Indice dei contenuti per November - December 2016 in Popular Science

OSSIC X The Sweet Sound of Virtual Reality GRAND AWARD WINNER When it comes to virtual reality, video gets all the glory. But hearing in VR—as bullets whiz overhead and floors creak underfoot—is just as key. Heavyweights like HTC and Oculus are working hard on their audio engines, but a San Diego startup is taking multidimensional sound a step further. Ossic’s X overear headphones adapt to a listener’s anatomy, creating the most convincing 3-D audio effects yet. First, sensors at the top of the ear cups measure your head size to precisely time audio delays between the ears. Four drivers surround each ear, simulating sound that comes from multiple directions. Finally, the Ossic X’s built-in head tracking uses an accelerometer, a gyroscope, and a compass to match what you’re hearing…

VIBRAM ARCTIC GRIP A Shoe Sole That Won’t Slip on Ice GRAND AWARD WINNER Vibram’s Arctic Grip is a new type of rubber shoe sole that stops feet from slipping while walking or running on the most treacherous ice. Vibram designed the treads to mimic polar bear paws, which have tiny papillae and curved claws to increase friction (and thus traction) on ice. Arctic Grip— which debuted on shoes from six brands, including Saucony and Wolverine—uses an array of lugs crafted out of a unique ice-grabbing rubber compound to increase traction. When the wearer steps, the compound causes a split-second melt-then-freeze reaction; melting disperses the ice, and freezing against the textured sole creates more surface area for the lugs to grab onto. STYLES FROM $150 A GIRO AVANCE MIPS The…

ESTWING AL-PRO FRAMING HAMMER Light Hammer Heavy Hitter GRAND AWARD WINNER House framers can drive hundreds of nails a day. For them, a heavy hammer means more fatigue—and possibly more missed hits (and injuries). Estwing’s new Al-Pro Framing Hammer lightens the load. Designers crafted the shaft out of aircraft-grade aluminum, making it half the weight of its pricier titanium competitors, and letting workers hit longer without getting worn out. The team also filled the head with steel shot, which dampens vibration from blows and allows for maximum force in every swing. Not to cripple the tool’s nail-pulling ability with a softer aluminum claw, Estwing opted to make the teeth out of sturdy steel. All this adds up to a lifetime hammer for the day-rate pro—as well as for the weekend…

MICROSOFT SKYPE TRANSLATOR The End of the Language Barrier The Internet connected us all—but what good is that if we can’t understand each other? Skype’s artificial-intelligence-based Translator is our digital Tower of Babel. It lets us talk to anyone, anywhere, regardless of mother tongue. Made available on Windows in late 2015, Translator uses layers of machine-learning algorithms. When a user speaks, the AI, drawing on millions of speech examples, analyzes the words and transcribes them into text. The text is then scrubbed of “ums” and word repetitions, and run through a translator. The AI is self-learning; the more it “hears” a regional accent or slang, the smarter it gets and the better it functions. Callers can receive audio in eight languages and see transcripts in more than 50. Can you…

JEREMY FISHER WAS 11 YEARS OLD when he designed his first costume: The self-described Star Wars junkie transformed into bounty hunter Boba Fett for Halloween, crafting armor from milk jugs and papier-mâché, and raiding closets for anything resembling a Wookie scalp. Most recently, the artist and costume fanatic tackled a monster that had defied George Lucas. In Return of the Jedi, an actor was supposed to play the predatory alien Rancor. But the prop didn’t look believable, so filmmakers used a rod-operated puppet instead. “That sparked my imagination,” says Fisher. “The guys who made Star Wars couldn’t even design this costume.” This past April, Fisher began to assemble Rancor in the design studio attached to his Los Angeles home. He first built a T-shaped structure from PVC piping, then fashioned…

SOFTWARE ENGINEER JAMES NEWMAN KNEW how computers worked—but he wanted to see how the data flowed inside them. So four years ago, at his home in Cambridge, England, he began building a massive processor out of individual transistors, rather than the tiny ones used in silicon chips. He then added LEDs to every logic gate (the building blocks of a circuit that produce the 1s and 0s) to display the data movement in real time. The machine grew far larger than he’d ever intended. “I just got suckered into it bit by bit,” he says. By the time Newman finished the “megaprocessor” this summer, it stood 6 feet high and 30 feet long, weighed more than 1,000 pounds, and took up most of his living room. The machine consists of…

KOENIGSEGG FREEVALVE New Life for the Gas Engine GRAND AWARD WINNER For more than a century, the internal combustion engine has relied on the ungainly camshaft. This spinning rod with variable lobes sits atop the engine, where it opens and closes intake and exhaust valves during the combustion cycle. But the camshaft has a limited range of motion, so its control over the valves is imprecise. This is the root of engine inefficiency. In April, Swedish supercar-maker Koenigsegg debuted the world’s first camless engine— the FreeValve—on a Chinese Qoros concept car. FreeValve forgoes the camshaft for electro-hydraulic-pneumatic actuators. They attach right to intake and exhaust valves, so engineers can control combustion within each cylinder. The design gets more power— imagine a four-cylinder getting 250 horsepower, sans turbo— and greater fuel…

4 NASA JUNO Journey to the Center of a Gas Giant GRAND AWARD WINNER On July 4—540 million miles from the nearest Independence Day barbecue—the solar-powered Juno orbiter began circling Jupiter’s poles, passing 2,600 miles above the planet’s clouds. “No spacecraft has ever orbited this close to Jupiter, in the heart of the radiation belts, where the magnetic field is this strong,” says project scientist Steve Levin. Protected from that radiation by a titanium vault, Juno’s scientific instruments—including a radiometer to study atmosphere and a particle detector to measure magnetic fields—will allow scientists to peer beneath the gas giant’s clouds. Over the next year and a half, Juno’s observations will tell scientists how much water is on Jupiter and whether the planet has a solid core. This could reveal how…

The United Nations of Mobile Networks Inconsistent service is the great Achilles’ heel of our ultraconnected lives. In urban canyons, signals can be fickle; abroad, staying online can be fruitless and costly. Google’s Project Fi, an experimental cellular network that rolled out this past spring, fills in those connectivity gaps. Instead of relying on one carrier’s towers, Project Fi connects to the strongest signal from among T-Mobile, Sprint, US Cellular, and a number of international partners. When the connection from one of Google’s 1 million trusted Wi-Fi hotspots is stronger, the call—or webpage or video stream—will go from cellular to Wi-Fi completely uninterrupted. Google hopes other carriers will one day adopt similar service-jumping schemes, but for the time being, data-hungry consumers can try it out on one of the company’s…

+MATERIALS • 11-by-11-inch plywood board• ¼-by-2½-inch machine screw• AJC washer• ¼-inch hex nut• Two Slurpee straws• Adhesive putty• 1-inch-thick foam insulation sheet• 7-inch record• 45 rpm adapter (ours came attached to the record)• 9 square inches of cellophane • Box of T-pins• Six 8-ounce Styrofoam cups• Old headphone cable• Phonograph needle and cartridge• Conductive wire glue• Pushpin• Loud batterypowered speaker +INSTRUCTIONS 1/Drill the exact center of the plywood board until you can thread the screw through. Tighten it on with the washer and the hex nut, and cover it with a 3-inch piece of the straw. Stabilize the board by placing adhesive putty under its corners.2/Cut two 7-inch circles (traced from the record) and a 11/2-inch circle (traced from the 45 rpm adapter) from the insulation…

How do you incorporate technology into cake? When somebody asks for, say, the Millennium Falcon—great cake, we’ve probably done it 60 or 70 times—I go, “Maybe we can put some bright blue lights on the back so it looks like it’s taking off; it would be really cool if you had some smoke shooting out of here.” I’m always looking to add tech but only where it fits, like a cake of a robot or a spaceship. For a wedding cake, I’m not trying to convince brides, “Let’s make this levitate.” Have you had any epic failures? Before I had a show, the Food Network invited me to make a cake of Elvis in this big competition. I wanted a cake spinning around on Elvis’ guitar. I couldn’t find a…

A WE’VE ALL BEEN TOLD TO bundle up or we’ll catch cold. But science says the common cold is caused by the rhinovirus, not the weather. Actually, according to researchers at Yale University, there just might be something to this old wives’ tale. For decades, researchers have known that the rhinovirus replicates more readily in cooler environments, such as the nasal cavity, rather than at the cozier core body temperature. The reason for this, explains Ellen Foxman, an assistant professor at Yale University School of Medicine, long remained a mystery. Scientists didn’t know whether the virus itself worked better at colder temperatures, or the immune system worked worse. “No one could find anything,” she says. Then Foxman and her colleagues studied what’s called the innate immune system, which is present…

SANOFI PASTEUR DENGVAXIA Finally, a Vaccine for Dengue INNOVATION OF THE YEAR Dengue—a virus most commonly transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito—infects some 400 million people yearly. It causes high fever, severe headaches, vomiting, and sometimes death. About 40 percent of the world’s population is at risk, and as the climate warms and travel increases, that risk will only climb. This year, the World Health Organization started recommending the first.vaccine to prevent dengue, and inoculations have begun in hot zones like Brazil and the Philippines. Four viruses cause dengue, so developing a vaccine that protects against all four took researchers 20 years to do. If 20 percent of the population gets vaccinated, dengue cases could drop 50 percent within five years. Controlling dengue could also reduce the $9 billion the…

Autopilot is not auto. Tesla labeled it a beta program—meaning that it’s a work in progress—and told drivers to stay alert and keep their hands on the wheel. THE SLACK CHANNEL AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA’S human-machine interaction lab, where I work, is typically a steady drip of lecture reminders and wall-climbing robot videos. But this past summer, news of the fi rst Tesla Autopilot-related fatality turned the feed into a Niagara Falls of critical chatter. Graduate research assistant: “It’s a habit of all people launching products to claim things are working to keep people excited.” Postdoc research fellow: “Such failures are inevitable, at least until the technology improves. Tesla took the plunge fi rst, and therefore is subject to increased scrutiny.” Student researcher: “If a driver was attentively behind…

1/ Quiet Cruise When air molecules slam into a supersonic jet, they create a highpressure wake that reaches the ground as a startling “ba-boom.” By slowing down its cruise speed to Mach 1.2 (the Concorde’s was Mach 2), the AS2’s wake will dis sipate before it reaches civilization. 2/ Straight and Carbon-Strong Wings Typical supersonic wings sweep back to create a triangular shape. That design creates lift—but also drag-producing air eddies toward the back of the wings. The AS2’s wings jut straight out from the fuselage and, thanks to ultrastrong carbon fiber, have a thinner contour. This lets air travel in straighter lines, reducing overall drag by about 20 percent. 3/ Pinch Point The AS2’s 170-footlong fuselage pinches in at the wings, creating an elongated Cokebottle shape. This allows for…

OPENWORKS ENGINEERING SKYWALL 100 The Drone Catcher GRAND AWARD WINNER The majority of the half-million drones registered with the FAA are harmless. Then there are the flame-throwing ones that star on YouTube. The SkyWall 100 shouldermounted net launcher is law enforcement’s best bet for grounding those malicious fliers. The gun, which uses auto-aiming software to lock onto targets up to 330 feet away, can fire three types of projectile nets: one that captures the drone, one with a parachute to lower it to the ground, and one that also jams the craft’s electronics. It can nab drones flying as fast as 23 miles per hour and weighing up to 6.6 pounds (twice a DJI Phantom 4). In a recent demo for the U.S. Army, SkyWall hit targets in 10 out…

A Traffi cstraddling bus B PENN STATE CRISPR-CAS9 FOR FOOD ’Shrooms with Shelf Life Up to 40 percent of food in the U.S. goes to waste, often due to spoilage. A plant pathologist at Penn State used the versatile gene-editing tool called CRISPRCas9 to design a button mushroom that resists browning, might have a longer shelf life , and could ultimately cost the same as regular old ’shrooms. Though the product is not yet on sale, the tech behind it skirted USDA regulation last spring, paving the way for future geneedited groceries. C COLUMBIA + UNIV. OF ICELAND CARBFIX A Speedy Way to Store C02 Capturing carbon from the atmosphere is an alluring solution to our climate woes, but we need to figure out how to store it quickly and…