February 2008

Meet Jennifer Daftari’s fifth-grade class at Jay Elementary School in Jay, Oklahoma. They don’t know it yet, but they’re going to save the world.

I got an e-mail not long ago from Ms. Daftari in which she made a compelling (and ego-satisfying) case that her students are PopSci’s greatest fans. Every month when she announces the arrival of a new issue, she wrote, “they wildly applaud, sitting on the edge of their seats to see what new ideas, technology and inventions their eyes will behold. You and your staff are ‘rock stars’ to my students.”

There's just no nice way to say it: You're stupid with your money. You may fancy yourself a shrewd investor, but if you have normal human instincts—if you stand up and cheer at sporting events, if you follow the crowd toward the exit at the theater—then you have the instincts that make investors alternate between delirious greed and inconsolable fear. Like most of your peers, you are wired to buy high and sell low, and that's why Richard Peterson is about to become one very rich psychiatrist.

Carnivorous plants generally stick to a diet of bugs that they ensnare. On rare occasions, though, tropical pitcher plants—which drown and break down prey in vase-shaped traps that can be smaller than a little finger or larger than a football—have been found holding the skeletal remains of frogs, geckos and even small rodents. But what about human flesh?

Camera makers love the incremental update: selling a new model with just enough enhancements that you'll be tempted to trade up. But if you own one of several Canon point-and-shoots, you can get new features, such as shooting in high-quality RAW format, measuring accurate exposures via a live histogram, and even running simple applications like games or a calendar, without having to pay for an upgrade. All you need to do is replace your firmware, the computer code embedded in the camera's memory that serves as its operating system.

Last summer, more than 1,000 environmentalists in the U.K. staged a weeklong protest in a "Climate Camp" at Heathrow Airport, where about 70 people were arrested. Their immediate purpose was to block a planned expansion of Heathrow, but the protests highlighted a growing complaint in Europe—that the ride to global-warming catastrophe is being fueled not only by coal-fired power plants and SUVs, but also by the ever-rising number of commercial jets. Now governments are starting to listen.

Replacing a circuit breaker in a dark basement is one thing. But what if you had to climb around the outside of a spacecraft orbiting hundreds of miles above the Earth to do it? This kind of dangerous maintenance work has become fairly common for astronauts aboard the International Space Station, where they spend as much time fixing the $100-billion-plus orbiting science lab as they do performing actual research.

Even snail mail is getting a tech upgrade. This month TrackingtheWorld, a California-based GPS developer, expects to begin mass-producing Letter Loggers—small GPS-equipped envelope inserts that could help the U.S. Postal Service spot bottlenecks in the system. The insert is durable enough to shoot through sorting machines without crushing the circuits. A high-gain antenna pulls info from a satellite every few minutes and records the letters location to a memory card (to prevent interference with other devices, it wont transmit data in real time).

It’s a drizzly morning on New York’s Upper East Side, and Rockefeller University microbiologist David Thaler is sipping a double espresso amid the retro-hippie pillows and dangling paper stars of Java Girl, a favorite haunt of the neighborhood’s brainiac Nobel laureates, aging poets and famous entertainers. Thaler somehow manages to embody all three—a long, graying ponytail curling down the middle of his back, wire-frame glasses askew over expansive brown eyes, and a schnozz to rival an Einstein, Ginsberg or Allen. Thaler is one of the leading cheerleaders for a new field of biotechnology aimed at engineering the bacteria inside us to deliver drugs, destroy tumors, actively fight infection, and even vaccinate against their disease-causing kin.

To a chemist, burning means the rapid combination of a fuel with oxygen, called oxidation. You might say, for instance, “Oh, no, we didn’t have a fire at the nuclear power plant, we just had a ‘rapid oxidation event,’ ” a phrase that won officials at Three Mile Island the Doublespeak Award in 1979.

Ralf Ottow was standing in front of his bathroom mirror one morning when he noticed that his forehead was sunburned. He hadnt been out tanning—his homemade flashlight had fried his skin.

Once upon a time, when banks observed the gold standard, every dollar was backed by an equal amount of metal. Put simply, your money was in the vault. But now cash is all most people ever get to hold, and as the dollar goes digital, the only tangible vestige of your wealth will soon be the computer that keeps track of it. So where is your money today?

You have to listen very, very closely, but yes, cells produce a symphony of sounds. Although they wont win a Grammy anytime soon, the various audio blips produced by cells are giving scientists insight into cellular biomechanics and could even be used to help detect cancer.

Every single American bank note is printed at Bureau of Engraving and Printing facilities, with ink and on paper each made, separately, in only one factory in the world. And yet at any given time, there is at least $70 million worth of fake U.S. currency floating around, 75 percent of which is in $100 bills. In large part because of the advent of inexpensive scanners and printers, more and more fake bills are entering circulation: From 1997 to 2007, the amount of passed counterfeit bills nearly doubled, to $64.9 million.

By this spring, drivers in the U.K. will encounter an unfamiliar, and unprecedented, option at the pump: gasoline blended with a corn-based alcohol called butanol. It's part of a pilot project run by energy company BP, which aims to gauge public reaction to the new fuel. Butanol is easier to store and transport than existing biofuels and has an energy content more comparable to that of gasoline. Now, with more efficient ways to make it on the horizon, an increasing number of experts think butanol is poised to overtake ethanol as the best-selling alternative fuel on the market.

Engineers have tried and failed for decades to build motorcycles with automatic transmissions. Honda finally gets it right with the new DN-01 "sports cruiser" bike. Conventional automatic transmissions, like those in cars, lag when you hit the throttle and can throw a bike off balance during turns. Honda's HFT (for Human Friendly Transmission) responds to the throttle instantly by using hydraulic pumps instead of standard gears.