june 2008

If you ever see a large industrial metal fire (yes, they happen) on the news, you may be surprised at what the firefighters do to extinguish it: nothing. Several metals, including lithium, sodium and magnesium, can burn easily, and from time to time large amounts catch fire in factories. But even heaps of burning metal need not cause immediate panic. They don’t blow up; instead they tend to build up ash that chokes off their oxygen supply, so they slowly burn out.

Your dirty hands can harbor millions of germs, but simply washing your hands with regular soap—making sure you vigorously rub them together for 30 seconds—will slough enough microbes down the drain to cut that number to the tens of thousands.

You may find this hard to believe if you’re standing near a swarm of chain smokers, but most scientists think the trace amounts of carbon dioxide and other pollutants in cigarette smoke have, at most, a negligible effect on the climate. “In fact,” theorizes John M. Wallace, a professor at the University of Washington’s climate-research department, “it might even counteract global warming by an equally minuscule amount, because the white particulate matter in smoke would reflect some of the sun’s energy, thereby minimizing heat.”

Sony’s petite SRS-ZX1 computer speakers produce outsize bass for their dimensions (7.5 by 3.1 by 7 inches). But the company’s press release had us stumped. It said that the speakers amplify low tones by directing sound along a Möbius strip, a flat strip twisted 180 degrees and joined at the ends. One problem: A Möbius strip is a two-dimensional closed loop. How would sound get in or out?

In each issue, PopSci rounds up the must-have products for the month. This June, check out dozens of the hottest new products: from the smallest pro camera to a eco-friendly mower to a frame that prints out its shots.

AstroTech’s ultra-compact telescope is priced for amateurs, yet it rivals larger, more expensive models. By packing in three glass lenses, it focuses red, green and blue light all at a single point. This eliminates the blurry, bluish halo in two-lens amateur scopes, which focus blue light in a different spot than red and green.

It could be any human skull, but this one is in fact much smaller and comes with a lot more controversy. In 2006, South African paleoanthropologist Lee Berger discovered this skull and thousands of other human bones piled in corners, buried under sand, or cemented to walls by dripping flowstone (the mineral that makes stalagmites) in a pair of burial caves in the Pacific island nation of Palau.

A trio of prismatic drops (left to right: water, ethylene glycol and ethanol) balances on a new ultra-repellent surface invented by scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The surface, made up of silicon spikes just 400 nanometers wide, physically repels a wide variety of liquids, including water, oil, solvents and detergents.

Previously, scientists relied on chemical modification to make surfaces repel liquids, a time-consuming process. In the end, each coating worked to repel only certain liquids, and oil-repellent surfaces simply weren’t possible to manufacture.

Most of us fly for speed, but French industrial designer Jean-Marie Massaud believes that slow cruising in an airship could be the next step in air travel. Massaud has sketched airships since the age of five, he says, and has since collaborated with major brands like Yves Saint Laurent and Yamaha to design, respectively, perfume bottles and submarines. Now he’s partnering with Onera, France’s space agency, to create the world’s first luxury airship. The design of the Manned Cloud calls for a double-decker, 5.6-million-square-foot airship shaped like a whale. Boasting a top speed of 105 mph and outfitted with all the amenities of a cruise ship, it would ferry 55 passengers from Paris to Madagascar in four days, offering a turbulence-free, unpressurized flight at an altitude of a mere 9,800 feet.

By now, even your toddler knows where and how to locate just about anything on the Web. But unless your friends are all dialed in to the same social network, a white-pages-style directory for finding actual people is often harder to come by. These five services aim to change that.

So you finally finished writing your novel and then somehow accidentally dumped it? It happens. Luckily, when you delete a file from your computer’s trash bin, it’s actually just marked for deletion. That means it can be overwritten on your hard drive by other data, but there’s a good chance it’s still intact—for a while, anyway.

Lose track of time underwater, and you could lose your life when your oxygen runs out. Luckily, the Eterna KonTiki Diver watch saves you from your own absentmindedness. It uses technology from the automotive industry to stay waterproof at 3,280 feet without tightly screwing down its winding stem (a step that users often forget with other mechanical diving watches).

If it weren’t for the landmines, Lingapura would be a great place to dig. For part of the 10th century, this pocket of northwestern Cambodia was the capital of the famed Angkorian empire, a sprawling city studded with homes, irrigation channels, and more than 1,000 temples crowned with stone lingam, or phalluses. But ever since Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge dotted Cambodia with millions of landmines in the 1970s, Lingapura’s ruins have sat mostly untouched.

Humpback whales sing some of the most beautiful songs in the animal world. It’s not just “woo, woo, woo”—their songs last 10 to 15 minutes and have a definite form, usually consisting of five or six unique phrases. Only the males sing, which has led many scientists to theorize that they croon to attract females. The hole in this argument, though, is that no one has ever seen a female whale show any interest in a male’s song.

When it came time to replace his old surfboard, Mike Sheldrake decided to build his own. But the former Web programmer didn’t have the sculpting skills to carve one out of foam the way professional builders do. So he used 3-D modeling software to design a snap-together deck that’s as sturdy as a conventional model and performs just as well, made from the cheapest material he could find: cardboard.