINA ELAHI
!!! JANUARY 4 The U.S. government stops a 22-year ban on HIV-positive immigrants and drops HIV testing from the required medical exam. !!!

om
HEADLINES
MED TECH
CAVITY KILLER
SAY “AHH” This applica-
tor slides between teeth to
strip enamel, followed by an
applicator loaded with resin
A NO-DRILL FIX FOR VULNERABLE TEETH to strengthen the tooth.
Bacteria love hanging out between work, the only option is drilling through
your teeth—food gets caught there, healthy tooth to get to the problem spot.
and brushing can’t reach all the germs. Icon, developed by dental-materials
If the bugs settle in and form a cavity, manufacturer DMG, does away with both
your dentist must drill through your the drill and the waiting time. A dentist
tooth just to get at it. But now dentists simply slides a thin plastic applicator
can trade their drills for a simple treat- between the patient’s teeth and squirts the
ment that stops early-stage cavities. cavity with hydrochloric acid, which etches
COURTESY JIM LENNON/DMG AMERICA

The Icon system lets dentists halt away the enamel to access the tooth’s
decay between teeth. Usually when deeper layers. Using a fresh applicator, he
a dentist spots an early cavity—when then injects a low-viscosity resin into the
bacteria have eaten away enough gaps in the tooth’s lattice and hardens the
tooth such that it’s a weak lattice but resin with a quick flash of high-energy blue dent George Wolfe hopes to have ready in a
hasn’t yet degraded into a true cavity’s light to fortify the tooth. year. The sooner the better, he says: “One
sinkhole—he prescribes an enamel- DMG is working on a version that could of my greatest fears is having to hold down
strengthening fluoride rinse and hopes hold up to the wear and tear of a tooth’s my scared kid for a filling. Hopefully, I’ll
the tooth heals itself. If that doesn’t chewing surfaces, which company presi- never have to.”—SUSANNAH F. LOCKE

ENVIRONMENT
SMOKE ON
THE WATER
NEW CLEAN-FUEL RULES FOR SHIPS COULD
ACTUALLY HURT THE ENVIRONMENT
The International Maritime Organization, which oversees the PROTECTIVE POLLUTION Sulfurous ship emissions might harm peo-
shipping industry, will begin enforcing rules this July that man- ple’s health, but the clouds they form help slow global warming.
date cleaner fuel to cut air pollution and acid rain. Ironically, this
eco-motivated change will undo one of our strongest, if acciden- to be seen from orbit, reflect sunlight back into space, prevent-
tal, defenses against climate change. ing the equivalent of up to 40 percent of the warming caused by
NASA/MODIS RAPID RESPONSE TEAM
The regulations call for reducing the sulfur in shipping human-produced carbon dioxide. “The IMO has done a good job
fuel—which is basically unrefined petroleum sludge—from 4.5 addressing air-quality issues,” says Daniel Lack, an atmospheric
to 0.5 percent by 2020. Scientists project that this switch will cut scientist at NOAA. “But there’s a climate impact that wasn’t nec-
sulfur-pollution-related premature deaths from 87,000 world- essarily considered.”
wide per year to 46,000. But the sulfate aerosols spewing from Worse, the fuel switch won’t improve ships’ carbon emis-
supertanker smokestacks also produce planet-cooling clouds sions—if the industry were a country, it would be the sixth-largest
called ship tracks, which form when water droplets coalesce CO2 emitter. The IMO plans to regulate CO2, but until then, it
around sulfate particles. These clouds, which are big enough might be best to leave well enough alone.—CHRISTOPHER MIMS

HEADLINES
STATISTICALLY SPEAKING
INTERNET INTHE ETHER

AIRWAVES ABANDONED BY TV COULD BEAM HIGH-SPEED INTERNET EVERYWHERE
When TV went digital, Verizon, AT&T and other cellphone carriers tal FCC license. The town’s hilly landscape and abundant trees
shelled out a combined $19 billion for some of the freed-up air- made conventional wireless near-impossible, so the company set
waves, known as white spaces. Now wireless company Spectrum up an Internet-connected radio transmitter at the town’s edge
Bridge is using the parts that are still unclaimed to deliver high- and gave the school, business district and a few homes modem-
speed Internet from its broadcast tower to your laptop computer. like radio receivers. “They’ve been trying to get connected to
As soon as next month, the Federal Communications Com- the outside world for the better part of this century,” says Jeff
mission is expected to allow commercial white-space Internet, Schmidt, Spectrum’s director of engineering.
which could help hook up the 54 percent of rural homes without Because wireless mics and news cameras can also use
broadband. These white-space channels use lower frequencies white-space channels, Spectrum’s system chooses among
than Wi-Fi, so they can pass through physical obstacles easier unused channels listed by the FCC. If all goes well in Claudville,
and travel farther. Last October, Spectrum activated the first the company plans to test the tech in the more crowded airwaves
white-space network, in Claudville, Virginia, under an experimen- of cities this year.—AMINA ELAHI
BRIAN KAAS DESIGN
!!! FEBRUARY 12 The Winter Olympic Games start in Vancouver, with LEED-certified sporting venues that will use less water and electricity. .

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Step One: Fix everything by Adam M. Bright
ILLUSTRATIONS BY PAUL WOOTTON
Chicago road crews are scrambling to fill 67,000 potholes a month.
Communities in Pennsylvania rely on 100-year-old water pipes made
of wood. Squirrels still cause widespread blackouts. The country’s
600,000 bridges, four million miles of roads, and 30,000 wastewater
plants desperately need attention. The solution isn’t patches, it’s an
overhaul. Soon roads and power lines will fix themselves, and we’ll
mine energy from sewage. America’s 21st-century tune-up won’t
happen overnight, but we could start reaping the benefits (faster
broadband! cleaner water!) within the next few years.
Mess #1: Transportation

Defeating soul-deadening gridlock,
monster potholes and dangerous road ice
Cars that Report potholes bridges that

TASK: Fix the third of major roads that are in poor shape flex on the fly
STATUS: Three years to a prototype TASK: Upgrade the 26 percent of decrepit bridges
In a new system developed at Northeastern University, vehicles STATUS: Pedestrian versions exist; traffic bridges in 10 years
that cover lots of asphalt—taxis, buses, garbage trucks—will Regular bridges are fairly rigid structures that break down over
be outfitted with acoustic wave sensors to detect potholes time from stress. “Tensegrity” structures disperse load over a nest of tensed cables and
before the human eye can see them. Sound waves probe the compressed struts that allow them to be both flexible and structurally rigid. Now the
top three feet of the road for telltale air pockets and small University of California at San Diego is developing traffic-bearing tensegrity bridges
cracks, while ground-penetrating radar looks inside bridge with feedback sensors to guide subtle adjustments in cable length, which could
decks for corrosion and lasers scan the road surface. A cellular alleviate the shifting stresses of an overladen truck, counteract the vibration frequency
data connection sends data to control centers, where it can be of an earthquake, or disperse the load of a severed cable.
assembled into maps of trouble spots.
Roads that de-ice themselves

TASK: Reduce the 1,300 road deaths a year from Concrete that senses
snowy and icy winter conditions cracks and heals on its own
STATUS: In testing by more than 20 state departments TASK: Replace miles of concrete highways with smarter versions
of transportation STATUS: Field-testing for self-sensing concrete in progress
A new road coating called SafeLane not only gives tires Carbon nanotubes are prized for both their strength and their piezoresistance—they
more traction, it actually helps prevent the accumulation change their electrical resistance as they’re stressed. Xun Yu, a mechanical-engineering
of ice and snow by holding on to de-icing salts, allowing professor at the University of Minnesota–Duluth, is cooking up a concrete mix that
road crews to scatter salt a couple of days before a contains 0.1 percent carbon nanotubes, making it harder to crack than traditional
blizzard rather than waiting until the snow is already on concrete, and smart too. By embedding electrodes into it as it sets, Yu can measure
the ground. SafeLane consists of layers of epoxy mixed changes in electrical resistance to detect compression from passing cars. Future versions
with dolomitic limestone. The epoxy layer is snowplow- will better calculate speed and vehicle weight on the go for a real-time view of the
proof, lasts up to 15 years, and helps seal the pavement road’s stress. Meanwhile, a new concrete mix developed by Victor Li, a professor of civil
to keep corrosive salts from leaching down to steel bars and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan, contains unhydrated
in sensitive bridge decks. Anecdotal results from its first cement grains that are activated when exposed to carbon dioxide in air and water from
five years in the field show up to a 70 percent decrease rain—exactly what you’d find in a small crack in the road. The reaction produces a
in winter accidents. calcium carbonate seal, restoring the slab to its normal load-bearing capacity.

THE FUTURE OF
ENGINEERING
trackless elevated trains

TASK: Add urban railways for a third the cost of
conventional light rail
STATUS: Texas A&M University’s Texas Transportation
Institute has offered free land for a two-mile test track
To save the multibillion-dollar cost of clearing 24-foot-wide
swaths for new track, trainmaker Tubular Rail wants to shoot
trains up to 150 mph over existing infrastructure through a
series of elevated rings 100 feet apart. As it passes through
each ring, the 400-foot-long carbon-fiber car is pushed
along by electrically powered steel rollers. To save juice,
the motors gear up only as a train approaches; up to 90
percent of the kinetic energy of the train can be recaptured
as the rollers wind down.
glowing cement
TASK: Use phosphorescent highways to
reduce the 50 percent of fatal highway accidents
that happen at night
STATUS: Prototypes have been demonstrated
Nanophosphors are just what they sound like: tiny particles
that glow after exposure to the sun. Scientists at the Council
for Scientific and Industrial Research in South Africa have Highways that store heat
been adding them to materials such as cement and paint to TASK: Embed roads with water-carrying pipes that hold onto the sun’s energy
create things like self-illuminating lane markings and roads STATUS: Projects already in place in Europe
that shine without overhead streetlights. Both could help Road Energy Systems, designed by the Dutch engineering firm Ooms Avenhorn, captures
reduce late-night lane drifting, as well as collisions with energy from hot or cold asphalt. A grid of water circulated just beneath a special blacktop
animals (and pedestrians) on unlit rural roads. Currently is heated in summer or cooled in winter before being pumped down to naturally insulated
the glow lasts just a few hours, but researchers are aquifers 300 feet belowground. The hot or cold water can then be used by nearby
experimenting with additives to find a more potent blend buildings. In summer, the stored cold water also helps cool the road to keep it from
that will shine all night long. softening and deteriorating. In winter, the hot water keeps ice from forming.

THE FUTURE OF
ENGINEERING Replacing treatment plants that use too much power,

Mess #2: and 19th-century networks of leaky pipes
Our water infrastructure is older than our roads and power
grid, with many pipes sitting in trenches dug by hand in the
1800s. In parts of the Northeast, up to 50 percent of our clean
water leaks into the ground between the treatment center
and the tap. Across the country, we lose an average of seven
billion gallons of drinking water a day to leaks—and we
have an 800,000-mile network of pipes that needs constant
monitoring and repair. We also use far too much energy
treating all our water, regardless of its end use, and piping it
long distances. Besides fixing up the nation’s pipes, the future
of water is cleaning only what we need.
A neighborhood-sized saltwater purifier

TASK: Decentralize our clean-water system machines could be deployed up and down the coast, with
STATUS: Prototypes now; commercial units within a year each unit tapping into the ocean to provide neighborhoods
Yoram Cohen, a University of California at Los Angeles chemical with about 5,000 gallons of drinking water per day. The units
engineer, has a solution for thirsty communities in states carry software that can fine-tune filtering in response to local
like California, which burns 20 percent of its power treating changes in water temperature, salinity, pH and silt, and can be
and pumping in water from far-off high-grade reservoirs: to remotely controlled from a central operations center.
spread out the task. His tanning-bed-size reverse-osmosis
Clean water like plants do

TASK: Treat our water on fewer terawatts saltwater at about a third of the cost and a tenth the energy of
STATUS: First small-scale versions by 2011 conventional reverse-osmosis systems. The membrane’s protein
Plants pull water into their roots by osmosis, using tiny channels channels, each just a few nanometers across, allow a stream of
called aquaporins, a method that doesn’t require any energy. water molecules—and only water molecules—to pass single file
Now a Danish company called Aquaporin is developing a at a rate of one billion per second. No pumps are needed
membrane based on that same principle to extract pure H20 from to force the water across the channels.
Aquaporins
Membrane Ions
Filtered
water

clot leaky water pipes
TASK: Pump rubberlike blocks into our system to find
and automatically fix leaks
STATUS: Deployed in the U.K. in 2008
Scottish oil-and-gas company Brinker Technology has a no-dig system of pipe repair
that mimics the way clots form at a cut. When a leak is detected, a service truck
could drive to a nearby fire hydrant and pump in Platelets—squishy, rubberlike cubes
and balls ranging in size from less than a millimeter to nearly two inches across,
depending on the size of the leak. The Platelets travel in the pipe until the outflowing
pressure pulls them toward to the crack. There, they bunch together to form a long-
lasting clot. Utilities don’t even need to know exactly where the leak is located.
Lay new pipes without

digging trenches Bacteria that make
TASK: Deal with 240,000 annual water-main breaks toxic water glow
more quickly by using simple slide-in liners TASK: Install phosphorescent poison detectors at the nation’s
STATUS: Thousands of feet of pipe repaired since March 155,000 drinking-water systems
Another way of fixing broken pipe without summoning STATUS: Commercially available in 2–5 years
the backhoes is to coat it with a new inner lining—already Bacteria are little geniuses at identifying molecules. They’re also
common today in sewage pipes, which are under less prolific, cheap, and easy to manipulate, which makes them ideal
pressure because they rely on gravity to move their contents workers. Using genetically modified, nonharmful strains of E. coli,
along. But Missouri-based Insituform Technologies’s chemist Sylvia Daunert of the University of Kentucky has designed a
new InsituMain liner can withstand the internal forces of prototype biosensor system capable of detecting a variety of drinking-
pressurized pipe, allowing in-place repair of drinking-water water toxins, including arsenic, anthrax, lead and PCBs.
mains. Instead of a full-length trench, two access points (up to The bacteria are housed in the tip of a fiber-optic cable, Glowing
700 feet apart) are cut on either side of the broken pipe. Then which dangles in the drinking-water supply. When they protein
workers insert at one end a flexible liner made from a felt- detect a toxin, the bacteria glow; the light they produce
and-glass-fiber composite and soaked in thermosetting epoxy is carried along the fiber to a monitoring station, where
resin and pull it through the inner walls of the crumbling pipe. its intensity is measured to determine the precise
Exposing the liner to steam or hot water stiffens and seals it, concentration of toxic molecules (sensitive down to
leaving it flush with the inside of the pipe. parts-per-billion scale).
Toxin
New liner Bacterium

Steam

Mess #3: Superconducting tape
Liquid N2
Overhauling inefficient plants and an ancient grid

A 2006 study at Lawrence Berkeley National is expected to grow by 1,150 terawatt-hours—
Laboratory found that power interruptions cost the equivalent of adding 13 New York Cities—by
the economy about $79 billion annually, or 2030. A smarter power grid will surely help, but
about one third of national electric spending, we’ll need additional innovations like these to
thanks to our aging grid. Meanwhile, energy use keep up with spiking demand.
Hang Cram more copper

superconducting underground
cables that won’t TASK: Replace thousands of miles of buried
leak electricity wire with a better-insulated version that carries
TASK: Replace miles of copper wire 25 percent more power
with cables that carry up to 10 times STATUS: 5–10 years away from widespread use
as much electricity per cubic inch In urban areas, overheard power lines are a nuisance and
STATUS: 10–20 years to wide use a danger, which means most electricity crosses the city in
Instead of clearing paths for thousands underground tubes. As urban power demands increase, we
of miles of new power lines to could rip up streets to lay new lines, but an easier solution
carry renewable energy across the is just to cram more copper into the conduits we already
country, we could restring the existing have. That’s what the Electric Power Research Institute
ones to run with high-temperature (EPRI), an industry R&D consortium, is aiming for with a
superconducting cables like those new insulation material that’s embedded with vinylsilane-
being studied at Oak Ridge National coated particles of silicon dioxide to give it 33 percent more
Laboratory. The cables transmit insulating ability than existing line coatings. That means the
electricity along a one-micrometer- next generation of power lines could carry up to a quarter
thick superconductive layer of tape more current without adding any more bulky insulation.
wrapped around a stainless-steel tube
full of liquid nitrogen that cools the
line down below –321ºF. In that chilled
superconducting state, the lines lose
no energy to resistance (today’s copper
cables lose 5 to 7 percent).
Copper-crawling robots
TASK: Deploy fleets of nimble robots that scoot along power lines,
looking for flaws so that humans don’t have to
STATUS: First commercial versions around 2012 Power
Conventional inspection is slow and expensive, often requiring a helicopter
line
flyby. EPRI is working on a robot that can autonomously survey an 80-mile
length of line twice a year for cheaper and more reliable inspections. The
robot will straddle the line, carrying a camera, a diffused scanning laser
and on-board image-analysis software, which it will use to construct both
a visual history of the deterioration of the line, as well as a 3-D map of
encroaching tree branches and other potential problems.
Antenna

Insulation
Copper
Make energy like plants do

TASK: Convert sunlight into chemical energy
STATUS: Last year, scientists found a plentiful raw
material that can free oxygen from water
Solar panels are not the only energy-harvesting strategy under
the sun. For years, scientists have also been trying to do what
Underground power lines plants do—use sunlight to photosynthesize fuel. Until now, most
that heal themselves approaches relied on impractically scarce materials like iridium
TASK: Coat cables with a self-repairing salve as a catalyst that triggers the reaction. But last year, researchers
STATUS: Commercially available in 10–15 years at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory figured out how to
Another way to dig up fewer streets is to avoid unearthing use cobalt oxide, one of the most abundant industrial catalysts.
cables for small repairs. Whenever there’s a nick or hairline To overcome the relative inefficiency with which cobalt oxide
crack in an insulation sheath, the electrical field in the uses sunlight to crack water molecules and free the oxygen,
underlying copper subtly shifts. In a new insulation being researchers layered the catalyst on a tightly stacked scaffold that
developed by EPRI, nanoparticles sensitive to this shift heat makes it effectively 1,600 times as efficient. The net result: Arrays
up and melt surrounding polymer molecules, forming a fresh of cobalt-oxide panels could provide a steady supply of oxygen,
protective scar. As today’s decrepit lines gradually go kaput protons and electrons. The next goal is to find a similarly efficient
(about a quarter are already past their intended lifetime), second catalyst to transform the by-products into an energy-
EPRI hopes to replace them with these self-mending ones. dense fuel like methanol to give gasoline a run for its money.
Add storage to the grid

TASK: Build plants full of spinning drums that store electricity,
so we can finally save surplus energy
STATUS: 20-megawatt plant under construction in Stephentown, N.Y. Vacuum
Incredibly, today’s grid has practically no storage capacity. The electricity coming out chamber
of your socket was generated less than a millisecond ago, so power plants have to
continually generate enough energy for the biggest spikes. To prepare for the power
fluctuations endemic to renewable energy, we’ll need to inventory excess power to Magnetic
use during cloudy, windless afternoons and nights. The Massachusetts-based company bearing
Beacon Power’s solution is to store the grid’s surplus energy in hundreds of spinning
Carbon-and-
carbon-fiber-and-fiberglass drums. Each of its Generation 4 flywheels features a
fiberglass
2,500-pound rotor mounted on magnetic bearings and sealed in a vacuum to create a
drum
near-friction-free environment. Energy coming in from the grid accelerates the three-
foot rotor to 16,000 rpm (about Mach 2), where it keeps spinning with at least 97 Motor/
percent efficiency. To pump energy back into the grid, some of the rotational energy is generator
bled off to power a generator on the main shaft. Each flywheel can store a 15-minute,
100-kilowatt charge and can discharge 150,000 times over 20 years.

THE FUTURE OF
ENGINEERING
Mess #4:
Boosting anemic
broadband speeds
and wireless
networks stuck in
the 20th century
The U.S. ranks 17th worldwide
in broadband access, but not for
long—last year’s stimulus package
allotted $7.2 billion for upgrading
our underperforming broadband
infrastructure. Our legacy copper
wiring just can’t carry the data to
support HD-video streaming, for
instance, and next-gen wireless
networks are slower to roll out than
in, say, Japan, because of the sheer
size of this country. But advances
in fiber-optic cables and broadband
blimps could bring serious speed
increases to homes and smartphones.
Faster Fiber Make the network

TASK: Replace our international fiber-optic trunk lines with thicker cables airborne
that carry 10 times the data per second TASK: Float broadband blimps above
STATUS: Demonstrated last year areas that are a headache to hardwire
Our next generation of transoceanic submarine fiber cables may be built according to the Alcatel- STATUS: Delivery of a first ship to
Lucent design that recently set transmission speed records by moving data 10 times as fast as current a military contractor this year; full
cables. The new cables started with a fiber core that is on average 40 percent thicker than the ones platforms in 3–5 years
currently draped across the ocean floor. Engineers designed an array of 155 lasers that emit light of We’re going to need to dig a lot more
different wavelengths, and in addition to encoding information in the timing of the light pulses the fiber and copper in the coming years
way current cables do, they modulated the polarization and the phase to pack extra data onto to meet the exploding communications
each light wave. The new fiber cables can send 15.5 terabytes—the equivalent of 400 DVDs—each demand. Or we can just float a few
second from Boston to Bilbao. blimps. Sanswire, a manufacturer of
unmanned aerial vehicles, is working on
a 525-foot helium- and fuel-gas-filled
Flexible Fiber airship, the Stratellite, which would
TASK: Snake high-speed fiber-optics into virtually every home provide blanket broadband coverage from
STATUS: Available now the tranquil heights of the stratosphere.
Corning’s new, flexible ClearCurve cable features a nanomaterial Hovering at 65,000 feet, each blimp could
mesh wrapped around the cable core that keeps the photons in provide phone, TV and high-speed Internet
line even when stapled, bent, or twisted around a nail—usually to an area about the size of Texas, without
any such quick turns would make the line go dark. That means the lag times that have plagued satellite-
telecoms can finally put fiber-optic lines into people’s homes, based communications. Stratellites can
where cables often run up against right angles and tight squeezes even daisy-chain to link cities and rural
from the sidewalk to the house. Verizon is already using the areas across the country—all without a
cable for its FiOS service. Fiber core Nanomaterial single new wire touching the ground. 3

Mess #5:
Banishing energy-hogging treatment plants and rotting pipes

Every year, Americans produce 12 trillion gallons of wet sewage and to clever new technology, sewage will be reclaimed to provide power,
burn 21 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity to clean it to drinking- produce fertilizer and, eventually, yield clean water. In other words,
water standards. Why not put the smelly stuff to good use? Thanks sooner than you think, you’ll be drinking your own urine.
drop robots down the drain

TASK: Deploy fleets of autonomous machines to spot leaks in sewage pipes
STATUS: New models that use a laser to measure inside pipes could be ready by 2011
RedZone Robotics’s new Solo sewer robots will use image-interpreting software developed at Carnegie
Mellon University to analyze their video feeds and tag potential problems in the pipe, so a 10-hour run can
be condensed to a two-hour highlight reel of dripping cracks and grasping roots. Each Solo carries a camera
at either end, sonar to scan below the water, and lasers to search sewer walls for acid corrosion.
Anode Cathode
Electron
Bacteria
Turn sludge into electricity Recycle urine

TASK: Reduce the energy we use to treat wastewater, TASK: Recover phosphorus and nitrogen from wastewater to make fertilizer
currently 1.5 percent of our total national power STATUS: First U.S. plant opened last June; another coming this year
STATUS: Field-testing reactors; commercial units by 2015 Believe it or not, the wastewater of 100,000 people could yield an annual crop of
Bruce Logan, a professor of environmental engineering at Penn about 200 tons of high-grade fertilizer. The Vancouver company Ostara hopes to use
State University, has designed a microbial fuel cell to turn the this fact to overcome our shrinking supply of recoverable phosphorus rock, one of
chemical energy in sewage directly into electricity—and clean the three essential components of modern fertilizer. Ostara’s PEARL Nutrient Recycling
sewage in the process. Bacteria housed on a graphite fiber anode system extracts phosphates and other minerals like ammonia from municipal
break down the fats, proteins and sugars in sewage, freeing up wastewater and then churns the nutrients into safe, slow-release fertilizer pellets sold
a steady stream of electrons, which the bacteria transfer directly under the name Crystal Green. The challenge is sequestering the urine, which accounts
into the electrode. Those electrons move to the cathode, providing for just 1 percent of sewage by volume. One solution: source-separated toilets (think:
electrical power and, at the cathode, producing hydrogen gas. a little bowl within a big bowl), already being tried in Sweden and Denmark.

IN LIVING COLOR
Mary Lou Jepsen
has invented a
hybrid computer
screen that blends
the best aspects
of both laptop and
e-reader displays.
& www.fantamag.com
POPSCI INNOVATOR
Mary Lou Jepsen

has created massive
holograms and cheap
laptops for the develop-
ing world. Now she’s
rethinking the LCD
screen, leading the
way to the next great
By Lauren Aaronson
gadget: an e-reader to photographs by john b. carnett
replace your laptop digital imaging by Eric Heintz
For Mary Lou Jepsen, getting an MRI is not unlike getting a new page. Jepsen’s screen combines the best of both tech-
massage—a relaxing ritual, a rare slice of time when no work nologies. Flick a switch, and the bulb that makes the screen
can possibly be done. I’m accompanying Jepsen to her doc- glow will dim. But instead of going dark, only the colors will
tor’s appointment at Massachusetts General Hospital because fade. That’s because in Jepsen’s screen, ambient light can
it’s the only few hours she can fit me in. She’s in Boston for substitute for backlight, bouncing off the mirror-like material
three days, in between trips to her Sausalito, California, that Jepsen has added to each pixel to reflect shades of black
houseboat and her apartment in Taipei, Taiwan, and she’s and white. With the lamp completely off, the screen, called
booked back-to-back with appointments. Yesterday she 3Qi (pronounced “three chee,” as in qi, the Chinese word
had a meeting with the team at One Laptop Per Child, the for “spirit,” and a geeky pun on the 3G wireless network),
nonprofit she helped create and with which she still col- displays letters as crisp and readable as those on Amazon’s
laborates on new computer designs. Today she’s talking Kindle. In this mode, 3Qi uses about one fifth the power of a
with her doctor about the medicine she needs to take to normal computer screen, Jepsen says. And unlike the E Ink–
stay alive, after a tumor nearly killed her 10 years ago. based Kindle or any other widely available e-reader, it still
Tomorrow she will appear at the Boston Book Festival does everything a regular LCD does, including play videos.
in a debate about the future of reading, along with top As Jepsen will say in her talk tomorrow, “The future of
executives from Sony and Google. reading is screens.” She puts it to me more bluntly: “Books are
While Jepsen gets her brain scanned, I sit in the toast.” She’s not talking about reading, just dead-tree delivery,
waiting room and guard the tote bag that contains and there’s evidence to back her up. Between January and Sep-
the reason her life is so frenzied: a 10-inch slab of tember of last year, $112.5 million worth of digital, download-
glass that, she says, merges the best of computers able books were sold, up from $7.2 million during the same
and e-readers into a single screen. Turn on the period five years earlier. Since the introduction of the Sony
store-bought tablet PC that Jepsen’s prototype Reader Digital Book in 2006 and the Kindle in 2007, the num-
screen sits in—she removed the old screen with a ber of e-readers sold in the U.S. has more than doubled every
screwdriver and swapped hers in—and it looks and year—an estimated one million in 2008, three million in 2009,
acts like any LCD screen, because it is an LCD, only and a projected six million this year. According to one forecast,
better. LCDs display color and video, but they kill battery that number could rise to 77 million worldwide by 2018.
life. Electronic ink is more energy-efficient and paper-like, That may be hard to believe given the single-task capabil-
but it’s black and white and is frustratingly slow to load a ity of current e-readers. But once a screen arrives that com-

SHINE A LITTLE LIGHT A
schematic representation
of a single pixel in Jepsen’s
hybrid LCD screen
A Backlight E Mirror B Layer of C Color filters D Ambient light

liquid crystals
3Qi combines two kinds of displays—an ordinary color LCD and a low-power, high-
resolution black-and-white version—into one package. Here’s how it pulls it off
CREATING COLOR [C], which tint and combine the light to in a mirror [E]. The beams bounce back
Part of each pixel acts like one in a nor- create the colors on your screen. out through the liquid crystals, which
mal LCD screen: A backlight [A] shines change the brightness of the light that
through a layer of liquid crystals [B]. BOUNCING BLACK AND WHITE escapes, just like in the color mode. But
The crystals control how much light gets Turn the energy-sucking backlight down, instead of shuttling through color filters,
through, depending on how they shift their and the pixel reflects light instead of pro- which absorb and dim rays, that light ex-
orientation when zapped with electricity. ducing it. Ambient light [D], whether from its through an empty space—so you see
The light that makes it past the crystals a lamp or the sun, enters the display and it as white, black or one of 254 shades of
passes through red, green and blue filters hits a large part of the pixel that’s covered gray in between.

POPSCI INNOVATOR
bines the best of laptops and e-readers into a single, affordable dismantling radios, writing short stories, and making charcoal
package—once a flip of a switch can transform your high- drawings. By sixth grade, she was teaching herself calculus.
definition-movie-playing color laptop screen into an e-book Her parents struggled financially—her father repaired car
with enough battery life to last a trans-Pacific flight—then engines until his business burned down, and then ran for po-
things get more interesting. Laptops could become simple flat litical office and lost—so they pushed the teenage Jepsen in a
touchscreens, and e-readers as we know them could eventu- pragmatic direction. “I didn’t want to be an electrical engineer,”
ally become obsolete. If the future of gadgets is in the screens, she says. “But I did want to go to college. And they said they’d
Jepsen is trying to write that future. help me pay for it if I’d major in electrical engineering.”
So are plenty of others, of course. And this could be the During her freshman year at Brown University, she figured
year the leaders in the display race pull away from the pack. out a way to meld science and art: In a physics class, she learned
The cellphone-chip giant Qualcomm; the current e-reader dis- how to create holograms. “You make this emulsion, spread it on
play leader, E Ink; and at least one other major player are set to glass, and at the end of this whole complicated process, you have
release next-generation e-reader screens by 2011. But Jepsen’s this magical 3-D thing,” she says. “I was hooked.”
hybrid screen is likely to be the first and the least expensive She decided to spend her life making holograms. She went
of the bunch. Her company, Pixel Qi, which is based in both on to earn a master’s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technol-
Silicon Valley and Taipei, will, by the time you read this, have ogy’s Media Lab, where she helped develop a groundbreaking
started a run of millions of screens. Although Jepsen won’t 3-D video system (which, incidentally, earned a mention in
name brands, she says these will soon appear in netbooks, this magazine in 1991). Then she took her artistic engineering
tablet computers and dedicated e-readers. around the world. Sometimes she put it to practical ends, as
The Pixel Qi screen I’m guarding in the hospital waiting when she helped the Australian government fix the security
room is one of a few thousand that currently exist. Jepsen had hologram on their dollar bill. Other times, it was purely art, as
shown it to me earlier in the day, so I restrain the impulse to when she splashed a 66-foot hologram of Roman baths across
pull it out of her bag to do my reading. I knew that in the black- an entire city block in Cologne, Germany. In the ’90s, she even
and-white mode, the screen makes reading the newspaper as came up with the idea of using solar-mirror arrays in California
easy on my eyes as, well, the paper itself. Because the black-and- to project a movie onto the moon (a plan she later shelved after
white portion of each pixel is so large (and because parts of that deciding that it would be culturally disastrous to deface some-
little pixel-portion can be turned on and off individually), the thing revered by many religions).
resolution in black and white is nearly 200 dots per inch. It’s While in Germany in her mid-20s, she began to suffer mys-
remarkable, and I understand why despite being an underdog terious health problems: scrapes that didn’t heal, kidney ail-
in this race—a woman doing business in Asia, competing with ments usually contracted only by AIDS patients. As a freelance
some of the giants of the electronics business, all the while art-holographer, she lacked health insurance, so she felt she
managing a life-threatening medical condition—Jepsen is on had to switch to steadier work. She went back to Brown to get
the cusp of something big. And why she’s so busy fielding a Ph.D. in optics, thinking an advanced degree might help her
interest that she can step out of an MRI visibly relaxed. “That’s compete in the male-dominated electronics industry. Partway
the most time off I’ve had in a long time,” she says as she steps through her studies, though, she found herself nearly incapaci-
out of the imaging room. tated. “I was going blind, and I was in a wheelchair,” she says.
“I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life living with
holograms and hormones my parents.” Finally, doctors unearthed a hormone-wrecking
Even when she’s not fresh from a rejuvenating medical
procedure, Jepsen is simultaneously placid and upbeat,
particularly for a woman on the verge of breaking into a
multibillion-dollar industry. She meets the constant demands
for her time matter-of-factly, without any apparent stress,
and for someone who spends so much of her time in front of
conference crowds, she’s surprisingly un-self-conscious. She
once filmed a series of Web videos on her work while wear-
ing a pirate-like eye patch to cover a parasitic infection. And
today she seems perfectly comfortable being interviewed in
her hospital gown.
At 44, Jepsen has found a way to bring together the strands
of a long and unusual career in art and engineering, 20-plus
years of manipulating light for fun and profit. As a kid in a
farmhouse in Windsor, Connecticut, she loved the 3-D pictures
in her Thumbelina storybook so much that she scratched her
way through the ridged plastic pages, in the process learning
how bending light can trick the eyes. She stayed up all night

POPSCI INNOVATOR
mass on her pituitary gland—this after years of telling her that saving benefits of reflective pixels to the rest of us.
her illness was all in her head. “In fact, it was,” she says. “They She hashed out ideas over the dinner table with her hus-
sucked it out of my nose.” band, John Ryan, a telecom consultant, and when he became
Removing part of her pituitary gave Jepsen back her more interested in her project than his own job, she hired him
health. It also gave her a strict lifelong course of pills, needed as chief operating officer. After securing venture-capital fund-
to replace the lost gland’s hormones, and a strong sense of ing, she rented offices across the street from YouTube in San
urgency. “If I don’t take my pills every 12 hours, I can die,” Bruno, California, set up a lab for playing with liquid crystals in
she says. “So how do I want to use my time?” the office kitchen, and began experimenting with ways to get
more light through the screen. By the time she and her growing
rethinking the screen team finished, they had changed nearly every layer inside the
In 2005, after nine years at display companies, Jepsen applied LCD, so that all that remains from the original OLPC screen,
for a professorship at MIT. As part of her interview, she spoke Jepsen says, is the basic idea of the black-and-white mode. “It
with professor Nicholas Negroponte, who had just returned doesn’t sound as cool as giving poor kids laptops, but it’s one
from proposing his “$100 laptop” idea—building low-cost and the same,” she says. As Pixel Qi scales up, the cost of the
laptops for kids in developing countries—at the World Eco- screens (which are going into the next OLPC computer) should
nomic Forum. Jepsen and Negroponte hit it off immediately. come down, making Jepsen’s technology ever more accessible.
Within hours, the two had hatched the One Laptop Per Child Jepsen is still involved in Pixel Qi’s technical work, but
(OLPC) initiative, and Negroponte immediately dispatched most of the rest of the time she’s in the air, on her way to
her to Europe to talk with technology leaders. Working as supervise manufacturing in Taipei or to meet with a company
OLPC’s screen guru, she made the project happen, says Media about using her screen. She logs nearly 300,000 air miles a
Lab researcher V. Michael Bove, a technical adviser to OLPC year in service of these missions. And despite the seemingly
who has known Jepsen since her grad-student days. “She was obvious benefits of her screen designs, it’s never an easy sell.
the one who had the big fights with Taiwanese LCD makers “To a certain degree, she’s selling ice to Eskimos,” says John
and engineers who didn’t think it”—making an inexpensive Jacobs, a laptop analyst at DisplaySearch who used to evalu-
laptop—“could be done.” ate new screens for Apple. “No matter how great the ice is,
The true humanitarian worth of spreading cheap laptops they’ve already got some.”
across the developing world is up for debate, but OLPC had Yet Jepsen has an “ace in the hole,” Jacobs says: “She’s a
one undeniable effect: It led directly to the advent of the small, phenomenal evangelist for the technology.” Since she started
stripped-down, inexpensive “netbook,” a sector that now makes Pixel Qi, she has effectively completed a world tour every
up about 20 percent of all laptop sales. Once the nonprofit month, trying to convince computer manufacturers from
showed that it could build a compact, functional laptop for less China to Texas to use her screens. When a CEO dismisses
than $200, nearly every other computer maker followed suit, Pixel Qi as just another here-today, gone-tomorrow screen
and the gadget-buying public snatched them up. Since its de- technology, she pulls out her OLPC credentials: “Which one
but in 2007, OLPC has delivered more than a million comput- has shipped a million products within a year of starting mass
ers; Acer, Asus, HP and other consumer-electronics companies production? Which one? There are none,” she tells them.
now ship approximately 40 million netbooks a year. “There are none at all. Which one has even shipped 1,000
Jepsen left OLPC at the beginning of 2008 to take her products within a year of mass production? OK, 100? We’ve
display technology further. She started Pixel Qi with her own got a million. That’s why you should believe me.”
money and the half a million frequent-flier miles she had
racked up traveling to Africa. For the OLPC computer, she had taking on the e-giant
designed a new low-power display that could have maximum When she’s at the LCD factory in Taipei that’s gearing up to
battery life in villages where the electricity was spotty at best. produce her new screen, Jepsen is on constant call, sometimes
Instead of always using the power-hungry LCD backlamp, the napping on the floor after pulling an all-nighter. It takes more
screen could be illuminated by reflecting sunlight (a variation than 100 different machines to assemble the layers of an LCD
on the outdoor-readable screens found in some cellphones screen, and as Pixel Qi moves into mass production, problems
and rugged laptops). 3Qi is designed to bring the battery- can occur at every step: a few specks of [continued ON page 82]

LENGTHY READING
Dropped into an exist-
ing netbook, the 3Qi
screen adds about an
hour of battery life.
Devices designed
to work specifically
with the screen could
extend that to nearly
a day, Jepsen says.
PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN AT CRIMSON CORNER, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

Scientists are trying to develop pure-fusion reactions—bursts that Fear Factor
don’t require uranium or plutonium to ignite—for clean energy. But they Nuclear weapons are scary. The U.S. has already created small
could also usher in so-called low-yield nuclear weapons that emit very “bunker-buster” nukes that can penetrate underground targets. But
little radiation and could be both small and difficult to detect. weaponized pure fusion would require miniaturizing lasers or other
trigger technologies that currently involve building-sized equipment.
Why, God, Why? Of course, pure fusion may also be impossible. According to several
The civilian rationale is that pure-fusion nuclear power could reports, including declassified information from the Department of
supplement, if not replace, fossil fuels and conventional reactors. And Energy, weapons scientists have tried and failed to pull it off since the
the era of widespread nuclear weapons development is largely over. 1950s, and funding for the research was banned in 1993. But Jeremy
A 2008 report by the American Association for the Advancement of Tamsett, editor of the Journal of Strategic Security, says the 2004
Science, the American Physical Society and the Center for Strategic and Defense Authorization Act repealed the restrictions. And this year,
International Studies recommended extending the life of old nukes Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will attempt to create pure-
with upgraded warheads and onboard microsensors for quality control fusion reactions with lasers at its National Ignition Facility.
(rather than building anything new). But if scientists happen upon pure
fusion, who knows what they might do with it? WORRY METER

UNCOMMON KNOWLEDGE
SCARY
SCIENCE
Bold innovation or terrible idea? Your guide
to the experiments that only sound scary—
and the lab work you truly should lose sleep over
BY JASON DALEY ILLUSTRATIONS BY JON PROCTOR
& ww
www.
w.fa
w. fant
fa ntam
nt amag
am ag.c
ag.com
.c om
Rovers and probes have provided some info on Martian soil and Fear Factor
climate, but scientists want to bring a chunk of the Red Planet NASA’s Planetary Protection division (“Our mission is to prevent
down to Earth on what’s called a sample-return mission. Uh, biological cross-contamination”) plans to house everything in a
remember The Andromeda Strain? What happens if some freaky special receiving facility on Earth similar to a level-4 biohazard-
virus comes back on NASA’s planned 2018 sample return? containment lab, the most secure kind. “The only thing that would
be of concern is something that can replicate,” says Margaret Race, a
Why, God, Why? principal investigator with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
Martian probes can’t carry the full spectrum of scientific gear (SETI) Institute who focuses on contaminants and planetary
and monitors to the dirt, but they can bring the dirt back to protection. “If it’s radiation or toxins, we can deal with that.” She
instruments on Earth, buying time and flexibility for testing. And believes the Mars sample could be just as vulnerable to Earthly
when it comes to Mars rocks, scientists love time and flexibility. microbes as people might be to any Martian germs. “We’ve gotten
Researchers spent more than a decade studying the Martian rock very good at biocontainment,” Race says. “If something goes wrong,
known as the Allen Hills meteorite (and found possible fossil we could just autoclave”—sterilize—”everything.”
evidence of life). If and when we bring back a coffee-cup-size
sample from Mars in 2018, it will also need Earth-bound scrutiny. WORRY METER

UNCOMMON KNOWLEDGE
Last January, at a conference in Sorrento, Italy, Fear Factor

researchers from the University of California at As sinister as they seem, the tiny cyborgs aren’t yet a
Berkeley and the University of Michigan shocked threat to Al Qaeda or your privacy. Even the fruit beetle
the crowd with a living, remote-control fruit beetle, isn’t strong enough to carry much besides the electrodes
part of a Pentagon-funded HI-MEMS (“hybrid insects and radio antennas that steer it. But researchers are
microelectromechanical system”) program to develop working to breed stronger payload-bearing beetles and to
cyborg creepy-crawlies. Recently the Berkeley team develop components that could be powered by the insect’s
created a remote-control fig beetle that they can movement rather than by burdensome batteries. And
launch and land and direct to the left and right. here’s something scary: The Berkeley scientists can now
implant the MEMS equipment during the pupal stage so
Why, God, Why? that the beetles emerge embedded with electrodes, ready
For years, Darpa, the Pentagon’s experimental-research to be wired up. Still, bugs may never join troops on the
branch, has attempted to build true nano air vehicles, tiny front lines. For one thing, their short life span makes all the
aircraft that can act as miniature drones in war zones. expense of cyborging them difficult to justify.
Adapting real insects turns out to be simpler—their bodies
accept implants easily, and they’re hardy, fast and nimble. WORRY METER
They also blend in outdoors.
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UNCOMMON KNOWLEDGE
In 2005, researchers in Switzerland gave 29 test such a drug could find a place in facilitating Fear Factor
subjects a sniff of the neuropeptide oxytocin, a.k.a. interrogations and negotiations, or in ending You don’t have to worry about a used-car dealer
the “love drug,” known to play a role in developing armed conflicts. spraying you with oxytocin—according to
trust and social attachment in mammals, before Kosfeld, it’s almost impossible to aerosolize a
having them play a financial investment game. The dose. But squirted up the nose, the drug might
result? Almost half of the trust-primed oxy sniffers induce cooperation during interrogations. The
handed all their francs to an anonymous partner. field is just getting started. Last year, bioethicist
Now insiders say the military may be in the process Malcolm Dando warned that calmatives are part
of weaponizing oxytocin and similar compounds. of a paradigm shift in the biochemical-weapons
world and that we shouldn’t weaponize drugs,
Why, God, Why? especially if we don’t fully understand them.
Lead researcher Michael Kosfeld, who conducted Recent Israeli research on human subjects, for
the study at the University of Zurich, says the true instance, suggests that oxytocin might also
value of oxytocin may be in treating people with increase antisocial behavior.
social-anxiety disorder or to help relieve some
symptoms of autism and Asperger’s syndrome. But WORRY METER
Jonathan Moreno, a bioethicist at the University of
Pennsylvania and author of the book Mind Wars:
Brain Research and National Defense, believes
SMILE POLICE
Last year, 500 or so employees of the Keihin
Electric Express Railway in Tokyo lined up
in front of a camera to be judged by the
Japanese company Omron’s Smile Scan
software, which measures facial movement
and rates smiles from 1 to 100. And smile
enforcement is just the beginning; a
whole slate of behavior-recognition
software will someday pick people out
of a crowd for insufficient perkiness.
Why, God, Why?

It’s not Orwell—it’s Omron’s OKAO
Vision facial-recognition software
suite, developed to help machines
understand facial expressions and
now used to monitor fatigue in
truck drivers. Smile Scan does its
creepy evaluative thing in more
than 100 Japanese businesses and
organizations.
Fear Factor
Behavior-recognition software has Researchers across the globe are refining what the technology can do. The
already infiltrated our lives. A system next iterations, such as software by the British company OmniPerception,
called NICE helps call centers determine will identify—and perhaps someday decode—an individual’s gait or
when a phone customer is becoming angry, smile. Soon even your living room will evaluate you: Last year, Sony
and surveillance systems like Perceptrak applied for a patent on a mood-detecting device for its PlayStation 3.
can detect suspicious behavior via camera.
WORRY METER

FIELDWORK
www.
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com & ww
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If a few
very smart
neuroscientists
are right, with
enough number
crunching and
a powerful
brain scanner,
science can pluck
pictures—and
maybe one day
even thoughts—
directly from
your brain
BY LISA KATAYAMA ILLUSTRATION BY COHERENT IMAGES
It’s after dark on a warm Monday night in April, and I’m

lying face-up in a 13-ton tube at the Henry H. Wheeler, Jr. Brain
Imaging Center at the University of California at Berkeley. The
room is dimly lit, and I am alone. A white plastic cage covers my
face, and a blue computer screen shines brightly into my eyes. I’m
here because a neuroscientist named Jack Gallant is about to read
my mind. He has given me strict instructions not to move; even
the slightest twitch could affect the accuracy of what he’s about
to do. As I stare straight up, I notice an itch on my thigh. Don’t
scratch it, I tell myself. I try to keep my thoughts blank as the
beeping gets faster and the fMRI machine—the scanner that will
detect changes in blood flow in my brain—powers up.
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FIELDWORK
Gallant assures me that the random thoughts in squiggly lines and light gray V shapes inside rows of
my head will not affect his results. Today he’s just gray circles. “That’s it? That’s my brain?” I ask, my head
concerned with what I see and how that registers in foggy from having tried so hard to stay still. It surprises
the visual cortex, a region at the back of the brain me that all the goings-on in my mind can be reduced to
that processes what my eyes take in. It doesn’t matter a bunch of geometric shapes. Gallant tells me that brain
that I’m thinking about what to eat for dinner, or that activity is basically just a bunch of neurons firing—an
I’m worried about getting a parking ticket on Oxford estimated 300 million in the primary visual cortex
Street. The only important thing, he says, is for me to alone, according to the latest research.
keep as still as possible, and soon he’ll have enough To help make sense of the shapes, the brain scanner
information to re-create the pictures I’ve been staring at divides them up into a grid of three-dimensional
without ever having seen the images himself. cube-like structures called volume pixels, or voxels.
For the past 10 years, Gallant has been running a To me, each voxel looks like a random mix of whites,
neuroscience and psychology lab at Berkeley dedicated grays and blacks. But to Gallant’s computer model,
to brain imaging and vision research. He’s one of a few which can see more-precise data in those shades, the
neuroscientists in the world on the verge of unlocking voxels are a meaningful matrix of zeroes and ones. By
the key to mind reading through brain-pattern analysis crunching this matrix, it can transform the shapes back
using magnetic resonance scans and algorithms. By into a remarkably accurate rendering of the Einstein
showing me a series of random photographs and Guy or the grazing sheep. Gallant and his team didn’t
evaluating fMRI readings from my primary visual have time to generate enough scans of my brain to
cortex, Gallant says his technique can reconstruct make their algorithm work, but they showed me
imagery stored in my brain. His current method some convincing results from other volunteers. “It’s
takes hours of analysis, but his objective is to hone not perfect,” says Shinji Nishimoto, one of Gallant’s
the technology to the point where it can deduce what postdocs, “but we’re getting pretty close.”
people are seeing in real time. As I leave the lab, my thoughts secure in my head,
If successful, it could influence the way we do just I feel a bit uneasy knowing that they may not stay that
about everything. Mind-reading machines could help way for long. Gallant’s “neural decoding”—a term he
doctors understand the inner worlds of people with prefers to “mind reading”—is getting faster and more
hallucinations, cognitive disabilities, post-traumatic sophisticated all the time. In fact, last October, his lab
stress disorder and other impairments. Judges could managed to re-create entire video clips just by analyzing
use them to sneak a look into suspects’ brains by the brain patterns of people watching them. In one
having them reenact the experience and reading their example, a reconstructed video of an elephant walking
visions. Such machines could also determine whether through the desert shows a blotchy Dumbo-shaped mass
someone using the insanity defense is faking it, or plodding across the screen. The fine details are lost, but
whether someone claiming self-defense truly feared the rendering is nonetheless impressive for having been
for his life. On the flip side, the technology raises pulled from someone’s brain. And it’s not just Gallant
serious ethical concerns, with critics worrying that it who’s making progress. Using similar technology, other
could one day make our private thoughts vulnerable to researchers are unlocking memories and dreams.
snoops and hackers. Beyond the fuzzy realm of the paranormal, mind
I ponder all this as I lie motionless in the brain reading could simply be a question of having the right
scanner, staring straight ahead while Gallant and two tools. “As long as we have good measurements of brain
of his lab researchers flash several dozen photographs activity and good computational models of the brain,”
in front of my eyes, a few seconds at a time. I see sheep Gallant wrote in a supplement to a paper he published
grazing in a meadow, a rock formation, a pond and a in Nature in 2008, “it should be possible in principle
profile of a guy who looks like Einstein. I’m not actually to decode the visual content of mental processes like
supposed to be looking at these pictures—my job is dreams, memory, and imagery.”
to stare at the white dot in the middle of the screen.
“Seeing” doesn’t happen entirely in the conscious
realm, Gallant explains. The visual cortex works like a the magic of the mri
camera, automatically absorbing information through Gallant is a slight, wiry man with a horseshoe mustache
the retina and registering the imagery in the brain.
Ten minutes feels like an eternity, but finally the
fMRI announces the conclusion of its program with
another loud beep. The researchers remove me from
Mind-reading machines could
my bind and escort me to the control room, where a
giant monitor is displaying 30 scanned images of my
help doctors understand the
brain from different angles. I see bunches of white inner worlds of the mentally ill.
& www.fantamag.com
What’s on
your mind?
Remarkably, scientists can
predict with near-perfect
accuracy the last thing you
saw just by analyzing your
brain activity. The technique
is called neural decoding.
To do it, scientists must first
Mismatch
scan your brain while you
look at thousands of pictures.
A computer then analyzes
how your brain responds to HOW IT WORKS
each image, matching brain Your brain gener-
activity to various details like ates a unique pattern Mismatch
shape and color. Over time, the of activity for every
computer establishes a sort image it sees [top].
By analyzing thou-
of master decoding key that it
sands of fMRI scans
can later use to identify and
[right], software
reconstruct almost any object can match patterns match
you see without the need to in your brain to
analyze the image beforehand. specific objects.
and a Willy Wonka–esque energy about him. He tends healthy eyes. Experiments on rodents affirmed that the
to use friendly, vivid analogies when he talks. “The brain location and shape of things we see are replicated in
is a Thanksgiving turkey,” he said to me last summer V1. If I were to look at a tree, for instance, the back of
during a visit to his bare-bones office at Berkeley. He the eye would register a representation of an upside-
was drawing furiously on the chalkboard, attempting down tree onto V1. But it wasn’t until the late 1990s,
to explain in simple terms the inner workings of the when neuroscientists used a process called multi-voxel
visual cortex. “The outside of the turkey is the skin, or pattern recognition, that scientists were able to pinpoint
the brain’s cortex. All the giblets inside are subcortical these representations non-invasively in humans. The
nuclei. This”—he tapped his chalk on the giant balloon- technique uses fMRIs to map the visual cortex into tiny
like cavity at the rear of his “turkey” diagram—“is the structures—voxels—that correspond to patterns of blood
primary visual cortex,” the center of our vision system. flow. One pattern in the area responsible for shape, for
The brain employs a complex assembly line to instance, might suggest that a person is looking at a dog,
construct the world around us. The primary visual cortex, while another pattern in the area responsible for color
or V1, connects to a maze of other regions known as could suggest that the dog is brown.
V2, V3, and so on. (“Nobody knows exactly how many Gallant’s project takes the technique to a new
areas there are up there,” Gallant says, a finger to his level, using a computer model to not only identify
head.) Each region performs specific vision-related images but also reconstruct them. On the night of
functions, like distinguishing colors, discerning shapes, my fMRI session, I met five members of Gallant’s lab
gauging depth, or sensing motion. When I look at a dog, who, for the past three years, have been wrestling
for instance, I don’t just see the shape of a four-legged with probability theory to come up with the best
animal; I recognize that it’s the brown-and-white dog algorithms to power the model. When I asked them
I owned as a child, romping in a familiar way in the how exactly they devised the code, Thomas Naselaris,
backyard I grew up in. It might even trigger a memory of a tall, curly-haired postdoc, put a long equation on the
playing with him. Each of these aspects of “seeing” would blackboard called Bayes’ theorem. It’s a fundamental
be represented by different patterns in the visual cortex. tenet of probability theory that calculates how odds
The key function of V1 relevant to Gallant’s change in response to new information, he explained,
research—registering visual stimuli—was discovered in and it’s the key to their technique.
KEVIN HAND
the early 20th century, when soldiers with bullet wounds To calculate the probability that someone’s brain
to the back of the head, presumably to their visual patterns represent a particular image, the researchers
cortex, experienced partial blindness despite having must first prime their special equation with a sizable

FIELDWORK
sampling of data, plugging in 1,750 of the subject’s fMRI

scans. “For every possible image a person could be Decoding brain activity is “all
looking at, Bayes’ theorem tells you the probability that
the image is correct,” Naselaris says. It’s a bit like trying numbers,” says Gallant. “The
to predict the make of a car concealed beneath a tarp: To
come up with an accurate guess, you must first analyze trick is to do good bookkeeping.”
all the available clues—the shape of the tarp, its size,
maybe the type of person who owns the car, possibly the their brain signals and, like Gallant, reconstruct them.
sound of the engine. The more information you have, the Meanwhile, Gallant and Nishimoto are attempting
better your guess. Likewise, the more data you plug into to reproduce movies stored in the brain. After I finish
the equation, the more accurate its predictions. my fMRI scans, Gallant showed me a video clip on his
computer featuring psychedelic bears floating in front
of mountains. Every few seconds, a new bear zoomed
dancing bears into the foreground and then floated away like a beach
The ability to pluck a picture from someone’s brain is an ball tossed in the air. Occasionally a colorful cube flew
impressive feat, but the far bigger challenge is figuring past the bears. Just looking at it made me dizzy. “This
out the actual thoughts associated with that picture. is a motion-enhanced movie,” Gallant says excitedly. “It
Gallant would have no way to know, for instance, what makes your visual system go absolutely crazy, so you
I was thinking while I was lying in the scanner. That’s get lots of blood flow and signals.”
because thoughts, unlike pictures, are not neatly recorded Nishimoto, the lab’s resident “motion guy,” is able
at the back of the brain. to reconstruct from brain scans the colors, location and
So where are they recorded? Tom Mitchell, a movement of these bears, generating reproductions of
computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, along the original video footage. In a similar experiment, he
with his colleague Marcel Just, is using fMRI and multi- asked a volunteer to watch two hours of movie trailers
voxel pattern recognition to answer that question. By inside an fMRI machine. A computer then matched the
mapping the brain’s response to images, words and subject’s brain patterns to colors and moving shapes in
emotions, Mitchell believes his lab could be decoding the movie. To build up the computer model’s reference
thoughts, not just pictures, within the decade. library of associations—to prime it—the researchers
To pinpoint where thoughts live in the brain, during fed it thousands of hours of YouTube videos and asked
a recent study he put volunteers in an fMRI machine, it to predict how the person’s brain would respond to
showed them two objects—a hammer and a house, for watching them. Then, when the subject watched a new
example—and used software to analyze voxel patterns set of videos, the computer was able to match the new
triggered in multiple parts of the brain, ultimately brain patterns to images in its library to piece together a
determining which object the subject was thinking reproduction of the original video clip. The reconstructed
about. Like Gallant, Mitchell can do this with 90 percent video captured the general flow of motion, as well as
accuracy. “When you think about a hammer, you think shapes and colors, although it missed fine details such
about all aspects of it. You might think about swinging as facial features. The resolution will improve, the
it, which would fire neurons in your researchers say, as more data is added
motor cortex,” he says. “You might to the computer model. “Whenever
think about what it looks like, which I tell anyone we can do this,” Gallant
activates the visual cortex.” His team says, “they say there’s no way.”
COURTESY YUKIYASU KAMITANI/ATR BRAIN ACTIVITY IMAGING CENTER
also gathered fMRI data from the Thinking back to the rat’s nest of
amygdala and the anterior cingulate lines from my own fMRI readings—
cortex—areas that correlate with all that from looking at a simple black-
emotions like anger and love—to and-white photo—it’s a little creepy to
map out brain patterns that form think that our mental processes can be
when people hear words such as reduced to binary code in this fashion.
“love,” “justice” and “anxiety.” But then again, so is the notion of
Yukiyasu Kamitani, a a mysterious black box of neurons
computational neuroscientist at controlling everything we do and
the Advanced Telecommunications think. “It’s all numbers,” Gallant says.
Research Institute International “The trick is to do good bookkeeping.”
in Japan, believes he can take the
technology even further and decode Lisa Katayama is a freelance writer
dreams. This summer, he plans to put HEAD FIRST fMRI machines like this one are based in San Francisco. This is her first
sleeping people in the fMRI to read helping scientists decode brain activity. feature for POPULAR SCIENCE.

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the green dream
one man’s mission to build an eco-friendly, affordable home
JOHN B. CARNETT,
POPSCI’s staff photogra-
pher, is using the latest
green technology to
build his dream home.
Follow his progress in
each issue, and visit
popsci.com/greendream
for tips, videos of the
build, and John’s blog.
STAGE #6:
SWAPPABLE SWITCHES
A WIRELESS LIGHTING SYSTEM MAKES ELECTRICAL SWITCHES PORTABLE
OST HOUSES require a central 10-channel controller that’s instance, I can program the controller
M hundreds of feet of electrical

wire to connect light
switches to a main power source, but
hardwired to my fuse box. Since the
switches generate their own power,
they require no batteries, wires or
to let me turn out the lights in my son’s
bedroom from the living room. I can
even pull a switch from its wall-docking
not my eco-friendly dream home. messy electrical channels carved into plate and use it as remote, turning all
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on or off and uses it to transmit TIME TO INSTALL: A few days your existing lighting, check out the
radio signals up to 300 feet away to ECO-ADVANTAGE: Saves energy and next page.—John B. Carnett
hundreds of feet of electrical wiring

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next column: building a graywater recycling system


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74
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JOHN B. CARNETT
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! THE H2WHOA CREDO: DIY CAN BE DANGEROUS. We review all our proj-
ects before publishing them, but ultimately your safety is your responsibility. Always wear FEBRUARY 2010 POPULAR SCIENCE 69
protective gear, take proper safety precautions, and follow all laws and regulations.
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HOW 2.0
[continued from preceding page]
YOU BUILT WHAT ?!

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place to another. To prevent sagging, the sheets and profit-and-loss reports. The
#!FIRE IN THE HOLE barrel is supported by cable run over a premium package ($35/month) includes
A breach at the base of the barrel swings 16-foot mast erected from the platform. budgeting models and links to your bank
open for loading ammunition. For practice, As the pumpkin travels toward the barrel’s account for daily updates.
Gill and Arold get surplus basketballs from mouth, it builds velocity, without being
a local sporting-goods store and fill them slowed down by the excess friction that a 5 GET ORGANIZED
with corn seed and insulating foam to longer chute could create. Arold and Gill Google’s Small Business Toolkit (google
approximate the weight and density of the have achieved distances of 3,700 feet with .com/smallbusinessnetwork) has several
pumpkins used at the Delaware competi- pumpkins and broken a mile with a bowl- helpful instruments for running your shop.
JOHN B. CARNETT
tion. Unlike irregularly shaped pumpkins, ing ball. Pocked with the craters of landing You can have Google host your corporate
the balls consistently fly straight, plus projectiles, Gill’s fields are now geological e-mail, place a listing on its yellow pages,
they’re available year-round. Friends also records of the shots fired. Except for the and use Google Analytics to improve your
often leave bowling-cum-cannon-balls at first bowling ball—that was never found. Web presence.—Amanda Schupak

HOW 2.0
POINT-AND-
CLICK APPS
CREATING MOBILE
web APPLICATIONS ISN’T
tricks JUST FOR CODE-WRITING
GEEKS ANYMORE
Even with the huge number of mobile apps already avail-
able, cellphone screens are always awaiting new ideas
from innovative developers. If you have your own idea for
the perfect app, whether for a wide audience or just your
own use, you’re in luck—you no longer need to be a deft
programmer to produce it. There are now a number of app-
generating tools on the Web that will enable you to bring
your concept to life by clicking instead of coding. You may
have even downloaded some of the resulting mobile apps
already, like Inside Trader, a strategy game built with a tool
called PhoneGap, or the Spinal Tap iPhone app, made at
MobileRoadie.com. The best app-building option will depend
on your price range, the platform you prefer (iPhone, Black-
Berry or Android) and the functions you want. Some will
BREAK FROM CODE even navigate the processing of submitting the app for you.
An app made using Here’s a guide to help you choose the right tool.
the PhoneGap
—Dave Prochnow
development tool
MAKE YOUR OWN MOBILE APPS
COURTESY DAVE PROCHNOW; COURTESY APPBREEDER; COURTESY MOBILE ROADIE

EASY MODERATE ADVANCED CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: BRIAN KLUTCH; INSET: COURTESY DIGITAL DANDELION;
APP-BUILDING SITES APP TEMPLATES APP WRAPPER

MOBILE ROADIE (mobileroadie.com) APPBREEDER (appbreeder.com) PHONEGAP (phonegap.com)
COST: $500, plus $29/month COST: $95, plus $0–$60/month COST: Free
PLATFORM: iPhone PLATFORM: Android, BlackBerry, iPhone PLATFORM: Android, BlackBerry, iPhone
Originally designed for bands, Mobile Roadie Offering 10 templates plus a custom option, PhoneGap allows you to repurpose exist-
lets you publish news, video and music to your AppBreeder lets you build, edit, and publish your ing Web-based applications, HTML, CSS and
app, and it can connect to an online store. app with e-mail, geo-location and video options. JavaScript into amazing mobile apps, and for
multiple platforms at the same time. Unlike
SWEBAPPS (swebapps.com) MYAPPBUILDER (myappbuilder.com) the others, it’s not a drag-and-drop tool; you
COST: $200–$400, plus $25/month COST: $20, plus $29/month will have to debug your app, fix any errors, and
PLATFORM: iPhone PLATFORM: iPhone shepherd it through the submission process
Make a four-, six- or eight-button app with MyAppBuilder enables you to publish your yourself. But if you don’t mind the extra work,
features like “Events” and “Portfolio.” When it’s e-book, music, RSS, Twitter and video content it’s worth it to cover all the mobile-app mar-
ready, Swebapps submits it to the App Store. using eight different templates. kets in one fell swoop—for free.

HOW 2.0
MORE INSANE SNOW VEHICLES
SNOW JOB
TWO MECHANICS ON A REMOTE OUTPOST BUILD
A “SNOW CHOPPER” OUT OF SALVAGED PARTS
In the desolate old ice ax, and a couple of ice screws
environment of welded to the frame serve as foot pegs. YETI
THEME Antarctica, when It has two chrome tanks that used to
To build his high-riding snow plow, Colorado
BUILDING mechanics Bob welder Rex Bailey mounted tires from an
be fire extinguishers; now one contains agricultural sprayer onto an old Dodge 3500
Sawicki and Toby fuel, and the other feeds compressed Cummins diesel pickup truck and used a
Weisser weren’t air to a salvaged air horn. The aged commercial plasma cutter to create spokes,
at their jobs maintaining a fleet of engine performs modestly well, doing axle mounts and the truck’s rear end. The
snowmobiles at the U.S. logistics hub 30 to 35 mph on the snow—but that’s Yeti’s wheels are 76 inches high.
there, they passed the time by building pretty good for 99.9 percent post-con- Time: 2,600 hours
a motorcycle-like snow vehicle out of sumer content.—Andrew Rosenblum Cost: $38,800
junked parts and trash. As government Time: 120 hours Cost: $10
employees, they were forbidden to use
any new equipment on their side proj-
ect. Instead, they got the engine and
track from a totaled 1981 Ski-Doo Elan
and, with the exception of nuts, bolts
and fuel hoses, everything else from
savvy dumpster diving.
Using pipes salvaged from a
recycling bin, Sawicki and Weisser
THE SNOW MONSTER
fabricated a frame, with a bent Builder Lars Erik-Lindberg’s hot rod consists
crowbar as the brake and a of a fiberglass Model T replica mounted on
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY DENNIS CORDOVA; COURTESY LARS ERIK-LINDBERG; COURTESY BOB SAWICKI
tent pin as the accelerator. the frame of a Volvo Duett station wagon,
The emergency brake is an powered by a Chevy V8 engine. Underneath,
Erik-Lindberg installed the tracks and suspen-
sion from an Arctic Cat snowmobile, allowing
the vehicle to cruise across the fro-
zen lakes of Sweden at 100 mph.
Time: 400–500 hours
Cost: $15,000
DASHING THROUGH THE SNOW

The builders made the Snow
Chopper entirely from parts they
found around their workplace at
Antarctica’s McMurdo Station.

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Donate online: www.smiletrain.org or call: 1-800-932-9541
According to the U.S. Government, women who plan to have a child should be sure to take sufficient levels of folic acid (400 micrograms per day) during pregnancy to help prevent neural tube defects and reduce the risk for cleft lip and
palate. When folic acid is taken one month before conception and throughout the first trimester, it has been proven to reduce the risk for neural tube defects by 50 to 70 per cent. Foods to avoid may include raw or undercooked seafood,
beef, pork or poultry; delicatessen meats; fish that contain high levels of mercury; smoked seafood; fish exposed to industrial pollutants; raw shellfish or eggs; soft cheeses; unpasteurized milk; pâté; caffeine; alcohol; and unwashed veg-
etables. For more information, visit www.SmileTrain.org. Smile Train is a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit recognized by the IRS, and all donations to Smile Train are tax-deductible in accordance with IRS regulations. © 2010 Smile Train.

HOW 2.0
GRAY
MATTER
OUT OF
THIN AIR
A LITTLE OXYGEN IS ALL
A ZINC-AIR BATTERY
NEEDS TO BECOME
A POWERHOUSE
A battery that runs on air?
Why, that’s almost as good
as a car that runs on
water! Those cars are
fantasy, but batteries
that run on air are actually quite
common, especially among older
people. Tiny zinc-air batteries are
widely used in hearing aids, where
they have replaced toxic mercury-
based batteries in providing a
small but steady stream of power.
They supply more energy for
their size than any other battery, ELECTRIC FLYER These zinc-air button cells aren’t
because they draw some of their powerful enough for liftoff, but they can keep the
rotors turning longer than other batteries can.
power straight from the air.
All batteries generate power
with two chemical reactions: one chemical, zinc metal, which is fuel and oxygen to burn it with. Jets
that produces electrons at the converted to zincate ions and then need to carry only the fuel, since
anode (negative terminal) and zinc oxide. This releases two they can pull in oxygen from the air.
one that absorbs them at the electrons per atom of zinc, which The downside is that jets can’t
cathode (positive terminal). are absorbed by oxygen on the produce as much thrust as rockets,
This creates a circulation of cathode side. because there’s a limit to how fast
electrons—an electrical cur- Zinc-air batteries can pack they can suck in air. Zinc-air bat-
rent—from the anode to the more power into a smaller teries have the same limitation.
cathode. Most batteries con- space than other batteries for They can deliver a large amount of
tain all the chemicals needed the same reason that jets run energy, but only relatively slowly;
for both reactions. for longer than rockets. Rockets, they’re like endurance runners, not
But zinc-air batteries which must operate in the vacu- sprinters—the tortoise to Energiz-
contain only the anode-side um of space, have to carry both er’s bunny.—Theodore Gray
INSIDE A ZINC-AIR BATTERY

A. Cathode can with air holes WHAT’S NEXT Because zinc-air bat-
B. Teflon air filter teries must be open to the air, the
A B C D E F G C. Graphite-and-wire-mesh water inside them eventually evapo-
air cathode rates, limiting their life span. But
D. Dielectric filter paper future cells could use electrolytes
E. Zinc-powder anode made of ionic fluids, which do not
MIKE WALKER
F. Anode can evaporate. The potential exists for

G. Insulating ring rechargeable zinc-air batteries with
10 times the capacity of today’s cells.
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HOW 2.0
HOW CAN GEEK ASK A
I FIND THE
BEST IPHONE
APPS?
Apple has admitted more than 100,000 applications to its App Of course, old-fashioned reviews can help only so much,
Store, and the overload has made it a problem since day one to sift so try tapping into the wisdom of other users with Appolicious
through them on iTunes. But there are plenty of other tools to help (appolicious.com), which provides ratings from a giant social net-
you separate the ones that actually do something from the ones work of app seekers, and Chorus, an iPhone app itself that gives
that just make crude noises. recommendations based on what your friends use and like.
A good place to start is AppShopper (appshopper.com). It’s the That’s not to say that Apple has been asleep at the wheel.
most comprehensive resource out there, diligently tracking the The company recently added a feature called App Genius to
App Store for additions, price drops, newly popular apps and app the iPhone’s software. This generates useful suggestions
updates. If the amount of information still seems intimidating, sites by analyzing what you already have and listing statistically
like Appvee (appvee.com), which posts video reviews for new apps, related—though not necessarily similar—apps to download.
and 148Apps (148apps.com), where reviewers put notable apps
JOHN HERRMAN covers iPhone applications for the gadget blog gizmodo.com.
through their paces on a daily basis, can further narrow the field.
THEREDDRESS.CO.UK
Some sites have a tighter focus, like TouchArcade (toucharcade GOT A QUESTION? SEND IT TO US AT h20@bonniercorp.com.
.com) for games and Krapps (krapps.com) for odd and funny apps.
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HOW 2.0
MONEY-SAVING SITE OF THE MONTH

BUDGETBYTES.BLOGSPOT.COM
Countless food blogs offer great recipes, but Budget Bytes adds
an extra element: the estimated cost of all the ingredients, down to
AN LED the penny. Learn how to prepare a barbecue chicken dinner for $2.42
per serving, or cheddar-and-broccoli-stuffed potatoes at only 79 cents
*originally posted by Shane Dulong on instructables.com

GLOW STICK* a plate. Besides price data and cooking tips, the site recommends
inexpensive but essential ingredients and utensils for your kitchen.
BECAUSE YOU’RE STILL
A RAVER AT HEART
LAZY PROJECT OF THE MONTH
1. Attach an LED to a
coin battery. Connect
the LED’s longer lead
THE AUTOMATIC DOOR
FROM LEFT: BRIAN KLUTCH (3); COURTESY ADAM FIERMAN (2)
to the positive side,

the shorter one to the Adam Fierman figured that if
negative side. you can open a car door remotely
with a key fob, why not the door
2. Take apart a clear
ballpoint pen.
to his dorm room? When he
presses a button on the fob, a
printer carriage on the inside of
3. Place the LED into the
pen tube, and secure
the battery in place.
the door moves sideways, pull-
ing a string connected to a lever
Dance. that turns the door handle. For
more details, search for “key-fob
opener” on hackaday.com.
HAVE AN IDEA FOR A
5-MINUTE PROJECT?
SEND IT TO US AT h20@bonniercorp.com.
www.storem
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m & ww
www.
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sometimes you just need to know
FYI
Q Which
organs
can I 0
$4
live without, ,00
0
0,0
and how much $2
00
cash can I get $1
60
for them? ,00
Ronnie Rinehart, Iowa Park, Tex. 0
First, a disclaimer: Selling
your organs is illegal in
the United States. It’s
also very dangerous.
Handing off an
organ is risky
enough when done in a top hospital,
even more so if you’re doing it for
cash in a back alley. No, really: Don’t
do this. OK? OK.
There are many organs one
Now, black-market organ dealers “look-the-other-way” payoffs. Most
VICTOR DE SCHWANBERG/PHOTO RESEARCHERS; FACING PAGE: COURTESY PAUL D. ANDREWS

can theoretically do without, or for
which there’s a backup. Most folks don’t do a great job of filing taxes, but people get $1,000 to $10,000 for their
can spare a kidney, a portion of their here are some prices based on rumored kidney (probably much less than you
liver, a lung, some intestines, and an deals and reports from the World Heath were hoping for).
eyeball, and still live a long life. That Organization. In India, a kidney fetches The best bet is to wait until
said, donating a lung, a piece of liver around $20,000. In China, buyers will compensation for organs is legalized
or a section of intestines is a very pay $40,000 or more. A good, healthy in the U.S.—the Organ Trafficking
complicated surgery, so it’s not done kidney from Israel goes for $160,000. Prohibition Act of 2009 would allow
frequently on the black market. And Don’t expect to pocket all that payment to donors, but it stalled in
no one’s going to make much cash on dough, though. “The person giving up Congress—because there’s certainly
an eyeball. “In the U.S., there’s a fairly the organ only gets a fraction of the a market for kidneys. Last summer, a
steady supply of donated corneas fee,” says Sally Satel, a scholar at the man offering one of his for $100,000
from corpses,” says Sean Fitzpatrick, American Enterprise Institute think (plus medical expenses) on Craigslist
director of public affairs at the New tank who studies the prices paid by legal received several offers until the Web
England Organ Bank. “There’s pretty and illegal organ-donor operations. After site removed his post. And you could
much no market demand for eyes.” the organ broker—the guy who sets up probably hold out for even more. In
Giving up a kidney, though, is a your kidney-for-cash transaction—takes 1999, before eBay delisted a kidney put
relatively simple surgery that has his cut, he needs to pay for travel, the up for auction, bidders drove the price
netted desperate people a few bucks. surgeon, medical supplies and a few up to $5.75 million.—BJORN CAREY .
Try to stump us. Send your questions to fyi@popsci.com.
& www.fantamag.com
FYI
REASONS HENRIETTA
5 LACKS IS THE MOST

IMPORTANT WOMAN
IN MEDICAL HISTORY
In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a poor woman with a middle-school
education, made one of the greatest medical contributions ever.
Her cells, taken from a cervical-cancer biopsy, became the first
immortal human cell line—the cells reproduce infinitely in a
lab. Although other immortal lines have since been established, DIVIDE AND CONQUER A HeLa cell splitting into two
Lacks’s “HeLa” cells are the standard in labs around the world. new cells. The green spots are chromosomes.
Together they outweigh 100 Empire State Buildings and could
circle the equator three times. This month, POPSCI contributor multiply it, and start a cell line. Isolating one cell and keeping it
Rebecca Skloot’s book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, tells alive is the basic technique for cloning and in-vitro fertilization.
the story behind the woman who revolutionized modern medi-
A scientist accidentally poured a chemical on a HeLa cell
cine. Here, five reasons we should all thank Henrietta Lacks.
Before HeLa cells, scientists spent more time trying to keep

4 that spread out its tangled chromosomes. Later on, sci-
entists used this technique to determine that humans have 46
1 cells alive than performing actual research on the cells. An
endless supply of HeLa cells freed up time for discovery.
chromosomes—23 pairs—not 48, which provided the basis for
making several types of genetic diagnoses.
In 1952, the worst year of the polio epidemic, HeLa cells It was discovered that Lacks’s cancerous cells used an
2 were used to test the vaccine that protected millions. 5 enzyme called telomerase to repair their DNA, allowing
them, and other types of cancer cells, to function when normal
Some cells in Lacks’s tissue sample behaved differently cells would have died. Anti-cancer drugs that work against this
3 than others. Scientists learned to isolate one specific cell, enzyme are currently in early clinical trials.

POPSCI INNOVATOR
[continued FROM page 50]
dust in the workroom taint the materials,

a batch of the liquid crystals doesn’t pre-
cisely match the batch that came before.
This is when Jepsen is most content.
“Time disappears, coffee appears, and it’s
just work at high pressure to debug the
problem. Those days are actually some
of my happiest. The speed is fast, and the
insights gained are tremendous.”
Part of her ability to sustain that non-
stop rhythm may come from the quiet
force—the qi?—of Jepsen’s personality.
But part of it, serendipitously, comes
from her illness. Thanks to the destruc-
tion of her pituitary gland, her body no
longer makes the cortisol that usually
regulates a person’s internal clock, so
she doesn’t get jet lag; she feels awake
as soon as she takes her pills. “My health
used to limit me, but now it’s sort of an
advantage,” she says. “I think business
executives may consider it”—pituitary-
gland removal—“an optional surgery at
some time in the future.”
The frantic pace is necessary because,
as young as the e-reader industry may
be, trying to break into it is like trying to
launch a new operating system after Mi-
crosoft. She’s up against a company that
pretty much started the business: E Ink,
which today controls some 90 percent of
the market. Spun out of MIT’s Media Lab
in 1997, E Ink makes the screens for most
of today’s e-readers, including the Kindle.
The E Ink screen mimics the look of ink
on paper because it’s filled with floating
particles of actual ink pigment. A zap of
current sends oppositely charged black or
white particles to the surface, forming im-
ages that stay put until zapped again. That
means the screen draws power only when
changing pages—ideal for a book, with
which you can stare at a sheet for min-
utes. But again: no color, and no video.
Soon Jepsen and her competitors will
take E Ink (and one another) on. At least
one other manufacturer says that it will
ship an e-reader screen this year with
color and video and that, unlike 3Qi, the

screen will remain full-color in low-
power mode. Made by Qualcomm, the
Mirasol display creates pixels with tiny
moving metal pieces, just a few micro-
meters across, that move up and down
to reflect light of different wavelengths
and colors. Like E Ink’s screen, it doesn’t
need a backlight and uses energy only
when changing images.
There are more contenders in the
pipeline, too, all boasting some variation
of color, video or both. A Philips spin-off
called Liquavista plans to produce low-
power, video-playing black-and-white
screens at the end of this year, and full-
color versions by the end of next. They
rely on a technique called electrowetting,
which replaces the liquid crystals inside
an LCD with drops of oil in water that
require less electricity to move. The old
guard E Ink plans to release a color ver-
sion late this year, and the company has
displays running videos in its labs that it
hopes to produce in a few years.
But, as Jepsen reminds me (with
uncharacteristic brusqueness) when I
mention that there are other fast, color-
ful reflective displays around: “not that
are ready to ship.” Hers is also likely to
be cheaper. The 3Qi screen, as a tweak
on existing LCDs, is manufactured on
the same machinery and from most
of the same materials as the 1.5 billion
displays shipped every year. As a result,
a netbook with a 10-inch Pixel Qi screen
should cost little more than one with
an ordinary LCD.
ReadAbility
is in the eye
of the beholder
Whether 3Qi succeeds will ultimately de-
pend on the subjective experience of mil-
lions of sets of eyes. The circumstances
in which people feel comfortable reading
turn out to be somewhat unpredictable.
For instance, it’s as much a myth that
LCDs cause eyestrain because their back-
lights shine into your eyes like a flashlight
as it is that reflective screens like E Ink’s
are easier on the eyes just because they
reflect light. “Light is light,” says VCD Sci-
ences display consultant Lou Silverstein,
a fellow of the Society for Information
Display. “Your eyeball can’t tell whether
it’s reflected or transmitted.” LCDs and
FEBRUARY 2010 POPULAR SCIENCE 83

POPSCI INNOVATOR
E Ink look different because of the way

E Ink reflects light. Its pigments sit at
the surface and scatter light in many
directions, just as paper does. LCDs and
even other reflective screens direct light
only at certain angles, so the look isn’t
quite as uniform as paper. Jepsen says her
team has employed a number of tricks to
improve the angle of reflection on the 3Qi,
but because it’s still an LCD, it will never
look quite as much like print as E Ink.
But it may not have to. The real goal
of Pixel Qi, Ryan says, is to “try to ask and
answer a big question: What is the device
of the future? The idea that people would
actually carry three devices—phone, net-
book, e-reader—doesn’t seem right.”
So the Kindle-style e-reader may be a
transitory gadget, a step toward super-thin
tablets that support modern computing
just as well as old-fashioned reading.
Pixel Qi may help catalyze that change,
although it too may find itself a bridge
technology, superseded once people cross
to the all-color, all-the-time side. By that
time, though, Jepsen may have moved on.
She has near-term plans to improve Pixel
Qi’s current display, making it more effi-
cient and offering it in different sizes. And
then it may be back to the developing
world, this time to spread the influence of
television. “People, primarily in India, are
coming to me saying, you know, make us
a 10-watt TV,” she says. A battery-powered
HDTV may sound frivolous but, Jepsen
explains, India’s musical movies are a cul-
tural institution that many people get left
out of because of a lack of electricity. “We
want to see our Bollywood,” they tell her.
Jepsen’s motivation now, as an entre-
preneur, is the same as it was during her
days of projecting art-project holograms
onto German cities: “My reward for all
the technical work is to get this image I
can enjoy at the end.”
Senior Associate Editor Lauren Aaronson

runs POPSCI’s What’s New section and
the Best of What’s New Awards.

gjshowcase

gjshowcase

gjshowcase

gjshowcase

gjshowcase

gjshowcase

POPULAR SCIENCE DIRECT
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THE from the popular science archives
FUTURE THEN
NOVEMBER 1983 SCREEN STARS: MORE DISPLAY
TECHNOLOGY THROUGH THE YEARS
Liquid Color Display
Seiko kicked off a screen revolution with its announcement in 1983 of
the world’s first consumer color LCD television. The 2.13-inch portable
Pocket Color TV screen featured thin-film transistors that only military
equipment had used before. The transistors activated a new breed of
liquid crystals, which responded to voltage twice as fast as conventional
crystals, producing a bright, blur-free picture for anyone squinting at
the tiny display. Today’s flat-screen TVs may still be about as thick as
the 1.1-inch Seiko, but now they’re large enough to fill a wall and can
refresh their picture around 20 times as fast as the Pocket TV. One chal-
lenge that still vexes engineers: controlling image quality in different light
conditions. See one researcher’s brilliant new solution and glimpse the
COMPACT CONSOLE
next great leap in displays in “Screen Queen” [page 46].—Amina Elahi
August 1965
The Motorola Compact attempted to shrink bulky
1960s TV without sacrificing picture quality. Viewers
could enjoy programs without the pincushion distor-
tion at the corners that plagued earlier sets, and
reducing the depth of the picture tube and simplify-
ing the color circuit made for a less stocky console.
MOVING PICTURES
March 1975
Aspiring flat-screen manufacturers needed a way to
eliminate the maze of hundreds of wires required to
drive circuitry in their TVs. Westinghouse research-
ers built a thin-film transistor [above]—still in use
today—that did the job using only 15 wires.
FIELD STUDIES
May 1991
Field-emission displays combined the best of old-
school vacuum tubes and cutting-edge silicon chips.
Millions of cold cathodes shot electrons through a
vacuum, lighting up phosphor elements to create an
image, all while consuming less energy than LCDs.
POPULAR SCIENCE magazine, Vol. 276, No. 2 (ISSN 161-7370, USPS 577-250), is published monthly by
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