popular science - june 2009

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contentsthis month’s guide to innovation and discovery

june ’09 VOLUME 274 #6

THE 2009 PopSci

INVENTION AWARDS37 This year’s ultimate garage creations and the big thinkers behind them.

38 THE FASTEST TANKAn unmanned machine tops 60 mph.

42 A BETTER CATHETERA guided needle prevents vein punctures.

43 TOUGH ON FISH, EASY ON LAKESThis lure biodegrades for clean waters.

44 HEIGHTENED REALITYThe next generation of Minority Report–style interfaces.

46 ROBO-LEGSAn exoskeleton that lets paraplegics walk and even climb stairs.

48 POWER MADE FROM SHOCKSTurns bumpy roads into a car’s electricity.

50 GREAT ESCAPESAn emergency harness lowers evacuees from the tallest skyscrapers.

51 ELECTRONIC VOICE BOXA stick-on gadget restores speech by translating neural signals.

52 GREEN STYROFOAMMushrooms produce an ecofriendly alternative to traditional insulation.

53 GREASE LIGHTINGUsed frying oil in one end, electricity out of the other.

PopSci innovator

54 AN ARMY OF ONE MINDThe Segway failed to transform society, but Dean Kamen isn’t done trying. Now he’s taking on clean water, robotic arms and gas-free driving. And his greatest feat might be making a lot more people into inventors like him. By Rena Marie Pacella

INSTANT EXPERT—special edition

60 THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO STEM CELLSEverything you need to know about the hottest topic in medicine: stem cells’ cures and controversies. By Elizabeth Svoboda

38

POPSCI.COM

54

60

FEATURES

51

53

5043 44

WHERE

ARE

THEY

NOW?

PLUS

“We recently received the contract to begin manufacturing the Paragon Dive System for final Navy certification.” —Taber MacCallum, 2008 winning invention: sewage-proof suit



04 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2009

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Hands-on ScienceBrowse decades of DIY stories from the POPULAR

SCIENCE online archives, updated with how-to instructions for new projects. Get ready to make something crazy at popsci.com/archiveupdate.

Show Us Your Labs Do you tinker in your garage or experiment in your basement? Tell PopSci.com about your home workshop or laboratory at popsci.com/yourlabs.

Ice That Burns Oil is in short supply, but there’s a massive store of natural gas frozen at the poles. Scientists are devising ways to turn this icy gas into useful energy. Get the inside scoop at popsci.com/ice.

Hubble Retrospective PopSci.com takes a look back at the Hubble Space Telescope, from the wrong-mirror debacle to the images of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet crashing into Jupiter. See it all at popsci.com/hubble.

CONTENTS

REGULARS$�MEGAPIXELS

10 A virus up close and personal; a disaster-rescue robot.

$�WHAT’S NEW

15 GADGETSA laptop’s screen pops off to be an independent tablet.

16 THE GOODSAn ergonomic camcorder; a fingerprint-reading suitcase.

18 AUTO TECH Road-testing the gadget-heavy BMW 7-series.

24 RECREATIONA lightweight, carbon-fiber kayak for extreme maneuvers.

$�HEADLINES

27 EXPLORATIONSearching for life in pristine lakes beneath Antarctic ice.

28 AVIATIONA plane attempts to circle the globe on solar power alone.

30 30-SECOND SCIENCEAnimals attack: mutant rats, Ebola pigs and filthy flies.

33 UPDATE THE TEXTBOOKSDoes the Internet actually make you smarter?

$�HOW 2.0

71 YOU BUILT ?!An 18-foot-tall robotic exoskeleton.

74 GRAY MATTERThink mercury’s a liquid? Not if you freeze it.

77 USE IT BETTERThe best hacks for your Google cellphone. 78 ASK A GEEKAre high-end HDTVs worth the cash?

$�FYI

80 Can birds fart? Will crocodiles move to the poles?

$�OTHER STUFF

06 FROM THE EDITOR

08 THE INBOX

100 THE FUTURE THEN

WHAT

NEW SLIDESHOWS AND FEATURES

30

THEFUTURE

NOW

QUESTION 1

How many planets are in the solar system?

QUESTION 2

What’s the common name for dihydrogen

monoxide?

QUESTION 3

Do jellyfish have brains?

WHAT’S YOUR SCI-Q? You’re smart, but how much do you really know about science? We’ve written a pop quiz, so don your thinking caps. Put your knowledge to the test at popsci.com/quizme, and find out if you’re a whiz or a dunce.

Answer key: 1) 8, now that Pluto’s been demoted; 2) Water; 3) Nope, they have

a network of nerves but no central location to it.

POPSCI QUIZ

16

71



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Children of Invention

POPSCI.COM06 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2009

MAYBE I’VE SUCCUMBED to sampling error here, but it seems to me that inventors are getting younger. Unlike our Brilliant 10 honorees, chosen each fall from a roster of scientists under 40, the annual POPSCI Invention Award recipients [page 37] get no favoritism for being fledgling. Even so, the roll is

packed with young’uns this year. Geoff and Mike Howe started working on their light, speedy Ripsaw tank nine years ago, when the identical twins were 25. Michael Callahan came up with his Audeo voice box at age 22, inspired by a skateboard-ing accident he had at 17. And

the five guys who came up with the GenShock power-generating suspension system were all MIT undergrads at the time. If the company they’ve created to manufacture and market the technology takes off, they might never work for anyone other than themselves.

At the risk of sounding ageist, I’m thrilled to see signs that the whippersnap-pers are taking over the workshop. This spring, we launched our first POPULAR SCIENCE National School Inventors Challenge, inviting kids to submit their ideas for world-changing inventions. (Hurry! The deadline for submissions is June 30; go to popsci.com/sciencecontest for more info.) When we debuted the program at a science-teachers conference in New Orleans in March, nearly 700 educators made the commitment to get their students involved.

I suspect Dean Kamen would be gratified to learn of that out-of-the-blocks momentum, although it wouldn’t satisfy him. Kamen may always be best known as the inventor of the Segway, but as Rena Pacella’s profile on page 54 makes clear, he’d far prefer to be recognized as the founder of FIRST, an orga-nization that stages robotics competitions as a way to bring about its (and his) central vision: “to transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology heroes.”

Rock-star engineers? It’s a notion that’s all too easy to dismiss as a pipe dream. But take a stroll through our Invention Awards, and I think you’ll agree that these guys can comfortably wear the mantle of “hero.”

MARK JANNOT

[email protected]

THE WHIPPER-

SNAPPERS ARE

TAKING OVER

THE WORKSHOP.

FROM THE EDITOR

JOH

N B

. C

ARN

ETT

Editor-in-Chief Mark JannotDeputy Editor Jacob WardCreative Director Sam Syed

EDITORIALExecutive Editor Mike HaneyFeatures Editor Nicole DyerEditorial Production Manager Felicia PardoCopy and Research Director Rina BanderSenior Technology Editor Seán CaptainSenior Associate Editors Doug Cantor, Bjorn Carey, Seth Fletcher, Martha HarbisonAssociate Editor Lauren AaronsonAssistant Editor Susannah F. LockeEditorial Assistant Amy GeppertEditor at Large Dawn StoverContributing Technology Editor Steve MorgensternContributing Editors Eric Adams, Theodore Gray, Eric Hagerman, Joseph Hooper, Suzanne Kantra Kirschner, Preston Lerner, Gregory Mone, Rena Marie Pacella, Dave Prochnow, Jessica Snyder Sachs, Rebecca Skloot, Mike Spinelli, Elizabeth Svoboda, Kalee Thompson, Phillip Torrone, James Vlahos, Speed WeedContributing Troubadour Jonathan CoultonContributing Futurist Andrew ZolliEditorial Intern Catherine Schwanke

ART AND PHOTOGRAPHYArt Director Matthew CokeleyPhoto Editor Kristine LaMannaStaff Photographer John B. CarnettSenior Designer Stephanie O’Hara Contributing Artists Kevin Hand, Nick Kaloterakis, Graham Murdoch, Bob Sauls, Paul Wootton Photo Intern Jack Forbes

POPSCI.COMDigital Content Director Megan MillerDigital Content Manager Taylor HengenAssociate Web Editor Paul Adams

POPULAR SCIENCE MEDIA GROUP

Group Publisher Gregg R. HanoAssociate Publisher Wendi S. BergerExecutive Assistant Christopher GravesMarketing Director Mike GallicFinancial Director Tara BiscielloVice President, Corporate Sales and Marketing Pete MichalskyNortheast Advertising Office: Alex DeSanctis 212-779-5129, Susan Faggella 212-779-5007, Chris Young 212-779-5148, Taryn Young 212-779-5030Midwest Advertising Office: Manager John Marquardt 312-252-2838 Ad Assistant Krissy Van Rossum Los Angeles Advertising Office: Manager Robert Hoeck 310-227-8958 Digital Account Manager Kate Gregory Detroit Advertising Office: Manager Edward A. Bartley 248-282-5545 Ad Assistant Diane Pahl San Fran cisco Advertising Office: Jill Stankoski 415-496-2700 Southern Regional Advertising Office: Manager Jason A. Albaum 404-892-0760 Classified Advertising Sales Patrick Notaro 212-779-5555Direct Response Sales Alycia Isabelle 800-280-2069Interactive Sales Director Rob PfeifferDigital Account Managers Jessica DeBiase, Jesse Parker, Jenny SmithDigital Sales Development Manager Brian GlaserSales Development Managers Alexis Costa, Kerri LevineCreative Services Director Mike IadanzaMarketing Art Director Shawn WoznickiPromotions Manager Eshonda CarawayConsumer Marketing Director Bob CohnAssociate Directors Lauren Rosenblatt, Andrew SchulmanSenior Planning Manager Raymond WardNew Business Manager Cliff SabbagRetention Manager Connie CotnerSingle Copy Sales Director Vicki WestonPublicity Manager Amanda McNallyHuman Resources Manager Kim PutmanProduction Associate Erika Hernandez Group Production Director Laurel KurnidesOperations Director Mimi Rosenfeld

Chairman Jonas BonnierChief Executive Officer Terry SnowChief Operating Officer Dan AltmanChief Financial Officer Randall KoubekVice President, Consumer Marketing Bruce MillerVice President, Production Lisa EarlywineVice President, E-Media Bill AllmanVice President, Enterprise Systems Shawn LarsonVice President, Human Resources Cathy HertzVice President, Corporate Communications Dean TurcolBrand Director John MillerPublishing Consultant Martin S. WalkerCorporate Counsel Jeremy Thompson For service anytime, please use our Web site: popsci.com/ customerservice. You can also call 800-289-9399; for Canadian and foreign, please call 386-597-4279. Or you may write to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235.

THEFUTURE

NOW



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08 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2009 POPSCI.COM

THE INBOX [email protected]

Our second-annual How It Works special issue, published

in April, parsed everything from Army helicopters to the

Internet. Some readers would have liked more detail on

that Black Hawk; others called it our best issue ever.

HOW IT WORKEDI’ve been a dedicated POPULAR SCIENCE reader since 1971, and the April issue is the best I’ve seen. It was so crammed with technically interesting and intellectually stimulating stories, it’s hard to believe you fit it all into just 100 pages. I congratulate you for producing a truly excellent magazine and applaud you for keeping up the spirit that has made it great for 137 years.Peter KarpVia e-mail

Editors’ note: Forgive us a moment while we toot our own horn,

but Mr. Karp isn’t the only one abuzz about POPULAR SCIENCE these

days. We’re proud to share some exciting news: The American

Society of Magazine Editors has named POPSCI a finalist for

a 2009 National Magazine Award for General Excellence, the

industry’s highest honor. Big thanks to all of our loyal readers,

who keep us inspired.

ALL MIXED UP“The Most Advanced Mixing Board” [How It Works] is an example of technology enabling people to create things more for their own satisfaction than for customers’. My wife and I are both 69, and because of all the sounds competing with actors’ lines, neither of us can understand much of what movie characters say. We comprehend the spoken words in older movies—made before advanced mixing boards came into vogue—just fine, and we enjoy watching them more because of it.Larry StrawhornOlney, Md.

CorrectionsWe neglected to credit the inventor of the Sun-brella in “Power from the People” [March]. He is Arian Reyes, CEO of Solar Solace.

In “Easy Rider” [What’s New, April], a picture of the single-speed Trek bicycle the District was mistakenly identified as the eight-speed Soho. The District is $930.

In “The Thinnest, Most Colorful TV Yet” [How It Works], the labels for the anode layer of the OLED TV screen and the thin-film transistors were switched.

FROM OUR CONTRIBUTORS

MAIN OFFICE

2 Park Ave., 9th FloorNew York, NY 10016Fax: 212-779-5108Web: popsci.com

NEW SUBSCRIPTIONS

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THEFUTURE

NOW

For licensing and reprints of POPULAR SCIENCE content, contact Wright’s Reprints at 877-652-5295.

SUBSCRIPTION INQUIRIES

Report changes of address and subscription problems to:POPULAR SCIENCEP.O. Box 420235 Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235Phone: 800-289-9399Web: popsci.com/manage

INTERNATIONAL

EDITIONS

For inquiries regarding international licensing or

syndication, please contact [email protected].

LETTERS

Send letters to the editor to letters @popsci.com. Send science questions to [email protected]. Comments may be edited for length and clarity. We regret that we cannot answer unpublished letters.

The paper used for this magazine comes from certified forests that are managed in a sustainable way to meet the social, economic and environmental needs of present and future generations.

Contributing writer Arianne

Cohen is tall—really tall. At

6'3", she’s statistically likelier

to be influential and earn

more money (an additional

$789 per inch) than someone

of average height. In The Tall Book, she investigates these

and other surprising ways

the world treats people of

extreme height. The book

will arrive in stores this

month. You can head over

to popsci.com/thetallbook

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megapixelsthe must-see photos of the month

HANDLE WITH CARE To pro-

tect itself, a virus like the one

shown here uses a protein shell

to seal off its genetic payload.

A MILLION LITTLE PIECESSCIENTISTS CREATE

AN IMAGE OF A VIRUS’S

PROTECTIVE CASING

After three years of piecing together hundreds

of individual x-ray images, researchers were

able to produce the first high-resolution

picture of the five million atoms that make

up a virus’s protective shell. The yellow- and

red-colored ribbons were highlighted to illus-

trate how four identical proteins join to form

the building block of the blue-hued shell, or

capsid, of the Ps V-F penicillin fungus-attacking

virus. The virus does not infect humans, but its

shape is similar to those that do, making it a

valuable model for developing future medi-

cal treatments. “If we know how to package

a virus, we could apply that information to

gene-therapy delivery mechanisms and dis-

ease control,” says Yizhi Jane Tao, an assistant

professor of biochemistry and cell biology at

Rice University. BY CATHERINE SCHWANKE

PHOTOGRAPH BY J. TAO AND J. PAN



POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 11

See more amazing photos at popsci.com/gallery.

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JUST PRESS “SAVE”DISASTER SEARCH-

AND-RESCUE IN

ROBOT-CRAZY JAPAN

No, it’s not a robot uprising. This is the Tokyo

Fire Department’s Rescue Robot, also known

as RoboCue, taking a mock patient to safety

as part of a training exercise for dirty-bomb

containment and casualty rescue, held late

last year in Tokyo. Designed by the fire depart-

ment itself, the search-and-recover ’bot is

tethered by a 328-foot cable and equipped

with infrared cameras, a megaphone, and

ultrasonic sensors that find victims in places

where human rescuers cannot go, such as

burning houses. It also has an onboard

oxygen canister for those who might need it.

Two feeler appendages gently load the victim,

whether injured by the blast or trampled in

the ensuing chaos, onto a sleigh bed before

wheeling him safely out. The only drawback:

Hauling multiple victims is not possible with

this particular model. BY BRIAN ASHCRAFT

PHOTOGRAPH BY KIYOSHI OTA

See more amazing photos at popsci.com/gallery.



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POPSCI.COM JUNE 2009 POPULAR SCIENCE 15

Soon you’ll be able to hang a photo on the fridge without even

printing it out. Always Innovating’s Touch Book will be the first

budget laptop whose display detaches to become a standalone

touchscreen tablet. Removable magnets on the back cover let

you stick the one-pound, half-inch-thick sliver on any metal

surface for use as a digital frame, calendar or notepad.

what’s neWtech that puts the future in the palm of your hand

24Gear for kayaking

trips and tricks

SPLIT PERSONALITYThe electronics and a three-to-five-hour battery hide

behind the display, instead of under the keyboard, so the

screen has a life of its own. Add the keyboard, and its battery

provides extra juice—up to 15 hours total, the company says,

or three times as long as most laptops. This longevity comes

from a simple Linux operating system and a fast but low-power

processor that’s also found in advanced cellphones. Future

models might link the screen with Bluetooth, so you could even

type fridge memos from the table.—Amanda schupak

20Cameras that see

in the dark

ALWAYS INNOVATING TOUCH BOOK

SCREEN: 9-in. resistive touchscreen

PROCESSOR: Texas Instruments

600-MHz OMAP3

PRICE: $400 ($300 for tablet only)

SIZE: 9.4 x 7 x 1.4 in. WEIGHT: 2 lbs.

AVAILABILITY: summer (est.)

GET IT: alwaysinnovating.com

18We drive BMW’s

ultra-techie 750i

POP OFF THIS COMPUTER’S

SCREEN FOR A TABLET TO GO




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From $130; seagate.com

12 MUST-HAVE PRODUCTS

Personal

Baggage

Keep out snoops with the first fingerprint-reading suitcase. Press your thumb to its sensor, and an electronic lock opens only if your print matches one of several you can store in its memory. Heys USA BioCase

From $1,100; heysusa.com

Silent

Movie

Get crisp shots whether taking 12.1-megapixel stills or 1080p high-def movies. The GH1’s autofocus motor works in both modes and is even insulated to keep its whirring sound out of your movies. Panasonic

GH1 Price not set; panasonic.com

Sound Advice

This scanner listens for doubled-up pages to avoid misfeeds. It sends ultrasonic waves through incoming paper, and a sensor recognizes the change in sound caused by air trapped

between two sheets. Fujitsu ScanScap S1500

$500; fujitsu.com

Crime-Scene

Analysis

Archerfish is the first home security system that analyzes the video it records. It can recognize key events, such as a person entering a room, and send an alert by e-mail or text message. Archerfish

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month; myarcherfish.com

Coloring Book

The first color e-reader can display thousands of hues. One charge powers it for 40 hours, thanks to a new kind of LCD that consumes electricity only when you turn pages (although page flips take longer than with grayscale e-paper). Fujitsu FLEPia $1,000 (est.); www.frontech.fujitsu.com/en

JAPAN ONLY




Camera Angle

Aim your camcorder with less effort. The HMX-R10 puts its lens and sensor at a 25-degree angle, so they point straight ahead when you hold your hand up naturally— no need to tilt your wrist or elbow backward. Samsung

HMX-R10 $550; samsung.com

Carry a Tune

Roland updates the 1980s-style keytar by building in a sound generator, so the AX-Synth doesn’t require an extra synthesizer or other equipment to turn its digital notes into sound. Just plug it into an amp, and rock out. Roland

AX-Synth

$1,250;

rolandus .com

go your own way

This GPS unit tailors route recommendations to its owner's driving habits. It records your average speeds on different types of roads, like highways and local streets, and uses that info to estimate drive times. Navigon

4300T Max $280; navigon.com

Better Boater This boat shoe saves knees from the vibration of a humming motor. Hard plastic inserts keep your foot steady, and a small air pocket in the midsole redirects force out to the sides. Sperry Top-

Sider ASV Solution $140; sperrytopsider .com

Shooting the

Breeze

This Bluetooth headset lets pals hear you on windy days. When gusts prevent its microphones from picking up low tones, it adds sound gathered by a vibration sensor against your skin. If winds really howl, it warns you to move. Aliph JawBone Prime

Earcandy $130; jawbone.com

Far Sighted

Binoculars with built-in cameras use separate lenses for the cam and the specs. These are the first that let you focus both sets by turning a single knob, ensuring that your five-megapixel picture is as sharp as the view you see through the binoculars. Bushnell Sync Focus

ImageView $280; bushnell.com

POPS

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TH



WHAT’S NEW

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SMART CARTHE NEW BMW 7-SERIES IS A FUNHOUSE OF AUTOMOTIVE

TECHNOLOGY. BUT DOES ANY OF IT MAKE DRIVING EASIER?

TESTED

CO

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BM

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ICA

When even an $18,000 Honda offers

a navigation system, an $81,000

luxury sedan has to work harder to

impress. For BMW’s 7-Series, the

techno lures include computer-

enhanced performance from the twin-

turbocharged V8 and enough gizmos

to equip the cockpit of the Starship

Enterprise. We spent more than 1,000

miles testing and grading the 750i. Our

conclusion: It, along with its sibling,

the long-wheelbase 750Li, ditches the

silly-gadget overload for technology

that actually makes driving safer and

more fun. Some fancy bits, such as the

Pedestrian Detection system, remain

undercooked or unsatisfying. Where it

counts, though—in power, handling, and

the navigation and multimedia systems—

the technology makes this a BMW worth

every penny.—Lawrence Ulrich

Engine

Grade: A

With direct fuel injection

and two turbochargers

nestled efficiently between

the “V” of the cylinder

banks, a new 4.4-liter V8

produces 400 horsepower.

It also generates a

prodigious 450 pound-

feet of torque, more than

BMW’s 6-liter V12. The

engine hurtles the 750i

from 0 to 60 mph in an

improbable 5.1 seconds,

yet it’s quiet and civilized

in everyday driving.

Four-wheel

Steering

Grade: B

When you make a turn at

low speeds, the BMW’s

rear wheels point in the

opposite direction of the

fronts, tightening the car’s

turning circle to 39.4 feet.

That’s better than any

comparably large sedan,

and it makes parking

surprisingly easy. Still, it’s

not a home run. The system

adds cost and complexity,

and at higher speeds the

benefits are subtle.

High-beam

Assist

Grade: A

A truly bright idea: The

car detects approaching

vehicles from more than

half a mile away, using a

camera mounted near the

rearview mirror. The system

automatically dims the high

beams until the oncoming

vehicle passes and then

switches them back on.

The result: no more on-

again, off-again with

the high-beam lever on

darkened roads.

controls

Grade: A

The rotary iDrive knob that

manages navigation and

other functions—and once

made even basic radio

tuning complicated—is

suddenly intuitive. The

fourth-generation iDrive

banishes buried submenus

and illogical functions. Old-

fashioned buttons for often-

used functions surround

a slimmed-down console

knob. A huge, 10.2-inch

high-res screen displays

easily readable graphics.

Night Vision

Grade: C–

BMW’s thermal-imaging

safety system adds

Pedestrian Detection, in

which the navigation screen

shows an animated outline

of people and animals

lurking at up to 1,000 feet in

front of the car. If it detects a

person 330 feet or less away,

it flashes a warning on a

head-up display. But the

novelty fades quickly—for

the system to be truly useful,

you’d have to stare at the

screen instead of the road.

AUTO TECH

GADGET MOBILE The thoroughly

tricked-out 2009 BMW 750i




WHAT’S NEW PHOTOGRAPHY

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IN A NEW LIGHT

TWO CAMERAS AIM TO SHOOT

IN THE DARK—AND THE SUNDOES IT

WORK?

Dim moonbeams or glaring rays:

Either can ruin a photo. New cameras

from Fujifilm and Sony promise sharp

pictures in all kinds of tricky lighting.

Both try to conquer darkness

by erasing pixel noise—white or

colored flecks that appear in photos

when there isn’t enough light for the

camera’s image sensor to get a good

reading. Fujifilm’s model also takes

on high-contrast settings, in which the

range between bright and dark parts

of a scene exceeds what the sensor

can measure. For example, in photos

on a bright day, a blue sky often

comes out white.

We tested the cameras by photo-

graphing a bridge—both at night and

in strong sunlight—and a basketball

game with a bright court and a sha-

dowy huddle of players.—Dan Havlik

Fujifilm F200EXR

THE TECH In dim conditions, this

camera can double its light-gathering

power by combining data from every

two pixels on its 12-megapixel sensor,

producing a crisp 6-megapixel image. In

high-contrast scenes, you can program

half the pixels to a low sensitivity for

capturing bright features and half of

them to a high sensitivity for dark areas.

THE RESULTS Photos of the bridge at

night had only a few white speckles in

the dark sky—far less than images from

competing cameras, which were riddled

with colored spots. By day, it captured

slightly more detail in the shadows

under the bridge, while maintaining a

truer blue sky. $400; fujifilm.com

Sony DSC-HX1

THE TECH This 9.1-megapixel camera

takes six pictures and combines them

into one. Because pixel noise varies with

each shot, the processor cancels out

specks that appear on only one of the

photos to produce a single clean image.

THE RESULTS Low-light photos of still

objects had only mild pixel noise. But

in removing the fuzziness, the HX1 also

erased actual details from the photos.

Because the camera took about two

seconds to capture the six pictures, its

noise-reduction tech didn’t work with

action photos at the game, which came

out splotchy. And waiting that long for

each photo was frustrating.

$500; sonystyle.com

EXTREME VIEW

Sony and Fujifilm

introduce new tech-

nologies for taking

photos in very dim or

very bright scenes.

EDITORS’ RAting EDITORS’ RAting




WHAT’S NEW HOME ENTERTAINMENT

SA

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CR

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From Second Life to The Sims to Spore,

games have long encouraged users

to develop content, such as fashions

or creatures, and share it online. But

Microsoft has taken creativity to the next

stage with Kodu, a program that allows

players on an Xbox 360 or a PC to craft

entire games using just the controller to

select icons.

You develop your creation by choosing

objects and characters and setting rules

for how they behave. For example,

select the game’s enemies —say,

spaceships—from among the 20

characters that come with Kodu,

and then choose the actions

they perform, such as shooting

at castles and moving away from

GET YOUR GAME ONCREATE VIDEOGAMES WITHOUT CRUNCHING CODE

IT’S ABOUT

TIME

obstacles such as mountains. Then

establish the number of points you win

if you shoot down a spaceship or you

lose if it destroys your castles, and add

a scoreboard to keep track. Kodu also

lets you customize your game world by

adding land, trees and bodies of water.

GET IT:

Microsoft

Kodu

$10 (est.);

xbox.com

IN RELATED NEWS: CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTUREMillions of people participate in online

role-playing games like .

But they are limited to a handful of

missions designed by the games’

developers. City of Heroes, a comic-

book-inspired adventure for Mac and

PC, is the first to let loose the creativity

of its players, allowing them to devise

storylines, modify characters, and write

scripts. Programming is a cinch: Would-be

authors select from drop-down menus to

specify, for example, the superpowers and

costumes of heroes and villains, and they

simply type dialogue in boxes.

� In Kodu, you select icons to

build rules that describe how

objects and characters behave.

If you don’t want to start from

scratch, select premade characters,

environments or entire games and

modify them as you wish. Once you’ve

finished your game, you can share

it with friends through the Xbox Live

online community.—Sean Portnoy

World of Warcraft


City of Heroes

$20, plus $15/month;

cityofheroes.com



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Bike is shown with optional accessories. *Only available at participating dealers. Offer ends May 31, 2009, or while supplies last. $12,999 applies to 2009 Vegas 8-Ball. California models are subject to additional $250 low-emissions fee. **The industry’s only full-line fi ve-year limited warranty is available on all new unused Victory bikes for a limited time. ***Offer is valid only in the U.S. and Canada and does not apply to prior purchases. The fi ve-year coverage consists of 48 months’ POLARISTAR ESC coverage in addition to the Victory 12-month factory warranty for a total of fi ve years. The ESC carries a standard $50 deductible and no mileage limitation. The ESC will be mailed six to eight weeks from receipt of purchase. Victory and Victory Motorcycles® are registered trademarks of Polaris Industries Inc. Always wear a helmet, eye protection, and protective clothing and obey the speed limit. Never ride under the infl uence of drugs or alcohol. ©2009 Polaris Industries Inc.

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WHAT’S NEW RECREATION

XX

XX

XX

X

Whitewater kayaking is virtually an aerial sport, with paddlers

in freestyle competitions performing tricks like airscrews—

barrel rolls above a rapid. The lighter your kayak, the higher you

can go, so instead of conventional polyethylene plastic, Wave

Sport turned to composite materials for its 54 Cx kayak. The first

prototype, a pure carbon-fiber model, weighed just 19 pounds

(about 15 pounds less than a plastic kayak) and was easier to

maneuver, thanks to the rigid frame. But it proved no match

for river rocks, which cracked the hull. In three subsequent

prototypes, Wave Sport added Kevlar strips to reinforce the

parts of the kayak that take the most abuse. The resulting six-

foot-two-inch boat—the first carbon-fiber freestyle kayak made

in the U.S.—weighs a bantam 20 pounds but is sturdy enough to

survive a hotdog paddler’s acrobatics.—Mark Anders

WATER ROCKETBRAVE THE RAPIDS WITH THIS SUMMER’S LIGHTEST, TOUGHEST GEAR

FULLY

LOADED

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GET IT: Wave Sport 54 Cx

$2,500 (limited run

of 50); wavesport.com


PERFECT PADDLE

Unlike most paddles, which have

separate blades attached to a

shaft, the 42-ounce Eddy is molded

as a single piece of braided carbon

fiber and Kevlar. The stiffer design

transfers more power to the water.

Adventure Technology Eddy

$329; atpaddle.com

tight fit

These slim boots squeeze inside

the smallest hulls. But their sturdy

wraparound soles, made from

rubber similar to that used on

climbing shoes, protect your feet

from rocks and provide a solid

grip on slippery riverbanks. TEVA

Cherry Bomb $65; teva.com

HEAD SHOTS

Capture the entire river with

this waterproof helmet cam’s

170-degree lens. Set it to record

up to 56 minutes of video or to

shoot five-megapixel stills every

two or five seconds. GoPro

Helmet HERO Wide $190;

goprocamera.com

WATER SAFETY

This sealed nylon canister keeps

gear like GPS units, cameras and

mobile phones dry under three

feet of water for up to 30 minutes.

And its padded interior protects

them from impacts. Outdoor

Research SeaVault Capsule

$55; outdoorresearch.com



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POPSCI.COM JUNE 2009 POPULAR SCIENCE 27

This winter, Russian scientists will resume

drilling into what may be the most pristine

environment in the world: Lake Vostok, an

unfrozen body of freshwater the size of Lake

Ontario cut off from the world for millennia

beneath two miles of Antarctic ice. The sedi-

ment on the lakebed could hold clues to past

climate changes, and the waters could be

teeming with new forms of life—but the slight-

est mistake could spoil the lake for good.

After more than a decade of technical

difficulties, and objections from the scientific

community that the project could contami-

nate the lake with outside bacteria or drilling I LLU

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headlinesdiscoveries, advances and debates in science

A football helmet that

keeps players cool

Ebola-infected

pigs run amok

Fly around the world

on solar power

30 3428

UNCHARTED WATERfluids, the Russians have cleaned up their

act just 500 feet from breaching the lake.

But they are no longer the only scien-

tific group with its sights set on tapping

Antarctica’s lakes. A team led by glaciolo-

gist Martin Siegert of the University of

Edinburgh in Scotland recently unveiled

an even more ambitious plan: Drill into

the six-mile-long Lake Ellsworth, two

miles below the ice in western Antarctica,

and search for life using remote-control

probes, in December 2012.

Scientists know that ice covered the

lakes, two of some 150 bodies of water

ICE CAPADES Scientists use explosives to

generate seismic maps of Lake Ellsworth

[left] and GPS to track water flow [above].

EXPLORATION

A NEW SCIENTIFIC PROJECT JOINS THE RACE TO EXPLORE LAKES UNDER ANTARCTIC ICE

below Antarctica’s icy surface, more than

400,000 years before humans existed. Any

microbes living there can survive total

darkness, high pressure, near-freezing

temperatures, high acidity and oxygen

debt—and, as such, possibly possess

never-before-seen biology. “It could be

like a super-Galápagos,” Siegert says.

“Given that we’ve found microbial life

in other environments thought too harsh

to support living things, such as seismic

vents in the ocean floor, it would be sur-

prising if we don’t find something living in

these lakes,” says

South Pole

Lake Vostok

McMurdo Station

Lake Ellsworth

Ross Ice Shelf

[continued ON page 29]




This fall, Swiss adventurer Bertrand

Piccard and his team will begin test

flights of a prototype of Solar Impulse,

a sun-powered plane designed to

circumnavigate the globe without

burning a drop of oil. Piccard wants

the project to demonstrate the poten-

tial of green technology, and he’s

feeling the pressure. “We still have to

prove that this plane will fly,” he says.

Led by CEO André Borschberg, the

team has implemented major design

revisions since announcing the project

in 2003, such as bowing the wings to

improve handling and substituting light-

weight engines, but the basic idea is the

same. Photovoltaic cells on the wings

will gather solar energy, recharging the

AVIATION

RACING THE SUN A SOLAR-POWERED PLANE GEARS UP FOR A ROUND-THE-WORLD FLIGHT

batteries that power its propellers.

Traveling at a leisurely, energy-

efficient 45 mph, Solar Impulse will take

three weeks to loop the world, landing

every few days to change pilots and show

off the technology to the public. Piccard

hopes the sight of the plane in flight

will prove that renewable energy can

transform even the most energy-hungry

STURDIER TAILMoving down the horizontal stabilizing

wing streamlined the plane and reduced

stress on the body in turbulent winds.

This allowed the team to trim weight from

the already light carbon-fiber fuselage.

FRESH AIRPiccard’s grandfather, Auguste Pic-

card, invented the pressurized cabin,

but the prototype plane won’t have one,

so its top altitude will be 28,500 feet.

HEADLINES



THE UPS AND DOWNS

OF SOLAR FLIGHT

Solar Impulse will fly eastward around the equator for

the most possible sun exposure. The plane will take off

from the ground before dawn with fully charged bat-

teries. It will reach 10,000 feet by that sunrise, and the

solar cells will begin restoring the power spent during

the initial ascent. The plane will peak at 39,000 feet so

it can gradually descend to 10,000 feet during the night

to conserve energy, ready to recharge and ascend

when day breaks again. If it drains its batteries before

sunrise, the pilot can land it like a glider.

human activities, sparking interest and

investment in green tech across the globe.

Takeoff of the full-size plane is slated for

2011, but Piccard and Borschberg are cur-

rently focused on getting the prototype off

the ground by September and working their

way up to 36-hour overnight flights. “We

have the plane,” Piccard says. “This is really

the moment of truth.”—GREGORY MONE

LIGHTWEIGHT ENGINESThe four lightweight, custom-

built engines that replaced the

original layout of two larger,

rear-mounted engines will put

less strain on the wings

and body.

EFFICIENT SOLAR CELLSThe photovoltaic cells are 25 percent more efficient than

those that were planned in 2003. The 12,000 cells will

crank out only six kilowatts on average—just enough to

run the four 10-horsepower motors.


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“IT WOULD BE

SURPRISING

IF WE DON’T

FIND LIFE IN

THE LAKES.”

Mahlon Kennicutt, president of the Scientific

Committee on Antarctic Research, a nongov-

ernmental advisory body. Past discoveries of

such microbes have led to the development of

better artificial sweeteners and key enzymes

used in DNA research, among other things.

Drilling into Vostok has been difficult.

The ice at the lake’s perimeter consists of

extremely hard crystals of up to five feet

long, and friction on the crystals from the

drill melts a layer of water that causes the bit

to slip, slowing progress. “No one had ever

encountered ice like this before,” explains

Valery Lukin, director of the Russian expedi-

tion. This December, Lukin’s

team will drill to the

cusp of the lake,

after which they

will replace the

kerosene anti-

freeze in the hole

with inert silicon

oil (concern that

the kerosene

could contaminate

the lake has stalled

the project in the past).

Next year, they will pierce

the lake so that water flows back into the

hole, which they will allow to freeze and then

remove for analysis a year later.

The U.K. team has refined its equipment

to better cut the ice and preserve the lake.

They plan to carve through the ice with a jet

of 200°F water melted from ice extracted

from the hole itself. The water, filtered twice

to remove any bacteria or viruses from the

outside, also sterilizes the equipment. But,

Siegert says, it’s impossible to do this type

of research without leaving some mark: “It’s

like leaving footprints on the moon.” Although

his crew won’t strike water until two years

after the Russians do, he believes that his

mission’s sample-collecting phase will ulti-

mately provide the more valuable data. The

team will lower a pair of probes into the lake

to capture video and retrieve water and sedi-

ment samples—and any microbes in them.

Of course, the groups might not find any-

thing, but that’s what makes drilling into this

vast, completely unexplored realm so excit-

ing. “We’ve never sampled this water, so we

have no idea what’s down there,” Kennicutt

says. “But it is becoming clear that Antarctica

is a very dynamic place.”—TOM CLYNES

[continued from page 27]

39,000 ft.

10,000 ft.




UNSTOPPABLE MUTANT RATS

Sixty years of killing rats with poison

might be making them stronger,

according to new research. A series

of small mutations in some rats’

genetic code allows them to survive

high doses of warfarin, the most com-

monly used rodenticide. Warfarin

inhibits blood clotting, causing fatal

internal bleeding. Although “super-

warfarin” poisons are available, study

leader Simone Rost of the University

of Würzburg in Germany warns that

the rodents might develop immunity

to those chemicals as well.

THIS LITTLE PIGGIE HAD EBOLA

In January, the Ebola virus leapt from pigs to farmers in the Philippines. But

don’t panic. Despite being a cousin of the deadly African strains, this one, Ebola-

Reston, merely causes flu-like symptoms in humans, says Pierre Rollin, a

biologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To be safe, the Philip-

pine government ordered farmers to euthanize 6,500 pigs from infected farms.

Ebola-Reston was first seen in Philippine monkeys in 1989 and has since passed

to other species. Scientists think contagious bats urinated in pigs’ water supply,

and the swine then coughed the virus onto humans.—KATharine GAMMON

CALL IN THE SWAT TEAM

Roughly 70 percent of all the antibiotics

used in the U.S. are for warding off bacte-

rial infection in farm animals so they can

grow big fast. The trouble is, these bacteria

eventually develop resistance to the drugs

and, researcher Jay Graham of Johns

Hopkins University has recently shown,

flies are spreading the resistant bacteria

around. The flies can pick up strains from

chicken droppings that cause human ill-

nesses such as meningitis and carry them

as far as 20 miles. Graham recommends

sterilizing animal waste with the same

techniques used for human sewage.

ANIMAL ATTACKVERMIN AND FARM CRITTERS STIR UP HEALTH SCARES

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ACHIN’ BACON An Ebola strain has jumped

from monkeys and bats to pigs and people.

30-SECOND SCIENCE

YIKES Rats’ genetic mutations let

them survive poison.

HEADLINES

SUPERBUG FARM Flies

feed on bacteria-ridden

chicken feces and spread

human diseases.

Cameras run out of memory at the

worst times—like when you faced down

Michael Jordan at the poker tables in

Vegas. But a new flash-memory sys-

tem could pack up to two terabytes of

storage, or 480 hours of high-definition

video, into the average memory card.

Current SD memory cards store

files using the 10-year-old FAT32 stan-

dard filing program. FAT32 often splits

photos or videos into small pieces,

which it saves in random locations on

the card. This slows down the flash

drive as it saves and retrieves files,

capping storage at 32 gigabytes—any

more would make the card impracti-

cally sluggish. So new SD eXtended

Capacity (SDXC) cards will feature

Microsoft’s exFAT system, which opens

the door to bigger storage by saving

files in one piece in an organized way

that makes them quicker to find.

The first SDXC cards, due out from

Panasonic this year, will offer 64 giga-

bytes—space for 3,500 12-megapixel

photos or a 50-gig Blu-ray movie—

and read/write speeds 10 times as fast

as current cards. As companies scale

down transistors (the circuits that

physically store data), standard cards

could theoretically store two terabytes.

Although the cards won’t work in

SD-card-reading devices, SDXC cam-

eras in the pipeline will prove your

wildest stories—as long as your battery

doesn’t die.—MARSHALL LOUIS REAVES

ENDLESS MEMORYCOMING SOON: THE TWO-

TERABYTE FLASH CARD

SHRINKAGE

TOTAL RECALL Revamped flash cards

could store 40

Blu-ray movies.



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HEADLINES

Dolphins are elegant swimmers, but waterlily leaf beetle

larvae take first place for the simplest stroke. The insect just

arches its back to manipulate a basic physics principle that

lets it glide across water. Now engineers have borrowed this

technique to make a tiny boat that could autonomously patrol

water reservoirs for months on just a watch battery.

The larva’s efficiency relies on surface tension, the force

that causes water molecules to stick together. By arching

its body, the larva disrupts the water’s tension in such a way

that the bug moves forward. Sung Kwon Cho, an engineer at

the University of Pittsburgh, decided to harness the tension,

like the beetle does, to move an inch-long boat. But instead

ELECTRIC GLIDEENGINEERS TAKE CUES FROM BEETLES

TO MAKE A SUPER-EFFICIENT ROBO-BOAT

INSPIRED BY NATURE

of making a bendable craft, Cho

attached a Teflon-coated elec-

trode to the plastic boat’s stern.

Teflon usually repels water, but when you charge it with elec-

tricity it breaks the surface tension, as the beetle does, to push

the boat along. A side-mounted electrode turns the boat. Cho

suggests that his device could be up to 100 times as efficient as

mechanically driven mini-boats and, in a few years, could scale

up to power a sensor-toting surveillance dinghy five times the

size of his prototype.—SUSANNAH F. LOCKE

WATER BUG Electrodes propel

this boat by breaking the sur-

face tension of water, as a leaf

beetle larva does.

Surgical solutions for restoring lush locks have always involved

a painful trade-off—transplanting hairs from the rear of your

head to the top could leave you thin in the back. But Bessam

Farjo, a hair-loss specialist at the British company Intercytex, has

devised a less barbaric fix: cloning patients’ hair cells. “The con-

cept is to create a limitless supply of donor hair,” Farjo says.

Male pattern baldness is caused when some hair-producing

dermal papilla cells begin growing thinner, less visible hairs.

Standard transplant procedures involve plucking roughly 6,000

healthy cells, but Farjo takes only 100. He clones these in the

lab until he has millions and then injects them into sparse scalp

regions, where each can sprout a fresh hair and even encourage

additional hair growth in neighboring scalp tissue. The procedure

isn’t just a matter of vanity; it could provide insight into how to

clone other tissues for therapeutic uses.

Farjo recently wrapped up a 13-man, 48-week clinical trial in

SEND IN THE CLONES COVERING BALDING HEADS WITH CLONED HAIR

MED TECH

which 40 percent of the implanted cells, paired with blood-

flow-stimulating scalp massage, produced new hair. His

next goal: growing complete hair follicles in the lab, which

could make the transformation from Mr. Clean to Donald

Trump even more certain.—ELIZABETH SVOBODA

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from the back of the

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injecting them into

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POPSCI.COM 34 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2009

Football championships, coaches say,

are won during preseason workouts. So

football players, from high-schoolers

up to the pros, report to mini-camps

every summer to run windsprints and

engage in full-contact drills. Broken

bones and blown-out knees are the

typical player’s biggest concern, but 39

football players, mostly high-schoolers,

have died from overheating since 1995.

Now Hothead Technologies in Atlanta

is introducing a helmet that monitors the

temperatures of an entire football team

in real time so coaches can pull players

off the field before it’s too late. The Heat

Observation Technology (HOT) system

uses an electric thermometer called a

thermistor, a spoon-size device made

of metals whose electrical resistance

vary with temperature. Inserted under

the padding of a standard helmet, the

thermistor measures the temperature in

the player’s temporal artery and uses a

built-in radio to transmit temperatures

between 99.9° and 110°F—heat illness

typically sets in around 104°—every 10

seconds to a PDA monitored by a coach

or trainer on the sidelines. Rain, sweat

and ambient temperature typically skew

the results from skin-contact thermom-

eters, but Hothead is nearly as accurate

as a rectal thermometer, which sets the

standard for the industry.

Simply resting and hydrating over-

heated athletes would go a long way

toward preventing deaths like Korey

Stringer’s. The 335-pound Minnesota

Vikings lineman collapsed after a swel-

HEADLINES

BURN NOTICEA FOOTBALL HELMET

TELLS THE SIDELINE

WHEN PLAYERS

ARE DANGEROUSLY

OVERHEATED

SPORT TECH

tering morning practice in July 2001. His

body temperature was 108.8°, and he

died of organ failure hours later. “It took

Stringer some time to get into the danger

zone,” says Jay Buckalew, Hothead’s

CEO and founder. “I have no doubt that

our device would have detected that.”

Hothead is currently wrapping up

deals with the major helmet companies,

including Riddell and Schutt, and is nego-

tiating with the NFL. Teams with HOT

helmets will pay a $50 activation charge

per player per year, plus an additional

$100 annual team fee for the PDA service.

The helmet companies have placed 10,000

orders for this year, and Hothead expects

to roll out 400,000, mostly to high schools

and colleges, by 2011.—BRETT ZARDA CLO

CK

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PREVENTIVE

MEDICINE The

Hothead helmet

[shown without

padding] sends

body-temperature

data to a PDA [right]

to prevent deaths

like that of Korey

Stringer [below].

Thermistor

Antenna

Radio

transmitter



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THE 2009 POPSCI

INVENTIONAWARDS

A Decoder for Impaired Speech

Insulation Made from Mushrooms

An All-in-One Grease Refinery

Michael Callahan

Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre

James Peret

INVENTION

INVENTION

INVENTION

INVENTOR

INVENTORS

INVENTOR

right now, somewhere in America, there’s an inventor in a garage on the verge of something big. It might not be a cure for leukemia or a rocket to Mars, but some unexpected innovations can be almost as profound. Like the fisherman who made a lure that doesn’t damage the environment. Or the college kids who built a shock absorber that saves fuel by turning potholes into power. Here in our third-annual Invention Awards, we present these and eight other standout inventors whose creativity and hard work are making our lives better, as well as the secrets for getting your own great idea out of the garage and into the world.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN B. CARNETT ILLUSTRATIONS BY BLAND DESIGNS

A 60mph Tank

Geoff and Mike Howe

INVENTION INVENTORS

38

51

52

53

A Better IV Catheter

Amir BelsonINVENTION INVENTOR

42

The World As a Web Interface

Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry

INVENTION INVENTORS

44

A Stronger, Greener Fishing Lure

Ben HobbinsINVENTION INVENTOR

43

Robo-legs Amit GofferINVENTION INVENTOR

46

Shocks That Create Power

The MIT Team

INVENTION INVENTORS

48

An Escape Harness for Skyscrapers

Kevin StoneINVENTION INVENTOR

50

Check out video of the winning inventions at popsci.com/invention.




2009INVENTIONAWARDS

THE FASTEST TANKAN UNMANNED BEAST THAT CRUISES OVER ANY TERRAIN AT MORE THAN 60 MPH

Ripsaw

Geoff and Mike Howe

$760,000 9 years

INVENTION

INVENTORS

TIMECOST

HORIZON

PROTOTYPE PRODUCT

Track Spring-loaded wheel

HOW IT WORKS To glide

over rough terrain at top

speed, the Ripsaw has shock

absorbers that provide 14

inches of travel. But when the

suspension compresses, it

creates slack that could cause

a track to come off, poten-

tially flipping the vehicle.

So the inventors devised a

spring-loaded wheel at the

front that extends to keep

the tracks taut. The Ripsaw

has never thrown a track.




cue up the Ripsaw’s greatest hits on YouTube, and you can watch the unmanned tank tear across muddy fields at 60 mph, jump 50 feet, and crush birch trees. But right now, as its remote driver inches it back and forth for a photo shoot, it’s like watching Babe Ruth forced to bunt with the bases loaded. The Ripsaw, lurching and belching black puffs of smoke, somehow seems restless.

Like their creation, identical twins Geoff and Mike Howe, 34, don’t like to sit still for long. At age seven, they built a log cabin. Ten years later, they converted a school bus into a drivable, transforming stage for their heavy-metal band, Two Much Trouble. In 2000 they


“SHOULD I

PATENT MY

INVENTION?”

AMATEUR INVENTORS FAQ

GETTING A PATENT is expensive and time-consuming, so don’t just start filling out an application as soon as you come up with a bright idea. John Calvert, the administrator for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Inventor Assistance Pro-gram, offers advice on whether it’s truly worth it.—Sarah Z. Wexler

#�Short of a getting a patent, legally there’s not much you can do to protect an idea that could be easily replicated.

#�You can expect to pay about $5,000 to the patent office to secure and maintain the rights to a patent, and another $3,000 to $15,000 for attorney’s fees. But the more leg-work you can do—from researching similar inventions to making sketches—the less it will cost you. Patent attorneys in cities like D.C. or New York often charge more for the same services as those in places like Alabama or North Dakota. Many will work with you remotely, potentially saving you a few grand.

#�Once you’ve filed, you still won’t have any rights to stop some-one from making a product that infringes on your idea. At that point you can send the infringers a cease-and-desist letter, but you can’t sue them. Once you receive the patent, potentially years down the line, you can take legal action.

#�Mark your invention “pat-ent pending” after you’ve filed. That’s fair warning to potential infringers that you can send a cease-and-desist letter.

#�Remember that there’s no such thing as a worldwide patent. Some-one in China can (and probably will) see your idea, rip it off, and sell it there without consequence.

#�Still, an approved patent can be extremely valuable, giv-ing you a mini monopoly in the U.S. for 20 years. After that, it expires, and you can’t renew.

couldn’t agree on their next project: Geoff favored a jet-turbine-powered off-road truck; Mike, the world’s fastest tracked vehicle. “That weekend, Mike calls me down to his garage,” Geoff says. “He’s already got the suspension built for the Ripsaw. So we went with that.”

Every engineer they consulted said they couldn’t best the 42mph top speed of an M1A Abrams, the most powerful tank in the world. Other tanks are built to protect the people inside, with frames made of heavy armored-steel plates. Designed for rugged unmanned missions, the Ripsaw just needed to go fast, so the brothers started trimming weight. First they built a frame of welded steel tubes, like the ones used by Nascar,

MEAN MACHINE Troops could use

the Ripsaw as an advance scout,

sending it a mile or two ahead of

a convoy, and use its cameras and

new sensor technology to sniff out

roadside bombs or ambushes.



00 POPULAR SCIENCE POPSCI.COM

BEHIND THE WHEEL The Ripsaw’s six

cameras send live, 360-degree video to

a control room, where program man-

ager Will McMaster steers the tank.

that provides 50 percent more strength at half the weight.

When you reinvent the tank, finding ready-made parts is no easy task, and a tread light enough to spin at 60 mph and strong enough to hold together at that speed didn’t exist. So the Howes hand-shaped steel cleats and redesigned the mechanism for connecting them in a track. (Because the patent for the mechanism, one of eight on Ripsaw components, is still pending, they will reveal only that they didn’t use the typical pin-and-bushing system of connecting treads.) The two-pound cleats weigh about 90 percent less than similarly scaled tank cleats. With the combined weight savings, the Ripsaw’s 650-horsepower V8 engine cranks out nine times as much horsepower per pound as an M1A Abrams.

While working their day jobs—Mike as a financial adviser, Geoff as a foreman at a utilities plant—the self-taught engineers hauled the Ripsaw prototype from their workshop in Maine to the 2005 Washington Auto Show, where they showed it to army officials interested in developing

weaponized unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). That led to a demonstration for Maine Senator Susan Collins, who helped the Howes secure $1.25 million from the Department of Defense.

The brothers founded Howe and Howe Technologies in 2006 and set to work upgrading various Ripsaw systems, including a differential drive train that automatically doles out the right amount of power to each track for turns. The following year they handed it over to the Army’s Armament Research Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC), which paired it with a remote-control M240 machine gun and put the entire system through months of strenuous tests. “What really set it apart from other UGVs was its speed,” says Bhavanjot Singh, the ARDEC project manager overseeing the Ripsaw’s development. Other UGVs top out at around 20 mph, but the Ripsaw can keep up with a pack of Humvees.

Back on the field, the tank has been readied for the photo. The program manager for Howe and Howe Technologies, Will McMaster, who is sitting at the Ripsaw’s controls around

the corner and roughly a football field away, drives it straight over a three-foot-tall concrete wall. The brothers think that when the $760,000 Ripsaw is ready for mass production this summer, feats like this will give them a lead over other companies vying for a military UGV contract. “Every other UGV is small and uses [artificial intelligence] to avoid obstacles,” Mike says. “The Ripsaw doesn’t have to avoid obstacles; it drives over them.”—Bjorn Carey


OVER THE HILL Despite the best efforts of

inventors Mike [left] and Geoff Howe, the

Ripsaw has proven unbreakable. It did once

break a suspension mount—and drove on

for hours without trouble.

2009INVENTIONAWARDS



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A BETTER CATHETERA NEW DESIGN THAT HELPS DOCTORS START AN IV SUCCESSFULLY, EVERY TIME

When Amir Belson flew from Israel for a pediatric fellowship at Stanford University in 1998, he carried a list of 64 ideas for medical inventions. Many of the concepts were influenced by the years he served as a flight surgeon in the Israeli air force, while others came from time spent in a neonatal intensive-care unit. One of them was an idea for a better intravenous catheter, one that wouldn’t damage veins or kink inside of them. By 2005, he had made his first prototype.

The design of the IV catheters that drip medications and fluid into patients’ bodies has changed little in 30 years. Belson found that as many as 40 percent of first attempts to start an IV fail. Advancing a needle blindly often leaves veins clogged and useless for weeks, bruises patients, exhausts clinicians, and costs hospitals thousands of dollars a week in extra needles and labor. Some research has been done to thread catheters using ultrasound technology or infrared light, but both techniques are expensive and require additional training.

Belson’s Vascular Pathways prototype, inspired when he spent an entire shift working to insert an IV into a newborn, is a more practical design based on standard catheters. As with any needle, a medical professional using Vascular Pathways knows the vein has been reached when blood flashes back through the needle. She then slides forward a lever, which advances a guide wire safely out from inside the needle. The guide wire rolls into a curlicue before the catheter slides over it, preventing the catheter tip from hitting the vein’s walls. Finally, the needle and guide wire are retracted, leaving the catheter in place. “It’s going to make a big difference in saving a lot of what are now unavoidable re-sticks,” says Jeff Stuart, medical director of the Washington Outpatient Surgery Center in Freemont, California.

After testing the device on large veins in pigs, Belson started IVs in the tiny veins in rabbits’ ears, where muscles keep the ears bouncing around. Of 100 pricks made, only one failed. Having received FDA approval, in April Belson began a two-month trial with people. If successful, he plans to team up with Australian company Telesso Technologies and sell Vascular Pathways at a price comparable to current catheters, hoping, he says, “to make this catheter the gold standard worldwide.”—Corey Binns

Vascular Pathways Amir Belson

$600,000 6 years

INVENTION INVENTOR

TIMECOST HORIZON

PROTOTYPE PRODUCT

WHEREARETHEYNOW?

“My company was awarded a $750,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research.”—Jerome Rifkin

2008 INVENTION AWARDS


GORDON LINK, A DIABETIC and foot amputee,

is not looking to climb Mount Everest, run a

marathon, or snowboard off a cliff. “I just want to

walk without stumbling like I’m a drunk,” he says.

It may not sound like a tall order, but until he was fitted with

a prototype prosthetic foot that simulates the body’s natural

movements, walking on uneven ground was like navigating

an obstacle course. “Hitting a low spot of even one inch with

my old foot was like a non-amputee stepping into a four-

inch hole,” he adds. “Not good.”

Link has been testing the new foot for the past six

months, but 36-year-old inventor Jerome Rifkin has been

A MORE NATURAL ARTIFICIAL FOOTdescription

name

time

Mimics the jointed motion of a real foot for easier walking

K3 Promoter

8 yearshorizon

the idea

Prototype Product

cost to develop

$100,000

building and

rebuilding

the flexible

mechanical foot for more than eight years—ever since

he broke his hip in a bicycle accident and spent three

years learning to walk again. The mechanical engineer

had studied prosthetics as an undergrad, but his physical

therapy was a crash course in the biomechanics of walking.

“That’s when I realized that prosthetic feet were nothing

like natural feet,” he says.

With 26 bones, 35 joints, and the awesome responsibili-

ties of weight-bearing and propulsion, the foot is one of

HOW IT WORKS

NO FLAT FEET Jerome Rifkin

watches his prototype foot

flex in a testing rig he built.

A flexible midfoot joint makes the

prosthetic stable on uneven ground,

and a spring-loaded toe provides

push-off for each step.

INVENTOR

Jerome Rifkin

Midfoot joint

HOW IT WORKS The guide wire forms

a curlicue at its end for easy advancing.

The catheter is inserted over the guide

wire, which steers the catheter’s tip to

avoid kinking against the vein’s walls.

2009INVENTIONAWARDS

Guide wire

Needle

2008 INVENTION WINNER

PROSTHETIC FOOT




Ben Hobbins didn’t set out to clean up his local lakes, but his IronClads baits do exactly that. The Wisconsin inventor’s idea—fishing lures that are extra-strong, eco-friendly and nontoxic—solves a serious, if little-known environmental problem. Flexible and cheap soft plastics are the most popular type of lure among sport fishermen, but almost all of them eventually end up at the bottom of lakes and rivers because they easily detach from their hook when they’re cast or bitten. Once there, the baits disintegrate over time, releasing harmful phthalates and other petrochemicals. According to one study, 25 million pounds of the lures are left in U.S. waters every year.

In 2006, Hobbins, an avid fisherman, was really just trying to come up with a stronger version of the lures he was using for ice fishing, when the concept came to him. “I hate rebaiting hooks in zero-degree weather,” he says. A former biotech strategist, he speculated that methods used in the industry for skin grafting—using an expandable mesh to ensure that a graft stays intact and in place—could also work for reinforcing lures. The result was IronClads, which stay firmly on their hooks because of a microtube of polyester mesh that lends strength to the plastic, just as rebar gives tensile strength to concrete. The lures can sustain 93 pounds of tensile strain, so only fish with serrated teeth and considerable heft could possibly bite through them.

Hobbins sold his initial IronClads to local stores. Inspired by the praise he received for their environmental impact, he then set out to solve the remaining problem: the fact that the plastic was still toxic. Last summer he began work on an equally strong silicone-based version that, if it does tear off, biodegrades without the toxins released by soft baits made from plasticized polyvinyl chloride. (Neither version contains the usual flexibility-lending plasticizers made from phthalates, which Congress has banned from children’s toys.) Now testing the greener version, Hobbins has enlisted the help of the University of Wisconsin, which also worked with him to raise funding and create the initial prototypes of the lures. He expects the silicone IronClads to hit stores this year.—Christopher Steiner

TOUGH ON FISH, EASY ON LAKESA LURE THAT USES A SURGICAL TRICK TO PREVENT GETTING TORN FROM HOOKS, AND DOESN’T CONTAMINATE THE WATER

IronClads Ben Hobbins

$375,000 3 years

INVENTION INVENTOR

TIMECOST HORIZON

PROTOTYPE PRODUCT

Polyester-

mesh tubes

HOW IT WORKS

The IronClads’s

twin polyester-

tube skeleton

acts like rebar

in concrete,

giving the lure

the tensile

strength to

withstand

anything

but a direct

chomp from

the biggest,

toothiest fish.





HEIGHTENED REALITYA SYSTEM THAT TURNS YOUR SURROUNDINGS INTO A COMPUTER INTERFACE

SixthSense Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry

$350 8 months

INVENTION INVENTORS

TIMECOST HORIZON

PROTOTYPE PRODUCT

2009INVENTIONAWARDS

FINGERS ON THE

PULSE Using Sixth-

Sense, grad student

Pranav Mistry can

operate his laptop,

snap photos, and

more with hand

signals alone.




When he’s wearing the SixthSense, a combination miniature projector, webcam and notebook computer, Pranav Mistry can snap photos just by making the shape of a frame with his fingers. He can conjure a phone keypad in the palm of his hand and tap the virtual numbers to place a call. The system can even recognize a book in front of the camera, retrieve its Amazon listing from the Web, and project its rating on the cover. Watching Mistry, a graduate student in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Arts and Sciences program, demonstrate the device is like witnessing a magic show. But he and his adviser, Pattie Maes, a digital-interface specialist at MIT’s Media Lab, expect the SixthSense to do a lot more than evoke wonder. Within a few years, they hope, it will let people operate smartphones without touching a button, do instant research on objects around them, and generally offer the kind of enhanced-reality experience that’s now confined to science fiction.

Maes hit on the idea last October while discussing g-speak, a real-world version of the gesture-controlled interface in the movie Minority Report. She liked the notion of using hand signals to manipulate digital content but wanted something cheaper that you could walk around with, projecting content and interacting with it anywhere you liked. Mistry, nicknamed “Zombie” because of his aversion to sleep, turned

out a prototype in just three weeks.Although the system has evolved

considerably since then, the basic concept has stuck. A pocket projector and a webcam hang on Mistry’s chest, both wired to a laptop in his backpack, and he wears four different-colored marker caps or pieces of tape on his thumbs and index fingers. When he switches on the system, the webcam starts capturing video and streaming it back to the computer. Then the computer’s vision algorithms take over. The real brains of this system, this software filters out background imagery, determines x and y coordinates for each cap or tape color in the video frame, and tracks them over time. The computer discerns which colors are moving which way, so it can follow freehand gestures. These, in turn, trigger various functions.

Say, for instance, Mistry wants to know the time. He traces a small circle on his wrist with his index finger, and the computer tracks the red marker

IN THE NEWS The SixthSense can scan newspaper stories and

retrieve related video from YouTube or other Web sites, which it

projects directly onto the surface of the paper.

“HOW SECRETIVE SHOULD I BE?”

LOOSE LIPS can sink potential inventions. So be very careful about sharing proprie-tary information. Anytime you write about your invention on the Web or in a published article, display it at a trade show, or make it public in certain other ways, that could qualify as a legal disclosure. From that moment on, you have only a one-year grace period to file for a patent; if you don’t, you lose the claim rights, and anyone else can try to patent it. Louis Foreman, author of the upcoming Independent Inventor’s

Handbook, suggests that you have anyone you discuss the invention with sign a non-disclosure agreement, a legally binding document in which the signer agrees to keep mum. You can download a sample NDA on our Web site at popsci.com/nda.—S.z.w.

cap or piece of tape, recognizes the gesture, and instructs the projector to flash the image of a watch onto his wrist. For book-recognition, Mistry activates the program with a gesture, and the system snaps a photo of the book, compares it with book-cover images it finds online, computes a match, and retrieves and projects the ratings. Future functions will similarly rely on computer vision algorithms. “It recognizes what’s in front of the user and augments those things with relevant information,” Maes explains.

This summer, Mistry will begin working with Samsung engineers to compress the entire system into one of the company’s new smartphones, which has a built-in projector. With further improvements to the algorithms, eventually even the markers and tape could go away and the device could track fingers alone, making it even easier to enhance your surroundings anywhere you go.—Gregory Mone


Webcam

Projector

Laptop

HOW IT WORKS

A webcam captures

video, including spe-

cific hand signals that

the laptop reads as

commands. A mini-

projector then displays

the relevant content—

e-mail, stock charts,

photos—on the nearest

surface.




FAC

ING

PA

GE: IL

AN

MIZ

RA

HI/

WPN

After breaking his neck in a 1997 fall, Israeli engineer Amit Goffer learned that he would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He soon concluded that this mode of transportation was outdated and began work on the ReWalk, the only wearable exoskeleton that allows paraplegics to stand, amble, and even climb stairs. Soon, more than a dozen patients in the U.S. will strap in and start strolling.

Goffer, now 56, needed a design that would be not only safe but also energy-efficient enough to last for an entire day. “I was worried you would need a truckload of batteries,” he recalls. To solve that problem, he made a design choice that meant he could never use it. Goffer is paralyzed from the chest down, but he realized that if wearers could use crutches, it would conserve energy and simplify balance, since the device wouldn’t have to keep the person upright all on its own.

The 44-pound prototype, which takes just a few minutes to get into, has several modes—among them, walking, sitting, and climbing/descending stairs—that the user selects on a wristband controller. Plant one of the crutches and lean forward in walk mode, for example, and a tilt sensor in the ReWalk’s shoulder harness registers the motion. A computer in a backpack interprets this data and instructs electric motors in the hip and knee of one leg to move it forward. (Other exoskeletons, like Honda’s walking-assist device, take cues from users’ actual leg motions or electrical signals in their muscles, which wouldn’t work with paraplegics.) Another plant of the crutches and another lean, and the motors on the other side swing the

ROBO-LEGSAN EXOSKELETON THAT ENABLES PARAPLEGICS TO WALK

“HOW DO I GET INVESTORS?”

FROM THE TIME you come up with an idea, expect to spend 50 to 70 percent of your time raising capital from angel investors, says Ellen Sandles, executive director of the Tri-State Private Investors Network. Here’s what you need to know to get the big check.—S.z.w.

second leg ahead. Stand up straight, and the device halts.Like the crutches, many of the components, including the

motors and battery pack, are off-the-shelf. Goffer says it’s the control algorithms that make the difference. For example, early in the ReWalk’s development, he and his team found that the tilt sensor could be thrown off by variations in the way users dressed (for example, its angle could be changed if a user wore a large belt buckle underneath the harness), so they wrote software that accounts for those differences and corrects them. The code also has to filter out vibrations from the ground, initiate the most energy-efficient steps so the batteries don’t drain prematurely, quickly recognize a stumble and recover in time to prevent a fall, and more.

Goffer says the next version will be down to about 30 pounds. Several patients have already tested the prototype successfully abroad, and U.S. clinical trials are set to start soon. One of ReWalk’s testers, 41-year-old paraplegic Radi Kaiof, thinks patients will be satisfied. When strapped in, he says, “I speak eye-to-eye with people, not from the bottom up. There is one life in a wheelchair, and this is a new life.”—GREGORY MONE

ReWalk Amit Goffer

$2 million+ 10 years

INVENTION INVENTOR

TIME HORIZONCOST

PROTOTYPE PRODUCT

#�Know your angel. Some invest only in start-up ventures, whereas others seek more mature companies.#�Most angels invest anywhere from $25,000 to $100,000. #�If you haven’t actually run a business, you should partner with somebody who has.

#�Plan on dipping into your own pocket. If you expect investors to risk their money on your venture, you should contribute 20 percent of your own net worth. #�Approach investors only after applying for patents, and come with a prototype and a solid business plan in hand.

# You don’t need to have any rev-enue yet. You do need to be working on a marketing plan to prove that you ultimately can generate revenue.#�You’ll get far more attention if you line up customers who are will-ing to test or sample your product.


2009INVENTIONAWARDS

HOW IT WORKS

The user plants the

crutches out front

and leans forward.

A sensor registers

the motion, and the

computer instructs

motors in the hip

and knee of one leg

to swing it forward.

Tilt sensors

Computer

Motors




WALK ON Inventor Amit Goffer can’t use it himself,

but the ReWalk allowed Radi Kaiof [right], a para-

plegic, to walk for the first time in nearly 20 years.

“People didn’t believe me. They’ve been trying to develop these exoskeletons for the paralyzed for 50 years.” —ReWalk inventor Amit Goffer




POWER PLAYERS Still in their early 20s,

Zack Anderson [left], Shakeel Avadhany

and the other team members handle

everything from the company’s busi-

ness plans to GenShock’s electronics.

POWER MADE FROM SHOCKSA SHOCK ABSORBER THAT GENERATES ENERGY AND INCREASES FUEL EFFICIENCY

GenShock Shakeel Avadhany, Zack Anderson, Zack Jackowski, Ryan Bavetta and Vladimir Tarasov $100,000 2 years

INVENTION INVENTORS

TIMECOST

HORIZON

PROTOTYPE PRODUCT

HOW IT WORKS

As the vehicle

moves, the shock

compresses and its

piston pumps fluid

to drive a hydrau-

lic motor and an

electric-motor gen-

erator. The power

that’s produced lets

the engine-driven

alternator do less

work, saving fuel.

2009INVENTIONAWARDS

Electric-motor generator

Hydraulic

fluid

Hydraulic

motor

Piston




The idea for an energy-producing shock absorber started humbly enough, just another wild invention tossed out during a late-night dorm-room bull session. Only, the students involved were among MIT’s best, and they actually went ahead and built it. Two years later, they’ve got a shiny Hummer H1, loaned by the manufacturer to use as a rolling testbed, and their GenShock may soon find its way into the military’s fleet of Humvees.

The team—Shakeel Avadhany, Zack Anderson, Zack Jackowski, Ryan Bavetta and Vladimir Tarasov—came up with a way to harness the energy generated by the up-down motion of a vehicle’s shocks as they compress over dips, bumps and potholes. The power that the GenShock system produces lets the alternator, which is driven by the engine and provides electricity to charge the battery, do less work. And that, ultimately, saves fuel.

They began by creating a simple hydraulic system, in which the shock absorber’s piston pumps fluid to drive a hydraulic motor and a miniature electric-motor generator. The team’s first prototype generated a total of 800 watts of continuous power with four shocks, and up to five kilowatts—about seven times as much as a typical car alternator produces—over nasty off-road terrain. They estimate that their next version could double the generating capacity, boosting fuel mileage on paved roads by 2 to 5 percent in commercial trucks and 6 percent in military vehicles, which when fully armored can slurp diesel at a dispiriting four to eight miles per gallon. Hybrids, which can store GenShock electricity in their batteries, would gain the most—up to 10 percent.

As a retrofit for large commercial trucks, “the system could pay for itself in fuel savings in a little over a year,” Avadhany says. Although paved roads generate less shock movement, the regular high-frequency oscillation can still produce useful power. And as a bonus, the invention could potentially provide better performance and handling when coupled with a computer sensor system that reads the road and

varies resistance over the shocks.MIT’s licensing department showed

interest in acquiring the technology, but in 2007 the group decided instead to incorporate as Levant Power. Later, one of their professors brought their work to the attention of Paul J. Kern, a retired four-star army general and the president of Humvee manufacturer AM General. He wanted further evidence of GenShock’s electricity-generating potential. “It started as, ‘Let’s see what you can do,’ ” Avadhany recalls. “We weren’t expecting them to ship us a Hummer in the mail.” When the device showed promise in tests, a lucrative development contract followed.

Working between classes from a rented warehouse and makeshift office in South Boston, the team outfitted the hulking SUV with the GenShock system and data-acquisition gear. During 500 miles

WHEREARETHEYNOW?

“CAN I GET RICH?”

BEFORE YOU START DREAMING of an early retirement in Tahiti, you need to face facts: Most inventors don’t get wealthy from their idea. Selling your inven-tion to a major company will usually get you 2 to 4 percent of the gross sales as a licensing fee. If licensing isn’t an option, you can try taking it to market yourself. That route is riskier and can be hugely expensive—anywhere from $20,000 to $200,000 for development, to thousands more for production—but you can make 40 to 50 percent margins.—S.z.w.


of real-world testing, they began replacing existing components with custom miniaturized parts to scale down the shock’s size and weight and generate more power, while meeting the military’s sky-high standards for durability and performance. The system must last the lifetime of the vehicle, operate effectively when submerged in water, and limit electrical noise that could cause interference with other equipment.

The group is now speaking with the Office of Naval Research; the army’s Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center; and truck builders such as Navistar and Mack Trucks. If any of those groups put in an order for the GenShock system, the inventors, now all graduated, won’t even have to send out their résumés. “This is it,” Anderson says. “This company is our job.”—Lawrence Ulrich

“This month, we expect to have a beta system installed in one of the largest underground coal mines in southeastern Ohio. We’ve received $400,000 in funding and a loan for $792,000.”

—Russell Breeding

2008 INVENTION WINNER

MINE TRACKER

riner knew what

it felt like to be

trapped in tight

and dangerous

spaces. And he

realized that the technology used to plot the position of a

submarine could do the same for a miner.

So Breeding designed a system, called InSeT, that

employs a wireless radio network to provide real-time loca-

tions. Miners wear walkie-talkie-size transmitters that hold

a battery and an inertial-motion sensor, a device similar to

those used in guided warheads and Nintendo Wii controllers

to track motion on three axes. “It’s basically taking a missile-

guidance system and strapping it to a guy’s hip,” he says.

Radio transceivers bolted into the mine’s roof pick up

the transmitter’s signal and relay the positions of miners to

an aboveground computer, which places them on a map of

the mine. The tricky part is compensating for “drift,” small

inaccuracies in the motion sensors that build up over time.

Breeding, who works with similar technology in his day job

as a navigational consultant for government contractors,

spent two years creating algorithms that account for this

drift. His current system can locate a

miner to within 10 feet, even at the end

of an eight-hour shift. Dave Chirdon,

who is responsible for approving elec-

trical equipment for the federal Mine

Safety and Health Administration, says

the technology has the potential to be

the most accurate available.

The transceivers are covered in bul-

letproof plastic, but even so, Breeding’s

plan calls for a highly redundant radio

grid with 30 hours of battery power so

that signals will get through even if sev-

eral transceivers go down.

Breeding has successfully tested his

system in three mines and hopes to start

licensing the technology by year’s end.

Ponceroff can’t wait. “This is going to

be the best thing we’ve had ever, as far

as I’m concerned,” he says. “I hope he

makes a billion dollars.”—Kyle Stock

MINE MAN In Virginia’s

Pocahontas Mine,

Russell Breeding

wears a transmitter

that tracks miners

deep underground.

2008 INVENTION AWARDS


IN JANUARY 2006, an explosion rocked West Virginia’s

Sago coal mine, trapping 13 miners. Rescuers searched an

area 500 feet wide by two miles long and didn’t reach the

miners until 41 hours after the blast, eventually pulling out

12 bodies and one survivor. Jim Ponceroff, who led a rescue

team, says that the biggest challenge in recovering miners is

locating them quickly so that engineers can drill a borehole for

fresh air and, ultimately, rescue. Sago, like most of the coun-

try’s nearly 900 active mines, relied on radios that transmit

signals over a thin wire that’s easily damaged in a cave-in.

Russell Breeding watched the Sago disaster unfold on TV.

Although he had never set foot in a mine, the former subma-

name

InSeT SystemHOW IT WORKS

A sensor tracks a

miner’s location and

relays it to the surface over

a network of transceivers.

TUNNEL VISIONdescription

Finds lost miners with the same tech found in guided missiles and the Nintendo Wii

INVENTOR

Russell Breeding

the idea

time

2 yearshorizon

Prototype Product

cost to develop

$475,000

VISIT THE NEW POPSCI.COM




As the 9/11 inferno unfolded on television, one question kept dogging Kevin Stone: Why weren’t the people trapped in the World Trade Center able to make their way to safety? “I said to myself, This is crazy,” recalls Stone, an orthopedic surgeon and seasoned inventor in San Francisco. “There should be a better way to exit a skyscraper when something like this happens.”

Stone found all the existing systems for rescuing people from high places to

Rescue Reel Kevin Stone

$335,000 6 years

INVENTION INVENTOR

TIMECOST

HORIZON

PROTOTYPE PRODUCT

GREAT ESCAPESA HARNESS FOR EVACUATION FROM SKYSCRAPERS

be flawed or impractical, so he designed a device based on a fishing reel, a simple harness that would lower people steadily from skyscraper heights on a secure length of cord. The Rescue Reel affords people an easy way to engineer their own escape: All users have to do is open a file-drawer-size container and hook a Kevlar cord to a secure object or connection point (such as between a door and its frame). Then they step directly into the one-size-fits-all harness and rappel through an open window up to 100 stories from the ground. No special training is needed, and the entire sequence could take less than a minute.

Stone’s major innovation is a centrifugal braking system that automatically controls the rate of descent. The Rescue Reel’s cord unwinds from a spool and wraps around a shaft connected to a brake. As the shaft spins, a set of brake pads exerts force on the inner edge of the brake housing, smoothly slowing the user down. Should the automatic brake fail, the device is also equipped with a manual backup brake lever. Descending from 100 stories up takes less than four minutes—about two seconds per story.

Stone tested a prototype in 2007, and Skala, a company specializing in rope-access systems, has since conducted extensive tests of the device at California’s Vallejo Fire Department. It’s a significant upgrade from the slow, cumbersome rope systems firefighters usually use for high-floor rescues, says fire-safety consultant Scott Douglass. “It’s a lot more automated, and it’s easier and more intuitive for the trapped person to use.” He thinks it could be used for cliff rescues as well.

Now that testing is complete, Stone is preparing to market the Rescue Reel. A commercial-ready version should be available next year for about $1,500. He foresees lowering the price considerably once he starts mass production, making it practical for building owners who want to give their tenants an escape clause.

—Elizabeth Svoboda

2009INVENTIONAWARDS

Cord

Cord spool

Brake

HOW IT WORKS

As the cord unwinds, a

self-adjusting braking

system ensures that

the wearer descends

at a constant rate.




BE CAREFUL OF invention-marketing Web sites; the U.S. Patent Office lists complaints about 60 such sites that make money by exploiting inventors. That said, some of the best help you can get is at your computer. Here are four of the most useful sites.—S.z.w.

“ARE THOSE INVENTION-HELPER ORGANIZATIONS WORTH IT?”

When Michael Callahan was 17, he lost his short-term memory when he hit his head in a skateboarding accident. “The neural pathways were all wrong,” he recalls. Within weeks, he was back to normal, but the incident left him thinking, how could he help people who had permanently lost abilities that most of us take for granted? Five years later, he came up with the Audeo, a tiny device that detects electrical activity between the brain and vocal cords and turns it into audible speech.

When we speak, three basic things happen: the lungs deliver air, the vocal cords vibrate to create sound, and the mouth moves. The Audeo helps people for whom at least one of the three processes malfunctions due to ALS, traumatic brain injury or other problems—those whose brains and vocal cords are intact but whose impaired motor skills prevent them from moving their lungs and mouth.

Here’s how it works: Three pill-size electrodes on the throat pick up electrical signals generated between the brain and the vocal cords. A processor in the device then filters and amplifies the signals and sends them to an adjacent PC, where software decodes them and turns them into words spoken through the PC’s speakers. By placing the electrodes on the neck and “speaking” silently through vocal-cord movements (but without moving the mouth), the wearer generates enough neural activity to trigger this chain of events.

Callahan started working on the Audeo at the University of

ELECTRONIC VOICE BOXA DEVICE THAT ALLOWS PEOPLE WITH IMPAIRED SPEECH TO COMMUNICATE CLEARLY

Illinois, studying everything he could about signal processing and neuroscience. It took him four years to determine how to filter out unwanted electrical noise from the environment and the body (like the heartbeat) and detect only the signals needed for speech synthesis. He met his business partner, fellow engineering student Tom Coleman, in 2005, and the two formed Ambient Corporation later that year.

Callahan isn’t the only one trying to perfect silent speech. NASA’s Ames Research Center is working on a similar device to control rovers and help astronauts communicate even when there’s significant distance or noise. That version, however, uses pattern recognition and can distinguish just preprogrammed words. The Audeo allows people to use all English-language phonemes (the roughly 40 sounds that make up words, like “aw” and “ch”), so there’s no limit on what a user can say.

The technology does have room to improve. Right now, the Audeo can pick up a maximum of 30 words per minute, about one fifth the rate of normal speech. And learning the “language” of speaking in phonemes takes days of practice. Once mastered, though, the Audeo can do neat things like enable people to carry on phone conversations without making a sound. Ambient is also working on a cellphone interface, with the goal of scrapping the computer completely and reducing the price. “Eventually,” Callahan says, “we want it to cost as little as a Bluetooth headset.”—Lisa Katayama

The Audeo Michael Callahan

$330,000 5 years

INVENTION INVENTOR

TIMECOST HORIZON

PROTOTYPE PRODUCT


USPTO.GOV andGOOGLE.COM/PATENTSTo avoid overlapping with an invention that has already been patented, search the official government site and the more beginner-friendly Google Patent Search.

EDISONNATION.COMA social network where you can find other groups of inventors by field or region and take advantage of the wide membership. Survey people by posting a question, or start your own group.

UIAUSA.ORGThe nonprofit United Inventors Association offers a 10-part educational series on top-ics such as licensing deals, financing, market research, avoiding scams, and other need-to-know basics.

WEB.MIT.EDU/INVENTThe Lemelson-MIT Pro-gram’s handbook provides help with issues like how to prove an idea is yours, devel-oping a solid business plan, and deciding whether yourinvention is worth patenting.

HOW IT WORKS Three electrode sensors on the user’s neck

capture electrical signals between the brain and the vocal

cords. The device’s processor sends the amplified signals to

computer software, which decodes them and turns them into

spoken words that can be heard through the speakers.




Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre want to line the walls of your home with mushrooms. The young entrepreneurs have created a strong, low-cost biomaterial that could replace the expensive, environmentally harmful Styrofoam and plastics used in wall insulation, as well as in packaging and a host of other products. Wind-turbine blades and auto-body panels aren’t out of the realm of possibility, either.

“We like to call it low-tech biotech,” Bayer says. In the lab, the inventors grow mycelia, the vegetative roots of mushrooms that resemble bundles of white fiber. But instead of soil, the roots grow in a bed of agricultural by-products like buckwheat husks, and those intertwining fibers give the material structural support. The mixture is placed inside a panel (or whatever shape is required) and, after 10 to 14 days, the mycelia develop a dense network—just one cubic inch of the white-and-brown-specked “Greensulate” insulation contains eight miles of interconnected mycelia strands. The panels are dried in an oven at between 100° and 150°F to stop mycelia growth, and at the end of two weeks, they’re ready for your walls.

Bayer and McIntyre’s work with mushrooms has come a long way since

they first met as mechanical-engineering students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. When the two set out to make biodegradable and renewable insulation, they started testing different varieties of mushrooms grown in Tupperware. Many prototypes later, lab tests confirmed their early hunch about the unusual properties of the mushroom-derived insulation. Mixed-in seed husks, for example, helped the mycelia withstand a blowtorch. And besides being cheaper and eco-friendlier than petroleum-derived products, Greensulate can grow at room temperature and in the dark, doesn’t require expensive manufacturing equipment built to withstand industrial conditions, and can easily be tailored to different levels of strength and flexibility.

In 2007, the inventors incorporated under the name Ecovative Design

GREEN STYRO-FOAMAN ECO-FRIENDLY INSULATION MADE FROM MUSHROOMS

Greensulate Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre$1,500 2 years

INVENTION INVENTORS

TIMECOST

HORIZON

PROTOTYPE PRODUCT

and won $16,000 in funding through the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance. A year later, joined by now-COO Ed Browka and other team members, they took the $700,000 prize at the PICNIC Green Challenge in Amsterdam.

Ecovative has begun a trial run of Greensulate panels as replacements for insulation in a Vermont school gym. The partners expect to complete all industrial certification and testing by the end of the year and have enlisted Jeff Brooks of the Timberline Panel Company to advise them on meeting American Society for Testing and Materials standards for building insulation. “If they get to the point where I think they’ll get,” he says, “there’s a chance there would be no reason to use conventional foam products.”—Jeremy Hsu

2009INVENTIONAWARDS

HOW IT WORKS Greensu-

late’s strength derives from

billions of mycelia, or tube-

like mushroom roots that

intertwine with agricultural

castoffs like seed husks.

One cubic inch of the mate-

rial contains eight miles of

mycelium fibers.

OUT OF THE WOODS Eben

Bayer [left] and Gavin McIn-

tyre want mushroom-based

Greensulate to replace plas-

tics and other materials.




OIL MAN James Peret wondered why restaurant owners gave

away their excess grease instead of using it to power their busi-

ness. Then he discovered that no one had given them the option.

The nondescript six-foot-tall box behind Finz restaurant in Dedham, Massachusetts, looks like a tool shed, but actually it’s a self-contained grease refinery and five-kilowatt generator. Engineer James Peret’s Vegawatt is the first all-in-one device that processes grease to continuously provide a building with electricity and hot water, heralding a significant change in alternative-fuel applications. “It’s a brilliant idea,” says Josh Tickell, author of Biodiesel America. “A waste stream to an energy source, with no intermediary.”

Last December, after a year of 80-hour weeks on the development, Peret, 33, installed the first Vegawatt at Finz, a joint that offers loads of fried seafood. With patents still pending, he’s reluctant to give specifics on its inner workings, but it begins with staff members pouring in 10 to 12 gallons of used deep-fryer oil each day. Before going into the Vegawatt’s

GREASE LIGHTINGA GENERATOR THAT PROVIDES RESTAURANTS’ POWER USING THEIR LEFTOVER COOKING OIL

WHEREARETHEYNOW?

“I hope to have StunStick in full production shortly. I’m also in discussions with Neiman Marcus about debuting the civilian model in its catalog.”—Fred Pearson

FUTURE TECH: MILITARYinventor: fred pearson

A SHOCKING NEW WEAPON

I’m in a dark garage in the desolate woods of a small mountain

town, and Fred Pearson is about to send 50,000 volts of elec-

tricity through me. To stop him, I dodge the sparking claw of

electrodes at the tip of his yard-long rod and grab hold of the

device, hoping to take it away from him. A shock surges through

my hand, leaving me weak and trembling from fingertips to elbow.

“You asked for it,” Pearson says. He’s right. I’m playing guinea

pig for a prototype of the Tennessee inventor’s Stunstick Neuro-

scrambler, a new nonlethal weapon that causes enough pain to

make any mugger reconsider his career choice.

Pearson dreamed up the weapon six years ago while watching

his 10-year-old son slash the air with a toy light saber. He noticed

the ease and speed with which the boy’s sword could telescope

to three times its length. If electrified for real, it would enable the

person wielding it to remain beyond arm’s reach of an attacker

—something no handheld stun weapon can do. “That could be

a game-changing advantage in a real-life scenario,” says New

York–based martial artist Allain Atienza, who trains civilians, FBI

agents and Army Special Forces in close-combat fighting. The

problem with most such devices is that you have to be in contact

with your attacker to use them, notes Sid Heal, the commander

and technology-procurement specialist at the Los Angeles County

Sheriff’s Department. “I don’t know a single police officer who

has purchased [a stun gun] for his wife or daughters.”

Despite the fact that Pearson, a 51-year-old drywall contractor,

had never invented anything, he knew he could solve this prob-

lem. He took apart his son’s toy, wound fiberglass tape around

the shaft, lined it with wire, and augmented the electronics. Two

weeks later, the three-milliamp, 50,000-volt Neuroscrambler was

done. Press a button, and the entire shaft becomes electrically

charged, making it virtually impossible to disarm the operator.

“You can’t take what you can’t touch,” Pearson says.

Like other stun devices, the stick works by delivering a high-volt-

age, low-amperage electrical charge that overrides messages from

the brain to the muscles, leaving the victim unable to control that

part of his body. But, unlike any other weapon, it can also act like a

Taser, the weapon most often used by police. A Taser delivers higher

voltages and, by making contact in two points, contracts muscles

throughout the body, causing the subject to collapse.

That versatility is a boon for cops, who don’t always want to

Taser an attacker into submission, Heal says. “Sometimes we just

want to get a person to stop doing whatever it is he’s doing.” Heal

is eager for Pearson to begin human-effects testing—a first step to

LASD adoption—which should happen later this year at the Army’s

Target Behavioral Response Laboratory in New Jersey.

As I shake my dead arm, trying to restore sensation, I don’t envy

the test subjects. “That wasn’t so bad,” I lie. “Next time,” Pearson

tells me, “I’ll put in fresh batteries.”

A muscle-numbing magic wand that protects cops and citizens, Jedi-style

Stunstick Neuroscrambler

6 years

$50,000

Vegawatt James Peret

$300,000 4 years

INVENTION INVENTOR

TIMECOST HORIZON

PROTOTYPE PRODUCT

generator, the bread-crumb-filled muck is deposited into a reservoir and undergoes a multi-stage cleaning, treatment and filtration process. At this stage, the oil is prepared for combustion with a method Peret devised that draws heat from the exhaust system. After that, the processed grease moves into a tank that feeds the modified15-horsepower diesel generator. Heat from the Vegawatt’s engine coolant is used to warm the water in the building’s pipes, further reducing the restaurant’s energy needs.

The Vegawatt can process about 80 gallons of grease a week (standard for large restaurants) and produces five kilowatts of energy an hour, which could translate to monthly savings of $1,000, a 10 percent reduction in power costs. Peret is now selling the machine through his start-up, Owl Power Company, pitching it as the perfect way to go green, save money, and serve delicious fish and chips at the same time.—GREGORY MONE

HOW IT WORKS Dirty grease passes through a series

of tanks and filters that scrub, heat, and refine it

into fuel that burns clean in a diesel generator.

Filtration reservoir Diesel generator

Filtered oil Power

2007 INVENTION WINNER STUNSTICK



2009INVENTIONAWARDS


The creator of the Segway is one of the most successful and admired inventors in the world. He leads a team of 300 scientists and engineers devoted to making things that better mankind. But Dean Kamen won’t feel satisfied until he achieves his greatest goal: reinventing us

BY RENA MARIE PACELLA

“Let’s run it through from the top. This is going downhill.”Dean Kamen is standing on a six-inch riser in an almost empty room in the basement

of Westwind, his 32,000-square-foot house in Bedford, New Hampshire, trying to get this thing right. It’s crunch time for FIRST, the high-school robotics competition Kamen founded two decades ago in an effort to get kids jazzed about engineering, to make science as sexy as sports. (FIRST = For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Tech-nology.) In less than a month, 42,000 students on 1,700 teams will gather at 43 regional championships to showcase the ball-throwing ’bots that each team has spent six weeks assembling in novel ways from nearly identical boxes of parts. At stake besides glory is $9 million in scholarships. Kamen would dearly love to speak at every one of those 43 regional games, because he can’t afford to squander any opportunity to reach any one of those 42,000 fertile minds. But even Dean Kamen can’t be multiple places at once, so he’s decided to clone himself through the magic of video. And that’s why Kamen and his FIRST Robotics Competition co-founder, Woodie Flowers, are standing here peering into a teleprompter, trying, take after painful take, to perfect their message.

“You can bail out a bank, but you can’t bail out a generation,” Kamen recites for the tenth time in the past hour, and then his reedy voice trails off. “You can’t bail out a gen-eration . . . you can’t bail out a generation,” he mutters to himself, the wheels turning. This is supposed to be a pep talk—the barn burner the coach delivers to hype up the players before they storm the field, Kamen and Flowers taking turns exhorting these junior roboticists to new heights. But somehow the message keeps twisting away from simple inspiration toward something a bit more complicated.



ILLUSTRATION BY CRAIG PHILLIPS





“You can bail out the banks by printing money, but you can’t bail out a generation of dumb people by printing diplomas. . . . Although I personally think printing more money is about as dumb as printing diplo-mas.” As Kamen (who, for what it’s worth, never earned a college diploma) wanders fur-ther and further off-script, Flowers tries to reel him back: “After I say, ‘The world needs more and more people like you, dedicated to solving problems, problems that really matter,’ then, Dean, you need to go right into ‘But we have to get started,’ ” says Flowers, fully aware that trying to direct Kamen is futile. “We’ve been at it for 18 years,” corrects Kamen. “We can’t say ‘get started.’ ”

Finally, hundreds of edits later, Kamen seems to feel that he’s gotten it right. “There is a lot at stake in the world today,” he intones. “We need you to be able to tackle energy challenges, advance our abilities in medicine, and develop entire new industries. Innovation is absolutely an essential part of the solution. Even before the current finan-cial crisis, we were in a deep competitive hole. Too many people were making money from money, or money from flipping houses and hamburgers. Too few were using hard-earned science and engineering skills to devise real solutions. We need more of you to make your investment in learning and thinking—to be innovators. But we have to hurry. World leaders may be able to bail out the banks by printing money, but you can’t bail out a generation by printing diplomas. It takes hard work, but it’s worth it.”

No one ever said inventing was easy. And make no mistake, that’s what the man who created the Segway is doing here. He’s work-ing on refining the invention that will trump all others, that will establish his legacy long after he’s gone. Except this invention isn’t made of gears and gyroscopes. What Kamen is doing is trying to reinvent our entire cul-ture. And the brains of these high-school students is where he’s going to start.

Six weeks to game day: It’s day

one of build season, and the Morris High

School FIRST robotics team from the

Bronx—dubbed 2Train, for the subway

line that takes them to team meetings—is

still wrapping their minds around the chal-

lenge that has just been unveiled. Teams

must design and build robots that gather

balls off a court, shoot them into goal

baskets attached to opposing robots, and

like to know that while he barely eked out his high-school diploma, as a teenager he had already turned his parents’ basement into a machine shop and was making 60 grand a year rigging sound and light shows at museums and hotels around New York City. (He’s an ADHD dyslexic, that classic driven-innovator double threat.) You might like to know that he’s a creature of habit, offloading pesky daily decision-making by wearing the same uniform of Levi’s jeans, denim button-down shirt and work boots every day for nearly 30 years and eating at the same mid-dling Italian chain restaurant almost every night. It might intrigue you to learn that he is a pop-culture conscientious objector, a man who has watched Star Wars dozens of times and every other movie exactly never. And that in his garage resides the 14th Tesla electric Roadster to roll off the factory floor,

with a license plate that says “FIRST,” plus a Porsche coupe and a military-grade Hum-mer. In another garage are his two Enstrom helicopters, a three-seat piston-engine model he’ll sometimes take for a three-minute commute to his office and a turbo-powered 480 for longer jaunts, like when he decides to head over to North Dumpling, his private three-acre island in Long Island Sound that in 1987 he declared (only half-jokingly) an independent and sovereign nation.

You might be interested to know all that, but, according to Kamen, you shouldn’t be.

“Have you looked out the window lately? Read the news? The world is a mess!” he says. “We’re obsessing over distractions and pastimes while the world unwinds itself!”

do it while sliding over a tennis-court-

size field as slick as an ice rink. The

low-friction polymer surface is meant

to simulate the crippling effect of the

moon’s one-sixth gravity, which helps

explain the name Kamen and crew

have given this year’s game: Lunacy.

By day three, team captain Adam

Cohen, drill in hand, is ready to start

building. A couple dozen students

gather in the machine shop of Colum-

bia University’s engineering school.

The gymnasium-size shop, packed

with lathes, mills, grinders and CNC

machines, will be their second home for

the next six weeks. Wearing a “Robots

have feelings” T-shirt and a heavy tool

belt, Cohen is already taking apart the

bearings on four plastic wheels. Most of

the other kids are still in brainstorming

mode, and lead mentor and engineer

Bob Stark, who runs the shop, encour-

ages any and all ideas. “How about we

use a turret to shoot the balls?” says one

student. Suggests another, “We could

use a laser, like the laser in your com-

puter mouse, to track the acceleration.”

Today is laid-back and low-key.

Soon, though, they’ll be napping on

cold cement floors and eating leftover

pizza off workbenches in the little

snatches of downtime they can grab

between fabricating parts, writing

code, and wiring electronics.

YOU MIGHT BE interested to know a few things about Dean Kamen. You might C

OU

RTESY

AD

RIA

NA

GR

OIS

MA

N/F

IRST

2009INVENTIONAWARDS




Kamen is sitting in his office, across from a chair that’s painted to look as if Einstein were seated on it. Above him hangs an aerial photo of his lighthouse home on North Dumpling, the image emblazoned with a characteristically provocative boast: “The only 100% Science Literate Society. America could learn a lot from its neighbor.”

Kamen is not entirely averse to the propagation of the Dean Kamen mythology. Indeed, if he’s going to rally the troops neces-sary to rescue this country from its descent into moral complacency and moronic dol-drums, attaining rock-star status would be a wise tactical move. He’d just like to control the message. So here is what he would like you to know about him, something he deems a worthy investment of your mental energy: that every one of his inventions—the wearable drug-infusion pump he devised

in 1973 at age 22, the Segway scooter, his water purifier for impoverished communi-ties—has been designed for the betterment of mankind. And that in 1982 he built from nothing a company of inventors-for-hire called Deka Research, with the express mandate that they only invent products that make the world better. It’s also worth knowing that Kamen’s definition of better is not flexible: Better means giving humanity what it needs, not what it wants. Once we’ve provided the basic necessities (water, power, health care) for the nearly seven billion peo-ple on the planet, Kamen explains, then we can go back to chasing a quick buck.

“I don’t think Wilbur and Orville and Thomas Edison set out as their primary

Three weeks to game day: Team

2Train is revving up to test-drive Tan Tan,

the five-foot-tall boxy robot that the stu-

dents have packed with $7,000 worth of

controllers, gears, motors and conveyor

belts. At the moment, they’ve got Tan

Tan sprawled on its back in a corner of

the machine shop, its innards exposed for

inspection and adjustment. A handful of

the students crowding around Tan Tan

begin to speculate about who will drive

the robot at the upcoming competitions.

Tryouts are in a week. “I don’t want to be

a driver,” says sophomore Steve Thoma-

son, in baggy jeans and a black hoodie.

“It’s too much pressure. Maybe a shooter.”

From the sidelines, two students will

drive the robot with joysticks, while three

more will shoot “moon-

rocks” into the opponent’s

baskets. “The guys shoot a lot of b-ball,”

says mentor and Columbia engineering

student Hans Hyttinen, a former FIRST kid

himself, “so we’ll score big there.”

Thomason also has his sights set on

another position: scout. Several students

will be assigned to identify teams at the

competition that would make good allies.

Alliances are a huge part of the game. Each

two-minute match pits one three-team

alliance against another, and the alliances

change with every round. So the players

have to work well not just with their own

teammates but with their competitors too.

IN 1987, A DOCTOR named William Murphy died and left his most prized possessions to

goal to figure out how, in the shortest period of time possible, to make the most money,” says Kamen as he wanders through the cavernous top floor of a newly acquired, gutted industrial space a quarter-mile upstream from Deka, num-ber nine in his collection of abandoned textile-mill buildings. “They set out to make a machine that could fly, or make night safe by making light.”

Of course, Kamen makes money—a great deal of it, actually. But, he asserts, “making money is a consequence of good invention, not a motivation for invention.” And that’s how he runs his Manchester research outpost. Beholden to no stock-holders and no bottom line, he has fashioned an inventor’s paradise, where the laws of physics and thermodynam-

ics are the only ones that

matter, the laws of economics banished to some less evolved place and time. Deka is a strange, cultish world of really, really smart do-gooders who have the will and the capacity to build life-altering machines, and they couldn’t care less if the rest of the country thinks they’re crazy. It’s an extension of Kamen himself.

“Deka is a masterpiece,” says bioen-gineer Jason Demers, who has worked with Kamen for 15 years. “One person can do only so much. But when you get 300 people to think like you—and with your strengths—well, that’s when you can get a whole lot done.”

Now if Kamen could only get the rest of the world to run like Deka.

NEW YORK’S FINEST Noah

Kleinberg and Gabriel Ruiz [first

and second from right] pilot

2Train’s creation at the FIRST

regional semifinals in New York.

LETDOWN The Segway has

yet to transform personal

mobility, and production of

the iBot wheelchair [left] was

discontinued in January.

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his son, a doctor named William Murphy Jr. Not long after that, Murphy Jr. invited Kamen, who was already a successful inventor of medical devices, to his home. When, through casual conversation, Kamen learned that neglected somewhere in his friend’s house, jammed into a cluttered closet or packed in a box, there was a Nobel Prize—the actual Nobel Prize diploma that his friend’s father had received in 1934 for his treatment of anemia—something fired in Kamen’s brain. Suddenly he could see it clearly: We’re celebrating the wrong stuff. We should celebrate the heroes in sci-ence and technology the way we celebrate sports figures and entertainers. We need an organization directed at kids that exists solely for inspiration and recognition of science and technology. We need FIRST.

That was in 1989. Now Kamen had a vision, and soon he had a nonprofit and a snazzy red, white and blue logo designed by his father, the acclaimed pulp comic-book artist Jack Kamen. Not long after, Kamen and Flowers met for the first time, and, as Flowers recounts it, “had a philo-sophical love-in.” Flowers, a mechanical engineering professor, had founded an engineering contest at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that attracted more fans than the school’s football games. The contest, the two came to agree, should be blown out into a homecoming-game-style sporting event for high-schoolers: the NCAA of smarts. By the inaugural FIRST competition in 1992, Kamen had

was to a mystified Diane Sawyer’s “That’s it?” Instead of transforming the way we get around cities, the way we design cit-ies, the Segway has hit roadblock after regulatory roadblock, suffers weak sales, and appears destined to remain a novelty.

Kamen hoped his iBot wheelchair, which climbs stairs and raises a user to eye level, would transform the way disabled people interact with their environment. The iBot is one of the key innovations behind his selection for some of the nation’s most prestigious honors, includ-ing the National Medal of Technology, the Lemelson-MIT Prize and the Heinz Award. But in January, with insurance companies and Medicare refusing to foot the device’s steep $26,000 price tag, the Johnson & Johnson division that manufactured it had no choice but to discontinue its production.

“I am the most frustrated man on the planet,” Kamen pronounces. “But after someone kicks sand in your face, you’ve got to keep on going.” For all his setbacks, he is still a true believer. It’s not his solu-tions that fail; it’s the rest of the world that fails—fails to see the value in his solutions.

One week to game day, 10 hours

to robot shipping: “OK, turn it on,”

says Hyttinen. “It is,” replies Noah Klein-

berg, a senior in charge of programming.

Nothing. No electricity runs through

Tan Tan’s wires. It’s past 2 a.m., and the

robot must be crated up and ready for

transport to the New York Regionals by

noon tomorrow. The tick of the clock is

arm-twisted companies like Xerox and Baxter to foot the bill for the games and to sponsor 28 student teams, all mentored by professional engineers. It sounds small by today’s standards, but it was four times the size of any of the MIT contests, and it was an instant hit with the kids. By 1995, the contest had more than doubled in size, and it’s been growing rapidly ever since.

“If you give a clever kid just one wish, he’ll wish for 10 more wishes,” says Kamen. “I’m that clever kid. If you ask me what my greatest invention is, I’d say it’s more inven-tors, thousands of them, tens of thousands of them. It’s FIRST.”

Forgive him his urgency, his evan-gelism, his hard-earned sense that not enough people out there get it. Over

nearly four decades, Kamen has built an unparalleled portfolio of trans-formative medical devices: portable insulin pumps, stents, mobile dialysis machines, a breakthrough prosthetic arm. But when it comes to his more ambitious “fixes,” the ones with the potential to affect tens or hundreds of millions of lives, the world tends to give him a much cooler reception. Before the Segway debuted in 2001, the media was falling over itself to get a glimpse of the new machine, which was $100 million and 10 years in the making behind the closed doors of Deka’s skunkworks lab. When Kamen finally lifted the shroud of secrecy, it

WHAT’S NEXT Deka’s Luke arm [left]

is the most advanced prosthetic in the

world. Kamen’s personal Think car [right]

is powered in part by a Deka-designed

Stirling engine [below], as is the water

purifier that he hopes to deploy in impov-

erished communities worldwide.

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nearly deafening. The robot has logged

many hours on the sample sheets of

slippery polymer the team laid out to

make a test field in an empty parking

lot. Tan Tan wasn’t exactly graceful, but

it moved when and where it was sup-

posed to, mostly. Now it won’t respond

to even the most basic of commands: on.

They systematically disconnect

and reconnect everything, part by

part. Tick, tock, tick, tock. After an

hour, Hyttinen steps back and real-

izes that the sleep-deprived students,

when swapping in some new motors,

wired them backward. An easy fix.

By 3:30 a.m., all systems are go.

Ball-shooting time. The students start

feeding Tan Tan moonrocks, rolling them

toward it. The robot’s lower belts spin

so fast they suck in one ball, two balls,

three. But nothing comes out of the top.

Adam Cohen sums up the prevailing

verdict: “Now we’re sort of screwed.”

ONE DECEMBER EVENING at UnWine’d, a Kamen haunt in Manchester with live jazz and a wine selection that rivals the one in his own home’s basement, something bad happens: The silent flat-screen TV in the corner of the bar catches Kamen’s eye. “Look at these guys running around in tights and padding and throwing a ball around a field for millions of dollars.” He’s been snared by highlights from Monday night’s snooze of a matchup between the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Houston Texans. “It’s ridiculousness! We get what we celebrate in this country, and if we cel-ebrate bounce-bounce-throw . . . ”

He’s interrupted by a call from Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle. After sacrificing approximately half a second for pleasantries, he jumps right back onto the pulpit, this time preaching to Lingle. She’s already a big FIRST supporter, but Kamen wants more. New Hampshire Governor John Lynch, he tells her, has pledged to make Kamen’s state the first in the union to have a FIRST team at every high school. Kamen is trying to spur a race between the two states.

“You rarely see him eat, because when other people are eating, when their mouths are full, he’s got a captive audience,” says Vince Wilczynski, a FIRST game designer and dean of engineering at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. Kamen admits that he’s shameless about pushing FIRST on anyone within earshot, barter-

Kamen’s Stirling engine–run Slingshot burns grass or cow dung or whatever is

handy to power the world’s poorest, grid-less villages and convert their brackish

water into clean drinking water. For the power, the Stirling alternately heats and

cools (and in turn expands and compresses) helium sealed inside a cylinder, push-

ing pistons to create work. Channeled into the Slingshot, that energy boils water

in a chamber. The steam is superheated by a compressor and, as it condenses into

clean water, releases heat that can be recaptured to keep incoming water boiling.

Clean Water for everyone

Source water

Evaporator unit

Purified

water

Cooling panel

Recycled heat

Steam

Electronics panel

Heat source

Stirling engine core

Superheated steam

[continued ON page 85]

POWER SOURCE

DISTILLER

Recycled heat

Compressor

Condensing

freshwater



INSTANT EXPERTspecial edition

By Elizabeth Svoboda

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MEDI-MATION

Master the Lingo

Embryonic stem

cells: The Swiss Army knife

of regenerative science, these

cells are harvested in the early

fetal stage and have the unique

characteristic of pluripotency,

meaning that they can turn into

any one of more than 200 tissue

types. This makes them ideal

for regenerating diseased heart

tissue, repairing spinal cords,

and replenishing brain cells.

But to critics who believe that

human life begins at conception,

harvesting these cells is akin to

killing a baby.

Induced pluripotent

stem (iPS) cells: These

cells are as close as you’ll get

to a fountain of youth. Inserting

genes responsible for embryonic

pluripotency into adult skin

cells effectively rewinds their

developmental clock and gives

them embryonic-like powers to

morph into heart, cardiac and

other tissue types. An added

bonus: No embryos necessary.

Stem Cells 101

scientists talk up all types of stem cells and techniques

to create them. But don’t feel overwhelmed—much of the jargon can

be boiled down to these fundamental terms.


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Everything you need to know

about the hottest topic in

medicine, from big-league

breakthroughs and new therapies

to emerging health risks and the

patients willing to take them

For more than a decade, researchers have touted stem cells as the most promising advance in medicine since antibiotics. And this winter, when President Obama lifted the Bush administration’s ban on federal funding for embryonic-stem-cell research, talking heads buzzed that his decision could bring scientists that much closer to cures—not just treatments—for conditions like heart failure, spinal-cord injuries and Alzheimer’s disease. Biologists around the world toasted their new prospects with champagne. “Lifting the ban will free us up to use additional cell lines,” says Jack Kessler, director of the Feinberg Neuroscience Institute at Northwestern University. “It’s very important for science.”

The hype surrounding stem cells runs high these days. But getting the straight story—where the cells come from, what they do, and why they warrant executive orders and billions in research dollars—is surprisingly difficult. Making sense of the torrent of stem-cell research findings, separating the false claims from the scientists and studies that matter, requires an unusually well-honed baloney detector. In this comprehensive survey of the stem-cell landscape, we’ve done the vetting for you: hashing out the core science, analyzing the challenges, and getting firsthand insight from the patients themselves.

Big Money,

Big PictureThis year delivers a major spike

in federal funding for all types of

stem cells, and new legislation puts

fewer restrictions on how to spend

it. With just one U.S. clinical trial of

embryonic-stem-cell therapy under

way, the hope is that this double shot

of adrenaline will help American

researchers pick up the pace.

Amount of money the National

Institutes of Health (NIH) spent on

stem-cell research in 2008:

$938 million

Approximate amount of money the

state-funded California Institute for

Regenerative Medicine has approved

in research grants since its inception

in 2005: $693 million

Number of clinical trials on

embryonic stem cells sanctioned by

the Food and Drug Administration: 1

Estimated number of sanctioned

clinical trials involving non-

embryonic stem cells: 2,450

Estimated number of companies

developing stem-cell products

worldwide: 300

Approximate number of patients in

the U.S. who have received stem-

cell-based therapy within the past

three years: 30,000

Estimated amount of annual revenue

stem-cell therapies are expected to

generate in the U.S. by 2018:

$8 billion

Percentage of Americans in favor of

embryonic-stem-cell research: 73

Somatic-cell nuclear

transfer: This process

birthed the famous cloned sheep

Dolly. The basics: Take an egg

cell and replace its nucleus with

the genetic material of an adult

cell from the organism to be

cloned. Shocking the cell yields

an embryo with the same DNA as

the donor, which eliminates the

risk of an immune reaction. But

cloning humans may carry too

much ethical baggage to be truly

worthwhile, especially given the

viability of iPS cells, which also

contain a patient’s own DNA.

cord-blood stem

cells: These multipotent

stem cells are derived from

babies’ umbilical cords. Most

of them are precursors for

blood and immune cells, so they

aren’t as versatile as embryonic

or induced pluripotent adult

cells. Recently, however, cord-

blood stem-cell transplants

have become a viable

alternative to bone-marrow

transplants in treating blood

disorders like leukemia,

especially when a bone-marrow

match can’t be found.

GROUND ZERO A micro-

scopic view of a human

embryonic stem cell




Hans Keirstead will always remember the day he set down a once-paralyzed rat and watched it walk away. Keirstead, a biologist at the University of California at Irvine, along with his team at Geron Corporation in Menlo Park, California, were investigating a possible way to treat spinal-cord injuries with embryonic stem cells and, before that moment, not a single person in the lab knew which crippled rats had received the stem cells and which had not. “I’ll never forget holding the animals and knowing, without anyone telling me, which ones had been treated,” he says. “One of my grad students yelled, ‘We broke the code!’ It was so obvious. Some of the animals were walking, and some were not.”

But Keirstead hopes he’ll someday look back on this, the most transformative experience of his life so far, as a prelude to something much greater. In January the Food and Drug Administration gave Keirstead and Geron the green light to perform the same treatment again—only in paralyzed human patients. As the first U.S. clinical trial of embryonic-stem-cell therapy, Geron’s experiment represents what stem-cell biologists have so long been seeking: a chance to back up breezy hopes with concrete, dramatic results.

Like the rats in Keirstead’s earlier study, Geron’s human participants will receive injections of GRNOPC1, the company’s proprietary mixture of cells derived from embryonic stem cells. The

compound is designed to work on spinal-cord patients with acute injuries. That means all the participants in the initial safety trial, slated to begin next month, will have been hurt within two weeks of treatment. In addition to improved walking abilities, rats that received the treatment within days of being injured showed significant healing of the spinal cord’s protective covering, myelin. Since Geron has submitted to FDA scrutiny for years, some scientists say the time is right to see if human patients can make the same strides as their animal counterparts. “This field needs a big success,” says Robert Lanza, the chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology in Santa Monica, California. “The FDA is very careful. They would never allow clinical trials of a therapy like this unless there was proof it was safe.”

But critics worry that it could put patients’ health in danger, and that a botched trial could sour the public on future stem-cell treatments. “I have significant concerns that the spinal cord is not the best place to use stem cells for the first time. It’s a very complex environment,” says stem-cell expert Jack Kessler. “Everyone will be watching. If the trial doesn’t work, people will lose faith.” Keirstead acknowledges the risks, such as uncontrolled tumor growth [see “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” page 65], but feels compelled to press forward. “We’ve done everything we possibly can to ensure safety. Every scientist has to strike a delicate balance between scientific diligence and sympathy for patients’ desperate needs, and I feel we’ve struck that balance very well.” He’s looking forward to greeting treated patients in the clinic for the first time—and maybe, in his wildest dreams, watching them walk away.

all eyes are on the world’s first human

clinical trial of embryonic stem cells

The Study to Watch

INSTANT EXPERT SPECIAL EDITION

In 2008, Claudia Castillo, age 30, underwent an

operation to repair her windpipe. To eliminate the risk of

rejection, surgeon Paolo Macchiarini of the Hospital Clinic

of Barcelona in Spain implanted a section of trachea seeded

with stem cells taken from Castillo’s bone marrow. It was

the world’s first transplant surgery involving stem cells.

I was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 2004, and it

gave me a lot of problems, especially at night. I

kept coughing and coughing and getting worse. I

spent a lot of time incapacitated, because I had to be

quarantined. I also had bronchial stenosis, a condition

in which the bronchial tubes narrow and make it hard

to breathe. It’s hard to fix because you can’t just take

out one section of the bronchus and leave the other.

But my doctor said he had this new technique to

Patient Diary Claudia Castillo transplant a section of trachea into the bronchus.

I was scared going into the operation. When you’re

the first person in the entire world to have a procedure,

even the doctors don’t know exactly what will happen.

I walked into the operating room thinking, “Will I wake

up? Will I not wake up?” They took a section of trachea

out of the donor, cleaned it, and put my stem cells on it

so they could implant it into me.

So far, my body hasn’t rejected the organ, and I’m

feeling good. Now I can walk up stairs without having to

stop after every two steps. There

is still a lot of recovery time

ahead of me, and I’m not like

I was before the illness, but if

other people are considering this

surgery, I would say “Go for it!”

—As told to Tetsuhiko endo

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How It WorksInside the first government-sanctioned clinical trial to heal injured spinal cords with stem cells

A blunt blow or disease can cause paralysis by destroying nerve fibers, or axons, in the spinal cord that carry signals to and from the brain. When these signals are disrupted, the protective insulation surrounding the axons, known as myelin, erodes, leaving permanent damage. Starting

next month, scientists at Geron Corporation will begin injecting myelin-precursor cells derived from embryonic stem cells into patients with newly injured spines. The hope is that the new cells will create myelin and restore the flow of nerve impulses traveling along the axons.

Axon

Nerve

impulse

Glial

cell

Myelin

Myelin

Injured

area





These landmark studies deliver on the promise of

stem cells and bring real therapies within reach

Brilliant Breakthroughs

reversed stroke

damage in rats

Milestone: This 2008 study conducted by

Gary Steinberg and his colleagues at Stanford

University marks the first time researchers

used embryonic stem cells to create mature

brain cells that significantly improved an

injured rat’s coordination, without causing

tumors. When the researchers transplanted

freshly grown neurons into rats that had

suffered strokes and lost the use of one front

paw, the rats regained control over the limb

within two months.

Why It Matters: In the next few years, Steinberg

hopes to adapt the technique to restore brain

function in people who have suffered strokes and

other neurological ailments.

Cloned human embryos

Milestone: Robert Lanza and his team

at Advanced Cell Technology have made

significant progress toward therapeutic cloning.

By removing the nuclei from human egg cells

and replacing them with genetic material from

adult cells, the researchers proved for the first

time that the resulting cloned embryos were as

healthy as normal embryos, adding weight to

the argument that such clones could be viable

sources of embryonic stem cells.

Why It Matters: Deriving embryonic stem cells

from a patient’s own genes provides scientists

with a plentiful source of patient-tailored cells

and gets us one step closer to a new era of

personalized medicine.

endowed adult stem cells

with embryonic-like powers

Milestone: In 2007, Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto

University in Japan and James Thomson of

the University of Wisconsin announced almost

simultaneously that they had successfully

transformed mature skin cells into multipotent

powerhouses that could morph into dozens of

tissue types—a first in the field.

Why It Matters: Creating stem cells from a

patient’s own tissue eliminates problems with

immune rejection and sidesteps the controversial

use of embryos, making them virtually ideal to

treat disorders from diabetes to Alzheimer’s. But

their inability to morph into as many tissue types

as real embryonic cells remains a limitation.

Created adult-stem-

cell lines for 10 human

diseases

Milestone: Frustrated by the shortage of

embryonic-stem-cell lines (limited to 22 under

the Bush administration), last year George

Daley and other scientists at the Harvard Stem

Cell Institute took adult skin cells from patients

suffering from a variety of conditions, including

Parkinson’s disease and diabetes, and turned

them into undifferentiated cells that behave like

embryonic stem cells.

Why It Matters: These new stem cells could give

rise to a limitless supply of tissues that could

be used to study diseases and test medications

before experimenting on animals and humans.




Quack-Science Checklist Stem cells give new hope to thousands of

people with chronic medical conditions,

but shady researchers and clinics prey

on that hope by fabricating results and

offering untested treatments. Here are

some hallmarks of sham science.

Sweeping promises Chinese

surgeon Hongyun Huang lured hundreds

of desperate paralyzed patients to

his Beijing clinic with claims that his

treatments would provide “neuro-

regeneration, repair and functional

recovery.” But when a team of doctors

investigated Huang’s work in 2006, they

discovered that none of the spinal-cord-

injury patients they followed showed

any benefits from his therapy, and five

suffered dangerous side effects. One

man returned home with holes through

his skull—Huang had placed cells in the

man’s brain instead of his spine.

Blame-shifting After an

independent investigation in 2005 found

that Korean researcher Hwang Woo-

Suk had fabricated 11 of his stem-cell

lines, Hwang held a press conference to

apologize but still refused to admit that

he had cheated. Rather, he blamed his

collaborators for cooking up fake data

and charged that they were involved in a

conspiracy to sabotage his projects.

Highfalutin jargon At the

Cancun Stem Cell Clinic in Mexico,

patients receive treatments from

a “Hypoxicator” and a “Turbosonic

Machine.” Without offering any

evidence, the clinic’s Web site claims

that these devices “stimulate your body

to produce stem cells.”

Police tape In 2006, the Dutch

government shut down the PMC stem-

cell clinic in Rotterdam after one patient

was hospitalized for a serious allergic

reaction to an unproven treatment.

It started with a worst-case scenario. An Israeli boy was born with a rare disease called ataxia telangiectasia, which consumes parts of the brain and can cause paralysis. Anxious to halt the disease before the damage potentially turned lethal, the boy’s family sent him to a clinic in Moscow that gave him injections of neural stem cells from fetuses—once when he was 9 and then again when he was 10 and 12.

A year after the boy’s final treatment, disaster struck. He began complaining of headaches, and scans revealed that he had developed two nonmalignant tumors, one on his brain stem and the other on his spinal cord. Although he eventually underwent successful surgery to have the spinal-cord tumor removed, the case forced experts to reexamine the inherent risks of stem-cell treatment, particularly the tendency of transplanted stem cells to divide out of control. In a report on the Moscow debacle, Ninette Amariglio of the Sheba Medical Center in Israel wrote that mixing stem cells from multiple fetuses with growth-promoting compounds “may have created a high-risk situation where abnormal growth of more than one cell occurred.”

Other kinds of stem cells could have similar effects in humans if

they are not properly directed to evolve into distinct tissue types, warns Jack Kessler of the Feinberg Neuroscience Institute. “If you take a human embryonic stem cell and transplant it into a person without the cell being differentiated, it will cause a tumor, period. We have to remove all possibility of that happening.”

Making sure tumors don’t develop in stem-cell recipients is a tall order, requiring researchers to finely control the growth of the transplanted stem cells. Too little control, and the cells divide willy-nilly; too much, and they lose their regenerative capacity. Researchers have recently learned more about the biological factors that control stem-cell proliferation—last year, Jurgen Knoblich of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology isolated several cell proteins that can regulate or halt cell division. Still, the difficulty of striking the elusive cellular balance between stability and clinical effectiveness helps explain why we haven’t seen more stem-cell therapies in human trials yet. “I know there’s a lot of public pressure to demonstrate that stem-cell science is producing something,” says Marius Wernig, who directs a laboratory at the Stanford University School of Medicine, “but things can really backfire if we proceed too quickly.”

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

For all their promise, stem cells

harbor a dark side: tumors

SEALED FATE These

stem cells will eventually

morph into blood cells.




Landmark legislation to lift the ban on federal funds for embryonic stem cells, $10 billion in stimulus money, the first embryonic-stem-cell trial under way in the U.S.—it all adds up to a banner year for stem-cell science. But in a larger sense, things are just getting started. The next decade will see human trials of stem cells designed to treat all manner of illnesses and injuries, from blindness to diabetes, heart failure to paralysis.

More immediately, Advanced Cell Technology is slated to begin a human trial later this year that involves implanting embryonic stem cells into retinas to halt macular degeneration. Neuralstem in Rockville, Maryland, is lobbying the FDA for permission to start a trial using neural stem cells to treat ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also called Lou Gehrig’s disease). And San Diego–based Novocell is developing insulin-producing cells from embryonic stem cells and hopes to receive permission to implant the cells in diabetic patients in the next few years.

As the number of embryonic-stem-cell trials increases, the number of paperwork headaches that go along with them will decrease, since reversing the ban effectively eliminates the artificial division between resources used for federally funded stem-cell research and embryonic-stem-cell research. Before, “having to exclude public funds from certain projects was a nightmare,” says Stanford University stem-cell expert Marius Wernig. As a result, we can expect

stem cells: future

cures and controversies

What’s Next?

to see the creation of new research-ready embryonic-stem-cell lines that carry disease-causing genes. These will help scientists study the origins of disease on a cellular level and test new medicines before experimenting on humans.

But as research on embryonic stem cells intensifies, so too will the ethical objections. “A lot of social conservatives say that destroying any embryo is wrong, and they will continue to be a very solid minority,” says David Masci of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Those objections could quiet down if researchers learn to work with adult stem cells, which don’t involve embryos at all. Cardiologist Eduardo Marban of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles began a clinical trial this year that uses adult stem cells to repair cardiac tissue after a heart attack, and Joanne Hertzberg of Duke University plans to expand the cerebral-palsy trial in which Dallas Hextell [see Patient Diary below] participated, eventually offering the cord-blood stem-cell treatment to 100 children.

Although adult stem cells are promising, the need to avoid controversy can’t drive things—the field needs all the research options it can get. “There’s still so much we don’t understand, so we have no idea what type of stem cell is going to be best for which particular disease,” says Advanced Cell Technology’s Robert Lanza. “I think there’s a consensus in the scientific community that we need to pursue all of the avenues available.”

In July 2007, Cynthia and Derak Hextell of

Sacramento, California, enrolled their one-year-old son,

Dallas, in a Duke University clinical trial to receive cord-

blood stem-cell therapy for cerebral palsy, an incurable

neurological disorder that affects muscle coordination.

The hope is that the stem cells will repair the damaged

tissues in Dallas’s brain. The first-of-its-kind trial, which

will eventually enroll 100 children, is still in progress.

Kurtzberg aims to publish her results next year.

Cynthia: Dallas was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when

he was around eight months old. He was missing some

milestones, like rolling over, and he cried constantly.

After the shock of the diagnosis faded, I remembered

that we had banked his cord blood after he was born, as

a form of insurance, and I started doing some research.

Patient Diary Dallas Hextell

Derak: The Duke treatment was

simple. They just put the IV into his

arm. It took 15 or 20 minutes for all

the stem cells to get into his body.

Cynthia: Dallas started improving

within weeks. It had always

seemed like there was a fog over him, and he

just started focusing better. It was like his brain was

becoming more of a sponge.

Derak: He couldn’t crawl before we went to Duke, but

now he’s walking and running.

Cynthia: Everything points to the fact that the stem cells

worked, but it would be irresponsible to say either way

until there is hard proof. We don’t think Dallas would have

made the progress he made as quickly as he did without

the stem cells. Now we have to wait for the trial results.


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on human embry-

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1. Two Ideas, Vast Implications

2. Stop Sign Crime—The First Idea of

Calculus—The Derivative

3. Another Car, Another Crime—

The Second Idea of Calculus—

The Integral

4. The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus

5. Visualizing the Derivative—Slopes

6. Derivatives the Easy Way—

Symbol Pushing

7. Abstracting the Derivative—

Circles and Belts

8. Circles, Pyramids, Cones, and Spheres

9. Archimedes and the Tractrix

10. The Integral and the

Fundamental Theorem

11. Abstracting the Integral—

Pyramids and Dams

12. Buffon’s Needle or ʌ from Breadsticks

13. Achilles, Tortoises, Limits,

and Continuity

14. Calculators and Approximations

15. The Best of All Possible Worlds—

Optimization

16. Economics and Architecture

17. Galileo, Newton, and Baseball

18. Getting off the Line—Motion in Space

19. Mountain Slopes and Tangent Planes

20. Several Variables—Volumes Galore

21. The Fundamental Theorem Extended

22. Fields of Arrows—

Differential Equations

23. Owls, Rats, Waves, and Guitars

24. Calculus Everywhere

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JEFF S

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how 2.0tips, tricks, hacks and do-it-yourself projECTS

77Hack your Google

Android phone

The HDTV features

worth paying for

78

Carlos Owens had handled all kinds of machines as an

army mechanic, but he always dreamed of using those

skills for one project: his own “mecha,” a giant metal robot

that could mirror the movements of its human pilot.

Owens, 31, began building an 18-foot-tall, one-ton

prototype at his home in Wasilla, Alaska, in 2004. Working

without blueprints, he first built a full-scale model out of

wood. Moving on to steel, he had to devise a hydraulics

system that would provide precisely the right leverage and

range of movement. He settled on a complex network of

cables and hydraulic cylinders that can make the mecha

raise its arms, bend its knees, and even do a sit-up.

Owens is working on two more prototypes, modifying

the design to make it lighter and more maneuverable.

He foresees mechas having uses in the military and

the construction industry but acknowledges that

right now they’re best suited to entertainment. The

first application he has in mind: mecha-vs.-mecha

battles, demolition-derby style.—Charles Crain

AN EXOSKELETON THAT MOVES IN TIME WITH THE PERSON INSIDE IT

MAN IN MACHINE

YOU

BUILT

what

?!

We review all our projects before publishing them, but ultimately your safety is your responsibility. Always wear protective gear, take proper safety precautions, and follow all laws and regulations.

!

INSIDE JOB For the new prototype of his

mechanical suit, Carlos Owens is planning to

feature a chest plate that swings open so he

doesn’t have to climb in from underneath.

#�TIME: 4 YEARS # COST: $25,000

#�FRAME This mecha is

made of steel. The new design

is made of lighter but weaker

aluminum, so Owens has had to

heavily reinforce the limb joints.

#�HYDRAULICS Owens

used 27 hydraulic cylinders

that act like muscles to control

the mecha’s joints. A pump

powered by an 18-horsepower

engine keeps hydraulic fluid

moving through the machine.

#�CONTROL As the driver

moves his arms and legs, steel

cables transmit those move-

ments to the hydraulics to

make the mecha walk, bend

down, or open its hands.

THE H2WHOA CREDO: DIY CAN BE DANGEROUS.

74Solid figures from

frozen mercury



ILLU

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IS; PH

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GR

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: LU

IS B

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NO

BUILD A DEVICE THAT LETS YOU CHARGE BATTERIES FOR YOUR

CELLPHONE OR MUSIC PLAYER JUST BY TAKING A STROLL

POWER WALKING

HOW 2.0

GREENTECH

YOU·RE HALFWAY THROUGH OLVWHQLQJ�WR��/D\OD··�ZKHQ�LW�KDSSHQV��<RXU�03��SOD\HU·V�EDWWHU\�GLHV��1RUPDOO\�\RX·G�KDYH�WR�ZDLW�XQWLO�\RX�ZHUH�DW�\RXU�FRPSXWHU�WR�ÀQLVK�URFNLQJ�RXW��EXW�WKHUH�LV�DQ�HDV\�DQG�HFR�IULHQGO\�ZD\�WR�GR�LW�RQ�WKH�JR��)LUVW��VOLS�D�SLH]RHOHFWULF�WUDQVGXFHU³ D�GHYLFH�WKDW�JHQHUDWHV�D�WLQ\�FKDUJH�ZKHQ�WRXFKHG³LQWR�\RXU�VKRH��$�FRQQHFWHG�PRGXOH�FROOHFWV�WKH�YROWDJH�

FUHDWHG�HYHU\�WLPH�\RX�WDNH�D�VWHS�DQG�FRQWLQXRXVO\�SRZHUV�XS�D�UHFKDUJHDEOH�$$�EDWWHU\��,W�WDNHV�D�ORW�RI�ZDONLQJ�WR�JHW�D�IXOO�FKDUJH��EXW�LW·V�SHUIHFW�IRU�UHYLYLQJ�RU�WRSSLQJ�RII�D�JDGJHW��2QFH�WKH�EDWWHU\�LV�FKDUJHG��SXW�LW�LQWR�D�',<�ÀYH�YROW�FRQYHUWHU��DQG�SOXJ�LQ�\RXU�GHDG�03��SOD\HU��1RZ�\RX�FDQ�OLVWHQ�WR�WKH�JXLWDU�VROR�ZKLOH�\RX�ZDON�VRPH�PRUH�MXLFH�LQWR�DQRWKHU�EDWWHU\�—Dave Prochnow

323�,7�,172�7+(�&219(57(5�%2;��3/8*�,172�7+(�03��3/$<(5��

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See popsci.com/diy for more projects from our super-builder, Dave Prochnow.72 POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2009

/8&.,/<��<28�+$9(�$�)5(6+�$$�%$77(5<�,1�<285�6+2(�&+$5*(5��

122222��<28·5(�287�:$/.,1*��$1'�<285�03��3/$<(5�',(6�

WALK YOUR WAY TO A CHARGED-UP GADGET

#�time: 6 HOURS #�cost: $73.12

#�easy hard

1Download the wiring diagrams

at popsci.com/powerwalker. Build

the AA battery charger [A]. Connect

the piezoelectric device [B] to the

energy-harvesting-module input.

2 Mount the battery holder on

the project box. Connect the

battery holder’s terminals to the

energy-harvesting-module output,

and install the module in the box.

3 Test the battery charger by

tapping on the piezoelectric

device and measuring the voltage

output. Then measure the energy-

harvesting module’s voltage output.

4Adapt the converter [C] for

USB output. Snip off its plastic

connector. Solder the wires from the

circuit board to the USB receptacle’s

pins. Install the converter inside the

USB enclosure. Test the converter

with a fully charged AA battery.

5 Put a rechargeable nickel-

cadmium battery [D] into the

charger, and get a move on.

STEPS TO CHARGING

For more details and a list of parts,

go to popsci.com/powerwalker.

··

A

B

C

D



PLEASE PRINT PLAINLY

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Address __________________________________________________________________________

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Phone (optional)______________________Email______________________________________________________________________________

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POPSCI.COM

HOW 2.0


What you consider solid, liquid or gas

depends entirely on where you live. For

example, men from cold, cold Mars might

build their houses out of ice. Women from

Venus, where the average temperature is

about 870°F, could bathe in liquid zinc.

We think mercury is a liquid metal, but

it’s all relative. At one temperature, the mer-

cury atoms arrange themselves into a solid

crystal; at another, they flow freely around

each other as a liquid. Children from Pluto

(like mine, for example) could happily cast

their toy soldiers out of mercury, because

on that frigid planet it is a solid, malleable

metal a lot like tin. Here on temperate Earth,

you need a stove to cast tin but a tank of liq-

uid nitrogen to make mercury figurines.

At liquid-nitrogen temperature, about

–320°F, mercury acts like any other metal:

You can hammer it, file it, saw it. (It won't

shatter like other liquid-nitrogen-frozen

items because there's not enough moisture

inside.) Watching it solidify is exactly like

watching tin harden from a molten state.

As the atoms go from liquid to solid crys-

tal form, you see the surface pucker. And

because mercury, like most metals, shrinks

when it solidifies, you see the surface sink

in areas, forming a patchwork charac-

teristic of cast metal.

The fun of making frozen mercury

trinkets is another reason to lament the

fact that this marvelous metal is also an

insidious poison that must be handled

carefully and never spilled. Schools have

been evacuated because of one broken

mercury thermometer, and mercury in

the environment, particularly in fish, is a

major public-health concern. Which is, of

course, why I made this cute little mer-

cury fish.—Theodore Gray

HOW TO CAST SOLID, IF FLEETING, SHAPES IN MERCURY:

JUST ADD A LOT OF LIQUID NITROGEN

NICE CASTING 1. Room-temperature mer-

cury poured into a cold cornbread mold.

2. Adding liquid nitrogen freezes the metal.

FROZEN FISH 3. The frost crust forms

when water condenses from the air.

4. Above –38°F, the fish turns to liquid.

MIK

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ALK

ER

HOW 2.0

COLD, HARD FACTSGRAYMATTER

3

4

See a video of this demonstration at . popsci.com/mercuryfish

1

ACHTUNG! Don’t handle mercury. It is toxic, and even minor spills can be dangerous and very expensive to clean up.

2



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It happened on our last trip to South

America. After visiting the “Lost City” of

Machu Picchu in Peru, we ventured

through the mountains and down the

Amazon into Brazil. In an old village we

met a merchant with an impressive collec-

tion of spectacular, iridescent emeralds.

Each gem was tumbled smooth and

glistened like a perfect rain forest dew drop.

But the price was so unbelievable, I was sure

our interpreter had made a mistake.

But there was no mistake. And after return-

ing home, I had 20 carats of these exquisite

emeralds strung up in 14k gold and

wrapped as a gift for my wife’s birthday.

That’s when my trouble began. She loved

it. Absolutely adored it. In fact, she rarely

goes anywhere without the necklace and

has basked in compliments from total

strangers for months now.

So what’s the problem? I’m never

going to find an emerald deal this good

again. In giving her such a perfect gift, I’ve

made it impossible to top myself.

To make matters worse, my wife’s become

obsessed with emeralds. She can’t stop

sharing stories about how Cleopatra

cherished the

green gem above

all others and how

emeralds were

worshiped by the

Incas and Mayans

and prized by

Spanish conquis-

tadors and Indian

maharajahs. She’s

even buying into

ancient beliefs

that emeralds

bring intelligence,

well-being and

good luck to anyone who wears them.

I don’t have the heart to tell her that I’m

never going to find another deal this lucky.

Our elegant Emeralds in 14K Gold

Necklace features 20 carats of smooth,

round emerald beads, hand-wired

together with delicate 14K gold links.

Each bead is unique in both size and color,

ranging from transparent to translucent.

The 18" necklace fastens with a spring ring

clasp. If you are not thrilled at this rare

find, send it back within 30 days for a full

refund of the purchase price. But remember,

we have only found enough emeralds to

make a small limited number of necklaces

and earrings at this low price.

JEWELRY SPECS:

- 20 ctw of polished natural emeralds

- Linked with 14K gold

- Necklace is 18" in length

- Earrings are 5 ½" in length

- Individual color may vary.

The Curse of the Perfect Gift

14101 Southcross Drive W.,Dept. EGN162-01Burnsville, Minnesota 55337

Emeralds in 14K Gold Necklace

(20 ctw) MSRP $1,110

Your price $199 +s&h

Emeralds in 14K Gold Earrings

(5 ctw) MSRP $820

Your price $175 +s&h

Call now to take advantage of this limited offer.

1-800-333-2045Promotional Code EGN162-01Please mention this code when you call.

www.stauer.com

Smar t Luxur ies—Surpr i s ing Pr ices

20 carats of polished natural emeralds linked with 14K gold for under $200!

Complete your collection

with the 5 ctw Emerald

in 14K Gold Earrings.

“During my many years as a jeweler,

examining an astonishing 20 ctw

emerald necklace certainly is a rare

treat. The Stauer Emerald in Gold

Necklace is as good as it gets.”

— JAMES T. FENT, Stauer

GIA Graduate Gemologist

20 carats of genuinemined emeralds.

Enlarged to show details

��



NORTHBOUND Crocodile-like reptiles

lived in the Arctic 55 million years ago.

FYI

ISTO

CK

.

power, he notes that “ ‘off’ is a very 20th-century idea.

—cornelius howland

Crocodile-like reptiles lived

in the Arctic 55 million years

ago. Could it happen again?

Yes, but probably not anytime soon. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the planet’s average air temperature could warm by as much as 11.5°F by the end of the century. As a result, the world could be warmer than it was 55 million years ago, says Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees, an anal-ysis of hundreds of climate studies that reads like a nonfiction version of The Day after Tomorrow. Back then, the Canadian Arctic was as balmy as Florida and lousy with crocodile-like animals called champsosaurs.

Determining how individual species, much less entire ecosystems, will respond to rapid climate change is difficult at best, however. In the same regions where scientists found remains of champsosaurs, they also found fossils of their favorite food: turtles. Modern-day crocodiles could certainly be comfortable in a warmer north, but only if the prey and eco-systems required to support them proliferate there too.

The Arctic air may warm up, but there will most likely still be plenty of ice in the winters. Even aggressive climate models estimate that it will probably take thousands of years for the ice sheets to disappear year-round, so cold-blooded crocs will have to wait at least that long to head to the poles.—CHRISTOPHER MIMS

[continued From page 81]


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www.celestron.com



Give AChild WithACleft A Second Chance At Life.

Donate online: www.smiletrain.org or call: 1-800-932-9541

The Smile Train is a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit recognized by the IRS, and all donations to The Smile Train are tax-deductible in accordance with IRS regulations. ©2009 The Smile Train.

The Smile Train provides lifechanging free cleft surgery whichtakes as little as 45 minutes andcosts as little as $250.

It gives desperate children notjust a new smile—but a new life.

Your support can provide free treatment for poor children with clefts and other problems.

Mr./Mrs./Ms.

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Charge my gift to my credit card: � Visa � MasterCard � AMEX � Discover

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� My check is enclosed. The SmileTrain-Dept. Mag.P.O. Box 96231

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� $50 Medications for one surgery.� $ We’ll gratefully accept any amount.

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—The New York Times



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Richard W. Wetherill

1906-1989



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Popular Science reserves the right to refuse any advertising order. Only publica-tion of an advertisement shall constitute final acceptance of an order. Publicationdoes not constitute an agreement for continued publication. All orders are subjectto the applicable rate card, copies of which are available upon written request sentto the address provided. Popular Science, 2 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10016




TANK TOURISMSEPTEMBER 1920

After World War I, one battle-weary tank was

repurposed as a tourist attraction. Fitted with

an upper-deck platform to accommodate extra

passengers, it took customers for joyrides.

SMOKE BOMBSOCTOBER 1934

The U.S. Army’s newest tank [above] featured

a “smoke-generating apparatus” that created

a protective cloud around advancing soldiers.

Under the white haze, attacking infantry were

hidden from view while the defenders’ chances

of victory went, well, up in smoke.

ROLLING THROUGH

April 1951

The T-41, nicknamed the “Walker Bulldog”

after Lt. Walton Walker, was the army’s

first postwar tank. Equipped with a power-

ful 76-millimeter gun, the “light” 25-ton tank

could reach speeds of 35 mph, run by a new

air-cooled, opposed-cylinder engine.

POPULAR SCIENCE magazine, Vol. 274, No. 6 (ISSN 0161-7370, USPS 577-250), is published monthly by

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Treading WaterThen-cutting-edge amphibious vehicles helped the invading American

force transport cargo and troops to the beaches of Okinawa, Japan,

in 1945. Boasting continuous tracks, the LVT (for Landing Vehicles,

Tracked) series of oceangoing tanks could crawl over reefs that

would stall normal landing craft. Once ashore, the beach-busters

easily maneuvered over rough, sandy terrain to carry supplies to the

front line and bring back wounded troops, but they could reach top

speeds of only around 20 mph. See “The Fastest Tank” [page 38] to

read about a modern homemade tank that goes three times as fast,

speedier than any other tracked vehicle today.—Amber Sasse

SEPTEMBER 1945

FUTURE THENfrom the popular science archivesTHE

TANKS A LOT: MORE TANK STORIES

THROUGH THE YEARS

See allof POPSCI’s

137 years

at popsci.com/archives



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