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QUAKE-BE-GONE!High-Tech Earthquake Shields for Skyscrapers P.34
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FOR THE NEW ENERGY FUTURE,WE NEED TO TURN MORE IDEAS INTO ACTION.
The world needs more energy and less CO2. To meet that challenge, we need to turn bright ideas into workable solutions – and then make those solutions a reality.
We’re working on a range of innovative projects. Some are still on the drawing board – like developing ways to produce fuel from algae and straw. Others are already being delivered to our customers in many parts of the world – like cleaner-coal technology.
At the same time, we are making our existing fuels cleaner and more efficient, and working on technology to manage CO2 emissions.
To find out how Shell is helping prepare for the new energy future, visit www.shell.us/energytalk
contentsthis month’s guide to innovation and discovery
FEATURES
VOLUME 275 #5
POPULAR SCIENCE 05
#�the future of space
42 DEEP-SPACE BOOT CAMPHow do you prepare someone for a
grueling journey beyond low-Earth
orbit? Take a look inside NASA’s new
training program, with the first cohort
of astronauts being groomed for long-
haul space missions. By Dawn Stover
#�POPSCI lab rat
62 PERSONAL CHEMISTRYEvery day, we’re exposed to thousands of man-made molecules, some of which stay in our bodies for decades. How are contaminants in your kitchen affecting you? The new science of biomonitoring tracks these chemicals and what they mean for your health. By Arianne Cohen
#�The Green Dream
68 CLEARLY EFFICIENTLearn from POPULAR SCIENCE’s staff photographer as he constructs a home packed with affordable, environmentally friendly innovations. This month: installing custom, energy-efficient windows. By John B. Carnett
#�POPSCI INNOVATORS
49 BRILLIANT 10Meet POPSCI’s annual selection of the brightest young researchers in the country. They’re helping to keep us healthy, prevent disasters, and make green
energy cheaper than coal. Lucky for us, our future is in their capable hands.
14 Turkeys stuck at the U.S. border; brain electrodes.
$�WHAT’S NEW
19 RECREATIONVenture into the wild with an air-shock snowmobile.
20 THE GOODSA wrench that ratchets; a cellphone made from corn.
22 AUTOThe futuristic cars that could reinvent GM.
24 COMPUTINGMultitouch screens on PCs of every size and shape.
$�HEADLINES
33 MEDICINEA medical-isotope shortage delays millions of health tests.
34 DISASTER TECHProtecting skyscrapers from earthquakes.
36 THE CHECKLISTHow to fix the Large Hadron Collider.
39 EXPERIMENTSSee what survives the Mars torture chamber.
$�HOW 2.0
71 YOU BUILT WHAT?!A real-life replica of the videogame Lunar Lander.
74 REPURPOSED TECHCreate your own e-book reader from an old tablet PC.
76 GRAY MATTERGrinding a mix of metals to make showers of sparks.
78 ASK A GEEKWhat to look for in a host for your Web site.
$�FYI
80 Could Stallone beat a T. rex in arm wrestling?
$�OTHER STUFF
08 FROM THE EDITOR
11 THE INBOX
100 THE FUTURE THEN
CONTENTS
06 POPULAR SCIENCE NOVEMBER 2009
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Look at the Stars Inspired by our fully loaded backyard observatory [What’s New, page 26]? See a gallery of the finest amateur astrophotographers’ work and more info on setting up your own camera, at popsci.com/astrophoto.
Gear of the Year It’s almost that time again—time for POPSCI’s annual Best of What’s New list, cataloging the year’s most impressive new tech. We want to hear about your favorite innovations this year in the realm of science and technology. Tell us at popsci.com/bown2009readers.
DIY Kindle Get step-by-step photo instructions for building our DIY Kindle project, at popsci.com/DIYkindle.
REGULARS
NEW SLIDESHOWS AND FEATURES
NASA’S NEW SUIT The Constellation Program isn’t just rockets. After reading about Constellation astronaut training in this issue, take a closer look at their new-and-improved space duds: popsci.com/spacesuit.
POPSCI.COM
Windows 7 Is Here At long last, Microsoft’s successor to Windows Vista was just released, and with it a slew of fresh hardware taking advantage of its new features. Take a tour of the computing gear bringing about the bright future of the Windows PC, at popsci.com/windows7.
WHEN THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION announced its vision for space explo-ration in January 2004, NASA’s budget was clearly insufficient to the task. Yet NASA continued to pursue the hardware necessary for a base on the moon and a human voyage to Mars, even in the face of mounting evidence that (for instance) the International Space Station will pass its
2016 retire-by date before Ares I, NASA’s ferry to the station, enters service. The rhetoric/reality gap has become a chronic credibility problem for NASA.
In September, the White House received the Augustine Committee’s long-awaited report on the country’s options for human spaceflight, which concluded that within NASA’s $18-billion annual budget, “no plan . . . permits human exploration to continue in any meaningful way.” The panel came up with scenarios for travel
beyond low-Earth orbit that would require the Obama administration to pony up an additional $3 billion or so a year. In this economy, that’s hard to imagine.
So where does that leave us? I think we’ll extend the functioning life of the International Space Station to at least 2020. We’ll keep the space shuttle flying well beyond next year, to bridge the gap in our ability to fly humans to low-Earth orbit and to serve as a platform for the development of the agency’s next heavy-lift rocket. NASA will help foster private space companies’ ability to get astronauts to the ISS, so that the agency can set its sights on more-distant targets. It will begin planning human rendez-vous with asteroids and other interim destinations, building to the big kahuna several decades hence: human bootprints on Mars.
The astronauts in this year’s class will spend months on the ISS, and they might make one of those interim asteroid-hops leading up to the main event—but it’s highly unlikely that any will make the giant leap to Mars. And yet nine young Americans—including POPSCI Bril-liant 10 honoree Kate Rubins [see page 49]—are eagerly embarking on the gruel-ing training regimen we detail in our cover story [page 42]. Amid all the uncertainty about NASA, it’s inspiring to see some of the nation’s most accomplished young scientists still chasing the stars. MARK JANNOT
Editor-in-Chief Mark JannotDeputy Editor Jacob WardCreative Director Sam Syed
EDITORIALExecutive Editor Mike HaneyFeatures Editor Nicole DyerEditorial Production Manager Felicia PardoCopy and Research Director Rina BanderSenior Associate Editors Lauren Aaronson, Doug Cantor, Bjorn Carey, Seth Fletcher, Martha HarbisonAssociate Editor Corinne IozzioAssistant Editor Susannah F. LockeEditorial Assistant Amy GeppertEditor at Large Dawn StoverContributing Technology Editor Steve MorgensternContributing Editors Eric Adams, Theodore Gray, Eric Hagerman, Joseph Hooper, Preston Lerner, Gregory Mone, Rena Marie Pacella, Catherine Price, Dave Prochnow, Jessica Snyder Sachs, Rebecca Skloot, Mike Spinelli, Elizabeth Svoboda, Kalee Thompson, Phillip Torrone, James Vlahos, Speed WeedContributing Troubadour Jonathan CoultonEditorial Intern Carina Storrs
ART AND PHOTOGRAPHYArt Director Matthew CokeleyPhoto Editor Kristine LaMannaStaff Photographer John B. CarnettSenior Designer Stephanie O’Hara Contributing Artists Kevin Hand, Nick Kaloterakis, Graham Murdoch, Bob Sauls, Paul Wootton Photo Intern Jack ForbesProduction Intern Jodi Tong
POPSCI.COMDigital Content Director John MahoneyDigital Content Manager Taylor HengenAssociate Web Editor Paul Adams
BONNIER TECHNOLOGY GROUP
Group Publisher Gregg R. HanoAssociate Publishers Wendi S. Berger, Anthony RuotoloExecutive Assistant Christopher GravesMarketing Director Mike GallicFinancial Director Tara BiscielloVice President, Corporate Sales and Marketing Pete MichalskyNortheast Advertising Office: Lauren Brewer, Alex DeSanctis, Susan Faggella, Taryn Guillermo, Sara Schiano, Tara WeedfaldMidwest: Manager John Marquardt 312-252-2838 Ad Assistant Krissy Van Rossum West Coast Account Managers Robert Hoeck 310-227-8958, Bob Meth 310-227-8955 Ad Assistant Kate Gregory Detroit: Manager Edward A. Bartley 248-282-5545 Ad Assistant Diane Pahl Southern: Manager Jason A. Albaum 404-892-0760 Classified Advertising Sales Patrick Notaro 212-779-5555, Chip Parham 212-779-5492Direct Response Sales Alycia Isabelle 800-280-2069Interactive Sales Manager Chris YoungDigital Sales Development Manager Brian GlaserSales Development Managers Alexis Costa, Mike Kelly, Kerri LevineCreative Services Director Mike IadanzaDirector of Special Events Michelle CastSpecial Events Coordinators Erica Johnson, Athos KyriakidesMarketing Art Directors Lindsey Krist, Shawn WoznickiPromotions Manager Eshonda CarawayConsumer Marketing Director Bob CohnAssociate Directors Lauren Rosenblatt, Andrew SchulmanSenior Planning Manager Raymond WardNew Business Manager Cliff SabbagRetention Manager Connie CotnerSingle Copy Sales Director Vicki WestonPublicity Manager Amanda McNallyHuman Resources Manager Kim PutmanProduction Associate Erika Hernandez Group Production Director Laurel KurnidesOperations Director Mimi Rosenfeld
Chairman Jonas BonnierChief Executive Officer Terry SnowChief Operating Officer Dan AltmanChief Financial Officer Randall KoubekVice President, Consumer Marketing Bruce MillerVice President, Production Lisa EarlywineVice President, E-Media Bill AllmanVice President, Digital Sales & Marketing John HaskinVice President, Enterprise Systems Shawn LarsonVice President, Human Resources Cathy HertzVice President, Corporate Communications Dean TurcolBrand Director John MillerPublishing Consultant Martin S. WalkerCorporate Counsel Jeremy Thompson For service anytime, please use our Web site: popsci.com/ customerservice. You can also call 800-289-9399; for Canadian and foreign, please call 386-597-4279. Or you may write to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235.
The paper used for this magazine comes from certi-fied forests that are managed in a sustainable way to meet the social, economic and environ-mental needs of present and future generations.
HACK ATTACKSThe technology, cost and stand-off safety of unmanned warfare is seductive—but I worry that a clever software attack on our communications and positioning software could bring down our Air Force in one keystroke. Ronald A. BarkerMishawaka, Ind.
WAR ON WORDSI’ve enjoyed your magazine for many years but found your last issue distasteful. “Point. Click. Kill” is a horrific headline. You are promoting the notion that we can kill anyone, anywhere, as we please. That is not a step forward but 100 steps backward. I prefer to read publications that explore innovations in saving lives, not killing them.David G. HuebnerVia e-mail
CorrectionsIn The Future Then [Sept.], we referred to Hellcats as the fastest jets of their time. Hellcats were propeller-driven, and not the fastest aircraft.
In “The Next Grid” [July], we wrote that Southern California Edison supplies power to Los Angeles and San Diego. According to a
spokesperson, the company services “most of Southern California’s coastal, inland, desert and metro communities,” but not those cities.
The “water-walking shoes” mentioned in FYI [Sept.] are a concept, not a product. Wavewalk does, however, sell a kayak for stand-up paddling (wavewalk.com).
Get up to 25 music downloads free with a 7-day eMusic trial subscription. Offer available to first-time eMusic customers only located in the USA. Your free trial expires 7 days after registration. Certain songs will not be available during free your trial. Internet access, registration, and credit or debit card required. Limited time offer. Your subscription remains free until you exceed your free trial credits or your free trial expires. Offer and eMusic's prices are subject to change without notice and are subject to eMusic's terms of use. eMusic and the eMusic logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of eMusic.com Inc in the USA and other countries. All Right Reserved. eMusic is not responsible for products, services, or claims made by Popular Science.
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You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit www.FDA.gov/medwatch or call 1-800-FDA-1088.
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headlinesdiscoveries, advances and debates in science
An earthquake-proof
skyscraper
34The Martian torture
chamber
39
POPSCI.COM NOVEMBER 2009 POPULAR SCIENCE 33
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The Chalk River nuclear reactor in Ontario
doesn’t sell a watt of electricity. Never has.
But when it sprang a leak and shut down
this spring, it threw a multibillion-dollar
industry into crisis. Before it broke, the reactor
produced nearly two thirds of the U.S. supply
of molybdenum-99, or Mo-99, the isotope
behind 16 million critical diagnostic medical
tests each year. In July, things got worse: The
Dutch reactor that supplied the remaining
third shut down for a month of repair work.
Nuclear imaging is used on tens of
thousands of patients every day to take pictures
of their hearts, lungs, kidneys, bones, brains
and other organs. Doctors inject isotopes
into a patient and use a radiation-sensitive
camera to locate blood clots and tumors or to
diagnose seizures, among other things. Mo-99
is critical for about 80 percent of all nuclear-
medicine tests because as it decays, it releases
a daughter isotope called technetium-99m,
which is energetic enough for the camera to
see, but its short, six-hour half-life means
it conveniently decays to practically nothing
after 24 hours. Unfortunately, Mo-99 can’t be
stockpiled for more than a few days.
With the two main reactors down, Mo-99
became scarce. “We were getting 10 percent
of what we normally get,” says Michael
NUCLEAR DROUGHT
MEDICINE
A DWINDLING SUPPLY OF MEDICAL ISOTOPES MEANS PATIENTS MIGHT NOT GET THE TESTS THEY NEED
!!! !!!AUGUST 2 Scientists confirm the first case of a person infected with HIV from gorillas, proving that new strains of the virus can jump to humans.
PARTING THE WAVESBURIED RINGS PROTECT BUILDINGS FROM EARTHQUAKES
crushed by MAPLE’s massive output, stayed
out of the isotope-making business. But
MAPLE engineers found a set of flaws in
the reactors, and last spring, after spending
$600 million—several times the project’s
budget—Canada officially killed it. “That
was our big ‘oh, sh-t’ moment,” says Steve
Mattmuller, chief nuclear pharmacist at
Kettering Medical Center in Ohio. “We were
right back where we were 20 years ago, but
now our reactors were 20 years older.”
Since the MAPLE debacle, two long-
term solutions have been put into motion.
The nuclear-power firm Babcock &
Wilcox plans to build a facility to supply
half the U.S. Mo-99 market. And this
summer, Congressman Edward Markey of
Massachusetts introduced a $163-million
bill for domestic Mo-99 production, some of
which could be used to retrofit a reactor at
the University of Missouri that could fill the
other half. But neither project are likely to
be done before 2012.
The Mo-99 supply is back to 70
percent, but not for long. The Dutch
pushed January’s six-month maintenance
shutdown back to the spring in hopes that
the Chalk River reactor will be back up
by then, but the repairs are so extensive
that the Canadian government might shut
!!! AUGUST 6 Obese people have 8 percent less brain tissue, neurologists find, increasing their risk of Alzheimer’s. AUGUST 16 NASA confirms the comet Wild 2 contains glycine.
The earliest known attempt at earthquake-proofing dates
to the sixth century B.C., when builders in modern-day
Iran inserted stone blocks between a structure and its
foundation to reduce vibrations. Today’s engineers buffer
buildings with metal springs, ball bearings and rubber
pads, all designed to sop up the energy from seismic
waves. This summer, a team of physicists at the University
of Liverpool in England and the French National Centre for
Scientific Research tested a different strategy: redirect the
waves altogether. Instead of absorbing tremors, a shield
buried around a skyscraper simply reroutes them, like
water running around a boulder.
The design consists of a concrete-and-plastic plate
of concentric rings that encircles the foundation. The
materials are arranged from stiffest to most flexible from
the outer ring to the innermost. Waves follow the path of
least resistance toward stiffer rings and bend away from
the foundation as they pass through the plate. Computer
simulations show that it could protect against the most
destructive 70 percent of waves that travel horizontally in
the soil from the epicenter. In theory, “this could protect
any structure,” says Michael Tantala, a civil engineer and
earthquake expert at Tantala Associates in Philadelphia.
Engineers will probably combine traditional dampeners
with the plate because it doesn’t protect against all types
of waves, yet it could be particularly useful in areas where
waves traveling horizontally are more destructive, such as
parts of Seattle and San Francisco. “Everything around the
building will be devastated,” says Sebastien Guenneau, one
of the plate’s developers, “but the building itself will stay
still.” Next year, engineers will test a two-foot-wide model
of the design, and the tech could be on both new and old
WITHOUT MO-99, MEDICINE MAY AGAIN BECOME A DANGEROUS GUESSING GAME.
POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 35
Chalk River down for good. With the two
largest suppliers out, the world will again
be forced to scrape by.
As Mo-99 production trickles, certain
procedures may once more become the
high-stakes guessing games that they
were before radioactive diagnostics.
During this summer’s drought, Jim Ponto,
chief nuclear pharmacist at the University
of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, had to put
patients on a weeks-long waiting list. One
of his patients opted to skip a Tech-99m
procedure that would measure the spread
of her cancer and minimize the extent of
surgery. She couldn’t bear waiting a week
for the test and instead went straight to
the operating room. Cases like hers make
Ponto nervous. “The cancer could spread,”
he says, “and the doctor would never
know it.”—PAT WALTERS
!!! The amino acid is the first ingredient for proteins found in a comet. AUGUST 18 Mathematical models suggest that the best way to thwart a zombie attack is a swift offense.
FAST LANE TO MARSA NEW ION ENGINE COULD SLICE THE TIME IT TAKES TO GET TO THE RED PLANET
SPACE TECH
CR
AIG
BEN
JAM
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Six Europeans recently wrapped up
105 days in an isolation chamber with
no TV, no showers, and lots of pre-
cooked food, to test the stresses of a
journey to Mars. Real Marstronauts
might not have to suffer through all
that. A new ion engine, which shoots
charged particles to create thrust,
could get them to the Red Planet in
just 39 days.
In theory, there’s no better way of
getting between planets than an ion
engine. The engine in NASA’s asteroid
probe Dawn fires electrons at xenon
gas to convert those atoms into posi-
tive ions, which fall onto a positively
charged screen that repels the ions
out of the engine.
The problem is power. For exam-
ple, Dawn runs on three ion engines,
each of which puts out a steady, but mea-
sly, one third of an ounce of thrust. (Each
engine on a Boeing 777 churns out about
100,000 pounds of thrust.) This is great
for long, unmanned missions—it took
16 months to propel the probe to Mars—
but it’s not ideal for humans looking to
spend as little time in transit as possible.
NASA is retooling its engine for triple the
thrust, which could get a probe to Mars
faster, but it’s still too slow for a large
spaceship heavy with crew and gear. If a
little more thrust is good, a lot more is
better. The Texas-based aerospace com-
pany Ad Astra’s VASIMR engine creates
a thicker ion stream by shooting radio
waves, rather than electrons, at argon
gas. Then, the engine’s superconducting
magnets fling the ions to generate 50
times as much thrust.
In July the company demonstrated
the ion-making step, and next month it
will fire up the 200-kilowatt machine at
full power—almost strong enough that
four such engines could drive a manned
moon voyage. Running on solar power,
that trip would take six months, but Ad
Astra has a plan for speeding the engine
up for Mars: nukes. Unlike NASA’s cur-
rent engine designs, which cannot handle
megawatts of power, Ad Astra could scale
up VASIMR to run on a 200-megawatt
nuclear reactor. That, says Tim Glover,
the company’s director of development,
gives VASIMR an edge: “Would you rather
pull a trailer with a couple of bicycles, or
with a car?”—CARINA STORRS
FIRED UP The VASIMR ion engine [right and bottom left] ejects charged particles for thrust. This summer, tests [upper left] showed
that the engine could generate ions. Nuclear-powered ion engines could bring astronauts to Mars in just 39 days.
!!! NOVEMBER A FedEx hub in New Jersey plans to begin drawing 30 percent of its electricity needs from its rooftop solar array, the largest in the U.S.
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is a crucial time for the agency to fundamentally reevaluate how it prepares its new recruits for the rigors of deep space. Plans call for the construction of a new crew capsule called Orion to replace the space shuttle in 2015, plus two rockets and a lunar lander. This suite of hardware, known as Constellation, is billed as the Swiss Army knife of space exploration, capable of flying to multiple destinations and performing multiple missions. And that’s what NASA expects of these future astronauts, too. They will be trained as jacks-of-all-trades who can do experiments on the ISS, erect an outpost on the moon, or collect samples from an asteroid that’s hurtling through space. They are NASA’s first new astronaut class in five years, the first chosen since the Constellation development program began, and the first ever to be chosen
Three test pilots. Two flight surgeons. One molecular biologist. A flight controller, a Pentagon staffer and a CIA intelligence officer. These are the nine people chosen by NASA to be America’s next astronauts. Late this summer they reported to Houston along with two Japanese pilots, a Japanese doctor, a Canadian pilot and a Canadian physicist who will train alongside NASA’s class of 2009. Call them the lucky 14.
Selected from more than 3,500 applicants, NASA’s new astronaut candidates arrive at a pivotal moment in the history of human space exploration. The agency’s bold ambition is to rocket humans beyond the International Space Station for the first time in more than 40 years. The question is when. In September, a panel of space experts and former astronauts chaired by former Lockheed Martin chief Norman Augustine told the White House that a budgetary boost of an estimated $3 billion annually would allow NASA to develop the necessary spacecraft to take astronauts to the moon, near-Earth asteroids and ultimately to Mars. Anything less, the committee concluded, would delay a moon landing until at least the late 2030s.
Whether NASA gets extra financial support from Congress or not, now
THE OBSESSIVES
“IF YOU LOSE YOUR SENSE OF HUMOR ON THE WAY TO MARS, YOU’RE FINISHED.”
solely for long-duration missions in space. NASA isn’t just tasked with reinventing its hardware; to get beyond low-Earth orbit, it must reinvent its astronauts.
tough and cheerful
Like the astronauts before them, recruits will take an outdoor survival course in Maine, spend up to two weeks living in an underwater lab, endure altitude chambers, and struggle through flight mechanics. But for deep space, astronauts will need new training entirely, perhaps including spending weeks, even months, in confinement and isolation.
A trip to Mars will take humans so far from home that Earth will look no bigger than a star. The distance is so great that in a September New York Times op-ed, Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, went so far as to propose that, to save fuel, astronauts
perhaps shouldn’t come home at all. Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, an ardent believer in the colonization of Mars, has also floated this idea. For a trip that long, intense psychological preparation is critical.
The Mars Society, a space-advocacy group, has conducted a series of simulated Mars missions involving 80 crews at a
desert station and a dozen crews at an even more remote Arctic base. Robert Zubrin, the society’s president and author of The Case for Mars, recommends that NASA conduct experiments to see which astronaut teams work well together when tasked with field exploration in adverse conditions for N
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months on end. “You put them through missions, and you see who is tough and cheerful and team-spirited,” Zubrin says. “If you lose your sense of humor on the way to Mars, you’re finished.” One of the most important lessons learned during the field missions is that some people perform well on one team but not on another. “It’s because of the mix,” he explains.
Jason Kring, an assistant professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University who studies the human factors of spaceflight, agrees with Zubrin that intensive training here on Earth is a must. He also suggests that NASA include a clinical psychologist on the crew to help mitigate potential conflicts. “What to us would be a minor problem in an office environment can become a big deal after six to eight months with the same people,” he says.
NASA is already making efforts to screen more carefully for psychological flaws, after the meltdown of Lisa Nowak, the shuttle astronaut who goes on trial next month for attempting to kidnap a fellow astronaut’s girlfriend. It’s not hard to imagine how such instability could sink a space mission.
While everyone in the class of 2009 has an advanced degree in engineering, science or math (“extensive experience flying high-
DOCK AND ROLL An artist’s
rendering of NASA’s Altair lunar
lander approaching the Orion crew
capsule after a lunar mission
FLYING HOME A cutaway view of the proposed 16.5-foot-wide Orion crew capsule. It will carry up to six astronauts.
performance jet aircraft” was also a plus), the most sought-after quality was the ability to play well with others. Today, an astronaut with the right stuff is someone who does not get frazzled or grumpy when he spends seven months trapped in a flying office with co-workers who may not even speak his language—an office in which his and his companions’ recycled sweat and urine is a beverage, the toilet clogs, and a serious mistake means they all could die.
Of course, astronauts will need extra preparation for the physical challenges too. During the trip itself, they will be subjected to high doses of radiation, raising their odds of getting cancer later in life, and they will lose bone density. “The worst-case scenario would be a Mars crew that steps off the vehicle and their bones are too brittle to hold their weight,” Kring says. He suggests that NASA may eventually need to create
With its sights set on deep space, NASA has
tasked Oceaneering International to develop
the first new space suit since the shuttle “jet
pack” of the 1980s. For lunar missions, the
Constellation Space Suit System, or CSSS,
will come in two configurations: one that the
astronauts will wear aboard the spaceship
during launch, landing and spacewalks; and a
second configuration designed to be worn on
the moon’s surface. The two suits will share
many components, such as boots, legs, gloves,
and cooling and communications systems.
The big challenge is designing a system for
handling solid waste in the event that the crew
capsule loses cabin pressure and the astronauts
have to spend an extended period, even days, in
their suits while the problem is repaired.
For long missions in deep space, astronauts
must maintain their own suits, learning
beforehand how to fix every port and sensor on
them. “When you strap in for the real mission,
you should feel like you’re home,” says Jim
Buchli, the program manager for the CSSS at
Oceaneering. “There should be no surprises.”
—Dawn Stover, with additional
reporting by Carina Storrs
What Do You Wear in deep space?
a new category of astronauts trained for “ultra-long-duration” missions. “Thirty-six months in space is a lot different than six months,” he says.
new school
Preparing for even a space-station or lunar mission takes several years. The 2009 class won’t be full-fledged astronauts until 2011, and they won’t fly their first space missions until at least 2014. “The intent of basic training is to get folks up to the proficiency they need to begin mission-specific training,” says Duane Ross, NASA’s manager for astronaut candidate selection and training.
Unlike the 12 astronaut classes selected in the past three decades, which were divided into a caste system of pilots and mission specialists, NASA’s newest class will be known simply as
“astronauts.” Flying Orion is expected to be much less complicated than flying the shuttle. Many of the ship’s functions will be automated, recalling the days when Chuck Yeager called the astronauts “spam in a can.” Although the Orion missions will involve a crew of up to six instead of Apollo’s three, for long periods they will just be along for the ride. The glass cockpit interface, for instance, will have one tenth as many switches as Apollo.
Learning to pilot the space shuttle was in many ways the centerpiece of past astronauts’ training. The shuttle is “an incredibly complicated beast,” says Pam Melroy, a former shuttle commander who recently became director and deputy program manager of the Space Exploration Initiatives program at Lockheed Martin, the contractor building Orion. Recruits spent 54 weeks on shuttle systems during their two-
Think of the new astronaut suit as a wearable spaceship, complete with a toilet
year basic training, Ross says. Astronauts flying Orion won’t have to land on a runway, so the class of 2009 will instead spend more time learning things like Russian (since Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft will temporarily be the only ride to the ISS after the shuttle retires) and practicing extravehicular tasks in the world’s largest swimming pool. On the other hand, Orion will be a much smaller vehicle than the shuttle, so it will have less built-in redundancy. That means astronauts may have to spend more time training for equipment failures, Melroy says.
As with the shuttle, Orion astronauts will practice ascents in a full-motion simulator that forces them to make quick decisions about whether or not to abort a mission. They will also use simulators to learn how to dock with the ISS and how to fly the new lunar lander, Altair, down to the moon’s surface. The lunar-lander simulators
for the Apollo missions looked like flying bed frames, Melroy says, and all of them crashed during training. “I think we’re going to have to do a little better than that,” she says.
Engineers are still working on the designs for Orion and Altair but, as in the Apollo days, astronauts are involved in the process at every step. Already astronauts have been invited into mock-ups of the crew capsule to see whether they can fit comfortably in the seats and reach the controls. “By the time astronauts actually get in and start using the mock-up, they’re already very familiar with it,” says Olivia Fuentes, the exploration-development laboratory section manager for Lockheed Martin.
Further down the road, astronauts will begin preparing for surface operations on the moon and, potentially, N
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asteroids. A swimming pool can simulate the weightlessness of the ISS but not the moon’s gravity—one sixth of Earth’s. “We’re going to have to mix the water training with
training on how to walk on the moon again, as well as on the Martian surface,” Kring says. The Apollo astronauts practiced their moonwalks in the Partial Gravity Simulator, an adult-size Johnny Jump Up suspended from the ceiling, and future astronauts may use an improved version of a gravity simulator called the “pogo.” Asteroids and Martian moons may require still more training facilities, and both destinations will demand a revamped space suit that can be worn for days [see “What Do You Wear in Deep Space?” facing page].
Mind the Gap
NASA’s tentative plan is to retire the shuttle in 2010, but the Augustine committee estimates that Orion won’t fly until at least 2017, leaving a seven-year gap during which time no NASA manned spacecraft will take to the skies.
BUGGING OUT Astronauts
test a prototype of a six-legged
lunar buggy at Moses Lake
in Washington.
“A MARS CREW COULD STEP OFF A VEHICLE WITH BONES TOO BRITTLE TO SUPPORT THEIR OWN WEIGHT.”
In 1977, a six-year-old boy visiting Los Angeles from South
Korea saw Star Wars for the first time. He gaped at the curious
locomotion of R2-D2 and the human-robot interactions of C-3PO,
and as he flew back home, Dennis Hong remembers, “I knew I was
going to build robots for the rest of my life.”
Hong was born in California, but when he was three, his
father, an aerospace engineer, moved the family to Seoul for a
job. Hong lived there until his sophomore year of college, when
he transferred to the University of Wisconsin, and went on to grad
school at Purdue University. “All of it was mechanical engineering,
focused on robotics,” he says.
Today, Hong runs Virginia Tech’s Robotics and Mechanisms
Laboratory, which has produced a robotic hand that’s dexterous
enough to handle an egg, a pole-climbing snake ’bot for
construction inspections, and a momentum-propelled, three-
legged robot, among other projects.
“When I joined VT, people thought robotics should be all about
intelligence,” Hong says. Instead, he chose to focus on mechanical
systems found in nature. “We’re not copying nature; we’re using
its principles,” he explains. The design of the three-legged robot,
THE ROBOT MAKERBrilliant because: He builds sophisticated robots that don’t just copy biology—they improve on its most elegant and efficient principles
THE MENTAL MESSENGERBrilliant because: His engineering achievements will let people with disabilities control machines
Name: Adam Wilson Age: 28
affiliation: Wadsworth Center,
New York State Department of Health
Biomedical Engineering
Last April, Adam Wilson became the first
person to send a telepathic message—on
the social-networking site Twitter. “USING
EEG TO SEND TWEET,” he wrote, referring
to the electroencephalograph he used
to record electrical signals in his brain.
Wearing a red skullcap embedded with
electrodes wired to a computer, he
spelled out his missive by focusing on
letters flashing before him on a screen.
Beyond extrasensory tweets, Wilson’s
deeper ambition for the technology is to
help people who have lost the ability to
communicate, whether from a stroke or
a spinal-cord injury. He’s now developing
powerful brain-machine interfaces that
attach electrodes to the cerebral cortex,
the wrinkled tissue just beneath the
skull, where they pick up stronger brain
signals than the EEG technique he used
in the Twitter experiment. Partly inspired
by his fascination with music—Wilson
has played the guitar since the seventh
grade—his new system taps a brain region
that controls
response
to auditory
stimuli,
allowing
people with
neurological
disorders
to control a
computer cursor simply by thinking
about the sound of a cellphone ringing.
His next challenge is to engineer
seamless wireless systems that could
one day decipher complex thoughts—
perhaps well enough to help his idol,
physicist Stephen Hawking, whose
struggle with muscular dystrophy has
left him almost fully paralyzed, open
doors or steer his wheelchair with
thoughts alone. Says Wilson, “I would
love to work with him.”
—melinda wenner
Name: Dennis Hong Age: 38
affiliation: Virginia tech
for instance, looks unnatural, yet it mimics the momentum of
the human gait. To move forward, its hub flips over, causing
one leg to swing between the other two. The robotic hand is
controlled by compressed air, varying the strength of its grip
without the use of other motors, in the same way human grip
relies on elastic ligaments to help the fingers curl.
His lab’s latest effort is a humanoid called CHARLI,
for Cognitive Humanoid Autonomous Robot with Learning
Intelligence. It serves as a research platform for the study
of human locomotion and a contender in Robocup 2010, a
tournament in which robots compete in soccer matches.
Ultimately, Hong hopes to engineer robots that move with
the grace and adaptability of humans. The key, he believes, is
uninhibited research. In Korea, Hong recalls, “I grew up in an
environment of people being afraid or ashamed to speak up. In
my lab there’s no criticism, only refinement. You want to put a
nuclear reactor in your robot? Fine, let’s pursue that.”
Leading by example, Hong has an organized way of putting
his own least-inhibited ideas to use. “Next to my bed, I have a
notebook and a pen,” he says. “Every night, I see lines, colorful
things in my head. I wake up at 4 a.m., jot down everything. In
the morning, I type it into my database of ideas. When funders
want this or that, I look for a match.”—Jacob Ward
As a kid, Kate Rubins dreamed of being an astronaut and
figured flying fighter jets would be the best way to get to NASA.
She even went to space camp at age 12 to get a head start on
her training. Then she learned the disappointing news that, at
the time, the pilot job was off-limits to women.
Secretly, her parents hoped their daughter would choose
a safer career, but by high school Rubins had already set
her sights on another perilous profession: hunting killer
viruses. And this time, there was no glass ceiling to hold her
back. Rubins published her first paper on HIV in 1999 as an
undergraduate at the University of California at San Diego. In
2001, while a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University, she helped
the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
create the first animal model for testing smallpox, a scourge
that killed millions before its eradication in 1980. Rubins’s work
has made it possible to study how the virus evades the immune
system in living tissue, a major step toward new medicine and
vaccines should terrorists somehow get their hands on one
of the two known smallpox samples. It’s this ability to make
positive changes in the world that motivates Rubins. “We have a
responsibility as researchers to help people,” she says.
After smallpox, Rubins quickly shifted her attention to
another scourge, monkeypox, which is now reaching epidemic
proportions in Africa. A cousin to smallpox, the virus is
endemic to monkeys and rodents, but it can jump to humans
during the slaughter or consumption of bush meat, causing
facial boils, blindness and even death. During her tenure as a
Whitehead fellow at MIT, Rubins spent months in the remote
jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo, eating the
THE FLYING VIRUS HUNTERBrilliant because: She uncovers the genetic secrets of deadly viruses, and now she’s taking her science smarts to space as an astronaut
Name: Kate Rubins Age: 31
affiliation: Whitehead
Institute, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
“WE HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY AS RESEARCHERS TO HELP PEOPLE.”
occasional meal of grubs (her motto: “If people serve it, I eat
it”), trying to figure out why the disease appears to be spreading
so quickly. The region’s underdeveloped health infrastructure
makes infection rates hard to pin down, but an uptick in the
number of cases suggests the virus is gaining strength.
To track the genetic evolution of monkeypox, Rubins and her
team collect and analyze DNA samples from volunteer patients.
Because traditional genetic-sequencing techniques can take
weeks and often churn out incomplete results, she helped develop
a faster, more accurate method. Typically, scientists extract
monkeypox from patient samples and grow the virus on human or
monkey cells. The problem is that the virus can evolve in response
to its growth medium, so the final population of viruses may bear
little resemblance to the ones that are infecting people in Africa.
Rubins’s idea was to skip the tissue-culture step and instead rely
on a new high-powered DNA sequencer to amplify all the genetic
material. She then devised laboratory protocols and algorithms
to sort the monkeypox from the human cells. The entire process
takes less than five days and generates what Rubins calls an
“obscene” amount of genetic data on the virus.
Today, the Air Force no longer bars female fighter pilots. The
policy changed in 1993, but by then Rubins had already moved
on. She’s never been the type to sit around waiting for the tide
to turn. This fall, while her team continues its work in Africa,
Rubins will finally get the chance to live out that childhood dream
when she joins NASA’s 20th astronaut class, training to becoming
one of the first people to fly the shuttle’s successor, the Orion
[see page 42]. Selected from thousands of candidates, she says
her full-throttle hobbies of skydiving and scuba diving, not to
mention her ability to thrive in dangerous places, set her apart.
When asked if she’s nervous about the prospect of flying a new
spaceship to the moon, Rubins smiles calmly. “Not at all. I want
to be the first person to fly it, right? I’m just thrilled.”
Every day we’re exposed to thousands of man-made chemicals, some of which seep into our bodies and remain there for decades. What that means for our health, we don’t fully understand—but our writer subjected herself to a battery of new tests in search of answers BY ARIANNE COHEN
longer in aggregate, so we must be doing something right,” says Brian Buckley, the laboratory director at the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute at Rutgers University. Still, we do know a few unnerving things. One, all American adults carry around hundreds of synthetic chemicals in their bodies. Two, as a study published in the British Medical Journal in 2004 put it, “many synthetic chemicals have intrinsic hormonal activity,” and hormonal disruptions carry a high likelihood of causing disease. And three, according to the same study, “it is clear that environmental and lifestyle factors are key determinants of human disease—accounting for perhaps 75 percent of most cancers.”
In response to these concerns, in recent years scientists have begun testing the population’s chemical loads in the same rigorous manner that they’ve been testing the environment for decades. This science—called biomonitoring—is slowly helping us understand what our chemical-filled world is doing to us.
I am a paranoid and curious person, and I’ve been following environmental-exposure studies for years. Over time, I developed
Let’s start with the bad news: You are saturated with man-made chemicals, some of them toxic. Today’s exposure began when compounds in your shampoo and shaving cream seeped into your skin cells, and during your morning coffee, when you drank chemicals that were released into your brew as hot water ran against the plastic walls of your coffeemaker. It continued all day as you touched industrial chemicals in packaging, or walked through pesticide-sprayed lawns, or cooked dinner on nonstick pans. This very minute, your skin is probably touching a piece of clothing or furniture that was doused in protective chemicals to make it resistant to microbes, fungus or water. Tonight, there’s a good chance you’ll curl up in sheets treated with flame retardants.
Some of these chemicals can stay in the body for decades, and in numerous studies over the past eight or so years, environmental toxins have been linked to everything from early puberty to cancer. David Servan-Schreiber, a founding member of Doctors Without Borders in the U.S. and a cancer researcher who survived the disease himself, summarized our predicament in the New York
Times last year. “Since 1940, we have seen in Western societies a marked and rapid increase in common types of cancer,” he wrote. Since 1974, leukemia and brain cancer rates in children have risen by 28 percent. The federal government began regulating environmental toxins with the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, but in a way, that’s when the real trouble began. The act established a weak system for chemical testing and regulation, but it also grandfathered in any previously produced chemicals, to the tune of more than 60,000 free passes. To Servan-Schreiber, surveying the situation 32 years later, the culprit was clear: “Reducing exposure to many of the well-characterized chemical carcinogens abundant in our modern environments (pesticides, estrogens, benzene, PCBs, PVCs and bisphenol-A from heating liquids in plastic containers; alkylphenols in cleaning products; parabenes and phthalates in cosmetics and shampoos, etc.) would contribute to lessen the cancer risk.”
Of the 85,000-plus industrial chemicals now registered with the federal government, most are completely unstudied. That doesn’t mean they’re all going to kill us, of course. “We’re living
a morbid curiosity about how many chemicals were lodged in my body. Would I learn how to detoxify? Would I learn that I’m screwed? Would the information be useful at all? In any case, I decided to undergo the most comprehensive testing available to find out.
Last december, I lay on a clinic bed in Buckley’s laboratory at Rutgers. A nurse named Rosalind swabbed my arm in preparation for the Ironman of blood testing. My presence had caused a stir in the lab. They had agreed to take the blood samples I needed for my experiment, but it was far from standard procedure. To get a sense of what I was asking for, think of a lab as a restaurant. I was ordering 150 different dishes—one of everything on the menu—and each would require 10 to 30 complex steps to make. In addition to Rosalind, two other nurses stood by, studying pages of instructions from Quest Diagnostics and Axys Analytical, the labs that would later be analyzing my blood for chemicals including flame retardants, pesticides, plastics and metals.
where Toxins
come fromNot all brands contain the chemicals listed here, but enough do that informed shopping is important.
Rosalind picked up a needle, and the two nurses positioned themselves to grab vials as quickly as my arm could fill them. As I wondered what all that blood would reveal, my mind wandered to memories of a summer childhood ritual: standing in the bathroom in my bathing suit as my mother slathered me with thick layers of sunblock, pausing to let the greasy lotion soak in. Then she’d reach for another canister. “Shut your eyes.” This was my signal to clamp my eyes tight, stop breathing, and turn in a circle while my mother hosed me down with bug spray.
Rosalind read aloud: “OK, ladies. Now we are going to ‘Remove 14 size-large vials of blood from the patient, or as much
as is safe.’ ” She looked up. “OK?” It was the beginning of my experiment,
designed to mimic research conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s primary source for information on exposure to industrial chemicals in the population. In the late 1970s, the agency began searching for
That’s only a fraction of the few thousand chemicals produced in large quantities, but it’s also a major leap from several decades ago, when there was lead in the gas, asbestos in the walls, and no official effort to figure out whether these things were causing harm. To choose the chemicals it will test for, the CDC publishes a notice in the Federal Register soliciting recommendations from scientists. After the suggestions flood in, it gradually narrows the list, choosing chemicals that are widely distributed and suspected of causing harm. Practical concerns rule out searching for more than a few hundred chemicals. “There’s a limit if you’re getting just a few tubes of blood,” says Jim Pirkle, deputy director of
science for the CDC.The NHANES survey begins when
the CDC uses a computer algorithm to select 15 counties nationwide. Surveyors appear on the doorsteps of 800 to 1,600 people in each county and interview them, and around a third of the finalists—5,000 or so
exposure to heavy metals like lead and cadmium. Since then, the CDC has periodically conducted a census of American bodies called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). The agency uses the data for many things, ranging from children’s growth charts to obesity statistics—and, since 2001, to produce a study called the National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals. The next such report, due out late this year, will include data on the prevalence of 228 of the most common environmental toxins.
people nationwide—are ultimately screened. The agency takes measurements on height, weight, body-fat levels, blood pressure and heart rate, among other things. It does an oral-health exam, a bone scan and a vision test. The study participants fill out questionnaires on diet, sexual behavior and drug use. And yes, they also give copious amounts of urine and blood. The results are anonymous, although participants get a copy, along with a toll-free number to call for help understanding them.
Unless the CDC shows up at your house, it’s just about impossible to get this kind of testing. Until the past few years, chemical-exposure testing was available only in research labs, where academics focused on specific families of chemicals, using expensive techniques like gas chromatography and mass spectroscopy. “It really wasn’t available to the public-health community, or to groups of people who figured they might be exposed to pesticides or other agents, because no one had the hundreds of thousands of dollars to open labs and do the testing,” says environmental-exposure researcher Michael McCally, a senior scientist at Physicians for Social Responsibility in Washington, D.C. The technology has slowly moved into specialized commercial labs, but it’s still wildly expensive to access it. My
MOST OF THE CHEMICALS IN USE TODAY ARE UNTESTED AND UNREGULATED.
surrogates for other chemical exposures or lifestyle practices.” “There are almost no smoking guns,” Buckley says. “True
smoking guns usually happen in occupational contamination, where a high percentage of people in a factory come down with, say, lung cancer. Everything else is just estimate or conjecture.”
As for product safety testing, it’s far rarer than you might think. The Food and Drug Administration requires pharmaceuticals to be rigorously tested before entering the marketplace, but although the cosmetic industry conducts tests on animals for skin rashes and allergic reactions, those tests, overseen by an industry organization called the Cosmetic Ingredient Review, aren’t mandatory.
Cosmetics and general products are rarely, if ever, tested for long-term health effects, let alone potential effects on a fetus. All those air fresheners and cleaning products and perfumes that are sprayed liberally in the air you breathe? Never tested.
If evidence appears that a chemical might be harmful, it’s still tough to get
testing would cost me more than $4,000, and that was with Quest agreeing to do much of the blood analysis for free.
The CDC’s Report on Environmental Exposure doesn’t declare any chemicals harmful or safe. “It’s not their job,” Buckley says. “There are people at the National Institutes of Health who do that stuff, and the ATSDR”—the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, created by Congress with the Superfund act of 1980—“and there are epidemiologists, and all of us academics who spend our whole lives interpreting what the CDC puts out.”
Studies on the connection between environmental disease and chemicals have proliferated since the CDC published its first exposure report. Still, the field is young, and such is the state of the art that my makeshift test would give me only raw data about the chemicals in my body; it wouldn’t tell me anything about the likelihood that a particular chemical would give me cancer. I’d have to assemble a personal posse of experts—
those people who spend their lives interpreting CDC data— to help me understand the results.
as i arranged the follow-up to my bloodwork, the inherent difficulty of biomonitoring research became clear. Researchers have uncovered plenty of associations between toxins and diseases, and they’re uncovering more all the time. But it’s nearly impossible to quickly and definitively link an individual chemical to a specific disease without knowingly poisoning test subjects. It’s staggeringly hard to prove causation in a system as complicated as the body, particularly when a fetus exposed to a chemical might not show any sign of harm until it becomes an adult. In one study, men who lived in an agricultural area of Missouri were 40 percent less fertile than city-dwellers. Knockout punch for pesticides, right? Wrong. The British Medical Journal study cites this research as a classic example of the difficulty of linking chemicals to disease. “Although these new findings are suggestive, for none [of the findings] is the mechanism of the chemical’s effect self evident,” the researchers wrote. “This leaves doubts as to whether the measured chemicals are the real culprits or are
SOAPPHTHALATES, TRICLOCARBANS
(IN ANTIBACTERIAL SOAP)
Certain chemicals found in bar soap are asso-
ciated with hormonal disruptions that may
increase the risk of reproductive
problems and cancers.
SHAMPOO PHTHALATES,
PARABENS,
1,4-DIOXANE
These additives are
linked to hormonal
disruptions.
Q�Vent your gas stove outside to avoid releasing polycyclic hydrocarbons,
created by incomplete combustion, into your home, says Shelly Miller, an
air-pollution researcher at the University of Colorado.
Q�Use minimal carpet and drapery. “Carpets can be a reservoir
for all sorts of particles,” Miller says.
Q�Use a HEPA filter on your vacuum to keep captured particles from
escaping back into the air.
Q�Look up cosmetic and cleaning products on the Environmental
Working Group’s “Skin Deep” database (www.ewg.com), which
rates more than 50,000 products on a scale of 0 (safe) to 10 (haz-
ardous). A “data gap” rating lets you know whether the conclusion
is based on comprehensive safety data or industry research.
what you can doWe actually do have a lot of control over the chemicals we’re exposed to in our homes, where they are 1,000 times as likely to be inhaled as outdoors. Here’s how to start purifying your environment.
it off the market. Our regulatory system treats chemicals the same way our judicial system treats people, maintaining that they are innocent until proven guilty and trying them one by one. “Chemical-regulation policy deals with individual chemicals, not families of chemicals,” McCally says. That makes banning potentially harmful chemicals inefficient, because typically, if a single molecule has health effects, all its very similar cousins,
known as congeners, may as well. “Each congener is a different chemical, so you spend 10 years in court for each,” he says.
My test results may be the most confusing things I’ve ever received in the mail. I expected to rip them open and find a variant of the routine bloodwork I get from my doctor, complete with a little thumbs-up icon next to good cholesterol results. Instead, over four months I received six individual spreadsheets that said things like “2,3,7,8-TCDD UN 3373 L12090-1 WG27842 30.8g (wet) pg/g (wet weight basis) <.0065 spiked matrix WG27842-102 % Recov 78.3.” Gibberish to me.
My interpretation team was made up of three experts: McCally, Buckley, and Leo Trasande, director of the Mt. Sinai Center for Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research in New York and a lead investigator on the federally funded National Children’s Study, which will ultimately set benchmarks for toxic exposures among our most chemical-sensitive population.
chemicals are classified by the EPA as probable carcinogens, and they can stay in the body for 25 years, but scientists still don’t understand how potency and length of exposure relate to illness.
I’m carrying above-typical levels of residue from nonstick coatings like Teflon, specifically one called PFOA that
is associated with cancer. “Preliminary studies suggest that even low-level exposures can be problematic,” Trasande says.
I’m loaded with nitrate. “This is principally from processed foods, and there’s a cancer risk associated,” Buckley says.
I also have typical levels of exposure to plastics and plasticizers like phthalates, which add flexibility to soft plastics and vinyl and stability to creams and washes. “They’re ubiquitous,” McCally says. Phthalates are linked to reproductive disorders, and it’s unclear what exposure level could be considered safe.
Lastly, my levels of the notorious bisphenol-A, or BPA, an estrogenic compound found in plastic and plastered all over the news for the past two years, are typical. BPA has entered my system every time I’ve ever taken a swig
I started by calling Trasande. When I read him the first incomprehensible line from my results, he laughed. “I don’t know what that means,” he said. “Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin is nasty stuff. But I would need to also see the benchmarks.” I found the latest NHANES benchmarks and called him back. After going through the rest of the results with my panel, we arrived at a verdict: I am full of chemicals.
My levels of dioxins and furans, older chlorinated chemicals that are usually released into the air by manufacturing and garbage incineration, are above population averages. Industrial releases have decreased 80 percent since the 1980s, yet I’m still full of them because dioxin exposure is the gift that keeps on giving. The body stores dioxin in fat cells and occasionally releases it into the blood, recirculating the same chemicals throughout the body. These have been linked to reproductive disorders, cancer and other maladies.
My levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons—the result of incomplete combustion, these are commonly emitted by stoves and charred meat—are typical for the population. Some of these
FISH
MERCURY
Fish can soak up
mercury from
environmental
pollution, and
when you eat
them, you get it
too. Mercury can
be highly toxic,
damaging the ner-
vous system and
possibly causing
birth and develop-
mental defects.
PLASTIC
BOTTLESBISPHENOL-A
(BPA)
BPA may cause
hormonal and
reproductive
problems.
[continued on page 84]
THE VERDICT FROM MY EXTENSIVE BLOOD TESTING: I AM FULL OF CHEMICALS.
the green dreamone man’s mission to build an eco-friendly, affordable home
CLEARLY EFFICIENT
WITH THE EFFICIENT pre-fab panels that make up the walls of my home, it’s vital
that I don’t let all the heat—and my budget—escape out my 47 windows. So the fact that I had my heart set on sleek aluminum frames instead of wood or vinyl posed some challenges.
Residential aluminum windows tend to be inefficient because metal is far more conductive than wood, al-lowing significant heat loss, so they’re mostly used in warmer climates. Com-mercial models use thicker frames with a strip of insulating resin as a thermal break between the interior and exterior. But the extra materi-als and complicated design raise the price, and commercial makers aren’t
Biltite Evolution—for the past two years. His frames use four insulating tech-
niques: two types of plastic thermal breaks, air pockets to help prevent con-densation and three panes of glass with argon trapped between them. Since these don’t need to be as robust as commercial windows, Gordon uses thinner-walled alu-minum, which keeps the price down, and dealing directly with the manufacturer (Gordon) cuts out the standard distributor markup. My total bill is around $55,000.
A simulation of the window design run by an independent testing lab showed that it would be 50 percent more efficient than a vinyl window, with a U-value (a measure of how well it conducts heat) of 0.21, low enough to qualify for an energy tax credit.—John B. Carnett
set up for small residential orders. I got an astonishing quote of $137,000 for a mix of casement, fixed and slider models.
Then my architect found Tom Gordon, who runs a 16-person custom window-making shop in Rhode Island. Gordon has been designing an affordable, efficient residential aluminum model—the
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how 2.0tips, tricks, hacks and do-it-yourself projECTS
76The metals that make
the most sparks
GAME PLANNING
Iain Sharp spent
months gathering
parts from the Web,
garage sales and
his own collection of
junked electronics.
74Make an e-book reader
out of an old tablet PC
After hearing about preparations for the 40th
anniversary of the moon landing at Kennedy Space
Center last year, British engineer Iain Sharp decided
to develop a tribute of his own. His offering, a remake
of the 1979 Atari game Lunar Lander, in which players
try to settle a module onto the moon’s surface, is
a complex mix of scrapped PCs, fishing line, inkjet
printer motors and miniature space vehicles.
To enhance the retro look, Sharp suspended the
lander from a moving carriage with the fishing line.
As the line unspools and the lander descends, the
player turns a modified car steering wheel to rotate
the module and then hits a button to fire the “rockets”
and push the craft in the direction it’s pointing. The line
spools up, and printer motors shift the carriage along
a track, carrying the lander across the moonscape.
Sharp tested magnets as a means of measuring
successful touchdowns but found that they pulled the
lander right to the target, making the game too
easy. Instead he installed touch sensors to
measure when the craft hit the ground and
wrote software that estimates its exact
position based on how far the motors
moved in the course of the game.
Still, the game, which is installed at
the Southwold Pier in Suffolk, England,
doesn’t demand perfection from its
players. “You can get away with a few
little mistakes,” Sharp says, “which is kind
of like the real thing.”—Gregory Mone
THE CLASSIC VIDEOGAME LUNAR
LANDER IS TRANSFORMED INTO THREE DIMENSIONS
OVER THE MOON
We review all our projects before publishing them, but ultimately your safety is your responsibility. Always wear protective gear, take proper safety precautions, and follow all laws and regulations. THE H2WHOA CREDO: DIY CAN BE DANGEROUS.!
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“First, we’re assuming that the T. rex won’t just eat the person, right?” asks Jack Conrad, a vertebrate
paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Right. This is
a sanctioned match, and killing your opponent is strictly against the rules. “Doesn’t matter,” Conrad says. “There’s no chance that any human alive could win.”
The T. rex’s arms might have looked wimpy, but they were extremely strong. Each was about three feet long and, based on the size of the arm bones and analysis of the spots where muscle attached to the bone, they were jacked. “The bicep alone—and this is a conservative estimate—could curl 430 pounds,” Conrad says. Even the beefiest humans max out at around an embarrassing 260 pounds.
Surely an Over the Top–era Sylvester Stallone would put
up a good fight? “Not even Lou Ferrigno in his prime would stand a chance,” Conrad says. “They didn’t just have big biceps. Their chest and shoulder muscles were huge too. They had huge arms and shoulders—bigger than my leg. They had the strength to rip a human’s arm right out of its socket.”
There is a chance, however, that your competition might not be able to put all that beefy muscle to use. There are dozens of hypotheses about what the T. rex used its arms for, Conrad explains, but the ones taken most seriously involve pushing itself up if it was lying on its belly, tossing big chunks of meat into its mouth, or holding onto females during what scientists suspect was a very vigorous mating routine. These ideas are favored because such actions required Barbie doll–like up-and-down motions of the arm, and fossil evidence indicates that the dino king was incapable of rotating or twisting its arms. “The T. rex probably couldn’t have done the arm-wrestling move,” Conrad says. “So maybe you could get him on a technicality.”—BJORN CAREY
What would happen if I ate a teaspoonful ofwhite dwarf star?Robert Schulzetenberg, via e-mail
“Everything about it would be bad,” says Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at Adler Planetarium in Chicago, beginning with your attempt to scoop it up. Despite the fact that white dwarfs are fairly common throughout the universe, the nearest is 8.6 light-years away. Let’s assume, though, that you’ve spent 8.6 years in your light-speed car and that the radiation and heat emanating from the star didn’t kill you on your approach. White dwarfs are extremely dense stars, and their surface gravity is about 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. “You’d have to get your sample—which would be very hard to carve out—without falling onto the star and getting flattened into a plasma,” Hammergren says. “And even then, the high pressure would cause the hydrogen atoms in your body to fuse into helium.” (This type of reaction, by the way, is what triggers a hydrogen bomb.)
Then you’d have to worry about confinement. Freeing the sample from its superdense, high-pressure home and bringing it to Earth’s relatively low-pressure environment would cause it to expand explosively without proper containment. But if it didn’t blow up in your face—or vaporize your face, since the stuff’s temperature ranges between 10,000˚ and 100,000˚F—and you somehow got it to your kitchen table, you’d be hard-pressed to feed yourself: A single teaspoon would weigh in excess of five tons. “You’d pop it into your mouth and it would fall unimpeded through your body, carve a channel through your gut, come out through your nether regions, and burrow a hole toward the center of the Earth,” Hammergren says. “The good news is that it’s not quite dense enough to have a strong enough gravitational field to rip you apart from the inside out.”
It probably wouldn’t be worth the trouble anyway, Hammergren laments. White dwarfs are mostly helium or carbon, so your teaspoonful would taste like a whiff of flavorless helium gas or a lick of coal. But if you’re desperate for a taste of star, you don’t really need to travel 8.6 light-years—your fridge is full of the stuff. Most of the elements that make up our bodies and everything around us were formed in the cores of stars and then belched out into the universe over billions of years. Basically everything you eat was once part of a star. Might we recommend some star fruit?—B.C.
And that leaves the agency trying to predict the future.
You don’t pick astronauts for today’s needs, Ross says. “You make your best guess about what’s going to be happening five years from now.” The class of 2009 is one of NASA’s smallest, and that’s a reflection of limited chances to fly in the future. Shuttle astronauts could expect to make several missions during their careers, but with a smaller vehicle, NASA will have fewer astronauts in space. Like many of the Apollo astronauts, the new recruits might make only one or two flights in their entire career.
So why become an astronaut at all? Astronaut recruit Kate Rubins [also a 2009 Brilliant 10 honoree; see page 57] has heard that question before. When she told her peers about her new career path, some of them questioned it, wondering why anyone would want to become an astronaut now. NASA’s future is so uncertain and everything in space seems to be in constant need of repair. Who wants to rocket 255 miles into space to fix a toilet? Aren’t you a tenure-track molecular biologist at MIT? Naturally, Rubins sees things differently. Through her eyes, NASA has an unprecedented
opportunity. Many experts consider the ISS a training ground for more-ambitious adventures in space, and now that the facility is nearly complete, NASA may soon be free to turn its resources toward the next big chapter in its history: manned exploration beyond the ISS. The agency is already building a new ship for the job, rocket technology has never been more affordable, thanks to epic strides made by the private space industry, and increasing environmental threats to the planet make human outposts in space sound more and more like wise investments.
Today’s astronauts may take fewer flights, but the ones they do take could make history. It’s possible that someone in the 2009 class will be the next to set foot on the moon, or the first woman to ever do so. Some of them could even become the first to visit an asteroid.
Now is the perfect time to start preparing them for the trip.
from a water bottle—which I did a lot of as a teenager, training five hours a day as a swimmer.
The overall takeaway is not soothing. “The core message is that we are all exposed to a wide array of chemicals in the environment, as you have been,” Trasande says. “And what little we know suggests cause for concern. And equally concerning is what we don’t know.”
As I spent days decoding spreadsheets, one uplifting fact became clear: I tested notably clear of the majority of pesticides, fungicides and metals that I would most likely ingest outdoors. In fact, with the exception of the dioxins and furans that I and the rest of the country picked up decades ago, I was probably exposed to most of the chemicals in my body indoors—which means more of this is under my control than I thought.
“It doesn’t take a lot of something released indoors to cause exposure,” says Kirk Smith, a professor of global environmental health at the University of California at Berkeley, who taught me the Rule of 1,000: Anything released indoors is about 1,000 times as likely to be inhaled as something released outdoors.
Over the next decade, as the cost of chemical-exposure testing continues to drop, it will probably become more widely available for consumers. But is it worth it? Not according to Trasande, who suggests lifestyle changes over testing. “I wouldn’t advise routine body-burden testing for people,” he says. It’s expensive and invasive, and so far there’s not much that can be done with the knowledge such testing produces. “It’s important to understand that right now, what people can do is proactively reduce their exposure.” That means changing
your lifestyle to avoid as many suspect chemicals as possible.
There is, however, only so much you or I can do. Approximately 1,000 new chemicals are added every year to the 85,000 already on the federal registry. As Jane Houlihan, the senior vice president for research at the nonprofit watchdog organization Environmental Working Group, testified in Congress last year, “Companies are free to use almost any ingredient they choose in personal-care products, with no proof of safety required.” Houlihan argues that the FDA should claim the authority to oversee cosmetic safety, by requiring registration and testing of products and ingredients, making public-health-injury reports mandatory, and enforcing safety requirements—which is the way the agency oversees pesticides and food additives.
There are movements afoot to reform the Toxic Substances Control Act to look more like European Union regulations, which allow the banning of families of chemicals. Most notable is the Kids-Safe Chemical Act, which would empower the EPA to require safety testing of baby products before their release.
Still, any attempt at regulation has to reckon with the fact that there’s no going back to a chemical-free world—we’re far beyond that point. “The presence of these industrial chemicals in your bloodstream or tissues is not normal,” McCally says. “Your grandfather didn’t have these.” He pauses to recalibrate. “It’s a consequence of the chemical environment that we live in, and it’s a new normal. We’re just trying to figure out what that is.”
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