Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2020 i Popular Science

NEXT TIME YOU FIRE UP A PlayStation or launch Fortnite, take a moment of reverence for the 1972 Atari classic, Pong. Those two digital paddles—more like moving line segments—and the dot bouncing between them kicked off the era of modern video gaming. Now, a version of that contest is back, in furniture form: The Pong Table is a 28-by-48-inch analog shrine to digital culture. Rather than joysticking onscreen paddles, players spin oversize dials to move physical clackers under the glass. Inside, a computer controls a series of motors and pulleys magnetically linked to the pieces on the surface. Choose a traditional two-person match, a contest against AI, or even watch the table battle itself. The digital scoreboard doubles as a clock when the game ends and the house champion reigns…

THE SNOW HASN’T STARTED YET THIS October evening in Boulder, Colorado, but the sharp wind and low clouds around Backcountry Pizza & Tap House foretell an early winter storm. Just before 6 p.m., Diane Fritz comes in from the cold, passing pinball machines and pool tables on her way to the back room. Setting down her bag, she takes off her down jacket and quickly orders an IPA before happy hour ends. “Lots of people probably won’t make it,” she says, guessing they’ll be reluctant to brave frozen roads. She shrugs and pulls out her Mac bearing a sticker that reads: “Map Porn.” Fritz works for Auraria Library in Denver, assisting people who want to incorporate spatial information into their research. If a student were doing a project about energy,…

Along a stretch of rural highway in the coastal plains of North Carolina sits an unusual forest. The viridian-green branches of loblolly pines rise 60 feet above a carpet of soft, tufted grasses, rippling slightly in the breeze. The trees are widely spaced, 20 to 30 feet apart, with their lower limbs removed, creating an airy, cathedral-like canopy speckled with sunlight filtering through the needles. The woodland has a strangely serene, primeval feel. A sudden wave of grunting reveals large black shapes moving in the distance. A pickup approaches, further breaking the reverie, and out hops a slender middle-aged man in a ball cap. “Buron Lanier,” he says, extending a hand. “Sorry I’m late. I was just finishing up with a calf.” The shapes, Lanier’s Red Angus cattle, amble over.…

As a sleep researcher, one of the most common questions I’m asked is how to get a better night’s rest. That’s a challenging inquiry to answer. Many of us in the field began studying the subject because we are so terrible at it in practice. And despite decades of study, we still don’t totally understand what sleep is—or why our ancestors first started doing it. All vertebrates alive today have a form of slumber. So do some invertebrates like fruit flies and sea slugs. You can trace restfulness back to single-celled organisms that split their time between periods of quiescence and bursts of activity. In some ways, sleep is just a state of inactivity. But there’s something unique about it that we haven’t figured out. Despite what our fitness trackers…

1. DESIGNED FOR SMIZING DANIEL LIEBERMAN, HUMAN EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGIST AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY The area that surrounds the iris—called the sclera—is tinted in most animals but bright white in humans. This allows us to see where others direct their gazes, enabling crucial silent communication like eye rolls and sideways glances. 2. A BREATH OF WARM AIR ARSLAN ZAIDI, EVOLU-TIONARY GENETICIST AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA Climate likely plays a role in how noses formed. Our schnozzes filter air to make it warm and moist for our lungs. Wider nostrils prevent overheating, while narrow nasal holes more easily moisturize frigid, dry air. Evolution had to strike a balance. 3. FROM FINS TO FINGERS TETSUYA NAKAMURA, EVOLUTIONARY DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGIST AT RUTGERS UNIVERSITY At some point in the course of animal evolution, small bones…

ILLUSIONS HAVE FASCINATED HUMANS FOR centuries. Before we fully understood the science of sensation and perception, philosophers like Aristotle simply observed the world—and picked up on some weird stuff. According to Vincent Hayward, who studies such phenomena at the Institute for Intelligent Systems and Robotics in Paris, these tricks occur when experience and context make you expect one feeling but perceive another due to abnormal circumstances. Here are three of Aristotle’s earliest observed illusions, explained by modern science. 1/Waterfall illusion While watching a moving river, Aristotle noticed that when he shifted his attention to stationary rocks, they wiggled upstream. Neurons that process motion tire after focusing on the same activity. When struck with a still object, cells that track movement in the opposite direction have a stronger impact in comparison,…

• What came first: the chicken or the egg? When it comes to making our cover, at least, the egg wins. Specifically, 15 wooden nesting dolls ranging in size from a tiny thimble to a Starbucks venti latte. Robin Finlay, the prop-styling half of photography duo The Voorhes, sanded and painted the pieces again and again until they’d appear as smooth as the real deal in front of the camera. Then, using a special laser, she emblazoned a lucky four (two big and two medium) with foul and eggs. Because the tool was designed for perfectly round cylinders and surfaces, she had to secure the eggs in a home-brewed vise fashioned from two sections of PVC pipe. To create the final image containing dozens of the oblongs, photographer Adam Voorhes…

1. Katie Belloff • The daughter of artistic, musical parents, Katie Belloff, PopSci’s art director, knew from an early age that she wanted to embrace her creative side. (She recalls marker-ink-stained hands as a child.) While in college, she fell in love with publishing, and experimented with screen printing and letterpress. She used the latter technique on page 26, employing wooden type to create distinctive headline text. Striving for a playful vibe, Belloff led the redesign of PopSci that debuts with the issue you’re holding; it has new fonts and a color palette that will change with each edition. She describes the result as “clean and fun.” 2. Gregory Reid • When he was 18, Gregory Reid wanted to be a doctor. But there was a problem: He didn’t like…

STONE WAS CUTTING-EDGE until about 10,000 years ago, when our ancestors discovered a better material from which to fashion their arrows and axes: copper. Archaeologists believe it was the first metal manipulated by human hands, and since then, it has enabled some of our greatest inventions. Now copper is the third-most-consumed metal in the world. These six technologies show how it helped shape our civilization over the millennia. Metallurgy The oldest metal object unearthed to date is a tiny 6th millennium BCE copper awl found in the Middle East. Because it’s commonly found as a pure metal instead of mixed in ores, copper was ideal for human’s invention of metallurgy, the process of smelting and casting metals. This enabled early civilizations to wield hardier axes and arrows. Bronze Copper is…

Lake Khövsgöl is about as far north of the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar as you can get without leaving the country. If you’re too impatient for the 13-hour bus ride, you can take a prop plane to the town of Murun, then drive for three hours on dirt roads to Khatgal, a tiny village nestled against the lake’s southern shore. The felt yurts that dot the surrounding green plains are a throwback to the days—not so long ago—when most Mongolians lived as subsistence herders. In July 2017, archaeogeneticist Christina Warinner headed there to learn about the population’s complex relationship with milk. In Khatgal, she found a cooperative called Blessed by Yak, where families within a few hours’ drive pooled the bounty from their cows, goats, sheep, and yaks to supply…

YOU’VE SEEN ENOUGH MUSEUM models, illustrations, and CGI predators that you’d likely recognize a Tyrannosaurus rex if you saw one. But how can you be sure? Nobody has ever clapped eyes on one in real life, and even the best skeletons are often only 90 percent complete. Specialists called paleoartists do base their re-creations on hard evidence (bones, feathers, and bits of skin) but, just as often, well-informed guesses. We may never know exactly how T. rex and other prehistoric creatures like the Microraptor gui looked, but here’s how we landed on the current incarnations of these deceased beasts. STANCE The way joints fit together informs a dino’s pose—along with a bit of inspiration from contemporary creatures. Without cartilage and other connective tissues, experts map extinct skeletons against how birds…

MATTHEW FLINDERS IS BARELY FORTY, but he looks seventy. His once dark hair gleams white, his already slight frame skeletal. As a captain in the British Royal Navy, he’s survived shipwreck, imprisonment, and scurvy, but this kidney infection will do him in. Facing death, he finishes writing a book that will change the world as Europeans know it. Flinders completed the first circumnavigation of the “Terra Australis Incognita,” or “Unknown South Land,” in 1803. A decade later, he compiles his writings, maps, charts, and drawings of the rugged coasts, extensive reefs, fertile slopes, unusual wildlife, and other features of the faraway continent that he suggests naming “Australia.” His wife places a copy of the freshly printed book, A Voyage to Terra Australis, in his hands as he lies unconscious in…

The T206 Honus Wagner baseball card is the ultimate find for collectors. It was part of a limited-edition series issued in tobacco packs between 1909 and 1911. Production of Wagner’s T206 reportedly stopped early, so it’s the rarest of the bunch. There are somewhere between 50 and 75 of them in the world—depending on who you ask—and 33 have come through our company for authentication and grading. When a card arrives at our office, we first make sure it’s real, then assess its condition on a scale of 1 to 10. Because copies have sold for millions at auction, the Wagner used to be a popular target for forgeries. These are easy to spot: Up close, modern printing patterns look much different than the old methods. It also helps to…

I’ve had a fascination with beer for a long time. I had my first one in Bavaria in 1961 when I was 16. It was legal there, but when I got back to New York, the drinking age was 18. One time, I wanted a pint so badly, I dressed in lederhosen, went to a nearby tavern, and pretended I was German. It worked—they actually served me. I began studying alcoholic beverages in the 1990s at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, where I now direct the Biomolecular Archaeology Project. My colleagues and I had been researching the design and engineering of ancient pottery, but inevitably we started to wonder what had been inside those jugs. Around that time, an archaeologist working in Iran brought us a roughly 5,500-year-old vessel with…

THIS CARVED ornament was fixed on a hunting tool more than 14,000 years ago, but the illusion remains. Concentrate on the higher eye-shaped notch on the left side, and a tusk curves below it, revealing a mammoth. Stare at the one lower down, and that pointed tooth becomes a bison’s horn as the beast bows its head. You might recall a similar 19th-century illustration: It’s a duck until the bird’s bill morphs into a pair of rabbit’s ears. The rabbit-duck is a type of illusion called an ambiguous figure, and while we can’t know the ancient carver’s intent, this prehistoric knickknack is one too. According to Kyle Mathewson, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Alberta, the flip-flopping happens because the mammoth and bison share the same basic outlines. Your…

HUMANS HAVE GOTTEN a lot done in 300,000 years: We invented agriculture, developed writing systems, built cities, created the internet, and shrugged off gravity to land on the moon. These innovations make our past seem long—and stuffed with significance. But in the brief history of life, everything we’ve ever accomplished fits into a tiny sliver of time—just 0.008 percent of the entire continuum shown below. This is how the rise of the animal kingdom stretches out compared with our relatively insignificant existence.…

PEACH COBBLER AND ballpark peanuts have something in common: They’re classic American dishes built on decidedly un-American crops. The state fruit of Georgia originated in China, while peanuts (just like “Irish” potatoes) hail from South America. These aren’t gastronomical exceptions either. From the heyday of the Silk Road to the Columbian Exchange, globalization has been bringing humans—and their stomachs—closer together for thousands of years. Here we trace some iconic foods back to their foreign homelands. Kung Pao chicken/chilis Tien tsin, or Chinese red pepper, is named for the port city of Tianjin. But chilis don’t originate in the People’s Republic. Though they’re a key ingredient in many classic dishes, such as the Sichuan staple known as Kung Pao chicken, the spicy plant is native to Mexico. Columbus introduced it to…

THE FISH IS NEARLY THRE FEET LONG, AND AS IT SWIMS unhurriedly past the viewing window in Lower Granite Dam, Theresa Wilson glances up from her knitting. “Chinook,” she says, tapping her computer keyboard once to record its passage. The salmon pauses as if to be admired. Its mottled scales flash as it moves against the current of the Snake River. Then it darts away, bound upstream to the place where it was born. Salmon and trout are anadromous: They hatch in rivers, spend their lives at sea, then return to their birthplaces to reproduce and die. Here on the Snake in eastern Washington, that means traversing four hydroelectric dams, an arduous undertaking few complete. The Lower Granite is the last barrier between this chinook and its spawning grounds. It…

A BLACK-AND-WHITE BOSTON TERRIER NAMED CHEVY, AS SLEEK AND DAPPER AS A SEAL IN A TUXEDO, TROTS CRISPLY INTO THE SOUNDPROOF TESTING ROOM. HIS JAUNTY CONFIDENCE WILL FADE QUICKLY AS A TEAM OF RESEARCHERS SUBJECTS HIM TO A SERIES OF PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIMENTS THAT WILL DAUNT, DISMAY, AND ULTIMATELY BAFFLE HIM. POOR CHEVY IS ABOUT TO BE GASLIT FOR THE SAKE OF SCIENCE. This spiffy little terrier is volunteer number one on day number one of an ambitious project launched by Harvard University evolutionary neuroscientist Erin Hecht to answer basic questions about what dogs do and why they do it. She plans to collect data on the psychology and behavior of hundreds of them across all breeds over many years: how easily they make friends, how well they behave, how they…

In 2007, I started a position at the urban entomology lab at the University of Florida. At the time, bedbugs were spreading around the United States—after a long period of quiescence—so a lot of research was focused on understanding and controlling the insects. Bedbugs are ancient critters with diets made up entirely of blood. Before they developed their taste for humans, they dwelled in caves and fed on bats. When our species moved into the caves, we became one of their main meal sources. Eventually we gave them a free ride to our more-modern residences. They’ve had millennia to get to know us. To become scientifically acquainted with them, we needed to collect the bugs in the field and recolonize them in the lab, where we could scrutinize their behaviors.…

GLANCE AT THE STAIRS ABOVE. Find the base…rather, spot the top. Upon closer examination, you’ll realize that there is no beginning or end. There’s no way that’s feasible, right? These familiar steps, called the Penrose stairs, are a type of “impossible object”—a construction that could not exist in reality even though its individual pieces look totally valid, says Erez Freud, a cognitive neuroscientist at York University in Toronto. The paradoxical item takes form when the brain attempts to turn a 2D image into a 3D object. From years of trusted experience, our noggins assume lines are always straight and corners precisely 90 degrees. But those facts can’t be true and still create this eternal four-way staircase. You can’t walk upstairs forever, especially in a loop. Normally, two regions in the…

HUMANS HAVE MEANDERED through mazes for thousands of years, whether they be ancient Egyptian labyrinths, a Minotaur’s lair, passageways carved in cornfields, or horrifying hedges in Stephen King’s The Shining. Each puzzle’s objective is simple: Navigate through winding corridors and dead ends to reach the finish—that could mean you emerge on the other side, or sit soundly at its center. In the maze on the right, three distinct routes, each originating from a different entryway, will guide you to the middle. Can you traverse them all?…