Popular Science August 2013

MY WIFE IS a former semipro athlete. She was a track-and-field star in high school and earned a place on the Stanford University team, eventually taking second in the Pac-10 championship in the heptathlon. She made it as far as the Olympic trials before retiring, at the age of 23, due to bad knees. But even in retirement, man, could she run. In the early days of our romance, I introduced her to Ultimate Frisbee, a fledgling sport in which a co-ed team of soccer and lacrosse refugees chase a disc around a field. Where the rest of us had two gears—jogging and running—my wife had something like four or five. She also had a 30-inch vertical. She could outleap anyone guarding her, hanging in the air with enough reserved…

We held a Facebook conversation with author Annalee Newitz, whose latest book, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, explains how to survive mass extinction: PopSci: Could wealthy people buy their way to safety? Annalee Newitz: The wealthy may have access to more resources that could allow them to survive in the short term. For example, if we were threatened by famine or pandemic, they would have access to food and health care that others wouldn't, or if there's a radiation disaster, they may be able to buy their way into underground facilities. But if there's an asteroid strike, a giant volcanic eruption, or gamma-ray bombardment from space? Nope. PS: Are there any lessons to be drawn from previous major extinctions on Earth? AN: One of the big lessons for us is most…

Almost a mile beneath Gran Sasso mountain in Italy sits the DarkSide detector. DarkSide, which started operating in May, is designed to capture the faint signals generated by dark matter, the elusive particles that scientists suspect are partially responsible for the gravitational pull of the universe. Despite an immense international effort, scientists have yet to observe dark matter because it doesn't frequently interact with standard matter. The subterranean DarkSide consists of two nested chambers: a 13-foot-diameter outer sphere surrounded by 100 quartz sensors that measure background radiation, and a liquid-argon-filled inner cylinder with 38 similar sensors poised to capture flashes of light, produced if a dark-matter particle collides with an argon nucleus.…

Frequency range 20hz-20khz Repurposed parts 60 percent Price $80 EVERY YEAR, we globally throw out up to 44 million tons of electronic garbage. Only a small fraction of it gets recycled, leaving landfills full of heavy metals, such as lead and mercury, that can bleed into the ground. To help slow the pileup—and inspire other companies to do the same—Urbanears, a Swedish headphones maker, is trying something new. Instead of tossing large stocks of unsold headphones, the company disassembles them and uses the ear cups, headbands, and hinges to create the Re:Plattan headphones. Each pair has brand-new guts, contains about 60 percent repurposed material, and, because the components vary in color, has its own unique look. After the initial, limited run of 3,000 Re:Plattans, designers will have to wait for…

1 The Chrome extension Silencer blocks spoilers from social networks by filtering out posts with words that could ruin a TV episode or sporting event. A user enters a keyword or chooses a list; for example, the Arrested Development list weeds out 38 trigger words. Silencer Free 2 The Rainshader is the toughest umbrella on the market. Because its 10 fiberglass ribs extend below a user's shoulders, the helmet-shaped umbrella is less likely to invert. In wind-tunnel tests, it withstood gusts up to 38 mph without blowing inside out. Hospitality Umbrellas Rainshader $33 3 Meet Arduino's first preassembled robot. The 7-by-4-inch wheeled robot has two microprocessors—one for the motor and one for the sensors—an LCD screen, a digital compass, and a handful of other inputs. Arduino Robot $265 4 With…

Last summer, the Environmental Protect ion Agency and the Department of Transportation threw down the gauntlet: They set a new standard that will require the average car to run at 54.5 miles per gallon—nearly double today's average—by 2025. Carmakers could reach that goal the easy way, making vehicles smaller and lighter but, at the same time, less powerful. Instead, several are getting there the hard way, building pint-size engines that squeeze out as many horses as their beefier predecessors. Consumers, especially those accustomed to luxury, often dismiss small engines as weak, noisy, and unreliable. But modifications like turbocharging and direct fuel injection allow more-precise fuel delivery and near-complete combustion, boosting an engine's horsepower even as it consumes less gas. And of course, burning less fuel reduces greenhouse emissions and saves…