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 I S S U E # 1 2 0, N OV E M B E R 2 0 1 8

EDITORIAL
Editor Anthony Fordham afordham@nextmedia.com.au
Accept Obesity, But
DESIGN
Group Art Director Malcolm Campbell
Graphic Design David J. Williams Don’t Celebrate It
ADVERTISING
Advertising Sales There was something vaguely ironic - in a bad way - in the wording of
Lewis Preece lpreece@nextmedia.com.au
this press release from the University of Otago: “Researchers are using
Advertising Traffic
Diane Preece dpreece@nextmedia.com.au World Obesity Day today to call for an end to the stigma which fat people
Division General Manager
experience in their daily lives.”
Jim Preece jpreece@nextmedia.com.au

Production Manager Peter Ryman

Oh yeah? Well how about not using the the process, but obesity is a sign of the system
Circulation Director Carole Jones term “fat people” for a start, University of being out of control. Of sickness.
US EDITION Otago? The issue of obesity in Western so- As much as we’d like to imagine obesity is
Editor in Chief Joe Brown
Articles Editor Kevin Gray
cieties (and emerging in others now too) is caused by some kind of bug, or having a “slow
Managing Editor Jill C. Shomer a big huge important one. metabolism”, that doesn’t it the evidence.
Senior Editor Sophie Bushwick
Technology Editor Xavier Harding A few decades from now, I suspect research- In 1960, the average “energy availability”
ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY ers will refer to it as a pandemic, another great from afordable foods for an Australian was
Acting Design Director Chris Mueller
Photo Director Thomas Payne
scourge that impacted the lives of hundreds of 10,000 kilojoules per day. Today, it’s 14,000
Digital Associate Art Director Michael Moreno millions of people. First there was the Black kilojoules. We also sit around a lot more.
Associate Art Director Russ Smith
Acting Production Manager Paul Catalano Death, then there was the Spanish Flu (see Still, if obesity is caused by a bug, the way
POPSCI.COM p.36), then HIV/AIDS, and now obesity. Does we feed it with more energy and then don’t
Online Director Carl Franzen
this sound over the top? To call obesity a plague use much of that energy, can’t possibly help.
BONNIER’S TECHNOLOGY GROUP or a pandemic? Whatever the pathology, the researchers and
Group Editorial Director Anthony Licata
Group Publisher Gregory D Gatto Before I go further, let me deine terms. The interest groups calling for an end to “fat sham-
BONNIER University of Otago wants to end “fat stigma”, ing” are right, of course. You can cure yourself
Chairman Tomas Franzen but I’m not talking about being a bit fat, full- of obesity by eating less and exercising more.
Chief Executive Officer Eric Zinczenko
Chief Content Officer David Ritchie on-fat, or even fat-as. I’m talking about being But there’s no point trying to bully people into
Chief Operating Officer Lisa Earlywine
Senior Vice President, Digital Bruno Sousa obese. That’s deined as having an amount of following your weird ketogenic lifestyle.
Vice President, Consumer Marketing John Reese
“visceral” (ie, between your organs) fat, such But let’s not go too far in the opposite direc-
that your health is in some way afected. tion. Let’s not pretend obesity isn’t a disease at
Pretty wobbly deinition, right (if you’ll all. Yes, “fat shaming” gets in the way of proper
Executive Chairman David Gardiner
Managing Director Hamish Bayliss pardon the imagery)? That’s part of the prob- treatment. And it’s true that many (bad) doc-
Circulation Director Carole Jones lem. Obesity isn’t about a speciic weight, or a tors fail to diagnose disease properly because
Popular Science is published 12 times a year by speciic BMI (body mass index being increas- they just assume all the health problems are
nextmedia Pty Ltd ACN: 128 805 970
Building A, 207 Pacific Highway ingly discredited, anyway). It’s about sufering the fault of their “fat patient”. But being very
St Leonards, NSW 2065
a negative health outcome because of the fat overweight does impact your health. And be-
Under license from Bonnier International Magazines. © 2014
Bonnier
you’re carrying. When does being overweight ing a bit overweight puts you at higher risk of
Corporation and nextmedia Pty Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Repro- become obesity? It’s not easy to say. becoming very overweight. Duh?
duction in whole or part without written permission is prohibited.
Popular Science is a trademark of Bonnier Corporation and is used So “fat stigma” is often accusing a not-sick I blame the human body’s ability to store en-
under limited license. The Australian edition contains material
originally published in the US edition reprinted with permission of
person of being sick. And that sucks. All those ergy in the form of fat cells, full stop. It’s an ad-
Bonnier Corporation. Articles express the opinions of the authors other diseases, you either have them or you aptation that has existed for millions of years,
and are not necessarily those of the Publisher, Editor or nextmedia
Pty Ltd. ISSN 1835-9876. don’t. You can’t be almost-but-not-quite bu- if you include our evolutionary ancestors.
Privacy Notice
bonic. You can be a large person who is not suf- But only now do we have access to so much
We value the integrity of your personal information. If you provide fering any particular ill-efects even though energy that many humans have the oppor-
personal information through your participation in any competitions,
surveys or offers featured in this issue of Popular Science, this will be you weigh 135 kg. You can have a beer belly, a tunity to “get fat”. For most of the history of
used to provide the products or services that you have requested and
to improve the content of our magazines. Your details may be provided
gin belly, love handles, thunder thighs, what- civilisation, only the rich could et fat. Fat used
to third parties who assist us in this purpose. In the event of organ- ever - all things that can be symptomatic of to mean “prosperous and powerful”.
isations providing prizes or offers to our readers, we may pass your
details on to them. From time to time, we may use the information obesity, but not actual obesity. Oh sure, diseases like gout and Type II Dia-
you provide us to inform you of other products, services and events
our company has to offer. We may also give your information to other The cutting edge of health science is starting betes existed back then. People died of being
organisations which may use it to inform you about their products,
services and events, unless you tell us not to do so. You are welcome
to think that when a person gets really, really too obese. But not many people.
to access the information that we hold about you by getting in touch fat, it’s not just because they can’t stop eat- Shaming “fat people” isn’t the answer to this
with our privacy officer, who can be contacted at nextmedia, Locked
Bag 5555, ing chips. It’s because of immunometabolism: 21st century problem. But neither is pretending
St Leonards, NSW 1590
their body is engaged in an immune response that obesity isn’t a disease.
www.popsci.com.au that afects the way they process energy. Sure, ANTHONY FORDHAM
To subscribe, call 1300 361 146 chips and soft drink might have kickstarted afordham@nextmedia.com.au
or visit www.mymagazines.com.au

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 3
 NOVEMBER 2018

Contents For daily updates: www.popsci.com.au

48
Shamu Why is this tough little microscope with an orca
stencilled on the side, so keen to go to Jupiter’s
Goes to iciest Galilean moon? And why did we write bits
of this feature in first-person, as the microscope?
Europa Only diligent readers will find out!

4 POPULAR SCIENCE
 14

State of the Art

Your guide to everything
8
08 The strange future of your car!
Print your own videos?
28 10
12 Obsessed elucidates!
14 This is the vacuum page now
16 Epic speakers with lots of bits
18 Treat your ears to earbuds
20 The future of beer
22 Mini golf demands serious kit
24 Oversight: CARS WITH LASERS!

Insight
32 Important stuf for futurists

28 Can we find alien space-junk?

36 30 Is multitasking an illusion?
32 Do I need an exposome?
34 Aren’t dogs smart after all?
36 Why don’t you care about the flu?
30 Can AI beat fake news?

Features
Read, think, read some more

42 So many moons!
50 A microscope that speaks its mind

78 Rethink
Take a second look

60 Unfortunate ways to die

61 Melting pot of human DNA
62 Moore’s Law isn’t snore
63 Termites build to last
64 Gravity waves, dude
66 Tales from the Field!
68 Head trip (freak out)
70 Archives: November 1938
78 Retro Invention: Michelin Man!

The Other Stuf

Bonus Extra Material!

03 Our Editor Rants

06 The Big Picture
80 Lab Rats!
82 Next Issue

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 5
 Big
Picture

DIGGING THE RARE EARTH

Australian mining is about more than iron ore,
coal, gold, diamonds, and uranium. And this
drone shot of the Mt Marion lithium mine proves
it. Lithium prospecting is a big deal in Western
Australia right now, with test drilling and new
mine sites popping up every year. Currently
operated by Mineral Resources Limited, the Mt
Marion mine is projected to produce up to 60
million tonnes of Lithium over its operating life.
That’s a lot of mobile phones.

6 POPULAR SCIENCE
THE MINERALS ARE
IN THE ROCKS!?
To most of us, this looks like a rather
messy bit of maybe-quartz. To a
geologist, this is spodumene, a lithium
aluminium inosilicate. To a mining
company, it’s big bucks. Spodumene
is fused in acid to produce lithium in a
form useful for phones, medicine,
ceramics, and more.
 CONCEPT CARS ARE ALWAYS FUN. SURE, NONE OF

The Future of Cars

these amazing vehicles, all of which made recent
appearances at the 2018 Paris Motor Show, will ever sit
State in an ordinary person’s driveway. Yet each of them will
of the (That Will Never Be Built) contribute a styling or functional element to the future
Art parked for inspection by JORDAN GOLSON
of cars, in some way. Or maybe that doesn’t even matter.
Maybe they’re just art for art’s sake.

PEUGEOT E-LEGEND This electric muscle car stole the 2018 Paris Motor Show, acting
as a design showcase for the future of Peugeot and also showing
what a future fully autonomous car could look like on the inside.
A throwback to the long-running Peugeot 504 coupe, the exterior
design is breathtaking — while the interior is crazy enough to remind
you that the E-Legend is a concept and won’t be hitting showrooms
tomorrow. “Wood-look” panels, a massive 49-inch curved screen
and a small, retractable (for autonomous driving) steering wheel
mix and match the past and future.

REAL: Retro-futuristic external styling, video camera wing-mirrors, rims are UNREAL: Decades-old designer obsession with lozenge-shaped steering wheels,
inevitable, actually has legal-looking headlights. no apparent gap between brake and accelerator.

MERCEDES-BENZ EQ SILVER ARRO Technically this premièred

in August at Pebble Beach,
but this was the Silver
Arrow’s irst appearance
at a car show. More a
“show car” than some-
thing that Mercedes-Benz
actually plans to build, it’s
a modern take on the W
125 grand prix champi-
onship car from 1937.
So what’s the point
of this exercise? Well,
despite the Tesla and its
Ludicrous Mode, most of
the market still seems
to think electric cars
are boring. With a
single centre seat,
sensual lines, and
an outrageous
wooden interior,
Mercedes has built
a stunning EV that is
anything but.

REAL: Electric power. Self-indulgent single-seat cockpit. Full-width OLED dash UNREAL: The wheels, the windshield, the light-up EQs and pretty much every
and display in centre of steering wheel. other aspect of this mind-freak of a car.

8 POPULAR SCIENCE
 SMART FOREASE
The plastic fantastic Smart brand just turned 20,
and to celebrate, Smart showed off the ForEase.
It’s a concept that plays off the brand’s
iconic ForTwo, but strips off the
roof and makes it way more...
sigh... sporty. It looks like
something out of the mov-
ie Big Hero 6 — a kind of
squished sports car, with
alluring lines and roll-cage
humps behind the occu-
pants, but with the car-
toonish proportions for which
Smart is justly famous. Note the turbo
dials on top of the dash, and the faux-manual
gear-stick. Oh and the racing pedals.

REAL: Smart succumbing to the “everything must have a 0-100 time sub five UNREAL: How to make your actual car a concept car: weird colour accents, and
seconds!” trend, circular OLED displays everywhere. cut the top out of the steering wheel.

RENAULT EZ ULTIMO Renault calls the EZ Ultimo a “mobile lounge” and says
it could be what ride-hailing cars look like someday.
Autonomous, electric, and available on-demand, this
thing reminds us that every car is essentially a pod-on-
wheels. This one can whisk travellers from
city to city or out for a night on the
town. Outitted in leather, wood,
and marble (what, is carbon-i-
bre just too light now?), the
interior is a luxurious cocoon,
protecting the occupants
from the outside world.
Renault envisions the car as
an even more opulent take
on the limousine concept, and
part of the luxury experience
from a hotel or airline. That
single rear front-facing seat is
a bold choice, although there is a
rear-facing couch too. Still, if the Park
Hyatt Sydney wants to send one of these to
pick me up for my spa weekend, I’d be down.

REAL: Pod-like ultra-luxury cars will be among the first fully autonomous vehicles UNREAL: Single front-facing seat excludes a huge number of trip-types.
on the road. Use of boat-decking type wooden floors is already a thing. Side windows with physical grating on them.

RENAULT EZ-PRO
If the EZ Ultimo is about absurd
luxury, the EZ-Pro is about
absurd practicality. It’s an
autonomous, electric delivery
vehicle, able to carry everything
from parcels to furniture. Renault
envisions leets of these things
carrying packages out to every
corner of the city, with room for a
delivery… well, not driver, but per-
haps facilitator, to actually hand
out the goods at their destina-
tion. The company even sees the
potential for things like a rolling
farmers market, with the EZ-Pro
pulling up and showcasing fresh
fruits and veggies. Bewdiful!

REAL: The truck will boss the delivery guy around. Welcome your robot (car) UNREAL: Crazy concept-car wheels would get smashed to bits on kerbs, rounda-
overlords! Urban truck-trains seem like a 50/50 chance. bouts, cyclists, school-children etc...

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 9
 ONE OF THE GREAT IRRITATIONS OF LIVING IN THE FUTURE IS WHEN

Moving someone says “oh oh let me show you this awesome video I took” and then
you have to stand politely for 20 seconds while they swipe around their phone
State
of the
Pictures muttering about how they were sure they had it etc. Now there’s a cure: the
LifePrint hyperphoto printer ($279). It creates instant-print photos that use
an augmented-reality app to show those video clips as soon as you point your own
Art by ANTHONY FORDHAM
phone at them. Here’s how.

1. SHOOT
Take a short video with
a smartphone, just like
everyone does these days.
No problem.

2. SELECT
Open the Lifeprint app and
select a video clip. Swipe to
choose directly from
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
and GoPro.

3. PRINT
Over USB or a Wi-Fi link, print
out a still shot from the video
on the LifePrint Hyperprinter.

4. POSITION
Anyone with the app simply
activated Augmented Reality
mode and holds the photo in
front of the phone’s camera.

5. WATCH
The original video plays over
the still image (as seen
through your phone’s
camera), streamed
from the cloud.

ZINKIES!
Like most compact insta-printers, the LifePrint uses
ZINK “zero ink” technology. Like old-timey Polaroids,
each ZINK cartridge contains sheets that already have
all the pigments sandwiched into three layers - cyan,
magenta, and blue. The printer essentially fuses
different parts of the sheet to mix the colours and
create an image. They’re small - only 7.5 cm by 11.5 cm
- but crisp and clear. The LifePrint printer works over
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, so what it lacks in poster-size
printing, it makes up for in speed and convenience.

10 POPULAR SCIENCE
Made by hand for those who value perfection.
Hundreds of individual parts compose this Hi-Beat mechanical watch.
Our master watchmakers polish and ine-tune many of them to an accuracyy
of 1/1,000th of a millimetre. When you observe the precisely polished
surfaces of the hands and dial, you will see an intricate play of light and
shadow that expresses the subtle aesthetics of Japanese cratsmanship.
Dedication to perfection pursued for more than half a century.
grand-seiko.com

9S86 Mechanical Hi-Beat 36000 GMT

36,000 vibration-per-hour movement; 55-hour power reserve.
 State
of the
Art
Obsessed
What is a gadget, really? Is it just some kind of electronic
thing that does the same tricks as all the other electronic
things? Or is it a gigantic 3D printer or chips in a can or a
chair that your useless flatmates can’t ruin by leaving it out
in the rain? Here at PopSci we believe a gadget is all of those
Laserlight Core
things and more. To us, a gadget is just a new way of looking ber yl.cc
at a design, and it should also be as crazy as possible. $140
The creator of this intriguing bicycle torch,
selected without prejudice by ANTHONY FORDHAM Emily Brooke, says the idea is to project an
icon of a bike several metres ahead of you,
onto the road, so people get some kind of
warning that you’re racing up the inside
NOTE ON PRICING: For the first time in many months, we’ve actually lane at 53km/h. But we can’t help wonder
managed to source Australian dollar pricing on all these gadgets! This is because if the idea is really to let you create your
most are hosted on crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, which own bike lane wherever you go. Motorists
auto-convert prices. NOTE: Actual prices may vary and then there’s customs... love it! The light also has a regular
super-bright LED for actually lighting your
way. And as for the laser projector, it’s a
good conversation piece for when you’re
lying there waiting for the ambulance.

¡Yappah! Protein Crisps

www.yappah.com
$23
Chips in a can? What madness is this?
Wait, you’re saying chips originally came
in cans before humans invented cheap
plastic and ruined everything? These
chips celebrate upcycling and are made
with leftover ingredients from vegetable
processing factories and breweries. Then
they grind up chicken and mix that in too.
The pictures show lovely chicken breasts
but we think it’s... not the good bits of
those. No wait, the chips are delicious!

Picade Delux Navee

www.pimoroni.com www.deluxworld.com
$280 $79
The Picade is back! Now in an even more Things we learned this issue: vertical mice
compact form that doesn’t make its are apparently a thing, and they help
8-inch display seem lost in the cabinet. reduce RSI, especially for designers and
This DIY retro arcade machine uses a other mouse-heavy computer jobs. By
Raspberry Pi B+ (not included) to run balancing the mouse on its edge and
emulators and other totally legitimate having the main buttons on the side rather
sources of gaming goodness. The than the top, it allows the wrist to sit more
joystick and buttons click just like they comfortably. You know, sideways, like
did back in the 80s milk bar. You have to you’re a Velociraptor. This is Delux’s latest
add your own spilled milkshake, though, model, with a big clicky wheel on top for
for proper stickiness. extra programmable functionality.

12 POPULAR SCIENCE
MacroMAKEiT 3D Printer Emerick Lounger
$9999 www.emericklifestyle.com
www.makeit-3d.com/macro $400
What sucks about most 3D printers is they Do you have a relative or friend who
have a cubic print area 120 mm to a side, or keeps dragging the actual couch onto
smaller. What are they, 3D printers for the verandah on sunny days? Finding
extremely large ants? Who has the kind of furniture that works inside and outside is
time to make their cosplay costumes a pain, but the Emerick Lounger is a salve
120mm (cubed) at a time? Serious for that pain. A sort of combination
cosplayers - and people prototyping machine between a hammock and a high-end
parts, I guess - will spend $10K on this giant wicker love seat, it’s super-comfy for all
printer that has a 1400 x 800 x 610mm print but the extremely tall (whose legs will dig
area. Uh, note that even at this price you still into the metal rim). Bonus! It’s assembled
have to assemble it yourself. without tools - not even an Allen key!

UrmO Scooter
$2599
my-urmo.com
Remember how the Segway was going to
change urban transport forever and then
when it didn’t do that right away everyone
mocked it? Well who’s laughing now? Not
the people raking it in by running Segway
tours in every historical European city, and
not the designers of this. The UrmO is the
latest electric lean-controlled gyroscopic
two-wheeler, with the unique selling point
that it folds up. You can also get
handlebars to comply with ze Germans.
Bored with the conversation? Silently flip
this out of your briefcase and whrrr away...

Xiaomi Walkingpad Herston Desk Lamp

www.kickstarter.com www.herston-uk.com
$720 $550
The gigantic Chinese hyperconglomerate Don’t you hate it how your desk lamp
Xiaomi will try anything once, including a doesn’t move freely and won’t self-bal-
folding treadmill that’s only good for ance when you adjust its position? Don’t
walking. Still, without the awkward you hate it so much you’d be willing to pay
podium gubbins on top, you might actually $550 for a new lamp that does self
be motivated to go for a stationary stroll balance? To be fair, this is an art/design
at up to 6km/h in front of someone doing a object and you can choose various kinds of
totally different workout (?). The 28kg wood and the colour of the counter-
walking pad folds so you can then shove it weights. Look at its little counterweights!
under the couch and forget it exists like So adorkable! But yeah otherwise it’s a
your Nintendo Wii Fit. lamp. That self-balances.

Hydrow
$3999
www.hydrow.com
Do you have enough space and money
for a really good boat, but because of
cruel irony you’re also agoraphobic or
something? The Hydrow is a rowing
machine with an LCD display, that goes
on the internet and forces professional
rowers to give you, the almost-literal
armchair rower, to give you lessons on
rowing. No seriously, Hydrow calls it “on
demand coaching”. So what happens if I
demand coaching at 0235h, Hydrow?
 WE DON’T REALLY KNOW WHY DYSON INSISTS ON CALLING ITSELF A
vacuum cleaner company. Its product range is now varied enough (see: the

State Dyson Gets Its hair-dryer, the hand-dryer, the air purifier, the humidifier) that it should
really start celebrating its real strength: high-powered, super-compact,
of the Sucks in a Row electric motors. That is, after all, what all those products have in common.
Art by ANTHONY FORDHAM
Still, vacuuming is where the company got its big break, so vacuuming is
where the R&D bucks keep going. The latest result is this: the Cyclone V10.

INLINE SUCK
The previous V8 vac had its collection
bit perpendicular to the intake, kinking
the airflow. The V10 has everything
in a straight line, allowing for a larger
collection bin and (Dyson claims) 20%
POWERED UP more suck than the V8.
A further tweak of Dyson’s sig-
nature “digital motor” combined
with better battery management,
has made the company so confi-
dent in its new Cyclone V10, this
cordless vac is now the flagship.

HOT POTTERY
The impeller is the core of Dyson’s
digital motor, and its ceramic shaft
is cured at 1600 degrees to make it
three times harder than steel but
only half as dense. The new impel-
ler runs cooler, and so faster: up to
125,000rpm.

POWER OVERWHELMING
A new seven-cell lithium-ion battery
pack gives up to 60 minutes of suck-
time (on low power with no motorised
head), and lets the motor run full speed
right up until the last drop of electricity.

14 POPULAR SCIENCE
 KEF’S R-SERIES LOUDSPEAKERS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN VERY POPSCI

R is For
thanks to their lemon-squeezer-like Uni-Q driver. Also the way the R-se-
ries doesn’t cost car money, and comes in loorstanders or bookshelf-style
State
of the Re-Invention for more intimate listening sessions. Now for 2018, the new edition of the
R includes an incredible 1043 changes. The engineering is esoteric but at
Art by ANTHONY FORDHAM
least the aim is easy to explain: make your music (and home theatre) sound
even more detailed and natural. Here are a few of the tweaks.

UNI-Q
KEF’s signature mid-range
driver now sits in the centre
of the “stack” (older versions
had it at the top). This improves
acoustic balance.

SHADOW FLARE
The trim ring around the Uni-Q
driver was redesigned to reduce
diffraction, which otherwise can
make certain frequencies sound
blurry or imprecise.

PAPER PRECISION
Paper might seem a bit low-end
for a $4995 pair of speakers,
but it remains ideal for the
cones of these shallower, more
precise bass drivers.

LOSSY BRACING?
A little cheekily, KEF describes
its new internal bracing system
as having a “lossy interface”,
because it isn’t rigidly fixed to
the sides of the cabinet.

INVISIBLE GRILLES
Grilles protect the drivers,
but have to be acoustically
transparent. The answer? A
new, minimalist, patent-
pending microfibre design .

CROSSING OVER
The secret ingredient of any
good loudspeaker is the
crossover. This modest chunk
of old-fashioned-looking
electronics allows the speaker
to “split” high and low
frequencies between its various
drivers. The effectiveness
and elegance of how it does
this is the magic ingredient in
loudspeaker design. Obviously
KEF’s crossovers are excellent,
but how exactly do they work?
Well... that would be telling.

16 POPULAR SCIENCE
5
1

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 17
 State Sound 3

of the Investment
Art BY STAN HORACZEK

NORMAL EARBUDS HAVE JUST ONE OR TWO ‘ SPEAKERS’

- more accurately called drivers - for each ear. But those micro-
machines must handle a wide range of sounds, from Mariah
Carey’s high register to Barry White’s silky bass, so they struggle
to faithfully reproduce all the right acoustic details. The $2,200
Ultimate Ears Live headphones are different. Each in-ear unit
contains eight drivers, and each of those is tuned to a
specific part of the audio spectrum. Built for pro-
fessional musicians who play massive stages,
the buds produce a rich, true depiction
of the tunes. Here’s (pun intended)
what makes them sing.

1
Vibrating Metal
2
Moving Membrane
3
Bespoke Ear Fit
Seven of the drivers rely A magnet inside a Tubes made of medical-
on a ilament called a rounded metal enclosure grade PVC funnel
balanced armature, a causes a ive millimetre- sound from each of
type of tech common diameter diaphragm to the drivers into one
in hearing aids; metal pulse, displacing air and channel. To get a per-
vibrates between a pair pushing audio toward fect it, Ultimate Ears
of magnets to generate your ears. This eighth moulds the housing to
sound. Two armatures driver produces match a model of your
ring the low tones (like sound at the lower end ear canal. That snug
for a bass), four do the of the spectrum, adding connection offers the
mids (think: guitars), a visceral bass thump same external sound
and one hits the highs that you feel more reduction as industrial-
(e.g., cymbals). than hear. strength earplugs.

18 POPULAR SCIENCE
 The screens of the Future are available today!

Screen Innovations has worked with NASA to
develop a one-of-a-kind, ambient-light-rejecting,
zero-gravity screen to be installed in the Interna-
tional Space Station…
Until now, astronauts on the International Space
Station communicated with Mission Control and
their families back home on tablet-sized 13-inch
displays. Now they will have a large roll-out screen
from Screen Innovations, together with a laser pro-
jector that should last more than 30,000 hours of
use – that’s a movie a day for more than 40 years.
The criteria for a screen in space were unique, from
the obvious need for extreme lightness and easy
storage to trickier requirements such as screen
rigidity in zero gravity and the ability to reject the
bits of food and other detritus that have a habit of
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Although the theatre in your home resides in
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 Flavour
State
of the Saviour
Art BY CORINNE IOZZIO

20 POPULAR SCIENCE
 YOU R L O C A L P U T T- P U T T S P OT I S A S I LLY L A N D OF S P I N N I N G
windmills and laughing clowns. But the tacky surroundings don’t mean you

State Mini-Golf can’t go all Jack Nicklaus and totally freakin’ dominate those baby greens.

of the Master-Stroke The putting skills you refine while dodging miniature Stonehenges can help
on the big-kid course too. Here’s the pro-grade gear you need to destroy your
Art by ERIN BL AKEMORE friends at the shortest short game.

1
Practice first
The PuttOut is a
serious training tool. A
well-struck ball, with
the force and trajectory
to go in the hole, will 2
roll up the plastic ramp,
then back toward you.
Hit too hard and the
ball will launch off the
back; wayward shots
will fall off the side.

2
Picture success
Markings on the
Wellputt Pro mat help
you visualise every
element of a perfect
hit. Guidelines on the
10-foot-long turf show
the right backswing
distance and ideal ball
paths. The drills in the
included book will help
hone your skills.
5
3
Choose your tool
The Odyssey Exo
Seven’s head is alumin-
ium in the centre and
stainless steel around
the edges, a design
that puts more weight
around its perimeter.
That helps the face 4
stay square so you can
hit the ball straight.

4
Roll the right way
Don’t be fooled by
the poppy covers on
the Volvik Vivid balls:
They’re not like the
cheap rocks at a typical
mini-golf course. An
extra-sot exterior with 3
a matte inish helps
them grip the turf and 1
roll true instead of
sliding over the terrain.

5
Read the green
Thanks to their
polarization and tint,
the lenses in Oakley’s
Targetline Prizm Golf
sunglasses help reveal
the bumps and curves
in the putting surface.
Thick arms also help
block glare and any
distracting friends.

22 POPULAR SCIENCE
COM.AU OXFORD
O F D STREET
TR LEEDERVILLE
EED R L
 Oversight
KEY TECH

Yes, the Future

Will Depend
On Lasers
by ANTHONY FORDHAM

WHAT WAS THE SCI-FI MONSTER-CAM VISUAL

style of the 1990s and 2000s? It had to be infra-red, right?
Or the fabled night vision that works so magically in the
movies and so badly in the $200 “genuine army surplus”
goggles you bought off e-Bay.
So what about all those killer robots? How did they see?
Most writers just seemed to think that strapping few video
cameras to a robot’s head gives it vision. But a passive
light-gathering sensor like a camera (or a retina) only
works with a powerful data-processing and interpreting
system behind it. Evolution used passive light-sensing
millions of times, in the millions of species that have some
kind of eye, but this doesn’t mean waiting for photons to
hit you is the only way to see.
Sight is about identifying objects, sure, but it’s also
about ranging, figuring out how close something is to you.
Humans rely mostly on experience and stereoscopic
vision to determine whether a cube is a box near us or
a house much further away. It’s relatively easy to fool
a human with a carefully-constructed perspective-
distorting room. A famous pop-culture example is the
trick set Peter Jackson built for The Fellowship of the Ring, to
make Elijah Wood’s Frodo Baggins look tiny compared to
Sir Ian McKellan’s Gandalf (see p.68).
Which brings us to autonomous cars. They can’t afford
to be fooled by perspective (lives are at stake, duh), so
they use a system called LIDAR. It’s the light-based
equivalent of radar - Light Detection and Ranging.
It’s the key difference between really good cruise
control, and true autonomy. With an active sensor like
LIDAR, an autonomous car can say “no, I don’t care what
the situation looks like, I’m braking.”
The main image on this spread shows a LIDAR scan of
a typical city road (albeit from a drone). Not only can the
system tell the vehicle how close something is, it can also
tell it how quickly the distance to that object is changing.
This will be an autonomous car’s biggest advantage
over human drivers. To be able to glance at an oncoming
car, know it’s doing 84 km/h, know the distance, and
determine it is not possible to pull out in front of that car,
not just safely, but more importantly so that car won’t
have to slow down.
That’s what ends traffic jams. Not laws. Lasers.

24 POPULAR SCIENCE
PLEASE TIP YOUR
ROBOT
Most of the high-profile
autonomy projects right
now are around Uber-style
on-demand trip cars in urban
areas. Nuro is something
different. For a start, it’s tiny,
but that’s because it doesn’t
need to carry humans. Instead,
it just delivers your groceries.
Remember milk floats? It’s
like that, except with more
produce and less chance of
ruining your marriage. Maybe.

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 25
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 INSIGHT
ISSUE NOVEMBER
120 2018

28
CAN WE DETECT ALIENS BY
LOOKING FOR SIGNS OF
THEIR SPACE-JUNK?

30
WHAT IF YOUR ABILITY
TO MULTITASK WAS JUST
AN ILLUSION?

32
OH GREAT NOW
THERE’S ANOTHER -OME
TO WORRY ABOUT

34
ARE DOGS ANY SMARTER
THAN OTHER MAMMALS, OR
JUST CUTER?

36
WHY DON’T WE PAY MORE
ATTENTION TO KILLER
FLU EPIDEMICS?

38
CAN CHEAP ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE MAKE FAKE
NEWS OBSOLETE?

Insight
THE WORLD ISN’T GETTING SMALLER. IT’S
getting bigger. The Earth is literally
expanding, satellite by satellite,
every rocket launch “fuzzing out”
the smooth, near-perfect sphere of our planet
into something more fractal and complex. Should
this incidental geoengineering venture continue,
it will give the Earth a distinctly “civilised” look
across interstellar distances. And if we’ll look
like that one day, maybe other worlds already do.
If we’re puffing up our planet, other civilizations could be
doing the same to theirs, producing a ring of satellites that
we might be able to spot with telescopes we have today.
That’s according to Hector Socas-Navarro, an astrophys-
icist at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain.
Scientists have long speculated that fantastical sun-sized
structures might betray the presence of technological
aliens, but while a mega-solar panel blocking a distant star
is theoretically easy to spot, such notions remain squarely
in the realm of science fiction.
Thought experiments like Socas-Navarro’s, however,
show that now, equipped with better telescopes than their
predecessors, researchers are taking searches for plan-
et-level changes more seriously.
A VERY ATTENTIVE CLOUD
Socas-Navarro realised that one planet-scale project in par-
ticular should have a specific and visible effect. Imagine a
world something like Earth but a few hundred years ahead,
technologically speaking. In this world, the alien military
has launched GPS satellites to help with navigation.
Alien-NASA and alien-Google have also launched
countless weather and mapping satellites to deliver re-
al-time feeds of the entire planet.
Many of these satellites sit in special spots, geosyn-
chronous and geostationary orbits, where they move in
28 POPULAR SCIENCE
XENOHUNTING
by C H A R L I E W O O D
lockstep with their planet, letting them
monitor the same area all the time. Fill in
those special orbits and you get a thin cyl-
inder ringing the planet, one that, when it
passes between its star and an observer
(like us), casts a slightly different shadow
out into space than the naked planet
would alone.
When that shadow sweeps by the
Earth, planet-hunting satellites like the
ageing Kepler and newly functional TESS
could witness the alien star dimming in a
specific way.
FUZZY LOGIC
Socas-Navarro published preliminary
simulations in The Astrophysical Journal
in March showing what that dimming
would look like to modern telescopes if
we were to watch such an Earthlike planet
about ten light-years away.
A satellite ring as thin as ours would
be too sparse to see, he concluded, but
Kepler could spot one about a billion
times denser — a radical, but not im-
possible change that we could pull off in
200 years if launches continue to grow
at current rates.
Plenty of people are already studying
these stellar flickers, searching for some-
thing similar: a planet with natural rings.
“It makes for a tricky transit, a tricky
shadow,” says Masataka Aizawa, a gradu-
ate student at the University of Tokyo who
found one possible Saturn cousin in 2017.
He agrees that the dimming from a
dense satellite belt should look unique.
Natural rings spread out equatorially like
a record while geosynchronous orbits form a north to south tin-
can shape with vanishingly thin walls (ours currently measures
just 140 metres thick), and the two geometries should cast two
distinct shadows.
But he still considers the paper’s suggestion, which he calls
“science fictional,” a long shot. “I saw almost all of the [dim-
ming] curves in the Kepler data, and there is no such evidence
in my study,” he said.
Whether satellite-loving aliens are out there or not, running
more detailed simulations of how the dimming patterns of
moons differ from those of rings and satellite swarms helps all
exoplanet researchers, Socas-Navarro points out.
“We have to make sure we don’t misinterpret something as
interesting as aliens, that we don’t mistake [them] with a nat-
ural ring or a natural moon,” he says. “If you look deeply they
are different.”
COULD BE ANYONE OUT THERE
While the technosignatures workshop focused on listening, not
talking, Socas-Navarro’s ideas also suggest a sweeping conclu-
sion about the nature of the first contact between two species.
For decades our radio receivers and telescopes have re-
stricted our potential pen pals to what he colourfully dubs “big
brother”—civilizations with unthinkably advanced technol-
ogy. These species would be capable of engineering feats such
as literally moving stars around, but recent surveys for traces of
“astroengineering” have come up short.
As humanity’s capacity to observe advances, the type
of civilisation we can detect grows closer in nature to our
own. Socas-Navarro’s satellite ring is the mark of a mod-
erately advanced civilisation just centuries ahead of us,
rather than millennia.
And he’s not the only one thinking along those lines.
Others have proposed looking for orbital mirrors that could
warm or cool a planet, something we humans have recently
discussed as a potential solution to our
own changing climate.
COSMIC LAWMOWERS
W E H AV E T O
Over the last seventy years, our ma-
MAKE SURE
chines have developed from being
WE DON’T
able to observe a civilisation that con-
MISINTERPRET
trols stars to one that controls merely
SOMETHING AS
its own planet.
INTERESTING AS
Speaking of which, no matter the
A L I E N S , T H AT
political result of the current debate
WE DON’T
on climate change, inevitable we will
M I S TA K E
one day need to take an active hand in
[THEM] WITH
directly managing our planet’s climate
A N AT U R A L
and resources. That means launching
RING OR A
more satellites and engaging in other
N AT U R A L
planet-shaping activities that could be
M O O N ,”
seen from afar.
By the same logic, other highly visible
civilisations are also more likely to be
active curators of their planets.
“They will implement changes to their
planet just as a gardener will change his
garden,” Socas-Navarro says.
In such a universe, then, most in-
stances of first contact would not be
between locust-like consumers of pri-
mordial worlds rich in resources and
their hapless low-tech inhabitants (see:
Independence Day) but rather between
mature gardeners and those grappling
with their own unruly gardens.
The likely outcome of such contact,
one hopes, would not be war or con-
quest. It would be a gardening lesson.
RINGS OF A DIFFERENCE
Earth’s “GEO ring” of satellites forms a distinct flat-tin-
can shape (far left), that’s different from the natural rings
of a world like Saturn or this imagined exoplanet (left).
Natural rings are wide and have very little vertical thick-
ness. Satellite rings orbit more closely, and as in Earth’s
case there may even be two rings inclined to each other.
P O P S C I .CO M . AU 29
 You Can’t Multitask
I N V EST I GATO R / E L E A N O R
HAS YOUTUBE BECOME THE
primary entertainment vector for
at least some of the members of
your household? Then you may
have noticed a new tool in the bar
Insight beneath each YouTube video. The
button, a small white box nested
inside a larger box, is the much-awaited mini-player.
Instead of giving your attention to one video at a time,
users can now watch videos in a small pop-out player in
the corner of their screen, freeing them up to search for
new videos on the rest of the YouTube site. While literally
miniature, experts say the feature could have huge conse-
quences for our brains—and the future of streaming.
The rise of mini players have created a few practical
challenges for designers. Right now, businesses and cre-
atives must craft different iterations of their video content
for different platforms. Instagram and Snapchat are verti-
cal. Though YouTube has been adding new functionalities
over the past year, it’s long been dominated by a big fat
horizontal screen. But the mini-player complicates things.
Can viewers still read your video’s text once it’s shrunk
to the corner of the screen? How do you maximise
one video for two drastically different sizes?
Previously, YouTube’s desktop site played
one screen-dominating video at a time.
Now, users can browse the site while their
video plays, allowing them to queue up their
own second, third, and fourth video. It also
keeps people active on the existing page.
What do our brains think of all this? Earl
Miller is a professor of neuroscience at MIT
and an expert in human cognition. “The thing
about multitasking is that you can’t really multitask,”
he says. “Our minds are actually moving back and forth
between tasks, or in this case, between videos.”
Many of us believe ourselves to be proficient multi-
taskers, but Millers says that’s comes from a subtle act
of self-deception. “Our mind papers over [the gaps],” he
says, which creates an illusion of continuity. But lab stud-
ies reveal the truth: when we say we’re multitasking, we’re
just doing two things badly.
Social media platforms rarely ask you for cash directly.
Instead, they make their money through advertising.
Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram all
know so much about you that they can target you with
advertisements relevant to your interests to keep you
from mindlessly scrolling by. And advertisers want you
to be paying attention.
This so-called “attention economy” is the source of
incessant push notifications, infinite scroll, and autoplay.
30 POPULAR SCIENCE
C U M M I N S
Each feature is designed to keep you on the site. It’s work-
ing: When researchers compare the amount of time people
report they wanted to spend online with how much time
they actually do, the gap often measures in the hours.
As digital device adoption plateaus (everyone who
is going to buy one has a smartphone by now), the mini-
player and related features make more sense than ever.
Can’t get more screens with more devices, so let’s make
more screens inside the screen they aready have!
The current iteration of the mini-player is child’s play
compared to what the feature could become. Right now,
the service is confined to YouTube’s site. However, any
industry observers believe the tiny video could one day
follow you around on any site. At least, that is, if you
mostly use Chrome, the web browser run by YouTube’s
parent company, Google.
From a technical perspective, this service wouldn’t
be the hardest thing YouTube’s ever tackled. Trying to
combat extremism are much harder than building what
would essentially be a Google-approved Chrome exten-
sion. But from a business perspective, enabling viewers
to bring YouTube videos with them wherever they go
would be, in a word, aggressive. Though it’s likely
to be well-received among customers (many of
whom are already demanding this feature),
the move would essentially herald the end
of browser tabs — and create conflict with
other sites that need eyeballs on their con-
tent and their advertisers to turn a profit.
Tabs were introduced early in the inter-
net’s history. Building on tabs in spreadsheets,
a long-forgotten browser called InternetWorks
brought tabs to web windows in 1994. Earlier
browsers opened each new site in a different window,
but tabs created a system similar to a physical file folder:
one window displaying a bunch of different information,
all visible in a single glance, and easy to move between.
The entire internet experience has since been organised
around these lines. Unless you’re adding on more machin-
ery — two connected desktops, or a computer in front
of you and a phone in your hand — each tab is a discrete
unit. A YouTube mini-player could change that dynamic.
Instead of sharing an equal amount of space with every
other site — one tab for everyone! —the streaming service
could monopolise attention on any site at any time.
The true impact of the mini-player remains to be
seen. But it’s important for viewers and product devel-
opers alike to remember the paradox a feature like this
presents. You make it more convenient for users to binge-
watch, or watch content passively, but at the same time,
you’re adding to the noise.
 THE FILTH

Insight

Don’t Hold
Your Breath
DISEASE ARISES DUE TO A MULTITUDE OF by C L A I R E M A L DA R E L L I

factors, including both the genes we

inherit and the environments in which
and that is based on what you are being
we live. Sometimes it’s a single genetic exposed to,” says Gilbert. “We’ve been
mutation that causes the condition, as is the case tracking chemical pollutants in the air
with sickle cell disease or cystic ibrosis. Other times, and in the water, but if we had a device
environmental factors play the largest role; smoking like this, we could produce a much more
robust data set. It’d be huge.”
cigarettes greatly increases your risk of lung cancer, The device itself is about the size of an
for example. And while we have been studying the iPhone and rests in a case strapped to a
genetic roots of disease closely through the human person’s arm. In about the same rhythm
as we breathe, the device takes in an
genome project and similar ventures, we haven’t
breath-sized amount of air, and all the
yet igured a way to analyse a group and individual’s tiny particles that come with it.
environmental exposures: Because the goal of the study was
more explorative and less structured,
Researchers say a new, portable tool, that takes air samples the amount of time each person wore the
in the same rhythm as a human breath, could provide a device varied.
better understanding of how exposure might affect many The majority of people wore it from
aspects of our health. three to seven days, but one of the au-
The first study was straightforward: Researchers at- thors himself (Michael Snyder, a genet-
tached the device to 15 people so it could keep tabs on their icist at Stanford) wore it for two years
daily lives. And it turns out that every person seems to straight, night and day. W E K N OW
have a distinct exposome. They think that this might be Every few days to a week, the research- THERE ARE MANY
a missing puzzle piece to understanding disease. But until ers would unload the microbial contents E N V I R O N M E N TA L
now, no one has had a particularly good way of studying and sequence them. The researchers P O L L U TA N T S T H AT
this contact. found the contents varied significantly, AFFECT OUR
despite the fact that all participants were H E A LT H . B U T W E
BREATHE IN in the San Francisco Bay Area. D O N ’ T K N OW
“The device is really powerful,” says Jack Gilbert, a micro- THE MECHANISM
biologist and director of the Microbiome Centre at the Uni- ACTUALLY, DON’T BREATHE IN THROUGH WHICH
versity of Chicago. All of that data was interesting for re- THEY INFLUENCE
He says the study by itself is very preliminary, but searchers to peruse, but didn’t yield U S . I T ’S L I K E
the implications for it are huge: There are major any big insights into what makes H OW W E K N OW
health disparities between different populations EXPOSOME: us sick or keeps us healthy. EXERCISE IS
of people, he says, and figuring out which envi- th e co mb ina tio n Lead author Chao Jiang, a GOOD FOR OUR
r
ronmental factors have the most influence is key of bacteria and othe post-doc in the department of HEARTS, BUT WE
microparticles
to narrowing that gap. genetics at Stanford, says that D O N ’ T K N OW
we ingest daily
“Where you live can affect your disease risk, as we breathe although the research is pre- E X AC T LY W H Y.

32 POPULAR SCIENCE
 asthma, re-
So, by studying people with
connect specific
searchers might be able to
asthmatic ep-
environmental allergens to
ke a correlation
isodes, and potentially ma
s implications t in the air we
liminary, the device itself ha between a particle presen tions
to oth
public health. ptoms. ers th
for both basic science and breathe and the onset of sym conc
erns
es to mon- down, they like t at monito
Previous iterations of devic With that specificity nailed it som
e he in
f r pub
air have been might then be able to find the
mechanism years times turn luenza vi lic h
itor microorganisms in the more s mor rus, a ealth
ac hi ne s. Be - en the door to unde th e dan nd
un wi eld y, sta tio na ry m behind it, which would op rstan an others gerou how
d . If re s
cause they can’t be move
d around very creating targeted treatmen
ts. envir
onme what is d searc some
rch on the disea nt iffere h er
easily, they only have the ab
ility to mon- Gilbert says all of the resea se, th s where p nt ab s can
o
ing track of s far has used when ey m eople c u t the
itor a single room . So keep so-called “exposome” thu a igh on
ales in a day mmon areas likel nd where t be able t tract the
everything an individual inh samples collected from co y to t
urn d the influ
o pin
to, but none tially po
wasn’t really possible. humans expose themselves stop i a nger
o
e n z a v i int
r
t in it us is
Jiang says while we know
there are on a more individual scale. For n
o s trac us — and
t h at , w, it’s im k s . p o t en-
llutants that
many environmental po ye
in flu s, everyt
porta
nt to
know the ALL
affect our health, we don’t JUST DON’T BREATHE AT en hin rem
ich th ey in - ng says the have ce our he g around ember
me ch an ism th ro ug h wh In the future, Stanford’s Jia n’t ye
tp
alth . us do
ely will be or ho B e
fluence us. He likens this
to the fact portable device can and lik w m u i n ne d do u t s c i e n t s
ents, from poso ch . S wn w ists
od for our used for all sorts of experim
that we know exercise is go me-b
iotic
o don
’
hat, h
o
exactly why. ones that answer basic sci
ence ques- pill ju t expect a w,
hearts, but we don’t know st yet n ex-
ers can .
With this device, research
specific ex-
link health conditions to
s.
posures and specific thing

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 33

Insight
S U R E, D O G S A R E S M A RT E R T H A N
many of our other pets — but what
about animals in general? Pigs, for
instance, are smarter than you think.
As are many other species. Dogs, in fact, may not
even be notably smart. They might be distinctly
average. That’s the contention of a new paper
out today in the journal Learning & Behaviour,
which asks, “in what sense are dogs special?”
The project started when Stephen Lea, professor emeritus
at the University of Exeter, was editor of the British journal
Animal Behaviour. While the journal has published on
the mental abilities of species as diverse as pheasants,
mongooses, and flies, he says a large portion of the papers
that came across his desk had to do with dog cognition.
“Through the process of working as an editor [and]
seeing all this research, I definitely got a sense that we
as a collective had gotten a bit overexcited about dog
intelligence,” he says.
There are some obvious reasons for that. While dogs
have been cognition research subjects as far back as the
1800s (does the name Pavlov ring a bell?), Lea says that
through most of the 20th century, researchers focused on
primates and other species, and stopped paying attention
to the question of what (and how) dogs knew.
Then, in the 1990s, scientists began to look again at the
species that is so present in human lives. However, in the
rush of new research, he says, he wondered if dogs had
been oversold as uniquely intelligent.
WHAT EVEN ARE DOGS?
To try and figure out whether dogs were, in fact, animal
geniuses, he and co-author Britta Osthaus compared
more than 300 existing cognition studies. They compared
dog studies of ability to studies of three broad groups, all
of which dogs could be said to fall into: carnivorans (the
fancy term for “carnivores”), social hunters that rely on
BONE OF CONTENTION
by K AT E S C H N E R
one another to bring down prey, and
domesticated animals.
What they found was that dogs didn’t
seemtostandoutfromotheranimalsinany
of the categories. There were carnivorans,
social hunters, and domesticated animals
alike that could match or out-compete dogs
in cognition tests.
What was different about dogs was
their ability to match animals across
those three groups. Hyenas seem to
follow the cues of others in their pack
better; dolphins perform better in tests
of self-consciousness, and raccoons are
better at physical puzzles. However, no
other animal could perform as well as the
dog in all the categories.
The dog, it seems is a jack of all trades.
And while we often remember the saying
ends with “...and master of none” we
forget the original had an extra line: “Jack
of all trades and master of none... but
oftentimes better than a master of one.”
Lea is clear: “Every species has unique W H E T H E R I T ’S
intelligence,” he says. What he and BECAUSE OF
Osthaus argue is that “their intelligence D O M E S T I CA-
is what you would expect of an animal TION, BECAUSE
that is... recently descended from social O F A N E VO LU -
hunters... that are carnivores and that T I O N A RY
have [also] been domesticated,” he says. H I S TO RY O F
“There’s no other animal that fits all three HUNTING IN
of those criteria.” PA C K S , O R
OT H E R R E A-
C-C-COMBO! S O N S , N O B O DY
This new stu dy takes an unusual K N O W S E X A C T-
approach to cognition studies, says LY W H Y D O G S
Daphna Buchsbaum, the principal A R E T H E WAY
investigator at the University of Toronto’s THEY ARE.
Canine Cognition Lab.
“I think a lot of times as humans, we naturally look at
animal cognition through the lens of what makes them so
similar to or different from us,” she says. Here, Lea and
Osthaus compare dog cognition to that of other animals,
with some illuminating results.
Even within their proposal that dogs aren’t uniquely
intelligent, she says, there may be “something interesting
and unique” about dogs that enables them to sit in the
middle of those three categories.
There are competing theories
about why dogs are good at
what they’re good at. Whether
it’s because of domestication,
because of an evolutionary
history of hunting in packs, or other reasons, Lea says
nobody knows exactly why dogs are the way they are.
The paper points to more questions about how they
think, and future research directions for other animals
that have not been as widely studied as dogs. Studying
other carnivores—particularly endangered species such as
the African painted dog or the dhole, which may go extinct
before we can figure them out, Lea says—could offer a
whole new window into pre-domestication dog cognition,
as well as providing insight into those animals themselves.
As for dogs, Buchsbaum says, “the human environment
is their natural environment, and that’s not true of most of
these other animals.”
Figuring out how dogs think could be very important—
the North American dog population is large and growing,
she says, and dogs play roles in our lives ranging from
aiding people with disabilities to sniffing out cancers.
MAN’S DUMBEST FRIEND
So are dogs smarter than other animals? It’s starting to seem
the answer is: maybe not. But they are arguably
more present in our lives, says Buchsbaum.
That’s a reason to study their brains.
Another reason, says Lea, is that they can
take us far in studies of animal cognition,
because they are naturally comfortable
around us. They make good test subjects.
Still, he says, this new paper highlights other
species that need more study.
Carnivorans in general, for instance,
haven’t often been researched. Without
those studies, there’s no way to know how
dogs measure up. “We’d know a lot more
about dogs if we knew more about the
intelligence of other species that are not
dogs,” he says.
SO... DOG OR WOLF?
These days, everything we
thought we knew about
dogs is up for grabs. Is the
domestic dog a subspecies
of the grey wolf, or its own
distinct species? Some zo-
ologists want to stick with
Canis lupus familiaris, others
want doggos to drop the
lupus and just be Canis fa-
miliaris. Complicating the
matter is that the living
groups of grey wolves are
very genetically distinct
from the living dogs - in
other words, their common
relatives, or the wolves that
dogs descended from, have
all died out. And yet the two
animals can breed just fine,
producing wolfdogs. The
same goes for the Dingo, but
that’s a whole other story...
P O P S C I .CO M . AU 35

Insight
BETWEEN 1918 AND 1919, A PARTICULARLY
aggressive strain of the H1N1
virus infected every third person
on the planet . The s o - called
Spanish Flu killed at least 50
million people directly, and many more from
secondary effects. And yet today, historians often
describe it as a “forgotten” pandemic. Why?
Well, in some ways, they’re right. There are no monuments
to the victims. There are no classic works of literature in-
spired by the disease’s rapid advance - though it gets refer-
enced often enough. And there are plenty of books about
it, it features prominently in the history of medicine, and
Wikipedia’s entry is thousands of words long. So how for-
gotten can a pandemic be if there are so many documenta-
ries about it?
After reading countless contagious articles, visiting vir-
ulent museum exhibits, and attending infectious disease
lectures, a simpler, and much more compelling theory,
emerged: The Spanish influenza is not “forgotten,” so
much as no flu, no matter its impact, is ever really remem-
bered.
TWO TROUBLEMAKERS
Under an electron microscope, the chaos of any pandemic
is reduced to a single strand of pathogenic RNA. Flu vi-
ruses are mixed from two key ingredients: hemagglutinin,
a substance that causes red blood cells to clump together,
and neuraminidase, an enzyme that breaks down specific
acids. Scientists have identified 18 “H”s and 11 “N”s swirl-
ing in an earth-sized ether of bird feathers, pigsties, human
snot, and bat guano. When one H meets one N, the result-
ing crossover hit sounds like a Dewey decimal number, but
is in fact a deadly union.
In the case of the Spanish influenza, every victim was
felled by an unusually lethal combination of hemaggluti-
nin-1 and neuraminidase-1, or H1N1 for short.
36 POPULAR SCIENCE
H I STO RY R E P E AT I N G
by E L E A N O R C U M M I N S
It didn’t knock off the usual suspects
back in 1919. The very young and very
old—typically the first to fall in such an
outbreak—were not immune, but the
Spanish flu had an unusual thirst for the
blood of ostensibly healthy adults. Half
its victims were between 20 and 40 years
old, whose healthy immune systems ulti-
mately worked against them. They died
gruesome deaths: bleeding from their
mouth and eyes, bodies blackened by a
lack of oxygen.
It was faster, more brutal, and less sur-
vivable than Bubonic Plague. So why do
we still think of flu as little more than a
very bad cold?
WHO CARES?
Several theories have been posited as to
why the Spanish flu just didn’t stick as a
historical moment. That it charged across
the continents while World War I was un-
derway couldn’t have helped.
Wartime censorship gave the flu its
name; the Spanish press were one of
the few free to document the disease’s THE SAME VIRAL
spread (though the side-effect of that is S T R A I N T H AT
that many thought the pandemic started BROUGHT US
in Spain - it actually seems to have started T H E S PA N I S H
among US servicemen). FLU ENCIRCLED
Censorship also stifled early under- THE WORLD IN
standing, and limited people’s opportu- 2 0 0 9, I N A
nity to prepare. Perhaps forced silence, MUCH-LESS-
when coupled with quarantines, school D E A D LY
closures, and bans on public gatherings, PA N D E M I C
meant the true extent of the devastation C O L L O Q U I A L LY
did not make itself felt. Or maybe be- KNOWN AS
cause influenza has always been around, “ S W I N E F L U ”.
 nobody thought of it as serious, because people
have always died from flu from time to time.
Indeed, our flu-blindness has persisted, long
before the Spanish influenza extinguished itself.
The next pandemic, which admittedly killed
only 1.1 million people, cropped up in 1957.
Another flu, which claimed a similar number,
followed in 1968. Most recently, the same viral
strain that brought us the Spanish flu encircled
the world in 2009, in a much-less-deadly pan-
demic colloquially known as “swine flu”.
According to the US Centres for Disease Con-
trol and Prevention, 60 million were infected
in the United States alone. Fortunately, fewer than
13,000 died. That might seem like a lot, but the relatively
low death rate was thanks to technology and management.
Who knows what damage it would have done in the early
20th Century.
FLU-WAR STORIES
While few who lived through the swine flu outbreak
“forgot” it, but it’s not necessarily the first story we plan to
tell our grandchildren.
Our sense of urgency is further diminished for seasonal
flus. The strain varies, but you can practically set a watch
on the virus’ appearance. As a result, regular ol’ flu season
doesn’t typically receive the total freak-out response its
pandemic cousin reliably drums up.
On average, the CDC reports, fewer than half of Ameri-
cans get their flu shot (Australia is similarly chill about the
deadly chills). Those who do, CDC data suggests, do so be-
cause they understand the flu’s behaviour, and have been
sick with the flu or seen a love one sickened by it.
By contrast, 28 per cent of those who go unvaccinated
do so because they feel a vaccine is unnecessary,
according to a report from RAND. Others believe
the vaccine isn’t effective.
This later group is right — well, partially. The flu
vaccine ranges in effectiveness from 19 to 60 per
cent in any given year.
Why? Well, viral strains worth safeguarding
against are picked far in advance of flu season; the
drugs are developed in chicken eggs, which build
different molecules in response to disease than
humans; and manufacturing isn’t easy, either.
Doctors still advocate for patients to get the
vaccine, though, because any protection is better
than none, and some evidence suggests that while
the shot may not prevent you from contracting the
illness, it could make the disease less severe.
But that’s the thing: if we took flu seriously,
recognised its power to decide our fate, even 60
percent efficacy would definitely seem like some-
thing worth standing in line at CVS for.
Our blasé attitude toward the flu can have in-
credible consequences. In 2017-2018, accord-
ing to a new a analysis from the CDC more than
80,000 Americans died of the flu. That’s roughly
twice the number of people who died from car
accidents, and 79,998 more than have died from
ebola in the United States ever.
Australia has a much low death rate - only a few
hundred in any given year - partly thanks to our
lower and more thinly spread population.
Even so, 2017/2018 was a bad season for Aus-
tralia too. And this wasn’t a novel strain of in-
fluenza. It wasn’t a pandemic. It was just good
ol’ H2N3, that regular, otherwise unremarkable
horseman of the seasonal flupocalypse.
IT’S NOT A HEAD COLD
The lessons of the Spanish influenza are as rele-
vant as ever. Public health officials have learned
how to get the message out about disease, espe-
cially viral pandemics. Doctors know better when
and where to intervene, in theory preventing the
complete erosion of social order.
And the biggest difference between today and
1919? Vaccines. These may be imperfect, but vac-
cines help millions of people resist the worst of
this disease - a miserable few weeks is better than
death, after all.
But all of these advancements could turn out
to be useless, unless we remember that, when it
comes to the flu, we tend to forget.
P O P S C I .CO M . AU 37
 N
E
T H
I G
B

C A H E
OW N D
H EE E
S F
L
F
?
 C H I E F CO G I TATO R / R O B
A N Y FAC T- C H E C K E R W H O WO R K S I N T H E
media has a straightforward but challenging job: make
sure all the claims in an article are true. Are simple
facts, like the distance between two cities, accurate?
Are the quotes correct? Are broader statements
true? It’s an important task, and in an era of outright
fake news — especially considering the 2016 US
presidential election and now the upcoming US
midterms — it’s becoming even more crucial.
Sure, fake news doesn’t really have the same
impact on Australians. With our centrist major
parties, compulsory voting, and preferential voting
system, it’s much more difficult for unscrupulous
politicians to manipulate our opinions. Also, our head
of state isn’t determined by a gigantic multi-billion
dollar popularity contest.
But that’s not to say fake news has no effect on
Australian opinions. The point is we just don’t know
for sure. To figure out a way to fight fake news, we first
need to understand how significant it is in shaping the
way people think and live.
To tackle this larger issue, researchers from MIT
as well as institutions in Qatar and Bulgaria have
been working on a way to use artificial intelligence to
help humans make sense of the complicated media
landscape. And they realised that an important step
they needed to take before developing an AI that
can fact-check individual claims was to analyse how
reliable different news websites are in the first place.
So they set out to make an AI that could evaluate
how factually strong different sites are, and their
political bias.
To train their AI system, they first used data from
1,066 websites listed in a source called Media Bias /
Fact Check. Then, the AI analysed information about
news websites, considering sources like articles on
the sites themselves, their Wikipedia pages, Twitter
accounts, even URLs. Using information like this, the
AI had about a 65 per cent accuracy at predicting how
factual the website was, and was about 70 per cent
accurate at detecting its bias.
One of the best resources for the AI is one that
humans rely on, too. “It turns out that Wikipedia is
very important,” says Ra Bal a ostdoc at MIT’s
Computer Science
and the paper’s first
information you ne
news source might
Wikipedia page for
REPUBLICA/GETTY IMAGES
example, labels it as s
up top. The Drudg
Wikipedia page lab
conservative.
Wikipedia
important for anoth
V E R G E R
reason. “Not having [any]
Wikipedia page is associated
with a website not being very
reliable,” Baly adds.
T h e r e ’s a n o t h e r w a y
Wikipedia helps too. Sudden
changes to existing pages - Insight
from the subtle to the obvious
like publishing an unpopular politician’s person phone
number - can alert readers to the fact that an infowar
(of sorts) is kicking off. Sudden Wikipedia editing
battle over the biography of Tom Cruise? Someone
wants to manipulate your opinion of the actor. It’s not
necessarily fake news, but it’s a real red flag.
Keeping in mind the overall trustworthiness of
the website itself is a good step, too. For example,
in August, Facebook and a cybersecurity firm
announced they’d uncovered “inauthentic” news
coming out of Iran. One of the websites associated
with Iran was called the Liberty Front Press; they
called themselves “independent” but appeared to
actually be pro-Iran. Now that doesn’t necessarily
mean they aren’t independent, but if a site claims to
be independent and only publishes content that paints
Iran in a wholly positive light, it means it’s probably
a propaganda arm of the government. After all, if an
Aussie “independent” site claims all government
policies, State and Federal, are super awesome, you’d
be suspicious, right?
Of course, the MIT research group aren’t the only
ones using AI to analyse language like this: a Google-
made AI system called Jigsaw automatically scores the
toxicity of reader comments, and Facebook has turned
to AI to help augment its efforts to keep hate speech at
bay in Myanmar.
Another source was even more important than
Wikipedia for the MIT researchers’ AI system: articles
on the websites themselves. The AI was able to analyse
between 50 to 150 articles on each news site and
examine the language in them. “Extremely biased
websites try to appeal to the emotions of the readers,”
Baly says. “They use a different kind of language,” when
compared to a mainstream, down-the-middle site.
This doesn’t just mean right-leaning or so-called
ystems can detect
chists, and simple
pread weird ideas
es “for the lulz”.
ys they ’d still
ake their system
histicated. Their
this stage was to
iate a new way of
nking of how to
kle this problem.”
P O P S C I .CO M . AU 39
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 FEATURES
ISSUE NOVEMBER
120 2018

42 48
WHAT IS IT ABOUT MOONS ONCE THERE WAS A
AND DWARF PLANETS THAT MICROSCOPE WHO WANTED
NASA FINDS SO SEXY? TO GO TO SPACE
Mo n
 SAT E L L I T E O B S E SS I O N

struck

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 43
SAT E L L I T E O B S E SS I O N
ntil fairly recently, astronomers
U
didn’t have the tools to study the
stuff on the outskirts of our Solar
System. When they started look-
ing, they found lots of objects,
says Scott Sheppard, who is part
of the team that discovered The
Goblin.
But many of those objects come close
enough to the giant planets we know about,
like Neptune and Jupiter, that these larger bod-
ies influence their orbits. Like Sedna and 2012
VP113, 2015 TG387 is too far out for that. But all
three of those objects have similarities in their
orbit that point to something big affecting their
orbits. What that is, exactly, is yet unknown.
“For sixty years Pluto was the edge of the
Solar System as we thought about it,” says
Harvard astrophysicist Scott Kenyon, who
was not involved in the current study. That’s
all changed in recent years, he says, and Shep-
pard’s team is helping us to understand the
true outskirts of our Solar System.
Compared to what the team has already
found, The Goblin has
“a much bigger orbit,”
says Sheppard, “so it goes
much further away from The hypothesis that he thinks most likely is that
the sun than Sedna or
2012 VP113 go.” It takes there’s another large planet out there in the Oort
about 40,000 years for
the dwarf planet to orbit cloud, which influences all those other objects.
our star, and it was lucky
that Sheppard’s team was That would be Planet X.
looking at the right place
at the right time to spot it.
Normally, Sheppard says, objects out that
far are significantly affected by stuff outside
our Solar System. “The Goblin’s unusual be-
cause that doesn’t seem to be happening,” he
says.
Using what they knew of its orbit, “we ran a
bunch of simulations and determined that the
outside forces do push it around a little bit,” he
says, “but it’s… not that significant.”
That means The Goblin is a perfect object
to use as a “probe” to look at what else is going
on in the Oort Cloud. This far-out region of the
Solar System is still influenced by our Sun, but
44 POPULAR SCIENCE
we don’t know much about what’s out there. Astronomers can observe
the movement of objects like The Goblin and model what else might be
out there affecting their orbits. Because the object is so faint, Sheppard
says, astronomers don’t know much about it. “We don’t know if its sur-
face is as white as snow or as dark as coal,” he says. “Because it’s on the
small end it’s not massive enough to have a substantial atmosphere,” he
says.
The spooky title is just a nickname, says Sheppard. His team had been
monitoring the object for a while, but it was near Halloween 2015 when
they finally assessed that its orbit never brought it within the range of
known planets, so it was significant to them.
Because “2015 TG387” is awkward to say, they took the letters and
went with “The Goblin.” That’s not its final name, though. “It’ll have
to be officially named in the future, which would... probably be based
on some kind of mythology from the past,” he says, like most celestial
objects.
Speaking of the past, peering into the far reaches of our Solar System
allows us to figure out the system’s history. Our current understanding is
that the planets formed from a nebula of materials surrounding the Sun
newborn sun. Eventually, all the dust and gas gathered into the planets
as we know them.
But the current model would have no explanation for the theoretical
large mass that seems to be affecting the orbits of The Goblin and its far-
away colleagues.
Planet X us a nickname that has been applied to a number of theoreti-
cal objects over the years. Once it just meant a planet orbiting neatly a bit
further out from Pluto. After all, Pluto was discovered thanks to pertur-
bations in Neptune’s orbit. And Neptune was discovered the same way.
So why not a tenth planet?
Now the idea of Planet X is more complex, because if it exists, it’s
hanging out with a wild bunch of different objects, from potato-shaped
chunks of mushy ice, to dwarf planets like Pluto, it’s moon/twin Charon,
Sedna, Eris, and more.
Finding a large, orbit-clearing actual planet “would show that our So-
lar System formed in a very chaotic environment,” Sheppard says. That’s
because it’d be so far away from the Sun, and scientists would have to
figure out how it got out there.
 Using Hubble, which is about
four times more precise than
Kepler, they detected two sets
of telltale signs that suggested
the presence of an exomoon.

Even with our new knowledge of the dwarf worlds out past Pluto, we
still need a Planext X to explain the orbits of The Goblin and its two col-
leagues. At their distance from the Sun and the large planets we know
about, you’d expect the orbits of all three to be random, says Kenyon.
They do have very eccentric orbits - non-circular and tilted from the
plane of the ecliptic that all the big planets orbit on or very near. But
there’s still an element of order and commonality to them. “We’d like
some explanation of why they’re not random,” Kenyon says.
The hypothesis that he thinks most likely is that there’s another large
planet out there in the Oort cloud, which influences all those other ob-
jects. That would be Planet X. But whether or not it’s out there, he says,
The Goblin and the other dwarf planets provide “a better idea of what
the proto-solar nebula was like four billion years ago.”
So, the Golbin’s neighbours: 2015 TC387 has the biggest orbit that we
know of, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t more of its kind out there.
“I think most astronomers suspect that the Oort Cloud may be full of
all kinds of dwarf planets,” Alison Earnhart, a Juniata College physics
instructor, told Popular Science in an email. There might also be some
big ones out there, like Planet X, she wrote. But it’s one thing to suspect it
and another to observe it.
“The Goblin is another big step forward in our accumulation of evi-
dence for what is contained in the Oort Cloud, which is still a very myste- though nearly 200 moons are known to orbit
rious realm because it’s just so far away,” she says. planets in our solar system — Jupiter alone has
Sheppard’s team is still searching the outer reaches of the Solar Sys- at least 79 — up to now researchers had not yet
tem for objects that could help us understand the story of that region detected any moons around exoplanets.
— and pinpoint Planet X, if it actually exists. “It’s not a slam dunk,” To look for such “exomoons,” astronomers
Sheppard says. They estimate they’ll need to find at least three further from Columbia University examined data
objects, giving them a sample-size of six, to establish whether they’re all from NASA’s Kepler space telescope on 284
being affected by a larger object out in the Oort. The team is currently transiting planets. These worlds pass between
watching a few, he says, but these things take time. their stars and the observatory, resulting in a
brief dimming of the light of those stars. The
hat the Solar System is packed to the gunwales with moons scientists detected anomalies hinting at a

T
and dwarf planets and planetoids and whatever Ceres is
inevitably going to be reclassified into 50 years from now
(poor Ceres, so many identities since 1801 - planet, aster-
oid, dwarf planet). So you’d assume this must be true of
every planet-bearing star.
But in astronomy, assumptions must eventually be
backed up with real observations. So the quest to find not
just exoplanets but also exomoons has been underway for some years
now. And in 2018, that quest may have been successful...
Nearly eight thousand light-years away from Earth, there’s a star
about the same size as our sun. Like our own solar system, that distant
star is orbited by a planet about the same size as Jupiter. But that’s where
the similarities end. Around that planet circles a Neptune-sized gas gi-
ant, which may be the first moon discovered outside the solar system,
and the largest moon ever observed.
Over the past 20 or so years, scientists have confirmed the existence
of nearly 3,800 exoplanets, or planets around other stars. However, al-
moon around the exoplanet Kepler-1625b. This
gas giant is about the same diameter as Jupiter,
and orbits the solar-mass star Kepler-1625
about 7,825 light-years from Earth in the con-
stellation Cygnus.
The researchers then booked 40 hours of
time on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to
analyse Kepler-1625b during its 19-hour-long
transit across the face of its star.
Using Hubble, which is about four times
more precise than Kepler, they detected two
sets of telltale signs that suggested the pres-
ence of an exomoon.
“We indeed conclude that a moon is an ex-
cellent explanation for the data in hand,” said
study senior author David Kipping, an astro-
physicist at Columbia University.

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 45

First, after the exoplanet passed in front of
its star, the researchers detected a second and
much smaller decrease in the star’s brightness
3.5 hours later. This supports a scenario where
a moon trailed the planet, like a dog following
its owner.
Second, the astronomers found the planet
began its transit nearly 80 minutes earlier than
predicted. This is consistent with a picture
where a moon’s gravitational tug would cause
its planet to wobble from its predicted location.
Although the gravitational pull of another
planet could in principle also cause this anomaly,
Kepler found no evidence for additional planets
around this star during its four-year mission.
“It sounds like they struck gold,” said astro-
physicist Sean Raymond at the University of
Bordeaux in France, who did not take part in this
work. “Moons are out there and findable. It’s an
exciting next step in exoplanet exploration.”
46 POPULAR SCIENCE
The Goblin is too
new for a fancy
orbital diagram
like this, but 2015
he researchers estimated the exomoon, dubbed Ke-
T
RR245 (in yellow)
pler-1625b-i, is only 1.5 per cent the mass of its companion gives the general
planet, a ratio nearly that of Earth and its moon. However, idea of how wide-
ranging these
that still means the exomoon may be gargantuan. Ke- distant objects
pler-1625b is probably several times Jupiter’s mass, which can really be.
would mean its moon is about the mass and diameter of
Neptune.
The size of the moon is surprising. “All the large moons
in the solar system are at most about 1/10,000th as massive as their host
planets,” Raymond said. (For instance, Jupiter’s Ganymede is bigger
than Mercurcy, and twice as massive as the Moon, but only masses 0.02
Earths. Jupiter masses 317.8 Earths.)
The Kepler-1625b pair are so large that it “could also be regarded as a
binary planet system,” said Avi Loeb, chair of Harvard University’s as-
tronomy department.
“The biggest things will be the easiest to find,” Kipping said. “This
may not represent a particularly common type of moon system—it’s just
it’s for the easiest for us to find.”
The researchers estimated the exomoon orbits about 33 million kilo-
metres from its world. This means it may lie close enough for its planet’s
gravitational pull to rip it apart. But there’s nothing like this in our solar
system for the researchers to observe directly.
To study the dynamics of the planet-moon pair, the researchers cre-
ated computer models to see how the two might interact. “In about
three-quarters of the simulations that we did, we find the moon is per-
fectly stable,” Kipping said. “We don’t have any reason to believe that
 The existence
of possibly
dozens of
orbit is unstable.” smaller worlds away from their stars than Earth
Kepler-1625b orbits its star about the same dis-
tance that Earth does the sun. That puts the exo- on the is from the sun, Kipping said.
These searches with Hubble or
planet and its moon within their star’s habitable
zone — the area around the star warm enough for outskirts of NASA’s upcoming James Webb
Space Telescope may even turn
standing bodies of liquid water. All life on Earth
depends on liquid water, so the hunt for alien life our Solar up exomoons smaller than Jupi-
ter’s largest ones, he added.
often focuses on habitable zones.
System, The scientists noted they are
still urging caution about their
oth Kepler-1625b and its potential
implies find. “The first exomoon is ob-

B
newfound moon are gas giants, viously an extraordinary claim,
and so cannot support the bodies of
water needed for life as we know it to something for and it requires extraordinary
evidence,” Teachey says.
survive. However, “if there are addi-
tional rocky moons orbiting the large the future of “Furthermore, the size we’ve
calculated for this moon, about
planet, they might be habitable,”
Loeb said. “This is the most exciting our species. the size of Neptune, has hardly
been anticipated, and so that
prospect for future follow-ups on this discovery.” too is reason to be careful here.”
The size of this potential exomoon raises The existence of possibly
questions about how it formed. Some moons, dozens of smaller worlds on
like Earth’s, are thought to have coalesced from the debris of a giant im- the outskirts of our Solar System, and huge gas
pact against their companion planet. Others, like Neptune’s moon Tri- giant or ice giant moons orbiting even bigger
ton, likely started off as independent bodies only to later get ensnared worlds in other star systems, implies some-
by their planet’s gravitational pull. However, neither of these scenarios thing for the future of our species.
Rocky worlds seems to fit this exomoon, said study lead author Alex Teachey, an as- The Solar System has only four rocky worlds.
(below) are being trophysicist at Columbia University. It’s difficult to see how an impact Mercury is both the hottest and coldest place in
discovered along
against a gas giant would split off a moon, or how a moon of such size the Solar System thanks to it being tidally-locked
with gas giants. And
now, the first Earth- could get captured. to face the Sun. Mars is probably a good candi-
sized worlds are Another possibility is that this exomoon may have formed from the same date for terraforming but will need constant
starting to be material as its parent planet, as is suspected with Jupiter and its moons. maintenance over the millennia to stop it leaking
found. Kepler-20F
seems very like New models of moon formation have suggested “a small fraction of all its new atmosphere back into space.
Earth... but then moons can end up being as massive as about one per cent of their host Venus... uh... Venus is a bit of a problem
again so dd Venus, planet mass, which is about the case for Kepler-1625b,” Raymond said. child. About 86 per cent the size of Earth, with
based on size and
density. Yet Venus is
In the future, hunts for exomoons will likely look at exoplanets farther 0.9g surface gravity, it should be ideal for us.
one of the least- Unfortunately something weird happened to it
habitable places in in the distant past.
the Solar System.
It rotates backwards and very slowly. It also
has a CO2 atmosphere full of sulphuric acid
that’s so dense, even on a clear day an aeroplane
flying at normal airliner alitutude (about 10km)
wouldn’t be able to see the ground.
So each new star system may have a handful
of rocky worlds, most of which will be uninhab-
itable. So we will need to rely on moons and
dwarf planets, for resources and living space.
And maybe it’s even simpler than that.
Maybe it’s just that gas giant and ice giants are
too alien to be interesting. Moons have land-
scapes - Titan even has lakes, albeit of ethane.
For most of human history, a “moon” has
been something up in the sky you use to time
your harvest. But who knows, maybe one day
moons will be the places most of us call home.

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 47
The microscope that could look for life on Jupiter’s moon

BY SARAH SCOLES
PHOTOGRAPH BY THE VOORHES
Earth, far off now, looks like an
unpopulated set of continents
surrounded by empty ocean.
You’d never know that all kinds
of life—from staph to elephants
to humans—move all over its 1

surface. I just spent two years

in a wide orbit around the blue
marble, the first step in a circui-
tous journey toward Jupiter. We
circled around the globe in this
Space Launch System cargo cap-
sule until our position was just
right for Earth’s gravity to fling 2

us toward the Jovian planet.

That isn’t meant to be my new homestead, though. I’m headed for
Europa, a smaller sphere. Its exterior is sheathed in a miles-thick layer of
ice. But underneath, protected like I am in this lander, there might be an
ocean. Scientists say that with its water and its chemistry, it could be the
lthough willing and able to travel, Shamu—formally
named the Submersible Holographic Astrobiology
Microscope with Ultraresolution—is still very much on
Earth, in a basement lab of the Science, Research and
COURTESY PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY (4)

place in the solar system (besides Earth) most likely to have life. Other
spacecraft carrying other instruments have floated past it: Pioneer,
Voyager, Galileo (great names, right?). Looking down with their far-
sighted cameras, they didn’t see any beings waving white flags. In fact, no
human-made device has ever spotted definitive signs of alien existence.
But maybe they simply didn’t—or couldn’t—look close enough.
I can. Hello, I’m Shamu. (Isn’t that another great name?) Seeing
things close up is my raison d’être. I’ll land on Europa’s icy surface and
a drill will cut down into the moon. I’ll suck up its liquid essence and spy
magnified details that no one has seen before. Maybe my view will show
only water, neat, no microbes. But maybe not.
Teaching Center at Portland State University, where
science writers can meet it. A rugged field instrument,
Shamu uses lasers to create 3D movies of micro organ-
isms moving in a liquid sample. While similar tools
exist, the ones that boast high definition are too delicate to take into
the wilderness, and the tough ones aren’t precise enough to see
small bacteria. Shamu’s fans, meanwhile, think it’s well-suited to
investigate not just weird life in Earth’s extreme environments, but
also whether there is life beyond our planet.
Shamu occupies a small space in the lab of scientist Jay Nadeau.
One Friday in March, Nadeau is at work, leaning against a high

50 POPULAR SCIENCE
 4

Icecapade
rolling chair with two sweaters swung on its back. She wears another And the team Nadeau works with has Nadeau totes Shamu
sweater (it’s the Pacific Northwest, after all), featuring a set of alpacas created even simpler-looking versions. (1) on Greenland
marching around her torso. There’s a Ridley road bike she uses for “We’ve made one that would fit inside sea ice; measuring
snow depth(2); ice
commuting stashed against the wall, and a helmet next to a CPU. a soda can,” she says, “with electronics cores(3); slurping
Nadeau is small in all dimensions, and intense, with short curls spring- the size of a few packs of cards.” For up icy brine(4).
ing from her head. She walks past the wet-lab benches, to a back room now, Shamu is grounded, relegated to
where a graduate student sits at a computer and mostly ignores her. looking at ice-cold water from Earth’s
There, Nadeau puts her hand against a mesh cage a few feet by a few Arctic regions, super-salty desert water, and the wiggling extremo-
feet. Inside sits a squirt bottle filled with 70 percent sterilizing ethanol philes unlucky enough to be trapped there. Someday, though, Nadeau
solution, a roll of orange tape, and a Thorlabs temperature controller hopes it might get a peek at Europan liquid.
that resembles a cassette deck. But the primary occupant is a myste- Shifting her view from one place to another is nothing new for
rious tube-like object, about 2 feet long and as wide as a wine bottle, Nadeau. She got her doctorate in theoretical physics and moved
bolted to a silver beam attached to the bottom of the cage. into the life sciences at Caltech after that. When she walked into
This, Nadeau says, is “The Microscope.” her first biology lab, the newness was almost overwhelming.
To be honest, Shamu looks pretty unassuming—like a toy spy glass. “Everything looks like vials of clear liquid,” she says. The first time

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 51
SHAMU
“Our visual systems are probably
better than any possible method
of saying if this is alive or not.”
another lab sent her a DNA sample, she couldn’t find the genes.
They had sent her an almost-empty envelope. “There was noth-
ing inside it except a pencil circle with a couple of notes on it and
a piece of filter paper,” she says. The DNA, of course, was on the
paper, and she had to soak it to coax the sample into solution.
Thrown into the chilly deep end, she eventually learned what she
was doing and moved her research to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labo-
ratory, where she stuffed microbes with luminescent nanoparticles
that stuck to different chemicals, allowing Nadeau to track them.
JPL was interested in how to obtain information about life on other
planets. That quest starts with understanding life on Earth. And so
Nadeau became part astrobiologist, and eventually a biomedical
engineering professor at McGill University in Canada.
Around the time she started, in 2004, the country was doubling
down on astrobiology—the study of signs of life off-Earth. The
Canadian government had just funded a research network to identify
various sites in northern North America that resemble other planets.
“You write a proposal of why you want to go, and you can go,”
Nadeau says. And she did—to Nunavut territory, where cold
springs flow from the permafrost, carrying strange little life-forms.
On her regular trips to these Martian-like locations, she took along
a fluorescence microscope to test its capabilities for an extreme,
alien landscape—and to see what might live in such a place. To use
it, she injected each sample with fluorescent dye, which stained
The Ice Moon
Cracks line
Europa’s
frozen
surface.
specific chemical targets. The microscope
beamed high-intensity light at the sample,
illuminating the dye, and the instrument’s
optics produced a magnified image of the
specimen, its relevant molecules shining bright.
The microscope could handle only small samples, however, making
it harder to find the organisms she was looking for. And the instrument
itself was both fragile and difficult to miniaturise, making it unsuitable
for the otherworldly backcountry. Plus, if those dyes someday were to
spill on the Martian surface, NASA’s planetary protection office might
be all over her.
Next, she considered holographic microscopes because they could
make 3D movies that played in real time, and didn’t require contami-
nating dyes or anyone to focus them. These instruments shoot lasers
at the samples and, based on the way the samples scatter the light,
construct an all-dimensions digital movie of what’s inside.
At first, Nadeau and her team used a commercially available
scope, but it didn’t provide crisp-enough footage. When, in 2014,
she remarked to colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that she
wished somebody could build a better one, they responded, “We can.”
Together they developed Shamu. She and the JPL engineers
discuss the specs that each iteration should have, and then they
build it. After, Nadeau schleps it into the field to see if it works. You
don’t have to focus it, and it slurps up a lot of liquid. That’s a plus
if the population is sparse and the sample isn’t teeming with life,
which can be the case in harsh environments.
SimplethoughShamumightseemontheoutside,itcontainshidden
depths. It’s different from other field-ready holographic microscopes,
which have just a single laser. Shamu splits one
into two: One is the so-called reference beam,
which shoots straight through a sample of pure
water, encountering nothing. The other is the
science beam, which passes through the sam-
ple—of glacier melt, or salty water, or (maybe
someday) Europan ocean water—and changes
based on what it encounters. The microscope
combines and compares the two rays: The
difference between the nothing beam and the
something beam equals the living somethings
inside. The process happens instantaneously,
leaving microbes swimming in your vision. As
Nadeau puts it, “We know life when we see it.”
More specifically, Nadeau believes that
we know life when we see it moving, thus
giving up seemingly indisputable evidence
of its existence. “Our visual systems are
probably better than any possible method
of saying if this is alive or not.” We need, she
believes, to just look.
Nadeau would prefer if we looked for alien
life using Shamu, of course. She pats the
copper mesh and goes over to the computer,
where she tries to find a white paper she
NASA
co-authored called “Just Look!” As in, look for
 Shamu is a digital
CAMERA holographic
microscope: Its obvious
job is to magnify
specimens, but its
special talent is making
3D movies that provide
compelling evidence
of micro organisms
alive and stirring. After
SCIENCE
BEAM LENS researchers inject
REFERENCE liquid into the sample
BEAM
chamber, the microscope
splits a laser beam into
two shafts, which the
collimator lens makes
parallel. One ray passes
through the specimen; the
SPECIMEN second acts as a reference
beam. Shamu’s software
COLLIMATOR combines and compares
LENS the two rays, revealing
microorganisms moving
in the sample. Meanwhile,
a 3D camera at the top
of the scope records and
LIGHT transmits the results in
SOURCE
real time.
SPECIMEN SCIENCE BEAM REFERENCE BEAM

actual extraterrestrial microbes, not just for indirect evidence of living
beings, like chemicals that result from metabolism.
Nadeau can’t find the paper but reiterates the idea behind it like
so: When scientists wanted to see what was swimming around the
Mariana Trench, they put a chunk of bait on a stick and watched with
a camera. Marine beasts swam out of their hiding spots and came up
to investigate. The scientists caught it on film, and so learned that
beings lived way down there. “This is exactly what we’re trying to do,
but on the microbe scale,” Nadeau says.
On Europa, a drill would bore more than 10 centimetres into the
ice—far enough to reach liquid that seeps through the surface cracks—
and Shamu would have a look. But before the JPL-Nadeau team could
try to persuade NASA to give the scope a shot, they needed to try it out
on more-familiar territory. Like Greenland. Which they did, in 2015.
Sheathed in my case—bright-orange plastic, with a killer whale painted in
black on it—I couldn’t see anything. But I’d heard we were going to Green-
land, by way of Iceland. At the airport, someone sent me on a conveyor belt
through a metal detector. Words came muffled through my walls. “It’s a
scientific instrument,” someone said. Other voices asked so many questions
about what I was, and what I was here to do, it made me existential.
Soon enough, there was a rumble. Thrust. Lift. Then stillness. I
imagined it was my launch into space, until a voice came over the
plane’s PA. “We’ll have you in Reykjavik shortly,” it said.
Eventually, the humans set me down somewhere and began asking more
questions. Not to me, but about me. They were nervous. “Is this going to
work?” they asked. And then they just left!
After what seemed like hours, they returned and shot cloudy water
into my sample holder to test me. I found out they’d been to a place
called the Blue Lagoon. It was gross, they said. You could see the skin
cells from all the bathing people. And trash on the bottom. So of course
there were microbes feeding out there.
I quickly showed them a hologram. They sounded relieved, and we
continued to the Greenland Climate Research Centre for some real work.
It was freezing out, and the humans put on orange-and-black puffy
jumpsuits. Their arms were as big as their legs. In a place they called “the
swimming pool,” but which they never would have swum in, they cut
6 inches or so into the ice with a drill that looked like a pogo stick. “Not
enough, not enough,” they kept saying, as they pulled frozen cylinders
from the drill’s mouth, checking for the ice’s depth.
Finally, apparently, there was enough. They stuck me into a shallow hole
they’d dug, to keep me at the same cold temperature as the environment,
and fed me a sample. Again, as always, I made them a movie. Later I
learned this was yet another test, not what we were really here to do.
At last, we went to Malene Bay. In a white, flat landscape surrounded
by white, pointy mountains, the orange-swaddled people-blobs found a

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 53
 1

suitable spot, sucked out a cylinder of ice, set me down in the hole, and actual life on the icy moon. “That’s a Family History
Voyager 2 (1)
fed me a sample with a syringe. In a minute, they all exclaimed, “Ooooo!” very high bar,” Hand said. “That bar visited Jupiter
They could see something—algae, diatoms, marine bacteria—swimming. runs the risk of setting expectations and Europa (2) back
I could do this all day, and I did, showing them again and again what too high, perhaps.” in 1979. Jupiter’s
magnetic field
had been there the whole time, waiting for us to find it. There’s historical context for that scores the ice (3),
attitude. NASA has been hesitant to

t her computer, Nadeau pulls up a SpaceNews article
from the day before, a story that would cast doubt on
Shamu’s future itinerary: “Europa lander concept rede-
signed to lower cost and complexity,” reads the
headline. The text describes a presentation that the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory’s Kevin Hand, a deputy chief
scientist in the solar system exploration directorate,
made on March 28 to the National Academy of Sciences.
According to Hand, the lander doesn’t need to look directly for
influencing those
look explicitly for life ever since it sent distinct cracks (4).
the Viking missions to Mars, in 1976.
Those landers carried several experiments to look for biosignatures.
Two came back negative, but one study showed possible evidence
that microbes were there metabolizing. The problem was that a
promising chemical signature could come from, say, geology and
not biology. Ultimately, scientific consensus settled on “not aliens.”
The agency has steered away from life detection ever since. “NASA
has been kind of gun-shy about adding a mission that’s looking for

54 POPULAR SCIENCE

life,” astrobiologist Alison Murray says. She co-chaired the Europa
lander’s science definition team, and has been close to the mission-
planning process. It’s partly to save face. But it’s also partly because
that quest is hard.
“There’s no one thing you can look at and say, ‘Aha, life,’” says Curt
Niebur, the lander’s program scientist. Unless, he continues, a fish
swims in front of the camera.
Niebur doesn’t think that seeing small life swimming is the
same thing. “Just looking” for and at moving specks isn’t enough.
Instead, multiple lines of evidence need to provide the same bio-
logical answer.
Nadeau will get a chance to convince NASA of Shamu’s worthiness,
though. In late May, the agency released an official call for Europa
mission instrument proposals. Nadeau has been ready for months to
submit hers.
SHAMU
“The long voyage is almost
over. I coast toward the
surface, and a thruster
fires backward to slow
the lander down.”
It will be a while before the agency makes its final decision.
Sometimes, big missions like this one seem to exist only in the
perpetual future, like science fiction. There’s a 2013 movie called
Europa Report in which humans go to the Jovian moon and discover
single-celled organisms and a strange light beaming underneath the
ice. It turns out to be a macro predator. Nadeau has seen the movie,
and she thinks it reaches into reality. “Everybody’s saying, ‘We’re
going to look for these molecular-scale biosignatures,’” she says. “In
the back of their minds, they’re really hoping to see a sea monster.”
I’ve been in space for five years by the time anything exciting happens. When
NASA sends up astronauts, it gives them movies and books and games and
music. When NASA sends a microscope and a spectrometer to space, we
get nothing.
So, like some prisoner in solitary, I think about what I’ll do when I get
out. Slurp up samples. Shoot lasers at them. Use my software to find any
swimmers. Beam data nearly 400 million miles to Earth. Do that for 20
days. Then die alone on an alien planet.
Near my transit’s end, I haven’t seen anything—big or small—in a long
time. But I can feel the tugs from every mass out there.
When I sense the first shift after years of the constant, one-directional
slog, I know it’s Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, slowing me down so I’m not
going too fast relative to Europa.
For the next 18 months or so, another moon, Callisto, and Ganymede
tug on the lander and spiral me toward Europa. I get closer and closer
and closer and slower and slower and slower, till Europa finally swings
me into its own orbit.
The long voyage is almost over. I coast toward the surface, and a
thruster fires backward to slow the lander down. Its camera looks at the
ice, and a laser fires, hunting for a flat spot. Then the lander faces straight
down, and a sky crane lowers me 60 feet toward the icy crust.
The surface looks like a giant agar plate, full of bacteria that have
spawned in global lines of streaked Staphylococcus. It’s an illusion,
though. The grooves are actually cracks in the frozen glaze where water
might burst through. Maybe a sea monster swims below. Or perhaps
some single cells. Or only inanimate molecules. Regardless, I’m going to
find out. So good night and good luck: I have work to do now.
P O P S C I .CO M . AU 55
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 RETHINK
ISSUE NOVEMBER
120 2018

60
EMBARRASSING WAYS
TO DIE AND BANANAS,
YOUR RELATIVE

62
TINIER AND TINIER
COMPUTERS, TERMITES,
AND GRAVITY WAVES

66
WEIRD TALES FROM THE
FIELD AND WEIRDER HEAD
TRIPS FROM YOUR HEAD

71
PLEASE VAGUELY IMPROVE
OUR LIVES WITH THESE
INVENTIONS

72
POPULAR SCIENCE
PUNCHES DOPE-FIENDS
RIGHT ON THE KISSER!

78
NUNC EST BIBENDUM!
AND ALSO THE TIME
TO BUY NEW TYRES
 Slim TO CORONERS, EVERY CAUSE OF DEATH IS A NUMBER, A UNIQUE CODE THAT
iles incidents into a national database. Each year, outlandish cases conirm
Chance even our most paranoid fears: Burned by laming water skis? Godspeed, V91.07.
Bitten by an orca? Rest in pieces, W56.21. Though no one perished on laming
sticks in 2016, yeast infections and sunlight did do some folks in. These are some
Rethink of America’s strangest, smallest killers.

CAUSE 1 SKULL = 1 DEATH

OF DEATH (IN 2016)

F52.2 Failure of genital

response (?!)

J67.2 Bird fancier’s lung

A38 Scarlet fever

W35 Explosion and

rupture of boiler

X54 Lack of water

[different to dehydration]

Y60.7 During administration

of enema (yep)

B37.3 Candidiasis
(yeast infection)

E51.1 Beriberi

X32 Exposure to sunlight

A05.1 Botulism

W39 Discharge of firework

X20 Contact with venomous

snakes and lizards

X21 Contact with venomous

spiders of some species.

X29 Contact with unspecified J67.2 E51.1 X20, X21, X29 X10
venomous animal or plant BIRD FANCIER’S BERIBERI VENOM CONTACT WITH
LUNG (IS REAL) Chronically low Taken together, 15 HOT DRINKS,
Birds make for great thiamine (vitamin people died from FOOD, FATS, AND
X48 Accidental poisoning by meat, chatty pets, B1) can trigger beri- encounters with COOKING OILS
and exposure to pesticides and comfy bedding. beri, a disease that venomous snakes, Whether it’s deep-
But avian droppings can damage either lizards, spiders, and fried-turkey oil or
and feathers contain the circulatory or the other critters in 2016. scalding coffee, hot
antigens and other nervous system. It’s Thirteen of the liquids kill. Severe
SOURCE: CDC WONDER

V96.1 Hang-glider accident irritants that can rare in the States deceased were men, fluid burns or fryer-
injuring occupant become airborne. In but common among perhaps because based fires can
large quantities, like people with white- they’re more likely to cause a life-
in some pet stores or rice-based diets, or have dangerous jobs; threatening loss of
collectors’ homes, alcoholics, whose for instance, a bodily fluids, shock,
X10 Contact with hot drinks, they can cause killer livers struggle to majority of park and infections. Try
food, fats, and cooking oils lung inflammation. absorb B1 from food. rangers are male. brining instead.

60 POPULAR SCIENCE
 Bananas: A ’ S, T ’ S, G ’ S, AND C ’ S ARE ALL IT TAKES TO MAKE YOU, ME, OR A
banana. Unique strings of these molecules, matched up in units called
Your Cousin, base pairs, form doubled DNA helices, which serve as the recipes for all
Maybe? living things. Because the challenges of life—such as absorbing nutrients,
replicating, and moving—are fairly consistent across organisms, there’s
Rethink By ELEANOR CUMMINS plenty of overlap between sequences. Here’s a sampling.

ALL
LIVING PRIMATES HUMANS
THINGS

NEANDERT
ELEPHANTS & DENISO
87.9% 9
IDEN
CATS CHIMPAN T
& DOGS 98. 100
86% ch

Infographic SARA CHODOSH

GOR
MICE 9
PERCENT OF GENETIC MAKEUP IN COMMON WITH HUMANS

84.2%
CHICKENS ORANGU
70% 9
PUFFERFISH
67.1%
FRUIT FLIES
52%
BANANAS
44.1% SIB
Less
ARABIDOPSIS chan

SOURCE: EUROPEAN GENOME DATABASE & OTHERS, VIA LAWRENCE BRODY

43.8% BABO
2,00

9
RH
MACA
93.
YEAST
43%
AN
P
Less
chan
1,000

CUCUMBERS
37.7% COM
MARMO
9

To compare across distant species—whose Analyzing DNA line by line works fine within Though any two humans differ by only
codes diverge too greatly to lay side by the same phylogenetic family, where approximately one alteration per 1,000 base
side—scientists look for overlaps in the crossover is more common. It takes just a pairs, those changes add up across the
molecules DNA produces, such as proteins. 6 percent divergence in our genetic code to genome, which contains 3 billion pairs in total.
Both fruit flies and humans, for instance, get from humans to our distant, red-butted It takes only a few small tweaks in the MC1R
rely on the Wnt family of proteins to cousin, the baboon, despite millennia of gene, for instance, to increase pheomelanin
establish the back and belly of the embryo. evolving separately from one another. production and give a child fiery red hair.

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 61
 SCATTERED The chip powering your smartphone is teeming with transistors.
These Lilliputian gates open and close to control the flow of
Shrinking electrons, forming binary zeros and ones that tell the device
Act [Geddit?] what to do. Smaller gates mean more transistors—and faster
chips. In 1975, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted
Rethink By ROB VERGER counts would double biennially. (Yes, this is Moore’s law.)

10,000
Number of transistors per chip (in millions)

100

0.01

’90 ’00 ’10 ’17

1970 ’80

rise, but so far the

Analysts debate whether transistor counts will continue their exponential
ones inside ’90s-era
trajectory has held steady. In 1971, the Intel 4004 chip had just 2,300; the
contain billions. But running that
SOURCE: CHRISTOPH ER BATTEN

personal computers sported millions; and today’s silicon can

ghts, enginee rs began devising more-
many transistors takes a lot of power. So in the mid-au
ors into cores, groupin gs of transist ors that each handle
efficient chips by segmenting process
use less power. But these multico re chips still need to work quickly,
their own parallel tasks and
so engineers continue to jam in transistors.

62 POPULAR SCIENCE

Rethink
Ter-Mighty
Towers
BY M A RY B E T H G R I G GS
The Namibian savanna is dotted
with four-metre-tall towers of
sandy soil. Built by termites just
a fifth of an inch long, these
mounds aren’t only structu
feats—they’re a biological
extension of the 1.5-mil-
lion-bug colony inside. Th
researchers are still trying to
figure out how the “brain” of the
swarm works (how do termites
plan a mound without any blue-
prints?), they’ve recently uncov-
ered a lot about the entomological
monuments. “The function-
ing organism is really the whole
colony,” explains Hunter King,
a physicist at the University of
Akron who studies the mechan-
ics of insect swarms. “The
mound really is the lung and the
respiratory exchanger—and a
protective skin for the superor-
ganism.” Here’s how
these skyscrapers work.
D
Illustrati
1
3
1/Hand to mouth
Covered walkways up to 100mm wide and 70
metres long lead out to the grass, vegetation, a
dung that termites munch. There, tiny workers
build fractal-like networks of smaller, branching
corridors, and gobble up fresh supplies—but no
digestion will happen until they’re back at the nest.
2/Skin
Termites pack the mud so it’s porous enough to
allow fresh air to slowly seep in, but solid enough to
keep out intruders such as predatory ants. If
breached by a wayward elephant or a probi
human, workers immediately swarm up f
nest below to protect and repair the struc
3/Microbiome
This subfamily of termite outsources gut
growing a fungus that acts as a digestive
Workers mold their harvest onto the fungal masses,
which break down plant gunk into edible sugars and
nitrogen. This creates CO2, which would suffocate
the bugs if their mound didn’t circulate it out.
2
NIGHT MORNING MIDDAY AFTERNOON
4
4/Lungs
A mound breathes like we do—but instead
diaphragm, temperature drives oxygen flo
sun heats ducts near the exterior, creating a density
shift that brings up a stale breeze from inside the
nest. Fresh air enters through porous mud and sinks
in the cool interior. This reverses in the chill of night.
5/Reproductive system
Almost everything happens below ground. Workers
constantly bring food to the queen’s central
chamber and shuttle eggs to nearby nurseries.
Temps inside fluctuate by about 15 degrees through
the year, but humidity levels—important for the
colony’s fungus—sta a r und 80 per cent.
SINELAB (TERMITES)
5
P O P S C I .CO M . AU 63

Rethink
3.6 BILLION LIGHT-YEARS
LIGO uses tiny
tremors to detect the
collision of black
holes 30 times the
mass of the sun.
Subtle Ripples in Space go
Through a Tighter Squeeze
B y M AT T H E W R . F R A N C I S
IN 2015, SCIENTISTS CAUGHT EVIDENCE OF A
cosmic throwdown that took place 1.3 billion light-
years away. They spied this binary black-hole
collision by capturing gravitational waves—ripples in
spacetime created when massive objects interact—for
the first time. But now physicists want to see even
farther. Doing so could help them accurately measure
waves cast off by colliding neutron stars, impacts
that might be the source of many Earthly elements,
including gold. For that, they need the most sensitive
gravitational-wave detectors ever.
The devices that nab waves all rely on the same
mechanism. The US-based Laser Interferometer
Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and its
European counterpart, Virgo, fire lasers down two
mile-plus-long arms with mirrors at their ends. Pass-
ing waves wiggle the mirrors less than the width of
an atom, and scientists measure the ripples based on
when photons in the laser light bounce off them and
come back. Ordinarily, photons exit the lasers at ran-
dom intervals, so the signals are fuzzy.
Imagine these photons as raindrops, and the time
it takes for us to measure the gravitational wave as
a sidewalk. Drizzling drops hit the pavement inde-
pendent of one another. Some spots might stay dry
longer, while others get soaked. The droplet
nature of rain, like the photon nature of light,
64 POPULAR SCIENCE
4.9 BILLION LIGHT-YEARS
Squeezed light will
expand LIGO’s field
far enough to spot
black holes that
merged before
Earth existed.
leads to “graininess.”
Now physicists can even out those metaphorical
raindrops. In upgraded detectors, a principle of
quantum physics called “squeezed light” is helping
researchers paint a more precise image. Squeezing
light works by shining a laser through a special crys-
tal, which adjusts the rate of the photons’ flow so
they’re spaced out more evenly.
Instead of falling randomly, each raindrop is less
likely to hit a spot that’s already wet than a dry patch.
The result is a more even spritzing of the sidewalk
FROM TOP: OHN-JOSEPH MCKAY/EYEEM/GETTY IMAGES; NASA
square. Or, in the case of gravitational waves, a
nearly complete up-and-down wave pattern rather
than an uneven and jumpy picture.
Squishing in one dimension means stretching in
another, but scientists can give up certainty about the
energy of the light and not lose any crucial info. “We
manipulate light such that we put more of the uncer-
tainty in one [measurement] in order to measure the
other one more accurately,” says Katherine Dooley of
Cardiff University, a LIGO collaborator.
Squeezed-light tech has already increased
accuracy at the smaller GEO600 detector in Ger-
many fourfold. If LIGO and Virgo see similar gains,
we’ll squeeze out many more neutron-star collisions
from the cosmos—the pot of gold at the end
of gravity’s rainbow.
Not even close to scale. Our
entire galaxy would be smaller
than a full-stop on this page.
 AUSTRALIA’S
No.1 GUIDE OCTOBER 19TH - 21ST
TO AUDIO THE COMO MELBOURNE
AND AV
INSIDE:
Vol.31#6 FULL
A$9.99 NZ$10.99
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ROOMS • EVENTS • PRIZES!
AV RECEIVERS

ON TEST:
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& NAD
ATMOS AND VOICE CONTROL!
Q ACOUSTICS’ GOOGLE
HOME MAX
SPEAKERS THE

ON LE W!
 Rethink
TALES F R O M T H E
MICRO-
METEORITE

FIELD
MANIA
Norwegian
musician Jon
Larsen hunts tiny
space rocks, also
known as cosmic
spherules.
HACKS Ocean pollution, habitat loss, and collisions with ships have
helped land sperm whales on the vulnerable species list. For
What I biologists like me to track their migration and monitor their

Learned
From
stress levels, we take samples of their blubber, which con-
tains DNA and hormones—microscopic markers of an animal’s health.
To collect the blubber, we stand on a ship’s bow and fire modified cross-
bow darts. The hollow projectiles hit the mammal and pop back out with
0.2
Average size,
in mm, of the
Getting a pencil-eraser-size sample.
In 2010, I was chasing whales in the Gulf of Mexico. To land a shot, you
micrometeorites
Larsen studies
Covered have to get within 10 or 12 metres. One day, after more than four near
misses, we spotted a big animal just as the sun was going down. As we got

in Whale close, its blowhole, which is akin to a nostril, sprayed all over us—and then

Snot
IAIN KERR,
the animal dived before we could get a sample. Enveloped in this cloud of
stinky, horrible whale snot, I thought: Anything this stinky and horrible
has to be productive. It turns out whale blow has some of the same mole-
cules that flesh does. I began thinking about how to collect snot.
9.6
Minimum search
The solution came from my hobby: drones. We could fly one right time, in minutes,
CEO AND WHALE
for Larsen to find
B I O LO G I S T AT O C E A N through a cloud of whale blow. So in 2012, we started developing a drone
ALLIANCE a specimen
outfitted with petri dishes. Now, I can fly SnotBot to a whale more than a
kilometre away to grab a sample.

39
Mass, in millions of
kilograms, of
particles that land
on Earth annually

AS TOLD TO JESSICA BODDY

TRACE EVIDENCE At the poles, snow doesn’t melt; it accumulates in layers of ice that
stretch back in time like tree rings. I study particles trapped in these lay-
What ers to see how climate has changed.
First, my team gathers ice cores from the coldest climes. In Green-
Ancient land, we traverse thousands of miles on snowmobiles to reach different collection
Storms sites, surrounded by nothing but flat, white beauty. Then we drill for samples that
range from a couple hundred feet to more than a mile long and date back up to
Blew Into 50,000 years.
The Arctic Greenland cores preserve specks of dust from Chinese deserts and sea salt from
big storms in the North Atlantic. But there are so few particles—some are one in a
trillion—that it’s like trying to find a postage stamp somewhere in New York City. We
ERICH OSTERBERG,
C L I M AT E S C I E N T I S T AT melt a cross-section of ice and use a special instrument to count individual flecks.
DARTMOUTH COLLEGE These tell us what the climate used to be like. For example, winds had to be strong to
carry larger dust motes thousands of miles. Little differences in the weights of oxygen
AS TOLD TO LEXI KRUPP
and hydrogen in water molecules tell us about the temperature when they fell as snow
thousands of years ago—and how that compares to rising temperatures today.

66 POPULAR SCIENCE
 1
Five-millimetre bird band
M AT T W I L K I N S , P O S T D O C T O R A L
F E L LO W AT T H E C E N T E R F O R S C I E N C E
O U T R E A C H A T V A N D E R B I LT U N I V E R S I T Y
The US Geological Survey distributes
these half-gram metal bands to help us
track birds as they migrate south for the
winter. Some of the fliers weigh just a
few tens of grams themselves.

6
Four-micrometre nanobot
LOUIS ROGOWSKI, MECHANICAL ENGINEERING PH.D.
S T U D E N T AT S O U T H E R N M E T H O D I S T U N I V E R S I T Y
We use a magnetic field to propel each
bacterium-size mechanical swimmer through
blood vessels or tissues. With this technique,
we’d like to create nanobots for surgery or
targeted drug delivery.

COLLECTIONS

The Tiniest 2
Scientific
Tools I Use One-micrometre DNA injection needle
T I M O T H Y WA R R I N G T O N , R E S E A R C H
S C I E N T I S T AT F R E D S E N S E T E C H N O LO G I E S

5 To manipulate wee
objects, you need
During my doctorate, I was breeding
millimeter-long transgenic worms, barely
visible to the naked eye, by sticking DNA
spectacularly tiny
Five-millimetre needle hooks into their gonads. We couldn’t find
H E R N Á N VÁ Z Q U E Z M I R A N D A ,
tools. We a s ke d syringes small enough, so we had to make
W I L D L I F E G E N O M I C I S T AT scientists to tell us about the our own. First, we would heat a glass tube
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA, LINCOLN cutest little instruments they about a tenth of a millimetre thick and
When we prepare mice and voles for use in their research. Here are a break it to make a needle. Then we’d snap
preservation, we have to clean up few of our favourites. off the sealed tip to make sure it was
their delicate skeletons. So we let open for injections. The improvised
2-millimetre-wide dermestid beetle instrument is very finicky to make, but
larvae eat the flesh inside the it does its job really well.
skull and around the ribs. After
the bugs grow up and then die, we
carefully remove them with needle
hooks. You can’t get these tools at
Walmart, so many are handmade—and
that’s hard work. When a researcher
makes a perfect hook, they treasure
it for the rest of their life.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY BRITT SPENCER

Five-millilitre
4 3 round-bottom flask
J E N N A F R A N K E , G R A D U AT E
S T U D E N T AT U N I V E R S I T Y
OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
One-micrometre magnetic beads
N I C O L E G R E E N , D O C T O R AT E I N B I O C H E M I S T R Y This little vessel is the
AT K A N S A S S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y pioneer of flasks in my lab.
My lab looks at how muscles grow and develop at I use it to practice small-
the level of individual proteins. We grind up scale reactions on
dead flies and mix in magnetic beads coated to fluorescent dyes I haven’t
bind with certain molecules. The beads draw tested before.
everything important toward a magnet, making it
easy to isolate the material that matters.
AS TOLD TO ELEANOR CUMMINS

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 67
 Rethink
HEAD
I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y B R A N D O N L O V I N G
The Science IN THE LORD OF THE RINGS TRILOGY,
Frodo the hobbit appears minuscule beside
Behind The the absurdly tall wizard, Gandalf. But in real-
ity, the pair of actors have a mere 5-inch height
Impossible difference. How did director Peter Jackson
execute such a sizable deceit?
Room Hobbits appearing doll size, tourists pinch-
ing a grain-of-salt-size Eiffel Tower for Insta-
B Y S A R A K I L E Y WAT S O N
gram, and beachgoers standing atop a body
of water are all made possible by something
called forced perspective, a technique that uses
changes in distance and vantage point to hijack
the way our minds perceive size.
Take the Ames room, as depicted above.
This seemingly normal space allows anyone to
dramatically increase in size when they walk
from one end of the expanse to another.
The key is the room’s shape. Instead of a per-
fect rectangle with 90-degree angles and flat
68 POPULAR SCIENCE
TRIP
floors, an Ames room is a sloped trapezoid. As
someone steps backward and downslope along
the far wall, they appear to shrink—at least if
you’re watching from a peephole placed in the
right spot. Designers make sure the light hits
your eye at the same angles it would in a regular
old rectangular room, says Andrew Glenner-
ster, a visual neuroscientist at the University of
Reading in England.
When you watch someone walk across,
you’re stuck with two contradictory standards,
Glennerster says. Rooms have 90-degree cor-
ners, and people don’t change size when they
move across them. What’s most peculiar is that
for some reason, our brains choose to throw
out the human-size-constancy standard over
the right-angled-rooms one. This makes mind
tricks like these far more powerful than any-
thing done via digital wizardry.
HEAD TRIP WEE PUZZLES

SMOKE AND NEURONS Summing It Up

BY CLAIRE MALDARELLI

F E W TA S K S S E N D S H I V E R S
up more spines than a maths problem.
Expunge your fears by cracking these
puzzles (instructions below; answers on
page 70) dubbed “Sums” by their creator,
engineer Gordon Burgin.

[1]

18 10
3
20 12

[2]

7
17 26
4
20 22
3

[3]
You Can Never See It All At Once
BY NICOLE WETSMAN

TWELVE BLACK DOTS DANCE ABOUT
this grid. They never actually move or vanish,
but no matter how fast you twitch your eyes
back and forth, you can’t seem to trap them all
in your gaze at once.
Ninio’s extinction illusion is a riff on the
Hermann grid, a classic piece of visual trick-
ery in which your eyes see illusory gray blobs
at the intersections of a black-and-white lat-
tice. We don’t know exactly why the Hermann
grid happens, says Susana Martinez-Conde, a
neuroscientist at the State University of New
York’s Downstate Medical Centre. This makes
it challenging to sort out the brain science be-
hind any modifications on the original illusion.
Researchers’ prevailing theory for the flick-
ering-dots variant above is that we have more
neurons clustered at the center of our vision
24
than the outside. The lack of cells in our
periphery renders us nearly blind to things 14 14
far enough outside the center. To compen-
29
sate, the brain takes its best guess at what’s 2 6
out there based on the more-visible gray
areas. This makes a dot seem solid when 7 4 15
we’re looking right at it but invisible when
viewed with a sideways glance.
So, when our eyes dart around the en-
tire scene, the black dots move into and
out of our visual field, making them seem A small set of rules:
as if they are flickering on and off. “Our vi- The numbers in each sector of the above circle,
sual system is lazy,” Martinez-Conde says. square, and star equal the sum of the numbers
“Regular patterns are tempting because in the circles that border them. Easy enough,
right? A few more caveats: The numbers in the
you can look at a small portion and think
small circles can be only 0 through 9, and each
you have the whole thing figured out.” digit can appear only once. (The most common
Don’t fret—we get by just fine without see- solution is listed on page 70, but other
ing everything. Usually. solutions might exist.)

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 69
WEE PUZZLES
THE COOL THING ABOUT THIS ENIGMA IS THAT ONLY TWO POSSIBLE ANSWERS
Bound By can fill each blank: zero and one—and each grid has a sole solution. But only two consecutive zeros
or ones can sit next to or below each other, and each row and column must have the same number of
Two zeros and ones. No row or column can be the same. Hint: Find pairs (answers below).

[1] [2]

0 0 0 1
0 0 1 1 1
0 1 0 0 0
1
0 0 1 1
1 0 0
1 1 0 1 0 1 1
1 1 1 1 1

LIGHT SHOW

Why Am I THE ANSWERS

Seeing Stars? [1]

6
18 10
BY NICOLÁS RIVERO 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 0
9 3 1
1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1
20 12
YOU’VE PROBABLY SEEN Santa Cruz. 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0
them while falling asleep— But phosphenes also oc- 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 8
kaleidoscope patterns play- cur at rest with our eyes shut.
0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0
ing behind your eyelids. That’s because the visual cor-
What are they? tex creates some spontaneous 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 2 6 7
We see because photons of activity all the time, Samaha 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 17 26
light bounce onto our retinas, says. Where the resulting mo- 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 
reaching brain cells called tifs originate is uncertain, but 5 4 9
neurons, which transform scientists think they are far 20 22
their energy into an electrical from arbitrary. Seeing sim- [2] 3 8 1
signal for the brain’s visual ilar images again and again
0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0
cortex. But sometimes the makes the same neurons fire
noggin’s wiring goes haywire together, strengthening their 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1
7
and sends phantom cues connections. We see a LOT 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1
called phosphenes. They are of vertical and horizontal 24
0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0
the tiny stars that blur your lines, such as in walls, door- 3 9 8 0
1 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 14 14
vision when you whack your ways,treetrunks,andeventhe 29
head or rub your eyes. Physi- horizon. The more the cells re- 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 2 6
cal force can jar our neurons, sponsible for seeing such lines 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 7 4 15
causing them to fire and send fire, thestrongertheirlinksbe- 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1  1 5
errant messages, says Jason come—and the more likely we
Samaha, a psychologist at are to see those patterns when
the University of California, we’re trying to snooze.

70 POPULAR SCIENCE
 I Wish Someone
How 2.0
Would Invent…
reporting by JESSICA BODDY AND ELEANOR CUMMINS / illustrations by RAMI NIEMI

A personal climate modulator

ASHER ROCKAH VIA TWITTER

Office climates are often calibrated for an average

man. Others shiver or perspire. That’s because the
brain’s temperature regulators—the cortex and
hypothalamus—rely on cues from thermal
receptors in skin. But Embr Labs thinks it can hack
in. Its wearable contains a thermoelectric module
that cools or heats your wrist. The idea is that even
a localized shift can alter overall comfort. But
environmental physiologist Davide Filingeri of
Loughborough University says a one-spot approach
isn’t enough. A full-body suit with multiple modules,
however, could one day do the trick.

A health-monitoring toilet
BILL MALCOLM VIA FACEBOOK

URINE LUCK! MICHAEL SNYDER,ABIOSENSOR EXPERTAT The world’s simplest keychain

@FROGELIXIR VIA TWITTER
Stanford University, says the loo has tons of untapped po-
Does you keyring look like you work at Goulburn
tential. A sensor in the bowl could track hormones, viruses, Gaol in the 1950s? Ronin Institute security
and molecules that might indicate signs of pregnancy, an infectious anthropologist and competitive lock-picker
disease, or diabetes. Tiny cameras could help monitor the shape, Schuyler Towne says “one key to rule them all” is
achievable. The trick: That key is you. We can already
size, and consistency of poop, searching for irregularities indicat-
unlock phones with a fingerprint or face. Towne
ing cancer. Smart toilets with these features are in the works, but expects that technique will be ubiquitous in a
they won’t reach Bunnings for another decade, Snyder says. Clinics decade—unlocking your car, storage locker, and
will get the first look. The Japanese-made Flowsky toilet from tech front door. Unfortunately, each lock will have a
single point of failure. If someone steals that data,
company Toto, created for urologists and hospitals, will measure the you have only so many body parts left to use. To
flow rate of a patient’s pee to monitor bladder health. prevent this, Towne says, a two-step verification
process will be...key.

illustrations by Rami Niemi P O P S C I .CO M . AU 71


NOV 1938
From The
Archives
The War on Drugs
Used to Sound Awesome
THE FOLLOWING PIECE
isn’t noir fiction, and wasn’t
written by Raymond Chandler
or Dashiell Hammett. It was
w ri t te n b y Ha rold “ F la sh”
Murray and he makes it sound
like drug-busting in the 1930s
was every cliché we ever couldn’t
seriously believe. And also a lot
of fun, as long as you keep your
nose clean. To coin a phrase.
In 1930s American, all drugs
are “dope” (and we don’t mean
cool, dude). All users are “vic-
tims” but still deserve to go to
jail for degeneracy or some-
thing. And of course all push-
ers and distributors are human
cockroaches who deserve to be
by ANTHONY FORDHAM
72 POPULAR SCIENCE
“One of the men, a hulking
longshoreman, leaped at me
with a butch butcher knife”
punched down while “Federal
men” tear apart their crappy
tenement apartments. Also, the
dope-house cat betrays a gang of
dope-distributing longshoremen
at one point which is something
not even Raymond Chandler
would dare make up.
And of course we couldn’t
let this epic noir true story end
without mentioning the new
menace stalking American high
schools. Marijuana! We can’t
decide which we find funnier: the
idea that the US government was
so terrified of marijuana, or that
they really believed Americans
only started smoking “reefers” in
the late 1930s...
This Horse Is Clearly Drunk
NOVEMBER 1938
Or at least legless. In the 1930s, the film industry was huge.
The special effects industry, at least when it came to things
like compositing and green screens? Not quite as huge. So if
you wanted a close-up of the jockey in your horse-racing
film, you needed to know a guy who could build a convincing
mechanical horse. And have a budget of at least $100.
POPULAR SCIENCE, NOVEMBER 1938, PAGE 96

A
DOOR creaked behind me. I swung around on
the dark, evil-smelling stairway. Two “torpedoes,”
swarthy gunmen of a dope ring, blocked the stairs
behind me. Another door opened above. Three
more torpedoes, guns in hand, stepped out ahead of me.
For weeks, I had been on the trail of an elusive narcotic
king known as Tally-Ho. An anonymous tip had brought me
to a squalid East Side tenement house in New York City. After
seven years in the narcotic service, after sending more than
500 men to the penitentiary, I was in a trap of the underworld.
One of the men picked up an empty ash can. I knew what
that meant. By sending it clattering down the stairs, he would
cover the sound of gun-fire. Before he could drop it, however,
there were footsteps on the stairs. A woman and her three
children were coming down from the top floor. The torpedoes
whipped their guns into their pockets. They put on an act,
pretending we were all pals. In a flash, I made up my mind. If
I was to be murdered, it would be before witnesses. So, when
the woman passed, I stepped out and walked down beside her.
Any second, I expected to feel lead in
my back. But the torpedoes, taken off
guard, didn’t know what to do. Once
in the street, I vanished like a rabbit.
But I came back a week later,
walking on crutches. That is a
favorite ruse for getting in close
before a raid. Because nobody pays
much attention to a cripple, I wound
bandages around one foot and
hobbled down the street toward the
tenement. Opposite the door, I hurled the crutches in the
gutter and tore into the building. Other Federal men, planted
on all sides, followed me. We hit the gang’s hideout like
terriers in a rat’s nest. Outnumbered, the same men who
would have killed me without batting an eye when they had
me alone, surrendered without even reaching for a gun.
Trailing organized dope gangs is one of the toughest
and most dangerous forms of crime-fighting. You are

Not satisfied with the thousands of addicts on whom they already have a hold, the vicious dope rings also
prey on the innocent. These photographs, posed by the author, show how a “steerer” finds a new customer
for his wicked trade. Every possible trick is used to entice a new victim into trying some form of narcotic

Curiosity leads many
to take the fatal step. The
steerer guides his victim to
an opium den, making sure
they are not followed
Now hopelessly in the grip of the
dope habit, the addict craves more
and more of the drug. Here her pipe
is being loaded with a a pill of opium
cooked over a peanut-oil lamp
After smoking twenty or thirty pills, the victim drops off into a
deep sleep, which is often a hellish nightmare. Many times, death is
the only release from the habit. To diguise the telltale fumes of the
opium, incense is burned or dampened sheets are hung over doors,
as shown above

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 73
 Dope fiends will go to any length to satisify
their uncontrollable craving. A medicine
dropper, spoon, and safety pin are a “poor
man’s hypodermic” for using deadly heroin

dealing with human rats, cunning and ruthless. The pay is never
big. But there is tremendous satisfaction in outwitting these
enemies of society.
I got into it after the war. As a boy, I grew up in the toughest part
of the South Side in Chicago. Many of my boyhood friends later
became gangsters and ended in prison—or the morgue. I was
lucky enough to keep out of trouble and end up on the right side.
When I joined the narcotic service, I was put out on my own. It
was sink or swim. The first time I reached a dope peddler, he
spotted me in an instant. I asked for “two dollars worth of
morphine.” If I had been a real addict, I would have said “a bindle
of junk” or “two decks of M.” Knowing the lingo of the dope
world, a lingo that is continually changing, is an important part of
the equipment of a Federal agent. Learning the infinite variety of
ruses and dodges used by dope sellers and addicts is equally
important. Almost every case on which I have worked has taught
Here the author shows
me something new about the wiles of the underworld.
how a victim will even
In Newark, N. J., we once raided an opium joint on an upper
risk infection to continue floor. Stairs that led to it were so steep that a man would lose his
his habit. Taking a small balance if he tried to swing an ax to smash in the door. A second
amount of heroin from agent had to stand on the step below and brace the man with the
a hiding place - in this ax. When we finally broke in, we searched for hours before we
case a lamp - he places found the incriminating pipes and drugs. Looking for a false
it in the bowl of a spoon bottom in a bin, we shoveled out two and a half tons of coal.
Then, we discovered that while we were smashing in the door, the
inmates of the dive had been pushing the pipes and opium out
under our feet, into a hollow doorsill!
An old maneuver which permits a gang to shift a “plant,” or
store of drugs, to a new location in a few seconds is what is known
as “hanging out the wash.” Across an
areaway between tenement buildings,
an endless clothesline is stretched.
Socks are hung just outside the
window of the room where the dope is
stored. At the first sign of trouble, the
Holding the spoon
drugs are dumped in the socks and
over a match flame, he
pulled across to a window in the other
dissolves the drug in a
building. Here, a gang member quickly
few drops of water. The
removes the plant to a place of safety.
warm liquid is drawn
up into the medicine
On the lower East Side of New
dropper, as seen in the
York City, I first encountered the “two
photo at right peas in a pod” ruse. A man dressed in

74 POPULAR SCIENCE
a checkered cap, a blue shirt, and brown trousers took five dollars I was a pickpocket. To gain the confidence of gang members, I would steal
from a Federal agent who was posing as a dope addict and left to my own wallet which had been planted in the pocket of another Federal man!
get the drugs. Five minutes later, the checkered cap, blue shirt, and I always kept on buying until I had got to the higher-ups who supplied the
brown trousers appeared again. I stepped across and made my “pushers,” or peddlers with their vicious wares. Usually, I would be
arrest. Then I discovered that I had a different man, dressed shadowed by another Federal man, a former ace intelligence officer. He, in
exactly like the first one. As we needed both the marked money turn, would be trailed by a husky 200-pounder ready for battle. If I got in a
and the drugs to make a holeproof case, the trick had cheated us jam, I broke a window as a signal and these helpers rushed to my aid.
of half our evidence. Finding the narcotics, after we had raided a hangout, was sometimes as
Switching cars is another frequent practice of dope mobs. They difficult as trailing the dope mob to its lair. There are literally thousands of
will take a buyer in one car, receive his money, and then signal a unexpected places where you find the drugs secreted. I have discovered
second machine. As it speeds past, they toss the money into it and them in fountain pens, lamps, hat bands, rubber heels, fish, hollowed-out
the dope is thrown back into their car. Then, if the purchaser is a handles of tools, and in a host of other places. Once, I started to move a
Federal agent, he is able to hold the occupants of only one car and match box on a fireplace mantel. It wouldn’t move. It was fastened tight and
will have only half the evidence he desires. formed the door of a secret cache.
Probably the slickest dealer in narcotics I ever encountered was
one operating in Detroit. He was a former internal-revenue man
who had gone bad. I was sent out there to collect evidence on the
notorious Purple gang and soon ran across his trail. He had what
seemed like a holeproof set-up. Nobody ever saw him. Buyers put
their money in an empty cigarette package and tossed it in a
window on the ground floor of a respectable-looking house. Then
they walked one block beyond, turned around, and walked back.
As they passed the window, the drugs were tossed out to them. All
operations inside the room took place behind a curtain and the
doors were re-enforced and barricaded. I made the arrest by
diving through the window in a surprise pounce that caught the
criminal with all the needed evidence on him.
Another ingenious scheme was one I encountered in Chicago.
The dope peddler would leave his drugs in public lockers at
elevated-railway stations. Then, when the addict had paid him the
money, he would hand him the key to the locker. In this way, he
was never near the site when the narcotics were obtained.
In tracking down these crooks, I used a wide variety of disguises.
Sometimes I played the part of a “dodo,” a bum in the street
seeking a cheap shot of dope. Again, I would pretend to be a “wing-
dinger,” an addict who specializes in stealing physician’s
prescription blanks and using forged prescriptions to get narcotics.
The easiest role was that of a “beef-steaker,” a beginner who is not
yet a confirmed addict. In some cities, I would let it get around that

Blood poisoning has no terrors for the dope-crazy mind. Jabbing

the safety pin into his arm, the addict forces the point of the
medicine dropper into the puncture and then squeezes the bulb

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 75
From The
Archives
A few years ago, a gang running dope across
the Canadian border used a grisly ruse to
smuggle large quantities of heroin, morphine,
and cocaine into the country. Dressed as a
widow in deep mour ning, a woman
accompanied the body of her “husband” back
to the United States. Three times in one year,
the same widow made the same trip. An alert
conductor became suspicious and tipped off
the authorities. Investigation proved that the
woman was a gang member and that an
underworld undertaker had supplied the
bodies which were filled with stores of various
narcotics before being placed in the coffins.
All human sentiments and all sense of
right and wrong seem lost to the dope
addict. I have known brothers to give drugs
to their sisters, and mothers to administer it
to their children. I even encountered a case
in which a woman had made an addict out
of her pet white poodle.
Another pet, a black-and-white cat, led us to
a big drug cache in one of the most thrilling
raids I ever made. At the time, I had twenty-
one stool pigeons reporting on the activities of
the underworld. These informers used to meet
me near the Aquarium in Battery Park, on the
edge of New York Bay. We called them the
“twenty-one seals.” They noticed that a large
number of dope fiends were riding the ferries
to Brooklyn. These addicts left with a haggard
Uncle Sam’s newest drug menace - marijauana. Here police officers [in straw boaters - Future
Ed] are destroying a patch of the outlawed narcotic weed found growing in a vacant lot
76 POPULAR SCIENCE
ex p re s s i o n a n d
returned step-ping
high. Somewhere across
the bay, they
were obtaining
t h e i r d o p e. I
trailed them to a
certain block near
the waterfront and made
contact with the peddler. He
would take your money and send
you around the block one way
while he went the other. Thus,
you could not see which house he
entered to obtain the junk. Once, by sprinting
at top speed, I got around in time to discover
him disappearing in a door-way. With the
plant located, I was ready for the raid two
nights later.
The building proved to be a sailors’
rooming house. Dashing in, I raced through
several huge, unlighted rooms and came to a
kitchen where two men were eating a fish
dinner. I had my revolver in one hand and
my badge in the other. One of the men, a
hulking longshoreman built like a bull, leaped
at me with a butcher knife. Because I had
been in the service only a few months and
might be considered too quick on the trigger
if I killed a suspect, I was afraid to shoot. So,
I dropped my badge and made a grab for a
blackjack in my
back pocket.
Hitting the
charging man
full in the stomach,
I stopped him for a
moment. His knife ripped
down my sleeve, but
missed my arm.
At that moment, the
o t h e r Fe d e r a l m e n
arrived. We quieted the
prisoners and began searching
for the dope. We went through 200 sailors’
kits and found no trace of it. We were almost
ready to give up when a cat jumped on the
table. One of the men shouted at it. It leaped
down and darted toward a little cat box,
containing sawdust, in one corner. Then it
veered away as though afraid of the box.
That seemed strange, so I investigated. In a
false bottom, beneath the sawdust, I found
700 vials of heroin.
In recent years, the tide of narcotics has
been rising with increasing strength.
Marijuana is providing a “kindergarten” for
dope addicts. In one Ohio town, twenty high-
school children were found to be using the
dangerous drug. In Illinois, a school-supply
store was discovered dispensing “reefers,” or
marijuana cigarettes, and in Michigan, a
woman used her children to peddle them in
grade school. From marijuana, addicts go for
a “bigger kick” to cocaine and morphine,
ending with shattered nerves—mental and
physical wrecks.
Marijuana presents a specially difficult
problem to law-enforcement agencies.
Looking like a harmless weed, the plant can be
grown in back yards and vacant lots. Less
expensive than other forms of dope, reefers of
marijuana are easily disguised as regular
cigarettes, and their users are soon enslaved by
the degrading habit.
Against sinister gangs that cash in on such
human misery, the Government is waging a
day-and-night battle. Dope racketeers are
the big game of the underworld. Tracking
them down is a thrilling and risky job, an
occupation that requires cunning and
daring combined. Upon the vigilance and
integrity of a few hundred men—narcotic
agents who take chances of which you
rarely hear—the country is depending in its
war against illegal drugs.
 Novel Life-Saving Bell
Holds Ship’s Crew
T OSSING and rolling in heavy seas, a new life-saving sphere for
ocean-going ships, invented by Ronald T. G. Mason, English
engineer, has an inner passenger-carrying globe mounted on twin pivots
that allow it to remain upright regardless of the movement of the outer
shell. Fitted with a radio, electric lights, emergency food supplies, and a
watertight ventilating system, a life-saving ball only twelve feet in
diameter could safely accommodate the entire crew of a small cargo
steamer, it is claimed. On shipboard, the sphere would be suspended
from a steel launching rig reached from deck level by a sloping ramp.

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 77
 Nunc Est Bibendum!
The Michelin man has been named the “Icon of the Millennium”.
Not bad for a tyre salesman who encouraged drinking...
by ANTHONY FORDHAM

PEOPLE WHO CALL THIS FAMILIAR,

marshmallow-like fellow “The Michelin
Man” are revealing something about them-
selves. Specifically, they’re revealing that
they speak English. Much of Europe calls the
Michelin Man by another name: Bibendum.
Why? Because the original ad from 1894
showed a pince-nez-wearing, captain of
industry between two shrivelled compet-
itors, proudly raising a glass and crying:
“Nunc est bibendum!”
Readers with a classical education will
recognise this as a line from Horace. It
means “Now is the time for drinking!” or
simply “Drink up!”
nses-y
Kind of an odd senti-
d ads were like ment for a tyre company,
zzles. His pince-nez you might think, encour-
ts him see obstacles,
aging everyone to buy
drinks jagged glass,
d his buddies are their tyres and then hit
flated tyres. Now the bottle, but it was a
u do the rest. different time. The main
difference being that
even as late as 1894, cars - sorry, automo-
biles - were mostly still considered play-
things of the uber rich (or uber-obsessed).
A little like ultralight aircraft today.
So car-related marketing was, in many way,
a nod to a very exclusive club. Which puts the
ad in a slightly more favourable context.
For a start, “nunc est bibendum” was used
to propose a toast. Then the rest of the ad
goes on: “That is to say, to your health! The
Michelin tyre drinks up obstacles!”
See, it’s a metaphor. Michelin definitely
isn’t telling you to used your automobile ex-
clusively for the purpose of driving to places
to get smashed.

1898 1910 925 1950

A captain of A jollier fellow The war is over! Even though
industry! Proudly emerges pre- The world is people were
toasting us all Great War. rushing forward! already saying
with a... glass Bibendum is Bibendum needs “I’ve put on so
full of broken white because o run! Tyres are much weight
glass? Ribbing tyres were black now, which I look like the
is thin to evoke originally a sort makes them Michelin Man!”
bicycle tyres. of grey colour. tronger. He isn’t. they labelled him.

78 POPULAR SCIENCE
 Histoire de la publicité
fetishists love old logos
like this. And PopSci loves
the vaguely creepy vibe
they give off. Pre-war
Europe wasn’t just
another country, it was
another world...

RED VS GREEN two-star Michelin rating means it’s an amazing restaurant,

Uh... except for the way Michelin decided to strongly
encourage people to use their cars to drive to places and
get smashed. See, one of the interesting things about
Bibendum is that he was instrumental in making “drive
your car to your holiday” a thing.
In the early 20th century, Michelin wanted to sell tyres.
To need new tyres, you first had to wear out the
old ones. So Michelin needed to encourage
people to drive around a lot.
Thus were born the Michelin Guides. Red
ones for restaurants and hotels, and then green
guides for attractions and destinations. The
first guide, in 1900, listed places you could buy
new tyres or get your complicated automobile
repaired (“There’s flux in my velocitrix and the
decelerator keeps shooting hot oil in my eye...”),
throughout France. It also tossed in some hotel
recommendations, and a list of petrol stations.
After all, in 1900 there were around 3,000
cars operating in France, and the “charging in
frastructure” (ie, servos) was much more limite
than the average Tesla owner faces today. Yet it
was much the same situation: In order to justify building
a better refuelling network, independent service stations
needed to know they’d actually get customers, so someone
had to encourage everyone to put their beloved horses out
to pasture, and buy expensive, cantankerous, smelly, limit-
ed-range automobiles instead.
Bizarrely, it worked. Michelin expanded their guide in
the run-up to World War I, prioritising Belgium and then
Algeria and Tunisia (they were French, remember).
TASTES LIKE BOILED TYRE
Eventually, the Michelin guide started awarding stars to
restaurants. In the same way fancy Aussie restaurants get
“hats”, in Europe, high-end degustation-menu type joints
covet Michelin stars. It’s all very European and low-key: a
and three stars is very rare.
As a branding exercise, the Michelin star system has
been... odd. All epicurean travellers know about it, but it’s
surprising how often a serious gourmand won’t also know
the “Michelin” is indeed the same one as the tyre company,
with the hilariously fat dude and everything.
Meanwhile, Bibendum continued to evolve as a logo. He
lost his pince-nez and got googly eyes in the 1920s, gained
a sash with “Michelin” written on it, became increasingly
trim and fit-looking, and then eventually turned into a CGI
monstrosity in 2005.
All in the name of selling a pneumatic tyre,
which itself is an invention that remains huge-
ly underrated in the evolution of the car.
After all, without pneumatic tyres, any at-
tempt to travel at over, say, 20 km/h, would
rattle your teeth right out of your head. It would
also send your horrible death-trap of an auto-
mobile flying off the road every time you hit a
small rock or pothole.
Today, tyre-tech is incredibly sophisticated.
There are tyres specifically designed for what
kind of drive your car has - front, rear, or all-
wheel. The motorsport industry (which Michelin
plays a huge role in) continuously experiments
with different formulations of hydrocarbons,
right down at the molecular level, to shave a few
Une planète sans more precious milliseconds of lap-time.
compagnons And yet throughout the entire evolution of the car, the
The Michelin guides machine that has arguably done more to establish the hu-
became so ubiquitous
that many people didn’t
man right of freedom of travel and ironically killed millions
even realise they only while contributing to the poisoning of the air, Bibendum has
existed to encourage use marched - and occasionally sprinted - cheerfully onward.
of automobiles and thus
Icon of the millennium? Some people might insist that
sell more tyres.
between 1001 and 2001 CE, the Christian cross was a bit
more significant than a mascot for a tyre company. But
then, if the Church wanted to beat the advertisers a their
own game, they should have taken out a trademark.

1970 1980 1998 2005

Theory: everyone It’s the 80s! Everyone calm And now he’s
was on so many Action! Jazzercise! down, Bibendum CGI with a sash
drugs in the 1970s Running toward just wants to that has his selie
the logo designers the customer! help you. See on it, perfectly
needed an actual Service! He brings him helpfully reflecting the
tyre and a sash to the tyres to YOU! indicating the state of the
remind them who Consume! Greed tyres... at the top world today.
he was. is good! of the car? Buy tyres.

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 79
 L A B R AT S
BEST OF:
Smartphone Aversion Therapy
The first step toward breaking an addiction is
10,000 volts to the back of the neck
[While I was up at the very ethnic little supermarket that
still manages to cling to existence near the bus stop near
the long flight of stone steps that leads down to the park
near the street near my flat... where was I? Oh yeah, I was
buying home-brand toilet paper, and the guy behind the
counter who I think was born literally right there behind
that counter, spotted that my phone was incredibly out of
date and barely even seemed to be interested in tracking my
purchase of the home-brand toilet paper.
“Oh dude,” said the behind-the-counter-guy. “Have you
seen those new Samsungs, the Nine? So amazing and so cheap
compared to the iPhone. I used to be all about iPhone but the
new one is like $1500 just for the phone and I’m like what that’s
crazy because I save up for ‘em I do, and the Samsung Nine is
just a thousand bucks which...” he twitched for a moment, but
recovered well “...yeah uh, I save up for ‘em I only just saved up
for the Samsung Nine and it’s going to be so great.”
He looked at me expectantly. “Excuse me,” I said politely.
“I need to poo.” I took my home-brand toilet paper and got
out of there, before I started breaking wind uncontrollably.
Not from scatological need, but from the below therapy
session, which even years later still gives me flashbacks...]
THE THERAPY BEGINS NORMALLY ENOUGH.
“This is the primary electrode,” says Violet Reduction,
lead something-or-other on a Kickstarter project that
somehow, despite being a Kickstarter project, still
has $125 to pay me to test their new anti-smartphone-
therapy-device. Well, I say their but really it’s just Violet
Reduction and I think some money she won on the
pokies or something. “The primary electrode goes on
the nape of your neck,” she says, and affixes it with
dainty fingers and also some kind of glue.
“I’m not sure if I’m the best subject for this,” I say,
wavering slightly as she hooks the primary electrode
to a typically small Arduino board. “I don’t really have
a smartphone addiction problem.” The Arduino board
is in turn hooked up to an atypically large bank of what
look like lithium-ion RC car batteries. The board and the
batteries are likewise both attached to my smartphone,
via Bluetooth or WiFi or an app, or something.
“Yes you do,” says Violet, presumably referring to my
non-existant smartphone problem. “You all do. That’s a
nice watch you’re wearing, by the way.”
I rub my watch defensively. “Uh thanks. My mother
gave it to me. She’s kept a record of the serial number
so I can’t pawn it.” I’m not sure why I tell Violet that.
Incipient electroshock makes me garrulous. Also
flatulent, but I’m holding that in (see intro - Ed). Violet
flips a couple of toggle switches and runs a script on her
notebook, which is connected to the Arduino board via
USB or whatever. What can I say: we live in a world of
things connecting to things via other things.
80 POPULAR SCIENCE
BY
SUBJECT
“A very nice watch,” she says. “What time is it?” ZERO
Without even thinking, I pick up my Galaxy Nexus
and press the power button to activate the screen. I
just get a glimpse of the time - it’s 14:26, as if you care -
when a massive bolt of electricity lights up my spine and
makes me convulse against the straps. I’m strapped in,
you see. To the chair. For my safety.
“Gnargh!” I say, through clenched teeth. The charge
eases off, and I flop back into the chair.
“As I thought,” says Voilet. “Even with that nice
mother-present watch, you still use your smartphone
to tell time. Addict.”
“Analogue is hard to read!” I splutter. There’s sweat
on my brow. Violet’s doing something, just out of my
field of view. I know she’s using her own smartphone
to send me an SMS, I know it’s just a meaningless
jumble of letters and emoticons, yet when my phone Violet
goes bing to announce a new SMS, I can’t help it. I have reappears,
to look. I can’t not look!
“Gneeearsh!” I say, as another 10,000 volts
shaking her
delaminates my spinal cord. head sadly.
Violet reappears, shaking her head sadly. “You see? A “You see?
terrible problem. It’s not just you. If these little handheld
computers were the egg sacs of an alien race, our planet
A terrible
would already be forfeit.” problem. It’s
My phone vibrates. The screen lights up. An icon in not just you.
the top left indicates one of my apps has an available
upgrade. I don’t want to, it’s like my thumb is on
If these little
autopilot, but I’m swiping down. I have time to see that handheld
the app wanting an upgrade is the Smartphone Aversion computers
Therapy App that Violet installed when I arrived, but
by then I’m jerking around like... like a guy getting were the egg
electrocuted via a rack of RC batteries and an Arduino sacs of an
board, actually. And farting a lot, now.
“Make it stop!” I scream.
alien race, our
“Only you can make it stop,” says Violet. Then, on her planet would
own phone, she quite slowly and deliberately selects me already be
from her contacts list and taps Call.
My phone buzzes and plays an amusing quote from
forfeit”.
Back to the Future’s Doc Brown. That’s my ringtone.
“Nooooo,” I say, looking at my phone like it’s, I dunno,
electrified or something.
Violet calls again, even as she reaches behind me and
does something to the rig.
“Noooooo!” I howl, and thrash against the straps, of
my own volition this time. I steadfastly refuse to touch
my phone. I won’t touch it! Violet looks smug. She holds
up the primary electrode. I feel the back of my neck. I
wasn’t plugged in. My phone buzzes. I’m not ashamed.
I grab my $125 - cash this time - and run.
By the way if you ever ring me and get the voicemail
please, for the sake of my digestive system, don’t leave a
message. Just SMS. From a distance.
AUSTRALIAN
BIPLANES ARE BACK!
Well, sort of.
BALL LIGHTNING
Does weather’s weirdest trick even exist?

MEGA
ROCKETS
EVEN LARGER
HADRON COLLIDER
The world’s scariest
scientific instrument
gets an upgrade

New machines,
taking us to orbit,
to the Moon, and
far beyond

CITIZEN SCIENCE
How you can help
advance human
knowledge

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82 POPULAR SCIENCE
Consumer Mirrorless Camera
Fujifilm X-T100