December 2008

Nearly every summer rainstorm comes with thunder and lightning. Yet during even the blusteriest blizzard, there's nary a spark in the air. It can occur (although snow lightning strikes just six times a year on average in the U.S.), but winter air doesn't make for prime lightning-forming conditions, says meteorologist Robin Tanamachi of the University of Oklahoma.

Popular Science celebrates the eternal human urge to go bigger! Better! Farther! Inside, a look at three vehicles with the need to exceed.

The number of school-age kids with peanut allergies has doubled in the past decade. Yet scientists can't quite put their finger on what makes the legume such a threat or why the allergy has become so prevalent.

In August, at the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) AirVenture show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Randall Fishman’s ElectraFlyer-C made a virtually silent pass over the audience at a mere 200 feet. What they were seeing (but not hearing) might be the world’s first fully electric-powered airplane—representing, said one EAA official, “a groundbreaking technology that would be aviation’s first true alternative to a fossil-fuel engine.”

The dreaded lost file syndrome: You know that somewhere on your hard drive, the file you seek is happily sitting, awaiting you. But you just can't find it, and you can't even remember the name of it.

Now what?

The GroundBot is a spherical sentry designed to roll up to 6 mph through just about anything—mud, sand, snow and even water. Two gyroscopically steadied wide-angle cameras and a suite of sensors give remote operators a real-time, 360-degree view of the landscape, letting them zoom in on prowlers or detect gas leaks, radioactivity and biohazards.

In his eight years as president, George W. Bush has done little to win the hearts of conservationists. Opponents criticize his backing of widespread drilling and mining projects, lax oversight of industrial pollution, and recent attempts to dismantle the 36-year-old Endangered Species Act.

But now, as he’s leaving office, the 43rd president is attempting to “blue” his legacy by granting national-monument status to a string of pristine islands, atolls and coral reefs in the center of the Pacific Ocean.

In his eight years as president, George W. Bush has done little to win the hearts of conservationists. Opponents criticize his backing of widespread drilling and mining projects, lax oversight of industrial pollution, and recent attempts to dismantle the 36-year-old Endangered Species Act.

But now, as he’s leaving office, the 43rd president is attempting to “blue” his legacy by granting national-monument status to a string of pristine islands, atolls and coral reefs in the center of the Pacific Ocean.

With the wingspan of a B-29 bomber, the WhiteKnightTwo is the largest all-carbon-fiber aircraft ever built. Its mission is to carry a smaller craft, SpaceShipTwo, and drop it at 48,000 feet, where it will blast off into suborbital space with paying passengers—in 2010, if all goes well.

In 2002 I got my first digital pen, which captured handwriting as an image file, eliminating the need for paper notes. Or so I thought. Unfortunately, my full-speed penmanship was just as illegible in electronic form. Six years later, Livescribe solved that problem. Its Pulse uses the same technology to track its location on specially printed paper, but it pairs the text with an audio recording.

In congested cities like Tokyo, there’s barely room to swing a wrecking ball, and neighbors hate the caustic dust that implosions kick up. So the Japanese construction company Kajima developed a tidier technique, which it first used this past spring to take down a 17-story and a 20-story office tower: Knock out the ground floor, lower the building on computer-controlled hydraulic jacks, and repeat.

“Boss,” the brainchild of Tartan Racing (a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University and General Motors), was the winner of the 2007 Darpa Urban Challenge, a competition of autonomous vehicles. The mission: execute tricky merging, passing and parking maneuvers as quickly as possible, while obeying California-state traffic laws.

Zoning laws often forbid tall wind turbines. The Windspire captures breezes at 30 feet and below with a design in which blades run up a pole’s length and spin around it. Contoured airfoils make the Windspire the first vertical-axis turbine that can start in slow winds without help from a motor or inefficient scoops or wings.

Construction on the $10-billion behemoth—housed 300 feet underground in a 17-mile circular tube—spanned 14 years and required the efforts of 10,000 engineers and physicists. But its real engineering feat comes from the 1,200 magnets—each 35 tons in weight, 50 feet long, and powerful enough to crush a bus between them—that steer a stream of protons traveling at nearly the speed of light. These magnets are powered by 4,700 miles’ worth of superconducting niobium-titanium cable, and work only when cooled to 3.4˚F above absolute zero, colder than deep space.

This Web site uses ordinary photos—whether of national monuments, scientific specimens or your vacation—to build a 3-D view that you navigate as if in a videogame. Photosynth analyzes dozens of shots to find overlapping areas and piece them together.