Science

I’ve just stepped onto the factory floor at Segway world headquarters in Bedford, New Hampshire, when two engineers sporting matching jeans (tapered), shirts (plaid) and hairlines (receding) glide by and shoot me matching expressions (grins). “Doesn’t anyone walk around here?” I ask, as the distinctive, almost melodic hum of the Human Transporter (HT) trails off. Segway development engineer David Robinson responds with a different expression, this one more quizzical than the one on his colleagues’ faces. “Would you?” he asks.

Pit a California ground squirrel against an ambushing rattlesnake, and you may be surprised by the defense. The rodent squares off, flails its tail, kicks up sand, even bites. But its most covert weapon has escaped the eyes of scientistsuntil now. Researchers at the University of California, Davis, have discovered that the squirrel's tail actually heats up during battle, radiating an infrared signal that can send rattlers slithering.

By 1919, hail cannons had been discredited—but people intent on changing the weather refuse to give them up.

The evolution of life on Earth over the past four billion years may be the most lavish, and successful, R&D program in history. The human being, capable of making tools and solving crossword puzzles, is one remarkable product, but so too is the squid, which mastered jet propulsion millions of years before NASA, and the bacterium—the original inventor, three billion years ago, of the free-spinning wheel. Natural selection has exploited almost every physical and chemical phenomenon, including electricity, which is used by both sharks and the duckbill platypus to sense potential prey.

Powerful explosions take place near James Walker’s office in San Antonio, Texas, every day. At two adjacent shooting ranges, testers fire guns, and in a third facility built to simulate massive impacts, they smash materials into targets at more than 25,000 miles an hour.

A week after finishing her dissertation on the formation of the moon, Robin Canup danced the lead in Coppelia with the Boulder Ballet. “At the time, it felt like I had a wonderfully full and busy life,” she says, “but I can’t believe now I did it all.” Canup, 35, stopped dancing professionally five years ago. “By that age you’re an old dancer but a young scientist,” she says. Still, there’s an unexpected harmony to her career: Now she studies how moons glide around planets in space.

For the third straight year, we have pounded on the doors of academe, scrutinized professional journals, and scoured the rosters of awards-granting organizations to select 10 scientists to watch—people who are gaining recognition from their peers yet remain virtually unknown to the public.

“See this?” says Henrik Jensen. He clicks a mouse button, and an onscreen marble bust starts to rotate. The spinning torso has a subtle, almost intangible glow. Thanks to complex computer algorithms Jensen devised, it appears uncannily real.

When we make a new memory, where is it stored in our brains? The question consumed Karel Svoboda for years. Others had approached the problem in two ways: They used noninvasive technologies such as MRI and PET scans to watch the living brain in action; for a closer look, they dissected brain tissue under the microscope.

When Claire Gmachl worked at Bell Labs, she had a parlor trick that never failed to delight visitors. She would place a lens a few inches from a laser and clamp a matchstick six inches in front of the lens. Then she’d use the lens to focus the laser’s invisible infrared beam onto the matchtip, and voil! She could light a match without touching it. You might think a scientist would be glad to have an entertaining way to show off the power of her devices. But to tell the truth, Gmachl found the exercise a bit “dorky.” She has little patience for distractions.

Brian Enquist talks about the natural world as if it were a wind-up clock. “If you take it apart, it’s very complex,” he says, “but there are some very simple principles that make it work.” And like a master Swiss watchmaker, he is looking for a set of universal laws that describe the
rhythms of plant and animal life.

Summer temperatures rarely rise above 0 degrees Celsius in Antarctica. There are no trees or flowers, no cars or cable TV—just perpetual daylight, a hunk of ice the size of the continental U.S., and glaciers as big as cities, moving hundreds of meters a year. Deep within those glaciers, under millions of pounds of pressure, the history of the atmosphere lies buried.

“I don’t actually like the cold,” admits Kurt Cuffey.

David Liu didn’t want his cats to be bored while he worked long days in the lab. So a few months ago, he did what any enterprising amateur inventor in his position would do: He whipped out his Lego set and built a motorized, heat-sensing, stuffed-mouse-flinging catapult to keep his kitties entertained. “They love it,” he says.

When Liu was still a graduate student at UC Berkeley, he had a different kind of tinkerer’s epiphany.

DAVID WAGNER
UC Berkeley computer scientist Wagner co-authored a withering critique of an Internet-based voting system that the U.S. had planned to introduce for citizens living abroad. The report, which described multiple security flaws, led to the program’s abrupt cancellation in February.

Dreaded cables!