MARS COLONY: A uniquely Australian perspectiv

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INVENTOR'S
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How to make your
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Inventor David Loury

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W H Y T H E W O R L D N E E D S TH E VALK YR I E

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CLIP Super-Fast 3D Printer HOLY BRAILLE Tablet for the Blind
TRIDENT Submarine Drone And More Amazing Inventions!

MAY 2016
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MYTHBUSTERS
Jamie & Adam's exit interview
Tesla Model 3 madness!
Is branded petrol worth it?
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 Feed
Editor’s Letter
Issue #90, May 2016

EDITORIAL
Editor Anthony Fordham afordham@nextmedia.com.au
Contributors Lindsay Handmer, Carl Williams

DESIGN
Group Art Director Malcolm Campbell
Art Director Tim Frawley

ADVERTISING
Divisional Manager
Jim Preece jpreece@nextmedia.com.au
ph: 02 9901 6150
National Advertising Sales Manager
Rumours of the Death of
Lewis Preece lpreece@nextmedia.com.au
ph: 02 9901 6175

Production Manager Peter Ryman

Circulation Director Carole Jones
Australian Manufacturing
US EDITION
Editor-in-Chief Cliff Ransom
Executive Editor Jennifer Bogo
Managing Editor Jill C. Shomer
Are... Complicated
EDITORIAL
Editorial Production Manager Felicia Pardo During the production of this issue of Australian Popular Science,
Articles Editor Kevin Gray
Information Editor Katie Peek, PhD. Arrium Limited finally went into receivership, sounding the death
Technology Editor Michael Nunez
Projects Editor Sophie Bushwick knell for the steel town of Whyalla (maybe). This, according to the
Associate Editors Breanna Draxler, Lois Parshley
Assistant Editor Lindsey Kratochwill doom-sayers, is it for Australian manufacturing.
ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY
Design Director Todd Detwiler We can’t make cars, we can’t this country (one of the few was only worth big bucks
Photo Director Thomas Payne
make steel, even the Electrolux in the world that can produce because huge companies had
POPSCI.COM
Online Director Carl Franzen fridge factory in Orange shut much more food than it needs monopolies on the business.
Senior Editor Paul Adams
Assistant Editors Sarah Fecht, Loren Grush down in April. to feed its population) won’t The actual price of steel is low
BONNIER’S TECHNOLOGY GROUP Now obviously the closing simply start up the factories (at time of writing a billet of
Group Editorial Director Anthony Licata
Group Publisher Gregory D Gatto
of these companies is terrible and blast furnaces again? steel was worth US$50 per
news for the people actually Oh, you say it takes time and tonne). A fully-assembled
BONNIER
Chairman Tomas Franzen employed by them. But specialist knowledge to bring microwave tile-based active
Chief Executive Officer Eric Zinczenko
Chief Content Officer David Ritchie politicians have always used those industries back and phased array radar system,
Chief Operating Officer Lisa Earlywine
Senior Vice President, Digital Bruno Sousa these local stories to push that could mean us losing a like the ones they make at CEA
Vice President, Consumer Marketing John Reese
national agendas. Big business war or something? Please. Technologies in the ACT, is
is aggressively Darwinian in You tell Australians that we worth quite a bit more.
operation. Make the slightest need 10,000 tonnes of steel by It is absolute Economics
mistake, fail to evolve with Friday to avoid an invasion, 101 that as a democratic
a changing market, bleat too we’ll have the stuff rolling out country grows and
Chief Executive Officer David Gardiner
Commercial Director Bruce Duncan
loudly for governments to by Thursday morning. prospers, it abandons basic
bail you out “to protect the Anyway, all that’s not the manufacturing for specialist
Popular Science is published 12 times a year by
nextmedia Pty Ltd ACN: 128 805 970 jobs” even though there’s no point. What is the point is that manufacturing and services.
Building A, 207 Pacific Highway
St Leonards, NSW 2065 commercial point to existing also during the production Everyone is taught this but
Under license from Bonnier International Magazines. © 2014 Bonnier anymore, and you’re dead. of this issue, I went to a no one seems to either believe
Corporation and nextmedia Pty Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in
whole or part without written permission is prohibited. Popular Science is Anyway, now we’re told Data61 expo that showcased it nor think it’s a good thing.
a trademark of Bonnier Corporation and is used under limited license.
The Australian edition contains material originally published in the US
that Australia has become all the amazing stuff the Jobs! Jobs! Think of the jobs!
edition reprinted with permission of Bonnier Corporation. Articles express “uncompetitive”. And it’s true various project groups in that To which I say, as of April
the opinions of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Publish-
er, Editor or nextmedia Pty Ltd. ISSN 1835-9876. we no longer make T-shirts or organisation are doing. 2016, what jobs?
Privacy Notice stuffed toys or wooden tables Yes, Australia may not be Is Australia exposed to a
We value the integrity of your personal information. If you provide personal
information through your participation in any competitions, surveys or or large chunks of steel, as making steel billets. But if collapse in international law
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the rulers are happy to keep
or offers to our readers, we may pass your details on to them. From time an underclass of brutally poor nanotech foundry in Victoria smart people doing smart
to time, we may use the information you provide us to inform you of other
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ting in touch with our privacy officer, who can be contacted at nextmedia, But there’s a big difference membrane fi lters, spacecraft than it is to be dirt poor and
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To subscribe, call 1300 361 146 Australia absolutely knows control system, or the designs your 19th century sawmills.
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how to make steel and if the for a whole bunch of new cars,
THE POPSCI PROMISE We share with our world really went to hell in a we can do that. ANTHONY FORDHAM
readers the belief that the future will be handbasket do you not think Fact is, making steel afordham@nextmedia.com.au
better, and science and technology are
leading the way.

P OP S C I . C O M. AU 03
Contents #90

38
Alexander Duru is
literally risking life and
limb to br ing h i s d rea m to
life. What will you create?

THE INVENTION ISSUE

We showcase the most amazing
inventions of the year, including:
38 Valkyrie / personal aeroplane
40 Omni / flying hoverboard
42 Eternal / self-powered camera
43 Jibo / robot companion
44 CLIP / super-fast 3D printer
45 Holy Braille / tablet for the blind
46 Eora 3D / smartphone 3D scanner
47 Trident / cheap underwater drone
48 PSM Pill / internal biomonitor
49 MX3D / bridge printer

76
FROM THE
ARCHIVES NDS
GODDARD DEFE
HIS ROCKET
ts
He was told rocke
ace.
wouldn’t work in sp
us a
In 1924, he wrote
how
column explaining
.
of course they do

Please refer to page 68 for details

G E TT Y I MAG ES

04 P O P U L A R S CI E NCE
M AY 2 0 1 6
For daily updates: www.popsci.com.au

41 50 56 62
MYTHBUSTERS
SIGNING OFF
Adam and Jamie give their final
interview, and reflect on their
amazing life as celebrity
“makers and builders”.
THE INVENTOR’S
HANDBOOK
Got an invention deep
inside your mind? Here’s
how to extract it and
maximise success (and profit).
FOR LOVE OF A
RED PLANET
The Mars Society gets no
government money, but does
millions of dollars of space travel
research anyway. Why?
UNNATURALLY
DELICIOUS
Is our obsession with “natural”
food bad for business, society,
the planet and even the hapless
animals we eat?

NOW
The state of the art
NEXT
Pre-boarding the future
MANUAL
Build tomorrow, yourself

06 BBQs with apps, really
12 BenQ’s beautiful... desk lamp?
14 Why Giphy wants to rule the world
16 Vivid, the tiniest external HDD
18 Is premium petrol worth it?
20 Tesla’s Model 3 wins at hype
22 Bees get better backpacks
24 El Niño’s epic surf
26 A brief history of space helmets
28 Can we ever bring back privacy?
30 Kickstarting videogames
32 Is it time to abolish schools?
34 WTH is the “14Nm die process”?
36 Plants breathe - who knew.
70 Make a bugbot for... reasons
72 Recreating deadly balloons!
73 Use big data to help you upgrade
your new house.
74 Three projects reinvent breakfast
75 Hack Teddy Ruxpin to say
anything (ie swearwords)

THE OTHER BITS 03 A word from the editor | 78 Ask Anything: why do the yanks still use inches?
A garnish, to add colour 80 Retro Invention: The Most Hyped Products Ever | 82 Lab Rats
P OP SC I . C O M. AU 05
 MAY 2016

BACKY
T A
S

R
E
B

D
E D IT E D BY X AV I ER H A R D I N G + DAVE G E RSH G ORN With T hese

P R
A E
RT
Y EV

P RO P ST Y L I NG BY L I N DA K EI L FO R H A L L EY R ES O U RC ES .

BOB GRILLSON PREMIUM

GRILL US$5,000
If you can hail a cab from a smartphone,

SMARTER
In the age of the connected home,
we can’t forget the backyard. These eight
innovative gadgets usher in a new age
of connected backyard technology.
you should be able to cook a steak from one
too. That’s the lazy-man genius behind the
Bob Grillson smart grill. This 12 kW burner
is app enabled, letting you grill, smoke, or
cook a pizza—all while you kick back inside
in the comfort of your air conditioning. And
its brushed-steel curves tell your barbecue
guests you have fiery taste.
by DAV E
G ER S H G O R N

6 PO P U L A R S CI E N CE P HOTOG R AP HY BY Jonathon Kambouris

 M AY 201 6
Now
First Look
BACKY
T A
S

R
E
B

D
With T hese

P R
A E
RT
Y EV

CHILL
BETTER
LILY CAMERA DRONE $1200
This is the future; we don’t take selfies. Our drones do that for
us. Toss the Lily Camera into the air, and it grabs 1080p video
and 12-megapixel stills of your party. Now you can get back to
what’s important: hanging with friends.

OM SOUND SYSTEM SPEAKER $2,100

Left the stereo outside after the party? No worries—the
Om Sound System is a weather-resistant, solar-powered
speaker that can be deployed anywhere. It also has three
LED light arrays that can illuminate walkways and decks.

METASENSOR $299 FOR THREE

No matter how polite they are when they arrive, wandering
houseguests turn curious. If Metasensor’s Sensor-1 moves, it
messages your smartphone, alerting you to whoever is poking
through your medicine cabinet or wardrobe. Coz peeps do that.

IROBOT BRAAVA JET 240 $299

You’re the host. Why should you wash sticky shoe prints off
the kitchen floor yourself? The new Braava jet 240 from the
Roomba-makers does it for you. Using three smart cleaning
modes—wet mop, damp sweep, and dry sweep—the Braava
will scrub stains and spills from all the festivities. P RO P ST Y L I NG BY L IN DA KE I L FO R H A L L E Y R ES OU RC ES

8 P O P U L A R SC IENC E
 ........

AUG 24 / Perth, HBF Stadium

AUG 26 / Brisbane, BCEC
AUG 27 / Melbourne, Margaret Court Arena
AUG 28 / Sydney, Australian Technology Park
........

Tickets out now from / www.thinkinc.org.au

 M AY 201 6
Now
First Look
BACKY
T A
S

R
E
B

D
With T hese

P R
A E
RT
Y EV

BREW
CRAFTIER

P RO P STY L I NG BY L I N DA K EI L FO R H A L L E Y RESO U R C ES

PICOBREW MINI $1499 LUMINOODLE $50 YETI RAMBLER

Has craft brewing become a beer
glut? We think not. Picobrew’s new
compact beer-maker helps concoct
new styles or replicate your favorite
brands. Brew five litres, then let it
ferment in a mini keg.
The Luminoodle is a USB-powered
lighting system to end extension cords
and tangled wires. It emits 180 lumens,
and has built-in magnets and loop
ties that attach to anything. Light your
driveway for night cricket.
COLSTER $50
The beer koozie sheds its mongrel
student foam for stainless steel. The new
Yeti Rambler’s double-wall insulation and
lock-tight gasket keep your stubby as
cold as the inside of a chilled keg.

10 P O P U L A R S CI E NCE

Now
Reinvention
A LAMP
The humble desk lamp is actually a
pretty common focus for an amazing
high-end redesign - consider if you
THAT KNOWS will FLUXO (the world’s first truly
smart lamp), Lumir C (a candle-
powered LED lamp, seriously), The
WHEN YOU’RE Lampster (a robot-shaped lamp with
“attitude”) and the Fade Task Lamp
READING
(it simulates sunsets). What most of
these have in common is they cost
hundreds and - Fade excepted - are all
boutique projects only made possible
by Kickstarter crowdfunding.
by
Now, a major corporation is
ANTHONY FOR D HAM
pushing a $250 desk lamp too. BenQ
calls its lamp the WiT. Of which
brevity may be the soul, but the
acronym is anything but. It stands for
“Wide arc illumination”, “Integrated
eye comfort features” and “Tailor
BENQ WIT
LED Power: 18W
Colour range: 2700-5700K
Light output: 1800 Lux @ 400mm
Output angle: 90-degrees
Price: $249.95
www.benq.com.au
12 P O U L A R S CI E N CE
MAY 201 6
made adjustment”.
Word salad aside, the WiT is
specifically designed to be used
alongside an LCD display. The
touch-activated “e-reading”
mode uses an ambient light
sensor to detect how bright the
user’s monitor (or Kindle) is,
and adjusts the lamp’s output
to “balance” illumination.
The LED strip in the WiT
covers 90-degrees and can be
brighter in the centre than on
the edges, while also adjusting
colour temperature. Like the
latest version of Apple’s iOS
on the iPhone, this means the
WiT can cast a yellower, more
gentle light in the evening,
which BenQ says can reduce
eye strain.
Yes, it’s a $250
desk lamp, but if
you’re spending serious
hours at the PC, the WiT
could quickly pay itself off in
savings on eye-strain-induced
migraine medication...
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Now
The Platform

14 P O P UL A R SC IENC E
M AY 2 0 1 6
Now
The Platform

THE GUY
WHO MADE US POPUL AR

SPEAK IN GIFS
SCIENCE

If you’ve ever shared a GIF—those brief video loops of movie by

XAVIER HARDING
scenes and cooking tutorials—you’ve used the future’s most
effective communication tool. At least that’s what Giphy, the
three-year-old indexing platform for GIFs, is telling us. In a busy
world, where even tweeting takes too much time, the highlight
clip has become our go-to lexicon. More than 65 million people think it will be used for really practical things.
Like, you get a cut and you think, “How do I
a month use Giphy to search and share GIFs. But for company stitch myself up?” You can find a GIF that will
founder Alex Chung, our global chatter will soon be a lot more show you in five seconds what to do. The same
than just piano-playing cats and Beyoncé moves. goes for CPR, or the Heimlich maneuver. As
well as how-to’s, recipes, everything.

What’s the most surprising use

Why do we need a search
engine for GIFs?
No one searches Google for self-expression.
When was the last time you searched
“happy” or “sad”? You would just get anti-
depressant pills or it would be the Wikipedia
of GIFs you’ve seen?
You’re not getting information from The I was at South by Southwest, and a mother
New York Times. You’re getting it from came up to me and she said: ‘I just want to
friends, from Twitter. It’s peer-to-peer. GIFs thank you. I have an autistic child, and we use
are a great format for sharing information your site to teach him what human
and for self-expression. We always ask, expression is. There’s no place else I can really
“When has the Internet really made you  do that.’ And it was just really heart warming. I
felt kind of proud at that moment.

Wow, that is amazing. Any others?

A mother told me she used the site to teach Well, for dancers, when they choreograph a
routine, they break it down into specific move-
her autistic child what human ments. This is the vocabulary of dance. There’s
no way to translate it well onto paper. So GIFs
expression is. I felt proud at that moment. become like their sketches. They are an easy
way to codify those dance moves.

GIFs are like a return to form for

page for what sad is. That’s not useful, unless
you’re a fifth grader writing a report. Google’s
page rank is taken straight out of the citation
system for library management. It was never
meant to index all of pop culture.
Why do you say GIFs are the
communication tool of the future?
The Internet has changed communication.
cry? Or made you go ‘aww’?” It doesn’t  humans. Like a grown-up show-and-tell.
really do that. Unless you read some really  It’s true. GIFs can represent a concept
beautiful poem, but that happens like— that other mediums can’t, such as infinity—
because they are forever looping. Nowadays
Every day. communication is messaging. Everything
Yup, every day [laughs]. But really, beyond  that was on the internet is now shared within
that, GIFs are efficient. It’s the easiest natural messaging apps and is conversation based.
way to communicate by using the entire GIFs are everything we as humans want to say
lexicon of pop culture as your dictionary. We that words can’t express.

P H OTO G RA P H BY Liam Sharp P OP SC I . C O M. AU 15

 MAY 201 6
Now
Form Factor

THE PRETTIEST DICTIONARY OF

OBSOLESCENCE
PORTABLE STORAGE SUPERFLOPPY: Collective term
for the brief attempt in the 1990s
to provide PCs with removable
storage that could hold more than
the 1.44MB of a standard 3.5-inch
When Nick Popov went down to his drives have dozens of moving parts, and
by floppy disc. Brands included the
local Big Chain Computer Store to buy an while they are built tough, they do wear Flextra (21MB), floptical drives
A NTH ONY
FOR DH AM
external hard drive, he was dismayed at out. And many’s the thesis that’s been (21MB), Iomega’s Zip drive (100MB
the range on offer. To him, pack-of-cards lost after an inopportune “head crash”. and eventually 750MB) and the
was too big. He wanted something that Desktop PCs and notebooks, SuperDisk (120MB). All were
rendered obsolete by cheap CD
could slip into a pocket or disappear into a meanwhile, have been turning to solid- burners in the early 2000s which
laptop bag. And above all, he wanted it to state drives (SSDs) for some years now. could store 640MB on a disc costing
be solid-state. So he built the Vivid SSD. Using flash memory similar to what only a couple of dollars.
Most of the external USB hard drives you find on camera’s memory chip -
from the likes of Seagate and Western or the computer’s own RAM - these
Digital still use notebook PC magnetic drives have no moving parts at all. And mix-and-match as they please. There’s
drives. Several magnetic platters spin because a read-head doesn’t have to also a free engraving option.
at extreme speeds while a tiny read- physically move across a platter, an SSD You won’t just lose this thing in your
head moves back and forth even faster, can be very, very fast. bag, you’ll lose it in your pocket, it’s that
encoding data via magnetic fields. These Today, this technology is mature and small. And more importantly, it’s fast.
it’s getting increasingly In our tests, we benchmarked the 1TB
difficult to buy a high- Vivid at 439 megabytes a second read,
quality notebook PC that 451 MB/s write, over USB3.0.
doesn’t have an SSD. Of course, you have to pay for this
VIVID SSD So Popov decided to kind of performance. The 250GB
Capacities: 250GB, 500GB, 1TB create an ultra-compact version is merely expensive, while at
Connectivity: USB3.0 USB equivalent. $599, the 1TB unit is eye-watering (a
Flash type: Synchronous MLC The result is this, typical USB 1TB magnetic drive costs
Features: TRIM, ECC, EMS the Vivid SSD. It’s tiny, around $150). But this is what things
protection, SMART really tiny, the size of a cost when they’re built not by a giant
Read speed: 439 MB/s flattened matchbox. corporation, but a single entrepreneur
Write speed: 451 MB/s The case is obsessed with detail and using only
Warranty: 5 years beautifully machined quality components.
Dimensions: 67 x 40 x 10mm aluminium in two Yes, we’re pretty impressed with
Weight: 80g separate pieces, and the Vivid SSD. If nothing else, it really
Price: $199 - $599 buyers can choose showcases how far we’ve come since
www.vividstorage.com from eight colours and the days of the 5.25-inch floppy.

16 PO P U L A R S CI E NCE

Now
End Game
IN A POST-PETROL
WORLD, HOW DO
YOU MAKE PEOPLE
BUY PREMIUM?
At some point in the last ten
years or so, petrol retailers
around the country all seemed
to come to the same conclusion:
service stations should only sell
unleaded RON91 “E10” regular
fuel with 10% ethanol, RON95
premium and RON98. Regular
unleaded was out. Motorists
were told that higher RON
numbers meant better quality,
and the major brands would
sell special formulations of the
RON98 fuel with cool names
like V-Power or Vortex or, in the
case of BP, Ultimate.
These ultra-premium fuels
differ from regular petrol in
that they contain patented
additives which - the brands
claim - improve performance,
emissions and even clean the
engine as it drives.
In fact this kind of petrol
have been around since at
least 2000 (diesel was added
more recently). BP’s fuels
technical expert in the Global
Fuels Technology Group,
Garry Whitfield, says the first
Ultimate “product” came on the
market in 2000.
“Engine technology was
pretty different back then,”
he says. “Very few petrol
cars were direct-injection,
for instance.” In other words,
these more “primitive” engines
(though plenty of Japanese
and European cars started
getting direct
injection in the
by
late 1990s)
A NTH ONY could handle
FOR DH AM rougher fuels
18 P O P U L A R S CI E NCE
MAY 201 6
without fear of clogging up with
particulates and other by-products
of incomplete combustion or partly
burned oil or whatever.
“Engines are becoming more
susceptible to dirt,” Whitfield claims,
but then says: “Yes, in newer engines
it doesn’t build up as quick, but the
servicing intervals on these cars
is much, much longer. People are
driving around with dirty engines and
that’s affecting their emissions and
power. You might not even notice it
until you try going up a steep hill,
1955
people will see a power loss there.”
Whitfield says that while all CONCEPT... BOWSER?
This Wayne Helix fuel dispenser was
of BP’s fuels are of course high part of BP’s “Fuelling the Future”
quality, the more basic products do showcase for the London Olympics back
a likewise basic job of cleaning a in 2012. It shows detailed labelling for
car’s injection system. He says BP’s the biofuel components in both petrol
Year of production and diesel and is designed to handle
latest formulation for Ultimate 98 - those more challenging, but perhaps
of f irst direct-
injection petrol
the specifics of which are patented more sustainable, fuels. While biofuels
and thus secret - keeps an engine have many downsides, they’re certainly
engine, found in more interesting than another new
the Mercedes -Benz
cleaner and gives an immediate 3.1%
version of fancy crude...
300SL “gull-wing”. improvement in economy (assuming
The 2996 cc, inline - the driver uses a particular drive
six M198 developed cycle as defined by BP). relief from the infamous “cycle” that
222HP (165kW) - Ultimate 98 is priced quite a bit sees pump prices rise and fall by over
still respectable more than 3.1% higher than even 25c a litre in the average week.
today, esp in a RON95 petrol, so the benefits have to Whitfield (or rather, his PR minder)
1093kg car! go beyond fuel consumption to justify wouldn’t be drawn on whether BP
the price. “It’s for people thinks its Ultimate range
who care about their of fuels can survive
cars,” says Whitfield. BP ULTIMATE 98 another massive shift
While petrol Octane rating: 98 in oil prices - either up
consumption in Australia Claimed or down. But it’s hard to
isn’t exactly falling, eff iciency see how, in a world of
fuel companies must increase: 3.1% ubiquitous hybrids and
be starting to feel Range needed to increasing interest in
like they’re living on clean: 1300km long-range EVs, creating
Price: E10 price +
borrowed time. The yet another “premium
$0.18/L (average,
phenomenal pre-order petrol” is a sustainable
April 2016)
success of the Tesla long-term marketing
www.bp.com
Model 3 (see page 20) strategy - in any sense of
shows some of us want the word “sustainable”.

Now
Speed Lab
THE
SEXIEST
TESLA
YET
After luring potential BMW and Mercedes-
Benz owners over to the land of luxury EVs
with the Model S, and branching into the
ultra-lucrative SUV market with the Model X,
Tesla has now at last unveiled its “affordable”
smaller car - the Model 3.
You can hardly have missed it. The launch
itself showcased an attractive smallish
sedan without the Model S’s lift back, and an
obviously unfinished interior, but it was the
public response that really made the news.
Tesla took over 325,000 pre-orders in less
than a week, providing the company with a
much-needed US$300 million-plus injection
of cash (each pre-order costs $1000) and the
potential to earn over US$14 billion... if it can
meet the production demand.
This is the huge challenge of course. At
almost the same time as it was launching the
Model 3, Tesla had to admit its deliveries of
the Model X had fallen short of targets.
The company says this is because the
crossover with its radical sensor-equipped
“falcon doors” fell victim to - and this is a
real quote - “[our] hubris in adding far too
much new technology” which
delayed production.
Right now, while CEO
by Elon Musk is on a high,
A NTHONY the people at Tesla who
FORDHAM have to actually get stuff
20 PO P U L A R S CI E N CE
M AY 201 6
confirmed, probably more like
semi-affordable) electric car
with 300km+ of range and
decent performance.
The reveal on 31st March
2016 was only part one of the
pre-launch hype. A second reveal
later this year will confirm the
many, many questions we all still
have about the Model 3, and will
done must be tasting an all too hopefully show a finished interior,
different flavour of adrenalin: TESLA MODEL 3 safety ratings, and the AWD
fear. The company has promised Platform: version. Elon Musk expects pre-
deliveries of the Model 3 will 5-door sedan orders will have topped 500,000
begin in 2017, but car industry 0 - 60: <6 seconds by then, making the Model 3 the
observers have their doubts. Range: 345km most successful car launch in
Forbes, for instance, cited Drive: Rear- history. In terms of orders, anyway.
Tesla’s ongoing production wheel, AWD TBC Superchargers, gigafactories,
problems as a bad sign. Musk Safety rating: middle-class EVs, this is the
himself admitted the response Untested Tesla future. There’s a lot that
was over three times greater Autopilot: can go wrong. But with this
than expected. Standard massive life-giving transfusion
What all this does show, Price: of cash into a company that has
however, is that there is massive US$35,000 (AU only a passing acquaintance with
appetite for an affordable pricing TBC) profit, there’s also much that can
(or once Australian pricing is go right. Watch this space.
TOO S3XY FOR MY (FORD) KA?
Back in 2013, Tesla tried to trademark not the Model 3, but the Model
E. Ford put a stop to the application because... well, it’s kind of
complicated. The big blue oval applied to trademark Model E back in
2001 for use with its own electric vehicles. Oddly though, Ford cancelled
that application in 2010. At the same time, it had a separate Model E
trademark application in effect in 2003 for some kind of car-related online
messaging thing it was toying around with. This application was abandoned
in 2006. Of course, when Tesla popped up in 2013 with its own Model E application, Ford
objected. Whatever the heck Ford is thinking when it comes to “Model E”, it’s obvious by
the design of the Model 3’s logo that Tesla hasn’t abandoned the “SEX” joke. There are even
rumours of a smaller crossover call, yep, the Model Y. Very s3xy, Tesla. Very s3xy indeed.
 Subwoofers SQ
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 MAY 201 6
Now
Nanotech

The sensor on the bee ( pictured) requires a “reader”

mounted on the hive entrance. The newer sensor is
powered by the bee’s own movement. While the energy
harvester (shown inset) is complete, the sensor package
still needs to be made more compact before it can be
rolled out in large numbers.

COLONIES IN CRISIS
Bees are in trouble around the world, especially in the
Americas and Europe where “colony collapse disorder”
can wipe out a colony. Adult workers simply disappear,

BEES TO POWER leaving the queen and immature workers to starve. While
this disorder has been known throughout our 5000+

THEIR OWN year history with bees, the incidence of collapse seems
to have massively accelerated since 2010. The CSIRO’s
work, combined with data from around the world, will

SALVATION hopefully shed some light on this unfolding disaster.

Physicists and entomologists
at the CSIRO (and now Data61)
have spent the last few years
gluing tiny sensor backpacks
to honeybees. These sensors,
only one step up from painting
tiny numbers on the bee with a
likewise tiny paintbrush.
A more valuable
system would see
re-capturing tens of thousands
of bees to change their batteries
just isn’t practical!
So Data61 has
worked with a
energy as the bee flies around
the world, oblivious.
Despite the sophistication of
his silicon-based harvester, Prof
de Souza remains in awe of the

once “read” by a device
mounted over the entrance
to the hive, provide valuable
information on swarming and
pollinating behaviour.
Scientists also set up sugar-
water feeding zones and expose
bees to different levels of
pesticides and other pollutants,
to see how these affect the
hive’s ability to pollinate crops
and produce honey.
Until now though, these
sensors have been passive,
little more than an electronic
serial number that allows
identification of individual bees.
Because they
have to be read
by
by a scanner,
ANTHONY the backpacks
FO RDHAM are basically
$81
each bee equipped Victorian nanotech natural biological systems on
with a compact radio foundry to create a which his device depends.
transmitter, more minute “engine”, a “This is the direction
like the kinds of 100-micrometre biotechnology has to go,” he says.
tags scientists use wide energy- “It is amazing how the bee does
on everything from harvesting system all this, just with hydrocarbons
Cos t , pe r
possums to blue that uses nano-scale and these incredible, beautiful
hive, o f bee
whales. Instead of pollination
springs to literally biological structures.”
waiting for the bee to s e r v i ces for
convert a bee’s While tracking bees in
return to the hive for almonds in buzz into power. more detail is important for
analysis, it could be Aus t ra l i a . I n Project leader crop security, it’s the energy
tracked in real time, California, Professor Paulo de harvesting device that has the
wherever it is. t h e cos t i s Souza - a physicist, Popular Science team excited.
The technological $ 2 50 pe r h ive, not an entomologist Right now, it produces a mere
limitation of building due in pa r t - says the real trickle of electricity, just enough
a powered sensor to t h e r i s k o f innovation here is to power a simple sensor
small enough for a colony collapse using a flat structure; package in the bee’s backpack.
bee to carry? Power. disorder. similar energy One day though, it could scale
While it’s possible to harvesters have their up to power our pacemakers,
build a battery small and light springs arranged vertically. other medical implants... or even
enough, keeping it topped up is... The horizontal configuration our mobile phones. Just another
problematic. Believe it or not, more efficiently scavenges thing to thanks bees for...

22 P O P U L A R S CI E NCE SOURCE: CROP POLLINATION ASSOCIATION INC.

 M AY 201 6

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 ED I TED BY BREANNA DRAXLER + MATT G ILES

The largest wave

of 2016? Aaron Gold’s
18-plus-metre wave
at Jaws, which is off
Maui’s North Shore.

24 PO P U L A R S CI E NCE P HOTOG R AP H BY Mike Coots

 M AY 201 6

141
Number of
g i a nt waves
at the 2016
Eddie Aikau
tournament
i n Wa i m ea
Bay, which
is held only
wh e n waves
top 35 feet.

Every few years, El Niño—the weather phenomenon caused

by unusually high surface temperatures in the Pacific
Ocean—deals us some wild cards. Some are devastating, in
the form of floods and droughts. Others are godsends, in the
form of much-needed rain or this year’s gargantuan waves
that gave surfers the ride of their lives. This past winter’s
El Niño was one of the three strongest on record, creating
waves with magnitudes not seen in nearly two decades. The
breaks that pro surfers paddled into during the Eddie Aikau
Big Wave Invitational (pictured) in late February ranged from
12 to 18 metres. The monster swells, according to Mark Willis,
chief meteorologist of the website Surfline, are the result of
an extended southward Pacific jet stream—strong upper-
level winds lift warm evaporation into the atmosphere and
begin to turbulently churn that moisture. This action creates
more intense and frequent storms that, when combined with
offshore winds that help waves grow larger and break cleanly,
lead to some once-in-a-lifetime surfing sets.
by
A N NA B EL EDWA R DS

P OP SC I . C O M. AU 25
Next In the 47 years since humans first
Now & Later stepped on the moon, space-helmet
technology hasn’t exactly made a giant
leap. But the prospect of exploring Mars
has NASA’s designers literally back at
their drawing boards. “The requirements
are different from anything we’ve done
before,” says Dave Lavery, who leads
NASA’s Solar System Exploration

What We’ll Program. These requirements include

durability (to withstand abrasion in wind
storms), flexibility (for yearlong missions),

Wear to Mars and field of view (for 360-degree visibility).

“The shape [of future helmets] is going
to be driven by the ability to see your
The Evolution of feet while walking on the rough surface
of Mars,” says NASA’s Amy Ross, who
the Space Helmet designs space suits. Now it’s up to
NASA to get us there.

by
SA R A H F EC H T

PAST
(1960s & ’70s)
The iconic bubble
helmet worn by Neil
Armstrong and Buzz
Aldrin was built to
withstand the moon’s
extreme temperature
swings and protect
astronauts’ eyes from
solar glare and
radiation. At the back,
the helmet’s fitted
shape cushioned the
head in case of an
emergency during
launch or landing.

PRESENT
Today’s helmet is
almost identical to the
Apollo era’s—bulbous
and locked solidly into
the neck of the suit—
except that this one
has cameras and lights.
Since the International
Space Station circles
the Earth every 92
minutes, astronauts
might be suddenly
plunged into darkness
during a spacewalk,
so lights are a must.

26 P O P U L A R S CI E NCE
 M AY 201 6

FUTURE
(2030s & ’40s)
On Mars, visibility
and range of motion
will be extremely
important. That’s
why the helmet for
the BioSuit—one
of the contending
designs for a Mars
mission—moves
freely with the
astronaut’s head, like
a motorcycle helmet.
It will also have a
heads-up display with
information
on navigation,
logistics, scheduling,
situational awareness,
and life support.

P H OTO G RA P HY BY Douglas Sonders P OP S C I . C O M 27

Next
The Conversation
Privacy. Here’s
How We Fix It.
In the wake of Edward Snowden’s
NSA reveal, society has grappled with
how to balance personal privacy 1
and public safety. Events like the mass
terror attacks in San Bernardino, Brussels,
Laura and Paris have only raised the stakes.
Poitras Records of our daily lives now exist on
our smartphones. That is why the prospect
of a federally sanctioned iPhone hack—
Academy Award-winning even a one-time occurrence under the
filmmaker of Citizenfour, argument of national security—could open
a documentary about the a Pandora’s box; 2 it could threaten future
Snowden-NSA affair technological rights and human rights.
US presidential candidates are
by
M ATT GI LES
technologies, 3 which
would allow access to
private information.4
This could create
unintended entry points
for rival governments
and hackers, as well as
companies’ products.
damage the brands and
trustworthiness of tech
Some people say they don’t mind giving
up privacy because they have nothing to
hide.5 But citizens in the US and abroad
have the right to be shielded and need to be
shielded from state prying. 6
Encryption has gone from niche to
necessary—the software and apps are no
st for those in the know. 7 They
1. The post-9/11 era was filled with impunity;
there was no accountability. When a country
maintains that culture over multiple decades
and presidencies, it becomes hard to backtrack.
2. I trust the state, but only for very
specific things. The reason we have laws and
the Constitution is that trust is not enough.
3. The risks of all this private information
being made public are very real. I don’t think
we’ve seen the worst of what can happen
when that information is released.
A ND RE W B U RTO N /G ET TY I MAG ES
4. Criminals and terrorists will always
try to circumvent protections—it’s going to
happen. We need to use the resources we
have at organisations like the NSA to secure
things, not break them.

encode information, protecting reams of
personal data (like medical records) 8 and
metadata (like geospatial information)
that are being uploaded to the cloud every
second of the day.
Safer software and hardware, however,
might not be enough. Like the US Bill of
Rights, we’ll need a legal framework to
protect the Internet rights that we have,
5. We are trying to install human-rights
protections into the architecture of systems
that people use by default every day.
There will be people who don’t want to use
those systems, but at least you won’t have
to be a software expert to be protected.
6. Saying you don’t care about privacy is
like saying you don’t care about free speech.
Maybe you don’t feel that you personally
need privacy, but you do believe a journalist
or a lawyer or a doctor does.
7. There are people who were initially shocked
by the idea of using computers to communi-
cate, but now they are on Skype. People adapt
to technology—they figure it out. Trusted cyber
communication tools are ready and available.
MI C H AL AN DRYSI A K
8. When you centralize records, those computer
systems are vulnerable. There are laws to
protect that information, but criminals who break
into a doctor’s computer don’t care about laws.
M AY 201 6
Jacob
Appelbaum
Computer security
researcher, journalist, and
member of the Tor project
until now, taken for granted. 9 Future
citizens, raised online with all of the
inherent benefits and risks, 10 will
JACOB’S
hopefully better understand how to
navigate these new digital waters. 11
They’ll insist on defending their
DEVICES
freedom by controlling what information
they let others—corporations and A German-made
governments alike—see. 12 Cry ptophone,
which he us es to
call Julian Assange
A n iPhone 5C
with microphones
9. Privacy is not a futurist thing.
If you can connect to the Internet now, re m oved to
someone can connect with you in a avoid tapping
secure fashion, even behind firewalls.
T h e e n c r y p t io n
s e r v ice S i l e nt
10. What scares me is the next generation. Circle, wh ich
They might take mass surveillance as he uses to call a
the new normal. The people being targeted regular telephone
seem to be those who are limited in their
understanding of what’s possible. network
through Tor
Several Androids
11. If you send a postcard, you don’t t h at r un o n
expect privacy. If you put it in an envelope,
you do. It’s the same with the Internet. free and secure
Yes, there will always be online governmental so f twa re
scrutiny—that won’t go away—but there will
be strategies to preserve privacy, and tactics
that can subvert unwarranted mass scrutiny.
12. If you are in middle school now, there is
a good likelihood you already have a digital foot-
print. You’ll want to defend it, and defend the
new kinds of democratic relationships it creates.
P OP SC I . C O M. AU 29
 MAY 201 6
Next
amuse.bouche

Do they hate big

budgets, or do they just
hate responsibility? by
DA N I EL
W I L KS

T
he combined development and
marketing budget for console shooter/
MMO hybrid Destiny topped out
around US$500 million ($660m).
Though the game still comfortably
holds the record for the most
expensive ever made, there are many other titles
that have budgets rivalling those of any big budget
Hollywood production.
Despite being that very rare videogame entity
- an original, new IP - Destiny in its core gameplay
nevertheless conforms to that golden AAA rule: with
such high budgets, large studios are very risk averse,
and more often than not home in on sequels and tried
and true gameplay mechanics (run, shoot) rather
than branching out on new ideas.
So for many game developers, the lure of big
budgets has little appeal. They have distanced
themselves, at least in part, from the pressures and
expectations of mega-budget titles by turning to
crowdfunding to gather money for passion projects.
A type-species example: Pillars of Eternity, known
at the time as Project Eternity, was probably the first
mega successful crowdfunded campaigns from a big
name developer.
Obsidian Entertainment, creator of a number of
hugely successful AAA titles including Star Wars:
Knights of the Old Republic II and Fallout New
Vegas, launched the crowdfunding campaign for
Project Eternity in 2012 after being told that there
was no market for an RPG with 1990s-style top-down
“isometric” graphics.
The market analysts were wrong and Obsidian
was right: the campaign quickly blew past the initial
funding goal, eventually netting just shy of US$4
million ($5.3m).
Of course, crowdfunding adds its own pressures
to game developers, as pledges essentially act as pre-
orders for titles, and gamers aren’t known for being
the most forgiving bunch when it comes to delays or
lack of information.
Star Citizen, a massively multiplayer space
exploration and combat game is a reigning hall-of-
shamer when it comes to delays. Despite its massive
IF PREVIOUS YEARS ARE ANY
GUIDE, HALF TO TWO THIRDS OF
THOSE SUCCESSFULLY FUNDED
GAMES WILL FOLD BEFORE
DELIVERY, BE SIGNIFICANTLY
DELAYED OR WILL OTHERWISE
UNDER-DELIVER IN SOME WAY
financial success, Chris Roberts’ uber-ambitious project
highlights the pitfalls of the crowdfunding model.
As of this writing, Star Citizen has amassed $112
million in pledges since the project was first launched
in 2012. But right now there’s still only a very limited
“dogfight mode” currently available to backers. Yet the
marketing of this unreleased game is so effective (you
Daniel Wilks
can buy beautiful spaceships in much the same way
is the editor of
as you order a real car online, then walk around them
PC PowerPlay,
in a virtual hangar), some gamers have already spent Aust ral i a’s
hundreds and even thousands of dollars on these virtual oldest (and
ships - which can’t yet be flown in space. best) PC gaming
Star Citizen and its many sub-games still have no set magazine. He
release date, but the money keeps coming in, extending has personally
the stretch goals for backers, the ambition of the lost/wasted
developers and the time it will take to finish the project. m a ny tens
o f do l l ars
Yes, 2015 was a bumper year for gaming
o n te r r i bl e
crowdfunding. Across all gaming categories -
K icks tar ter
videogame, boardgame, card and RPG - according to
projects
Kickstarter’s own statistics, about 49% of the 15433 including
gaming projects launched were successfully funded. “Woolfe: The Red
But if previous years are any guide, anywhere from Hood Diaries”
half to two thirds of those successfully funded games a n d “Samurai
will fold before delivery, be significantly delayed or will Cop 2: Deadly
otherwise under-deliver in some way (fewer features, Vengeance.”
poor quality, supply problems etc).
Crowdfunding may be a boon to developers looking
to free themselves from the pressures of mega-budget
productions, but consumers should definitely go in with
their eyes open, and their expectations realistic.

30 P O P U L A R S CI E NCE
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Next
Rethink
Is it Time to
Abolish Schools?
N
o, bear with me. Seriously, in this
online connected app-uploaded
gamified social media world, does
making kids go to a sort of labour-
camp like institution to be trained to
all jump up and run around when a
bell rings, make much sense anymore?
Okay context. Around about a century ago,
many of the Western democracies came up with a
brilliant idea. If they could educate the population to
a standardised level, that might just create a society
where literate individuals could get jobs, make money,
and spend that money on all the amazing new things
science and tech was creating. Like cars and ice-boxes
and eventually radios and televisions.
The other thing that was happening in the world
at that time was rapid industrialisation. Where once
people lived on the farm - and kept farm time, and
life revolved around chores, and kids would learn to
read in the evenings if they were lucky - now people
worked in factories. And what are factory jobs all
about? That’s right: shift work.
Here was a new age where parents had to clock in
at, say, 0700h and work until 1600h. What to do with
the kids for that time? Send them to a factory of their
own, of course, but a factory where they learn. From
this, the school-as-we-know-it evolved.
Yes, schools also take ideas from private academies
and even the military a little bit, but the rigidly
defined lesson times and locations and the Pavlovian
“ringing of the bell” where everyone gets up and
changes places - that’s the industrial revolution writ
small, right there. If you think about it, it’s weird.
Yes schools work but there are many downsides
to the way they educate. If you’re a particular type of
person with a particular intellectual and academic
style, you will excel in a typical school. You need to be
smart - but not too smart or you’ll get bored. You need
to be able to work and study hard - but not too hard
or you’ll finish too quickly and get bored. You need to
be able to think critically and have original ideas - but
within a specific framework, otherwise your teachers
won’t understand you and you’ll get bored.
Woe betide if you exhibit atypicality in some
way, though. If you’re “on the spectrum” or you have
32 P O P U L A R S CI E NCE
MAY 201 6
by
A N T H ONY
FO R DH A M
HIGH SCHOOL OF THE FUTURE
SHOULD SHOULD BE ABOUT
MEETING IN COFFEE SHOPS TO
DISCUSS SHAKESPEARE WITH A
TEACHER WHO DOESN’T HAVE TO
GET TO A CRUMBLING BUILDING
BY 0630H FOR “CLASS PREP”.
ADHD or one of the more annoying (to teachers) forms
of dyslexia. If you’re depressive or intensely introverted,
if you need to lead a group to thrive or be led yourself.
Square pegs and round holes? Some people aren’t even
pegs at all. Some just can’t be taught, this way.
For most of the 20th century, the institutional school
was the worst form of education we had - except for all the
others. Yet until now, the problem with homeschooling is
that people can get intellectually isolated. There’s no cross-
pollination of ideas. Yes people have been successfully
homeschooled, but the teaching parent absolutely must be
engaged with the world at large.
What the internet and its attendant computer
technology allows now, though, is the creation of
decentralised education. Teaching can be tailored
(perhaps ultimately by AIs) to the individual. Potentials
can be realised. And of course there needs to be
mandated socialisation, “play groups” if you will. Anthony
But attending a primary or high school of the Fo rdham i s
future should be more like university. It should be less the editor of
about turning up at the gate by 0845h, and more about Austral i an
Popular Science.
logging hours in a mathematics app. About meeting in
He survived
libraries and coffee shops to discuss Shakespeare with
t h e great NSW
a teacher who doesn’t have to commute at 0630h to get public education
to a crumbling building in time for “class prep”. About system, but has
dedicating a whole day to a cricket match, not just two n o sca rs to show
crowded hours on a Wednesday, because the adaptive it. Because all
online systems know how to make sure you’re getting h i s scars are o n
enough geology study later in the week. the inside.
Will any of this happen? Only if we’re bold. Because
it’s very easy to just say “the current system exists,
therefore it must work.” But I for one would spare the
next generation those long, dreary afternoons spent
doing nothing useful but waiting for a bell to ring.
 AUSTRALIA’S
No.1 GUIDE
TO AUDIO & AV
www.AVHub.com.au

Vol.29 #3
APRIL/MAY 2016
A$9.99 NZ$10.99

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ON !ALE
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PLUS! Killer Klowns From Outer Space on Blu-ray
 M AY 201 6
Next
Phrasebook

What the heck is...

The 14
Nanometre
Process
The individual transistors in the microchips that control your
PC, tablet, smartphone and more are getting smaller and smaller.
In fact, they’re now so small, engineers are running into problems.
The modern microchip is an amazing thing.
An entire microscopic city of mathematical
potential, a vast metropolis of tiny gateways
arranged in very precise patterns to maximise
performance, minimise power use and waste
heat, and enable you to view cat videos online in
increasingly intense resolution.
A key part of what makes this possible is
shrinking the physical size of the transistors
inside the chip, so designers can fit more onto
the integrated circuit. More transistors means
faster mathematical performance.
Technology vs physics
it comes to performance and low
power consumption.
The ultimate dream, at least
according to Intel’s futurists, is a
SEVEN nanometre process. Chips
that need so little power and will
be so cheap to replicate (if rather
expensive to develop) they will appear
in everything from clothing tags to
coffee cups. The era of “ubiquitous
computing” will then begin.
Looks good on a label
Except, even up at 14 Nm engineers
W h e re i t a l l sta r ted . Tur i ng’s
“Bombe”, the code -breaking proto-
computer he designed in 1939
packed much closer together too - and
something few people realise is that in
the early 2000s, transistors reached a
size where just making them smaller
did not increase performance.
Increases in CPU speed since
the 2000s have come instead from
design changes. The FinFETs and tri-
gates and what have you. For instance,

Engineers talk about the size of these
transistors in nanometres. Back in 2013, CPUs
were built to a 22 nanometre standard. Today,
the latest chips are on a 16 Nm process but...
that might no longer mean what people think.
The thing is, the smaller the transistors (or
“gates” as they are also known) get, the more
they are disturbed by quantum effects. These
gates are so small, the electrons they use to
carry an electrical signal can bounce around or
“leak” and create mathematical errors.
To deal with this, chip manufacturers have
had to develop increasingly sophisticated and
complicated technology. Solutions include the
FinFET or “Fin Field Effect Transistor”, used by
IBM, AMD and others. Or there’s Intel’s tri-gate
3D transistor used in its
by Ivy Bridge, Haswell and
A NTH ONY Skylake series processors
FOR DH AM that has given the
company a real edge when
5
are not sure what that measurement a FinFET can be 35 nanometres long
means anymore. These “nanometre” in total, but have a central fin that is
measurements have become more just eight nanometres wide.
a marketing term, rather than Ultimately, engineers want to build
describing any physical feature of gates that are made up of a just few
the chip design. It used to mean atoms. But silicon may not be the
Number of the length of the transistor, but material for the job. So the next great
transistors, then manufacturers started using technological leap forward could be
in billions, many different methods to increase as dramatic as the shift from valves to
on the main performance. Transistors are now solid-state transistors themselves.
system- on-
chip (SoC)
of the
Microsoft
3D FUTURE
Xbox One
Chip architecture used to be two-dimensional, etched into the surface of
videogame
a silicon wafer using a process called lithography. Today, brain-meltingly
console. An
complex technological processes allow manufacturers to build nano-scale
Intel 386
3D structures into their chips, including tiny fins and channels, and add
CPU from
special insulating materials and more. Silicon may have a hard limit when it
1985 had
comes to performance, but human ingenuity keeps pushing that limit back.
275,000.

34 PO P U L A R S CI E NCE
M AY 2 0 1 6

In a Warming World,
Will Plants Hold More
Carbon... Or Less?

by
THE DISCOVERY
C ARL An international team of scientists from Australia, the United
WI L L I AMS States, Sweden and New Zealand, have found that a wide
range of different kinds of plants respond to temperature
changes in strikingly similar ways.
Over a three-year period, a diverse range of plant
species – from herbs and grasses to towering trees – were
surveyed at 18 locations across the planet, including
temperate rainforests in Far North Queensland, boreal
forests in Sweden, tropical forests in Costa Rica and the
Alaskan tundra. The plants were specifically chosen to
represent seven different types of ecosystems.
Researchers measured the respiratory response of the
plants to temperature changes, and despite the wide range
of plant types and diversity of habitats, found that the
“sensitivity of respiration” to temperature, decreases as
plants get warmer, and was consistent across all 231 species
examined. This challenges current assumptions on how plant
respiration responds to changes in temperature.

400
THE IMPLICATIONS currently assume that plant
According to Owen Atkin from the ARC Centre of respiration doubles for every
Excellence in Plant Energy Biology at ANU: “Our 10°C rise in temperature. This
findings highlight the need to better understand the assumption, however, has now
response of plants to temperature changes if we are to found to be incorrect.
predict how natural ecosystems will respond in future “We clearly demonstrate
parts per million
climate scenarios. there is a fundamental
that global
“We have a reasonably good understanding of response of respiration to
atmospheric
plant biology, but we haven’t translated that fully to temperature,” explains Mark
levels of carbon
current climate models.” dioxide reached in
Tjoelker of the Hawkesbury
The research, published online in the journal March 2015, 43 per
Institute for the Environment
PNAS, is the most comprehensive study of plant cent above pre -
at Western Sydney University,
respiration responses to temperature yet conducted, industrial levels and a co-author of the paper,
and has important implications for predicting “and an over-simplification
climatic responses to increased global temperatures of this response function in
as well as our understanding of how plants may current climate models.”
respond to a warming planet. Plants play a major role in
Climate models that simulate the interactions of the global carbon cycle – the
global cycles of carbon with land and oceanic systems, movement of carbon between

36 PO P U L A R S CI E N CE

In a warmer world, plants may retain more
of the carbon made available to them by
photosynthesis and, therefore, possess
greater capacity to act as carbon sinks
the atmosphere, oceans and land – by using the Sun’s “What’s exciting about the
energy to convert carbon in atmospheric carbon dioxide research is they appear to have
(CO2) into organic compounds, such as sugars and found a convergence in the
fats. We know this as photosynthesis, and this process temperature response of plant
results in a flow of CO2 from the atmosphere to the respiration, which represents
biosphere, causing plants to act as carbon sinks that a significant step forward in
soak-up atmospheric CO2. In fact, plants account for improving the accuracy of
about 120 gigatonnes of carbon being removed from climate models.” says Martin
the atmosphere every year. De Kauwe from the Climate and
But plants do breathe, or rather, their cells consume Forest Ecosystem Modelling
oxygen and give off CO2. Cellular respiration by plants Group at Macquarie University.
returns around half of the carbon they capture, back The research indicates that
to the atmosphere, and so global rates of respiration in a warmer world plants may
- how fast plants are breathing - have a significant retain more of the carbon
influence on the size of the land carbon sink and in turn made available to them by
the levels of atmospheric CO2. photosynthesis and, therefore,
Climate models to date, however, have poorly possess greater capacity to
represented the respiration response function to act as carbon sinks, which our
temperature in their simulations. climate models should reflect.
Also, by retaining more
carbon, plants increase their
biomass, though this may not
necessarily mean biomass
$1.2 trillion
humans find useful; we mainly
use seeds or fruits.
Indeed, work carried out
under the Australian Grains Free
Air CO₂ Enrichment (AGFACE)
the annual economic cost in US dollars of program, has reported
global warming, wiping 1.6% annually from reductions in the nutritional
global GDP content of many staple food
Next
Ergo Propter Hoc
crops as higher amounts of CO2
are made available for plant
growth, with lower levels of
protein and micronutrients like
iron and zinc observed.
According to Tjoelker,
current research is “just
the tip of the iceberg” in
our understanding of plant
respiration and how plants will
function in a warming world.
IN SHORT
Climate scientists were
worried that higher
temperatures would mean
plant “respiration” releases
more CO2 than photosynthesis
sequesters. New studies show
that at higher temperatures,
plants retain more carbon
and work more efficiency as
carbon sinks. This could affect
future climate models.
P OP SC I . C O M. AU 37
 1

AVIATION

THE 2016 THE MOST BEAUTIFUL

PLANE EVER MADE

INVENTION David Loury isn’t a classic-car kind of guy. But when he decided to
come up with a radically different design for a private plane, he turned to
luxury automobiles—and their design-forward aesthetic—for inspiration.

AWARDS
“Maserati and Mercedes-Benz were the two main cars I looked at, and
I engineered ideas and concepts from them,” says the independent
aerospace engineer. Those concepts evolved into the Valkyrie: a five-seat,
single-piston-engine plane that he calls a “high-tech vehicle of the future.”
The Valkyrie’s exterior certainly looks futuristic—and beautiful.

38 P O P U L A R S CI E N CE
 1 With a 260-kilowatt
engine, the Valkyrie can
reach 260 knots (480
km/h). It has a range of
over 1,900 kilometres.
2 Valkyrie’s single-piece
Plexiglas canopy is the
largest ever on a private
plane, providing a 320-
degree view.
That’s because Loury designed
it to have aesthetic proportions:
“a convex profile in the front, a
concave one in the back, and an
inflection point where they join.”
I M AGE C O URT ESY C O BALT
In addition to looking good,
Loury wanted Valkyrie to be
efficient and easy to fly. So he
gave it a canard, a second wing
near the nose that supplies
additional lift. This helps make
the plane up to 20 per cent
P H OTO I LLU ST RAT I O N BY Eric Heintz
faster, with less fuel burn than a
Cessna or comparable aircraft.
The canard also makes it nearly
impossible to stall— that is, to lose
lift in midair. Coupled with simple
controls (just one handle-to-handle
throttle) and the information-rich
Garmin G3X flight-display system,
Valkyrie is extremely user-friendly.
“When you start the engine, it’s
as easy to control as a car,” Loury
says. “So even if you are a bad
pilot, it will forgive your errors.”
To a point that is. It’s certainly not
completely stall-proof.
Loury’s startup, Cobalt, plans
to start filling preorders for the
experimental version of the plane,
Valkyrie X, as early as late 2016,
and aims to make the consumer
version, Co50 Valkyrie, available in
mid-2017. The only thing standing
between you and a Co50 Valkyrie is
Invention: the $970,000 price tag.
Valkyrie “It’s not cheap to make a plane
Inventor: like this,” says Loury. But he
David Loury points out the price is only slightly
Company: more than similar private aircraft.
Cobalt
“Before the Valkyrie, the offerings
Maturity:
weren’t glamorous or fun,” he says,
쏆쏆쏆쏆쏆
“and not nearly worth the effort.”
MATT GILES
P OP SC I . C O M. AU 39
20 16 I NVE NTI O N AWARDS

RECREATION

FINALLY,
A HOVERBOARD
THAT FLIES

1 Duru controls his

altitude and speed On May 22, 2015, Lake Ouareau
using a handheld
remote fashioned in Quebec, Canada, was
from a pair of pliers. peaceful and sunny. Then
something straight out of
2 Snowboard bindings
strap his feet to
science fiction roared across
the frame. the water. Alexandru Duru,
balancing on a homemade
hoverboard 4.8 metres above
the surface, flew a distance of
275.8 m—smashing the previous
Guinness World Record (a
measly 49.9 m) for the farthest
hoverboard flight. “Riding it is
a feeling that no other machine
can provide,” Duru says.
“Nothing comes close.”
Duru, a software engineer,
has devoted the past five years
to perfecting his hoverboard
design, called Omni. His first
attempt was little more than
a piece of wood strapped to
a motor and propeller. The
current iteration—refined
by his new company, Omni
Hoverboards, and local
2
university students—is made
from carbon fibre but still has
a DIY feel: It achieves lift with
eight electric motors each with
a large propeller, all powered by
16 lithium-polymer batteries.
Duru and his team are now
developing a second prototype
that’s sleeker, more powerful,
and safe enough for an eager
public. He plans for it to be
1 ready for distribution by 2017.
“Most people imagine a future
Invention: with hoverboards in them,”
Omni
he says. “I think it’s going to
Inventor: happen for sure.”
Alexandru Duru
ALYSSA FAV R EAU
Company:
Omni
Hoverboards
Maturity:
쏆쏆쏆쏆쏆

40 P O P U L A R S CI E NCE P HOTOG R AP HY BY John Kealey

 M AY 201 6

Q&A
With Adam Savage

A LIFETIME OF INSPIRATION
How do you get reason, it took me a

THE MYTHBUSTERS started on a project?

When I build stuff, I like
to have the materials I
while to understand that
starting from scratch is
the most powerful thing
If science and technology are best will work with in front of I can do. As tedious as it
me so I can understand might seem, the result is
left to professionals, nobody told Adam them. But before getting better—the second try
Savage and Jamie Hyneman. For 14 to them, I do construction is almost always better
seasons, they have provided scientific reality and problem solving in than the first.
checks to more than 1,000 common myths my head. The process
of building in my head What’s the biggest
on their hit TV series, MythBusters. In March is one of my favourite obstacle you’ve faced and
2016, the wild ride came to an end. feelings—I get an overcome?
endorphin rush. Drawing At a certain point in every
During their run, the dynamic duo and their co-hosts determined helps me remember build, I have felt like it
the truth not by quoting expert opinions, but by conducting their the ideas I am having. would be a total failure. I’d
own rough-and-ready experiments. Although they did consult I certainly think the get 70 per cent into it, and
experts, “We always based our conclusions on something we pencil is one of the I would think that this is
saw happen,” Savage says. most powerful tools for a piece of crap; why waste
Before MythBusters, “DIY” usually referred to building a invention ever. I use this so much time on it?
bookcase or insulating an attic. But the series showed us a really wonderfully crappy Then I would realise I
quirkier, more creative application for hands-on skills. Nearly Paper Mate Sharpwriter have to push through.
every myth called for a testing contraption, often involving No. 2 mechanical pencil. But it still happens. I
explosives or firearms, operated by hosts who clearly loved I pick one up and I feel feel that way on almost
creating gonzo rigs. like inventing. everything I do.
MA ART EN D E B O ER / G E TT Y I MAG ES

You couldn’t watch without getting the itch to break out a

power tool. It’s no coincidence, then, that Savage and Hyneman’s Any tips for DIYers? Do you ever
popularity coincided with the rise of the maker movement, which Be ready to build take a day off?
celebrates fun and often wildly impractical creations. everything three to No, I am so addicted to
“They were an enormous inspiration to the movement,” says four times. It is a making things. There
Mark Hatch, CEO of the maker mecca TechShop. developmental process, are days I don’t build
Savage and Hyneman would call that myth busted. “We and I never get it right anything, but I am always
stumbled on a way of doing the show that surfed the wave,” the first time. Being thinking. That’s how I
Hyneman says. Still, they taught us all that technology exists to open to that fact helps function best.
be used, abused, hacked, and modified. JA MES B . ME IGS free me up. For some AS TOLD TO MATT GILES

P OP SC I . C O M. AU 41
 20 16 I NVE NTI O N AWARDS
ENERGY
SELF-
POWERED
CAMERA
At first glance, the boxy
“eternal camera” looks like
an old daguerreotype device.
But appearances are deceiving.
This is something new—
a camera that powers itself.
The computer vision lab at
Columbia University, led by
computer scientist Shree K.
Nayar, created this ever-
The eternal camera’s image
1
sensor uses 1,200 photo-
diodes in a 30-by-40 array.
42 P O P U L A R S CI E NCE
lasting camera by making
photodiodes—devices that
convert light into electricity
—do double duty. In digital
cameras, photodiodes measure
light. In solar panels, they
harvest energy. The eternal
camera’s photodiodes do both
jobs. This enables the camera
to generate enough power to
take photos forever—as long as
there’s light available.
Nayar’s team began by
building just one double-duty
photodiode. Mounted on a robot
that slowly moved it in a grid, it
captured an entire picture one
pixel at a time, which took about
an hour. The current iteration
of the camera incorporates 1,200
pixels and takes a photo every
1
second, displaying the images
on an external monitor.
The group next plans to reduce
the camera’s size while increasing
its speed and resolution. That
way it could be used for specialty
projects where size and access
to power are concerns: to track
wildlife as part of conservation
projects, to use less power on space-
exploration missions, or to provide
round-the-clock security.
For Nayar, the camera’s
Invention: appeal goes beyond its technical
Eternal accomplishments. “There’s a
camera
romantic aspect to this,” he says.
Inventors:
“To have anything that can produce
Shree K. Nayar
Mikhail Fridberg information without consuming
Daniel C. Sims power, that can go on forever—it’s a
Affiliation: powerful concept.”
Columbia ALYSSA FAVREAU
University
Maturity:
쏆쏆쏆쏆쏆
2
2 Each photodiode
3 measures the light
that passes through a
lens and turns it into
an electrical signal,
which represents a
single pixel. Combined,
the signals create an
image—just as they do
in a standard camera.
3 Unlike conventional
cameras, each of the
eternal camera’s pho-
todiodes are wired into
a special circuit, which
takes some of the elec-
tricity produced from
the absorbed light and
stores it in a capacitor
to power itself.
IL LU ST R AT ION BY M C KIB ILLO
 ROBOTICS

THE ROBOT
COMPANION
YOU’LL WANT
TO HANG WITH

As a child, Cynthia Breazeal

loved R2-D2 and C-3PO from
Star Wars. They were not only
functional, as we expect robots
to be, but they also radiated
personality. Decades later, as
an expert in social robotics at
MIT, Breazeal decided to infuse
a real-life robotic assistant with
the same endearing charm.
She co-founded a company,
launched an Indiegogo
campaign, and today, Jibo is
ready to engage its owners.
Most smart machines, such
as phones, distract people from
one another. “We all know this
image of the dinner table where
everybody’s staring at their
devices,” Breazeal says. Not so
with Jibo. “He really feels like
he’s part of the family,” she says.
Like any good assistant, Jibo
takes calls and gives alerts. The Jibo inquisitively cocks
his head while conversing
3.4-kilogram, nearly 30-cm-high in an eager voice. His
robot can recognise faces and touchscreen face swivels
autonomously learn individual to follow the user and
displays a range of
preferences. He can even recite Invention:
friendly expressions.
a favourite bedtime story or Jibo
snap photos on demand. Those Inventors:
who shelled out an extra $100 for innovating the experience Cynthia Breazeal
during the initial crowdfunding of technology in the home,” she (pictured)
Jonathan Ross
C O U RTESY JI B O

campaign will get a developers’ says. “But I forget she’s there Fardad Faridi
version of Jibo (standard home ther home AIs, such as the half the time. Jibo brings that Andy Atkins
versions were offered for $499), Amazon Echo with its Alexa sense of high-touch engage- Rich Sadowsky
so they can continually add to persona. “Alexa has validated ment and personal attention.” Todd Pack
his repertoire after he ships to that there’s a huge opportunity SARAH STANLEY Company:
Jibo
Maturity:
쏆쏆쏆쏆쏆

43
20 16 I NVE NTI O N AWARDS
BREAKOUT YOUNG INVENTOR
ANN MAKOSINSKI
Ann Makosinski’s first serious toy
was a box of transistors. She’s been
tinkering ever since, creating projects
with a hot-glue gun and household
items. A few years ago, she used her
hobby to solve a real-world problem.
A friend in the Philippines
mentioned she was failing school;
without electricity, she couldn’t do
her homework at night. So Makosinski
devised a flashlight powered by the
heat of your hand. It uses peltier
tiles, which generate electricity when
one side is hotter than the other, to
draw energy from the heat difference
between hand and air. Makosinski
submitted her invention to the 2013
Google Science Fair and won first
place in her age group.
She has since nabbed prizes from
competitions such as the 2014 Intel
International Science and Engineering
Fair, and has twice appeared on The
Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
Makosinski is now enrolled at the
University of British Columbia in
Vancouver, but hitting the books hasn’t
stopped her from inventing. Her latest
creation is the eDrink, which uses the
heat from a coffee mug to charge a
phone for 30 minutes. SA R A H FEC H T
MANUFACTURING
FASTEST 3D
PRINTER EVER
During a TedTalk in March 2015, Joseph
DeSimone quietly revolutionised 3D printing.
With little fanfare, he printed a palm-size
geodesic sphere, a task that normally takes
hours, in a little over six minutes.
A serial entrepreneur, DeSimone had
devised his rapid 3D-printing method with
help from his former postdoc Alex Ermoshkin.
Instead of using conventional techniques, they
drew inspiration from the liquid-metal T-1000 Invention:
assassin in Terminator 2. Continuous Liquid
Like the fictional robot, their M1 printer Interface Produc-
tion (CLIP)
“grows” solid objects out of liquid—by applying
ultraviolet light and oxygen to resin in a
technique called Continuous Liquid Interface
Inventors:
Joseph DeSimone
Alex Ermoshkin
Production, or CLIP. “We’re using light as a very Ed Samulski
delicate chisel that can make complex, amazing Company:
Carbon
things,” DeSimone says. The result is 25 to 100
times faster than conventional printing. It also Maturity:
works with more materials, including the entire 쏆쏆쏆쏆쏆
polymer family, and at a higher resolution than
competitors, which build objects in layers—
making CLIP ideal for custom commercial
manufacturing. Now the company DeSimone
co-founded, Carbon, is partnering with BMW,
Johnson & Johnson, and others to do just that.
N
Carbon created this
sphere as a test of the
printer’s ability to work
with acrylate resin.

ACCESSIBILITY
QUEST FOR
THE HOLY
BRAILLE
Digital tablets provide access
to a world of information—but
there’s no elegant, affordable
way for the visually impaired to
read from them. That’s because
current braille readers, which
attach to the bottom of a tablet,
provide room for only one line
of text at a time. Researchers
at the University of Michigan,
I L LUST RAT I O N BY MCKIB IL LO
led by Brent Gillespie, Alex
Russomanno, Mark Burns,
and Sile O’Modhrain, hope to
develop a refreshable display to
translate an entire page at once.
The project was partially
motivated by O’Modhrain, who
is visually impaired. “Existing
displays don’t allow you to
access lots of braille code and
graphical information,” she
says. “Math and music codes, for
example, are displayed spatially,
so that they’re spread over
multiple lines.”
Existing technology could
conceivably allow for a full-page
braille screen that refreshes like
a tablet. But the price would
be astronomical. For instance,
single-line displays that rely
on electronics cost more than
1
1 Each dot sits on
an inflatable bubble.
2 Air or liquid flows
into a specific channel
to reach the bubble,
which inflates and
lifts that dot.
3 A microfluidic chip
controls the pattern
that emerges.
$3,000; expanding them to a
full page could potentially raise
the price to as high as $55,000.
To reduce that cost, the team
chose to make their device with
microfluidics.
Here’s how: A refreshable
display must raise and lower
braille dots—a full page might
include up to 10,000—to create
a pattern. In the team’s device, a
microfluidic chip controls this
process by moving small doses
of fluid through tiny channels.
Invention:
Holy Braille Their prototype is only a couple
Inventors:
of inches wide, but the team
Brent Gillespie hopes to expand it to a full-page
Alex Russomanno display that would cost $1,000
Mark Burns to $2,000. As for the device’s
(not pictured)
Sile O’Modhrain name, collaborator Noel Runyan
Affiliation:
coined a popular moniker:
University of Holy Braille. XAVIER HARDING
Michigan
Maturity:
쏆쏆쏆쏆쏆
P OP SC I . C O M. AU 45
20 16 I NVE NTI O N AWARDS
DRONES
A DRONE FOR
THE EVERYDAY
COUSTEAU
Four years ago, Eric Stackpole
and David Lang were on
a quest for treasure: They
wanted to build a cheap
remotely operated vehicle
(ROV) and explore an
underwater cave rumoured
to contain gold. For help,
they turned to like-minded
enthusiasts online. An open-
source community quickly
formed to contribute to the
ROV’s design.
The treasure proved
46 P O P U L A R S CI E NCE
GADGETS
PRECISE 3D
SCANNING
ON THE GO
In 2012, Rahul Koduri, Asfand
Khan, and Richard Boers were
designing a solar tracking
system. But it didn’t work. To
find out what went wrong,
they needed to find out how
the shape of a metal dish had
warped—by performing a 3D
scan. “The cheapest option we
could find for a scanner was
$20,000, which we couldn’t
afford,” Khan says. “So we
patched something together
using open-source libraries, a
camera, and a cheap laser.”
elusive, but Stackpole and
Lang still found success:
They discovered a market
for affordable, collaborative
underwater exploration.
The pair decided to produce
a kit that would make such
exploration “accessible to
everyone,” Lang says. So far,
thousands of people have used
it to do things like observe
melon-headed whales and
discover biofluorescence in a
clam species.
Invention:
Now their company,
Trident OpenROV, has built a new
Inventors: vehicle called Trident—a drone
Eric Stackpole that works right out of the box.
David Lang Thousands of people in
Company: their online community helped
OpenROV
OpenROV develop Trident’s
Maturity: new features: a dive depth of
쏆쏆쏆쏆쏆 100 metres, a three-thruster
design that allows for delicate
Invention:
eora 3D
Inventors:
Rahul Koduri
Asfand Khan
Richard Boers
Company:
COU RT ESY EORA 3D
eora 3D
Maturity:
쏆쏆쏆쏆쏆
manoeuvres, and a sleek profile
that provides steadier, faster
movement. This enables Trident
to perform transects, which is
when it semi-autonomously
travels in long parallel lines to
capture the topography of a
seabed or lake bed. Users will
also be able to modify their
drones with extra tools, such
as special lighting systems and
water samplers.
Not to mention, the
inventors say, Trident is fun
to control. “Normal ROVs feel
much slower and heavier,”
Lang says. Steering Trident is
“almost like flying a jet fighter,”
Stackpole adds. “When you get
down there and start looking
around, it’s addictive.” OpenROV
plans to start shipping the
drone in November.
SARAH STANLEY
 While doing online
research to refine their home-
built device, the team realised
other DIYers wanted their own
cheap, accurate 3D scanners
F ROM TOP: PHOTOGRAPH BY SARAH D E HE E R ; COU RT ESY OP E N R OV
photos without capturing
reliable depth data. Eora 3D
achieves higher precision via a
soft-drink-can-sized device that
attaches to the smartphone

too. So they put aside the solar
project and created eora 3D (yes,
no capital). It’s a smartphone-
connected laser scanner that
achieves the same resolution
as an industrial scanner but at
a somewhat lower price: $415.
After a successful Kickstarter
campaign, the device will begin
shipping to backers in June.
The key to eora 3D is that it
harnesses the processing power
of smartphones, making it “as
much a software innovation
as a hardware innovation,”
says Khan. There are other
smartphone scanners, but
they are low-resolution. That’s
because they stitch together
1 An HD video
camera captures the
underwater scene.
and sweeps a green laser across
an object. The laser allows the
phone to capture depth data
for each pixel as the phone
snaps photos. The smartphone
app then stitches more than a
thousand of these images into
a digital model.
To capture the object from
all angles, users can place it on a
Bluetooth-connected turntable,
which rotates in sync with
the laser. The turntable, which
comes with the device, is ideal
for scanning small objects. For
larger ones, eora 3D can take a
few scans at different angles
and stitch them together later.
SA R A H STA N LE Y
2 you know with what you can learn and
TASTIEST INVENTOR AWARD
ALTON BROWN
Food Network star Alton Brown
began hacking (his preferred term)
kitchen devices on his food-science
show, Good Eats. During season one, he
made a fish smoker from a cardboard
box. Since then, his hacks have grown
in size and showmanship. For his first
national culinary variety show in 2014,
Edible Inevitable, Brown built his Mega
Bake oven, which uses 54 one-thousand-
watt lights to cook a pizza in three
minutes. And his Jet Cream—two fire
extinguishers, one filled with CO2 and
the other with a “top secret” chocolate-
cream mixture—makes carbonated ice
cream in just 10 seconds.
“Experimentation is the finest
expression of curiosity,” says Brown,
who is currently on his second tour, Eat
Your Science. “It’s trying to match what
what can be done. So what do I say to
kids and young adults? Take apart the
lawnmower. Build the jetpack. And don’t
forget the kitchen is a laboratory, and
there’s one in every house.”
JASON LEDERM A N

2 1
A neutrally buoyant
tether sends live
video and other flight
data to the surface.

P OP SC I . C O M. AU 47
 20 16 I NVE NTI O N AWARDS
H E A LT H
SWALLOW
A PILL TO
MONITOR
YOUR VITALS
Vital signs are key indicators
of health. But tracking some
of these signals, such as the
body’s core temperature, can
require invasive tactics—which
is especially problematic for
active or injured patients.
Almost anyone, however, can
swallow a pill.
48 P O P U L A R S CI E N CE
That’s what Giovanni
Traverso, a gastroenterologist
and biomedical engineer at
Harvard Medical School, and Al
Swiston, a biomaterials scientist
at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory,
realized when they met at
a work event in 2012. At the
time, Traverso was working on
ingestible devices and Swiston
on vital-sign monitoring—so
they decided to join forces to
create what Traverso calls “an
ingestible stethoscope.”
“It’s basically a really tiny
microphone that is able to listen
just like the doctor would,”
says Swiston. The PSM pill
(short for “physiological status
monitoring”) contains special
microphones that pick up the
sounds of the heart and lungs,
3
as well as a tiny thermometer
that measures core body
temperature. It is the only pill
of its kind that can track three
vital signs at once.
So far, the prototype has
successfully been tested in pigs,
and the team plans to try it in
humans next. If all goes well,
the military could one day use
the device to monitor soldiers
in the field for hypothermia
or dehydration. A marathon
runner could closely track her
heart rate during a race. And
Invention:
PSM Pill doctors could look for abnormal
Inventors: heart rhythms or early signs of
Giovanni Traverso asthma. The researchers hope
Robert Langer to one day incorporate drug
Al Swiston
delivery so the pill could also
Affiliation: treat the conditions it detects.
Harvard Medical
School, MIT’s CL AIRE MALDARELLI
Lincoln Laboratory
Maturity:
쏆쏆쏆쏆쏆
2 1 Once a person swallows
the pill, hydrophones
(microphones that work un-
derwater) pick up sounds
coming from the heart and
lungs, while a small ther-
mometer measures core
body temperature.
2 The monitor sends the
sound and temperature
data to a computer, where
an algorithm separates the
waveforms of the sounds
into two distinct tracks: one
for respiratory rate and one
for heart rate.
3 As the pill travels through
the GI tract, the doctor is
able to continue monitoring
vital signs until the pill
passes—which happens
within a day or two.
IL LU ST R AT ION BY M C KIB ILLO

C O U RTESY MX 3 D; A L L I N V ENTO R IM AG ES C O U RTESY O F T H E I N VE NTORS
ARCHITECTURE
A BRIDGE
PRINTER
For the past 12 years, the Joris
Laarman Lab in Amsterdam
has crafted experimental
furniture and artwork. To
produce their more ambitious
designs, Laarman and his
partners adopted 3D printing
early on. But existing printers
couldn’t produce their larger
creations. So the team built its
own system, called multiaxis 3D
printing, or MX3D.
“We thought, ‘Why not get
an industrial robot, attach an
advanced welding machine to
it, and see what it does?’” says
Tim Geurtjens, chief technology
officer of Joris Laarman Lab
and its spinoff R&D company,
also called MX3D.
First, the team developed
unique software to control
the industrial robotic arm.
Then they attached extruders—
which are the parts of printers
that push out material—to
it and started printing with
copper and aluminium.
Most 3D printers attach the
extruding tools to a frame,
which gives them three axes of
M AY 201 6
The multiaxis
industrial robots are
essentially robotic
arms equipped with
extruding tools
and the software
to control them.
movement. The MX3D has six:
It is a mobile, freely moving
robot that can travel with and
around the printed structure
to build an object of nearly any
size or shape.
To showcase MX3D’s ability
to create durable, large-scale
objects, the team is printing
a fully functioning steel
bridge in Amsterdam—a city
of 165 canals. They wanted
to do a project that would
Invention: demonstrate the technology
MX3D and inspire people at the
Inventors: same time. “So we came to the
Tim Geurtjens idea of printing a footbridge,”
Joris Laarman
Gijs van der Velden Geurtjens says, “since we are
Company: from Amsterdam, after all.”
MX3D GRENNAN MILLIKEN
Maturity:
쏆쏆쏆쏆쏆
P OP SC I . C O M. AU 49
thE
iNveNtOr’s
haNDBOOk
B Y R AC H E L N U W E R /// I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y D O U B L E N AU T

We are living in a golden age of invention.

››
Makerspaces and online creator communities abound; information
is abundant and free; equipment is affordable and available; and
crowdsourcing platforms offer a great way to test interest and build
excitement around a new idea—as well as to fund it. Because barriers to
entry are now practically non-existent, these days anyone can be an inventor.
As a result, the number of amateur creators is on the rise. Most important,
people of every age, gender, and background are involved in this movement.
“You don’t have to be an expert in a field in order to make an original
contribution,” says Steve Sasson, inventor of the digital camera and a 2011
National Inventors Hall of Fame inductee. “You can become an inventor
simply by having an idea, working on it, and refining it.”

iDeATiON
“ ”
Every Wednesday I’m inspired by every- In historical A lot of inventions
we do a live Google+ one around me, and studies of inventors, that come about
hangout called Show by reading about what we’ve discovered are because new
and Tell. People from things are like in other that they often find technologies allow
around the world show parts of the world. the world to be people to apply
off what they’re work- When I see someone irritating, and they or combine them in
ing on. Solving prob- struggling, I want want to fix it. ways that haven’t
lems that they bring to to do everything I can been done before.
us is the number-one to ease that struggle. eRiC HiNtZ
place I get inspiration Historian, lEON
for new ideas. DANiellE Lemelson Center for
SANDleR
the Study of Invention
APPlesTONE and Innovation at Executive Director,
liMOR fRieD CEO, the Smithsonian Deshpande Center
Founder and Other Machine Co. for Technological
Lead Engineer, Innovation at MIT
Adafruit

50 P O P U L A R S CI E NCE
 MAY 201 6

P OP SC I . C O M. AU 51
 So you have an idea. How do
you know if it can bring you fame and fortune?
Follow this flowchart to find out.

Try Try
again!
DOeS A again!

SiMilAR PRODUct
AlReADY eXisT?
Not really
Can you No
hire or
partner with
Yes No someone
who can
help? Yes
Does your
idea somehow
improve on
what’s already
out there?
Not sure
Yes
Is there a
Nope market for it?
Yes
Will it be
Run the idea an affordable,
by 20 to 50 competitively
experts and/or priced product?
potential
customers.
Do they express
enthusiasm
and interest?
Not sure
Yes

Yes Are you driven,

passionate, and stubborn about
your idea yet intellectually
Meh, I just want money and fame honest with yourself?

Yes

You’re a Are you willing to

Let’s invest years of your
hobbyist Yes
go! life bringing this
inventor!
thing to market?

Um, not really

52
PROTOtYPiNG
Fear of failure (or looking crazy or stupid) is the biggest hurdle for
inventors. “You can’t be concerned with that,” says Ayah Bdeir, founder
and CEO of littleBits, a platform of easy-to-use modules that snap
together into electronic projects. “You have to get over it and just jump.”

P O P U L A R S CI E N CE
››
 MAY 201 6

1 Research & Model >

DIGITAL MODELLING 2D MILLING MACHINES > 3 Finalise
and 3D modelling and Commonly used in
Inventors, like design software, such as industry for producing The final prototype
artists, start with AutoCAD or SolidWorks parts with precise sizes should be presentable for
representations before and shapes potential investors and
they attempt to make customers.
something. Among their >
3D PRINTERS Used to
methods and tools: 2 Experiment create three-dimensional SCALING UP > The tools you
objects in plastic, metal, used in the experimental
RESEARCH > The Internet The creative process wax, nylon, and more phase might get the job
is a great way to find requires trial and error— done, but your final proto-
available materials and you must test your proto- >
LASER CUTTERS Uses a type will be built to scale
possible technologies and type, tweak it to make it high-power beam to make and it will likely entail
techniques you can apply. work better, and then test exact cuts at high speeds more expensive materials
The broader your search, it again. Repeat over and and more careful design.
the better. Mixing disci- over again until there’s no ELECTRONICS TOOLS >
plines often produces room for improvement. Such as a multimeter OUTSIDE HELP > If a proto-
the best results. The goal is to quickly and for measuring electric type’s final creation
inexpensively prove the resistance, voltage, and requires skills you don’t
DRAWING > Pencil & paper technical feasibility of current; an oscilloscope have and can’t easily learn,
your product. Tools for for debugging circuits; hire expert help.
>
MODELLING Cardboard, this phase include: and a soldering iron
X-Acto knife, hot glue

P OP SC I . C O M. AU 53
 ››
fUNDiNG
Most inventions that die—the good and the bad alike—
do so because of a lack of money. For those who
are not independently wealthy, there are still a number
of options for funding the invention process.

Crowdfunding
S. Brett Walker chose
Kickstarter to fund
the Circuit Scribe—a
rollerball pen filled with
conductive ink—
because his invention was
straightforward (“Every-
one knows how to use a
pen”) and inexpensive. He
also thought it would be a
boon for the maker com-
munity, which is active on
crowdfunding sites; such
platforms can also test
interest in an idea.
Competitions
In 2007, NASA challenged
the public to design
the next generation of
astronaut gloves. Peter
Homer, an engineer, took
first place for his design
and used the prize money
to start a company. Similar
invention challenges are
hosted by Netflix, the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foun-
dation, and—for young
inventors—the National
Inventors Hall of Fame and
Georgia Tech.
Self-funding
Limor Fried started
Adafruit by investing
$10,000 of her own money.
This let her test interest and
get immediate feedback.
“Rather than trying to raise
$5 million and then blowing
it all because there’s a flaw
that you didn’t realise, first
do a small manufacturing
run of a handmade design,
using money you put in
yourself,” she says. If
customers like your idea
and you listen to their
feedback, she says, you’ll
soon see a profit.
Investors
Prior to co-founding the
company behind commu-
nications gadget goTenna,
Daniela Perdomo worked
with tech startups. So she
already had venture-
capitalist connections.
They provided funds
to build goTenna, in
exchange for a slice of the
company. “If you don’t
have a network in the
tech world, there are a lot
of VCs and angels who
publicly post their emails
or are active on Twitter,”
she says. But the best
way to pitch your idea is a
personal connection or an
introduction: “Investors
find social validation to
be valuable,” she says.
Outsourcing
Licensing or selling your
intellectual property can
spare you the hassles of
a startup. For Alexander
Nectow, the co-inventor
of Retro-TRAP—which
enables high-resolution
molecular studies of the
brain—licensing to two
drug companies was a
no-brainer (heh). “My ma-
jor interests are in basic
science and research,
not starting a company,”
he says. “I preferred to
let others apply the tool
for their own needs.”

TO MARKeT
Ideally, you’ve been developing a community of
“true believers,” as tech entrepreneur Danielle Applestone
calls them—people who know about and support your
product. Get your prototypes into their hands first. Not
only will those people provide valuable feedback, they’ll also
spread the word. To extend your reach, evangelise about
your product at conferences, meetups, and hackathons, and
write about it in forums and blogs. The media can also help
you reach new audiences and build your customer base.
Seize upon every opportunity for an interview, even if it’s
not with a major news outlet; you never know who the
story might reach. Most companies hire professional
marketers to help with this phase. Finally, use feedback and
market research to determine demand. This will help you
set the pace for scaling up.
The challenges of scaling up production often catch
inventors off-guard, so the earlier you begin thinking
about manufacturing and introducing yourself to manu-
facturers, the better equipped you will be for the future.
A typical company might reach one per cent of the total
market in its first year, three per cent in its second, and
five per cent in its third. So if your total market is about
10,000 people, you’ll need to make 100 products your first
year. For anything fewer than 1,000 units, you should
probably just build your products in-house, following
the same procedures you used for your prototype. For
1,000 to 5,000 products, team up with nearby manufac-
turers to ensure an easy working relationship and low
transportation costs. Once you hit 10,000 units, however,
you’ll need to find a large-contract manufacturer.
 MAY 201 6

P OP SC I . C O M. AU 55
FOR LOVE
OF A RED
PLANET
It’s not affiliated with any space agency, its
members aren’t astronauts and will probably
never go to space, but the Mars Society
remains dedicated to a single ideal: the human
colonisation of the Fourth Rock from the Sun.
BY ANTHONY FORDHAM
 M AY 201 6

I WANTED TO BECOME
AN ASTRONOMER, BUT
I DIDN’T HAVE THE MATHS.
SO I BECAME A GEOLOGIST.

P H OTO BY DR L I NE DR U B E

P OP SC I . C O M. AU 57
FO R LOV E O F A R E D P L A N E T

he sun rises on a
desolate landscape.
These red hills have
never had their harsh
angles softened by
a fall of leaves, a blanket of
moss or even the lace-like
encrustations of lichen. And it’s
been aeons since water flowed
here, though you can still see
where ancient streams cut their
way into the rock.
The overwhelming sense
here is of stillness, of the
unimaginable blankness of deep
time, of a place content to wait,
for a thousand years, a million.
Suddenly, a figure crosses
the horizon. It stops, raises
a hand as if to shield its eyes
against the bright morning sun.
It wears a spacesuit, fishbowl-
helmeted, encrusted in sensors
and other technology. The
When the team is in “full simulation” mode, every time they leave
figure staggers down into a
the habitat they must wear space suits. Each rig weighs up to 20 kg,
shallow depression. Dust shifts
the 1G equivalent of the 120kg worn by the Apollo moonwalkers.
around its ankles, stirring
fitfully in a light breeze.
Then the figure reaches up
and takes off his helmet. the Flashline Marsh Arctic government, the Mars Society will do valuable research

PH OTO BY M ARS S O C I ET Y AU ST RAL I A / D R LI NE D RU B E

He breathes deep, then makes
a note on a clipboard. Because
this place of red rocks and
desolation isn’t Mars. It’s Utah.
And the man in the spacesuit
isn’t an interplanetary traveller.
He’s a member of the Mars
Society, and part of a crew doing
experiments at MDRS - the Mars
Desert Research Station.
VOLUNTEER ARMY
It’s one of the Society’s two
major research facilities.
The other one is FMARS,
Research Station. That tiny
facility, looking like little more
than a water tank, simulates
Martian fieldwork in an
entirely different way.
Located in northern Canada
on Devon Island, FMARS sits
in a region of permafrost, in
an ancient impact crater. It’s
165 km north of the nearest
town (Resolute, Nunavut) and
is classified as a polar desert.
It’s also what the Mars Society
calls a “Mars analogue”. Here,
without the support of any
on Martian field work. NASA, ESA and the Russians
will look at their data with interest. But the money
comes from donors and members, and no one involved
has any illusions that they personally stand any kind
of chance of going to space, let alone Mars itself.
What is this strange organisation? Vaguely
reminiscent of the great “societies” of the age of
exploration - such as the Royal Society - the Mars Society
is a grassroots club, a gang of Mars-obsessed scientists,
artists and people of no particular expertise who all
share a common goal: to do whatever they can to help in
the long, hard road to a human presence on Mars.
While the Society is global, there are regional
versions. All have the same philosophy - humans on
Mars - but for such mundane purposes as tax breaks

TIMELINE: 1951
1912 THE SANDS

MARS IN 1898
A PRINCESS
OF MARS
(EDGAR RICE
1950
OF MARS
(ARTHUR
C CLARKE) 1959
FICTION THE WAR OF
THE WORLDS
(H G WELLS)
Martians come
to Earth and
BURROUGHS)
The author of
Tarzan set a
swashbuckling
romance on Mars
1948
MARVIN THE
MARTIAN
(LOONEY TUNES)
This iconic
THE MARTIAN
CHRONICLES
(RAY BRADBURY)
Like much of
Clarke’s debut is
the first “hard SF”
novel about Mars,
has a space ship
called Ares and deals
THE SIRENS OF
TITAN (KURT
VONNEGUT)
Brainwashed Earth
exiles settle Mars
Science fiction writers have always had a
get killed by our based on the work character looks the early fiction, with terraforming - and then re-invade
fascination with the red planet. Even the germs. Remade of astronomer innocuous but his assumes Mars remarkable given it Earth. Because
ones who know it isn’t really red. Here are approximately one Percival Lowell. tech packs a punch, is inhabited by was written 10 it’s Vonnegut,
some key moments in Martian fiction. billion times since, Its relationship to much to Daffy older, more years before humans it’s probably a
in various media. reality is... slight.. Duck’s chagrin. advanced beings. went to space. metaphor.

58 P O P U L A R S CI E NCE
 M AY 201 6

LEFT: Located in the Utah

badlands, the Mars Desert
Research Station simulates the
arid conditions similar to those
on the red planet.
BOTTOM: Will Mars’ 38%
gravity allow explorers to just
hang paper from hooks and
keep objects in open bins? It’s
difficult to test.

that the Planetary Society was

too broad-based. We needed
something more focused.”
The Mars Society Australia
formed soon after and Clarke
was elected to the board
in 2001. For him,
INTEREST IN the Society offers
scientists one
MARS WANED very obvious and
big advantage.
DURING THE HEIGHT “The big problem

OF THE COLD WAR in science today is

that its enormously
AND DIDN’T REIGNITE difficult to get funding
for multi-disciplinary
UNTIL MARS GLOBAL science,” he says. “If
you want to study the
SURVEYOR IN 1996 reproductive system
of the Corroboree
arrival at the red planet of frog or the biochemistry of the
and governance, national societies exist. Our is the the Mars Global Surveyor. hibernation of the Bongong
Mars Society Australia. For the first time in 20 years, moth, you can do that. But if
(relatively) high resolution you want to go to a remote
LOCAL KNOWLEDGE photos were streaming area and simulate a Martian
Australian Popular Science spoke with the current back to Earth, capturing field expedition, there’s just no
president, Jon Clarke. His first taste of the potential of imaginations once more. university that will give you
human spaceflight was as a child, following the great “It was a new age for money for that.”
Apollo adventure via the pages of LIFE Magazine (and exploration,” says Clarke.
maybe the odd issue of Popular Science?). “Because we could look at the A MARTIAN WORKDAY
“I wanted to become an astronomer,” he says. “But I images on the Internet almost What the Mars Society’s
didn’t have the maths. So I became a geologist.” He sees as soon as they arrived.” “missions” to its two
going to Mars as the logical next step beyond the moon. As a result, in 1997 the Mars simulators do is integrate
“I remember being disappointed when I realised a Mars Society first formed in the US. engineering, biology, human
mission wasn’t going to happen in the 1980s.” “It grew from a group called resources and more to see
Interest in Mars waned during the height of the the Mars Underground,” says exactly how a Martian field
Cold War, and didn’t re-ignite until 1996 with the Clarke. “There was a feeling mission should be designed.

1961
STRANGER IN 1992-
A STRANGE
LAND (ROBERT A 1968 1996
HEINLEIN) DO ANDROIDS RED/GREEN/
DREAM OF BLUE MARS
A human raised
ELECTRIC 1967 1990 (KIM STANLEY
1993
as a Martian must
reintegrate on 1964 SHEEP?
(PHILIP K DICK)
MAN PLUS 1985 TOTAL RECALL ROBINSON)
DOOM (ID SOFTWARE)
SANTA CLAUS (FREDERIK POHL) WATCHMEN (TRISTAR) An epic trilogy of
Earth. Origin of In the story To survive on (ALAN MOORE) Arnold the colonisation Set on Mars, this videogame had
the word “grok” CONQUERS
THE MARTIANS that inspired Mars, a man is This famous comic Schwarzenegger and terraforming revolutionary “2.5D” graphics and
(“to understand”) (EMBASSY Bladerunner, illegal transformed sends its Superman goes to Mars and of Mars. A real made its developers overnight
which is still used PICTURES) Martian escapees into a cyborg surrogate, Dr does violence. Also, benchmark in millionaires. Despite the hacknied
by uber-geeks Regarded as one of complain of the and eventually Manhattan, to something about Martian fiction storyline involving ancient Martian
to this day. the worst movies terrifying oldness abandons his ties consider his options a prostitute with despite not being portals and demons from hell,
ever made. of the place. with Earth. on Mars. three boobs... you know, that good. it essentially defined the “first

P OP SC I . C O M. AU 59
FO R LOV E O F A R E D P L A N E T

THIS: Fully suited

“simulacranauts” test a
sampling device.
LEFT: Rovers have
proven their worth on
Mars, and will surely
accompany any human
exploration team.
BOTTOM: Testing newer
suits in Australia’s harsh
interior. Despite the
plants, this is very
Mars-like environment,

“That Russian experiment, in the simulated spacesuits.”

Mars 500, that simulated the
space journey,” says Clarke.
“What we do is simulate the
field work on the surface
of the planet. Everything is
recorded, analysed. Human
safety comes first, but after
that it’s all science.”
Clarke says more than one
space agency is interested in
Called Mars 160, the mission (which will start at
MDRS in 2016) will work closely with NASA’s Ames
Research Centre and the Russian space agency
too. The aim? To simulate a field program for the
exploration of Mars.
Of course, this all costs money, and the Mars
Society relies on donations and support from
members. But its facilities are “open to everybody”
Clarke says, while NASA tends to spend millions
doing a very specific experiment, then locks all its

P H OTO BY MA RS SO C I E TY AU ST RALI A / D R L I NE D RU B E / M ARS ONE

the Mars Society’s results.
NASA and the ESA are big
supporters, while the Russians
show interest.
As mentioned, currently
the Society has two stations,
MDRS in Utah and FMARS
on remote Devon Island in
Canada. In fact, Clarke is due
JOIN THE JOURNEY! to join a team at FMARS in the
The Mars Society Australia is open to northern summer of 2017, as
new members. For a yearly fee, you’ll the crew geologist.
get email updates, invites to various “There’ll be two engineers, a
events, and of course the opportunity to biologist, myself as geologist, a
contribute. The Society wants - needs - health and safety officer and a
people to come up with ideas and help out journalist,” says Clarke. “We’ll
with projects. Think interplanetarily, act be running in simulation mode
locally. marssociety.org.au most of the time. That means if
we want to go outside, it will be
equipment away in a shed.
A PLANET GIRT BY SEA
Clarke is an advocate for the construction of a new
and even more sophisticated “Martian base” at
Arkaroola in the Flinders ranges.
“It’s sufficiently isolated, but it has an all-weather
runway 30 minutes from the site,” he says. “It’s about
a day’s drive from Adelaide and there are no mining
leases or native title to worry about.” In fact Arkaroola
was Australia’s first eco-tourism venture. “There
are even radioactive hot springs at Paralana,” says
Clarke. The location is under a weaker part of Earth’s
magnetic field and is also subject to higher than
normal levels of cosmic radiation - all things that
make it a great Mars analogue.
“One of the really big advantages is that Arkaroola
would let us simulate a really long traverse,” says
Clarke, referring to the long overland trips any

2000
2000 MISSION TO MARS 2000 2001
1996 THE GREAT (BEUNA VISTA) RED MARS RED FACTION 2003
VOYAGE WALL OF MARS First of the “Mars (WARNER BROS) 2001 (VOLITION) ILIUM (DAN
(STEPHEN (ALASTAIR fever” movies that In the next of the GHOSTS OF MARS The “other” famous SIMMONS)
BAXTER) REYNOLDS) presumably started “Mars fever” films (SCREEN GEMS) Mars videogame. In the far future,
In an alternate 1986 Reynolds gives pre-production of the early 2000s, For some reason, One of the first Mars is the site
1995 where JFK was Mars as the origin in the late 1990s, Val Kilmer must get director John games to allow of a bizarre
DOOM II: HELL ON EARTH never assassinated, of one of his post- starred Tim Robbins the better of a robot Carpenter sets his the player to dig re-enactment of
(ID SOFTWARE) NASA eschews both human societies in and a mysterious that can do kung-fu remake of Assault their way through the Trojan War
Adds more nasties and eventually Shuttle and Voyager his award-winning beam of light. while dealing with on Precinct 13 on a level, almost but by post-humans
moves the action to Earth, but programs to a first Revelation Space Tried to be all Mars and weird Mars. Because not entirely in away who resemble the
otherwise the same DOOM we love. woman on Mars. series of novels. 2001... and failed. bugs or something. “Mars fever”. unlike Minecraft. Greek Gods.

60 P O P U L A R S CI E NCE
 M AY 201 6

MEANWHILE ON REALITY TELEVISION

So, Mars One. Remember Mars One?
The one-time darling of the mainstream media of an entire crew fazes him.
that promised to send four colonists on a one- “None of the disasters
way trip to Mars, using commercial space tech, in space shut down their
and paying for it with an ambitious reality TV respective space programs,”
program? Mars One CEO Bas Lansdorp (who we he says. “Flying in space has
may have interviewed a few years back) claims enormous risk. Yes people die
the show could be bigger than the Olympics, in their cars every day but
bigger than Ben Hur, bigger than Jesus probably. you personally have a tiny
Unfortunately, if you visit the Mars One website chance of being in an accident.
today, you won’t find any news about the When you go to space though,
progression of mission, but you will be invited Mars One’s fantastical concept for a
the chance of disaster is
to purchase a book about what Mars One is and habitat - realistic or hopelessly optimistic? almost one in ten. Who would
what the colonists will need to do to survive. sign up for those odds?” His
Critics (including MIT and a number of Australian candidate Josh Richards spent a few implication is clear: he would.
journalists) are now fairly sure Mars One will days in a fake habitat at Circular Quay to promote Yet Clarke himself is well
never launch anyone toward the red planet, ever. the DVD release of Matt Damon’s The Martian, past the age of experiencing
Not that the program is a scam, as such, rather but he offered no actual updates about Mars One. spaceflight personally.
that it’s hopelessly naive. Lansdorp breezily While it was a beautiful dream, it’s likely “What do I hope we achieve
dismisses concerns the colony will poison itself the harsh realities of what it takes to even get before my time is up?” he asks.
with excess oxygen, and that his cost estimates humans to low Earth orbit have taken the wind “I’d like to see humans back
are at least an order of magnitude too small. out of Mars One’s (solar?) sails. We wish it was a in space, beyond Low Earth
Meanwhile, the “accepted candidates” real thing that will really happen. But it probably Orbit.” He doesn’t exactly say
continue to do media and promote the company. isn’t, and it probably won’t. www.mars-one.com we’re destined for the stars,
but he says we should keep up
the work, and keep our eyes on
eventual Martian explorers will have to take. “We need the technology is available the prize: Mars.
an empty circle, 200 kilometres across. Australia is one nearly off the shelf, or exists “Whatever happens, good
of the few places left where you can get that.” in prototype form. We’ve been or bad,” says Jon Clarke, “the
The Mars Society Australia has designed a new putting people on the ISS for choice will be up to us.”
habitat it calls MarsOZ. The cost to build? A cool years, and some astronauts
million. But Clarke says a downsized version could be have clocked up the equivalent DISCLOSURE: Our
built for around $300K. of a round-trip to Mars. People interview with Mars Society
“The interest is there, but the money hasn’t are routinely spending six Australia president Jon
yet come,” he says. Though the ANU school of months in space.” Clarke is thanks to the latest
engineering designed MarsOZ, “we run into the Over the next hour or so, instalment of the videogame
integrated research funding problem again,” Clarke Clarke and I go on a long and DOOM. This fourth game in
says. Uni funds are tight. No one wants to spend rambling conversational the long-running series has
money on “general” science. journey discussing all the amazing graphics and frenetic
possible pitfalls and dangers action... and it’s set on Mars.
OUR MARTIAN DESTINY and “unknown unknowns” of Find it in shops and via digital
“I firmly believe we could put people on Mars within a potential Mars shot. But he download from 13th May.
a decade, if money was no object,” says Clarke. “Yes, refuses to relent. Not even the That’s right. Friday the 13th.
it would cost a few hundred billion but so much of prospect of a disaster, the loss doom.com

2015
2011 THE MARTIAN
THE MARTIAN (MATT DAMON!)
(ANDY WEIR) 2012 A mere four years
An astronaut is JOHN CARTER after the novel we
left behind on Mars (DISNEY) get this. Jon Clarke
2004 2005 and must fend A disastrously- says it’s one of the 2016
DOOM3 (ID SOFTWARE) DOOM (UNIVERSAL PICTURES) for himself while marketed film few movies that DOOM (ID SOFTWARE)
The game that started it all is back, Pits The Rock against demonic awaiting rescue. version of Edgar captures “why Like all the DOOM games/movies,
with a cutting-edge 3D graphics mutations of scientists named Popular via eBook Rice Burrough’s we would go to this is an action/horror shooter that
engine, set in a Martian refinery after the developers of the original due to liberal use of ancient Barsoom / Mars, the wonder starts on Mars, with demons. The
being overrun by demons. SOP. game. Regarded as... poor. blogger-speak. Mars stories. of that experience.” graphics will blow your mind.

P OP SC I . C O M. AU 61
 U N N A T U R A L LY

DELICIOUS
Our obsession with “natural” food could
be holding us back, at least that’s the argument
in Jayson Lusk’s latest book. But does he put too
much faith in the altruism of the free market?
Should we (or indeed can we?) trust
industrial agriculture to keep
us healthy?

In one of the first chapters of and melting them together in

Unnaturally Delicious, Jayson
Lusk’s new manifesto detailing
“How Science and Technology
are Serving Up Super Foods to
Save the World”, he describes a
memorable meal with his wife
at the Las Vegas Mesa Grill,
“one of the trendy restaurants
owned by the celebrity chef
Bobby Flay.” As fans of Mexican
and south-western food, they of
course “thoroughly enjoyed” the
restaurant’s signature entrée:
goat cheese queso fundido.
So thoroughly did they enjoy
this entrée, that his wife bought
Flay’s cookbook. And with that,
their disappointments began.
First, the fuss over finding the
right kind of chilli peppers.
Then, the time spent roasting
the peppers, making a roux,
assembling the various quesos
a dish. The recipe claimed half
an hour was needed to prepare
the dish, but it took them all
afternoon. The result? It was
pretty good, but it wasn’t quite
right. “Guess we’ll just have to
wait till our next trip to Vegas to
have the real deal,” Lusk laments.
The point of this anecdote is to
highlight how the “naturalness”
and genuine from-scratch
nature of the recipe made it not
more enjoyable, but less. Some
people might like this kind of
cooking. But odds are most of us
don’t. In Unnaturally Delicious,
Lusk, a distinguished professor
of Agricultural Economics at
Oklahoma State University,
whips up a benevolent portrait of
technological change, recounting
the stories of various “disruptive”
innovations that could save our

BY NADIA BERENSTEIN
 M AY 201 6

P OP SC I . C O M. AU 63
UN N AT U R A L LY D E L I C I OU S
lives and our planet, if only we’d get over our nostalgic obsession
with so-called naturalness. Because naturalness ain’t that great.
In the book, readers encounter a techno-utopia that is new yet
familiar, attuned to our needs in spite of ourselves, and always
perfectly at our command. But as might be evident from his robochef
ardour (see “Machine Cuisine” boxout), in Lusk’s zeal to celebrate
technology’s triumphs in “overcoming” nature’s limits, he frequently
oversells his case, touting the latest technological fi xes while
downplaying the complexity of choices needed to get us there.
Unnaturally Delicious excels in some important respects. There
is much in this book to please a reader curious about what the
farmers of the future are up to. Lusk has a relish for the technical
aspects of agronomy, and writes with lucidity and enthusiasm,
for instance, about the “precision farming” methods that combine
GPS, ingenious sampling techniques, and big data analytics,
allowing farmers to customise the application of water, fertilisers,
and pesticides on a nearly plant-by-plant basis, minimising the
resource intensity and environmental impacts of farming.
HEN OR FARMER: WHICH COMES FIRST?
In another intriguing chapter, Lusk examines the effects of a
recent California ballot referendum banning the use of battery
cages on the business of industrial egg production. A hen in a
battery cage seems such a self-evidently miserable thing that
it’s difficult to think of the cage as anything but an invention of
profit-maximising maniacs, but Lusk describes how its design
solves multiple problems entailed in hen rearing.
“There’s a reason farmers started bringing their hens indoors
decades ago,” he reminds us. “It wasn’t because they were evil
‘factory farmers’ but because they could provide a safer and
more stable environment for the hens.” Getting rid of cages and
letting hens run free seems like a great idea — who doesn’t want
64 P O P U L A R S CI E NCE
“
CAGE-FREE EGG PRODUCTION
CREATES ANOTHER SET OF
COMPLEX PROBLEMS
to rush around without a care in the world, in a grassy
meadow? — but is that kind of life actually best for
domesticated hens? It’s not at all clear.
While ethical eaters should maybe suck down the
additional egg cost, cage-free production creates another
set of complex problems, including increased risk of
disease and hen mortality due to intra-hen squabbles,
significant environmental and air quality issues, and
growing (human) worker dissatisfaction.
Yes, the cramped bare cage is pretty objectively bad.
But there are choices that lie between the “free and
natural” hen and the miserable egg factory.
Lusk describes some of the emerging solutions that
will allow us to eat our omelettes in good conscience:
enhanced cage systems designed with hen behaviour
in mind, which include perches and nesting areas; or a
funky Dutch hen factory building called the Rondeel.
This seems an obviously
c r u el way to fa r m. Bu t i s
fully open pasture bad
i n a d i fferent way ?

M ACHINE
CUISINE
Clearly, everyone who
cares about fine food
needs the services of “a
personalised chef that
makes perfect dishes every
time, without complaining
and without pay.” A
robochef, like Rosie from
the Jetsons, could be just
the machine to salvage
desire from disappointment.
This robochef, Lusk
informs us, isn’t just a
dream of a future past,
but a present-day reality.
Designed by Moley
Robotics, a prototype
robochef — a pedestal
topped by a two-metre
cylinder with programmable
robotic arms — debuted at
a German industrial fair in
2015, where it prepared a
Wit h a bad
Thermom ix, you
throw every thing
in a pot and it
explodes in your
face. A bad robot
kitchen simply
strangles you to
death and makes
sausages out of
your remains.
crab bisque by duplicating
the movements of a
celebrity chef.
Lusk’s faith in the
infallibility of the kitchen
robot is almost touching:
“The robot doesn’t forget
whether it added an
ingredient, how long the
onions have been sautéing,
or when to reduce the heat.”
You’d never be able to
tell the difference between
the robochef’s handiwork
and that of the master chef.
“Actually, the robot would
make the dish precisely the
same every time, whereas
even the best chef is known
to make the occasional
mistake.” Such a machine,
he crows, could make the
entire kitchen obsolete.
M AY 201 6
He also suggests creating a market for animal welfare
credits, similar to the emissions permits sold to
incentivise investment in cleaner energy.
In Lusk’s accounting, the California ballot initiative,
motivated by misguided sentimentality but unwilling
to back up its feelings with investments in new methods
of egg production, made little difference to the actual
experiences of hens. For Lusk, this story has a clear
moral: meaningful change comes neither from the ballot
box nor from government regulations and standards,
but from investment in basic research and technological
innovations, guided by free market processes.
Perhaps, in an age of opportunists and “tangential
experts” such as the mega-popular Food Babe (see
boxout overleaf), this kind of book is vital and necessary.
To many intelligent, well-meaning, and influential
people, the call for more local food and more farmer’s
markets, less processed food and less fast food, seems
like a no-brainer. These are solutions to Western
culture’s anguished and dissociative relationship to
food, our shamefully fat children, our pained and
dying bodies, our ravaged and warming planet.
And it is absolutely critical to question the pieties
that associate the “natural” with the good and the
harmless, to ask who benefits and who bears the costs,
and to calculate just what those costs are.
TRUST THE MARKET(?)
But for the moral authority of the “natural,” Lusk
unquestioningly substitutes the moral authority of
markets. Repeatedly, he suggests that the market
picks winners and losers for the greater good of all.
Discussing bioengineered yeasts, for instance, he
claims: “to the extent that biotechnology applications
can pass the market test, they may also address
concerns that many social justice advocates express
about exploitative plantations, high food prices, and
unequal access to quality, nutritious foodstuffs.” This
may or may not be true with regards to these products,
but it should be abundantly clear that social utility is
not an inevitable consequence of commercial success.
One chapter in particular, pointedly titled “Waste
Not, Want Not,” exemplifies both the book’s greatest
strengths — its lucid accounting of costs and benefits,
its descriptions of technologies in development and
machines in operation — and its greatest liability,
a credulous insistence on the benevolence of
technological entrepreneurs in a free market.
The chapter focuses on Beef Products International
(BPI), and its chief product: lean fi nely textured beef.
Founded by Eldon Roth in 1981, BPI pioneered
technologies for separating “high value edible protein”
from cartilage, fat, and other components of beef
scraps, the tissue that remains on a beef carcass after
butchering which would otherwise go largely to waste.
According to BPI, the protein salvaged each day
from beef scraps is the equivalent of nearly 6,000
P OP SC I . C O M. AU 65
UN N AT U R A L LY D E L I C I OU S
We suspect Jayson Lusk wouldn’t hesitate to hook
into a grapefruit that really looked like this. Each
segment a different, life - enhancing flavour. Consume!
cattle. Finely textured beef meant both a reduction in
waste and a reduction in ground meat prices.
However, you’re more likely to know finely textured
beef by its pungent dysphemism: “pink slime.” If so,
the image it will bring to mind is of a soft-serve-like
Pepto-pink sludge, perhaps accompanied by ominous
music and exhortations decrying agribusiness and
demanding “real food.”
But, according to Lusk, the notorious image is not
a photograph of finely textured beef, which is neither
slimy nor pink (except when frozen, as with other
ground beef). “I’ve yet to find a food industry expert
who knows what’s in the picture,” he says, “yet it is the
web image most viewed in connection with the term.”
(For instance, imgur.com has a running gag where one
of the Telly Tubbies’ custard-making machines is held
up as an example of pink slime production.)
Food activists use pink slime as a sort of anti-mascot
for the multiple outrages perpetrated by Big Food, and
demanded that fast food and other companies cease to
use it in their burgers.
“Finely textured beef,” Lusk says, “went from being
66 PO P U L A R S CI E N CE
1 2
1 . Vat grow n 2. A free range 3 . Orga n ic
meat: o ffen ce lifestyle might cheeseburger.
against nature or have hidden ‘Hea l thy ’ and ta sty,
inevitable future? disadvantages for but incredibly
Is it really wors e hens. Is there an resource intensive
than killing cows? ethical compromise? and ineff icient.
an ingredient in almost three-quarters of the nation’s hamburgers
to nearly none.” BPI had to close factories and lay off more than six
hundred employees.
HAGIOGRAPHICAL BUTCHERY
On one hand, we have our horror at pink slime, a disgust that
has historic roots in muckraking exposes like Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle, and in deep-seated cultural taboos concerning the
distinction between edible food and inedible waste.
On the other side, we have the factory meticulously designed to
exclude pathogens and to recover the maximal amount of protein
from the trash-heap, as well as all the jobs and value created.
To this reader, it’s an intriguing case that shows how
technological systems are entangled in complex and sometimes
contradictory ways with social values, and how the languages
of science and of food can apparently be at odds, even when
describing the same object.
But for Lusk, the story of “pink slime” is a story of profound
injustice, plain and simple. Lusk portrays BPI as a family business,
whose patriarch, Roth, rose from humble origins, never attended
college, and yet built a great company on the strength of an idea
and an invention.
Roth is the archetypal hero of this book, the effortlessly
humanitarian entrepreneur, whose innovations serve the social
good by reducing food waste, and who fully recognises the
tremendous responsibility that his company bears for the public’s
health and safety. Yet he has been laid low, heartbroken actually, as
his company’s product is maligned and its market share crumbles.
It’s a compelling tale, but one problem, of course, is that they’re
not all like Roth. Lusk labours to explain how the logic of the
marketplace holds food producers to higher safety standards
than the government ever could, and how business principles
support conservationist ethics more strongly than the laws
environmentalists lobby for. In case after case, Lusk’s clear
 JA RGON
BUSTER
LOCAVORE - a person who
prefers to eat food produced
locally, despite studies
that show centralised
production and distribution
is more efficient for large
urbanised populations.

FOOD BABE - blog name

for former management
consultant Vana Deva Hari,
3
who gives nutrition advice
and is heavily criticised for
allegedly relying too much
on pseudoscience

“
TECHNOLOGY IS ENTANGLED IN
COMPLEX AND CONTRADICTORY
WAYS WITH SOCIAL VALUES
PINK SLIME - unofficial name
of a meat product created
by processing carcasses to
recover protein that would
otherwise be wasted. Made
unpopular by viral videos
showing a substance that
probably isn’t “pink slime” at all.

implication is that the government is redundant, useless, or
regressive, and in any case completely behind the curve when it
comes to technology.
HEALTHY EATING: WHO MAKES THE CALL?
Lusk’s previous book, The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto
About the Politics of Your Plate (2013), is, by some accounts,
something of a screed, decrying the efforts of elite liberal
(it’s American, so he means progressive) “food fascists” to tax
away our freedoms in a nanny state run amok. Unnaturally
Delicious certainly puts a kinder, gentler spin on these politics —
describing, for instance, the ways that government regulations
benefit big business to the detriment of small entrepreneurs, and
the gains that could be made by young researchers in academic
and government labs if only the public would quit fretting about
GMOs, gluten, and artificiality.
In spending so much of his fire criticising the pomposity
of locavores or the chemophobia of buffoons (see boxout), he
fails to take seriously that public concerns about the role of
big business in food production might not be due to solely to
ignorance or anti-science bias.
While Lusk admits that the US federal government (and by
extension, all government) plays an important role in funding
basic research — indeed, he acknowledges his own academic
position at a land grant college is only made possible by public
funds — he laments an erosion in the quality of that work.
“An increasingly larger portion of federal research dollars has
shifted away from productivity-enhancing research” on things
like soil, seeds, and machines, “toward research on social goals
like childhood obesity, climate change, and the economic viability
CHEMOPHOBE - distinct
from the actual phobia of
chemicals, chemophobes
draw arbitrary distinctions
between “natural” and
“artificial” chemicals in
food and adjust their
diets accordingly.
of organic production and small farmers.” For Lusk,
socially oriented research is unproductive.
And yet, our food system is both social and
technological, natural and artificial. But just as
the anti-battery-cage activists’ could not allow
themselves, politically, to see how the cage was
entangled in larger technological systems of food
production, Lusk is blind to or dismissive of the social
and cultural contexts into which his technological
solutions must fit to be effective.
“The all-natural future is not the kind of future
in which I want to live,” Lusk says at one point. I am
in full and enthusiastic agreement. But I’m not sure
that the future that he offers - where an unregulated
market can do whatever it wants to our food, while we
trust in the idea that they think making people sick is
bad for business and so will do so much more than a
government to keep food safe and healthy - is the one
that I would like to live in, either.

P OP SC I . C O M. AU 67
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 EDITED BY SO PHIE B U SHW I C K

An Obstacle-
Dodging Bug Bot
TIME 2 hours In 1984, Italian neuroscientist Valentino Braitenberg
COST $30
DIFFICULTY • •••• published a book exploring how complex animal behaviours
might arise from simple networks of nerves, sense
organs, and muscles. That book, Vehicles, inspired a
robotics movement now known as BEAM (Biology,
Electronics, Aesthetics, Mechanics), which is dedicated to
designing simple robots that do complex things. You can
build your own BEAM robot with only four switches, two
batteries, and two motors. Despite its simplicity, this basic,
buglike robot can detect and avoid obstacles, shut down
by
SEA N MIC HAE L
if lifted or flipped, and wake or sleep on command.
R AGA N Just make sure to set it down on a smooth, flat floor.

70 P O P U L A R S CI E NCE P HOTOG R AP H BY Jonathon Kambouris


TO O L S
Drill and bits Screwdriver set
I NST R U CT I ON S
1 Drill out the battery
boxes’ spring rivets. Save
the ring terminals and
attached wires. Remove
the T-nuts’ prongs, put
them in the holes, and
put a spring clip, tap
washer, and ring terminal
on the posts. Secure with
6-32 screws.
I L LU ST RAT IO N BY C L I NT FO R D
2 Pass a 4-40 screw
through one box’s
bottom corner hole on
the end nearest the clip.
Temporarily mount the
roller switch: Pass this
screw through the switch
Electrician’s tool
hole farthest from the
wheel and secure with
a nut. Rotate the switch
until its other hole is
parallel to the long box
edge, and drill a small
hole through the plastic
below. Solder the four
front pins of the slide
switch to the roller
switch’s C terminal. Sol-
der the red wire to one
of its rear pins. Demount
the switches. Repeat for
the second battery box,
but connect its red wire
to the opposite pin.
M AT E R I A L S
Soldering iron
• 2 si n gl e - C
battery boxes
wi th l ea d s
• 2 6 -32 T- nu ts
wi th match i n g
screws
• 2 sma l l
spring clips
• 4 ¼ R bevel
ta p wa sh ers
• 2 machine
screws with
match i n g nu ts a n d
sp l i t wa sh ers
• 1 sn a p - a c tio n
roller switch with
25- mm a r m
• 1 D P DT
slideswitch
• 2 M 3 × 1 0 mm
F/F threaded
sta n d o ffs wi th
3 Solder two red wires with screws. Connect
to the roller switch’s NO one black wire to the NC
terminal. Then use 4-40 terminals and the other
screws, nuts, and wash- to the NO terminals.
ers to mount the battery Solder a black wire to
boxes back to back with each C terminal.
switches in between.
Install standoffs at the 5 Load the torch
rear corners. cylinders and pop them
into the battery boxes,
4 Align the lever switches one facing forward and
at 90 degrees. Solder one backward. Press a
their NC terminals tap washer onto each
together and solder rivet nut and a rivet nut
wire between their NO onto each motor shaft.
terminals. Mount the Snap the motors into the
switches across the front spring clips and turn on
of the battery boxes the slide switch.
M AY 201 6
fou r match i n g
screws
• 2 sn a p - a c tion
lever switches
wi th 25- mm a rm s
• 2 sheet-metal
screws
• 2 3 ×A A A
flashlight battery
cylinders
• 6 A A A batteries
• 2 6 -32 aluminium
r ivet nu ts
• 2 D C gea r motors,
300 to 600 rpm
• 2 large paper
clips, straightened
• 2 sma l l
fema l e q u ick-
connect lugs
6 Depress the roller
switch. Touch one black
lead to one motor ter-
minal on the same side
of the robot, and one
red lead to the other. If
the wheel doesn’t turn
forward, reverse red
and black. Solder leads.
Repeat for both motors.
7 Solder the paper clips
into quick-connect lugs
and bend into “whis-
kers” that cross ahead
of the robot. Slip the
lugs over the switch
levers and let the bot go.
P OP SC I . C O M. AU 71

Manual
History Strikes Back
Attack of the
Fire Balloons
In November 1944, Japanese soldiers
in a top-secret oceanside location loosed
a set of balloons into the westerly
winds. These globes, about 10 metres
in diameter, contained a crude but
ingenious device for releasing ballast
that their inventors hoped would keep
them airborne for three to four days—
long enough to reach the United States.
There, an onboard timer would activate,
causing the balloons to drop their
payload: incendiary bombs.
Of the roughly 10,000 balloons—or
“Fu-go”—launched, about 10 per cent
made it across the ocean. But the timer
couldn’t control where the bombs
dropped, so most fell in unpopulated
areas. The strategy never amounted to
much. Still, these balloons were the first
successful intercontinental weapons.
WA RN I NG: P l ay w i t h f i re, a n d yo u
could get burned. So be careful, and
keep your balloon under control!
72 P O P U L A R S CI E NCE
MAY 201 6
DIY-history columnist
WILLIAM GURSTELLE
gives bygone weapons
a modern spin
Last year, a pair of foresters
found a 70-year-old Fu-go,
half-buried but intact, in the
mountains of eastern British
Columbia. That amazing
discovery inspired me to build
my own fire balloon—without the
dangerous payload.
My design is much simpler
than the historical one. Because
my fire balloons lift off with hot
air rather than helium, I need to
use only lightweight materials.
First I smear a dab of Sterno
inside a small aluminium pie tin.
Once lit, the fuel heats the air in
a flimsy, plastic dry-cleaner bag,
attached to the pie tin with thin
wire. The volume of heated air
gives the device enough buoy-
ancy to rise hundreds of metres.
To prevent my DIY Fu-go
from starting fires, I tether it with
a spool of fine wire. On a cool,
still night, it looks like a jellyfish
with a pulsing orange heart
floating toward the clouds.
P HOTOGRA P H BY Ackerman + Gruber
M AY 2 0 1 6
Manual
Fund it already

Use Big Data

To Save On
Energy Bills
by ANTHONY FOR D H AM

Until now, if you wanted to know

how much heat leaked out of
your house, how much insulation 1 2
might cost, or whether or not a
photovoltaic system would be
1 URBAN HEAT ISLAND 2 WINTER HEAT LOSS
worth installing, you had to call in
Heatmap data combined with Google maps Again using thermal data, this layer
a consultant. They’d stomp around
lets you select your house and see exactly how shows how much heat escapes from your
your property and eventually
hot the roof gets at midday (and how cool at house during winter - that means you’re paying
give you a report which you can’t
night) - this factors into to your insulation costs. for heat you shouldn’t need to use. Click on
help but think is probably slightly
Town planners can also pinpoint unpleasant your roof to see how much insulation could
biased toward you paying for stuff
“hot spots” in public areas and add more trees cost, based on what R-value you want to
you might not actually need...
or other shade. achieve (from 3.5 to 5).
The CSIRO and Data61 is
running a pilot project with the City
of Port Phillip council to provide
residents with free data that
shows them, well, pretty much
anything they need to know.
Our science organisations
are awash with data these days.
Companies like Esri offer data
subscription services to platforms 3 4
such as ArcGIS. Planes and
satellites criss-cross the country
3 SOLAR POTENTIAL 4 RAINFALL
capturing all kinds of surface
Perhaps the most useful layer. Using LIDAR Pretty straightforward, this layer shows how
data: Heatmaps, water, insolation
data, and combining the angle of the rooftop much rain hits your roof. It’s also possible to
(the amount of solar energy
with the direction it faces, it’s possible to get draw polygons to take in the whole property,
hitting the ground) and more.
an accurate estimate of how much electricity the back shed, etc. Homeowners can use the
Making use of the data requires
a given section of roof should be able to data to assess how much water they should
building platforms that the general
produce. Includes solar power and solar hot be able to capture and whether a water tank
public can use. Enter OurClimate.
water analysis. or gutter upgrade is worth it.
Ultimately, this service - paid
for by your local council - could
offer residents multiple layers of
information about their address. CHECK IT OUT
Here’s what CSIRO trialled in the Right now, OurClimate is called MyClimate and exists as a pilot study for the City of Port Phillip only. But
City of Port Phillip. you can have a play with the system at: thermalweb.it.csiro.au/acrgis/myclimate/index.html

P OP SC I . C O M. AU 73
 MAY 201 6
Manual
Theme Building

Three Projects That

Reinvent Breakfast
It’s hard to get excited about a meal that takes place when you’re by
half-asleep. To get the day started right, these makers have invented J ER EM Y S. CO O K
machines that shake up breakfast. Their outlandish appliances might not
end up on your table, but they’ll certainly whet your DIY appetite.

1 CEREAL HACKS 2 BACON ALARM CLOCK 3 WAFFLE-MAKING ROBOT

In March 2015, artist and
inventor Dominic Wilcox
got an offer he couldn’t
refuse. Kellogg’s wanted
him to create five goofy
devices to liven up cereal.
Wilcox dreamed up 20.
He eventually built seven,
including a cereal-
serving drone, a spoon
with LED eyes, a “tummy
rumbling amplifier,”
and a head-mounted Traditional alarm clocks alarm.” With help Jon Eivind Stranden, a and it does the rest.” At
crane for scooping tasty wake you with annoying from friends, including Norwegian electrical- the heart of the WaffleBot
cereal. The latter, which beeps. Tech entrepreneur engineer Josh Myer, he engineering student, is a waffle iron, opened
appeared on The Late Matty Sallin decided to built a pig-shaped device. created the WaffleBot and closed by a motor
Show, uses three levers make mornings more Partially inspired by the to help cook breakfast on a wire, and a custom
to control the crane’s pleasant—with a bacon- Easy-Bake oven, it uses when he has (non royalty) valve that releases the
motion and a fourth to scented alarm clock. two halogen lights to heat guests. “It solves the delicious batter. After a
release milk. “The way “You probably have a up precooked bacon in problem of having to preset cooking time, the
it moves looks robotic,” memory of waking up to about 10 minutes. Such constantly fill and empty iron rotates upside down
Wilcox says, “but it’s the smell of breakfast,” a healthy solution! Once the waffle iron,” he says. and automatically falls
powered by hydraulics.” Sallin says. “It’s a he’s awake, Sallin simply “You just select how open, releasing a waffle
Which makes it cooler. completely effective eats breakfast in bed. many waffles you want, onto a waiting plate.

74 PO P U L A R S CI E NCE IL LU ST R AT IONS BY Chris Philpot

 Manual
Repurposed Tech

Hack a Teddy
M AT E R I A L S

• Te d d y R u x p i n D r i v e r, D u a l TIME 3 hours
• Screwdriver T B 6 6 1 2 F NG COST About $85

Ruxpin to Say •
•
•
Wirecutters
Soldering iron
CHIP computer
• 3 .5 mm aud io cable
• 3 .7 - v o l t s i n g l e - c e l l
Li-po batter y
DIFFICULTY • • •

Anything • S p a rk F u n M o t o r

Remember this guy? Back in the 1980s, Teddy

Ruxpin took the world by storm. Now, Oakland
engineer Andrew Langley is bringing Teddy back. He
hacked the bear’s circuitry and installed CHIP, the
$9 computer that his company, Next Thing, had just
crowdfunded. The 1 GHz computer can run text-to-
voice algorithms to let the bear read anything. He
might not be a true AI or have learning capability or
even be that huggable anymore, but at least you can
program him to shout aggressive beat poetry
at your great aunt. Which is what inventing is
all about really, isn’t it?
by
A ND REW
ROSE NBLUM
P H OTO G R AP H Y BY MI C H A EL B UC U ZZO ( 3)

I NSTR U CT I ON S

1. Purchase a working Teddy
Ruxpin from eBay, and
EVISCERATE IT! Pop open
its back with the screwdriver.
Inside, identify three sets of
motor connectors for the eyes,
upper jaw, and lower jaw.
2. To sync the upper and lower
jaws, wire them together: Clip
the first two wires on the upper
and lower jaw connectors, and
solder together the “jaw open”
and the “jaw closed” wires.
This doesn’t count as torture.
3. An H-bridge circuit will
let the CHIP control Teddy’s
motors. Find the relevant
wiring diagram via Google
to connect the CHIP, the motor
driver, and the bear’s control
board / tiny fuzzy soul.
4. Cut the audio output wires
that connect Teddy to his
onboard speaker, and rewire
them to the audio cable.
Plug the cable and the battery
into the CHIP. Now his very soul
is yours to command.
5. Follow CHIP’s directions
to boot up and log onto the
Internet. Then download
Langley’s software from
Github. Launch the interface,
and give Teddy something
(preferably demonic) to say.

P OP SC I . C O M. AU 75
Archives
September 1924
Goddard’s Truth
Falls on Deaf Ears
by ANTHONY FORDHAM
Here in September 1924’s
unimaginable future, we were
surprised at the sudden resurgence of
flat Earth theory over the New Year
period. Pop scientists and amateur
rappers alike found themselves
embroiled once more in a debate we
all thought had been settled or at
least gotten-over some years ago...
One of the many wrong “facts” Flat
Earthers use to “prove” that we’ve
never been to space to photograph
a spheroid Earth, is the “fact” that
a rocket engine cannot operate in a
vacuum because there’s nothing for
the exhaust to push against.
This issue has been around for a
while. Inventor of the fi rst liquid-
fuel rocket and one of the founders
of the space age (and the US rocket
program too), Robert H Goddard,
struggled to get the general public
By PROF. ROBERT H. GODDARD
Head of the Department of
Physics, Clark University
and the mainstream media to
understand and accept that his
rocket design wouldn’t just work in
a vacuum - it would work better.
After the publication of his
defi nitive work “A Method of
Reaching Extreme Altitudes” in
1919, the New York Times took
special pains in January 1920 to
ridicule Goddard in an unsigned
editorial (the anonymity was a wise
hedge of bets, as it turned out).
While the nameless editor agreed a
rocket could indeed carry scientific
instruments to high altitude, he
took issue with the idea that the
engine could operate in a vacuum:
“After the rocket quits our air and
really starts on its longer journey, its
fl ight would be neither accelerated
nor maintained by the explosion of
the charges it then might have left.
In discussing the high-altitude
rocket, there is not much question as
to the long ranges possible, if a high
velocity of the expelled gases is had
with a rocket consisting chiefly of
propellant material. There is, however,
much criticism of the idea of the rocket
propelling itself at a height where there
is practically a perfect vacuum, it being
maintained that there will be “nothing
for the explosions, or expelled gases,
to push against.”
Contrary to common supposition,
however, the explosions have a
greater effect in a vacuum than in the
air. In fact, if the air were very much
compressed, the explosions, instead of
giving strong propulsion, would have
no effect whatever.
To see this, it must be realised that
what pushes the rocket forward is the
gas that is shot back toward the rear.
The first reusable spacecraft, the Shuttle, had to dump
its external tanks during liftoff. Blue Origin and SpaceX
can now land their rockets - and thus a new era is born.
To claim that it would be is to deny a fundamental law of
dynamics, and only Dr. Einstein and his chosen dozen, so
few and fit, are licensed to do that.”
Chosen dozen? Apparently Einstein is Science Jesus,
Goddard is dumb, and the New York Times knows the
best time to kick a man is when he’s proposing the
creation of a technology that will literally change history:
“That Professor Goddard, with his “chair” in Clark
College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian
Institution, does not know the relation of action and
reaction, and of the need to have something better than
a vacuum against which to react - to say that would be
absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge
ladled out daily in high school.”
Unfortunately, it turned out the New York Times
anonymous editor of 1920 didn’t understand the “relation
of action and reaction” either - or rather, failed to realise a
rocket accelerates not because its exhaust pushes against
hus as a boy on roller skates throws
some weights backward, he will be
pushed forward by the reaction... The
aster he throws the weights, the
aster he will be pushed forward. In a
vacuum, the gases from the rocket will
scape at high speed, and the rocket
herefore will continue to be kicked
orward by the reaction.
Everyone knows that a blank
A boy on skates
cartridge, fired in a revolver, produces
throws weights a kick of the revolver; and the a
behind him, and apparatus [see opposite, the one at the
end of our red arrow] in which a blank
h e ro l l s fo r -
wa rd s. P hysics cartridge is fired in a revolver free to
in action! turn about an axis, shows that the kick
occurs also in a vacuum.
On the other hand, if a blank
cartridge could be fired in a tank
containing air under a pressure so
great that no gas could escape, then
there would be no motion of escaping

air, but because the rocket itself is
being pushed forward by the exhaust
as it leaves the rocket.
Goddard attempted to put all
this to rights in the September
1924 edition of Popular Science
(we’ve reproduced his piece below)
but at the time it had little effect.
Despite Goddard’s many scientific
Goddard’s original patent for a liquid-
fuelled rocket. Filed under “mad!”
Goddard built various deadly-
looking ‘apparatus’ to bust my ths
long before the My thbusters
gases to give a kick to the revolver.
Ask any engineer if he would
discard the condenser on his engine,
in which steam exhausts into a partial
vacuum, and replace it by a tank
under pressure. He will tell you that if
there were sufficient pressure in the
tank into which the exhaust passes,
it would stop the engine. The same
principle applies to the rocket.
In order to test this point, a
rocket chamber was fired in a tank
pumped down to but 1/1500 normal
atmospheric pressure... When the
gases were fired downward, the recoil
kicked the chamber upward, and the
rise was registered by a scratch on a
strip of smoked glass...
M AY 201 6
achievements and his pioneering
liquid-fuelled rocket launches at
Roswell between 1926 and 1941,
non-physicists kept up the
ridicule Sadly, after years
suffering from the effects of
tuberculosis, Goddard died of
throat cancer at the age of just 62.
While Flat Earthers still believe
rocket propulsion in a vacuum is
impossible, the rest of civilisation
had to admit that Goddard was
right once rockets, you know,
actually started going into space.
On 17th July 1969, the day after
Apollo 11 launched and while
Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins
where literally on route to the
moon, in hard vacuum, propelled
only by rockets, the New York
Times finally saw fit to publish
the following correction:
“Further investigation
and experimentation have
confirmed the findings of Isaac
Newton in the 17th Century
and it is now definitely
established that a rocket can
function in a vacuum as well
as in an atmosphere. The Times
regrets the error.” Thanks guys.
Because the editors of 1924
couldn’t yet appreciate how
amazing it was having Robert H
Goddard (and Werner von Braun,
etc) writing columns for them,
they went with his cover. hink
you understand it? Please email
us at leters@popsci.com.au. Is the
man with the paintbrush baffled
at the high-tech amazingness of
The results of 50 tests proved that
there is a 20 per cent greater lifting the ute-mounted spray painter
force on a rocket in a vacuum than in
air at ordinary pressure. This proof
behind him? Does he, like so
of reaction in a vacuum is but one of many in the 20s, have lice?
a number of matters than have been
settled experimentally, and that will Progress indeed!
lead to rather startling results.
P OP S C I . C O M. AU 77
Ask Us Anything
AN SWERS BY Daniel Engber & Anthony Fordham
Q: WHY HASN’T THE
US ADOPTED THE
METRIC SYSTEM?
Short answer It’s complicated.
A:
While most nations use the metric system
—those units of decimals that are universally
employed in science—the US still clings to
pounds, inches, and feet. Despite several
high-profile attempts to change that,
Americans refuse to convert.
Thomas Jefferson first tried to move the
Popular Science mothership’s home nation
toward a decimal-based system in 1789.
But without support from scientists, his idea
flopped. More than a century later, in 1906,
telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell
told US Congress that “few people have
any adequate conception of the amount of
unnecessary labor (sic) involved in the use of
our present weights and measures.”
Strong words, but still no change.
Things looked promising in 1968, when
Congress authorised a three-year study that
eventually recommended converting to
metric and laid out a 10-year plan to get
there. But they did not make the switch man-
78 P O P U L A R S CI E N CE
datory. Instead, business owners and people
who opposed big government and globali-
sation—and who saw conversion as ceding
control—won the battle for hearts and minds.
A Gallup poll at the time showed that 45 per
cent of Americans opposed the switch.
Today, the problem with metric is
the same as it’s always been: The benefits of
switching are negligible, but the costs
are huge. Manufacturers would have to
convert values on packaging. Ordinary
people would have to replace their tape
measures, switch to metric wrenches, waste
time figuring out what it means to
say its 20 degrees Celsius outside.
Even metric fans see the hassle. “Like
all educated people, I just assumed it made
perfect sense to go metric,” says Donald
Hillger, president of the US Metric Associ-
ation, which was founded a century ago to
promote conversion. “Now I look at it and
think: ‘Exactly what am I personally going to
get from this? I’m going to get annoyed.’”
Still, metric creep is already here. Yanks
buy soft drinks by the litre, machine car
parts in millimeters, and measure medicine
in milligrams. “It’s going to happen,” Hillger
says, “but at the rate we’re going, it will take
a while.” It will be a game of inches. Geddit?
Q: IS HISTORIC
LIFESPAN
SKEWED BY
DEAD BABIES?
Short answer: Only if you confuse
“lifespan” with “life expectancy”
A:
Most people accept the idea that until the
mid 20th century, the average person died
in their 40s or 50s. But if you think about
it, there was massive infant mortality back
then, so does this skewing average length
of life? Did people who survived childhood
actually live as long as we do now?
Nope, they did not. While it’s true that all
those poor babies would drag down average
lifespan if they got counted, that’s not how
life expectancy is calculated.
Basically, for a given time period, let’s say
the 1880s, demographers look at both the
birth and death rate in the population and
assign each age group a life expectancy. If you
are already 85 in 1880, you can expect to live
until 89. If you are 25, you can expect to reach
your 60s. If you were just born? Sorry, odds
are you won’t see your 50th birthday.
This takes into effect periods of extreme
child mortality (in London in the 1700s,
infant mortality was over 70%!), war and
pandemics like the Spanish Flu.
While life expectancy is a statistically
modelled “guess”, we of course do have
data on the lifespans of people born long
ago. And the data is clear: the average
person today lives longer than at any period
in the past. Here’s to a long life.
 M AY 201 6

Have a burning question? Email

it to letters@popsci.com.au

Q: Could the Tasmanian Tiger still

exist somewhere in the wild? Q: WHY DOES SUNLIGHT
A: At 68,401 km2, Tasmania is a respectable
size for an island, but it’s still a mere sliver of
the planet’s total 510.1 million km2 of land. But
LIGHTEN HAIR BUT
it’s still plenty big enough, and wild enough, to
hide a supposedly extinct apex predator. Maybe.
In their primitive wisdom, colonial Europeans
DARKEN SKIN?
decided the best way to deal with Thylacines
hassling their chook pens was to shoot the lot of Short answer Skin protects itself; hair doesn’t.
‘em and pay hunters a bounty (they also offered
a bounty on Tasmania’s indigenous population,
but that’s another even less pleasant story). As a
result, a species that had already lost its foothold
A:
The sun’s ultraviolet rays damage skin and hair. So both rely on a pigmented
on the mainland was pushed to apparent polymer called melanin for protection. Melanin both absorbs and scatters UV rays,
extinction: as any cryptozoology enthusiast keeping them away from your cells’ fragile DNA. But melanin degrades over time and
knows, “Benjamin”, the last Thylacine, died in loses its colour from prolonged exposure.
Beaumaris Zoo in 1933. In hair, the result is a bleached or yellowed effect. But because hair cells are dead—
Once the animal went extinct, everyone’s comprised only of lipids, water, pigments, and structural proteins—these light strands
attitude totally changed. Today, we want to remain in this damaged state until new hair with fresh melanin grows to replace them.
believe they still exist. Since that sad day in Skin cells, on the other hand, are alive and can react and adapt to UV rays. When sun
1933, there have been over 3800 claimed hits the skin, the body cranks out a hormone that binds to melanin-making cells, causing
sightings of Thylacines in Tasmania, with a them to produce more melanin for additional protection. This melanin populates the
slight concentration in the north east. lower epidermis and becomes darker as it disperses to the upper layers. Over time,
Look, Tasmania is still pretty wild in a lot of this process leads to a suntan, which serves to protect you better.
places. High in the hills, deep in the shadowed Prolonged exposure to UV light can eventually damage skin’s cellular DNA, though,
valleys, in the far wilderness where leaf-litter and those damaged cells put you at a higher risk for skin cancer. Tanning and repeated
and fallen branches cover the ground to a sunburns only multiply those risks. So feel free to sun your hair until it’s golden blonde—
depth of two metres or more, a dog-sized ut sl t er on that sunscreen
predator could still make itself a secret life.
It’s a nicer thought than the idea we drove
a rare animal to extinction for no good reason,
anyway. Apparently, they didn’t even eat chooks.

Q: Is there a secret hydrogen

engine that profit-hungry oil
companies suppressed?
A: It’s a fun conspiracy to believe in, but
it doesn’t really matter. The issue with
hydrogen engines isn’t whether or not they
work or are more efficient. They do work, and
their efficiency depends on what method they
use to generate power.
The issue with hydrogen is getting the
hydrogen into the engine in the first place.
Unlike petrol, hydrogen has to be stored at
high pressure and extremely low “cryogenic”
temperatures. That means expensive
infrastructure. The oil companies don’t need
to worry about H2 engines stealing their
business. Until hydrogen service stations are
built, no one has to suppress anything. Big oil
still has us by the balls.

P OP SC I . C O M. AU 79
 THE SEGWAY
Segment: Personal transport
Hyped: 2001
Released: 2002
The Segway was meant to change the world
and revolutionise personal transport. And
while the actual product is fun and relatively
easy to use, it cost US$4950 on release
- a punishing price for an electric scooter.
Inventor (and Popular Science favourite)
VIRGIN GALACTIC Dean Kamen had to sell the company, and
Segment: Space tourism in 2010, the new CEO died after plunging
Hyped: 2004 off a cliff... on a Segway. You’ll most
Released: Still waiting likely encounter a Segway today on
Backed by billionaire Richard Branson, the much hyped promise was a city tour. Don’t buy one of the
suborbital joy flights, with the (much more) distant ultimate goal of knock-off clones that costs a
establishing a space hotel. Founded way back in 2004, the company tenth the original price: there’s
got loads of interest (and millions in investments) but has yet to make a reason they’re so cheap.
any commercial flights. Despite an impressive pace of development,
the promised flights were always just a year or two away. Then Today’s Equivalent: The
in 2014, the VSS Enterprise broke up in mid-air. The company is “hoverboard”, a weird gyro-
currently on hold, despite building a spaceport in the US desert. stabilised two-wheeler with no
control stick, which people fall off
Today’s Equivalent: Mars One promises to send four colonists on a and hurt themselves. Whereupon the
one-way trip to Mars but a complete lack of, well, anything makes the hoverboard bursts into flames.
organisation appear to be either hopelessly naive or an actual scam.

The Hype Train

Famous
inventions that
got carried away
with themselves

The saying goes:

invention is 1% inspiration, VIRTUAL REALITY 1.0
99% perspiration. But Segment: Virtual reality / gaming
Hyped: 1990s
maybe the real figure
Released: 2000s, kinda
is 1% inspiration and
Before the Oculus Rift there was VR. Celebrated
perspiration, and 99% in cyberpunk and featured in dozens of 1990s
marketing. The length sci-fi flicks, it promised to transport the user into a
and velocity of the Hype virtual world via head-mounted stereoscopic video
Train - getting the public goggles. The problem? VR was first conceived in
excited by an invention - a world without small, cheap high-definition LCD
displays, or accelerometers, or even PCs capable
is almost (but not quite) of rendering a realistic virtual world in real-time.
completely unrelated to That didn’t stop various headsets hitting the
the actual success of the market. Most cost tens of thousands of dollars
invention itself. Here are and were limited to research labs. The few, very
some examples of the limited consumer units were expensive and caused
headaches. The concept was sound, but the
most hyped inventions in technology just wasn’t ready.
history. The marketing
was inspired. The product Today’s Equivalent: VR is here at last thanks to the
itself? Results varied. tech in your smartphone. Tiny displays, powerful
sensors and $1500 gaming PCs that outperform the
supercomputers of the 1990s have made devices like
the Oculus Rift (hyped in 2012, deliveries start this
by LINDSAY HANDMER &
A NTHONY FOR D HAM year) and the HTC VIVE possible. Only 20 years late!

80 P O P U L A R S CI E N CE
M AY 2 0 1 6
AIRSHIPS
S e g me nt : I nte r n at ion a l t r a n s p or t
Hy p e d : 1 9 2 0 s
R e le a s e d : 1 9 2 0 s -1 9 4 0 s
Back in the 1920s, lighter-than-air dirigibles
promised a new class of travel. Dignified,
sophisticated, classy and luxurious,
Zeppelins such as the Hindenburg plied the
skies, shuttling wealthy passengers from
Europe across the Atlantic to New York
(docking atop the Empire State Building) and
Rio, Brazil. The biggest airships were over
twice as long as the largest fixed wing craft
flying today, and vastly out-ranged planes
and auto-gyros alike. Contrary to popular
belief, it wasn’t the Hindenburg disaster that
sounded the death knell for airships. No, it
wasn’t that one airship crashed, it was that
pretty much all airships crashed, eventually.
The US Navy’s pride the USS Shenandoah
crashed in 1927, and the sister-ships USS
Acron and USS Macon crashed in 1933 and
1935 respectively, and there were many
others. The USS Los Angeles and the Graf
Zeppelin were unusual in that they both
retired without crashing. The Graf Zeppelin
managed 17,177 flight hours and the
Los Angeles racked up 4,181 (some
modern airliners have flown well over
100,000 hours). The real problem?
Airships are just too slow.
Today’s Equivalent: Supersonic commercial
air travel and “suborbital” flights. Sydney to
London in four hours? Yes please!
3D TV/FILM
Then
Segment: Entertainment Retro Invention
Hyped: 1980s
Released: 2010
Another staple of science-fiction, 3D entertainment was
pioneered at the theatre with anaglyph glasses - those
dorky paper jobs with one cyan eye and one red. By
encoding half of the image with a red filter and half with
cyan, a limited 3D effect could be created, at the expense
of colour fidelity. The advent of LCDs and polarised lenses
allowed other technologies to bring 3D to the cinema,
but it took high-resolution LCD displays (and digital
projectors) to bring 3D back in a big way starting in 2010.
Mid- to high-end TVs sold in the last five years usually
have 3D functionality via LCD-switching glasses that
need a battery, or more commonly via polarised plastic
lenses. Market research shows people hardly use 3D and
today it definitely takes second place to 4K as a killer THE TRUE PIONEER
feature. Cinemas have embraced the tech, however. High
resolution digital projectors give good results, and it allows
cinemas to charge a premium on tickets. Think the iPhone saved
Apple? It would never have
happened without the iPod.
Today’s Equivalent: 4K. This ultra-high resolution has The original was a 5GB lump
four times the pixels of full HD with its 3840x2160 grid (vs with flaky software, a weird
1920x1080). Ultra HD TVs are now affordable but ironically Firewire cord and Mac-only
connectivity. But it tapped a
there’s still very little 4K content available. previously unidentified desire
in the market for personal tech
that wasn’t just functional,
but beautiful. There were
other music players, but the
iPod won the hyper-Darwinian
game of consumer electronics
survival, and the rest is history.
THE FLYING CAR
S e g me nt : Pe r s on a l t r a n s p or t
Hy p e d : 1 9 2 0 s -2 01 0 s
R e le a s e d : T B A
The dream of personal flight, of taking to the sky
as easily as we now take to the road, has a long
AN ELECTRONIC
history. Way back in 1926, Henry Ford tried to DEMON WRAPPED
build ‘the Model T of the air’ and later predicted IN CUTENESS
that a combination car and plane was mere years
away. In more recent times (the 1990s onwards),
Furby was the must-have toy
the Moller Skycar appeared on Popular Science’s of 1998. The massive hype was
cover more than once, and continually renewed in part due to its fake robotic
our hope of driveway take-off, until the joke (fauxbotic?) nature, in a world
that had a vague idea that
could no longer be sustained and the company
robots and computers were
filed for bankruptcy. Just last year, the gorgeous becoming “a thing”. Following
looking Aeromobil (pictured) sparked worldwide fights over the limited number
attention - before a crash landing that is. In any of first-run units, Fury went on
to sell/spawn over 40 million
case, it’s more a “streetable plane” than a “flying
abominations. The joke? The
car” as are all the other various examples. “learning” was all fakery. But
inventor David Hampton was
Today’s Equivalent: The flying car remains an happy to wait - an “Empto-
Tronic” Furby hit shelves in
enduring “tech of the future” even today, when we
2005, and a proper learning
live in the future. A closer dream is the affordable toy-bot with LCD eyes and an
electric car with road-trip range. Could Tesla’s app arrived in 2012.
Model 3 finally deliver?
P OP SC I . C O M. AU 81
Labrats
Inverse Pyramid
Body Fuel Life
Support Coupons
Is it fair to judge a food based purely
on whether or not you can digest it?
My relationship with food has
always been strictly utilitarian. When
you’re one of the intellectual poor, you
gotta leave your hang-ups about the
beans touching the mashed potatoes,
uh, somewhere else.
Typically I eat out of packets.
Maybe I should move to a country
that still has the kind of poor people
who cook street food, but none
of those countries do the sorts of
scientific research I rely on to pay
me $125 per experiment. So I buy
noodles in bulk.
I’ve previously recounted my
experience with food replacement
powders. The powder is convenient,
yes, but the total glandular collapse
that follows is not. Maybe it’s a
psychosomatic thing. I need my food
to at least look like, you know, food.
“Unsustainable farming practices
aren’t sustainable,” says Sally
Fodmap, the CEO of Inverse Pyramid.
It’s a new ‘science-based techno-food
provider with digital app and social
media nutrition gamificationTM’. She
goes on: “We believe in a world where
food can inspire us to create amazing
social experiences by harnessing the
power of emergent communities.”
We’re sitting at a plain formica table
somewhere in the city’s south. As
usual, I give my little speech: “Look,
I’m just here to do the test, I don’t need
background justification for why you’ve
created your product or whatever. I
just want to get this done and get my
$125 because I’m low on ramen.”
“Ramen!” splutters Fodmap. “Do
you know what that stuff is made of?”
“Uh, wheat and artificial miso-style
82 P O P U L A R S CI E N CE
STORY BY Subject Zero
flavouring powder?” I hazard.
“EXACTLY!” cries Fodmap.
“Unsustainable! Our personalised
recipes - which you can share on
Twitter and Instagram via a dedicated
button on our integrated digital
oven - are completely free of all
unsustainable crops and food sources
including wheat, rice, cotton, water,
brown coal, gelatin, wild-caught
yellowfin tuna and saffron.”
“What... what does that leave?” I
ask, because I can’t help myself.
“Excellent question,” says Fodmap,
and examines her nails for about a
minute. She looks up. “Oh! Well, our
nutritionally ethical ingredients are
from completely natural non-animal
colouring agents and cellulose.”
“Cellulose?” I ask. “Like, from
plants? I thought humans couldn’t,
you know, digest cellulose?”
“HAHAHA!” says Fodmap and I
mean she doesn’t laugh, she carefully
and deliberately says HAHAHA.
“That’s what agribusiness and the fast
food megacorps want you to believe.
Cellulose is the most abundant
organic compound on the planet.
Therefore humans must be able
to digest it, otherwise we couldn’t
have evolved in the first place. See?
Checkmate, science!” Fodmap sits
back again, looking very satisfied.
“Come on,” she says. “Eat up.”
I look down at the plate in front of
me. Following Fodmap’s speech I am
now certain of what I had previously
only just suspected: this is a plate of
corrugated cardboard and powdered
milk. The cardboard has been cut
into different shapes that vaguely
resemble the traditional foods that
inspired it. I suddenly realise the bean
shape is touching the potato shape,
damnit. I hate that in a meal.
“Nutritionally enhanced,” says
Fodmap, leaning forward and pointing
one blood-red fingernail at the slop.
“Completely ethical in every way. And
of course totally recycled.”
“Recycled?” I exclaim. Fodmap
suddenly looks askance.
“Um no, no not recycled. Definitely
not recycled. Definitely no residual
organics from aquarium exhibits that
have completed their life cycle. No
no no. Ground up lungfish you say?
Who gave you that idea? Did someone
leak? Is someone leaking to the
press?” Fodmap grips the table, looks
around wildly, blinks a lot.
In an effort to placate her, I fork a
mouthful of soggy cardboard into my
face. Yep, it tastes exactly like I always
imagined soggy cardboard would
taste. I chew away at it for a
bit. Fodmap looks hopeful.
“Is it... good?” she asks,
breathlessly, staring at me intensely.
“Uh,” I say. “Define good?”
“Does it... can you taste the
ethical integrity? Can you detect the
personalised nutritional enrichment? NEXT
Or is it just a bit too lungfishy?” She
blanches. “Not that it would be at
ISSUE!
all lungfishy. No lungfish used in the Issue #91,
production of Inverse Pyramid Body June 2016
Fuel Life Support Coupons.”
She’s doing some kind of weird On sale 2nd
finger-crossing ritual, like I guess the June 2016
marketing equivalent of warding off ORION: INSIDE
the evil eye. I decide to ignore it, and NASA’S MEGA-
swallow. It goes down... pretty bad. BUDGET
“Oh God,” says Fodmap, staring CREWED
at me. “Did you just swallow the MISSION
substrate? Why did you do that you TO MARS //
Suspended
idiot, that stuff is basically cardboard.
animation //
You can’t digest cardboard. Ugh! I told
UBER FOR
Sonny we need instructions. This stuff BLOOD? //
isn’t intuitive at all. We better stop the Olympic tech //
test. Here’s your $125. I suggest you MAKING DRUGS
spend at least some of it on laxatives.” IN SPACE //
I smile, because she says that like Disaster theme
I’ve never heard it before. park + MORE!
 The screens of the Future are available today!

Screen Innovations has worked with NASA to
develop a one-of-a-kind, ambient-light-rejecting,
zero-gravity screen to be installed in the Interna-
tional Space Station…
Until now, astronauts on the International Space
Station communicated with Mission Control and
their families back home on tablet-sized 13-inch
displays. Now they will have a large roll-out screen
from Screen Innovations, together with a laser pro-
jector that should last more than 30,000 hours of
use – that’s a movie a day for more than 40 years.
The criteria for a screen in space were unique, from
the obvious need for extreme lightness and easy
storage to trickier requirements such as screen
rigidity in zero gravity and the ability to reject the
bits of food and other detritus that have a habit of
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Although the theatre in your home resides in
a more-worldly environment with picture quality
taking a front row seat it’s nice to know that Screen
Innovations also delivers the best down-to-earth
solution around.

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02 9949 9349 sales@networkav.com.au www.networkav.com