As you know if you've driven anywhere ever, traffic lights are part of a vast conspiracy designed to make it as difficult and time consuming as possible for you to get where you want to go. Lights change from green to red because someone might be coming from another direction, which isn't a very efficient way to run things, since you spend so much of your travel time either slowing down, speeding up, or stopped uselessly.
The only reason that we have to suffer through red lights is that humans in general aren't aware enough, quick enough, or kind enough to safely and reliably take turns through intersections at speed. Autonomous cars, which are far better at both driving and cooperating, don't need these restrictions. So, with a little bit of communication and coordination, they'll be able to blast through even the most complex intersections while barely slowing down.
These autonomous intersections are "slot-based," which means that they operate similarly to the way that air traffic control systems at airports coordinate landing aircraft. Air traffic controllers communicate with all incoming aircraft, and assign each one of them a specific place in the landing pattern. The individual aircraft speed up or slow down on their approach to the pattern, such that they enter it at the right time, in the right slot, and the overall pattern flows steadily. This is important, since fixed-wing aircraft tend to have trouble coming to a stop before landing.
The reason that we can't implement this system in cars is twofold: we don't have a centralized intersection control system to coordinate between vehicles, and vehicles (driven by humans) don't communicate their intentions in a reliable manner. But with autonomous cars, we could make this happen for real, and if we do, the advantages would be significant. Using a centralized intersection management and vehicle communication system, slot-based intersections like the one in the video above could significantly boost intersection efficiency. We've known this anecdotally for a while, but a new paper from researchers at MIT gives our hunches about the increase in efficiency empirical heft. The MIT team also suggests ways in which traffic flow through intersections like these could be optimized.
Rather than designing traffic management systems so that they prioritize vehicle arrival times on a first come, first served basis, the researchers suggest sending vehicles through in batches—especially as traffic gets heavier. This would involve a slight delay for individual vehicles (since they may have to coordinate with other vehicles to form a batch), but it's more efficient overall, since batches of cars can trade intersection time better than single vehicles can. The video above shows the batch method, while the video below (from 2012 research at UT Austin) shows a highly complex intersection with coordination of single cars rather than batches.
Simulations suggest that a slot-based system sending through groups of cars could double the capacity of an intersection, while also significantly reducing wait times. In the simplest case (an intersection of two single-lane roads), cars arriving at a rate of one every 3 seconds would experience an average delay of about 5 seconds if they had to wait for a traffic light to turn green. An autonomously controlled intersection would drop that wait time to less than a second. Not bad. But the control system really starts to show its worth as traffic increases. If a car arrives every 2.5 seconds, the average car will be delayed about 10 seconds by a traffic light, whereas the slot-based intersection would hold it up for a second and a half. And as the arriving cars start to overload the capacity of our little intersection at 1 car every 2 seconds, you'd be stuck there for 99 seconds (!) if there's a light, but delayed only 2.5 seconds under autonomous slot-based control.
We should point out that this only works if all of the cars traveling through the intersection are autonomous. One human trying to get through this delicately choreographed scrum would probably cause an enormous number of accidents due to both lack of coordination and unpredictability. For this reason, it seems likely that traffic lights aren't going to disappear until humans finally give up driving. An interim step, though, might be traffic lights that stay green (in all directions) as long as only autonomous cars are passing through them, reverting to a traditional (frustrating and inefficient, that is) state of operation when a human approaches.
The researchers point out that the advantages of slot-based control go beyond just saving time: they reduce fuel consumption, and along with it, the amount of carbon that would otherwise get pumped into the atmosphere by legions of cars idling at traffic lights.
It will take a lot of work to implement something like this. And because it's heavily dependent on having autonomous cars replace today’s human-controlled vehicles, let's hurry up and let the robots take over so that we can all benefit.
882
Saturday, March 26, 2016
Friday, March 25, 2016
Nanocones and what they mean for solar power
Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University) in Australia have created an entirely new nanostructure they have dubbed a “nanocone”. It combines the upside-down physics of topological insulators with the easier-to-explain process of plasmonics. The result is a nanomaterial that can be used with silicon-based photovoltaics to increase their light absorption properties.
Topological insulators have the peculiar property of behaving as insulators on the inside but conductors on the outside and plasmonics exploits the oscillations in the density of electrons that are generated when photons hit a metal surface. What the RMIT researchers have done by bringing these worlds together is create a plasmonic nanostructure that has a core-shell structure that lends itself to being topological insulator.
“This is the first time that a nanocone with intrinsically core-shell structure has been fabricated,” said Min Gu, the RMIT professor who led the research, in an e-mail interview with IEEE Spectrum. “The nanocone has a topologically protected metallic shell and a dielectric (insulating) core. They do not need a particular fabrication method and the unique nanostructure has the intrinsic properties of topological insulators.”
The topological insulator nanocone arrays could enhance the light absorption of solar cells by focusing incident sunlight into the silicon, according to Gu.
In research described in the journal Science Advances, this enhanced light absorption is achieved by the insulating core of the cone providing an ultrahigh refractive index in the near-infrared frequency range. Meanwhile, the metallic shell provides a strong plasmonic response and strong backward light scattering in the visible frequency range.
The researchers predict that then when a nanocone array is integrated into a silicon thin-film solar cell, it can help enhance light absorption for the cell up to 15 percent in the ultraviolet and visible ranges.
“With the enhanced light absorption, both the short circuit current and photoelectric conversion efficiency could be enhanced,” said Gu.
In future research, Gu and his colleagues plan to investigate plasmonics in other types of topological insulator nanostructures, such as nano-spheres and nano-cylinders and try to achieve plasmonic nanostructures that respond to a broad spectrum of light: from ultraviolet down to THz in all in a single core-shell nanostructure. He added: “In particular, we want to apply these nanostructures into ultra-thin PV devices.”
379
Topological insulators have the peculiar property of behaving as insulators on the inside but conductors on the outside and plasmonics exploits the oscillations in the density of electrons that are generated when photons hit a metal surface. What the RMIT researchers have done by bringing these worlds together is create a plasmonic nanostructure that has a core-shell structure that lends itself to being topological insulator.
“This is the first time that a nanocone with intrinsically core-shell structure has been fabricated,” said Min Gu, the RMIT professor who led the research, in an e-mail interview with IEEE Spectrum. “The nanocone has a topologically protected metallic shell and a dielectric (insulating) core. They do not need a particular fabrication method and the unique nanostructure has the intrinsic properties of topological insulators.”
The topological insulator nanocone arrays could enhance the light absorption of solar cells by focusing incident sunlight into the silicon, according to Gu.
In research described in the journal Science Advances, this enhanced light absorption is achieved by the insulating core of the cone providing an ultrahigh refractive index in the near-infrared frequency range. Meanwhile, the metallic shell provides a strong plasmonic response and strong backward light scattering in the visible frequency range.
The researchers predict that then when a nanocone array is integrated into a silicon thin-film solar cell, it can help enhance light absorption for the cell up to 15 percent in the ultraviolet and visible ranges.
“With the enhanced light absorption, both the short circuit current and photoelectric conversion efficiency could be enhanced,” said Gu.
In future research, Gu and his colleagues plan to investigate plasmonics in other types of topological insulator nanostructures, such as nano-spheres and nano-cylinders and try to achieve plasmonic nanostructures that respond to a broad spectrum of light: from ultraviolet down to THz in all in a single core-shell nanostructure. He added: “In particular, we want to apply these nanostructures into ultra-thin PV devices.”
379
Thursday, March 24, 2016
Warp Speed: Science Fiction and Reality
Faster than light travel has appeared in multiple Sci-Fi shows and movies, however, it hasn’t been figured out yet. NASA has made plans for FTL-drive starships, but very few of them are within reach because many of them are too expensive, they break the laws of physics, or we don’t have that level of technology yet.
So, the verdict is we either need to figure out how to break the laws of physics or create something that goes near the speed of light (NFTL). My idea for an NFTL system is like a slingshot. Like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, only bigger, this slingshot would accelerate a ship inside its main tube, then it would shoot it very much like a softball pitch across the stars.
On the other side of this field, we could use a theoretical Boson Cloud Exciter, which I heard about on a TV show called Eureka. This BCE would theoretically be used as a catcher’s mitt for a FTL jump. Another idea would be to figure out how to convert an entire ship into photos or some other type of energy that can travel at or faster than the speed of light, shoot it at a target planet, where it would be converted back into the original matter of the ship and its content. The risk with this is if something blocks the some of the particles, then the ship and all of its content would be scattered throughout space.
NASA had an idea of having a starship project a “warp bubble” that has positive particles behind it pulling and negative particles in front pulling. However, physics once again caused problems, because you can’t project something in front of you at the speed of light because it breaks the law of special relativity.
This warp bubble is actually called Alcubierre’s Warp drive and it’s used like a “moving sidewalk”. As an example, imagine you are on one of those moving sidewalks that can be found in some airports. Although there may be a limit to how fast one can walk across the floor (light speed limit), what if you are on a moving section of floor that moves faster than you can walk (moving section of spacetime)? In the case of the Alcubierre warp drive, this moving section of spacetime is created by expanding spacetime behind the ship (coming out of the floor), and by contracting spacetime in front of the ship (back into the floor). This has roots in the Big Bang (inflationary universe), in which the universe inflated faster than the speed of light.
So, to attain NFTL or FTL travel, much more research, attention, and money will need to be pumped into this technology and related technologies.
For more information check out the NASA website: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/warpstat_prt.htm
476
So, the verdict is we either need to figure out how to break the laws of physics or create something that goes near the speed of light (NFTL). My idea for an NFTL system is like a slingshot. Like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, only bigger, this slingshot would accelerate a ship inside its main tube, then it would shoot it very much like a softball pitch across the stars.
On the other side of this field, we could use a theoretical Boson Cloud Exciter, which I heard about on a TV show called Eureka. This BCE would theoretically be used as a catcher’s mitt for a FTL jump. Another idea would be to figure out how to convert an entire ship into photos or some other type of energy that can travel at or faster than the speed of light, shoot it at a target planet, where it would be converted back into the original matter of the ship and its content. The risk with this is if something blocks the some of the particles, then the ship and all of its content would be scattered throughout space.
NASA had an idea of having a starship project a “warp bubble” that has positive particles behind it pulling and negative particles in front pulling. However, physics once again caused problems, because you can’t project something in front of you at the speed of light because it breaks the law of special relativity.
This warp bubble is actually called Alcubierre’s Warp drive and it’s used like a “moving sidewalk”. As an example, imagine you are on one of those moving sidewalks that can be found in some airports. Although there may be a limit to how fast one can walk across the floor (light speed limit), what if you are on a moving section of floor that moves faster than you can walk (moving section of spacetime)? In the case of the Alcubierre warp drive, this moving section of spacetime is created by expanding spacetime behind the ship (coming out of the floor), and by contracting spacetime in front of the ship (back into the floor). This has roots in the Big Bang (inflationary universe), in which the universe inflated faster than the speed of light.
So, to attain NFTL or FTL travel, much more research, attention, and money will need to be pumped into this technology and related technologies.
For more information check out the NASA website: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/warpstat_prt.htm
476
Sunday, March 13, 2016
It's alright, the Chinese malware won't hurt your selfies
The security track record of Apple’s locked-down mobile operating system has been so spotless that any hairline fracture in its protections makes headlines. So when security researchers revealed that a new flavor of malware known as AceDeceiver had found its way onto as many as 6.6 million Chinese iPhones, the news was covered like a kind of smartphone bird flu, originating in Asia but bound to infect the globe. But for iPhone owners, the lesson is an old one: Don’t go to extraordinary lengths to install sketchy pirated apps on your phone, and you should be fine.
“Everyone’s blown this way out of proportion,” says iOS security researcher and forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski. “In its current form, this isn’t dangerous except to the exceptionally stupid.”
Researchers at Palo Alto Networks on Wednesday published a detailed blog post revealing that Chinese software has been using a set of clever techniques to bypass Apple’s security restrictions. The hack was pulled off by the developers of a Chinese-language desktop program for Windows called AiSiHelper, designed to interface with iPhones to let anyone jailbreak phones, back them up, and install pirated apps. When AiSiHelper is installed on a PC and an iPhone or iPad is connected to it, the desktop program automatically plants its own rogue third-party app store app on your iPhone or iPad, which then prompts you for your AppleID and password and sends any credentials you enter to a remote server. (Palo Alto Networks notes that it’s not clear if those credentials have yet been abused for fraud.)
To circumvent Apple’s installation restrictions, the AiSiHelper developers used two significant tricks: They snuck three versions of their app into the App Store by making them appear to Westerner as benign wallpaper apps while hiding their password-demanding features in the versions tailored to the Chinese market. And more importantly, they took advantage of a man-in-the-middle vulnerability in Apple’s Fairplay anti-piracy system that allowed the developers to continue to install their apps on iPhones from their desktop software even after the apps had been detected by Apple and removed from the app store. Apple didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment on that Fairplay vulnerability or the company’s failure to catch the sketchy apps in its App Store code reviews.
According to Palo Alto Networks, AiSiHelper has 15 million downloads and 6.6 million active users, and its rogue app installation targets people in mainland China. It’s not the first time that unsavory developers have taken advantage of the popularity of pirated apps in China to spread nasty code: A piece of password-stealing malware infected 225,000 jailbroken iPhones last year. But AceDeceiver has spooked the security community by breaking Apple’s security restrictions even on non-jailbroken iPhones.
Security researchers are more concerned that AceDeceiver’s disturbingly clever techniques could be replicated to attack people who weren’t already seeking to install unauthorized apps on their phone. If hackers could quietly install a piece of malware on your desktop machine—as opposed to Chinese iPhone owners’ voluntary installation of AiSiHelper on their PCs—they might be able to pull off the same Fairplay man-in-the-middle trick to inject malicious apps onto your iPhone, too. “It’s likely we’ll see this start to affect more regions around the world, whether by these attackers or others who copy the attack technique,” wrote Palo Alto researcher Claud Xiao in the firm’s blog post.
Despite AceDeceiver’s innovations, however, even Palo Alto’s own researchers admit that it doesn’t pose much of a very realistic threat to anyone who’s not actively seeking to put shady apps on their device. Instead, argues Palo Alto researcher Ryan Olson, it’s more likely that incautious people like those who installed AiSiHelper will again use the technique to install pirated, unauthorized programs that come with unwanted side effects. “We likely will see this attack used again in the future, but …it’s probably going to be in a similar model,” says Olson. “People installing software to pirate apps which abuses this loophole and may introduce malicious behavior, rather than widespread infections.”
As for the scenario where the same technique is repurposed by invisible desktop malware to smuggle an evil app onto the user’s iPhone, iOS security researcher Zdziarski argues it’s possible, but farfetched. The technique would first require sneaking that evil app past Apple’s app store security review. The victim’s desktop machine would have to be infected with malware. And even then the malicious app would be restricted to its own “sandbox” on the device and unable to access other apps’ processes or data. And if an attacker has access to a desktop, Zdziarski points out, why try to install a rogue app when he could just install ransomware or spyware directly on the PC, or even take iCloud tokens from the computer to steal the person’s iPhone’s secrets? “The technical capability is there, but I’m not sure how useful this is to an attacker,” Zdziarski says. “Why screw around installing an app that asks for their password when you already have full access to their data?”
In other words, it’s unlikely that AceDeceiver’s techniques would make an attacker’s job easier unless someone is actively seeking to circumvent Apple’s protections. The lesson for iPhone owners remains: If you don’t want rogue apps plaguing your pristine device, don’t go looking for them.
883
“Everyone’s blown this way out of proportion,” says iOS security researcher and forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski. “In its current form, this isn’t dangerous except to the exceptionally stupid.”
Researchers at Palo Alto Networks on Wednesday published a detailed blog post revealing that Chinese software has been using a set of clever techniques to bypass Apple’s security restrictions. The hack was pulled off by the developers of a Chinese-language desktop program for Windows called AiSiHelper, designed to interface with iPhones to let anyone jailbreak phones, back them up, and install pirated apps. When AiSiHelper is installed on a PC and an iPhone or iPad is connected to it, the desktop program automatically plants its own rogue third-party app store app on your iPhone or iPad, which then prompts you for your AppleID and password and sends any credentials you enter to a remote server. (Palo Alto Networks notes that it’s not clear if those credentials have yet been abused for fraud.)
To circumvent Apple’s installation restrictions, the AiSiHelper developers used two significant tricks: They snuck three versions of their app into the App Store by making them appear to Westerner as benign wallpaper apps while hiding their password-demanding features in the versions tailored to the Chinese market. And more importantly, they took advantage of a man-in-the-middle vulnerability in Apple’s Fairplay anti-piracy system that allowed the developers to continue to install their apps on iPhones from their desktop software even after the apps had been detected by Apple and removed from the app store. Apple didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment on that Fairplay vulnerability or the company’s failure to catch the sketchy apps in its App Store code reviews.
According to Palo Alto Networks, AiSiHelper has 15 million downloads and 6.6 million active users, and its rogue app installation targets people in mainland China. It’s not the first time that unsavory developers have taken advantage of the popularity of pirated apps in China to spread nasty code: A piece of password-stealing malware infected 225,000 jailbroken iPhones last year. But AceDeceiver has spooked the security community by breaking Apple’s security restrictions even on non-jailbroken iPhones.
Security researchers are more concerned that AceDeceiver’s disturbingly clever techniques could be replicated to attack people who weren’t already seeking to install unauthorized apps on their phone. If hackers could quietly install a piece of malware on your desktop machine—as opposed to Chinese iPhone owners’ voluntary installation of AiSiHelper on their PCs—they might be able to pull off the same Fairplay man-in-the-middle trick to inject malicious apps onto your iPhone, too. “It’s likely we’ll see this start to affect more regions around the world, whether by these attackers or others who copy the attack technique,” wrote Palo Alto researcher Claud Xiao in the firm’s blog post.
Despite AceDeceiver’s innovations, however, even Palo Alto’s own researchers admit that it doesn’t pose much of a very realistic threat to anyone who’s not actively seeking to put shady apps on their device. Instead, argues Palo Alto researcher Ryan Olson, it’s more likely that incautious people like those who installed AiSiHelper will again use the technique to install pirated, unauthorized programs that come with unwanted side effects. “We likely will see this attack used again in the future, but …it’s probably going to be in a similar model,” says Olson. “People installing software to pirate apps which abuses this loophole and may introduce malicious behavior, rather than widespread infections.”
As for the scenario where the same technique is repurposed by invisible desktop malware to smuggle an evil app onto the user’s iPhone, iOS security researcher Zdziarski argues it’s possible, but farfetched. The technique would first require sneaking that evil app past Apple’s app store security review. The victim’s desktop machine would have to be infected with malware. And even then the malicious app would be restricted to its own “sandbox” on the device and unable to access other apps’ processes or data. And if an attacker has access to a desktop, Zdziarski points out, why try to install a rogue app when he could just install ransomware or spyware directly on the PC, or even take iCloud tokens from the computer to steal the person’s iPhone’s secrets? “The technical capability is there, but I’m not sure how useful this is to an attacker,” Zdziarski says. “Why screw around installing an app that asks for their password when you already have full access to their data?”
In other words, it’s unlikely that AceDeceiver’s techniques would make an attacker’s job easier unless someone is actively seeking to circumvent Apple’s protections. The lesson for iPhone owners remains: If you don’t want rogue apps plaguing your pristine device, don’t go looking for them.
883
Saturday, March 12, 2016
An Actual Hoverboard
In the fall of 2014, Arx Pax unveiled what was essentially the first real, working hoverboard. It used proprietary “Magnetic Field Architecture” which enabled its Hover Engines to float over a passive conductive surface (copper or aluminum, but copper works best). It’s the board you saw Tony Hawk ride in a metal half-pipe, and it lifted the likes of Buzz Aldrin and a sumo wrestler.
We All Float On
For starters, you can see that it’s more skateboard-ish. It uses a traditional longboard deck which is mounted to the battery-pack body. The four Hover Engines are spread out a little wider to add stability, but they are now attached to the main body via skateboard trucks. Those trucks tilt the Hover Engines and actually allow you to steer, accelerate, and brake.
Basically, it creates little electromagnetic waves and you get to surf them. Which is awesome. Note that neither copper nor aluminum are “magnetic.” They are, however, conductive. The Hover Engines on the board create a magnetic field, and when that field interacts with a conductive surface it creates small closed loops of electricity called “eddy currents.” The eddy creates a secondary magnetic field within the conductive surface, and because the two fields are essentially mirror images of each other, they repel each other. Lift is generated—and motion, if it’s angled properly. Basically, it creates little electromagnetic waves and you get to surf them. Which is awesome.
The press saw it working on a smaller scale with Arx Pax’s developer hardware, known as the Whitebox+. As you might guess, the Whitebox+ is, well, a white box. It’s 10 x 10 inches across the top and 5 inches deep. It uses the same technology as the larger board, but everything’s shrunk down to a smaller size so developers can test their tweaks without risking injury. It has four miniature Hover Engines on the bottom, and you can control it with a standard dual-joystick radio control. As the engines tilt, the box scoots off in the direction they’re leaning. It felt much like flying your standard quad-copter.
The point was further driven home when I tried another developer device, the Pika. It’s just a single Whitebox-sized Hover Engine set into a 3D printed housing so you can hold in your hand. When you tilt it in different directions over the floor, you and really feel it push against you. It offered much better lateral thrust than the dumb electric leaf-blower stunt I tried.
It may look like the Hendo 2.0 doesn’t float as high as the Hendo 1.0 did, but that’s not exactly true. New on the Hendo 2.0, the Hover Engines each reside in their own little housings. This protects each engine from bumps and significantly reduces the noise level (the 1.0 had a deafening shriek). The housings extend below the pods a little bit, which make it look like it’s not hovering as high.
But as cool as the hoverboard is (and it is), what Arx Pax is really selling here is the Hover Engine. It’s something the company thinks would be especially adept at transporting goods and humans. Specifically, its taking aim at traditional maglev systems, which often require a powered track. Since Arx Pax’s Magnetic Field Architecture system requires only a passive conductive system, it may have lower power needs. The MFA system also has the advantage of being omnidirectional in its propulsion, so it could not only carry cars along a track, but it could theoretically leave the track once it reached its destination terminal, and then carry riders off to their specific destination, self-driving car style. Of course, that would only work over conductive surfaces, and U.S. roads currently aren’t equipped for the job.
The place we’re most likely to see this technology applied is in a system like the proposed Hyperloop, and it shouldn’t surprise you that Arx Pax is courting Hyperloop designers hard.
In January, its co-founder and CEO Greg Henderson sent out an open letter to the Hyperloop community extolling the virtues of MFA to participants in Texas A&M’s Hyperloop pod design competition. The company even built its own pod for the competition to demonstrate its unique capabilities. Arx Pax is reportedly in talks with most of the winners, so we may well see a number of the Hover Engines in action in this summer’s upcoming Hyperloop pod race in Hawthorne, CA. Arx Pax is selling its Hover Engine kits for $20,000 each. That’s a significant chunk of change, but Henderson says they’re still having to hustle to keep up with demand.
I assumed Henderson was merely pitching Magnetic Field Architecture as a means of levitation, but then the pod would require an additional method of propulsion to reach the high speeds (over 700 mph) that Elon Musk and others have quoted. He said he thinks the MFA system would be enough to support both levitation and propulsion. “To date we have modeled speeds up to 500 mph with some very promising results...I predict that before the Hyperloop is built, we will have technology limited more by time and the human body’s tolerance of G-forces than in the speed of our propulsion systems.”
Other places we might see this technology? Surprisingly, Arx Pax is looking at some biotech applications. Lots of animals use magnetic fields to aid in navigation. One of those animals is the mosquito. The company is exploring the possibility that its technology could be a chemical-free way of mitigating the number of mosquitoes in a certain area.
As for the hoverboards? Well, ten lucky, well-heeled Kickstarter backers are each receiving their own Hendo 2.0, having spent over $10,000 each in the crowdfunding campaign. And of course Arx Pax will keep a few on hand for demonstrations, but these will continue to be very rare beasts. Maybe someday we’ll see lavish, all-copper skate parks emerge where kids can rent these boards and experience this incredible gliding sensation. For now, though, it’s a spoonful of sugar to get us talking about hover technology, which isn’t such a bitter pill to swallow anyway.
1015
We All Float On
For starters, you can see that it’s more skateboard-ish. It uses a traditional longboard deck which is mounted to the battery-pack body. The four Hover Engines are spread out a little wider to add stability, but they are now attached to the main body via skateboard trucks. Those trucks tilt the Hover Engines and actually allow you to steer, accelerate, and brake.
Basically, it creates little electromagnetic waves and you get to surf them. Which is awesome. Note that neither copper nor aluminum are “magnetic.” They are, however, conductive. The Hover Engines on the board create a magnetic field, and when that field interacts with a conductive surface it creates small closed loops of electricity called “eddy currents.” The eddy creates a secondary magnetic field within the conductive surface, and because the two fields are essentially mirror images of each other, they repel each other. Lift is generated—and motion, if it’s angled properly. Basically, it creates little electromagnetic waves and you get to surf them. Which is awesome.
The press saw it working on a smaller scale with Arx Pax’s developer hardware, known as the Whitebox+. As you might guess, the Whitebox+ is, well, a white box. It’s 10 x 10 inches across the top and 5 inches deep. It uses the same technology as the larger board, but everything’s shrunk down to a smaller size so developers can test their tweaks without risking injury. It has four miniature Hover Engines on the bottom, and you can control it with a standard dual-joystick radio control. As the engines tilt, the box scoots off in the direction they’re leaning. It felt much like flying your standard quad-copter.
The point was further driven home when I tried another developer device, the Pika. It’s just a single Whitebox-sized Hover Engine set into a 3D printed housing so you can hold in your hand. When you tilt it in different directions over the floor, you and really feel it push against you. It offered much better lateral thrust than the dumb electric leaf-blower stunt I tried.
It may look like the Hendo 2.0 doesn’t float as high as the Hendo 1.0 did, but that’s not exactly true. New on the Hendo 2.0, the Hover Engines each reside in their own little housings. This protects each engine from bumps and significantly reduces the noise level (the 1.0 had a deafening shriek). The housings extend below the pods a little bit, which make it look like it’s not hovering as high.
But as cool as the hoverboard is (and it is), what Arx Pax is really selling here is the Hover Engine. It’s something the company thinks would be especially adept at transporting goods and humans. Specifically, its taking aim at traditional maglev systems, which often require a powered track. Since Arx Pax’s Magnetic Field Architecture system requires only a passive conductive system, it may have lower power needs. The MFA system also has the advantage of being omnidirectional in its propulsion, so it could not only carry cars along a track, but it could theoretically leave the track once it reached its destination terminal, and then carry riders off to their specific destination, self-driving car style. Of course, that would only work over conductive surfaces, and U.S. roads currently aren’t equipped for the job.
The place we’re most likely to see this technology applied is in a system like the proposed Hyperloop, and it shouldn’t surprise you that Arx Pax is courting Hyperloop designers hard.
In January, its co-founder and CEO Greg Henderson sent out an open letter to the Hyperloop community extolling the virtues of MFA to participants in Texas A&M’s Hyperloop pod design competition. The company even built its own pod for the competition to demonstrate its unique capabilities. Arx Pax is reportedly in talks with most of the winners, so we may well see a number of the Hover Engines in action in this summer’s upcoming Hyperloop pod race in Hawthorne, CA. Arx Pax is selling its Hover Engine kits for $20,000 each. That’s a significant chunk of change, but Henderson says they’re still having to hustle to keep up with demand.
I assumed Henderson was merely pitching Magnetic Field Architecture as a means of levitation, but then the pod would require an additional method of propulsion to reach the high speeds (over 700 mph) that Elon Musk and others have quoted. He said he thinks the MFA system would be enough to support both levitation and propulsion. “To date we have modeled speeds up to 500 mph with some very promising results...I predict that before the Hyperloop is built, we will have technology limited more by time and the human body’s tolerance of G-forces than in the speed of our propulsion systems.”
Other places we might see this technology? Surprisingly, Arx Pax is looking at some biotech applications. Lots of animals use magnetic fields to aid in navigation. One of those animals is the mosquito. The company is exploring the possibility that its technology could be a chemical-free way of mitigating the number of mosquitoes in a certain area.
As for the hoverboards? Well, ten lucky, well-heeled Kickstarter backers are each receiving their own Hendo 2.0, having spent over $10,000 each in the crowdfunding campaign. And of course Arx Pax will keep a few on hand for demonstrations, but these will continue to be very rare beasts. Maybe someday we’ll see lavish, all-copper skate parks emerge where kids can rent these boards and experience this incredible gliding sensation. For now, though, it’s a spoonful of sugar to get us talking about hover technology, which isn’t such a bitter pill to swallow anyway.
1015
Friday, March 11, 2016
Bananas as game controllers
What if you could play a videogame with a banana? Or a drum machine with a burrito? MaKey MaKey lets you do exactly that—and more.
MaKey Makey turns everyday objects into digital touchpads for your computer. Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum designed it while they were in grad school at MIT. Inspired by the maker movement, they wanted to create an open-ended way of getting people to think creatively about how kids interact with our increasingly networked world. The result is a clever kit that makes a controller of literally anything that conducts electricity.
“Makey Makey is a device for allowing people to plug the real world into their computers,” said David Ten Have of JoyLabz, which produces the kit. “We want people to be able to see the world as their construction kit. And basically the way MaKey MaKey works is that it pretends to be a USB keyboard.”
Each kit comes with a circuit board—the heart of the kit—a set of alligator clips, and a USB cable that plugs into your computer. The USB provides power to the circuit board, and the alligator clips link the board to any object that conducts electricity. Turns out, a lot of things conduct electricity. Food. Plants. Play-Doh. Even you. “We were shooting for creating a product that had an incredibly low floor for participation, but an incredibly high ceiling for expression,” said Ten Have. “We’re seeing things made as simple as a banana piano and as advanced as measuring tools for chemistry labs, for instance.”
The possibilities seem endless. Kids can turn their art into an instrument. Connect the alligator clips to people’s hands to make a human drum machine. People have transformed a trash can into a calculator and a slice of pizza into a game controller. Your garbage can is full of new controllers.
309
MaKey Makey turns everyday objects into digital touchpads for your computer. Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum designed it while they were in grad school at MIT. Inspired by the maker movement, they wanted to create an open-ended way of getting people to think creatively about how kids interact with our increasingly networked world. The result is a clever kit that makes a controller of literally anything that conducts electricity.
“Makey Makey is a device for allowing people to plug the real world into their computers,” said David Ten Have of JoyLabz, which produces the kit. “We want people to be able to see the world as their construction kit. And basically the way MaKey MaKey works is that it pretends to be a USB keyboard.”
Each kit comes with a circuit board—the heart of the kit—a set of alligator clips, and a USB cable that plugs into your computer. The USB provides power to the circuit board, and the alligator clips link the board to any object that conducts electricity. Turns out, a lot of things conduct electricity. Food. Plants. Play-Doh. Even you. “We were shooting for creating a product that had an incredibly low floor for participation, but an incredibly high ceiling for expression,” said Ten Have. “We’re seeing things made as simple as a banana piano and as advanced as measuring tools for chemistry labs, for instance.”
The possibilities seem endless. Kids can turn their art into an instrument. Connect the alligator clips to people’s hands to make a human drum machine. People have transformed a trash can into a calculator and a slice of pizza into a game controller. Your garbage can is full of new controllers.
309
Sunday, March 6, 2016
Hyperloop's First Stop... Slovakia
When Elon Musk proposed his wild idea for the Hyperloop almost four years ago, he billed it as an unbelievably cool way to get from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 30 minutes. But the first place to adopt the futuristic tech might in fact be … Slovakia.
Now, the phrase “part of the former Soviet bloc” may not bring to mind the ideal setting for a revolution in transportation tech. But the country’s position as one of Europe’s fastest-growing economies makes it a natural fit, says Dirk Ahlborn, who leads Hyperloop Transportation Technologies and sees the system carrying passengers and freight between between Bratislava and Vienna or Budapest in 10 minutes or less.1 “I personally think it’s a great place for it,” he says.
For anyone who hasn’t heard, Hyperloop is a conceptual high-speed transportation system that would fling people and cargo across great distances at triple-digit velocities, through tubes with close to zero air pressure inside. It works something like the pneumatic tubes banks once used. Yes, it sounds like science fiction, but several companies are pursuing it (Musk basically floated the idea, and invited people to run with it), and appear to be making progress.
We would love to see LA to San Francisco, but our primary goal is to build the Hyperloop.
Hyperloop Transportation Technologies isn’t your typical tech startup. It has just two full-time employees. The real work is done by more than 500 engineers with day jobs at places like NASA, Boeing, and SpaceX. They spend their free time working on Hyperloop in exchange for stock options because they get to work on something that could genuinely revolutionize transportation. In August, Ahlborn announced partnerships with Oerlikon Leybold Vacuum and global engineering design firm Aecom, which suggests the idea is attracting resources from companies with stockholders to answer to. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies plans to start building a prototype in California later this year.
So if California works for the test site, why not for the real thing? It would certainly be helpful. Traveling between SF and LA requires taking a 12-hour Amtrak ride, a six hour (on a good day) drive, or an hour-long flight that requires braving traffic to and from an airport and dealing with the TSA. And it’s not like that high-speed train we’ve been promised is coming anytime soon. In short, people would go fully bonkers for a Hyperloop route.
But it’s not feasible, at least not now. The same political battles that have pushed high-speed rail two years (and counting) behind schedule would certainly ensnarl Hyperloop.
Land is expensive (making right-of-way acquisition tricky), earthquakes are likely (raising questions about the safety of an unproven technology), and you can bet there would be no end of NIMBYism. All of which makes California a terrible place for beta testing.
Ahlborn’s competitor, which is called Hyperloop Technologies (there’s something of an “Original Ray’s Pizza” thing going on here) is taking a similar approach. CEO Rob Lloyd wants to have three working Hyperloops in place by 2020, and isn’t talking about connecting California’s big metropoles. He hasn’t specified any potential sites, but says a combination of government support, regulatory approval, and available capital are prerequisites.
“We would love to see LA to San Francisco, but our primary goal is to build the Hyperloop,” Ahlborn said in December, 2014. There’s no point in taking on tough political battles when other places are waving the technology in. Ahlborn says Slovakia has promised to handle securing land for the project, and various government officials seem psyched. “A transportation system of this kind would redefine the concept of commuting,” Vazil Hudak, the country’s minister of economy, said in an announcement.
The first stage of the Slovakia Hyperloop will run within Bratislava and cost $200-300 million, Ahlborn says. Connections to Vienna and Budapest would follow. He hasn’t pulled together the funding, but wants to see stage one built by 2020—nine years before California’s high-speed rail would be finished.
663
Now, the phrase “part of the former Soviet bloc” may not bring to mind the ideal setting for a revolution in transportation tech. But the country’s position as one of Europe’s fastest-growing economies makes it a natural fit, says Dirk Ahlborn, who leads Hyperloop Transportation Technologies and sees the system carrying passengers and freight between between Bratislava and Vienna or Budapest in 10 minutes or less.1 “I personally think it’s a great place for it,” he says.
For anyone who hasn’t heard, Hyperloop is a conceptual high-speed transportation system that would fling people and cargo across great distances at triple-digit velocities, through tubes with close to zero air pressure inside. It works something like the pneumatic tubes banks once used. Yes, it sounds like science fiction, but several companies are pursuing it (Musk basically floated the idea, and invited people to run with it), and appear to be making progress.
We would love to see LA to San Francisco, but our primary goal is to build the Hyperloop.
Hyperloop Transportation Technologies isn’t your typical tech startup. It has just two full-time employees. The real work is done by more than 500 engineers with day jobs at places like NASA, Boeing, and SpaceX. They spend their free time working on Hyperloop in exchange for stock options because they get to work on something that could genuinely revolutionize transportation. In August, Ahlborn announced partnerships with Oerlikon Leybold Vacuum and global engineering design firm Aecom, which suggests the idea is attracting resources from companies with stockholders to answer to. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies plans to start building a prototype in California later this year.
So if California works for the test site, why not for the real thing? It would certainly be helpful. Traveling between SF and LA requires taking a 12-hour Amtrak ride, a six hour (on a good day) drive, or an hour-long flight that requires braving traffic to and from an airport and dealing with the TSA. And it’s not like that high-speed train we’ve been promised is coming anytime soon. In short, people would go fully bonkers for a Hyperloop route.
But it’s not feasible, at least not now. The same political battles that have pushed high-speed rail two years (and counting) behind schedule would certainly ensnarl Hyperloop.
Land is expensive (making right-of-way acquisition tricky), earthquakes are likely (raising questions about the safety of an unproven technology), and you can bet there would be no end of NIMBYism. All of which makes California a terrible place for beta testing.
Ahlborn’s competitor, which is called Hyperloop Technologies (there’s something of an “Original Ray’s Pizza” thing going on here) is taking a similar approach. CEO Rob Lloyd wants to have three working Hyperloops in place by 2020, and isn’t talking about connecting California’s big metropoles. He hasn’t specified any potential sites, but says a combination of government support, regulatory approval, and available capital are prerequisites.
“We would love to see LA to San Francisco, but our primary goal is to build the Hyperloop,” Ahlborn said in December, 2014. There’s no point in taking on tough political battles when other places are waving the technology in. Ahlborn says Slovakia has promised to handle securing land for the project, and various government officials seem psyched. “A transportation system of this kind would redefine the concept of commuting,” Vazil Hudak, the country’s minister of economy, said in an announcement.
The first stage of the Slovakia Hyperloop will run within Bratislava and cost $200-300 million, Ahlborn says. Connections to Vienna and Budapest would follow. He hasn’t pulled together the funding, but wants to see stage one built by 2020—nine years before California’s high-speed rail would be finished.
663
Saturday, March 5, 2016
Russia's Nuclear Space Rocket
Russia has an idea that could change the trip to Mars. Last week, their national nuclear corporation Rosatom announced it is building a nuclear engine that will reach Mars in a month and a half—with fuel to burn for the trip home. Russia might not achieve its goal of launching a prototype by 2025. But that has more to do with the country’s financial situation, which is really not great, than the technical challenges of a nuclear engine. Actually, Soviet scientists solved many of those challenges by 1967, when they started launching fission-powered satellites. Americans had their own program, called SNAP-10A, which launched in in 1965. Ah, the Cold War.
Both countries prematurely quashed their nuclear thermal propulsion programs (Though the Soviets’ lasted into the 1980s). “Prematurely” because those fission systems were made for relatively lightweight orbital satellites—not high-thrust, interplanetary vessels fattened with life support for human riders. Nonetheless, “A nuclear contraption should not be too far off, not too complicated,” says Nikolai Sokov, senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, CA. “The really expensive thing will be designing a ship around these things.”
Nuclear thermal is but one flavor of nuclear propulsion. Rosatom did not respond to questions about their system’s specs, but its announcement hints at some sort of thermal fission. Which is to say, the engine would generate heat by splitting atoms and use that heat to burn hydrogen or some other chemical. Burning stuff goes one direction, spaceship goes the other.
The principle isn’t too far from chemical propulsion. The fastest chemical rockets produce thrust by igniting one type of chemical (the oxidizer) to burn another (the propellant), creating thrust. Chemical or otherwise, rocket scientists rate propulsion methods based on a metric called Specific Impulse, “Which means, if I have a pound of fuel, for how many seconds will that pound of fuel create a pound of thrust,” says Robert Kennedy, a systems engineer for Tetra Tech in Oak Ridge, TN, and former congressional fellow for the US House of Representatives’s space subcommittee. For instance, one pound of the chemical mixture powering the Space Launch System—NASA’s in utero rocket for the agency’s planned mission to Mars—produces about 269 seconds of thrust in a vacuum.
But the outcomes of those two methods are radically different, because chemical rocketry has a catch-22. The faster or farther you want to go, the more fuel you need to pack. The more fuel you pack, the heavier your rocket. And the heavier your rocket, the more fuel you need to bring…
Eventually, the equation balancing thrust to weight plateaus, which is why a year and a half is around the lower time limit for sending a chemically propelled, crewed mission to Mars. (Until Elon Musk’s spiritual descendants build asteroid-mined interplanetary fuel stations.) And that’s not even considering the incredible cost of launching fuel—about $3,000 a pound. Expensive, but the politics surrounding nuclear make it a harder sell in America, so NASA is stuck with the Space Launch System (and its thirsty fuel tanks) for now.
512
Both countries prematurely quashed their nuclear thermal propulsion programs (Though the Soviets’ lasted into the 1980s). “Prematurely” because those fission systems were made for relatively lightweight orbital satellites—not high-thrust, interplanetary vessels fattened with life support for human riders. Nonetheless, “A nuclear contraption should not be too far off, not too complicated,” says Nikolai Sokov, senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, CA. “The really expensive thing will be designing a ship around these things.”
Nuclear thermal is but one flavor of nuclear propulsion. Rosatom did not respond to questions about their system’s specs, but its announcement hints at some sort of thermal fission. Which is to say, the engine would generate heat by splitting atoms and use that heat to burn hydrogen or some other chemical. Burning stuff goes one direction, spaceship goes the other.
The principle isn’t too far from chemical propulsion. The fastest chemical rockets produce thrust by igniting one type of chemical (the oxidizer) to burn another (the propellant), creating thrust. Chemical or otherwise, rocket scientists rate propulsion methods based on a metric called Specific Impulse, “Which means, if I have a pound of fuel, for how many seconds will that pound of fuel create a pound of thrust,” says Robert Kennedy, a systems engineer for Tetra Tech in Oak Ridge, TN, and former congressional fellow for the US House of Representatives’s space subcommittee. For instance, one pound of the chemical mixture powering the Space Launch System—NASA’s in utero rocket for the agency’s planned mission to Mars—produces about 269 seconds of thrust in a vacuum.
But the outcomes of those two methods are radically different, because chemical rocketry has a catch-22. The faster or farther you want to go, the more fuel you need to pack. The more fuel you pack, the heavier your rocket. And the heavier your rocket, the more fuel you need to bring…
Eventually, the equation balancing thrust to weight plateaus, which is why a year and a half is around the lower time limit for sending a chemically propelled, crewed mission to Mars. (Until Elon Musk’s spiritual descendants build asteroid-mined interplanetary fuel stations.) And that’s not even considering the incredible cost of launching fuel—about $3,000 a pound. Expensive, but the politics surrounding nuclear make it a harder sell in America, so NASA is stuck with the Space Launch System (and its thirsty fuel tanks) for now.
512
Friday, March 4, 2016
Atomic Bombs actually did something good
From 1945 to 1963, the United States and the Soviet Union detonated over 400 nuclear bombs aboveground in a very bad, no good, uh, weapons-measuring contest that the world never wants to happen again. Atolls were destroyed, steppes contaminated, and fallout spread around the world. But what if some good came out of those nuclear detonations?
No, seriously.
When all those nukes were detonated, they spit out neutrons that set off a chain of events to create carbon-14, an exceedingly rare isotope of carbon. The amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere spiked. That carbon-14 reacted with oxygen to make carbon dioxide. Plants breathed it in, animals ate the plants, and humans ate the animals and plants. “Everyone alive has been labeled with it,” says Bruce Buchholz, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “The entire planet has been labeled.”
Unlike the short-lived radioactive particles that come out of nuclear detonations, carbon-14 is not dangerous to humans—but it is very useful, because levels of the isotope have been slowly falling off since the 1950s spike. By measuring the amount of carbon-14 in a sample, scientists can pinpoint its age within just a year or two. They can use the method to find the age of an unidentified body using tooth enamel, or study how often human fat cells are born and die, or discover how old trafficked ivory is. It works with literally anything that has carbon.
So every Monday afternoon, Buchholz and his colleagues at Lawrence Livermore fire up the accelerated mass spectrometer, the machine that measures carbon-14. They get samples from a hundred different scientists, law enforcement groups, and government agencies. That adds up to about 100 to 150 samples per week. The machine runs continuously through Thursday, day and night. They’re racing to do research that will soon be impossible.
A Modest Proposal, Part I
Back in the ‘90s, it was Buchholz who pioneered the idea of using carbon-14 to date biological samples. He, a nuclear engineer, met a neuroscientist at a chemistry conference, and they began one of those beautiful multidisciplinary collaborations to study the age of plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. The carbon-14 work, however, really took off when Jonas Frisén, a stem cell biologist at the Karolinska Institute, read Buchholz’s papers. Frisén studies whether adults can grow new brain cells. Neuroscience had long held as dogma that humans are born with all the neurons they will ever have. But studies in mice and rats were beginning to upend that idea. Friesen looked at Buchholz’s papers and saw a way to measure the age of neurons. If you could find 20-year-old neurons in the brain of a 70-year-old, then you have proof of that brain cells generate throughout an animal’s lifetime.
In a few years, some of this research will be impossible.
But no one knew yet if carbon-14 worked for dating brain tissue, and that task fell on Kirsty Spalding, then a postdoc in Frisén’s lab. Starting with human brains was no go, so they started with horses. Horses, like humans, live for decades. Spaulding would drive up to a slaughterhouse an hour out of Stockholm and collect horse heads. “It was not my most fun project,” she says. “Especially terrible as a vegetarian going to the slaughterhouse.” But the method worked. Inside the brains of a horse six years old and another 19 years old, they found measurable differences in the amount of carbon-14.
The work moved to humans. And Spalding found that a region of the brain called the hippocampus, involved in memory, indeed generated new neurons in adulthood. Frisen has since done similar work in heart cells, also thought to rarely—if never—regenerate. Spalding how has her own lab studying fat cells. Carbon-14 dating is a key method for understanding how tissues grow and re-grow in the body.
But carbon-14 in the atmosphere is still falling—by now, it is only 4 or 5 percent above pre-atomic age levels. In a few years, some of this research will be impossible. “That’s something we emphasize in grant applications,” says Frisén. “We need the money now.”
A Modest Proposal, Part II
So what if the someone, you know, detonated another bomb? For the sake of science! (And only science.)
“We’re talking to North Koreans about what they can do,” jokes Frisén. But more seriously, he says, “I would prefer that not happening. You would need dozens. It’s not anything we’re counting on.” Indeed, dozens, if not hundreds, of bombs are necessary to produce a big enough spike in carbon-14 to be useful for dating. And powerful ones too—the ones detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki are too small. Accidental radioactive leaks, like Chernobyl or Fukushima, make no difference, because it’s the detonation that produces the neutrons necessary for carbon-14.
But what if—if!—you could detonate a few dozen nuclear bombs? Could you safely do it somewhere remote? Well, not likely.
The United States’ atmospheric testing in the Nevada desert likely contributed to a 10 percent increase in thyroid cancers in exposed people. In the Marshall Islands, the testing caused an additional 1 percent increase in cancer. “No matter how remote, the contamination will reach people somewhere,” says Steve Simon, a radiation epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute, who led the Marshall Islands Nationwide Radiological Study.
Detonating a nuclear bomb high in the atmosphere—in space, essentially—would reduce radioactive fallout and contamination. The US actually did several high-altitude tests back in the 1950s and 60s. But nukes in space? Think of the satellites! The high-altitude test Starfish Prime knocked out several satellites in 1962, and that’s not something to repeat (on purpose).
So the window on carbon-14 dating is slowly closing. But that it was ever open in the first place was an odd, unintentional consequence of the atomic age.
973
No, seriously.
When all those nukes were detonated, they spit out neutrons that set off a chain of events to create carbon-14, an exceedingly rare isotope of carbon. The amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere spiked. That carbon-14 reacted with oxygen to make carbon dioxide. Plants breathed it in, animals ate the plants, and humans ate the animals and plants. “Everyone alive has been labeled with it,” says Bruce Buchholz, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “The entire planet has been labeled.”
Unlike the short-lived radioactive particles that come out of nuclear detonations, carbon-14 is not dangerous to humans—but it is very useful, because levels of the isotope have been slowly falling off since the 1950s spike. By measuring the amount of carbon-14 in a sample, scientists can pinpoint its age within just a year or two. They can use the method to find the age of an unidentified body using tooth enamel, or study how often human fat cells are born and die, or discover how old trafficked ivory is. It works with literally anything that has carbon.
So every Monday afternoon, Buchholz and his colleagues at Lawrence Livermore fire up the accelerated mass spectrometer, the machine that measures carbon-14. They get samples from a hundred different scientists, law enforcement groups, and government agencies. That adds up to about 100 to 150 samples per week. The machine runs continuously through Thursday, day and night. They’re racing to do research that will soon be impossible.
A Modest Proposal, Part I
Back in the ‘90s, it was Buchholz who pioneered the idea of using carbon-14 to date biological samples. He, a nuclear engineer, met a neuroscientist at a chemistry conference, and they began one of those beautiful multidisciplinary collaborations to study the age of plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. The carbon-14 work, however, really took off when Jonas Frisén, a stem cell biologist at the Karolinska Institute, read Buchholz’s papers. Frisén studies whether adults can grow new brain cells. Neuroscience had long held as dogma that humans are born with all the neurons they will ever have. But studies in mice and rats were beginning to upend that idea. Friesen looked at Buchholz’s papers and saw a way to measure the age of neurons. If you could find 20-year-old neurons in the brain of a 70-year-old, then you have proof of that brain cells generate throughout an animal’s lifetime.
In a few years, some of this research will be impossible.
But no one knew yet if carbon-14 worked for dating brain tissue, and that task fell on Kirsty Spalding, then a postdoc in Frisén’s lab. Starting with human brains was no go, so they started with horses. Horses, like humans, live for decades. Spaulding would drive up to a slaughterhouse an hour out of Stockholm and collect horse heads. “It was not my most fun project,” she says. “Especially terrible as a vegetarian going to the slaughterhouse.” But the method worked. Inside the brains of a horse six years old and another 19 years old, they found measurable differences in the amount of carbon-14.
The work moved to humans. And Spalding found that a region of the brain called the hippocampus, involved in memory, indeed generated new neurons in adulthood. Frisen has since done similar work in heart cells, also thought to rarely—if never—regenerate. Spalding how has her own lab studying fat cells. Carbon-14 dating is a key method for understanding how tissues grow and re-grow in the body.
But carbon-14 in the atmosphere is still falling—by now, it is only 4 or 5 percent above pre-atomic age levels. In a few years, some of this research will be impossible. “That’s something we emphasize in grant applications,” says Frisén. “We need the money now.”
A Modest Proposal, Part II
So what if the someone, you know, detonated another bomb? For the sake of science! (And only science.)
“We’re talking to North Koreans about what they can do,” jokes Frisén. But more seriously, he says, “I would prefer that not happening. You would need dozens. It’s not anything we’re counting on.” Indeed, dozens, if not hundreds, of bombs are necessary to produce a big enough spike in carbon-14 to be useful for dating. And powerful ones too—the ones detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki are too small. Accidental radioactive leaks, like Chernobyl or Fukushima, make no difference, because it’s the detonation that produces the neutrons necessary for carbon-14.
But what if—if!—you could detonate a few dozen nuclear bombs? Could you safely do it somewhere remote? Well, not likely.
The United States’ atmospheric testing in the Nevada desert likely contributed to a 10 percent increase in thyroid cancers in exposed people. In the Marshall Islands, the testing caused an additional 1 percent increase in cancer. “No matter how remote, the contamination will reach people somewhere,” says Steve Simon, a radiation epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute, who led the Marshall Islands Nationwide Radiological Study.
Detonating a nuclear bomb high in the atmosphere—in space, essentially—would reduce radioactive fallout and contamination. The US actually did several high-altitude tests back in the 1950s and 60s. But nukes in space? Think of the satellites! The high-altitude test Starfish Prime knocked out several satellites in 1962, and that’s not something to repeat (on purpose).
So the window on carbon-14 dating is slowly closing. But that it was ever open in the first place was an odd, unintentional consequence of the atomic age.
973
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