Science

On December 27, 2004, while the world was focused on the Indian Ocean tsunami, a few astronomers were contemplating the possibility of an even deadlier disaster: that of a massive asteroid striking Earth. A fifth of a mile wide—heftier than the space rock that leveled a vast swath of Siberian forest in 1908—Near-Earth Asteroid 2004 MN4 had grabbed the attention of NASA scientists just before Christmas. They put the chance of an April 13, 2029, collision at 1 in 2,700 and two days later upped the odds to 1 in 165.

E-mail spam offering lower mortgage rates and prescription-free Cialis regularly clogs up our inboxes, but scientists and graduate students also receive e-solicitation of a different kind: calls for paper submissions to research conferences. One conference’s constant entreaties for papers—and the registration fees required to submit them—led three grad students to suspect that the hard-sell approach of the conference organizers would result in relaxed academic standards. To test their theory, they submitted two fake research papers. But the students didn’t fake

Don’t tell anyone, but Doug Ausenbaugh has built an underground drug farm—in bucolic southern Indiana, no less. It’s cleverly cached in an old limestone mine near the hamlet of Marengo. There, carefully cultivated stalks flourish under the glare of artificial lights and the rainlike spatter of drip irrigation.

A few weeks ago, I was eating in a restaurant in West Virginia

Devalued stocks, raging unemployment and weakened national pride plagued the 1930s, but PopSci escaped the Great Depression with a focus on fun inventions. A ride that “gives thrill seekers topsy-turvy sensations, comparable to those of looping the loop in a plane” graced our May 1934 cover, half a century after the roller coaster first appeared in American amusement parks. A giant steel arm swung this four-passenger car like a pendulum until momentum took over, hurling riders around a full loop.

In a heated wartime editorial, PopSci rebutted highly publicized claims that U.S. planes were inferior in speed, range and armament to enemy fighters—claims made by Major Alexander de Seversky, a WWI Russian pilot turned U.S. aircraft manufacturer. “It would be an insult to the dictionary to designate as ’military’ craft so deficient in the basic qualities necessary for combat,” he wrote in his 1942 book Victory through Air Power. We argued that each plane in the U.S.

Take your medication with a gun made by PowderMed in Oxford, England, and the drugs will blast into your skin at 1,500 miles per hour. “You hear the sound, so you know it’s gone off,” explains Mark Kendall, a mechanical engineer at the University of Oxford and co-inventor of the flashlight-shaped disposable device.

First off, let me just say that i'll enjoy watching The Thing, a 600-pound creature made of orange rock, stop an oncoming 18-wheeler with his shoulder every bit as much as the next guy. But it's not the action scenes that get me excited about a movie like The Fantastic Four, which premieres on July 8. Whenever a new comic-book movie debuts, I get a kick out of seeing how the filmmakers finesse the science.

Deep-sea explorer Robert Ballard led the team that discovered the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic in 1985. Since that time, more than 100 scientists and tourists have visited the two-mile-deep site in submersibles. Now Ballard has a high-tech plan to radically expand the number of people who can visit the beloved wreck: Equip the Titanic for real-time virtual visitation with a system of video-equipped remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) permanently installed on the ocean floor [see Popular Science’s rendition of the system in our July issue].

When mosquitoes brought West Nile virus to New York, all the papers said it was going to be the next big deadly epidemic (which, of course, it wasn’t). The day the news came out, I was in my garden in Pittsburgh, and a mosquito landed on my arm. I smacked it, then immediately thought, “Oh my god! West Nile virus!” So I ran inside and did something I hadn’t done since grade-school summer camp: I doused myself with insect repellant. Then I got a whiff of the fumes and remembered I just read an article saying insecticides cause Parkinson’s disease!

The papers Einstein wrote in 1905 covered a broad swath—special relativity, electrodynamics, Brownian motion, light quanta. Churned out in less than a year, these ideas had lasting impact: scientists today still devote their lives to evaluating Einstein´s work on gravity, space and time. Einstein isn´t the only scientist, however, to pull off such compacted productivity. Newton, Galileo and others had their own superproductive 12-month stretches—but as far as we can tell, no post-Einstein scientist has managed one. Why? Read on.
Galileo Galilei: 1609-1610

Primers on high-security building design warn against basement garages. It’s a lesson learned from bitter experience: the 1993 truck bomb that exploded below the World Trade Center, killing six. But parking is a key commercial asset, and a large underground facility is planned for the Freedom Tower. Designers promise that vehicles will be screened and that blast-resistant materials will be used.

Running up the center of the building is a fortresslike tower whose walls, made of two-to-three-foot-thick reinforced concrete and steel, will provide structural support for the building and fire protection for the infrastructure it contains: elevators, stairways and utilities such as the pipes that carry water to the sprinklers.

If the World Trade Center attack had occurred at a busier time, it would have taken occupants four hours to get down the stairs—hours they didn’t have. The solution: emergency elevators. Surprising?

Firefighters have trouble battling blazes in areas larger than 7,500 square feet. But the Freedom Tower will have the open plan favored by corporate tenants: 35,000 to 52,000 square feet (depending on the floor), broken only by a central corridor. Designers in China have an innovative solution to this conflict between safety and the flexibility businesses require: fireproof partitions housed in the ceiling that lower automatically in case of fire.