FACTORIES IN SPACE: Could they end pollution and toxic waste?

A SA N D P I T
F O R R E A L LY
BIG KIDS

ASTEROID
APARTMENT
Would you live in
a flat that flies?

DYSON
SWARM
How to Build a
post-planet civilisation
SMART
TOYS
Your toddler is
already online

AFTER OIL
Dubai's plans for
a high-tech future

The Next Industrial Revolution Is Here, Now!

(But you probably didn't see it coming.)

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 ISSUE #102, APRIL 2017

EDITORIAL
Editor Anthony Fordham afordham@nextmedia.com.au
Contributors Kate Baggaley, Jeremy Britton, Dan Lander,
David Nield, Daniel Wilks

Small is Beautiful
DESIGN
Group Art Director Malcolm Campbell
Art Director Danny McGonigle

ADVERTISING
Group Advertising Manager

Theres a bit in Douglas Adams The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the

Cameron Ferris cferris@nextmedia.com.au
ph: 02 9901 6348

National Sales Executive Galaxy where, after an incidence of Arthur Dent being fatuous,
a bunch of aliens decide to invade Earth and punish us.
Sean Fletcher sfletcher@nextmedia.com.au
ph: 02 9901 6367

Production Manager Peter Ryman

Circulation Director Carole Jones
And so, for thousands more years The human brain has more connections
US EDITION
Editor in Chief Joe Brown
the mighty starships tore across the than there are stars in the observable
Articles Editor Kevin Gray
Managing Editor Jill C. Shomer
empty wastes of space and finally dived universe. The brain is so complex, we
Senior Editor Sophie Bushwick screaming on to the planet Earth - still dont understand how it works. And
Technology Editor Xavier Harding
Assistant Editors Dave Gershgorn, Matt Giles where, due to a terrible miscalculation it creates thought, a whole extra level
Editorial Assistant Grennan Milliken
Copy Chief Cindy Martin of scale, the entire battle fleet was of complexity that, strictly speaking,
doesnt exist but which is nevertheless
Researchers Ambrose Martos, Erika Villani
Editorial Intern Annabel Edwards accidentally swallowed by a small dog.
ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY
Obviously Adams wrote this as capable of shaping the world - and
Acting Design Director Chris Mueller a joke, but like with so many of the maybe one day - the universe around it.
Photo Director Thomas Payne
Digital Associate Art Director Michael Moreno jokes in HHGTTG, he may have Our technology follows the same
Associate Art Director Russ Smith
Acting Production Manager Paul Catalano unintentionally made a fundamental pattern. Water and windmills are
POPSCI.COM point about the universe. huge but only grind wheat or pump
Online Director Carl Franzen
Senior Editor Paul Adams
Which is this: the more complex a water. Steam engines are smaller but
Assistant Editors Sarah Fecht, Claire Maldarelli
Contributing Writers Kelsey D. Atherton,
system is, the less space it takes up. sill very large and have pretty obvious
Mary Beth Griggs,Alexandra Ossola The universe is almost isometric. limitations. A petrol engine is more
BONNIERS TECHNOLOGY GROUP At maximum zoom, seen as a whole, it compact, but modern electric engines
Group Editorial Director Anthony Licata
Group Publisher Gregory D Gatto looks the same from every angle, a sort are smaller and more powerful still. An
BONNIER
of foamy web of galactic superclusters. abacus is much larger than a calculator
Chairman Tomas Franzen Zoom in, and galaxies get a bit more which is much larger than an Intel i7-
Chief Executive Officer Eric Zinczenko
Chief Content Officer David Ritchie complex. They have central black holes 7700K desktop CPU.
Chief Operating Officer Lisa Earlywine
Senior Vice President, Digital Bruno Sousa and various shapes - spirals, spheres, Could this tie into the puzzling lack
Vice President, Consumer Marketing John Reese
occasional Mexican hats - but they are of aliens, out there in the galaxy? We
made of stars and gas and not much else. have many theories for why we dont
Stars themselves are also simple, see vast alien megastructures, but
made of hydrogen and a few trace leaving aside explanations like would
Chief Executive Officer David Gardiner
Commercial Director Bruce Duncan elements. Gas giants too are mostly gas an ant recognise a kitchen cabinet or
Popular Science is published 12 times a year by
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Under license from Bonnier International Magazines. 2014 Bonnier They have almost all the elements that spacefaring aliens are just... really tiny?
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P O P S C I .CO M . AU 3
 MAY 2017

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

56 Digging in the Dirt

The latest extreme sport is actually perfectly safe.
Go to an empty lot and start messing about with real
construction equipment. Heres how it works...

04 POPULAR SCIENCE
10 12

State of the Art

Your guide to everything

06 An insanely huge chainsaw

10 The science of motorcycles
12 Stereos go huge
14 Next-gen toys
22 33 16 Gadgets that use the cloud
18 How to build an ocean wind farm
20 Oversite: A mining monster

Insight
Important stuff for futurists

22 A floating super-apartment?
24 We should make stuff in space
26 Saving old TV shows
28 Inside a cruise ship

28
30 What is a Dyson swarm?
32 New Mars rockets
34 A huge diesel engine
34 Op Ed: The LP
36 Op Ed: amuse.bouche
38 Op Ed: Rethink

Features
Many many words

40 The Nanotech Revolution

48 Dubai, After the Oil
54 The Minds Behind LIGO

How 2.0
Made for you, by you

68 How to become a Lego master

70 Show us your tools!
71 Building trebuchets for profit
72 How super is your computer?
73 The ultimate roller coaster
74 Please Invent

The Other Stuff

Bonus Extra Material!

03 Our Editor Rants

76 The Shed
78 From the Archives

70 80
82
Retro Invention
Lab Rats

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 05
 State
of the
Art

6 POPULAR SCIENCE
 TRUNK SHOW

Lumber:
Jacked

STIHL MS 880 MAGNUM

1800 mm
chain bar length

95 km/h
max chain speed

6.4 kW
engine power

91 octane
petrol

Yes, the saw

continues....

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 7
THOR HAS HIS CRUSHING HAMMER. The saws 6.4- oomph to run a designers shaved to a (relatively)
Vulcan has his crippling anvil. And modern- kilowatt petrol massive 1800-mm weight off the manageable fifteen
day mortal tree-fellers have the Stihl MS engine is more than chain bar. Despite engine housing by kilograms. Still,
880 Magnum. The most powerful chain four times burlier its brawn, Stihl replacing magnesi- thats not bad for
than what weekend engineers made sure um with a light- a machine that can
saw available, the professional-grade tool limb-trimmers cut the slicer isnt too but-sturdy plastic, slash ti,ber as wide
can slice clean through an 2400-mm-thick with, which gives heavy for arborists which keeps the as an old-school
tree trunk in just two minutes. the MS 880 enough to hold steady: The entire package down tram. US$2,200
by MARK K AUFMAN

PROP STYLING BY SARAH GUIDO-LAAKSO FOR HALLEY RESOURCES PHOTOGRAPH BY LEVI BROWN

8 POPULAR SCIENCE
 5X FASTER THAN STANDARD DRIVE

FLASH ACCELERATED PERFORMANCE

MULTI TIER CACHING TECHNOLOGY

5 YEAR WARRANTY

FIRECU RE AT SEAGATE.COM

FOR THE FASTEST SPE

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seagate.com
2016 Seagate Technology LLC. All rights reserved.
 State
of the
Art
EASY, RIDER

Heavy
Metal
IN THE PANTHEON OF THE OPEN ROA
motorcycles are like adolescent god
small, yep, but powerful for the
size, which makes them very ha
to catch. Still, within these tee
ranks youll find hulksthe bigges
baddest kids on the proverbial schoo
yard of Olympus. Either run with t
troublemakers or get out of the wa
by JOE BROWN
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: COURTESY BMW; COURTESY KAWASAKI; COURTESY INDIAN MOTORCYCLE

Terrify Everyone
A three-metre single-seater weighing 360 k
would look imposing in your rearview mirror
if it werent a light-swallowing black that se
to bend space-time. But the Indian Chief D
Horse is, and its 1.8-litre engine has enoug
grunt to tow a small boat. Subtle!

Outrun Everything Go Everywhere

This 270-kilogram body exists primarily to house
the Kawasaki Ninja ZX-14s massive 1.5-litre
four-cylinder engine. At 142 killer wasps, it cranks
out more power than a Honda CR-V. Overkill?
Only if you call a sub-10-second quarter-mile and
2.6 seconds to 100 overkill. (So yes.)
The GS in BMW R 1200 GS Adventure is German
for Gelande Strae, or off-road, where BMWs
big baddies have trod since 1980. Though this
265-kilogram two-wheeler is too heavy to be
much of a dirt bike, with its relatively off-piste-
friendly suspension, its as close as youll get in a
bike thats also at home on a highway.

10 POPULAR SCIENCE
 Order online at
www.viavision.com.au *While stocks Last

EARS BEWARE
Can You
Hear It Now?
A ROCK CONCERT BLASTS
105 decibels into your ear holes.
And, though your neighbours
might curse the day you moved
in, you can re-create that level of
acoustic insanity in your living
room, basement, or whatever
personal sound cave suits you.
WARNING cranking up the
volume can lead to bad, distorted
sound. But have no fear: If
carefully constructed, a high-end
audio setup can knock you back
in your seat, without losing (too
much) fidelity.
by CORINNE IOZZIO
12 POPULAR SCIENCE
4
1/ Source
Even with bass rumbling, the Technics SL-1200GR turntable wont
skip. The aluminum platter (aka the playing surface) has a rubber
lining, the footings are silicone, and polymer tubes string through
State
the bodyall of which damped those bad vibes.
of the
Art PROP STYLING BY SARAH GUIDO-LAAKSO FOR HALLEY RESOURCES;
22
2/ Preamp
The preamp gets an audio signal ready for the amplifier to crankify.
ARCHETYPE STAND COURTESY SALAMANDER DESIGNS.
Unlike many big-box-storeeven high-endmodels, the Audio
Research GSPre has inputs for modern devices and a circuit,
complete with a pair of vacuum tubes, devoted to turntables.
3/ Amplifier
Delivering 450 watts apiece, stereo-wise, the McIntosh MC452 is
among the loudest stereo amps. Ironically, though, it makes quiet work The reduction, in
PHOTOGRAPH BY LEVI BROWN
of pushing massive sound. Inside this 50-kilo behemoth, each channel decibels, provided
has two amps that cancel out one anothers indelicacies. by sound-filtering
earplugs like Vibes.
The plugs cut
4/ Speakers volume equally
The midrange driver (the one for guitars and vocals) on the Bowers & across all
Wilkins 800 D3 rings true at high volumes. A new woven composite frequencies, so
dampens the brrrrt faster than its Kevlar predecessor. And a 1-inch tunes dont sound
tweeter pings highs, while two 10-inch subwoofers go low. muddled. Madness!
ne mechanical watchmaking, from japan.

Trimatic symbolises three Seiko inventions

that ensure the highest levels of reliability
and durability in its mechanical watches.

seiko.com.au
KIDS THESE DAYS

Thy Toybox
Overfloweth
YO U H O G G E D YO U R N I E C E S RO B O T D I N O SAU R
for a solid three hours after her birthday party.
Admit it. We wont judge you. Todays playthings
are some tempting stuff. They re bigger,
stronger, and faster than the foot-powered plastic
cars, immobile Lego fortresses, and dead-eyed
Teddy Ruxpin dolls that came before. Building
sets are so lifelike, go-karts so zippy, and robots so
intelligent that even adults will find these outsize
toys utterly irresistible. Now kindly hold my beer,
kid; theres a Nerf battle that needs my full attention.
2
by SARA CHODOSH

1
Top Gun
Childhood isnt
childhood if youre not
bruising someones
eyeball with a soft
dart, amiright? At 700
mm, the Nerf N-Strike
Mastodon is the
largest foam- 1
thrower around. In our
tests, its motor shot a 4
full magazine of
24darts up to 20
metres in 8.2 seconds.

2
Clever Girl
The RoboRaptor Blue
cant open doors, but
it can find its way
around the playroom.
Infrared sensors in its
head let the 100-cm
dinosaur wander
freely without
crashing into stuff.
Audio sensors trigger
roaring reactions to
any sudden noises.

3
Diggin It
At nearly a metre long
and comprised of
3,929 pieces, the
Technic Bucket Wheel
Excavator is the
largest motorised
Lego set ever made.
Tiny shafts and gears
transport plastic loot
down functional 3
conveyor belts and into
an included dump
truck waiting below.

14 POPULAR SCIENCE
 State
of the
Art

4
Hotter Wheels
6
Your car is brainy, so
why should your kids
ride be dumb? The 1.2
metre Actev Arrow
Smart-Kart has
proximity sensors that
trigger evasive
manoeuvres if tykes
hurtle themselves at
obstacles. And though
it hits 20 km/h,
parents can limit range
via Wi-Fi and GPS
5
tracking. Creepy!

5
Bot Story
Standing 1.2 m tall,
Meccanoid XL 2.0 can
look kids in the eye
while they program it.
Moving the bots limbs
teaches it anything
from dances to
secret handshakes;
10 motors in the joints
send motions to a
computer, where
theyre savedalong
7 with 3,000 phrases
for later recall.

6
Green Giant

PROP STYLING BY SARAH GUIDO-LAAKSO FOR HALLEY RESOURCE / PHOTOGRAPH BY LEVI BROWN
When youre bouncing
a record-breaking 3.5
metres on a pogo stick,
its good to know youll
have a soft landing.
Instead of a spring, the
Vurtego V4 Pros steel
and aluminium frame
contains highly
compressed air, which
provides extra force on
the jump and plenty of
cushioning when you
hit the ground.

7
Eat Dirt
The Tyco Terra
Climber can tackle the
rough terrain of your
backyard with ease.
Thanks to spiked
wheels, a reptilian tail,
and arms that rotate
a full 360 degrees, this
600-mm-long R/C toy
can traverse stairs,
rocks, and logs. It can
also flip itself over on
boring old rumpus-
room floors.

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 15
 State
of the
Art

SERVER SERVICES

Heads in
The Cloud
R I G H T N OW, I N A DATA C E N T R E
far, far away, gargantuan cloud
servers are providing brain-
power to devices as minute as
fitness trackers. A baseball-size
camera, for example, might
seem like little more than simple
home surveillance; or an ador-
able green dinosaur might appear
to be just a childs plaything. In
reality, armies of servers enable
theseand countless other
unassuming gadgets. Here are 2
five of the smartest out there.
by ROB VERGER

3 5

PROP STYLING BY SARAH GUIDO-LAAKSO FOR HALLEY RESOURCES / PHOTOGRAPH BY LEVI BROWN
1

1 2 3 4 5

IoT Attack Dog All-Seeing Eye Personal Trainer Ask Jeeves Jurassic Smarts
Last year, home- The Nest Cam Armed with data from Barely larger than a Imaginary friends,
owners connected Outdoor is always more than 200 million Wagon Wheel (choc), meet the competition.
some 4 billion devices watching, but it needs users, Under Armour the Echo Dot is always Backed by Watsons
to their networks. help to know what its motivates athletes ready. This Alexa-pow- encyclopedic memory
Dojo by BullGuard looking at. With the with what drives them ered voice-activated bank, a custom speech
keeps hackers from Nest Aware service, most: competition. assistant passes algorithm, and a
exploiting any footage uploads to The UA Record app commands through weekly-updated roster
potential inroads. The the companys servers, and HealthBox Amazons cloud-based of games, facts, and
150-mm box monitors where computer-vision kitwhich includes a natural language stories, CogniToys
traffic, and cuts off algorithms distinguish heart-rate monitor, processors to Dino is a clever,
any shady activity. a person from Bluey fitness tracker, and understand and carry gregarious (and
Meanwhile, Dojos chasing a magpie. scaletap into an out more than 9,000 adorable) chatterbox.
server looks for Those smarts reduce IBM-powered virtual tasks, including setting It also builds a profile
patterns across all its false-positive intruder coach that mercilessly alarms, hailing Ubers, of its human buddy,
relatives to thwart alerts which means pits users against and reordering a slab like if a kid is into
bigger threats. less embarassment! other, better athletes. ofJames Squire. Minecraft or soccer.

16 POPULAR SCIENCE
 EASY, BREEZY BEAUTIFUL

18
How to Build a Giant State
WindmillAt Sea of the
Art

POPULAR SCIENCE
USAS S M A LLE S T S TAT E (R HODE I S L A N D) N OW HOLD S A B IG R E C OR D :
that nations first air-powered offshore energy facility. The five-turbine,
30-megawatt Block Island Wind Farm, which opened in December,
can power up to 17,000 homes. Such turbines have spun across the US
for years, mostly in wide-open and gusty places like Texas, Oklahoma,
and Kansas, generating around 4.4 per cent of US ns the plants net more
electricity. Heres how these monstrous machines get assembled at sea.

by KENDRA PIERRE-LOUIS

Blade
(approx.
73 metres
long)
Nacelle
(approx.
100 metres
above the
surface)

1/ Foundation Formation
Fabricators in Louisiana cut 400-ton steel
foundations to varying lengths. That way the
turbines all reach the same height when placed
upon the uneven seafloor. A barge brings these
pieces to the site, where a crane lifts and
lowers them to the seabed. A pile driver affixes
it all to the ocean floor.
Tower
(approx.
2/ Premium Cable 82 metres
First, a water jet plows a trench 1.8 m below tall)
the seabed. Then a machine called Big Max
lays the 180-mm-thick cable (weighing
2.2million kilograms and able to transmit
34,500 volts), connecting the foundations to
Block Island, six kilometress away, and to the
mainland 27 kilometres away.
 3/ Special Delivery
Three ships haul and install the main
hardware: The 130-metre-long Brave Tern
carries nacelles (housing all generating
equipment), the 42-m-long Paul hauls three
blades and one of three 29-metre segments
that make up the tower, and the 41-metre-
long Caitlin carries the other two.
5/ Nacelles in the Wind
The crane operator hoists the school-bus-size
nacelle atop the tower, where workers guide
it into place. The top of this 400-ton pod
P O P S C I .CO M . AU
functions as a platform for workers to access
the engine inside it. On days when the sea is
19
too choppy for boats to travel, it could be used
as a helicopter pad for delivering workers by air.
4/ Standing Ship
Brave Tern looks and moves like a boat, but
once it reaches the site, it lowers four legs
and shoots up as high as 70 metres. A crane
operator then lifts each segment of the tower
(a total of 440 tons) and places one atop the
other. Together, they reach 82 metresjust Foundation
seven metres shy of the Harbour Bridge pylons. (approx. 52
metres high)
Fin Whale
6/ Blades of Glory (approx. 24
Each of the three fiberglass blades are nearly metres long)
the length of a Boeing 747 andthough
hollowweigh 29 tons apiece. A yoke on Brave
Terns crane cables swings each sliver from
Paul to the nacelle, where workers guide it
onto bolts. A blade can withstand the oceans
heavy winds for 20 years.
 Oversight

4
conveyor belts
receive overbur-
den (soil and rock)
or lignite from the
800
buckets, and carry square metres of
the material at tread carry the
more than 17 Baggers 13,000
km/h. Each belt is tons of weight at
3.2 metres wide, a stately 0.6 km/h.
big enough to
ferry a Smart
car with ease.

THYSSENKRUPP AG

20 POPULAR SCIENCE
THE SCOOP TALLER THAN THE STATUE OF LIBERTY AND HEAVIER THAN THE EIFFEL TOWER, THIS
German mining machine is one of the largest land vehicles on Earth. In HBOs futuristic Westworld, a
Mining bucket-wheel excavator like this claws out an entire city. In reality, these diggers work in open-
pit mines. The excavator pictured here, called Bagger 288, uses its revolving wheel of buckets as a
Monster shovel to continually shift 240,000 cubic metres of dirt a day. Once it reaches a seam of brown coal, or lignite,
it can harvest 265,000 tons of fuel a day. And the crew this behemoth requires? A mere three to four people.
by KELSEY ATHERTON

1,700 22
metres of electrical metres tall, the
cables (each the bucket-wheel is the
diameter of a height of a seven-
mans arm) feed storey building. Each
electricity to the of its 18 buckets is
excavator. In any 3,500 kg (empty!)
given moment, it and can scoop 6.5
can use as much cubic m of soil,
juice as a city of
20,000 people. 39,000 enough to fill a
cargo van.
kilos of paint cover
the structure,
which includes
two pylonseach
45 metres tall
and 2,200 metres
of steel suspen-
sion cables.

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 21
22
POPULAR SCIENCE
Insight
by SARA CHODOSH
HAVE YOU EVER WANTED TO
wake up and see the curvature of the Earth?
Or wanted to live exclusively indoors?
What about go to bed somewhere above
Ecuador and wake up near Cuba? Well
good news, weirdoes - theres a solution.
And its called the Analemma Tower.
Its about 32 kilometres high and it
dangles from an asteroid on a cable many
kilometres long. In case it wasnt already
obvious, Analemma Tower has not yet
been built, and its not under construction.
But unless you hate speculation and
big-picture dreaming, its also not a joke.
The firm that designed it, the Clouds
Architecture Office, specialises in bizarre
conceptual designs (they also did a Martian
house that uses ice to protect colonists from
radiation).
Yes, this is fantasy with a dash of realism.
But in a world that seems to be thinking
disappointingly small of late, its refreshing
to come across something thats equal parts
silly and inspiring.
DANGLING PARTICIPLE
Which doesnt mean were not about to
point out all the problems with a super
expensive high concept asteroid-anchored
floating supertower.
We wont be ungenerous. For instance,
lets pretend that the material to make the
PIE IN THE SKY
Life In An
Impossible
Apartment
since the other end seems to be off the west
coast of Peru, it seems likely your only real
dock would be in midtown Manhattan,
atop a special tower (sub-tower? Meta-
tower?) via a rather alarming-looking
cabled catchy thing.
Given how difficult the boarding and
disembarking process would be, youd
probably just stay in the Analemma all A small asteroid will be
captured, placed in a very
the time. And remember: youd literally
precise orbit, and then
be inside all the time. There can be no connected via cables
balconies. Because of the extreme height.
The office sections are the lowest down,
but even those are high enough up that
the wind would be fairly unbearable. The
residential sections would float around
8,000 metres high, where its -38 degrees
and even oxygen is scarce.
Of course that amazing view comes with
caveats: as you get higher, the shape of the
windows has to change to accommodate
the drop in pressure. So the best views will
only be seen through small portholes.
If you lived at the very top, youd get
an extra 40 minutes of daylight every
day. That might sound nice, but have fun
screwing up your circadian rhythm every
time you travel through the building.
Which brings us to the amount of time
youspendinelevators.Thefastestelevators
in the world are in The Shanghai Tower
and move at 20.5 metres per second, so a
 cable exists. And well assume someone
could dream up a way to assemble this
monstrosity over Dubai, then transport
it to New York City (as the architect
intends). Well also imagine that someone
is willing to spend the money to harness
an asteroid from which it can hang. NASA
estimated this would cost $1.25 billion just
to redirect a small asteroid into lunar orbit.
But hey, there are dozens of people in the
world today for whom a couple of billion
is something they could easily spend, and
still stay rich.
A quick word on the name: though the
asteroid that the Analemma would hang
from would be in geosynchronous orbit,
you wouldnt just chill over midtown
Manhattan all the time. Because of the
way the Earths orbit is angled (and how it
wobbles), geosynchronous satellites dont
stay over one particular spot on the Earth.
They trace a figure-eight pattern. This i snt
called ge0-almost-synchronous. In fact,
and un-coincidentally, this pattern is called
an analemma.
So: youd board your new home at 1300h
in New York. Then youd travel toward the
southern hemisphere at about 480 km/h
on average, then eventually turn and come
back, crossing the mid point and heading
out to the other loop of the figure-eight.
Then repeat.
Your sky-home would only really be
accessible at either end of its path, and
P O P S C I .CO M . AU
23
straight shot to the top of the Analemma
would take you just over 20 minutes.
And thats assuming there is a single
elevator that goes all the way to the top.
Maglev elevators would improve the
situation, but since theyre not yet a reality
its unclear how much better theyd be.
UNPRECEDENTED PRECEDENTS
But maybe we shouldnt care about all
this. Certainly, back in the 19th century The tower will start the day
drifting across lower Manhat-
when building technologies made the first tan. A transfer tower will allow
skyscrapers possible, critics were quick to (quick) hop ons and hop offs.
cry that no one would want to live stacked
on top of each other, and anyway who
would walk nineteen flights of stairs a day,
oh and how do we get the poop out of the
building, and will the top floors even have
water on tap etc moan-naysay-groan.
Chicago built the Home Insurance
Building in 1884, and was 42 metres tall.
And today the Burj Khalifas top floor is
at 584.5 metres (the top of the building is
at 829.8m). Both these structures solved
massive engineering problems to become
a reality we take for granted.
Of course, the Analemma Tower - which
after a couple of weeks of research were
pretty sure isnt an April Fools joke - is three
orders of magnitude bigger than the Burj
Khalifa. It will probably never be built.
But rest assured, when we finally do get
around to building a space elevator, it will
be even more incredible.
Over the course of the day,
the tower will drift to rural
areas. Great for parachuting
and ballooning!
 For printable bio-inks to grow, the broth of
stem cells and nutrients needs a loose watery
consistency to ensure the cells are mobile
enough to knit together. But a heart also
needs a support structure to grow correctly.
Insight Unfortunately, scientists havent yet devised
a scaffold for growing stem cells.
SPACE FACTORY But by printing organs in free-fall, in the
virtual zero gravity of orbit, Techshot
Earth of processes that generate toxic waste.
Consider gallium-arsenide, which costs
about $5000 per 250-mm wafer and leaves
behind many toxic compounds, including, as
the name suggests, arsenic.
Why mess around with gallium-arse-
nide? Because it makes amazing solar
panels, capable of converting about 40 per
cent of light into energy. Thats roughly

Made In Space thinks it can grow whole hearts without the

need for a scaffold.
double the efficiency of a mainstream sil-
icon-based PV panel.
Thats because low gravity makes printing University of Houston materials scientist
by ANDREW ROSENBLUM 3D shapes more direct. On Earth, complex Alex Ignatiev first manufactured a gallium-
3D objects such as a model heart need to be arsenide semiconductor in the vacuum of
printed as 2D layers that are overlaid on top space in the 1990s, aboard a NASA craft
IN LATE 2016, A STRIPPED 0UT of one another in a time-consuming process. called the Wake-Shield Facility.
plane went into a stomach-churning ascent Printing in microgravity allows the object to The space-made semiconductor was
and then plunge, 30,000 feet over the Gulf be spit out in genuine 3D, improving speed assessed as being 10,000 times better in
of Mexico. Not for thrills, or a movie, but for by a factor of 100. quality than units made on Earth. Thats
simulated weightlessness, allowing a high- because atomic oxygen and the quality of
tech printer to spit out cardiac stem cells THE BRIGHTER SIDE OF ARSENIC vacuum in space allows the compound to be
into a two-chambered, simplified structure Using low gravity to 3D print complex or del- neatly grown in layers one atom high, piled
of a babys heart. icate structures is just one benefit of indus- on top of each other thousands of layers,
This wild experiment wasnt science for the try in space. Theres another one that seems without any distortions.
sake of science, it was an important step in pretty obvious once its pointed out - freeing The absence of these distortions is vital; in
bringing a vital new medical product to mar-
ket. Executives at nScrypt (the makers of the
stem cell printer), Bioficial Organs (the ink
provider), and Techshot (who thought up the
heart experiment) are planning to print be t
This 3D printer has been
ing heart patches aboard the Internatio specifically designed
Space Station by 2019. The printer will fly t operate in a low gravity
on a commercial rocket. This is real. ronment like the ISS.
The emergence of private spaceflight c
panies like Blue Origin and SpaceX ha
intended, pushed down prices for sen X Rebirth is a
sci-fi videogame
goods and equipment into space. where players can build
Today it costs roughly $5,000 to la their own space factories
one kilogram of stuff, compared to $3
during the Shuttle - sorry, Space Transport
System - era. So a growing number of entre-
preneurs and researchers are looking to use
this relatively cheap access to harness the
unique qualities of low Earth orbit includ-
ing its vacuum, microgravity, unadulterated
solar power, and extreme temperatures
for manufacturing. Their experiments are
already spurring innovations in medicine,
technology, and materials science. In short,
orbital fabrication could revolutionise the
way we make things.

A LIGHTER HEART
Traditional heart transplants do work - if you
consider a lifetime on immunosuppressant
drugs and a lot of rules about what you can
and cant do as working.
Building a heart to order from a patients
own stem-cells would have a much lower
risk of rejection, and of course doesnt
Made In Space could soon
need a donor. get real brand cachet
But it turns out that gravity is a real Early tests on Vomit
problem when it comes to printing hearts. Comet planes show promise

24 POPULAR SCIENCE
theory, defect-free gallium-arsenide panels
could achieve 60 per cent efficiency.
So Ignatiev envisions kilometre-wide
gallium-arsenide panel arrays in orbit,
collecting the suns energy and beaming it
back to Earth via microwaves, similar to the
solar farms Japan proposed and started to
demonstrate in 2015.
Rather than creating the fragile panels on
Earth and blasting them up in multiple trips,
Ignatiev wants to assemble the solar cells in
space. Yes mess, but no fuss
As for all that arsenic and lead and other
nasty stuff, well no one wants to see low Earth
orbit turn into a floating toxic waste dump...
or rather, more of a toxic waste dump than it
already is (thanks, dead satellites).
Fortunately, space has unique abilities
to break down noxious residue. Outside
the protection of our planets atmosphere,
ultraviolet radiation from the sun helpfully
breaks apart dangerous molecules, and the
components disperse harmlessly.
Our planet is a closed system, whereas
space is an open environment that is very
Gallium Arsenide
solar panels are expensive
and polluting to build on
Earth, but not in orbit
caustic for most molecules, says Ignatiev.
They will either break apart or evaporate by
the vacuum environment of space.
This idea of moving toxic production off
the planet echoes the somewhat cryptic com-
ments from amazon.com and Blue Origin
founder Jeff Bezos in June and then Septem-
ber. You go to space to save Earth, he said.
He added that, for environmental reasons,
we need to build gigantic chip factories in
space, where the dirty business of making
things like semiconductors would be moved
off the planet entirely.
Theres another benefit too. So much of
our fancy electronics requires coolant in its
production. Typically, that coolant takes the
form of precious fresh water. But who needs
water if you have access to the freezing
vacuum of space as a coolant?
MADE IN SPACE
However alluring the prospects, off-world
production will take immense amounts
of money and require a new tolerance for
risk. Loss of life and huge start-up costs are
pretty much guaranteed. But that doesnt
mean it cant work.
And nScrypts Giles is thinking far beyond
printing hearts on the ISS. Assuming they can
increase the production speed significantly,
the advantages of printing in true 3D ver-
sus the 2-and-a-half-D layer-by-layer ap-
proach will allow space printing to compete
even with massive terrestrial manufacturers.
Ignatievs idea of kilometre-wide, space-
made gallium-arsenide solar panels are just
one example, but the same principle applies
for satellites and even spacecraft.
I want to print everything in space, Giles
says. I want to print a rocket in space.
Your replacement heart
could be made in space
Bio-inks work better without
gravity pulling them down
P O P S C I .CO M . AU 25

Insight
IN PROFILE
The Old
Show Hero
by BRYAN GARDINER
LIKE SO MANY KIDS WHO GREW UP
in Richmond, Virginia, during the 60s, Guy Spill-
er loved The Sailor Bob Show, a locally produced
childrens program about an artistic mariner and
his posse of puppets. So it was more than a lit-
tle surreal when, almost five decades later, the
semi-retired broadcast engineer found himself
at home digitising the shows original reel-to-
reel recordings with the help of one of the few
machines left that could play them. Holding
the actual episodes I had seen as a kid, watching
and remembering all the songs and segments, it
was a pretty amazing experience, Spiller recalls.
In an age when we can summon up virtually
any video from any era on YouTube, its tempting
to assume that television history has been fully
preserved. Tempting, but wrong. Whether its
Sailor Bob or hokey restaurant and car-dealer-
ship commercials, at least three decades worth
of low-budget pre-digital television remains in
real danger of disappearing forever.
THE (NEARLY) LOST TAPES
Drive 130-odd kilometres north of Spillers Mid-
lothian, Virginia, home, and youre confronted
with this reality head-on. More than 40,000
reels of 50-mm quadruplexthe same tape for-
mat Sailor Bob was recorded online the shelves
at the Library of Congress Packard Campus for
Audio-Visual Conservation. Only a fraction of
these have been digitised, usually the higher-pro-
file stuff like President Dwight D. Eisenhowers
inaugural colour-TV broadcast or the newscasts
of Martin Luther King Jr.sassassination.
The Librarys archivists have a lot of work
to do; more personal jobs, like the retired
newscaster looking to preserve his reel on a for-
mat his grandkids can watch, often get referred
to a guy like Spiller, who can rip your 50-mm strip
into nearly any digital video format you require.
But Spiller also has a backlog. Hes one of only
a handful of peopleincluding the full-timers
at the Librarywith both the means and exper-
tise to help usher these vital pieces of TV history
into the digital realm. Working out of his home,
26 POPULAR SCIENCE
Spiller digitises around 100 hour-long reels of
50-mm quadruplex videotape ayear.
Step into Spillers basement studio, and youll
find the primary engines of his art: two 800-kilo-
grams, wardrobe-sized RCA TR-70C videotape
recorders. Machines like these basically went ex-
tinct three decades ago, says Spiller. He should
know. The 67-year-old spent the early part of his
career using and repairing them. So far, Spiller
has managed to find and rescue eight so-called
quads before they ended up in landfills. I guess
Im kind of like the SPCA for old broadcast and
recording equipment, he says.
Introduced in 1956, quads were some of the
most complex machines of their era. Invented to
play 50-mm quadruplex reelsthe first official
tape-based format of the broadcast television
industrythey allowed for the real-time record-
ing and instant playback of any show. A quads
guts are an ordered confusion of vacuum pumps,
air compressors, motors, electrolytic capacitors,
resistors, and transistors.
The quad in quadruplex refers to the four
video heads they use to divide up the picture,
says Spiller. All four of those channels need to
play back as close to perfectly in sync as possible,
or youll start to see visual artefacts, he says.
Before quads, TV stations would essentially
record broadcasts by filming TV monitors. (Yep.)
If you wanted to rebroadcast something, youd
have to develop that film, so most networks
simply wouldnt replay a show in multiple time
zones. Quads changed everything. Then easier-
to-manage machines made them obsolete.
KEEPING THE DREAM ALIVE
Shoved in a forgotten back room at the
University of Georgia, Spillers RCA hadnt seen
an electric current in 27 years, until he found it in
2010. It required 70 new electrolytic capacitors
and a full week of tinkering to bring it back to life.
Watching this technomancer prep and operate
the restored machine, its clear why hes in rare
company. Spiller often looks like hes conducting
some elaborate electromechanical symphony.
It can take upwards of 15 minutes to clean
the tape path: the guide, the rotating rollers, the
stationary heads, and the control track head.
You do this before every recording. Once youve
threaded a tape through this labyrinth, extract-
ing the best picture then requires near-constant
knob-twiddling and fussing. Swearing doesn't
doe anything, but it can relieve stress.
Not that Spiller swears, because despite these
complexities, its a process the retired engineer
loves, especially in an age of disposable tech.
Spiller can charge hundreds of dollars to digitise
an hour of footage (though it varies a lot depend-
ing on the tape), and gets material from all over
the country. Im saving these machines; Im
getting to save shows from the Golden Era of TV,
and Im making people very happy, he says. So,
yeah, its satisfying on pretty much every level.
 I M S AV I N G
T H E S E M AC H I N E S ;
IM GET TING TO
S AV E S H O W S F R O M
THE GOLDEN ERA
O F T V, A N D
IM MAKING
P E O P L E V E RY
H A P P Y. S O , Y E A H ,
I T S S AT I S F Y I N G
ON PRETTY MUCH
E V E RY L E V E L .

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 27
 LIFE AQUATIC C RU I S E S H I P S A R E E N T I R E C I T I E S S E T TO S E AT H E L A RG E S T ON E S C A N C A R RY
thousandsofpeople.Tofunctionfarfromshore,floatingburgsliketheserelyonwashing
Port of machines that swallow thousands of sheets, water-filtration systems that serve both
fresh-andsaltwaterswimmingpools,andanarmyofaerobicbacteriatoeattanksofpoop.
Sprawl Thisistheoften-hiddenmachineryworkingbehindthescenesonanaveragemega-liner.
by AMY SCHELLENBAUM

1/Control Room
Two floors below the
hotel, or passenger
decks, sit the engines,
air-conditioning
compressors, and
diesel-power gener-
ators, which engineers
can adjust directly or
remotely, from a
control room. Newer
ships display these
controls on massive
touchscreen tables.
3

2/Water
To clean seawater,
ships often rely on
two main methods.
Reverse-osmosis
membranes filter out
salt, and evaporators
use heat from the
engine to boil off the
fresh H2O. After liquid
goes through one of
these processes, it can
safely fill onboard
swimming pools.

3/Exhaust 1
Exhaust scrubbers are
the most innovative
machinery on ships
today. Before venting,
exhaust enters a
cylindrical tank. A 4
solution of caustic
soda or seawater
sprays from all angles
to trap toxic sulfur
oxides. Then, the
solution falls 45 m
into a storage tank.

4/Food
A single ship can go
through 10 tonnes of
flour and 42,000
pineapples (mostly for
fruity cocktails) in a
year. Ballroom-size
freezers store
ingredients until
mealtime, when
waiters deliver to
1,000-seat dining
rooms via escalators.

28 POPULAR SCIENCE
 Insight

5/Garbage
In the waste-recycling
plant, a 1.4-m3 glass
crusher gnashes
bottles into pea-size
8 pellets, hydraulics
squeeze cardboard
and aluminium into
blocks, and incinera-
tors burn non-recycla-
ble refuse. Some ships
pulp food waste and
6 tip it overboard as
instant fish food.

6/Poop, etc.
Vacuum suction lines
zip poop to marine
sanitation farms,
which siphon out the
water, treat it until its
drinkable, then pump
it into the ocean.
Helpful aerobic
bacteria digest the
remaining sludge in
storage tanks until its
all offloaded ashore,
5 about once a month.

7/ Laundry
Large-capacity
washing machines
which can hold
hundreds of kilos of
fabricchurn away
while elaborate
machines iron and
press. Theres even an
8-m-wide device
solely for stretching
and folding sheets
into crisp rectangles.

7 8/The Fun Stuff

More entertaining
machines hustle on
ILLUSTRATIONS BY LUCY ENGELMAN

the upper decks. Cold

compressed air and
tiny water nozzles can
fill spa rooms with
snow. Some ships also
have wave machines
for onboard surfing or
7-m-tall chambers
that blast 160-km-
per-hour winds to
simulate a skydive.

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 29
 Star

Insight

STAR POWER
1

Anatomy of a
Dyson Swarm
HOW IT WORKS
BY 3100 CE, EARTHS SKYROCKETING
Solar
population might require so much array
energyto run our virtual-reality 4
consoles, jetpacks, and
Hyperloopsthatourpowerplants
wont be able to keep up. Physicist
A R R AY TO H A B I TAT: 1 6 0 K M

FreemanDysonproposedasolution
to just that sort of crisis in 1960: a
machine that encircles a star in a
shellofsolarcollectorstoharnessits 2

energy output. In our solar system, Space

such a sphere could surround the habitat
sunat149millionkmtocollect400
septillionwattspersecond,trillions 5
oftimesmoreenergythantheworld
uses now. The catch is that there
are no materials strong enough to 3
craft a solid mega-structure that
big. We could, however, deploy
tensofthousandsofsolarpanelsa 1/ Solar Power
Dysonswarmtoharvestthatsame Arrays of solar panels orbiting the sun convert its light into electricity. Raw
materials for the panels come from dismantling asteroids or entire planets
energy.Hereshowonemightwork. no problem for a technologically advanced, energy-gluttonous species.

by SARAH FECHT
2/ Staying Cool
The sun is hot. To avoid melting, radiators emit excess heat off the back of the array.
Dyson believed searching for heat signatures around distant stars could help us
THE DYSON SPHERE
locate alien civilisationsassuming, of course, that they employ this technology.

3/ Going Steady
As photons hit the solar collectors, they nudge them backward little by little.
Thrusters on the panels will occasionally fire to keep the arrays in position
and to avoid colliding with other members of the swarm.
DIAMETER: 300 MILLION KM

4/ Delivery System
Lasers or microwave beams will send power where its most neededto robotic
ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREA MANZATI

mining operations, space stations, or human settlements. Precision is key; the total
energy gathered by the swarm could sustain a laser capable of vaporising a planet.

5/ Life in Space
Beaming energy over shorter distanceslike to a nearby space habitatis most
efficient. Which is a good thing because well need somewhere to live after we
deplete our planets resources to build our Dyson swarm.

30 POPULAR SCIENCE


 LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE 1960S, NASAS SATURN V ROCKET SET

POWER TRIP A mark for extreme. At 110 m tall, with 35,000 kilonewtons of thrust, it lifted six
moon-bound missions into space. Retired in 1973, it remains the tallest, heaviest,
The Titans of and most powerful rocket our species has ever built. With moon missions on hold,

Mars-Bound Travel
we havent needed anything close to its capacity. Until now. As governments and
private companies race to send astronauts to Mars, bigger is once again betterand
necessary. Whose heavy-lifter is the biggest and baddest? Heres how they stack up.
by MARK K AUFMAN

400
SATURN V

300

200

100
HEIGHT (FT.)

0
THRUST (MILLIONS OF LB.)

2.5M

5M

SATURN V
7.5M

10M

Insight
400

ULA CHINA SPACEX NASA SPACEX

Atlas V Long March 5 Falcon Heavy Space Launch Interplanetary

In 2011, United Launch China has now joined Falcon Heavy, debuting System Transport
Alliances Atlas V lifted the space race, and is this year, can lift twice The first rocket to System
off with the largest catching up fast. Its as much weight as any surpass Saturn V s If built, the ITS will be
thing thats ever landed most powerful rocket current rocket. It may strength is slated for the largest rocket the
on MarsNASAs 1-ton to date, Long March 5, launch a Mars capsule takeoff next year. SLS world has ever seen,
Curiosity rover. In 2020, will deliver a Chinese as soon as 2020, will carry astronauts capable of carrying
itll carry Curiositys
ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREA MANZATI

space station plus followed by crewed into lunar orbit a few 100 settlers to the red
cousin. Having safely astronaut inhabi- missions six years later. years later, then bring planet. This colonisa-
launched to Earth tantsinto Earth If thats the case, NASAs first crews tion mega-ship could
orbit and beyond orbit, and send the SpaceX might beat to Mars in the 2030s. launch in 2024, or so
71 times, Atlas V nations first rover to NASA to putting Or 2040s. Its rocket SpaceX hopesit will
is ultra-reliable. Mars by 2020. bootprints in red dust. science, so who knows. need funding first.
MAX. MARS PAYLOAD: MAX. MARS PAYLOAD: MAX. MARS PAYLOAD: MAX. MARS PAYLOAD: MAX. MARS PAYLOAD:
4.9 TONNES 4.6 TONNES 13.6 TONNES 40.8 TONNES 450 TONNES
COST TO LAUNCH: COST TO LAUNCH: COST TO LAUNCH: COST TO LAUNCH: COST TO LAUNCH:
$163 MILLION UNKNOWN $90 MILLION $500 MILLION $62 MILLION

32 POPULAR SCIENCE
6,280
S H I P P I N G U P T O 1 5 , 5 5 0 S I X- M E T R E - L O N G C O N TA I N E R S A C R O S S
the ocean is hard work. So hard that Emma Maersk, a 400 metre cargo
Fuel use, in ship,needsseriousmuscle:theWrsil14RT-flex96C,amongthelargest
litres per hour dieselenginesontheplanet.Becauseitcostsalottorunandbelchesfilthy
Although its a
relatively efficient emissions, shipping outfits plan to phase out all 24 of the engines now Insight
engine, the RT-flex96C in use, or switch to cleaner-burning, more expensive fuels. By around
can still consume BREAK IT
nearly 45 million litres 2020, new emissions regulations will restrict this engine on the water. DOWN
of diesel in a year. And For now, one beast generates torque epic enough to propel Emma and
since fuel can account
for roughly 70 per cent
of a cargo ships
thousands of tonnes of consumer merchone container holds 6,000
pairs of sneakers, 10,000 iPads, or 48,000 bananasfrom Suffolk to
Diesel
operating budget, this
one is a money burner. Shenzhen at 45 km/h. Thats about 60 per cent faster than competitors. Sea
by MARY BETH GRIGGS Beast

140
Fuel heat,
in Celsius
Engineers must warm
the engines tar-like
heavy fuel oilthe
dregs of the refining
processbefore use.
Newer engines can use
cleaner fuel, such as
more-refined diesel or
liquid natural gas, at
lower temperatures.

7,000
Hours in
operation
per year
Your car engine might
last a few thousand
running hours in
its lifetime. The
14RT-flex96C can chug
up to 175,000 hours.
Thanks to their
rugged construction,
engines like this one
can run continuously
for as long as 25 years.

102
Revolutions
per minute
A consumer four-
stroke engine might
redline at 5,800 rpm,
firing every other
revolution. This runs a
two-stroke operation,
moving more slowly
but firing every cycle. It Wrtsil
produces more power 14RT-flex96C
while moving the 13 m tall
pistons less frequently. and 26 m long

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 33
 OP ED / THE LP

Scientists Are Revolting

BY THETIMEYOUREADTHIS,THOUSANDS graphene cell at the end of March. This new tech not only has
of people will have come together for more than 300 the potential to increase energy storage by 3000 per cent, it
individual marches all over the world in support of a cause could also be integrated into existing buildings and devices,
BY
that, at first glance, may seem a little abstract: science! meaning the idea of battery farms could already be obsolete.
DAN LANDER
The March for Science was originally proposed for early So its easy to understand how anyone involved with the
2017 as a standalone event in Washington DC, a fervent decision might be haunted by visions of demonic white
response to the hostility that the new administration has elephants over the coming months.
directed toward the scientific community. While theres plenty positive to be said for advocating for
But the idea snowballed into a global movement, with public policy based on cutting edge scientific evidence, its
presumably pro-science people all around the world worth remembering that, unlike religion or self-delusion,
mobilising in passionate defence of a rational society. science doesnt offer answers, only ever-evolving options.
It seems bizarre that wed even need such a march It mostly tells you where you went wrong last time, and
whats next, the March for Not Dying In The Street? But it you have to extrapolate from that a new method of going
makes sense when you look at some of the short-sighted, mostly-right next time. While knowing you will eventually
idiotic ideologies being peddled by public officials around be proven wrong. Religious people hate it, because they
the planet at the moment. dont always grasp the concept of constructive error, of
Climate change deniers, religious fundamentalists, being wrong in a way that improves things for the future.
homoeopathists and fluoride In discussing the future of
conspiracists (we hate the nanotechnology for this months cover
Slave Or Employee?
homoeopathists the most) make for a Sci-Fi promised you a robot story, MacDiarmid Institutes Dr. Nicola
somewhat anachronistic-feeling alliance, best friend. Worth it, if Gaston made an interesting point along
but there they are, united against one the planet dies? just those lines. Much of the scientific
common foe: evidence-base scie ce irectio of the last 60 or 70 years, says
And while the various fac n inspired by the dreams
science community may ess lassic science fiction
strangers to each other, it is s d space colonies; virtual
to realise that their collectiv ed productivity. Since
influence has increased to s ed to visit the Moon,
extent that we now have to c agination has been
them with civil demonstrati ith a brave new world
Unfortunately, the deep t over the horizon.
appeal of unscientific belief with that, according to
people is that it is easy, some t we now live in a time
intuitive. Science isnt easy, eams may have blinded
often counter-intuitive. ues Gaston, could be
Take the South Australia its time to abandon
governments recently ilosophy altogether,
announced $1 billion se thats what got us
battery and solar farm to this mess in the first
for instance. On paper, place. Maybe. If we
it looks like a win for throw all our resources
the technologists, nto saving the world,
a progressive and might succeed. Or we
enlightened move towards t die trying.
cleaner future. But, as any e y technological effort to
knows, theres a big risk inve would almost certainly
that might become redunda ihood of the planets
justifies its cost. uarantee alternative Dan Lander is a
Battery technology in par will become available. former editor of
advancing rapidly, and ther d we do? Well, its not as Rolling Stone and
likes to run around
possibility that what you get h choices are right... and the house with a
bucks in 2017 will only be a f erent degrees. fishbowl on his
you could buy for that amou tific advice like that, you head making pew
This isnt something that co y our leaders want to bury pew noises. He
claims he was
hydroelectric plants had to sand, put the decision off gasping for air and
Researchers at RMIT, for e nother election cycle. signalling for help.
unveiled a fractal-patterned ll cant forgive them for it. Metaphor!

34 POPULAR SCIENCE
 GALAXY ON GLASS
SPECTACULAR WALL ART FROM ASTRO PHOTOGRAPHER CHRIS BAKER

Available as frameless acrylic-aluminium mix or framed backlit up to 1.2 metres wide.

A big impact in any room. All limited editions.

www.cosmologychris.co.uk
www.facebook.com/galaxyonglass
or call Chris now on +44(0)7814 181647 GALAXY ON GLASS
 OPED / RETHINK

Do The Maths
DURING THE PRODUCTION OF THIS ISSUE with general and special relativity (because, from our
of PopSci, the University of Newcastle released data perspective, time passes more slowly out where the GPS
showing that just eight out of 6492 students they sur- satellites orbit, and the system has to correct for that), but
veyed, expressed a desire to work in mathematics when YOU dont need to know what a Lorentz transformation is, BY
ANTHONY
they finished school. Incredibly, a number of academics or what it does. Thats because a real mathematician took
FORDHAM
and commentators expressed shock at this result, which care of that years ago when they wrote the software.
came after a four-year study in NSW. Meanwhile, we have to deal with the way this study was
This lack of interest in, or possibly knowledge of reported. The problem with saying oh no only eight kids
maths jobs was characterised as dire by Western Sydney want to be mathematicians is that its kind of like saying
University education academic Kathryn Holmes. oh no, only eight kids want to grow up to be professional
Of course the actual study English speakers.
doesnt include the phrase Mathematics isnt a
only eight kids want to grow career or an industry. Its
up to be mathematicians in a language. In fact, maths
its abstract. Instead, the study is something deeper
talks about how, even though than language. Its a way
society is coming to depend of understanding and
more and more on complex describing the universe, in a
technology and algorithms, very fundamental way.
enrolments in STEM Yes, you can grow up to be
disciplines are in decline. a specialist in pure maths,
The study tries to spending years perfecting
figure out why kids arent ultra-obscure theorems that
interested in STEM. may or may not one day be
It also points out that, applied to aeroplane wings or
unsurprisingly, if youre rich, landmines. But thats a rare
smart, male, white and have calling. Eight out of 6492
parents who are scientists, might even be a little on the
you are more likely to also high side. Are there eight
want to be a scientist. pure-maths jobs a year?
But the M in STEM is Primary schools and
definitely the least popular high schools shouldnt
of this quartet of relatively be expected to inspire a
unpopular letters. So, as student to pursue a career
a certain old dude with a in maths. Thats a unis job.
chocolate addiction once And maybe not even first
said, why is it so? year uni, because the brain
Maths has a special place melting stuff you learn in
in society. Were utterly a first year calculus course
dependent on mathematics - including differentiation
to run almost all our tech, Actually Doing Physics, Not Maths and integration and maybe
Myth: Einstein was a bad maths student.
and yet maths remains one Reality: he was extremely good at maths. a smattering of Euler - is
of the few subjects in which considered little more than
it is socially acceptable to fail. basic arithmetic by proper mathematicians.
Consider how often youve heard someone say: Oh, I Heres some maths homework for you. Jump on
Anthony Fordham
was always hopeless at maths, haha. Now contrast that Wikipedia and search 17. Just 17. The number 17 has is the editor of
with: Oh, Ive never been able to read, haha. its own Wikipedia page. Read it, and then follow the link Australian Popular
Being illiterate in Australia in 2017 is a massive social to Natural numbers. Read that page. Then follow the Science. He is not
handicap. You either have to hide your illiteracy, or subject link to Clauchy sequences. Then metric space. Then good at maths
(but he can read).
yourself to time-consuming adult learning classes. closed set. Then whatever you want because unless And while mental
But if youve forgotten how to solve a quadratic equation, youre already a mathematician, by this point your brain arithmetic might
or never really got your head around the difference will be dribbling out of your ears. not be real
between exponential, hyperbolic and logarithmic, nobody My point? Real maths is hard, a specialisation on a maths, hes still
cares (except your long-suffering maths teacher). specialisation, a philosophy rather than a job. So I think impressed by
people who can
And thats because you dont need this knowledge the fact that eight kids already know they want to be square-root three
in day-to-day life. Sure, the GPS in your phone relies mathematicians before they even finish high school is digit numbers in
on the extremely very hardcore equations associated something that should be celebrated, not bemoaned. their heads.

36 POPULAR SCIENCE
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 OPED / amuse.bouche
Scale and/or Scope
AND SO TECHNOLOGY MARCHES GAILY INTO
the sphere of entertainment, whether it be more powerful
processors and graphics chips for gaming, or modern
special effects technology in TV and film. Visual artists can of Wildlands is little more than a distance that has to be
do anything, depict anything. And heres the downside:
because epic is now affordable, developers and directors
try to impress with excess rather than quality.
In the last month alone weve seen two high profile
videogames released that substitute size for substance,
and a number of films opting for grand spectacle rather
than, you know, an actual story.
Both Mass Effect: Andromeda and Ghost Recon:
Wildlands are continuations of established and successful
franchises, but have diverged from the style of previous
games by taking the action to an open world,
instead of linear levels of pre-packaged
scripted events.
This firmly places the
emphasis on scale over nearly
anything else. Previous
Mass Effect games have
had elements of open
world design in them,
but those explorable
areas were always
relatively small and
had really obvious
main objectives.
Andromeda,
on the other hand,
promises the player
- or threatens them
with, really - multiple
planets to explore and
a whole star system to flit
about in. While this is very
technically impressive in terms
of game programming and graphics
and the kind of content we gamer types
call assets, the scale of the games He Can Do Anything
universe just isnt matched by the scope But as a milsim gamer he
mostly just wants to shoot
of the games story. people in the face.
Rather than giving us a galaxy of
worlds full of compelling missions and areas to explore
and people (aliens are people too) to meet and moments to
remember, the developers have instead filled each planet
with a number of cookie-cutter templated quests that fill
the space with busywork rather than satisfactory content.
Welcome to the planet of [Planet]. To secure [Planet]
against [threat], please [travel to / build] [thing]. Additional are also both excellent open world games, that use the
[things] are marked on your map for you to [explore / kill
/ build]. Do you want to kiss this alien? [Yes / No] Once
complete, please report back here for the same again.
Elsewhere, Ghost Recon: Wildlands pits players against
a drug cartel in Bolivia. All of Bolivia. As a playable
space its big and appropriately vegetated an dotted with
decaying Roman Catholic infrastructure, but with the
38 POPULAR SCIENCE
exception of the enemy encampments around the map
and a few random encounters, Bolivia is just... empty.
Rather than being a place to explore and enjoy, the Bolivia
BY
travelled between missions. Its a time sink adding length DANIEL
to the game without adding anything to the playability. WILKS
Previous games in the Ghost Recon series (it was
originally a Tom Clancy spinoff, if you can believe it) have
a mission-based structure with small, open areas for,
you know, events to occur in. At the end of each mission,
players are transported to the next.
Now Ghost Recon Wildlands essentially adds a
commute between missions. The scale of the game has
been increased but the scope remains largely the same,
leading to an unsatisfying imbalance.
So the problem is obvious, right? Our
ability to computer generate a game
world has exceeded our ability to
think up interesting things to
do in that game world.
Not so, not at all. Scale
can be an impressive
thing when it is
used effectively,
as was the case
with The Witcher
3: Wild Hunt. The
game has three
continents, and they
are far from empty.
Developers CD
Projekt Red laboured,
obsessed really, to
create a living world, full
of fascinating characters
to discover, monsters to hunt,
villages, secrets, caves and at
least one horse to get drunk with and
go on a Sherlock Holmes style murder
investigation (the horse is Sherlock).
So what can we take away from this?
That the tools for creating huge virtual
worlds are easy to wield, but rather
harder to wield with any great degree of mastery? That
just because a game promises thousands of hours of play Daniel Wilks
is the editor of
in a vast open world, it wont actually be any good? That PC PowerPlay,
Ghost Recon has finally jumped the shark? Australias
The tide is turning, slowly. The PlayStation 4s Horizon: preferred gaming
Zero Dawn, and Nintendos Zelda: Breath of the Wild magazine. He
occasionally
wanders the city,
mechanic of being able to go (almost) anywhere, whenever demanding that
the player wants, to create an entertaining experience. merchants fill his
A few games show whats possible. They show that sack. When the
gameplay still rules, and that now its time for all developers cops turn up, he
yells Sidequest!
to realise that games cant be carried by clever technology and sprints off
alone. Graphics, physics, special effects - these are all good down the nearest
to have. But the game play itself must always come first. filthy alley.
NANOTECH

THINK LL
The Inevitable Futur chnology

40 POPULAR SCIENCE
 NANOTECH

Conceived in the late 1950s and

popularised in a hundred terrible
cyberpunk novels (and four or
five good ones) , nanotechnology
has been a textbook definition of
tomorrows world for decades.
me day soon, were told, a new
trial revolution will begin, and
be very small. But what if that
lution has already started? Heres
at nanotech was, what it is today,
nd what it will become...
S TO RY BY DA N L A N D E R

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 41
NANOTECH

or f notechnol

F
a term at is about as
tive as they come, a sli
semantic gem that c
fantastic visions of
equally and opposi
ing nightmares of annihi
via grey goo in equal measure.
In its more fanciful forms, nanotechnology,
like light-speed travel and teleportation, is a
staple of the sci-fi imagination.
Its a concept that casually promises
something from nothing, hinting at the po
tential of a godlike ability to control the ve
building blocks of nature, to manipul
stuff at a molecular level. Its a tanta
suggestion that if we make our m
really, really small, we might just b
bend the universe to our will.
Fantasy? Perhaps only to
degree. Nanotechnology is
and while its not especiall
exciting, the techniques
already developed poin
where things are buil
to our grandparen
indistinguishable fro
Lets take a look at h
evolving. You you m

PROTO NANO
In December 1959, firebrand p
ard Feynman presented a talk to th
can Physical Society called Plenty of R
at the Bottom. His subject was the problem
of manipulating and controlling things on a
small scale, and he tackled it with charac-
teristic fervour and irreverence.
There is a device on the market, they tell
me, by which you can write the Lords Prayer
on the head of a pin, Feynman said in his
talk. But thats nothing; thats the most prim-
itive, halting step in the direction I intend to
discuss. It is a staggeringly small world that is
below. In the year 2000, when they look back
at this age, they will wonder why it was not
until the year 1960 that anybody began seri- on the head of a pin? small. That notion is very much the Lords
ously to move in this direction. His answer was not to simply make smaller Prayer on a pin. So before we get any more
By the end of his relatively brief talk, with- and smaller physical etchings of the letters, confused, lets do some definitions.
out ever actually using the term nanotech- but rather to manipulate the very atoms of the In basic terms, macro (that is, normal or
nology, Feynman had nevertheless intro- pinhead to form the letters themselves. everyday) tech involves taking existing chunks
duced the concept to the world. Sure, he didnt quite know how to do it, but of matter - many millions of atoms clumped
Not content with etching the Lords Prayer Feynman was very confident that the laws of together into molecules and compounds - and
in tiny letters on the head of a pin, Feynman physics supported the idea and he was right. arranging them in relatively crude and approx-
pondered, Why cannot we write the entire There is a common misconception that imate patterns to build a microchip or a sports
24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica nanotechnology is just big technology made car, an oak dining table or a skyscraper.

42 POPULAR SCIENCE
 NANOTECH

Nan
science of transforming the actual matter
self, rearranging the way the atoms link to-
gether, building new molecules deliberately
and with very fine control (rather than by,
say, setting fire to something and hoping the
reaction goes the way you want it to).
In the many millions of years leading up
to Feynmans talk, nature alone made those
chunks of matter; in the years following
Feynmans pin analogy, it became apparent
that humans might be able to add their own
purpose-built blocks to the collection.
Nanotechnology, as it emerged, is that
human beings manipulating mat-
lecular level.

REALITY
ccording to the definition
onal Nanotechnology Initia-
s the measurement range be-
tre and 100 nanometres,
d to get a real sense of how
mensions really are, some
useful to consider that a hu-
75,000 nanometres across. And
ouble-helix is approximately two
tres wide.
real significance, however, is not that
izes were discussing are small, but that
he nanoscale, matter behaves differently.
ecause we are dealing with individual at-
oms and molecules rather than macro struc- Building directly with molecules
will allow us to create stronger,
tures, quantum effects become a key consid- lighter and simpler materials.
eration, and as Associate Professor Adam
Micolich from the University of NSW ex-
plains, that changes things fundamentally.
It depends on the system youre consid-
ering, but ultimately, it comes down to ei-
ther surface-to-volume ratio, size relative to A LOT OF THE EARLY SCIENCE FICTION
wavelength or the limit of small n in terms of
atoms, electrons, photons, whatever.
PROMISES OF NANOTECHNOLOGY HAVE
As factors like surface-to-volume or rel-
ative size to wavelength change, so too do
COME TRUE, JUST IN SMALL WAYS.
properties like luminosity and conductivity - Dr Nicola Gaston
start messing around with really really tiny
pieces of gold, for instance, and youll dis-
cover it becomes reddish-purple and stops
conducting electricity. A nanowire, for example, is a long structure Similarly, the functional properties of a
And thats where the fun begins. with a diameter of only one nanometre, and quantum dot which as we discussed last
because this tiny physical scale restricts the issue is small cluster of particles one atom
MICRO MANIPULATION flow of electrons across its width, a nanowires thick and up to 50 atoms in diameter can be
By changing the size and shape of things at a conductivity can be very precisely controlled. controlled by changing its size.
molecular level, scientists are able to tailor the Think of it like, if a nanowire is a narrow aque- Due to their physical shape, quantum dots
nature of nanoparticles to specific purposes duct or mains water pipe, then a normal wire is convert UV light down into the visible spec-
and take advantage of quantum-scale effects. the Amazon river at its widest point. trum, and changing the dots size changes

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 43
NANOTECH
SCRATCH PROOF NOW,
INDESTRUCTIBLE LATER?
One of the earliest commercial applications
for nanotechnology was the use of carbon
nanotubes in paints, particularly to resist mould,
algae and bacteria. The same technology has
also been used to make paint scratch-resistant.
Nanotubes have also been used to make material
that is more energy absorbent than Kevlar,
and it is believed that this could be combined
with a range of coatings that could make
almost any surface bulletproof.
44 POPULAR SCIENCE
g g y of
nano world, a nanotube, is a sheet of
carbon one atom thick, rolled into a cylinder.
By rolling the tube at different angles and
into different diameters, it is possible to
change its mechanical, electrical, thermal
and optical properties.
This structure also means these tubes pos-
sess the highest tensile strength of any ma-
terial yet discovered, more than a hundred
times stronger than steel.
PRACTICAL IMAGINATION
The Nanotechnology Products Database
(NPD) was established in January 2016 as a
way of keeping track of exactly who is using
which branch of nanotechnology to do what
in their own little corner of the world.
At the time of writing, it contained 7126
products from 1112 companies in 52 coun-
tries, numbers that should be all the proof
anyone needs that nanotechnology is now
real science, and no longer science fiction.
However, all those 80s cyberpunk novels
and 90s grey goo will kill us all novels may
have given us slightly unrealistic expecta-
tions of nanotechnology.
Anyone hoping for Star Trek level kit in
the near future might be a little disappoint-
ed the NPD currently doesnt list a repli-
cator (a sort of vending machine that builds
anything, from a juicy steak to a house brick
to a medical tricorder), although there is
an abundance of retro-future fashion that
might have appealed to Kirk or Spock. Con-
sider the hair gel called the Perfect Wave,
and some questionable waterproof trousers
dubbed the AnyWear Pants.
A lot of the early science fiction promises
of nanotechnology have come true, just in
small ways that for the most part are invisi-
ble, says Dr Nicola Gaston from New Zea-
lands MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced
Materials and Nanotechnology. The impact
of nanotechnology has been very hard to see
because it has been implemented in prac-
tical ways its the materials in your smart
 NANOTECH

SMARTER BANDAGES
One of the leading medical applications of
nanotechnology is in bandages that use
nanoparticles of silver to block microbes cellular
respiration, thus eliminating a whole range of
bacteria. The same technology is increasingly
being used in clothing, but as Dr Gaston points
out, this may pose an ethical dilemma. You have
to ask whether the use of nano materials should
be restricted to applications where they really
matter, she says. Things like nanosilver in socks,
for example, is it really sensible to be using these
resources in that capacity?

phone, its the components of all sorts of to provide UV protection, along with silica
devices that you dont necessarily think of as nanoparticles for waterproofing, and silver
being built on nanotechnology. for antibacterial properties.
So nanotechnology is already part of your And if that seems a tad boring, consider
everyday life. And if that seems a little mun- that using the same general principal, re-
dane, then youre not thinking hard enough searchers in China last year announced a
about how amazing everyday could become. fabric that doesnt just block UV light, but
actually absorbs it and converts it to electri-
JUST A PART OF LIFE cal energy. Yes, its a wearable battery.
Sunscreens and clothes; finishes on Similarly, researchers at the University of
everything from cars to sunglasses; the California have devised a fabric that uses
Carbon will be key to the
screen on your phone, computer or televi- gold nanoparticles to re-route light around
future of nanotechnology...
sion the real applications of nanotechnolo- and all of our technology! an object, rendering sort of invisible.
gy are everywhere, and that fact necessitates
a word of caution.
We have to be a little wary of how the
concept of nanotechnology is used, says
Gaston. There are definitely situations
where nanomaterials are added to a product
to make it attractive to a public who think
that sounds cool and futuristic, without real-
ly adding any benefit to that product.
Cynical marketing aside, the current
range of applied nanotechnology may be
humble, but it also represents the start of an
amazing journey. Consider the following

MANIPULATING LIGHT
Two leading areas of currently applied nano-
technology are sunscreens and clothing. Sun-
screens now commonly contain nanoparticles
of titanium dioxide (TiO2) and zinc oxide
(ZnO), both of which are highly UV absorbent.
TiO2 and ZnO are also added to clothing

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 45
NANOTECH

Carbon nanotubes could become

the steel of the next age, and be used
in almost everything we build.

EXPANDING OPPORTUNITIES
Quite simply, the future of nanotechnology
is the future of all technology. As we contin-
ue to improve our understanding of nanos-
cale engineering, the implications will influ-
ence more of what we produce.
In just one example, nanotubes - like the
quantum dots we looked at last issue - are
being explored extensively for medicine,
not just in diagnostics and drug delivery,
but also for their potential to work as nano-
sponges. Nanotubes are naturally expelled
very quickly from the body, so when used
THE NANO PUSHERMAN
as a nanosponge, they attach themselves to
Nanoparticles can also be used to dramatically
toxins in the bloodstream and then carry the increase the quality of drug delivery. As Dr Olga
foreign particles out when they go. Shimoni from UTS Initiative for Biomedical Materials
Similar technology is being explored to & Devices institute explains, currently nanoparticles
clean up oil spills and to purify water, with are commercially used to enhance the bioavailability
nanotubes bonding to pollutants, then being and stability of various drugs, but researchers have
removed with a filter specifically tailored to also proven their effectiveness for precision-targeting
their nanostructure. diseases such as cancer. Targeted drug delivery is
where you can put some biomolecules inside or on the
surface of a nanoparticle, says Shimoni, and this
NOT QUITE REPLICATION nanoparticle can be programmed to go to specific
One of the other most significant future appli- tissue, without causing toxicity to the whole body. This
cations for nanotechnology will simply be to has major implications for chemotherapy in particular.
replace so much of what we already have. On Thats right. Nanotechnology could bring the term
a planet of finite resources, the ability to repli- surgical strike back into the realm of medicine.
cate the rarest of those could become a very big
deal. Were looking to replace scarce or cost-
ly materials, things like platinum, with other
materials that can have the same function, but
that have to be designed to do it, says Gaston.
So you enable something like carbon to have
the same electronic properties as platinum by
controlling the structure at the nanoscale.

46 POPULAR SCIENCE
 NANOTECH

THE G S SCIENCE FICTION, ITS ABOUT AS LIKELY AS or

Far fr
been proven wrong.
r scenarios, the biggest

JURASSIC PARK OR STAR WARS, Dr Adam Micolich.
Carbon in particular is being prepared for
a starring role in the future. Chiefly, it may
replace steel in manufacturing, where it can
provide more than 100 times the structural
strength at about a sixth the weight.
(Okay pedants, so steel is defined as an alloy
of mostly iron and carbon, but that just means
chemical engineers and materials scientists
already know how important carbon is for en-
abling us to build really big, strong things.)
Carbon may also be the future of comput-
ing. At the end of 2016, researchers at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison created
carbon nanotube transistors that outper-
form state-of-the-art silicon transistors.
WAIT, WHATS GREY GOO?
Oh yeah, the grey goo. We should probably
mention that. Since nanotechnology ide-
ally involves a process known as self-as-
sembly where molecules are stimulated
to form certain structures under their own
energy, rather than being combined by
brute force, or stacked and glued this
does raise concerns about the process of
self-assembly running wild.
What if a particular carbon structure
were to continue to self-assemble infinite-
ly, converting all available carbon (which
includes you) into a uniform slab of use-
less, colourless stuff? This nightmare was
dubbed the grey goo scenario by nano-
technology pioneer Eric Drexler in his 1986
book Engines of Creation.
The grey goo is science fiction, its about
as likely as Jurassic Park or Star Wars, says
UNSWs Micolich, and Gaston agrees.
To a large extent, what were learning
to do with nanotechnology is to reproduce
many of the elements of control that are in
nature already, she says. The more we
learn about those systems, the more we
learn how to do things safely, and so, some of
those things that might once have been the-
concern for uture of nanotechnology
may in fact be a very familiar story - the story
of where the money comes from.
This sort of science is not cheap and it
needs large team efforts with lots of people,
says Micolich. Governments are either
winding back publicly funded investment in
basic research, or at least just not growing it
at a level commensurate to GDP growth.
Sometimes, on the surface, basic re-
search looks a bit pointless or driven only
by curiosity, but in the end, its the dis-
coveries that come by doing this that end
up being truly world-changing twenty or
fifty years later.
Be it transistors, hard drives, curved flat-
screen TVs or GPS at its fundamental core
its curiosity driven research. Thats followed
by a lot of applied work, but if you only care
about whats applied, your innovation dries
up really quickly.
One day we could live in a world where
factories are as big as suitcases, where buy-
ing a car means planting a seed in a vat of
carbon-based goop, and where losing a limb
is no more traumatic than breaking one.
Nanotechnology will make it possible. Its
really just a question of when.

BETTER VISUALS
Lets not forget those quantum dots, like the
ones Samsung is putting into new TVs, and
the ones we wrote about last issue that are
being extracted from coal. A quantum dots
unique ability to convert UV light into the visual
spectrum makes it perfect for display purposes.
Currently, devices use metallic quantum dots
to produce reds and greens, but blues must be
provided by a backlight, as the blue dots are too
small. However, recent innovations in graphene
quantum dots (the ones from coal) could mean
blues will soon be dot-driven as well.

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 47
Oil wont last forever, and Dubais government knows it. To stay
prosperous, the city-state bets big on science and technology.
by
ANDREW
BLUM

I.
After Oil
Dubai drops away
behind us, its
comic-book skyline
replaced by kha-
ki sand dunes and
the occasional wild
camel. The first sign
of the technolog-
ical ambition we
are about to see is
a billboard: a six-
metre-tall portrait
of Dubais ruler, His
Highness Sheikh
Mohammed bin
Rashid Al Maktoum,
rendered in a mosaic
of solar panels.
50 POPULAR SCIENCE
At a cluster of buildings about a half-
hour south of the city, a guard slides open
a high steel gate for our white SUV, with
Alhaz Rashid Khokhar at the wheel. A pro-
ject manager for the Dubai Electricity and
Water Authority, Khokhar has, for the past
several months, been working toward the
opening here of a 200-megawatt expansion
of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum
Solar Park. The dark panels stretch across
the desert for more than three km, a dis-
tance so far beyond the vanishing point
that standing at one corner is like looking
through a double mirror. The largest op-
erating solar plant in the United States is
just over 550 megawatts, but Dubai grows
by exponents. This 200-megawatt section
will soon be a smudge on the map beside
an additional 5,000 megawatts planned to
come online over the next 13 yearsa $14
billion investment targeted to meet 25 per-
cent of Dubais electricity needs. It is only
one piece of a technological jigsaw puzzle
that, once assembled, is intended to rein-
vent Dubais role in the world.
For more than a decade, this city-states
story has been all about superlatives: the
worlds tallest building, the biggest fire-
works display, the busiest international air-
port. But a new ethos has taken hold, a broad
and purposeful strategy to swap profligacy
for ingenuity. Unlike some countries, Du-
bai believes the planet is warmingand is
determined to use science and technology
not only to adapt to a new era of extremes,
but also to make that adaptation the basis of
its economy. Dubai wants to be known more
as a laboratory for world-saving technology
than for the man-made beaches, indoor ski
slopes, and vast air-conditioned malls that
defined its recent past. Its plan would seem
hard to believe if the contemporary reality of
Dubai itself werent already so improbable.
Dubais transformation from a blip on the
map to a global hub was a neat trick. But can
it pull it off again?
Khokhar moved here with his family near-
ly five years ago, after turning down a job at
home in India working for an international
consulting company. In doing so, he became
a leading indicator of Dubais aspirations.
Khokhars not a laborer from the subconti-
nent, living in an non air conditioned work
camp and toiling manually in the heatthe
notorious scenario that blemished Dubais
recent rise. He ranks among the regions best
minds, and was attracted by the pay and life-
style, as if Dubai were New York or London.
Here we have plans, Khokhar says about
the solar park, but he just as easily could be
talking about his family and Dubai itself.
He and his peers believe they are building
a better future, the outlines of which are all
around us. Inside the parks R&D facilitya
small concrete slab building with big solar
wings on the roofresearchers are working
to improve the performance of photo-voltaic
modules in the parched, dusty environment.
You can easily lose 30 to 70 per cent of the
power from dust, explains Jim Joseph John,
an Indian engineer who recently relocated
here from Phoenix, Arizona, where hed fin-
ished up some research for his PhD. On an
adjacent patch of sand, three visiting tech-
nicians fiddle with a sophisticated weath-
er station, their tools spilling out of their
rental cars trunk. Behind another fence is
a photo-voltaic reverse-osmosis system,
which transforms brackish groundwater into
drinking water. Across a construction lane
way, two steel towers a couple of storeys
tall poke at the sky like half-erected cranes.
Technicians are preparing to install 3D print-
OPENING SPREAD LEFT TO RIGHT: PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW BLUM; CHRIS RATCLIFFE/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
ers on them, which will extrudein a mat-
ter of weeksa whole building intended to
house (naturally) a drone lab. The lane way
itself will then be ripped up, its brick pav-
ers replaced with solar panels and a system
to wirelessly recharge electric cars as they
drive along. For the moment, a run-of-the-
mill plug energizes a tiny white car with a
Dubai Electricity decal.
Youre going to be surprised, John says.
The whole place is going to change.
I I .
Minister of the Future
We decided that we will go to the future
we will embrace the future without worry,
says Mohammad Al Gergawi, the architect
of Dubais vision for the next half-centu-
ry. He sits in the centre seat of a vast table
in the lush boardroom of one of the citys
newest hotels. A waiter comes with a three-
tiered curate stand piled with dates and
nuts, his hand trembling with anxiety as he
places it in front of Al Gergawione of the
most powerful men in Dubai and close ad-
viser to Sheikh Mohammed, the city-states
hereditary monarch and prime minister of
the United Arab Emirates, the federation of
which Dubai is a part.

We believe that we in the UAE and in
Dubai have a mission, Al Gergawi con-
tinues. This region needs a puller from
its misery. There is tremendous conflict.
There is a lot of hatred, sectarian war, re-
ligious war, ethnic cleanses, refugees. We
see the story. Then you come to Dubai.
The city appears a postcard for prosperity,
youthful diversity, and cosmopolitanism.
PHOTOGRAPH BY SIDDHARTH SIVA
Taxi drivers skydive on their days off, and
the fanciest hotels fill up with civil servants
and white-collar professionals on special-
occasion datesalongside Russian oli-
garchs and Indian industrialists who arrive
in 20-foot-long Rolls-Royces. The malls and
streets are busy with people of all skin col-
ours and ethnicities, in all kinds of national
dress. The sense of mutual tolerance is pal-
DUBAI
of Emirati privilege. Al Gergawi accessorises
Mohammad his with black titanium-rimmed eyeglasses
Al Gergawi
The minister and blue mesh Skechers, like an Arab Steve
charged with Jobs. This might not be an accident.
Dubais vision Early last year, in a move that didnt go
stands outside the
Future Foundation; as viral as footage of Dubai firefighters on
the building is jetpacks or a tennis match on a helipad,
3D-printed.
Sheikh Mohammed reshuffled his cabinet.
He created new positions for a Minister of
pable, sometimes joyful. Climate Change and Environment, a Min-
Sitting beside Al Gergawi are two ister of State for Happiness, and a Minister
20-something advisers. The three of them of State for Youth Affairs (a 22-year-old). Al
are dressed in the kandura, the Emirati ver- Gergawialready Minister of Cabinet Af-
sion of the flowing gown thats an icon of the fairs, got a new appendage to his title: and
Arab world. In golden cream, grey, or blue, the Future. This was a declaration of purpose.
perfectly pressed and fitted, with a sleek For the past 13 years, among other roles, he
collar and a tassel at the neck like a bolo tie, served as chairman of Dubai Holding, a
they wear them like power suits, the costume state-owned investment vehicle, where he
P O P S C I .CO M . AU 51
assembled a diverse empire of hotel, real
estate, and telecommunications businesses.
Now he would shift full time to planning the
future of Dubai. Today Im excited, actual-
ly, he says, in a guru-like cadence. Im very
excited. Im excited because I know well
have a beautiful journey to the future. I can
see it. I can feel it.
Cities are machines, the largest things we
build. Their airports and seaports digest and
expel people and goods, while their roads
and rails siphon both through the urban
landscape. Their tunnels carry data, power,
water, and sewage. Their governing author-
ities work (one hopes) with deliberateness,
imposing coherence on what otherwise
could be chaos. It can all hum efficientlyor
fail spectacularly. Typically, all of this is con-
structed over centuries. The Parisian sewer
system dates to the 1850s; New Yorks first
subway line opened in 1904; London got its
first central power station in 1891. Avenues
follow cow paths; creeks become water tun-
nels; fibre-optic lines slowly take their place
beside electric cables. The lesson of city
building is that infrastructure takes forever
the tortoise to technologys hare. But Dubai
has done it differently. Dubai has built in 50
years what has taken most cities 100. That
isnt hyperbole or a PR stuntthough Du-
bai is famously expert at bothbut a reality
52 POPULAR SCIENCE
The Financial
Centre Metro
Station
Dubais line of
driverless trains
helps the city
toward its goal of
25 percent of all
local trips made
via autonomous ve-
hicles by 2030.
plainly visible in this metropolis of nearly 3
million people. For centuries Dubai was a
sleepy port, serving the pearl trade in the
Straight of Hormuz. In 1966, when Al Ger-
gawi was three years old, the newly formed
Dubai Petroleum Company found oil off the
coast. While engineers worked to pump it
up from the seabed, his boyhood school still
lacked electricity. He drank rust-coloured
water, filtered with a piece of cloth. Noth-
ing was here, actually, he recalls. The site
of the beachfront hotel were sitting in had
been a smallpox sanatorium. While you
were coming from the airport, probably you
drove down Sheikh Zayed, which is an eight-
lane highway? My first trip on this road was
when it was a dirt road. It was sand dune.
Growth came with infrastructure. Flush
with petrodollars, Dubai began to build:
roads, a massive seaport, an airport, an air-
line, and power plants. But they knew their re-
source wealth was only temporary, while the
scarcity of the desert environment was forev-
er. Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, Du-
bais ruler at the time, put it in a maxim: My
grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a
camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a
Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover,
but his son will ride a camel. The prophesied
second generation of Land Rover drivers are
the 20-somethings sitting beside Al Gergawi.
(One drives not a Land Rover but a Mercedes
G-Wagen.) Al Gergawis challenge is to bend
fate, to keep the camels in the desert, and to
put his grandchildren back into Mercedesor
perhaps flying cars.
Over the past generation, Dubais ad-
vantage has been the new geography of air
travel. The city is perfectly situated to link
Europe and the Americas with Africa, Asia,
and Australia. An estimated 95 percent of
the worlds population is within flying range
of the Airbus A380, the giant double-decker
flagship of Emirates, Dubais airline.
For the next generation, Dubais advan-
tages are more fraught, tied as they are to
impending climate catastrophe. Many cities
are about to face new extremes of tempera-
ture and drought. Dubai already does. Many
cities will struggle to find fresh water and
clean power. Dubai already does. Viewed in

this light, Dubai is a place where the future
has arrived early.
Rather than be intimidated by its
potentially catastrophic challenges, with-
drawing from the world and doubling down
on outdated technologies, Dubai is acceler-
ating toward it. The plan is simple: Turn the
traditional mechanisms of urban life into a
platform for confronting the hazards of con-
temporary society. Then export those inno-
vations. If a city is a machine, Dubai wants
to be the most advanced city-machine the
world has ever seenand it wants to sell
its blueprints to everyone. Dubai is recog-
nizing that climate change is an existential
threat to its ability to be a prosperous part of
the world, says David Pomerantz, executive
director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a
watchdog group.
To publicly speculate about the jigsaw
puzzle of technological possibilities, Dubai
opened a Museum of the Future, housed
PHOTOGRAPH BY SIDDHARTH SIVA
temporarily in a white-wrapped pavilion un-
til permanent space can be constructed. An
opening video, projected in a 360-degree cy-
clorama, pretends to look back in time from
the Dubai of 2050. Not too long ago, climate
change brought us to the edge of extinction,
a narrator warns in Arabic and then English
as a montage of destruction flashes on the
screen: skyscrapers subsumed by sand, riots
in the streets, forests disintegrating into dust.
But the UAE saw an opportunity: to move
fast and create breakthroughs that the world
had never seen.
In this imagined Dubai of the future, the
electricity and water authority has blown
past todays supersize desalination plant
and opened a bio-desalination plant, grown
from the genes of a jellyfish (the most ab-
sorptive natural material) and a mangrove
tree (one of natures best desalinators).
And it sold them too: We also export jelly-
fish bio-desalination plants to cities across
the world, the stentorian voice continues.
Robots construct buildings from sand. An
artificial intelligence selects and grows
food in indoor farms. And flying cars pulse
through traffic-free streets. Its all presented
with enough science-fiction flair to maintain
a sense of humour. But the punchline is seri-
ous: We solved our own problems, and now
climate solutions are our greatest export.
At a historical moment whenin the United
States, at leastglobal-warming predictions
remain politically controversial, it is star-
tling to see Dubai planning its economic fu-
ture around these challenges.
Because we dont have, we need to think
harder, Al Gergawi says, tacitly acknowl-
edging that the pieces of the puzzle dont yet
fit together. We need to think faster, and
we need to reinvent every single product. You
look at history. You look at the future. You
look at research and say: You know what?
How can I create this journey? Then he pops
a cashew into his mouth.
I I I as a lab. The ability to meet their needs
The Laboratory City
One evening, walking along the beach, I
come upon a team of workmen busily dis-
assembling a small wooden platform with a
bold E stamped into the middle of a blue
circle. I was mystified when I first saw it that
morning, appearing as if out of nowhere.
Was it a dance floor for some extravagant
party on the beach? A helipad? These didnt
seem unusual questions in Dubai. Why did
it appear, only to be removed12 hours later
under cover of night? But if the purpose was
a secret, the workmen were never told to
keep it. Its for a drone, says the man who
seems to be in charge, momentarily pulling
his phone away from his ear. Why were they
dismantling it? Technical challenges.
DUBAI
The next day, Ahmed Hashem Bahrozyan,
a senior executive at Dubais Roads & Trans-
port Authority, clarifies things. Anything
that moves people, were looking into, he
says. Were standing beside what looks like
a carnival ride, caged behind velvet ropes:
the Ehang 184, a Chinese-designed drone
big enough to transport one passenger and
one small bag 30 minutes across the city.
The official plan is for trial service to begin
in July. But later, when pressed on the feasi-
bility of that immediate goal, the chairman
of the RTA only laughed. Dubai knows flair.
The announcement had the desired effect of
generating headlines worldwide. The same
went for the fanfare around Dubais plan
to build a Hyperloop passenger-transport
system connecting with its neighbour, Abu
Dhabian announcement that was later
downgraded to a pre-feasibility study.
Dubais other transportation plans are
more proven. In 2009, when it was reeling
from the global economic collapse, the city
opened a metro line, the first in the region,
with driverless trains. Its nearly 200 million
annual rides (compared with 1.763 billion on
the New York City subway system) form the
basis for Dubais goal that 25 percent of all
local trips be made via autonomous vehicles
by 2030. The RTA is looking at driverless
buses and aerial gondolas, and is pushing
to compete with cities around the world to
attract the companies that are developing
self-driving technology.
This is a case where being a monarchy
has its advantages. Dubai can change reg-
ulations quickly to better attract compa-
nies like Uber and Daimler to use the city
faster than other possible cities around
the worldwhere theres much more bu-
reaucracy, and it takes time to change
regulations and policiesthats attractive
to them, Bahrozyan says, because even
they dont know exactly what they need
unless they come and try. The RTA is
working toward providing the sophisticated
mapping necessary for autonomous trans-
port, as well as a citywide cloud that would
share data among thousands of vehicles
from many different manufacturers.
This is the kind of backbone building
that has proved worthwhile for Dubai in
the pastnot only to improve efficiency at
home, but also to export for profit abroad.
Its the same strategy that has driven the
growth of DP World, operator of Dubais
P O P S C I .CO M . AU 53
DUBAI
enormous Jebel Ali seaport, which sells its
automation technology globally.
Supercharging the plans is infrastructure
spending$3 billion of it on transportation
in advance of the World Expo, which Du-
bai will host in 2020, the first ever in the
Arab world. The RTA will extend the metro
line 9 miles to the site, adjacent to Dubais
sprawling new airport, and famous archi-
tects like Norman Foster and Santiago Ca-
latrava are designing pavilions.
Technically speaking, the sustainability
goals are bold. Fifty percent of the energy
used during the event will be generated
from renewable sources, and 50 percent
of that is expected to be generated on-site.
The Emirates pavilion, designed by Cala-
trava, will have deployable wings with inte-
grated solar panels.
Whereas past exposlike those in
Shanghai and Milanhave been primarily
focused on a domestic audience, Dubai ex-
pects 70 percent of the fairs 25 million vis-
itors to come from outside the UAE (most
54 POPULAR SCIENCE
likely on an A380). Theyll be unwittingly
Dubai is bank- celebrating something else as well: the 50th
anniversary of the founding of the United
in on the idea Arab Emirates.Its all a chance for Dubai to
punctuate that international outlookwhat
that diversity Reem Al-Hashimy, director general of the
Expo, describes as an interconnectivity.
and tolerance Thats how Dubai has survived, she says.
Its been this place where people come
can lead to from all over and find a better way of life.
Dubais middle class appears to be far
broader and more diverse than it was a
innovation and decade ago, when the dominant media nar-
rative was about a fantasy city built on the
prosperity. backs of slave labour. The extent to which
working conditions have improved is hard to
judge, but the reality of the city as a business
and commercial hub is plainly apparent. If
Dubais future is as a knowledge hub, it will
have to fulfil the dreams of more than just
the Emiratis. With rare exceptions, only they
are allowed to be citizens, and since visas are
based on employment, deportation isnt so
much an extreme consequence as an every-
day worry. That may have mattered less to
the Emiratis when labour was expendable.
But to compete for global talent, Dubai
needs to transform from a transitory poly-
glot society to a permanently cosmopolitan
onean ambition that has become a talking
point of Sheikh Mohammed. The unique-
ness of Dubai is the fact that it is a melting
pot of the worlds cultures, ethnicities, and
minds in one city, he said in a statement.
Al Gergawi acknowledges the challenge
of that transition in his own vague way. Im
saying were not perfect, he says. We are
young kids on the block, if you look at the
block as the world. Every day we say: How
can we improve? How can we move to the
next step in every single aspect?
Maybe it is necessary to grade Dubai
on a curve. By the standards of a liberal
democracy, Dubai remains retrograde.
There is no democratic representation, poor
freedom of the press, and homosexuality
remains illegal. But compared with the rest
of the Arab world, Dubai is a beacon of
PHOTOGRAPH BY SIDDHARTH SIVA
openness and modernity. Thirty percent of
the cabinet members are female (compared
with 0 percent in Saudi Arabia and 6
percent in Jordan), as is 66 percent of the
government workforce.
Dubais long game is to create an
atmosphere for future growth. It has taken
its initial good luckits limited oil reserves,
along with the unlimited ones of its generous
 neighbour, Abu Dhabiand made even more
out of it, leveraging finite oil wealth into a via-
ble position as a global hub. As part of the plan
for the Expo, the government has established
a $100 million fund to finance tech startups
from around the world and bring them to Du-
bai. It is banking on the idea that diversity and
tolerance can lead to innovation, and inno-
vation can lead to both economic prosperity
andin the current language of the govern-
menta happy city.
Can that happiness be attained without
extending citizenship beyond Emiratis? It
is a controversial question. Al Gergawi de-
murs. We are a young country, he says.
I V . grownsatellites. DubaiSat-1, launched in
Mars and Beyond
Sarah Amiri is a young scientist. At 30 years
old, she is the science lead and deputy pro-
ject manager of what is perhaps Dubais
most audacious project: the Emirates Mars
Mission. Before she even completed her
masters in computer engineering from the
American University of Sharjah, next to
Dubai, she landed here, at the Mohammed
bin Rashid Space Centre, a small com-
PHOTOGRAPH BY SIDDHARTH SIVA
pound of low buildings with faades of sil-
ver square panels, not far past the airport. A
circular radio dish points to the sky. A col-
ourful parrot chatters inside the cafeteria,
darkened on this weekend morning. The
building is otherwise quiet, except for a se-
curity guard and a single engineer, moni-
toring DubaiSat-2, the polar orbiting imag-
ing satellite the Emirates launched in 2013
Sarah Amiri Space Centre
She is the sci- The growing com-
ence lead and plex includes
deputy project mission control,
manager of the research labs,
Mars mission. and a clean
room to build
satellites.
and uses to take daily photographs of the
constantly changing region. He sits sleepy-
eyed in front of a shiny bank of screens, in a
glistening white-walled control room
somewhere between a stage set and a work-
ing model of Dubais aspirations.
The Space Centre has been methodically
building its capabilities, launching a suc-
cession of more-sophisticatedand home-
2009, partly replicated an existing design;
DubaiSat-2 was developed in partnership
with South Korean engineers. KhalifaSat,
launching next year, will be designed, devel-
oped, and constructed entirely at the Space
Centre. I could see its skeletal frame behind
a thick glass window. Down the hall, work-
ers painted a large clean roomthe only
one of its kind in the Middle Eastwhere
the spacecraft would be assembled. The
Mars probe, known as Hope, would launch
in 2020 and arrive in Mars orbit in time for
the Emirates jubilee in 2021.
But the plan isnt a firework, as Amiri said. This is a human story, and this is what
puts it. Dont just go and send space junk
there, she says. Dont clutter another
planet just to say that youre going to Mars.
The scientific goal of the mission is to meas-
ure and map the Martian atmosphere, and
its political goal is to create a community of
Emirati scientists and engineersto cultivate
the talent that will make Dubai a knowledge
hub. We get told by His Highness Sheikh
Mohammed that the most important part is
the scientists and engineers who are going to
come out of this, she explains.
Accordingly, the mission staff skews
young. Everyone is under 35, the average age
is 27, and 30 percent are female. Amiri speaks
passionately about inspiring the youth of the
Arab world. We need to give them monu-
mental challenges to solve.
In other parts of the world, not even the
most talented 30-year-olds are running
Mars missions. But Amiri was born into
the extreme privilege of her generation of
Emiratis, and has a zeal for Dubais tech-
nological ambitionsand the more-di-
verse city that they require.
If you block out people from different
backgrounds, then you block out innova-
tion, she says. Innovation comes from
differences in thinking and picking up in
different ways.
Later she tells me, Were living in a place
that dreams a goal before you can even
dream it, and provides you with the right
tools to work toward it.
Im reminded of something Al Gerga-
wi told me while recounting Dubais rapid
growth. We went from no road to Mars, he
humanity can achieve in one generation.
If Sheikh Rashids great-grandchil-
dren achieve their dreams, the story wont
be about driving cars or riding camels, but
about designing rocket ships and flying
them to other worlds.
P O P S C I .CO M . AU 55
 RUM
R E A D Y T O
G E T

BL
E

by J OS H D E A N
P H OTO G RA P H S BY
G I A C O M O F O R T U N AT O

56 POPULAR SCIENCE
 In big-kid amusement
parks, you run the heavy
equipment you once
only operated in your
childhood dreams.

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 57
THE SANDBOX
Working the controls of an
excavator is a little like
flying a helicopter, in that it
requires the use of both
hands independently, as
well as your feet. I say that
having never flown a heli-
copter, and having been in
an excavator for all of five
minutes, but it is definitely
more like flying a helicopter
than driving a car. When
do I get to crush something?
58 POPULAR SCIENCE
These are the thoughts Im having in the climate-controlled
cab of a 26-ton Komatsu PC210LC-10 idling in a north Texas
pasture while Jason Nibbe speaks calmly into my headset via
two-way radio. Prior to handing me the keys to this bright
yellow beast, Nibbe asked me and another client to watch a
brief instructional video demonstrating the basics of operat-
ing this excavator, as well as the bulldozer and wheel loader
that we would be driving later. Nibbe says I am to ignore the
two pedalseach of which is paired to one of the machines
independent steel treadsand focus on my hands.
The joystick on the left controls the stick and swing,
while the one on the right controls the boom and bucket.
None of these are useful terms, of course; Ive never heard
them used in the context of a mechanical arm so powerful
that it could, says General Manager David Beardsley, rip out
a road before the cops even knew what you were doing.
That arm is hydraulically powered and has three parts
that you can easily equate to a human limb. The boom is
the part from shoulder to elbow, the stick is the forearm,
and the bucket is your hand. (Swing refers to how you pivot
the cab atop its tanklike treads so you can work in a 360-de-
gree circle around the vehicle without moving the tracks.)
Before this excavator, the largest machine Id operated instructs [4] Wheel
was a U-Haul box truck. Ive never driven a Bobcat, nor dug loader tyre smash
a hole with anything but a shovel. Yet shortly after firing
up the PC210, I am confidently manoeuvring its 8.5-me-
tre-long arm, ripping up chunks of thick brown clay and, of
course, spinning the machines cab around and around at
high speed until Im so dizzy that the world goes white.
Are you done yet? Nibbe asks, as I move the left lever
1 2
3 4 5 back to neutral, which stops the swinging of the cab. I pause
to regain my senses, and then push the stick all the way to the
[1] Imdrivinga right, causing the cab to spin just as fast the other way.
wheel loader! [2]
Playing ball with This is acceptable behaviour at Extreme Sandbox,
an excavator [3] a company founded five years ago precisely so regular
General Manager people like me can pay to screw around on machines that
David Beardsley
weve fantasised about since childhood. Its not a free-for-
all. Instructors emphasise safety, and mostly the idea is to
[5] Joy Frick,
perform a series of increasingly difficult jobs, but excavator
another sandboxer,
runs the bulldozer cabs will do infinite 360sso fast!and instructors under-
stand that its something we students just have to get out
of our systems. They all make the same Dad joke about
optional vomit insurance in the classroom sessions.
The 26-ton PC210 is your middle-of-the-road excavator.
P O P S C I .CO M . AU 59
Its neither some wimpy starter machine nor a full-on metal
dinosaur; mostly you see this digger on a normal building
site. Its not so intimidating for a new operator, Rich
Smith, VP of Products and Services for Komatsu, would tell
me later. Its large enough to be impressive, but you dont
have to climb an 18-foot ladder to get into the cab.
Still, its big; and its surprising how effortless manipu-
lating the massive arm and claw feels. There is virtually no
feedback; moving the stick is no more physical than playing
an arcade game, thanks to a combination of electronic and
hydraulic controls. I expected to somehow experience the
weight of lifting a bucket filled with 250 kilos of earthto
sense the strainbut I feel nothing; ditto when I push the
claw into clay thats nearly as firm as concrete.
The controls are so responsive that you have to make
60 POPULAR SCIENCE
1 2 small, smooth inputs that arent immediately logical to
greenhorns (especially male ones), who tend to apply too
3 4
much force, which makes the entire machine shudder and
[1] An excavators jerk. Instructors call this stabbing the controls. Proper
tread [2] The wheel stick work, Nibbe says, should be delicate, like surgery.
loader should get
a born to pile OK, Josh, he says, after Ive dug two holes, made a pile,
bumper sticker [3] and lifted the boom as high as possible to rain a Texas dirt
Picking up a car with shower upon the land. Youve been in this machine 10
the excavator takes
as much effort as minutes, and you know as much about excavation as I do.
eating a ghost in Nibbe is exaggerating. What he means is that anyone
Pac-Man
[4] Tony Roberts,
who pays attention to the classroom instructions and then
another patron of practices a little can perform basic operations. I can move
the Sandbox around, position the arm, dig and dump dirtbut I do
so slowly and awkwardly. Experienced operators can do
multiple things at oncelike dig while swinging the cab.
 THE SANDBOX

apes, which includes humans. Tool use is fundamental. Its

Theyre also much faster and smoother. at our core. Obviously, theres a big difference between a
Slow or not, Im having fun. And, apparently, Im being rock and an excavator, Shumaker says. But I think our at-
safe. If I had done something stupid or dangerous, Nibbe traction to this stuff is almost primal.
would have hit the kill switch that every instructor carries. Thats the sense I got from Tony Roberts, a retired Navy
OK, he says. You wanna go pick up a car? chief who now teaches aircraft maintenance in Fort Worth
and whose wife bought him an Extreme Sandbox experi-
ence for Christmas. Roberts spends his days tearing apart
THE HISTORY OF EXTREME SANDBOX IS SHORT aeroplanes. He flies them, from Cessna single-props to
and sensible. Back in 2009, when he was still a manager DC9s, for fun. But he was so excited about the prospect of
for Target Corporation, company founder Randy Stenger driving bulldozers around an old horse pasture that hed
drove by a construction site with his 9-year-old son. The barely slept the night before and arrived an hour early. I
boy stared at the heavy equipment rolling around in the dirt really joined the Navy just to run equipment, he admits.
and asked, Wouldnt it be fun to go drive those things?
Yes, it would, Stenger answered, and the thought
stuck. Later, over beers, he mentioned it to his brother. IN 2015, STENGER COLD-CALLED A PRODUCER
They spent the next year turning the idea into a business, from Shark Tank and got on the show. Both Mark Cuban
and nearly another year looking for space. They finally and Kevin OLeary immediately embraced the concept.
opened the first Extreme Sandbox, three rented machines They decided to go halfsies on a $150,000 investment in
on a leased 4-hexctare lot outside Minneapolis, in April exchange for 15 per cent of the company.
2012. At first, Stenger taught the sessions himself, after get- Stenger isnt even alone in this space. His primary US
ting a crash course from his equipment dealer and practicing competitor, in fact, beat him to market by five years. That
for hours. Clients assumed he had a background in construc- would be Las Vegas-based Dig This, founded by Ed Mumm,
tion. Absolutely not, hed tell them, with a smirk that he a fence contractor who drove an excavator for the first time
often deploys. Does that give you a feeling of confidence? while building his own home, and went nuts for it. I real-
The business took off. Stenger hired helpincluding ised that if I enjoyed it this much, what about all the other
Nibbe, a former heavy-equipment operatorleased more people who never get the chance? he told me. Mumm
machines, and built a 600-square-metre facility to serve as looked around to see who else had the idea and saw only
offices, a classroom, and storage for the equipment. Every some failed one-offs and the UK-based Diggerland.
month was busier than the one before. Diggerland had four locations around the UK, but it was
This doesnt surprise me. Who hasnt felt the urge to too family-focused, in Mumms estimation. It featured
hop the fence of a construction site and hijack a crane? My
six-year-old son, Charlie, loved excavators even before
he could talk, and throughout his toddler years, he would
search for them obsessively out of car windows, scream-
ing DIGGER! every time he saw one. His two-year-old
brother, Nicky, is partial to dump trucks and bulldozers.
If it sometimes
Ive read them Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site
probably 800 times, and I know I have company. The
seems like
author, Sherri Duskey Rinker, used to watch her own son get
too worked up reading about trucks at bedtime. She made
human beings
up a calmer story about how diggers and dump trucks and
cranes slow down and sleep after dark. Her book earned the are biologically
No. 1 slot on The New York Times Childrens Picture Books
Best Seller list, bought by millions of parents like me.
If it seems like were hardwired to love machines, its
hardwired to
because we actually might be. There is a deeply ingrained
attraction to tools that initially evolved long ago with an-
love this stuff,
thropoid primates for object manipulation, and which
evolved more dramatically in our hominin line, says its because we
Thomas Wynn, professor of anthropology at the Universi-
ty of Colorado, and one of the worlds foremost experts on
early tool use. Humans like to fiddle with tools, he says.
actually might be.
Rob Shumaker, director of the Indianapolis Zoo and
a specialist in animal tool use, agrees. Using implements
to dig, pound, and hammer, he says, is universal in great

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 61
62 POPULAR SCIENCE

Twocarsflattened
by acorporate
groupafewdays
agotaunt mefrom
thecockpitof the
bulldozer,which
rumbleslikea
war machine.
mostly mini machines and gimmickslike excavators
converted to rides for kids. He wanted bigger equipment.
Mumm opened first in Colorado, then moved to Las Vegas
with a marketing slogan hes still very proud of: Theres a
new way to get dirty in Las Vegas... even your wife will like
it. One pleasant surprise: Almost half of his clients have
been female. I also didnt expect so many engineers,
Mumm says. Theyre just fascinated with this kind of
stuff. A lot of us never really grow up, I guess.
So far, Stenger and Mumm are friendly rivals, but that
might change when the second Dig This location opens
in Mayin the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. Los
Angeles will follow that. (Diggerland now has a US location
too, in Philadelphias New Jersey suburbs.)
Being in Vegas, Mumm attracts lots of bachelor parties,
as well as corporate groups in town for conventions.
Groups are huge for Stenger as well, making up about half
of his business. They follow a different program than indi-
vidual clients, typically doing some kind of team-building
exercise or competition after the standard instruction. In
Texas, theres an entire back pasture with boulders and
dirt piles where instructors set up courses. A team might
have to build a garage out of dirt and rock, and move a
wrecked car across the field and into it, using roads that
the instructors have destroyed. So before a team can start
building anything, it might have to move boulders or fill
holes. The point is to use all of the equipment.
When we first started, HR people got nervous, Stenger
says. They pictured desk jockeys drunk on diesel, unleashed
upon expensive machinesall on the companys dime. I
told them that this is safer than bowling. We use very large
equipment on a very solid base. It is virtually impossible to
flip one over. You couldnt do it if you wanted to.
THE SANDBOX
THE NEWEST MACHINE IN TEXAS IS A WHEEL
loadera vehicle with a huge bucket on the front to move
dirt and other material around a job site. It works almost like
a car, with a steering wheel, an accelerator, and a brakeplus
a joystick on the right that controls the bucket. It replaced a
much smaller machine, a skid steer loader that weighed only
around three tons. Stenger made the swap after recognising
something counter-intuitive: People are much more danger-
ous in a small, nimble machine. We had more close calls on
the skid steers than any other vehicle.
While the original concept of Extreme Sandbox was
that it would be a bucket-list thing, some customers
want to come back. One way to encourage that is to intro-
duce new toys such as the loader. Stengers got a firetruck
in Minnesota now, and has at times offered a road grader
and a combine harvester, thanks to a local farmer. Texas
had a giant, articulated, off-road dump truck for a while.
How about a crane? Thats the machine my two-year-old
son screams at the most. I would love it, Stenger says. Its
one of the few pieces of heavy equipment that requires a
license, but he swears hes working on it. Lately, Stenger
says, hes been lusting after those house-size dump trucks.
The thing that really hooked OLeary on Shark Tank
was the prospect of crushing a car, which any customer
can do for an additional $500. Extreme Sandbox gets
(mostly) intact cars from junkyards and lets you go at
them with an excavator. Sadly, that wasnt in my budget,
but I do get to pick up a junker with the excavator and
move it to a new parking spot, as well as push around an
old minivan and an F150 with the wheel loader and bull-
dozer, respectively.
Two cars flattened by a corporate group a few days ear-
lier taunt me from the cockpit of the bulldozer, which rum-
bles like a war machine. I suppress the urge to make a slow
turn toward them. What I really want, though, is to drive
across the lot and straight through the side of the trailer
thats serving as office and classroom until Stenger can
build a permanent structure. That would be satisfying.
Stenger laughs when I mention this later, and says Im
not the first to suggest it. Hes thought about getting some
old RVs for people to crush, but theyre filled with plastic
and foam, and are, he says, a nightmare to clean up.
Hes got all sorts of ideas for the future. Hes even
fantasised about how cool it would be to partner with
demolition contractorsguys who get paid to tear down
housesand arrange for his customers to do their work. I
have people who will pay to do it, Stenger says.
Id be down. I bet Matthew Frickwho came out to the
Sandbox with his wife when I was therewould be too.
Toward the end of the day, I run into the two of them in the
office, already plotting their return. They both loved the
excavator, but it was the bulldozer that stuck with Matthew.
Until you get in it and feel the torque and power at your
fingertips, you dont know, he says. Im still coming off
the power trip from that bulldozer.
P O P S C I .CO M . AU 63
 Sheila Dwyer,
Hanford Observatory
Ripples in spacetime make LIGOs
4-kilometre-long arms quiver so its
lasers hit detector mirrors inside.
Dwyer kept the mirrors aligned.
Madeline Wade, Michael Coughlin,
Kenyon College Harvard University
Wade writes code to calculate LIGOs Cosmic collisionslike black-hole
moveswithin one-ten-thousandth mergersmake LIGO dance.
the diameter of a protonbased on Coughlin uses optical telescopes to
laser behaviour. track down those black holes.

O N E
E X P E R I M E N T

1 , 0 1 1
P E O P L E
by M A R K K AU F M A N a n d C I C I Z H A N G

Robert Schofield, Anamaria Effler, Joey Key,

University of Oregon
A lightning strike 9,600 kilometres
away in West Africa could have
caused LIGO to quiver. Schofield
proved that it didnt.
Livingston Observatory University of Washington
Effler tweaked hardware to better By October, the wave was
catch false alarms. She and her confirmed. Key heads the team
team finished tinkering for the night that announced the discovery,
just before the real signal hit. translating it into 17 languages.

64 POPULAR SCIENCE

Caltech
Any movement can set off LIGO.
One pesky rumble occurred every
hour for months. McIvers team
found the culprit: a refrigerator.
In 2015, the LIGO Scientific
Collaborations twin observatories
detected gravitational wavesone
of Einsteins major predictions.
The feat, expected to win a Nobel,
made a few famous. But it depended
on this legion of the unsung.
Maria Alessandra Papa,
Max Planck Institute
Papa was among six editors of
the 1,011-author announcement.
Deciding what to cut was a
five-month-long labour of love.
Kiwamu Izumi,
Caltech
Izumi found ways to make LIGO less
vulnerable to false signals. Its like
detective work, trying to arrest the
criminal noise source.
Chris Messenger,
University of Glasgow
He turned LIGOs landmark
detection into audio: a chirp going up
in pitch and speed to represent black
holes spiraling into collision.
Jenne Driggers,
Hanford Observatory
On September 14, it looked like LIGO
caught a wave. Driggers was one of
many tasked with showing the signal
wasnt random noise.
Maggie Tse, MIT
This is just the beginning: Tse is
building a noise-reduction device to
improve LIGOs range, or the
volume of the universe you can see,
by 70 per cent.
P O P S C I .CO M . AU 65
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 OH, SNAP

The Guy Lego

Pays To Play

Master builders combined an

existing set (the Falcon)
with their own vision to
recreate this key location
from The Force Awakens.

W hen we spoke to Erik Varszegi in January

just finished building a Batmobile. A 5-m
long, 2-metre-tall Batmobile. It was so big, we
almost couldnt get it out the door, says the Lego
master builder. Thats childs play compared with the
life-size Star Wars X-wing fighter he and colleagues The Ultimate Collectors
crafted in 2013. With 5.3 million plastic elements, Series Millennium Falcon
weighing nearly 20 tonnes and spreading into a 13-m has over 5000 elements...
wingspan, its the worlds second largest Lego and cost $1000 new.
sculpture. Varszegi, who jokes that his job is to play
with toys all day, is one of just seven artists that Lego
pays todesign its head-snapping creations for splashy
public events and flagship retail displays. Heres how
to become an amateur Lego master:

Step 1: Hit the Bricks

Before you can break rules, you have to learn the
rules: Buy Lego sets and follow the instructions.
The designers are always coming up with new ways
to put the elements together, Varszegi says. You can
learn a lot from that. Then knock it down and create
something totally radical.

Step 2: Start at the Bottom

Lego hired Varszegi 22 years ago to glue store display
models together. He sometimes assembled the same
set hundreds of times. Even toys can get tedious.

Step 3: Become a Model Builder

This is apprentice stuff. While the boss free-builds
imaginative creations, youre still following his
prototype blueprintsat least on company time.
Varszegi used his breaks to sculpt models that
made him stand out.

Step 4: Achieve Lego Mastery

You did it: Legos so impressed that theyll let you
design your own giant builds. Just dont get lazy.
Im still learning, says Varszegi. Therell always
be a new piece, new coloursand endless ways
to put them together.

by ERIK VARSZEGI,
LEGO MASTER BUILDER

68 POPULAR SCIENCE
 How 2.0

The UCS Snowspeeder is

less complex than the
Falcon, but still
showcases interesting
build techniques.

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 69
 TOOLBOX
e feature plenty of fancy tools in PopSci. But let us take a moment
W to celebrate the ol faithfuls. Those humble devices that live,

The Faithful scattered across your workbench or shoved unceremoniously in a crooked

cupboard with a half-used tub of Osmocote and three left-hand gloves.
How 2.0 Instruments by LINDSAY HANDMER

1 4

8 3

7 6

1. Leatherman 2. Random 3. Wolf Eyes 4. Curved

Wingman Philips Head Waterproof Torch Needle Nose
SHOW US YOUR So very versatile,I was Screwdriver Indestructible, and also Pliers
once able to use it to Free, yet with an bright enough (1100 Used and not
SCREWDRIVERS! MacGyver a boat fuel amazingly tough lumens) to cut through returned to my Dads
This collection is from my own shed, line back together and long-lived tip, murky harbour water, toolkit 15 years ago,
but wed like to invite PopSci readers when up a creek with despite frequent enabling a semi-legal and invaluable for
to submit their most faithful, but an outboard, but no abuse on ridiculously skin dive and boat grabbing in tight to
perhaps unusual, tool. What chunk paddle. Literally. tight screws. mooring repair. reach spots.
of machinery makes your project
possible, but which the rest of us
might think: what the heck is THAT? 5. Butane 6. Ratcheting 7. Jaycar 8. Ozito 18V Drill
Send your submissions to: letters@ Soldering Iron Spanner Electronics Cheap as chips and
popsci.com.au, including up Electricity free! Also Mistakenly mailed to Multimeter just never quits. It
to 200 words about your project, and includes blowtorch me with no return Very beat up, yet has once drilled through
a 1MB+ size image of the device in and plastic cutting tip. address (but my helped troubleshoot 10mm of titanium
question! You might even win Once used to light a name on the box), and more electrical issues when a proper drill
something to help you work... campfire when we now I cant go back to than I can count. press died trying to
forgot the matches. using ring spanners. Saved my life too. do the same job.

70 POPULAR SCIENCE
 How 2.0

UNDER SIEGE

Game Of
Throwns
W hen I build a catapult, a trebuchet, or
a ballista (giant crossbow), it looks
and feels authentic. Thats because I check all
the historical references I can dig up. Ive had
25 years to amass a library on weaponry of
all ages and culturesbut ast the end of the
day, my weapons are original.
Keep in mind, these old weapons were
deadly. They were meant to kill. They
unleashed literally tons of force.
Unfortunately, in my world, its not all about
thatyou err on the side of safety. So as
engineers, well look at Roman and Medieval
siege weapons, make sure we get the right
look, and then make them just powerful
enough to throw a projectile off-camera.
We do this by fooling your eye. So on a
siege weapon, the large centre rolling winch
that you see is made to look period. But really
the thing that creates torsion is a much
smaller winch, made of metal, that sits inside
it. This lets us drop power. Well throw
objectslight objects10 metres
in the air, and 15 metres away.
In a real siege, a catapult would need to
throw farther than the enemy archers range,
so real weaponised projectiles would
fly 10 times farther than ours.
Another concern is getting your moneys
worth out of these devices. They arent cheap
and can take up to eight weeks to build. So
we make sure theyre not one-hit wonders.
One catapult we built for Game of Thrones
stood 3.5 m high by 2.5 m wide, weighed one
and half tons, and fired barrels with a sling
mechanism. But we also designed it so we
could swap in a spoon to hurl flaming balls.
That isnt something youll find in the
historical design. Still, in 25years of building
these things, nobodys called me out on it. So
if the weapons Im building arent actually
authentic, I seem to be getting away with it.

TOMMY DUNNE
ARMOURER AND WEAPONS
MASTER FOR GAME OF THRONES

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 71
 BY THE NUMBERS
Supercomputers, then and now
How 2.0
1946 500
SUPERSIZE ME ENIAC
1800

Big Thinkers 1965

CDC 6600 1
500
3 MIL

E ngineers measured early computing devices in kilo-girls, a unit roughly

equal to the calculating ability of a thousand women. By the time the
first supercomputer arrived in 1965, we needed a larger unit (PopSci would
1968
IBM SYSTEM
/360 MODEL 9 1 931.5
5 MIL

like to apologise for the apalling sexism of early computer scientists). Thus, 1976 160 MIL
CRAY-1
FLOPS, or floating point operations (a type of calculation) per second. In 70
1946, ENIAC, the first (non-super) computer, processed about 500 FLOPS.
Todays supers crunch petaFLOPSor 1,000 trillion operations per second. 1982 800 MIL
Shrinking transistor size lets more electronics fit in the same space, but CRAY X-MP
112
processing so much data requires a complex design, intricate cooling
systems, and openings for humans to access hardware. Thats why 1.9 BIL
supercomputers stay supersize.
16

2 TRIL

1600

7 TRIL

12K

36 TRIL
34K

470 TRIL

2500

16 QUAD

3422

34 QUAD

PROP STYLING BY SARAH GUIDO-LAAKSO FOR HALLEY RESOURCES / PHOTOGRAPH BY LEVI BROWN
7750

93 QUAD

1960

essing power (in FLOPS; bar size uses

ithmic scale, where an increase in one
epresents 10 times as many FLOPS)

oximate size (in square feet)

600 2/ ASCI Red

fted through Modeled the USs
ion of CERNs nuclear weapons
ntal research capabilities, avoiding
er year underground testing

equoia 4/ Sunway TaihuLight

re than Reached a record 93
cores to help petaFLOPS by trading
engineers slower memory for
engines high energy efficiency
 3

BY DESIGN

Monster 1 2 3 4
Mashup
Quick Takeoff The Big Drop So Many Twists The Crazy Drop
M any of the worlds 4,000-or-
so roller coasters are of the
humdrum county-fair variety. Only
A hydraulic start just
like the ones used to
launch fighter jets?
Youre about to
plunge from a
45-storey building.
Loop-de-frickin-loop.
A record 14inversions
including two in the
Imagine you reach the
top of a coaster
andwhoops!the
an elite few rides reach the Oh, yeah. The Formula Thats the height of shape of a heart, tracks are gone.
monumental heights and speeds Rossa debuted at 139-m-tall Kingda Ka, awwwmake The Thats the horrifying
of record-smashing supercoasters, Ferrari World in Abu at Six Flags Great Smiler a real experience on Japans
which draw millions of thrill- Dhabi in 2010 and Adventure in New head-turner at the Takabisha steel
seekers a yearand inspire as youd expect from Jersey. Opened in Alton Towers theme coaster. The tracks
competition that makes it way Ferraristole the 2005, it remains park in Staffordshire, invert backward,
harder to hold a record than break
ILLUSTRATION BY SUPERTOTTO

one. We rose to the challenge. Our
Frankencoaster splices together
four real-life record breakers
tallest, fastest, steepest, and most
topsy-turvyinto one seriously sick
ride. Youd better buckle up.
by ELEANOR CUMMINS
checkered flag for the worlds tallest UK. Famous for seeming to disappear,
worlds fastest coasterwhich its curves, its also creating a 121-degree
acceleration. Just 4.5 means it also takes notorious for its inverted decline. The
seconds after takeoff, the crown for worlds delays, stalled cars, drop pushes you down
youre hurtling longest drop. What and one serious and back at the same
forward at an utterly goes up must come crash. Fortunately, time, making the
stomach-lurching downfast. Kingda our string of circular ride, which debuted
239 km/h. Oh, look! Ka hits a top speed loops will never in 2011, even steeper
There goes lunch. of 205 km/h. leave you hanging. than a straight fall.

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 73
 MAKE IT SO

I Wish Someone
How 2.0 Would Invent

A Device that Moves Poorly Parked Cars

@ANNIENM8 VIA TWITTER

Were so bad at parallel-parking that we squander coveted,

public asphalt. A massive forklift could create space by shifting
offenders, but would block traffic. And its doubtful that car
owners would let you move their property. You could, however,
curb congestion. We all want to park on the street. Its so
cheap, says Michael Manville, an urban planner at the
University of California at Los Angeles. His solution? Surge
pricing. Charge more at busy times, and those spaces will open.

A Smog-Busting Blimp
CLIFF RUSSELL VIA FACEBOOK

Totally doable. Engineers could easily rig blimps with massive

catalytic converterslike those found in carsand send them
skyward to transform smog into clean air. However, says Peter
Eisenberger, an environmental scientist at Columbia University,
that would lead to another sort of air pollution. We would need
so many of these low-flying cleaners to make a difference that
they would overcrowd the sky.

A 3D Printer that Builds Human Organs

CHRISTIANO ADAMS VIA FACEBOOK

This could happen. Printing bone, muscle, and cartilageeven

an earis easy. Anthony Atala, who heads the Wake Forest
Institute for Regenerative Medicine, has done that. Organs are
harder. They need to grow slowly, generating massive networks
of nerves and blood vessels. Atalas plan is to print organ moulds
instead. The moulds have tiny holes for nutrients and oxygen to
flow through as injected cells blossom into organs.

74 POPULAR SCIENCE
 USE NEW TECH!
To read about new science and tech!

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or just dumb luck? F How
ZOMBIES

N W!
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MAKING OF

Sailing the Ice

by ANTHONY FORDHAM

WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN YOU combine

three snowboards, a bunch of aluminium
and a sail? You get the Swoosh, a new kind of
wind-powered racer.
Invented by the managing director of
Adventure Publishing (and Outer Edge
magazine), Charles Werb, the Swoosh isnt
just a one-off ice sailing rig, purpose-built for
a specific expedition. Werb hopes to develop
the little craft into a commercial product.
The Swoosh is simple enough to describe:
a metal spine supports a seat, sail, rigging,
canopy and three snowboards. Innovative
strips on the underside of the boards allow
the craft to track straight, and the rest is
down to the sailors skill.
The Swoosh will pack down into two
bags, says Werb, and take just 20 minutes
to set up out on the ice. The whole kit weighs
42 kg, or about the same as a large kayak.
The Swoosh on these pages is a fully-
functional prototype, and the commercial
version will look much prettier, with a
smooth aerodynamic cowling.
Compact and easy
Werb took this Swoosh up to Togliatti in
the Swoosh can be
Russia, for some demonstration runs as part set up in a few minutes.
of a World Ice and Snow Sailing Association
(WISSA) championships. There, other snow
sailors battled with converted windsurfers or
clung to parasails, while Werb sat more-or-less
comfortably in his compact little machine.
After early delays due to an unseasonable
warm-snap that melted too much of the
surface of the frozen Volga river, the Swoosh
team was eventually rewarded with freezing
conditions and a rock-hard ice surface.
During the test runs, the Swoosh hit
speeds of up to 55 km/h. That might not seem
like much compared to a supercar, but for a
sail-powered vehicle, thats nearly 30 knots,
and thats more than respectable.
Its not the first time the Swoosh has
performed in icy conditions. A previous
version travelled to Antarctica in 2016, where
it completed proof-of-concept trial runs. This
version was larger, and more complex, and
certainly too expensive to ever be a viable
commercial product.
The new Swoosh is no more complex to
set up than a small catamaran, and should
perform in a wide variety of conditions.
Charle
While there are plenty of places where adventus Werb,
the Swoosh go could sailing, its home town rer
has been
wont be one of them. Because the Swoosh on the S working
for yea woosh
was conceived and designed in Brisbane. rs

76 POPULAR SCIENCE
 TheShed
The simple-looking
spine piece
is actually cleverly
designed for
maximum strength.

Modified snowboards
act as runners for the
Swoosh. Added strips keep
it tracking straight

olga
ozen V
The fr s ideal
e
provid ions for
condit peed runs
high-s
 MAY 1967

A Computer...
In
From The
Archives

UNLIKE SO MANY INSTALMENTS O

From the Archives, this one needs very lit
introduction... except to point out that Popul
Science and C P Gilmore were both prov
incredibly and almost-but-not-entirely wro
in their prognostications that a self-contain
home computer would never be a thing.
Almost but not entirely wrong? Yes: becau
as a service, this computer (a mainframe th
takes up a whole room) works in more or less t
same way as a cloud server today.
Sure, your smartphone may be a trilli
times more powerful than the GE 235, but
still has to send a reasonably high resoluti
recording of your voice, via the internet,
a central processing server to get Siri to sa
you back (or Google to set your alarm). Sa
for those fancy enhanced photos and se
animated flip-books.
Oh okay we admit it: we guessed wrong, a
this article remains a snapshot of a future t
never was. The most oldey-timey thing abo
the rent-a-timeshare-mainframe-slot sche
described here? The terminal in the custome
home didnt even have a display. Back in 19
the idea of glowing text on a TV monitor w
probably little more than vague itch, in the ba
of 17 year-old Steve Wozniaks mind...

by ANTHONY FORDHAM

is similar to, though more powerful

than, the one G P Gilmore was pen-
pals with back in 1967.

This Awesome Mini

Dozer Makes Me Sad!
M AY 1 9 6 7

Why is this man so unimpressed with the completely awesome miniature

bulldozer he built himself from a kit? Is it because it has no useful
attachments on the front to actually do anything at all, and his
judgemental 60s neighbours are sneering at him for being a wastrel?
Cheer up idealised 60s man! After you finish playing with your midget
dozer, you can go and read a reasonably famous bit John Steinbeck wrote
about how he hates camping. Thats the kind of mag Popular Science is!

78 POPULAR SCIENCE
 POPULAR SCIENCE, MAY 1967, PAGE 90

I Used a Real Computer at Home... and So Will You

One day soon, youll be able to rent a giant digital com-
puter as you rent a telephone now. What will you do with
it? How will you work it? Heres a glimpse into the future

By C. P. GILMORE

Whats it like to have your own electronic
brain? The editors of Popular Science were
curious. So we invited feature writer C. P.
Gilmore to live with a computer for several
weeks. After youve read his report, [find out]
how you can borrow the services of the
same computer.
S ome people think computers are a
menace. I dont.
Some people are afraid that computers are so
smart theyll take over some day. Im not.
Ive got a real reason for my optimism. Ive
used a real computer in my home. Nope, I dont
mean just some kind of glorified adding machine
with a fancy name. I lived with a high-powered
digital computer - a cousin to the kind NASA uses
to compute satellite orbits and businessmen use
to dash off weekly payrolls for a few thousand, or
hundred thousand, employees.
Since I dont have a few thousand employees
or a satellite, I use my computer for more
everyday-type jobs: for example, to figure out
whether I should convert the heating system of a
house Im thinking of buying into another kind of
fuel, and to see when it would be most
economical to trade in my car. I worked on one
program - a set of instructions for the computer
- to have it do my income tax. And when I got
bored, I played games. My computer can play
tick-tack-toe [sic], blackjack, nim (an ancient
Chinese game), and dice (in which a random
generator rolls make-believe dice electronically).
My computer can do arithmetic like a super
genius-165,000calculationsasecond.Butinsome
ways its not very bright: It cant begin to do the
simplest problem until I tell it how in great detail.
Chances are my computer looks a lot different
than you imagine. Next to my desk is a Teletype
machine. It has a typewriter keyboard (with a few
extra keys), a telephone dial, and a roll of paper that
unwinds out of the top when the machine types.
The Teletype is hooked to an ordinary
telephone line. When I dial the right number, a
special-purpose computer two miles away
answers. The machine, a General Electric
Datanet 30, installed on the ground floor of GEs
50-story mid-Manhattan skyscraper, tells me
with a beep that its listening. When I talk to the
Datanet 30 - by typing on the machine in my
study - it feeds my questions and data to a GE 235
central processing computer.
The answer is typed out on the Teletype in a
second or so.
The machine that picks up the phone when I
dial fills an entire large room, and costs over a
million dollars. I dont have a million, and
probably wouldnt spend it on a computer if I did.
But I - and thousands of others now using similar
machines - can afford to use such high-powered
devices because of a new concept: time sharing.
Time sharing means that I dont buy a
computer; I rent its services whenever I want to
use it. Its like my telephone. I get two monthly
service charges - one from the telephone
company and one from GE. For this I get the use
of a Teletype and the computing facilities of the
GE 235. And just as the telephone central office
can handle a lot of customers with their individual
telephones, the Datanet 30 handles a lot of
customers with their individual Teletypes. More
than 100 other people have Teletype links to the
machine I use.
Sharing a computer. Time sharing, most
experts agree, is the key to the computers future,
at least for general use. A few years ago, when
people thought about household computers at
all, they thought of some small, inexpensive,
individual unit that would keep track of the family
checking account and automatically type out
Christmas-card labels. Now we know it wont be
like that at all.
The reason is economic. The bigger and faster
the computer, the cheaper it makes each
computation... it will be far cheaper to build one
monster computer with thousands or even
millions of customers hooked into it than to have
small, individual machines in individual homes.

A PS exclusive: the Ask-Our-Computer service

Starting this month, PS readers will be able to use a large digital computer
to solve complex home, shop, and car problems.
Just mail us a self-addressed, stamped, envelope and well send you a
free detailed questionnaire on which you set down data the computer will
need to solve the programmed problem-of-the-month as it applies to you.
Return the completed questionnaire to us, with a small service charge (the
amount depends on the programs complexity) and our programmer will
feed your data into the computer. We will mail you the actual answer sheet
from the computer as printed by our Teletype machine.
This months program is HEAT-2... the heating-cost program... that
takes burner efficiency into account. The service charge is $1.
As a bonus, when we send you your answer sheet we will also include a
pair of computer-produced tables that match equivalent engine-r.p.m. and
car-m.p.h. values for a wide range of rear-end ratio and tire-rolling radiuses.

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 79
 The Steam Shovel
Once an icon of industrialism, and famed for digging the Panama Canal,
the humble steam shovel deserves more love. Lets redress the balance.
by ANTHONY FORDHAM

WE NOW LIVE IN A CRAZY FUTURE Jobs? Oh there were still plenty of jobs. May- Gamification of Construction
where kilometre-tall skyscrapers are probably be not the tens of thousands of jobs a hand-dug In a world that had, until this point, largely
going to be 3D-printed pretty soon, so its easy canal would offer (or rather wouldnt offer, be- been built by human hands, the physical feats
to forget that many of our really, really big en- cause it would be impossible), bit these were achieved by these shovels were legendary.
gineering works were completed a surprising- rail-bound shovels, and needed a crew of four. One Bucyrus pulled out 53,500 cubic metres
ly long time ago. A time before petrol, diesel, Each machine employed an engineer, two stok- of rock and earth over more than three weeks
even before electricity. ers for the coal, and a crane operator. And they of continuous, uninterrupted work. Fatigue?
The Panama Canal, for instance, was built were supported by six more men who laid rail Injury? Complaints about pay? Not from these
between 1904 and 1914. The New York Subway for the shovel as the canal inched forward. steaming beasts of burden.
opened in 1904. The Suez Canal was even ear-
lier: 1869. And lets not forget the railways. All
these and many more were massive projects,
too big to be dug by human muscle alone. Just like in a childrens picture book,
after years of dedicated work, these mighty machines now
At some point in the early 19th century, de- sit rusting away, though some are restored by enthusiasts.
mand for heavy earth-moving and excavation
equipment exploded. Governments, especially
in the US, were splashing public cash on high-
ways and railways alike. Continent-splitting ca-
nals - dreamt of for centuries - could now at last
be dug. And the invention of the open-cut
mine meant big diggers were a license to print
money for the companies that made them.

Iron Hors ... Giraffe?

Really though, it was the railways that gave the
steam shovel the boost it needed to become
an industrial essential. The first shovels were
essentially locomotives. Boiler and boom alike
were mounted on rail bogeys and could not be
rotated through a full 360 degrees.
The first designs for a steam-shovel-like ma-
chine were developed as early as the 1790s. In
1833, US patents were issued for steam-pow-
ered excavators. As demand grew and technol-
ogy evolved, the steam shovel first gained the
ability to rotate through a full 360 degrees, and
then jump off the tracks onto caterpillar treads,
giving it a massive boost in flexibility.
Once liberated from the railway, there was
no stopping the steam shovel. It found a role in
mining, in highway construction, and in epic en-
gineering megaprojects like the Panama Canal.
In that particular case, 102 steam shovels
were eventually built-to-order to dig the ca-
nal, including 77 from a single company: Bu-
cyrus. Founded in 1880, Bucyrus would go on
building steam shovels and other excavating
equipment for the next 117 years until Cater-
pillar bought it in 1997 for US$8.8 billion.
Were the Panama Canal shovels worth it?
Well, these great hulking machines weighed 86 The big dig on rails
Six workers laid rail
tonnes each, and were able to shift eight tonnes as the steam shovels
of dirt and rock in a single scoop. Compared to progressed along the
pickaxes and spades? Worth every cent. Panama canal route

80 POPULAR SCIENCE

Before the steam shovel, big earthwork pro-
jects involved thousands of workers toiling in
heat and dust. In the age of the steam shovel,
digging became a race, a competition. Who
could move the most tonnage? Who could cut
through the mountain the fastest?
It was a golden age for capitalism. Rich
men sat back and watched with glee as their
workers tripled their efforts for the sheer joy
of what these machines could do. For the brag-
ging rights of having the fastest shovel. Spare
the horses? The horses were obsolete!
Steam shovels found a role in mining and
revolutionised what was possible in an open-
pit mine. Because these machines could
methodically munch through entire moun-
tainsides in a matter of days and weeks, they
spread around the world. Everyone wanted
earth-moving equipment, and steam shovels
could get the job done.
Oils Well That Ends Well
Steam, to this day, remains a very strong pow-
er source. A steam engine might not be the
fastest, or the most efficient, or the cleanest,
but if you need torque, and you need to shift
a lot of weight, and you dont want to spend
too much money on expensive fuels doing it,
steam was the obvious solution.
But nothing lasts forever. As steam shovels
made the fat cats fatter, some of the cash was
spent on developing newer and even more
exciting technologies.
Compared to a gang of dudes with shovels,
steam-powered excavators had no competi-
tion. But eventually, perhaps inevitably, diesel
engines became economical.
Diesel-powered excavators could still
be built big and strong, but they could also
be smaller, more delicate, and much much
DIG
BIGGER
So excavators have come on a bit.
This is the Komatsu PC8000. Its
mainly used in mining, and boasts
some pretty big numbers. Numbers
like: two 60L, 16-cylinder engines;
3000kW of power at 1800rpm; an
eight metre dig-depth; 200,000 kgf
of digging force (thats a lot); a 38
cubic metre bucket; and an operating
weight of 710 tonnes. Downsides?
Top speed is 2.2 km/h. Its also
price-on-application.
The distinctive bucket face
made Bucyrus shovels an obvious choice
for a certain Mr Squiggle character...
cheaper to buy and operate than a steamer.
Companies like Bucyrus and Englands
Ruston & Hornsby moved away from steam.
They still built big: mega-machines like the
49-metre-tall Big Brutus (left) were among
the largest shovels ever built, and they shifted
a lot of dirt in the 1960s and 1970s.
But a balance was soon to be reached. The
open-cut mines kept the true giants (see p.20,
for example) while smaller, more manageable
machines filtered down to the rest of us.
Today, theres an excavator for almost any
task you can imagine. From highway over-
passes to back yard bores (both kinds). Com-
pact, diesel or electric machines bring big
torque and big digging force, to help us main-
Big Brutus can dig up the world
thanks to the power of electricity. tain our mastery of the Earth.
Its the biggest single-shovel ever. But never forget - it all started with steam.
P O P S C I .CO M . AU 81
 L A B R AT S
Horse Drawn Hyperloop
Sometimes theres a fraction not enough friction
Stor y by SUBJEC T ZERO
THE HORSE LOOKS BORED. AS WELL IT MIGHT;
its been standing in this post-industrial wasteland for 40
minutes, as its owner goes on and on about his amazing
hyperloop instead of letting the horse get on with the job.
There was once a time when noble horses pulled
elegant canal boats up and down the length of this great
country, says CEO of Horsperloop (hes working on the
name) Tug Fetlock.
Not this country! yells someone in the crowd. The
crowd is only 14 people so its easy to tell that it was fellow
itinerate scientific test subject The Mistake who yelled it.
Yes alright, says Fetlock. Not this country, but in
England, it was definitely a thing in England with the
horses and the canal boats, right? And what was it that
made the whole system work?
The horses? I ask. The canals? asks Twitching
Simon, and then kicks me in the ankle. Its not deliberate
though so I dont say anything.
The lack of friction, says Fetlock, full of passion.
The lack of fiction between the canal boat and the,
like, ground or whatever. The point is that when I heard
about the hyperloop, right, Elon Musks super-train that
travels through an airless tube on maglev or whatever, I
immediately thought of horse drawn canal boats!
Is that really what you immediately thought of? I ask,
despite myself. Yes! insists Fetlock. And now here it is!
Or at least here is my 1/1000th scale test track!
To be fair to Fetlock, the test track is very beautiful. Its
a huge white tube, up on stanchions, about two metres
off the ground. It curves around in a great ellipse, pretty
much filling this big empty space left behind by sixteen
warehouses that all got demolished due to radiation
poisoning. They were poisoned, radioactively, by a
company that was trying to make a smartphone battery
that lasts forever. Suddenly I remember that my visit to that
company ended with me being literally sealed in a tube
for decontamination. And here I was again, about to get
another tube-ride.
Okay! says Fetlock. Lets see how she goes!
Theres a loading station or platform or something right
where the 14 of us are standing, and a hyperloop capsule
waiting on the platform. Dutifully, we all stomp up a set of
metal stairs and then duck into the Horseperloop capsule.
Its fine, I guess. Not flashy. More like a normal suburban
train carriage, except without all the graffiti and discarded
drug paraphernalia.
We all sit down, and Fetlock stands up the front of
the carriage. There are windows that line up with clear
sections in the outer tube, so we can see the horse down on
the cracked concrete below.
Okay, says Fetlock, Im going back outside to drive
Viper. You watch how effortlessly this whole thing works.
82 POPULAR SCIENCE
He leaves. The door slams shut. I hear pumps removing
the air from the tube. It suddenly occurs to me that I
have no idea how the tether that goes to the horse can be
attached to the capsule but also poke through the wall of
the tube and move around the loop. I suspect Fetlock is
doing it with some kind of amazing and probably quantum
invention that would make him way, way more money
than this ridiculous horse-drawn-maglev idea.
Ill give you guys three-to-one the horse just
explodes, says The Mistake, who has recently expanded
his gambling from the pokies at the Cash & Prizes to, well,
pretty much every aspect of his life.
We watch Fetlock pat Vipers flank and whisper
something encouraging. The horse takes the strain, leans
into the load, and starts to walk forward. We feel the
carriage lurch, then start to move. Its very smooth.
Yes, its taking all of Vipers strength to get the carriage
moving but once we build up speed, the lack of friction in
the tube means we never slow down. The faster we go, the
easier it is for Viper to pull the capsule.
Fetlock looks up at us and gives a double-thumbs-up. A
forest of thumbs against the capsule window reaffirms his
pleasure at how well the whole thing is going.
Meh, I say. Its not that fast, but maybe we dont
need fast. Maybe this will be like some kind of romantic
ride or something. Like the canal boats.
Hey, says The Mistake, dont get any ideas. He
shuffles away from me and crosses his legs.
Outside, Fetlock steps back and admires his work.
Horse plodding, capsule moving, magical and probably
quantum tether system just fine. He nods. Then he steps
forward again and gives what is obviously the sign for
Viper to stop walking.
The horse plods to a halt. The tether, stretching out
behind the animal, goes slack. Then, as the capsule keeps Next
Issue!
going with no friction to stop it, the tether goes really
slack... then its out in front of the horse... and then its
going tight... and the horses eyes bulge out... and then
ISSUE #103
the capsule is dragging the horse along the concrete... MAY 2017.
and Fetlock is running after us and shouting... and were ON SALE
looking at each other... and were desperately searching 27 TH APRIL 2017.
for an emergency stop button...
Eventually Viper gets tired of being dragged along, so HOW TO BUILD AN
AIRCRAFT CARRIER!
he digs his hoofs in and leans back. The tether goes really
// The Worlds
really tight, then snaps. It flies back in a flat trajectory and
Greatest Science
Viper ducks so the end hits Fetlock smack in the middle of Experiments (a
the face. He goes down. Trading Card
Were left slowly coasting around and around this Collection) //
endless loop with no way of stopping. Of course no system PORSCHE GOES
is peferct. We just need to wait it out. TURBO // The Future
Okay, The Mistake whispers, really loudly, four minutes of Being Old
later. Which one of these losers should we eat first? + MUCH MORE!
 L

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