Bugs can go places that humans can’t; they cooperate better than almost any other organism; some of them can even fly. It’s those desirable traits that are driving robotics toward a future that looks more like A Bug’s Life than The Jetsons.

Within a decade or so, swarms of mechatronic bugs outfitted with sensors and wireless transceivers will likely be burrowing through the rubble of buildings to search for earthquake survivors and scrabbling over the hull of a spacecraft to repair damage inflight.

A visit to the spa, circa 2015: Your session begins with a battery of mental tests—from visual puzzles to memory quizzes to games that measure reaction time. After your results are evaluated, you don a lightweight helmet housing electromagnetic coils and relax while a certified “neurotrainer” consults a 3-D image of your brain to adjust the helmet settings. You feel oddly energized as the device zaps your gray matter with painless energy pulses. After a few minutes, you visit the smart bar for a custom regimen of brain-enhancing pills.

“They’re drosophila with a backbone,” Pamela Yelick says as she shows me the tanks full of zebra fish in her lab. Translation: The critters are easy to work with, and scientists have cracked their genome, making them almost as good as fruit flies when it comes to doing genetic research. But for Yelick, a molecular biologist at the Forsyth Institute in Boston, one crucial trait makes them even better than fruit flies: Zebra fish have teeth. And not only that, they continuously shed and regrow those teeth over the course of their lifetime.

Call it the smart communicator. In a few years, the functions in today’s personal digital assistant (PDA)—notebook, to-do list, calendar, contacts—will be the least of it. Thanks to a variant of Moore’s Law that says data-storage density doubles every 18 months, tomorrow’s smart communicator will hold 250GB—enough to store 55 movies.

New York, NY, May 5, 2004--Popular Science received a National Magazine Award for General Excellence from the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) today at an industry luncheon, held at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City. This marks the first time Popular Science has been nominated in the General Excellence category, as well as its first National Magazine Award win.

At the turn of the 20^th century, corrupt entrepreneurs roamed the country in covered wagons, peddling "cure-all" tonics that were little more than alcohol and crushed leaves. The public drank it up, literally and figuratively, and many of these traveling leeches enjoyed millionaire status back when that was still a meaningful designation. We may think we live in a more enlightened age, but two scientists who often forgo their day jobs to chase frauds say snake-oil salesmen posing as science or health experts are as prevalent as ever.

6:00 A.M.




I'm not up five minutes, and it looks like I'll get my RDA of science claims at breakfast. Cheerios "can reduce your cholesterol."¹ My milk derives from a dairy whose cows "graze freely on lush natural pastures as nature intended."² My Concord Foods soy shake is "fat-free" and a "good source of fresh fruit."³

You’d think this mission was the brainchild of some mischievous teenagers who love mailbox baseball, but the attempt here is more like shooing a fly into the path of a speeding Hummer. Scheduled for a January launch, NASA’s Deep Impact will pull alongside the orbital path of comet Tempel 1 on July 3, 2005, when the comet is half a million miles away from Earth. The mother ship will release the impactor, a 793-pound copper-and-aluminum “fly,” which will drift for 24 hours as the comet closes in at 6 miles per second.

I need to find out, once and for all, how big it is. I need to see if I measure up to the other guys, if I have what it takes. And to do that, I’ll have to hang it out in public, let them size it up, in a very open display of the one quantity most important to the American car guy. Horsepower.

Dept: Gray Matter

Element: Tungsten

Project: Arc melting

Cost: $220

Time: 30 minutes

DABBLER | | | | | MASTER