THE LAST SHIP: Shell’s first (and only?

) floating LNG refinery

E LONG
NOW
W A C LO C K I N
U N TA I N W I L L
V E H I STO RY

LIFE: T RE THE
Is Earth’s MAKERS
just a re-r we still love
clockwork

Y
OX
C
SP E

P
M
SKIN TE

N
LI

I NS U
C

O
U
S

PE NT
RM

THE TI
LORDS
Who deci
what time

“Time Heals All Wounds”

Don't Fight Your Body Clock - Control It!

 astron gps solar.
the watch that keeps you on perfect time. worldwide.
Using just the power of light, Astron adjusts to any time zone on earth at the touch of a button.
With a precision of one second every 100,000 years, you will never be late again.

* If there are changes in the region / time zone, manual time zone selection may be required.

seiko.com.au
 ISSUE #106, SEP TEMBER 2017

EDITORIAL
Editor Anthony Fordham afordham@nextmedia.com.au
Contributors Gemma Conroy, Dan Lander, Daniel Wilks

DESIGN
Group Art Director Malcolm Campbell
Art Director Danny McGonigle Give Me Just
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Our ability to carve up time into tiny pieces and all agree which
Production Manager Peter Ryman
tiny piece it happens to be right now, keeps our civilisation
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US EDITION
Editor in Chief Joe Brown
Articles Editor Kevin Gray
Hours? Hours are great. Hours are really about the Dodge Challenger Demon ,
Managing Editor Jill C. Shomer
Senior Editor Sophie Bushwick
useful, because they help us know when which boasts that - in certain conditions
Technology Editor Xavier Harding exactly to turn up for work, when to - it is the fastest production car in the
Assistant Editors Dave Gershgorn, Matt Giles
Editorial Assistant Grennan Milliken knock off, when to pick up the kids from world for the 0-100km/h sprint.
Copy Chief Cindy Martin
Researchers Ambrose Martos, Erika Villani school, a thousand other things. And how much faster is it than, say,
a Porsche 918 Spider? About 0.3 of a
Editorial Intern Annabel Edwards
Minutes? Minutes are good, used
ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY
Acting Design Director Chris Mueller
properly. Minutes help us build transfer second. Seconds are stupid.
Photo Director Thomas Payne buffers between activities. It’s 1500h Yet seconds are probably our ultimate
Digital Associate Art Director Michael Moreno
Associate Art Director Russ Smith that marks the end of the day, but it’s future, when it comes to measuring
Acting Production Manager Paul Catalano
minutes that help us know when to time. All the other units are relative to
POPSCI.COM
Online Director Carl Franzen exactly start heading up to the school. Earth’s rotation and orbit, and some day
Senior Editor Paul Adams
Assistant Editors Sarah Fecht, Claire Maldarelli
But minutes can also make us crazy. some of us will live on other worlds, with
Contributing Writers Kelsey D. Atherton,
Mary Beth Griggs,Alexandra Ossola
It’s minutes that make people cram other orbits, and other day-lengths.
into an overcrowded train when there’s Even living on neighbouring Mars
BONNIER’S TECHNOLOGY GROUP
Group Editorial Director Anthony Licata another train coming right along will require colonists to celebrate two
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behind. Because they know they need different kinds of anniversary. The
BONNIER
Chairman Tomas Franzen
to get the 0847h to be at work at exactly standard - and irritatingly imprecise
Chief Executive Officer Eric Zinczenko 0900h. And that matters because - year of 365.2425 days-per-400-year-
Chief Content Officer David Ritchie
Chief Operating Officer Lisa Earlywine the boss can in turn use minutes to leap-cycle, and the 1.8-Julian-year
Senior Vice President, Digital Bruno Sousa
Vice President, Consumer Marketing John Reese determine that the employee is “late”. Martian year. Or is it the 668.5991
Seconds, now. Seconds are stupid. Oh, Martian-day (or Sol) year? Or what?
not for science of course. The second Yes, once we have a few colonies
is the only scientific unit of time, and up and running, someone will have to
Chief Executive Officer David Gardiner it’s vital - or rather, tiny fractions of a tackle the problem of universal time.
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second are vital - for doing science. Today, the second normally only gets
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For everyday life though? Seconds divided into little bits. In the future, it
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are what make people risk their lives Worst of all, we’ll probably have
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We value the integrity of your personal information. If you provide personal traffic on the highway. into putting every single one of those
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P O P S C I .CO M . AU 3
 SEPTEMBER 2017

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

38 The Clock
That Runs
The Inner You
We are all slaves to
our inner timekeeper,
yet few of us give
our invisible master
proper respect. Yet
defying our body
clocks isn’t an act of
liberation, it’s a fate
worse than death.

04 POPULAR SCIENCE
10 16

State of the Art

Your guide to everything
18 22 06 The Clock of the Long Now
08 What’s on your bedside table?
10 Obsessed returns!
12 A Demonic drive
14 Tools for treasure-hunters
16 Slow mo cameras...
17 ...and high speed cameras too!

Insight
Important stuff for futurists

28
18 Oversight: The biggest ship
22 Another brief history of time
24 Stars can be so retro
25 Can AIs learn social skills?
26 Do you dig time metaphors?
27 How long you do stuff and when
28 Time as perceived by an acorn
30 Op Ed: The LP
32 Op Ed: Rethink
34 Op Ed: amuse.bouche

Features
Many many words

60 46 Fighting over the “when” of life

54 Who to blame for what time it is
60 Blessed are the watchmakers

How 2.0
Made for you, by you

70 You built a Dalek?!

73 Sleep your way to Mars
74 Please invent...
76 The little big robot arm

The Other Stuff

Bonus Extra Material!

03 Our Editor Rants

78 From the Archives
80 Retro Invention
82 Next Issue

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 05
6
State
Marking Time...
POPULAR SCIENCE
of the All of Time
Art by ANTHONY FORDHAM
HUMAN LIVES ARE TOO SHORT TO
bother with really long-term planning, yet
also long enough to suffer from earlier
generation’s lack of foresight. The Long Now
Foundation wants to fix this problem.
Started in San Francisco in 1996, the Long
Now Foundation has a mission that’s fairly
easy to explain: it wants humans to think
about not the next decade, century or even
millennium. It wants us to consider a future as
far out as 10,000 years.
To do that, it’s using a $42 million donation
from Jeff Bezos to build a huge “Clock of the
Long Now” deep inside a Texas mountain (the
picture below is a small-scale prototype).
The unusual face doesn’t bother with hours
Drive rewind
spirals
or minutes. Instead, it shows the sidereal day
(the amount of time it takes the planet to
rotate, relative to the stars, not the sun), and
the precession of the zodiac.
Then there’s a display for the position of the
Sun and Moon, as well as the Moon’s phase.
And around the edge is the current Gregorian
year - except shown in a five-digital format.
So right now, the year is 02017.
Rarther than use solar panels or even
a “radioactive slug”, the clock will regular
human winding. This will ensure the clock
remains a relevant cultural object. However,
even if it is abandoned for long stretches, it
keeps time using changes in temperature
between day and night on the mountain.
As for accuracy, because nature is messy,
there’s no ideal system for measuring time. So
the Clock is built to a “phase locked loop” which
is reliable, but will also need regular resets.
An ingenious oscillator uses a metal strip
that buckles as the sun heats it up. The
buckling resets the clock to noon - and the
strip is positioned such that the sun only hits it
when it is directly overhead, at noon.
Right now the Clock is under construction.
But the Foundation’s ambition is anything
by modest. Quite simply, it wants the Clock
of the Long Now (a name coined by musician
Brian Eno) to become as important an
American cultural icon as Mount Rushmore.
Give it time.
Speed governor
Dial
- Five digit year
- Horizons
- Sun
- Moon
- Stars
 Equation of
time cam Normal clock dial

Binary mechanical
computer

Drive weights

Torsional pendulum
 3

PROP STYLING BY WENDY SCHAH FOR HALLEY RESOURCES / PHOTOGRAPH BY JONATHON KAMBOURIS
WHEN WE THINK OF TIME TRAVEL WE PICTURE SOMETHING
out of an H.G. Wells novel, but in a way, your bed is a time machine.
Beside Yourself Lay down,close your eyes, and wake up in the future. Unfortunately,
State At NIght the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that at
of the least 50 million adults in the U.S. have trouble getting shut-eye. This
gathering of gadgets can’t cure a full-fledged sleep disorder, but it
Art by MALLORY JOHNS
will appeal to your five senses and make it easier to drift peacefully

SMELL SOUND SIGHT TASTE TOUCH

1. Essential oils aren’t 2. Looping white noise 3. Switching between 4. For centuries, 5. Under Armour’s
a bedtime panacea, from an app or digital machine-fed light of purveyors of Ayurvedic Performance
but it’s easier to rest in sound machine can be our devices and total medicine have praised Pajamas feel like a
a room that smells inconsistent and darkness can confuse various spices for mixture of silk
more like peppermint, annoying. The Marpac our brains about the general relaxation. jammies and athletic
lemon, or cedarwood Dohm, however, time of day. The Philips Yogi’s Bedtime Tea gear. A bioceramic
than your dirty gym uses a two-speed Wake-Up Light contains two: coating reflects far
clothes. The Homedics asymmetrical fan to changes colour and cardamom and infrared rays from
Ellia Aspire Ultrasonic generate constant, brightness to simulate cinnamon. Chamomile body heat back to the
Diffuser uses a rapidly soothing sound. The natural sunrise and in the mix adds skin, which preliminary
vibrating transducer pitch and volume are sunset. Its LED shifts apigenin, a flavonoid, studies show might
to transform and adjustable up to among yellow, red, and which binds to help muscle recovery.
disperse a water- 75 decibels to drown orange to aid benzodiazepine brain The science isn’t
and-oil mix into a cool, out street noise or a transitions into and receptors to help settled, but the PJs
fragrant mist. snoring partner. out of sleep. chill you out. sure are cosy.

8 POPULAR SCIENCE
 3

State
of the
Art
Obsessed
Each month, hundreds (if not thousands)
of tasty nuggets of tech hit the market.
Here are 10 that pass the PopSci pub-test.
by DAN L ANDER

4
2

1
10

1 2
Porsche 911
Bluetooth Speakers
€499
www.porsche-design.com
Inspired by the famous
twin-exhaust of the Porsche
911 (a $12,000 option -
kidding!), these speakers are
all about full-throttle sound.
And like the 911, they punch
above their weight, with a
claimed 60-watts. They’re
not cheap, but then, “cheap”
isn’t really what Porsche is
all about, is it?
Azio Retro
Classic Keyboard
US$120
www.aziocorp.com
Keyboards are too practical.
Too usable. Here’s some
relief: a leather and zinc
alloy classic typewriter
design, with round key caps,
and adjustable pillar feet.
Since this is 2017, there’s full
backlighting of course, and
the Bluetooth version has
swappable keys to make it
Mac or Windows specific.
3 4
Avionics V1
Electric Bike
$TBA
www.avionics.bike
Only the prototype of this
super-stylish electric
pushbike exists at the
moment - but 80 hand-
made units will follow. A
5kW motor delivers a top
speed of 58km/h and a 120
kilometre range from a
3-hour charge. That should
make the V1 as easy to ride
as it is to look at.
ORII
Smart Ring
$TBA
www.orii.io
Want the convenience of a
Bluetooth earpiece without
the wankery of sticking it on
your ear? The ORII Smart
Ring is an earpiece you wear
on your finger. Simply touch
a fingertip to the side of the
head (as per the instruc-
tions), and bone-conduction
provides tinny - or should
that be boney? - sound.
5
Mighty Spotify
Player
US$85.99
www. bemighty.com
Want to take Spotify with
you, but don’t want to listen
to it via your phone for some
reason? The Mighty Player
allows offline storage of up
to 1000 songs, but has no
built-in speaker, so BYO
Bluetooth. So why bother?
Because it’s cheap,
shock-proof and water-re-
sistant, unlike many phones.

10 POPULAR SCIENCE

6 7
Radio Flyer
Landspeeder
US$499
www. landspeeder.
radioflyer.com
Forget the iconic red wagon.
Luke’s X-34 glides again as a
12-volt extravaganza with
two speeds (low gear hits
3km/h, high 8km/h) and
reverse. It carries two kids,
and a max payload of
60kgs, which sadly means
most of us will have to
watch on with envy.
Tertill Weeding
Robot
US$299
www.franklinrobotics.com
From the folks who brought
you the Roomba, Tertill is a
solar-powered weeder-bot
that roams the veggie
patch. With its array of
(hopefully accurate)
sensors, the Tertill detects
weeds just as they are
sprouting, then cuts them
off to ground level with a
miniature line-trimmer.
5
8 9
Sony Digital
Paper Notepad
US$699
www.sony.com
It’s underrate e-readers may
be gone, but Sony isn’t
giving up on e-paper. This
second incarnation of its
Digital Paper tablet aims to
deliver a “realistic writing
experience”, on a flexible
13-inch surface. There’s only
16GB of storage, but in true
e-paper style, it goes three
weeks on a charge.
Workhorse
Surefly
US$200,000
www. workhorse.com
Remember flying cars? You
know, VTOLs, from like three
issues ago? Here’s another
one. Powered by a hybrid
petrol-electric motor – com-
plete with a backup battery
for emergencies – the
Surefly seats two rich
people, has a top speed of
100km/h and an operating
ceiling of 1,200 metres.
6
10
Fluid Audio
Strum Buddy
US$79
www.fluidaudio.net
The true spirit of Rock &
Roll(TM) demands ear-
splitting gain, but that’s not
always... convenient. The
Strum Buddy is the perfect
solution for guitarists after
curfew. It’s a teeny
four-watt portable amp,
with built-in effects and a
suction cup. Mount it right
to the guitar and rock out.
P O P S C I .CO M . AU 11
 IT TAKES ONLY 2.3 SECONDS FOR THE DODGE CHALLENGER SRT DEMON
to reach 100 kilometres per hour. Maybe the Porsche 918 Spider is faster, maybe,
Gone in but it costs $1.07 million (and is sold out) while the Demon is just $113,000. This
State 2.3 seconds mad muscle car is cheap because unlike Tesla’s EVs, or the turbo-hybrid hyper-
of the cars from the likes of Koenigsegg, McLaren or even Ferrari, the Demon eschews
high-tech for simple, excessive amounts of raw power to do its party trick (and
Art by STAN HORACZEK
its top speed of 270 is hardly worth mentioning). Here’s how this brick flies.

626 1043 100+ 320

KILOWATTS
In drag mode, a
transmission-locking
system allows the
driver to rev the
Demon’s super-
charged V8 up to
2,350 rpm without the
car creeping forward,
making for greater
torque at go time.
NEWTON METRES
The car generates
enough torque to pop
a wheelie when it
launches, lifting its
front tyres a record
880 mm off the
ground and subjecting
the driver to as much
as 1.8 g of force. Keep
your head back!
OCTANE
Racing fuel packs
more power, allowing
the Demon to unleash
more killer wasps and
drive faster. Going
high-octane requires
a powertrain-control
module, part of a
package called the
Demon Crate.
MILLIMETRES
To maximise grip, the
Demon’s Nitto racing
tyres are made from a
soft, road-grabbing
rubber designed
specifically for the car.
Each one is extremely
wide: even a Nissan
GT-R’s rear tyres are
only 285mm .

HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO HIT 100 KM/H?

2018
Dodge Demon 2.3

2017 Porsche
3.2
COURTESY DODGE

911 GT3
1974 Dodge
Challenger 9.5

2017 Ford
Transit Connect 10.1

SEC OND S 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

12 POPULAR SCIENCE
 ‘A whirlwind
tour through the
history and the future of
AI – and why it matters to
all of us. A must-read.’

Sebastian
Thrun, CEO of
Udacity, a Google
Fellow and VP, and a
Research Professor
at Stanford
University.
 HEAVY METAL TREASURE HUNTING ISN’T ABOUT THE CHANCE OF STRIKING
proverbial gold, but that you never know what historical holdovers
Digging Up The Past the ground will produce (and anyway, you need a special kind of metal
detector to find gold). At the right local spot—an abandoned mine or
by ROB VERGER remote beach—these tools will allow you to burrow back in time.

1
Search the area
First, you need a
metal detector. The
Teknetics Patriot
can spot booty up
to 300mm under-
ground, and its
display will estimate 1
the object’s depth
and material. Audible
beeps let you know
ta te
when metal distorts
the electromagnetic S the
field generated by
the 500-mm head. of Art
2
Dig a tidy hole 2
A trowel is vital
for small digs, but
if you need to bust
through roots or dirt,
the serrated edges
of the metre-long
Ground Hawg

THIS AND PREVIOUS PAGE: PROP STYLING BY WENDY SCHELAH FOR HALLEY RESOURCES / PHOTOGRAPH BY JONATHON KAMBOURIS
Shovel will help you
cut. Four jabs with
the 200-mm blade
will create a cube-
shaped plug of earth 4
that’s easy to remove
- and replace.

3
Be more
aggressive
Rocky terrain requires
a hardcore tool,
like the Garrett
Retriever II Pick. This
steel pickaxe features
a flat blade for mov-
ing earth and a point
for cutting. Bonus: A
rare-earth magnet
in the head will
grab metal objects
underwater. The
medallion is saved!

4
Get accuracy
3
Once you start dig-
ging, use the Minelab
Pro-Find 35 to search
the hole. The probe
creates a 360-degree
electromagnetic field
with adjustable
power. It senses
when loot is within
grasp. Haptic and
audio alerts intensify
as you get closer to
(what probably isn’t
really) treasure.

14 POPULAR SCIENCE
 TIME > WORLD

Slow and VIDEO RUNNING AT THE SPEED OF MOLASSES REVEALS HIDDEN

movements our feeble peepers can’t typically see. While most footage is
Steady filmed at 30-60 frames per second, the high-speed cameras below can
capture hundreds or thousands. When played back at a normal rate, the
by STAN HORACZEK movies stretch out time, creating cinematic magic.

SLOW

GoPro Hero5 Black

Like a top-end smartphone, this
action camera can record footage
at 240 fps, or eight times slower
than real life. Unlike your
smartphone, however, it can
plunge up to 10 m underwater and
survive sky-high drops, so it can go
where the action is. Try filming the
mesmerizing-but-gross undula-
tions of a dog’s tongue as it drinks
from a bowl of water.

SLOWER

Sony RX100 Mark V

Moments shot at this camera’s
1,000 fps top speed produce
hypnotising films. Those speeds
require plentiful light, so the Sony’s
lens has an extra-wide aperture to
let in oodles of photons. One
second of filming time becomes 33

PROP STYLING BY WENDY SCHELAH FOR HALLEY RESOURCES / PHOTOGRAPHS BY JONATHON KAMBOURIS
seconds of playback.

SLOWEST

Phantom VEO 710

This pro camera can take a second
and stretch it into five minutes of
th te

high-def footage, mostly used in

research scenarios, like analysing
Ar e
of ta

the results of a crash-safety test.

t
S

With the resolution cut to the

lowest setting, the sensor can grab
an extraordinary million frames per
second, making one second last
more than nine hours.

16 POPULAR SCIENCE
 2

Fast and
State Furious
of the
Art by STAN HORACZEK

1
A SINGLE IMAGE CAN CAPTURE
a discrete (and discreet) moment,
but stringing dozens or hundreds
together into a time-lapse can tell an
hours-long story in one spectacular
sequence. Start with something
simple, like tracing a flower’s bloom
over the course of a morning, and,
with a little practice, you’ll be able to
catch more complex and captivating
motion, perhaps even an entire season
of growth. Here’s what you need to
fast-forward time like a pro.

1
Camera
The 24.2-megapixel sensor on Nikon’s
D5600 DSLR is large enough to
capture spectacular night skies that
won’t be overwhelmed by ugly pixel
noise, and the included zoom lens is
ideal for covering landscapes.

2
Control
The Pulse Camera Remote sits atop
your camera and communicates via
Bluetooth with a phone app. Use it
to dial in detailed commands, like the
interval between each shot and the
PROP STYLING BY WENDY SCHELAH FOR HALLEY RESOURCES; SEBASTIEN GABORIT/GETTY IMAGES

time frame you want to shoot.

3 3
Rotating Mount
Add an extra layer of motion to your
time-lapse videos with the Syrp
Genie Mini, a motorised turntable
that rotates the camera as it’s shoot-
ing. It’ll make even a static scene, like
a cityscape, look more dramatic.

4
Tripod
Few things ruin a well-shot sequence
quicker than a wobbly camera. The
aluminium MeFoto RoadTrip Classic
weighs just 1.6 kilos, yet supports
more than 330 kg of gear, making it
burly enough for your whole rig.
4

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 17
 Oversight

SUPERSTRUCTURES

If You Need A
Bigger Boat,
Build One
by ANTHONY FORDHAM

THE REASON ROYAL DUTCH SHELL

spent over $12 billion on Prelude - the world’s
second, but largest, floating liquefied natural
gas processor (FLNG) - was to speed up
extraction from offshore gas fields. Although,
when you’re talking 488 metres and 600,000
tonnes of displacement, “speed up” becomes
a relative term.
Construction began on Prelude way back in
2012, and the hull was launched in December
2013. The construction consortium - which
includes Samsung - then spent the next four
years building Prelude’s superstructure and
complex gas liquefaction equipment. The
huge construct (‘ship’ just doesn’t seem a big
enough word) finally left Korea in June 2017,
and arrived off the cost of Broome in July.
Now all that remains is to secure Prelude
to each of its 16 pre-prepared mooring
chains, boot up all the systems, and the
s ic gas will flow!
Again though, since this is such a huge
platform, the start up process will actually
take somewhere between nine and 12
months, and will employ, at least temporarily,
over 600 people.
Over the last decade, Shell has been
repositioning itself as a lots-of-different-
resources company, with a big focus on gas.
Which makes sense, because no matter
the outcome of the renewable energy debate,
natural gas will remain a huge part of the
world’s energy economy. And rather than
pepper our offshore waters with dozens of rigs
that will work for a set period of time and then
be shut down, Prelude can simply... well, not
simply, it will take months, but still... sail away
to the next gas field.

18 POPULAR SCIENCE
FLNG FIFO
Since it will take more than 650 workers to get Prelude up and running, not even
four daily helicopter flight from Broome will be enough to keep shifts filled. So
Shell has engaged the services of POSH and its “floatel” (their word, not ours)
vessel the, and we swear we’re not making this up, POSH Arcadia.
At 142m long(including helideck), is massive in itself, and it takes a hyper-ship
like Prelude to dwarf it. The Arcadia, and its sister-ship POSH Xanadu, have 390
cabins each, a gym, cinema, “sports room”, internet lounge, library and a full
equipped hospital “in compliance with offshore standards.”

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 19
RANSOMWARE
DOESN’T STAND
A CHANCE!
With ESET you‘ll have peace of mind knowing
you’re protected with award-winning
Internet Security and Antivrus software.

ESET puts a stop to hacking, viruses &

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before they can cause any harm.

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 ISSUE SEPTEMBER
106 2017

22 24 25 26 27 28
ANOTHER WHY STARS CAN ROBOTS EVER THE MANY WHAT ARE YOU TIME FLOWS
BRIEF HISTORY ARE BEHIND BE SYMPATHETIC METAPHORS DOING WITH ALL AT THE SPEED
OF TIME THE TIMES BAR TENDERS? OF TIME THAT TIME? OF YOUR LIFE
 TOCK TICKER OVER MILLENNIA, HUMANKIND’S TIME-TRACKING HAS GROWN INCREASINGLY
precise. Sundials divided days into hours. Clocks broke hours into quarters and minutes,
A Brief History and finally minutes into seconds. As timepieces evolved, so did scientists’ need for
ever-more-exact tickers. They developed devices that relied not on Earth’s wobbly rotation,
of Time(Keeping) but on microscopic atomic movements. At the heart of it all is an ever-advancing appreciation
for the only scientific unit of time, the second. Modern systems like GPS and cellphones rely
by KELSEY ATHERTON on keeping this interval consistent, which makes defining and refining it, well, of the essence.

THE
S TA R T 18000–8000 BCE 3500 BCE
OF TIME
Earthen Calendars Shadow Clocks
A hash-marked bone found in Humans cut days into smaller
the Semliki Valley in the units by tracking the sun with
Democratic Republic of the shadow-casting obelisks and
Congo might be the earliest rods. Nearly 2,000 years later,
human attempt to count the Egyptians refined that
days. Ten thousand years method into the earliest
later, in what’s now Scotland, known sundial. Babylonian,
humans dug moon-shaped Greek, Chinese, and Meso-
pits to track the lunar cycle. american versions followed.

1267 CE 725 CE

Seconds, Refined Mechanisation

By the 13th century, the The first known mechanical
equinox was 11 days out of clock was invented by Chinese
sync with the Julian calendar. monk Yi Xing and scholar
To rectify the error, English Liang Lingzan. As water
philosopher Roger Bacon used flowed onto and turned a
the slivers on Ptolemy’s wheel, a system of rods and
subdivided globe as units of levers marked the time with a
time. Now one second meant drumbeat every quarter and a
1/86,400 of a solar day. bell every full hour.

1430 CE 1656 CE

Spring Drive Pendulum Power

A 15th-century French duke As springs unwound, they
may have owned the first became inaccurate, causing
clock to drive its gears with a problems for precision-craving
spring instead of water or astronomers like Galileo. So
SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/GETTY IMAGES / ILLUSTRATIONS BY POLLY BECKER

weights. The design allowed 17th-century Dutch scientist

for compact timepieces like Christiaan Huygens built a
pocket watches, and boosted pendulum clock. Its metre-
accuracy. Later versions only long swinging weight lost only
dropped four minutes a day. one minute per day.

2017 2001 CE 1967 CE

Optical Future Seconds, Redefined

Visible light, which lets us Atomic clocks made a
detect faster vibrations than more-precise second possible,
microwaves do, led to optical though it took nearly two
clocks that err just a second decades for researchers to
every 140 million years. Too agree on a standard. Finally,
fragile to run longer than a they matched a second to the
few days, these tickers could precise frequency of energy a
eventually cause a redefinition caesium atom releases when
of the second. Again. its electrons jump.

22 POPULAR SCIENCE
“ A CONTINUOUS
MORE AND MOR
TIMEKEEPING MA
—POPUL

1500 BCE

Hours After D
By slowly flowing wa
one vessel into anot
measuring the liquid
against marked inte
Egyptians could see
much time had pass
without using sunlig
methods relied on sa
incense, or marked c

150 CE

Seconds, Defin
To help astronomers
stars, Egyptian mat
cian Ptolemy mappe
onto a globe. He div
degree of longitude
total) into 60 segme
minutes, and each o
into a further 60 s
divisions: seconds.

1927 CE

Quartzer Hou
Gravity can slow pen
but researchers at B
Laboratories found
electrified quartz cr
vibrates more consis
Quartz hit the big tim
when Seiko released
edition of its Astron
model that today us

1949 CE

Atomic Age
Atoms resonate eve
reliably than quartz
microwaves to track
oscillations, the Nat
Bureau of Standard
timer accurate to on
in eight months. Tod
advanced cesium cl
second per 300 mill
 PERSPECTIVES WHEN WE LOOK AT STARS IN THE NIGHT SKY, WE’RE
actually looking back in time. Since it takes a while
Staring Into for light to cross the vast emptiness of the universe—
Earth’s Past even at a blistering 186,000 miles per second—we’re
seeing each celestial object as it looked eons ago.
Insight But what if those stars looked back at our pale-blue
by SARAH FECHT dot? Here’s what the astral observers would see.

1
Trappist-1
a potentially habitable
2
Betelgeuse
a star in the
3
Andromeda
Earth’s nearest
4
SN2009
a supernova in
5
MACS J0416
a galaxy cluster
6
GN-z11
the most distant
seven-planet system Orion constellation neighboring galaxy galaxy NGC 4487 far, far away galaxy we know of

DISTANCE: DISTANCE: DISTANCE: DISTANCE: DISTANCE: DISTANCE:

39 light-years 642 light-years 2.5 million light-years 70 million light-years 4.5 billion light-years 13.4 billion light-years

WHATS GOING ON: WHATS GOING ON: WHATS GOING ON: WHATS GOING ON: WHATS GOING ON: WHATS GOING ON:
Sweden becomes Medieval Europe is Our ancient ancestors Tyrannosaurus rex A Mars-size rock Just a few million
the first nation to still bringing out its learn to wield tools. stalks North America, slams into Earth years after the Big
ban aerosol sprays dead from the worst Homo habilis most crunching prey in (probably), creating Bang, Earth’s
(over concerns years of the plague; likely butchers his its metre-long jaws, the moon and nearly neighbourhood
that they damage smaller outbreaks meals with sharp and possibly sporting destroying our planet. consists mostly of
the ozone layer). continue to ravage the stone flakes. He also feathers (sunglasses Fortunately, since the emptiness. What little
Meanwhile, the rest population. Britain sports humanlike feet, not included). Small, first cellular sacs gas and dust there is
of us boogie and France play a indicating that he shrewlike mammals won’t crawl out of the won’t clump together
to disco, in vitro bloody game of walks on two legs, start thriving in the proverbial mud for into our sun and
fertilisation produces thrones in the Hundred and has a bigger brain relatively warm a billion more years, planet for another
its first human baby, Years’ War… because than his predecessors. climate, just waiting no life-forms are 9 billion years. Enjoy
and Space Invaders the Black Death He will employ both to for their turn to rule harmed in the making the peace and quiet
invades arcades. wasn’t deadly enough. create disco. the planet. of this satellite. while it lasts.

CLOSEST STAR FARTHEST STAR

1 2 3 4 5 6

ILLUSTRATION BY WESLEY MERRITT

24 POPULAR SCIENCE
 BOT TO THE FUTURE A GUY WALKS INTO A BAR. THE ROBOT BARTENDER ASKS,
“What’ll it be?” But when does the bot greet him? As soon as the man
Teach AI walks in? After he’s browsed the taps? A machine with no sense of social

When to
graces would not know the answer. That is, unless you taught it the deli-
cate art of timing. According to Oregon State robotics professor Heather
Insight Say Hi Knight, robots must understand how humans perceive time in order to
build relationships with us. To teach them, Knight helps robots read our
cues. For instance, a drinker in a hurry will take a direct, not a meander-
ing, route to the barstool. But unpacking human body language is
by CASSIDY MAYEDA only part of what a would-be bionic barkeep might have to process.

How might a
drink-slinging
DRINK SERVER
AI serve and We imagined this robot’s
entertain us? process by combining two
areas of Heather Knight’s
AI research: observing
human motion to see
how we process time,
and developing
comic cadence.

Acustomerenters

Analyse customer
WANDERING DIRECT
motion path

Part of SOMEWHERE Where are

a group? NO they looking? AT YOU
ELSE

YES Looking at
NO Analyse facial On a Bluetooth
phone?
expression phone call?

Are they
dancing? ANIMATED BLANK
YES YES NO

“Hard day
YES NO Have they had NO at work?”
a drink yet?
Make the
Do jerk wait!
YES
the
robot “Anything good
on Instagram?” NO

“Bitcoin for your

ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN KUEHN

NO YES thoughts?” CHUCKLE

Let them show

you animal photos
Taking TEARS Cut them off,
selfies? ping a self-
driving taxi Serve a drink
YES Photobomb!

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 25
 DIFFERENT STROKES FORGET THE GEARS OF A WATCH. THOSE COLLECTIONS
of cogs and springs might help us track the passing hours, but
Which Way the way we visualise time is far more nuanced. “Time is abstract. It

to Tomorrow?
can’t be tall or short or big or small,” says Emanuel Bylund,
a linguist at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Time itself
Insight might be universal, but cultures worldwide use all kinds of
metaphors and mannerisms to imagine the fourthdimension —and
by MARY BETH GRIGGS not everyone crams it into the same spatial constraints.

Write Way, Clock It’s All Uphill Your Future

Write Time
To understand this page, you need
to read from left to right. That’s
how the Greeks set up their alpha-
bet, one of the precursors to our
own. But in written Arabic, words
Half-Full
Swedish days are “long,” but
Spanish ones can be “full.” These
metaphors help us see time, but
they can also mess with our heads a
little. In one experiment, people
from Here
Location isn’t just a buzzword for
real estate agents; terrain can
contour speech. Papua New
Guinea’s hilly landscape has helped
shape the indigenous Yupno
Is Behind You
Time seems to come at us head-on:
the future in front, the past behind.
Not so for the Aymara people of the
Andes. Because the past is what
they have experienced, it lies ahead,
ILLUSTRATION BY MARCO GORAN ROMANO

flow in the opposite direction, and
in Chinese, characters run top to
bottom. Researchers have found
that the direction of your writing
determines how you orient the
arrow of time. When asked to
organise events in a line from
earliest to latest, English readers
arranged them left to right, Arabic
right to left, and Chinese top to
bottom. People without writing
systems, like Papua New Guinea’s
Yupno, had a free-form approach.
watched a short line grow on a
screen for three seconds, followed
by a longer line over the same
duration. The lengthier line tricked
Swedish subjects into thinking extra
time had elapsed. The same thing
happened when Spanish-
speakers watched a cylinder fill up:
To them, a fuller cylinder meant
more time had passed. They had no
trouble with the line experiment,
and vice versa for the Swedes.
Words really do matter.
people’s perception of time. To
them, the future is uphill and the
past down. Cognitive scientist
Rafael Núñez from the University of
California, San Diego says that,
while rare today, other geography-
based time systems may have
existed once, based on features like
plains or waterways. But migration
to different lands—and landscapes
—likely erased their usefulness.
“Perhaps this is not a system that
travels well,” Núñez says.
where they can see it. The future
remains hidden, so it is behind them.
That’s because visual evidence is
particularly important to the
Aymara. Their grammar, for
instance, indicates whether you
personally saw Joe go to the store
(-vna), or learned he was going
there (-tayna). You’d also use -tayna
if you saw Joe leaving while you
were drunk, so your eyesight can’t
be trusted. This emphasis on vision
frames their view of time.

26 POPULAR SCIENCE
 15-19
44m00s
GROOMING
Gotta look good for
all those hot dates
you’re going on.
20-24

25-34
1h 00m
EATING
Savour it all before
your metabolism
slows down.
Insight

13m 48s
35-44

CHAUFFERING
Because the kids
can’t drive themselves
45-54 to Westfield.

55-64 3h 13m
WATCHING TV
Binge-watch all the
shows you missed
while raising kids.

65-74

75+
23m 24s
GARDENING
Retirement finally lets
you focus on the lawn
and veggie plot.

TIME Working Learning At Leisure Housework Eating/Drinking Travelling Grooming

SPENT Helping Shopping Exercising Religion Volunteering On the Phone

ILLUSTRATION BY SARA CHODOSH

MIND YOUR TIME BREATHTAKING MOMENTS MIGHT LINGER IN YOUR MEMORY, BUT THEY’RE NOT
what make up a life. It’s the minutes spent cleaning the toilet and choosing a
Where Does not-too-hard avocado that add up. We spend most of our time zoning out or
the Day Go? fussing about the lines at the grocery store, then wonder where the day went.
Here’s how you’re most likely spending your waking hours at different stages of
by SARA CHODOSH your life—and where you can pause to savor them for the lifetime they really are.

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 27
28
0.53%
Insight

POPULAR SCIENCE
0.50%
LIFETIMES
0.5%
Fractions of a
Life, Compared
How Long Is aYear? 3 ONT TO
TO A CHILD, A YEAR CAN FEEL LIKE AN ETERNITY. BUT TO THAT
kiddo’s grandparents, it passes in a flash. The same is true for the oldest flora and
fauna on the planet. As things age, each trip around the sun becomes an
ever-shrinking percentage of a vast lifetime. Take 38-year-old Creme Puff (RIP),
the oldest known house cat: 365 days was only 2.6 per cent of her yarn-chasing
0.4%
journey through existence. That might not seem like a lot to, say, the Grand
Canyon (if it could think, that is), but, as this graph shows, it’s all relative.

Ming the Clam

The growth bands in 1 Y AR O A
a quahog’s shell can GIAN TO TOISE
reveal how old it is. I I E
1,0 S TO
A SS
0.3%

0.26% Deep-Sea Needle

The makeup of a glass
sponge’s long, rod-shaped
silica skeleton encodes its age.

5 MINUTES TO
0.20% A HOUSEFLY
IS K
0.2% Y
I E
Great Green Gobs
This flowering plant,
found in South America
at high altitudes, grows

O N E Y E A R A S A P E R C E N TA G E O F A L I F E S PA N
only 10 mm each year.
 0.1%

1 YEAR TO A
FIRST GRADER
IS LIKE
1 MILLION YEARS
0.03% E GRAND
0.02% NYON
0.01%
0.001% 0.0005%

0.0%
GIANT BOWHEAD GREENLAND QUAHOG LLARETA BRISTLECONE GLASS QUAKING SEA GRASS
TORTOISE WHALE SHARK CLAM PLANT PINE SPONGE ASPEN COLONY MEADOW
188 200 392 507 3,000 5,067 11,000 80,000 200,000
A 3-MONTH
M A X I M U M K N O W N L I F E S PA N ( Y E A R S ) VACATION TO A
RETIREE
IS LIKE
1

AGE OF THE OLDEST HUMAN

122.5
JEANNE CALMENT (1875-1997)
She rubbed olive oil into her skin,
AGE, IN YEARS, OF OLDEST BRISTLECONE PINE

ate 2 pounds of chocolate per week, 1 HOURTO A

avoided stress—and smoked.

LENGTH,
IN DAYS,
OF A
DRAGONFLY’S
ADULT LIFE 1 YEAR TO AN
ASPEN COLONY
S E C O N D S IS LIKE
1,00O YEARS
300
MOST ADULT MAYFLIES LIVE
TOTHE ROCKIES

A DAY OR TWO. NOT DOLANIA

AMERICANA: ONCE FEMALE
MEMBERS OF THIS SPECIES

SHARK; FRANCO BANFI/GETTY IMAGES: GOMEZ; CINDY ORD/GETTY IMAGES FOR SIRIUSXM; SHUTTERSTOCK (17)
REACH MATURITY, THEY GET

P O P S C I .CO M . AU
FIVE MINUTES TO MATE AND AGE, IN YEARS, OF AN UNDERWATER MEADOW OF POSIDONIA

29
LAY EGGS BEFORE THEY DIE. OCEANICA SEA GRASS IN THE WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN BY SOPHIE BUSHWICK
 OP ED / THE LP

Hope Springs Eternal

MY RECENT OBSESSION WITH CLOCK WORK took one look at the spring-drive radio and said: “This
started before I knew this issue of PopSci would be all would be much cheaper to produce if we shoved a
BY
about time. I’m sure of it. I think. Anyway, does it matter? battery in there instead.” Today, windup radios give an
DAN LANDER
My fascination with tiny interlocking gears and spring hour’s playback from less than a minute of winding...
and capstans and rotors and whatnot is real. but only because there’s a dynamo feeding electrons
When you scratch beneath the metallic surface into a battery. Despite its considerably higher cost
(perhaps with one of those tiny little screwdrivers), and perception of superior quality, when it comes to
there’s something tantalising about windup power, an accuracy, clockwork can’t compete.
elegance that silent, unmoving electronics can’t match. But could it stage a comeback? Carbon nanotubes
If only it could store MORE power. Clockwork takes might be able to hold as much energy as a Li-Ion battery
kinetic energy from your elbow-grease as you wind it, of more or less the same volume. The nanotubes can
and releases it slowly via a spring or counterweight. The wind tight, nanoscale tight, and that enables much
actual joules are few, and a clockwork system’s capacity greater energy storage.
to do work is low. It only works at all because in terms of Still, I will admit, batteries are cheap and plentiful.
milliwatt-hours and peak energy requirements, telling And a spring that holds more energy will require more
time doesn’t need much. Spin some gears at precise winding to tighten it - that’s unavoidable physics.
speeds. That’s it. Easy. You have to put in as much energy as the
The numbers? Okay, the energy spring lets out... MORE actually
density of the steel mainspring because of operating losses. So
you’d find in an old clock is why not just go Li-Po?
about 200-300 joules-per- Because batteries are little
kilogram (of spring). By nuggets of death-juice,
comparison, even a cheap is why. During almost
rechargeable battery every phase of battery’s
holds well over 100,000 life, it finds a new way
joules/kilogram. to pollute. Especially
Those are the sort the initial mining,
of numbers that wreck production and disposal
the dream of replacing are all pretty nasty, and
all the solid state gear current recycling efforts
in your house with are token at best. As for
clockwork. Trying to spin the politics of cobalt and
even a small dynamo from tantalum mining... well, at
a prewound mainspring is least those little kids have jobs,
either going to result in a very right? Right?
short Netflix session - or require a If there’s one consistent thread
dangerously huge spring. in the confusing and ongoing energy
(Remember, shorting out even debate, it’s this: the days of being able to
a big dry-cell to make it deliver all I think I’m starting to understand why ely on a single, small group of simple
its stored energy in one fatal zap is they call these things “complications”... esources - oil, coal, wood, steel - are
almost impossible. A mainspring big over. Using the right technology for,
enough and wound tight enough to deliver a typical well, the right technology will be key to keeping this
home’s 20kWh of daily energy, if it came loose from civilisation from choking itself on poisonous waste.
its containment, would rip you and probably the whole A two tonne car that needs to drive at 100km/h? Sure,
house to shreds. Literal shreds.) pack the floor with Li-Ion batteries. Wristwatch that
Not that these issues have stopped inventors just needs to tell time? A spring is enough. As for the
trying. My favourite example: in the mid-1990s, UK smartphone... maybe having to jog for forty minutes to After escaping the
clutches of music
inventor Trevor Bayliss built a windup radio that used a charge the thing up via energy scavenging would actually journalism, Dan
mainspring to direct-drive a dynamo, rather that rely on be good for us. Lander installed a
an intermediate rechargeable battery. Sure, two minutes I suspect though, that the electric genie cannot be put crank on his front
of furious winding only gave 14 minutes of playback, but back in the bottle. Batteries are here to stay because they door. As you wind
the radio was supposed to be sold in Africa and places are easy and can store so much power in such a small space. it, spooky music
plays until he leaps
where replacing a worn out battery was impossible. And As for my clockwork obsession, it continues on. My out of a hidden
any bush-mechanic could re-tension a mainspring. friends wonder why I’m so happy rewinding a clock that hatch and scares
Unfortunately Bayliss’ radio did too well. He got will only need to be rewound again tomorrow. I tell them the hell out of you.
bought out by a mob called Freeplay, and Freeplay that’s the entire point. For science.

30 POPULAR SCIENCE
Order online at www.viavision.com.au
*While stocks Last
 OPED / RETHINK

The Haves and the Have

Slightly Differents
THERE’S BEEN A BIT OF BROUHAHA ABOUT back of Porsche 911s) is smart for a start-up like Tesla. But BY
ANTHONY
inequality in the news this month. And at last inequality it EVs won’t be mainstream until Tesla’s 500+ kilometre
FORDHAM
starting to get interesting, for us technologists I mean. It’s range is available for less than $100,000.
easy to forget, as we browse these pages full of marvellous That’s the point where the haves-and-have-differents
machines and world-changing inventions, that most of phenomenon will really kick in. For at least a decade or
what we feature here has to actually be paid for. so, we’ll have roads where a shrinking majority of drivers
I spent a week this month behind the wheel of Tesla’s are in cars with manual or traditional auto gearboxes, and
Model X SUV. And it’s clearly the future of driving. I’m a growing minority in EVs with regenerative braking and
sorry V8-enthusiasts, but once you’ve actually lived with (as one-pedal control.
opposed to just test-driven) a car that never fills the garage Even more than that though, it will be a world where
with throat-burning exhaust, never needs to go to a stinky being able to afford the high cost of entry - the price of an
service station where you peer at the grimy per-litre sign EV - will lead to a lower overall cost of living. That’s even
and make an involuntary noise of pain, and most of all can more significant than petrol costs.
come and go through even the quietest and most noise- Consider: if you buy a Mercedes-Benz S-Class today,
complaint-happy neighbourhood at whatever you put down your house-sized wad of cash...
hour of the early morning yo n you just keep paying.
well please... [breathes]... you Servicing and refuelling
won’t want to go back. such a car is way, way
The EV difference is about more expensive than a
so much more than saving humble little Camry.
money at the pump and Your big fancy house?
being “eco friendly”. It’s More expensive to heat and
a third way of driving. cool... unless you can also
In a manual, you have afford solar panels and
to constantly manage batteries. Yes, your total
pedals to prevent stalling. expenditure, amortized,
In an auto, you have is higher. But by paying
to constantly manage up front for much lower
to brake to stop the car ongoing costs means you,
crawling forward. In an EV the rich person, are even
with Tesla-style regenerative more insulated against a
braking, you drive with one change in your circumstances.
pedal - the accelerator. Meanwhile, the rest of us fret
Lift up, and the car slows as the about not just affording to buy our
regen system grabs energy from the dream car or dream home, but affording to
brake discs. It’s set up so zero-pedal input The falcon doors are a cool high tech keep it. Technology is breaking the ancient
from 50-60 km/h will bring the car to a party trick for the Model X, but the giant balance: the more stuff you have, the more
windscreen is even better
stop for a red light, at a speed that neither you have to worry about your stuff.
makes passengers hurl, nor makes the following car The newest stuff, the best technology, it just takes care of
scream with frustration. itself. And it’s only going to get better at it, and that means
One-pedal-driving changes everything. No more inequality is only going to get worse.
squeezing the brake because you entered a corner slightly The silver lining? New technology also makes things Anthony Fordham
too quickly: just lift off a bit. No more pause-and-lurch on cheaper. The car that a 20 year-old working part time at is the editor of
Australian Popular
a steep hill start as you come off the brake and onto the the local chemist drives today would make the commercial Science and finds
accelerator. After a bit of disorientation, it feels natural. travellers of the 1980s drool. A $495 TV from JB Hi-Fi is of it easy to
For those times when driving has to be about carrying a size beyond the dreams of the most profligate of 1980s recommend
other people in comfort and safety to a destination, this like gadget-fetishists. $290,000 cars
because he gets to
everything else about EV, is just better. So like we had to endure those fancy Mercedes-Benz give them back
The problem of course, is that the Model X starts at owners of the 1970s driving around with their auto-seeking after a week
$180,000. The one I drove, the P100D with Ludicrous AM radios and all wheel disc brakes, and power windows, instead of
Mode and all that, was specced to nearly $290,000. Drive so too will we have to tolerate the rich and their tax-break- wondering how
away sure, but still. qualifying EVs for at least a decade or so. he’s going to
afford the loan
Positioning its cars as high-end luxo-barges (that just But I’m not kidding about having an electric SUV as your repayments. Or
happen to be faster to 100 than all but the most stripped- “school run” family bus. It really is that much better. the insurance.

32 POPULAR SCIENCE
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 OPED / amuse.bouche

Everyone Goes a
Little Mad Sometimes
THERE ARE NUMEROUS FAR-REACHING RPG/dungeon crawler in which players explore the BY
studies that have shown the therapeutic benefits of endless dungeons beneath a family estate. DANIEL
videogames for people with certain mental illnesses, It’s darkly humorous in approach, but also surprisingly WILKS
variously giving people a sense of control where nuanced when it comes to how different kinds of trauma
previously there was none, counteracting the effects of manifest in party members.
PTSD, helping mitigate trauma and teaching empathy, Exploring the endless dungeon teeming with traps
but the portrayal of mental illness has only really been and monsters is a stressful affair. Running out of torches
taken seriously of late. increases stress, as does not having enough food or drink.
A staple of many horror themed games has been the Taking damage adds to stress as well.
concept of sanity. Not the most subtle take on mental When one of the party members reaches a stress threshold
illness and trauma to be sure – sanity meters degrade and they gain a traumatic effect. These effects vary due to the
the character goes from being sane to a gibbering wreck. characters themselves and the cause of the stress, but can
The 2002 Nintendo GameCube game, Eternal manifest in many ways. Cowards might flee to the rear
Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem is credited as being the ranks, changing the way combat has to be played.
first game to feature a full sanity meter. This Narcissists may do nothing but try and protect
green bar at the bottom of the screen themselves to the detriment of the
depleted upon being seen by an party. Kleptomaniacs might steal all
enemy, encountering something dropped loot, making it harder to
horrifying or taking damage, progress or reduce the stress of
and could be replenished other party members.
by using a finishing move Also, not all mental
on an enemy or using illnesses are presented as
restorative magic. being negative and can
When the sanity meter actually have positive
got low, a number of visual gameplay effects.
or auditory effects could For its 2017 hit
occur, some subtle, some Hellblade: Senua’s
character-based and some Sacrifice, developer
meta-textual, aimed at the Ninja Theory worked
player and not the character. closely with Paul Fletcher,
Some of the effects professor of health
included random audio cues, neuroscience at the University
increasing the volume of ambient of Cambridge to improve the
sound effects and lowering that depiction of schizoaffective disorder.
of dialogue, random whispers and Main character Senua suffers from
screams. While these effects were Hearing voices doesn’t always mean you schizoaffective disorder after her
both ground-breaking and intensely are mentally ill. However, in this context... tribe is killed by Viking raiders. The
it probably does. game is viewed through Senua’s eyes,
effective in 2002, the fourth-wall
breaking sanity effects that came into effect at low sanity so Ninja Theory has gone to great pains to ensure that
were even more effective as they simulated errors with the common traits of the disorder – visual and auditory
GameCube itself, the TV the game was being played on or hallucinations, paranoia and scattered thoughts – are
even gave the game the semblance of sentience. presented in the most realistic way possible. Daniel Wilks is
One sanity effect had the screen flash and go to black One of the key techniques used is binaural audio the editor of PC
with a bright few pixels in the middle, emulating the look design. Best experienced with headphones, the voices that PowerPlay,
Australia’s
of a faulty CRT TV. Another threw up error saying the constantly plague Senua dance around and chatter from all preferred
console had failed to read a corrupted sector of memory directions, like flies with dark messages of failure and denial. videogaming
and was deleting your save game. Yet another would The fact that Hellblade is at heart a combat game with magazine. The
detect save data from other games on memory cards in the a heroine who has suffered a psychotic break is still a little fullness of his
sanity bar
console, and comment on those games, making it seem troubling when it comes to portrayals of mental illness,
is inversely
like it “knew” which other games you had been playing. but the fact that mental illness has gone from a green proportional to
More recently, the indie Rogue-like hit, Darkest bar and madness to a nuanced take on schizoaffective the number of
Dungeon explored the effects of trauma on the psyche disorder in 15 years, shows that videogames - far from games that have
and how that trauma can effect group dynamics. The inducing or amplifying mental illness - may just be the destroyed his
Windows 10 install
game itself is a side-scrolling, procedurally generated best medium through which to understand it. again, this month.

34 POPULAR SCIENCE
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 ISSUE SEPTEMBER
106 2017

38 54
RESPECT YOUR INNER WHEN DID MET THE PEOPLE THE WATCHMAKING
CLOCK: OR DIE? LIFE BEGIN? WHO RULE TIME RENAISSANCE
THE
CLOCK
COULD BE

38 POPULAR SCIENCE
Depression
It seems obvious
that skipping
sleep and working
odd hours will
eventually take a
physical toll . But
mental illnesses like
depression and
anxiety are also
more common in
workers who spend
too much time
“on the clock”.
 THE CLOCK COULD BE KILLING YOU
“Trauma level 2,”
a female voice
warns over the
loudspeaker.
“Arriving in
10 minutes.”
It’s 1900h on a spring Friday, and the Highland
Hospital emergency room in Oakland, one of
the busiest trauma centres in northern Califor-
nia, is preparing itself for a rough one. When the
patient—a young cyclist hit by a car—arrives,
blood is streaming down his temples.
From a warren of care rooms, nearly a dozen
doctors and nurses materialise and buzz around
the patient. Amelia Breyre, a first-year resident
who looks not much older than a college sopho-
more, immediately takes charge. As soon as the
team finishes immobilising the victim, Breyre
must begin making split-second decisions:
X-ray? Intubate? Transfusion? She quickly de-
termines there is no internal bleeding or need
40 POPULAR SCIENCE
for surgery and orders up neck X-rays after
bandaging the patient’s head.
Breyre will make many such choices
tonight. Highland, a teaching hospital, is
perhaps the most selective of all the emer-
gency medical residencies in the US system.
To even be offered a place here means Breyre
must already be outstanding.
To succeed, she must stay sharp.
That quality of focus—amid the chaos and
battered humanity that comes through High-
land’s doors—is itself in need of urgent care.
Andrew Herring, an emergency-room doctor
who supervises Breyre and 40 other residents,
is worried about the team. ER doctors are shift
workers, and their hours are spread over an ev-
er-changing schedule of mornings, afternoons,
and nights. It’s meant to equally distribute the
burden of nocturnal work across an entire team
of physicians. But despite those good inten-
tions, Herring says, the result is that every single
one of them is exhausted and sleep- deprived.
That’s dangerous for doctor and patient alike.
“A single night shift has cognitive effects
going out for a week,” says Herring, a Har-
vard-trained physician. “When you are done,
you are burger meat, crispy fried. People will
tell you the next day that they are rested up,
but they aren’t — and mistakes occur.”
This phenomenon isn’t unique to Emergency
departments. Nocturnal labour presents risks to roughly 15
million shift workers in the United States , and around 1.4
million in Australia. Major industrial accidents, such as the
meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in 1979,
occur disproportionately in the dead hours before dawn.
The graveyard shift, it turns out, is aptly named. Those who
regularly endure it are also at higher risk for depression,
obesity, diabetes, and cancer. In fact, the correlation is so
strong that in 2010, the World Health Organisation went so
far as to classify late-night work as a probable carcinogen.
Biologists have come to believe that the negative effects
happen because toiling through the wee hours screws with
our circadian rhythms, mysterious internal timing mech-
anisms that can be modulated by external cues like light
and temperature. In fact, every species in domain Eukarya
— even certain bacteria—has evolved with these cellular
oscillations. They dictate hundreds of other crucial pro-
cesses, turning energy on and off in 24-hour cycles. They
orchestrate our daily peak rhythms for things like cognition, Obesity
fat synthesis, and even hair growth. Research suggests
These internal clocks, which biologists are just starting that the later it
to research and understand in detail, are constantly sync- gets, the more
likely we are to tuck
ing based on the food we eat, our exercise routines, social into something
interactions, and our exposure to light. fatty or alcoholic—
And yet for most of our history, ever since we gained so poor sleep could
mastery over fire, we’ve been working against them. be contributing
to the growing
In 2006, University of Virginia researchers turned on the obesity epidemic,
lights in the cages of lab mice six hours earlier than normal which afflicts 35.7
once a week for eight weeks, preventing them from reset- percent of adults
ting their clocks. In terms of light-cue changes, it was as across the U.S.

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 41
 THE CLOCK COULD BE KILLING YOU

When is the best time to...

You might think you’re in control of your day, but your body evolved to follow a natural rhythm.
Sticking closer to that routine can help keep you in tiptop shape. BY CLAIRE MALDARELLI

Drink coffee Eat Sleep Exercise Be creative Do maths

Sipping caffeine is It’s best to eat your Around 2000h or Some people swear The evolution of Scientists think we
best done early in the biggest meal early, 2100h, our bodies by early-morning jogs. language, religion, reach maximum
day. Imbibed later, it contrary to a typical start to cool, and we But muscle tone is and philosophy all alertness between
can reset your body’s American day. Insulin— sleep better when we highest around 1700h. started with 1000h and 1400h,
ILLUSTRATION BY TODD DETWILER

clock and prevent the hormone that have a low core body Even pros get a boost: late-night talks—and with a peak around
sleep. If you’re sure you regulates metabo- temperature. But how West Coast NFL research suggests midday. For the first
can take a shot of lism—peaks in the first much shut-eye is teams win more often there is still a different few hours after we
espresso at 2000h half of the day, then ideal? Studies show and by a higher cast to our nocturnal wake, organs with
and be snoring by steadily drops. So your that those who get six margin in matches musings. Skip more basic functions
2200h, try skipping blood sugar is less and a half to eight after 2000h. on the watching someone take priority. Once
the caffeine for a few likely to skyrocket hours are less likely US East Coast. Still else’s fiction - and the they’ve booted up, our
weeks to see what a after a big breakfast to die prematurely. on Pacific time, disruptive flickering brains have a chance
night of truly good than after a Eight hours seems their bodies were light of a TV - and to requisition some
rest feels like. comparable dinner. to be perfect. primed to play. write your own. more energy.

42 POPULAR SCIENCE
if they’d flown from New York to Paris once a
week. The result: Younger rodents got sick and
displayed mentally unstable behaviour; 53 per-
cent of the older mice just dropped dead.
“I really worry we are killing ourselves,” says
Herring, scanning the ER as Breyre and the oth-
ers multitask, and continue to physically and
mentally push themselves.
This past spring, Herring read about another
mouse study, by researchers at the University
of California at San Diego. The investigators
are part of the UCSD Centre for Circadian Bi-
ology, which is dedicated to the nascent and
often-overlooked field of chronobiology, the
science of our inner biological clocks. Its focus-
es on the implications of untethering humans
from our natural light cycles and other external
cues that regulate our bodies.
The UCSD mouse study, unlike the earlier
research from UVA, offered good news in its
findings: a way to use twilight to adjust the mice
to irregular day/night cycles.
Herring volunteered to make his team availa-
ble to the researchers. “I felt we really needed to
look at this in a different way,” he says.
USAN G OLDEN, DIRECTOR
o f the UC SD centre, do esn’t
merely talk chronobiology. She
lives it. At home, she and her
husband, James, a microbiology
professor who also works at UCSD,
cuddle up in front of the TV wearing orange
sunglasses to block blue rays, which our bodies
read as midday light. Other measures include
the installation of time-activated dimmers on
bathroom and bedroom lights, which ensure
any early-morning micturitional excursions
don’t blast them with artificial daylight .
“None of us are Luddites trying to live out-
side technology,” Golden tells me one day in her
office in the Applied Physics and Math building
on campus. “But that technological lifestyle
needs to be smarter,” she adds, “because we are
animals that evolved on Earth.”
Like most of her 35 colleagues, Golden didn’t
set out from school intent on pursuing a career
in chronobiology. The field only barely existed
when she did her graduate work in the 1980s.
Her specialty was, and still is, studying bacteria
that use light as a source of energy.
But with advances in computing and ana-
lytical methods, it’s now possible to process
thousands of tissue samples at once and chart
changes in metabolic processes over time. Add-
ing that fourth dimension made Golden realise
how much she had been missing by looking at a
single point in time for information. It made her
decide that science plus time—chronobiology—
equalled a new focus for her career.
“What we’ve really learned in the past
five years is that circadian studies cannot be
treated as a boutique discipline,” she says.
“It is biology. You cannot adequately study
neurobiology, metabolism, microbiome with-
out taking time into consideration. All of the
processes in all of these cells and organs change
over time. And if you look at a static snapshot
without considering that, you don’t get the right
answer. Or at least not the whole answer.”
That picture finally started to come into fo-
cus in 1972, when neuroscientists first discov-
ered how a tiny region in the brain’s hypothala-
mus acted as the body’s master circadian clock.
This small cluster of 20,000 neurons, named
the suprachiasmatic nucleus, sends signals
through the body to keep the various processes
switched on or off during the right moments of
our 24-hour cycles. The system uses daylight as
its main cue to stay on track.
Other discoveries followed. It turns out that
nearly every organ has an internal ticker. Your
pancreas has a mechanism that tells it when
to release insulin and when to stop. Your liver
knows when to stop processing glycogen and
start on fat. Even eyes have built-in timekeep-
ers that tell them when to repair retinal cells
damaged by ultraviolet rays. In other words, to
understand the body and its functions, we must
also understand its timers.
All across the UCSD campus, members of
the Centre for Circadian Biology—which does
not have its own building— are researching
these timekeeping functions. Already, they’ve
discovered how genes that run our circadian
rhythms are linked to metabolism and its con-
trol networks. Mess with one and you mess
with the other. For example, eat too late in the
THE GRAVEYARD
SHIFT, IT TURNS OUT,
IS APTLY NAMED.”
evening, when your metabolic defences have
powered down, and your chances of growing
obese, well, balloon.
Our mental health is also at risk. Researchers
have found that 70 per cent of people with dis-
orders that keep them from sleeping at the usual
time suffer from conditions like severe depres-
sion or anxiety. In fact, nearly two-thirds of bi-
polar sufferers report abnormal sleep cycles.
Already, doctors treating cancer have used
chronobiology’s findings to better plan treat-
ments. For example, undergoing chemother-
apy later in the day increases patients’ chances
of avoiding nausea, because the stomach lining
better repairs itself at that time.
Much of the centre’s research can seem like
a condemnation of our modern lifestyle. Sure,
we’ve always sat around a fire or in a room lit by
candles or oil lamps, and subtly disrupted our
cycles. But since the dawn of electricity, we’ve
exponentially accelerated our massive uncon-
trolled experiment in defying the night. And it’s
not just due to shift work. There are a thousand
small ways that we use artificial light to ignore
the subtle cues that changes in nature give us all
day. “Inside light is just terrible for you,” Gold-
en says. “It is making us all sick.”
As human-generated light keeps us in a
state of agitation throughout the night, it’s also
contributing to one of the biggest epidemics in
the West—obesity, which afflicts more than a
quarter (28 per cent) of Australian adults. That
role is slowly gaining attention, thanks to one of
Golden’s star researchers.
AT C H I D A N A N D A PA N D A
works at one of the most pre-em-
inent research facilities in the
US: the Salk Institute for Biology.
Although chronobiology is growing
in importance, many scientists, in-
cluding fellow biologists, still think it’s mostly
about jet lag and sleep. No one has resisted that
second-tier status more than Panda.
For more than a decade, he’s been studying
the links between human metabolism and our
inner clocks. He and other researchers have
found that by limiting the number of hours
during which obese mice can eat fatty foods,
they’re able to achieve all kinds of health ben-
efits for the plump subjects. Even when eating
the same amount and type of food as control
mice who could eat all day and night, the ones
who Panda restricted to an eight-hour feeding
schedule lost weight, shed stored body fat (par-
ticularly around the liver), and suffered less
P O P S C I .CO M . AU 43
 THE CLOCK COULD BE KILLING YOU

internal inflammation. In another study, a team of UCSD

researchers found that when they subjected obese mice
with cancer to time-restricted diets instead of allowing un-
restricted gluttony, their tumours shrank.
Despite these findings, and their potential effect on
the obesity epidemic, Panda has struggled for funding and
recognition. The NIH has denied all 14 of his proposals for
grants to study time-restricted feeding. The grants are de-
cided by anonymous peer review, and many of Panda’s
mainstream fellows are sceptical about the science of time.
“My reviewers said, ‘Humans don’t eat like mice; they eat
three meals a day within 12 hours, so it has no human signif-
icance,’” Panda recalls, visibly incensed. “That really piss-
es me off. I’ve reviewed 150 years of human research, and
most studies never asked or recorded when people eat. They
asked what you had, but rarely when you ate.”
Panda’s focus on chronobiology, his belief in its role in
our lives, goes back to rural India. He and his sister could tell
the time of evening, for example, based on when the frogs
would enter their backyard and begin croaking.
To an observant child, it was apparent that the
natural world has immutable rhythms. His inter-
est has led him to explore entirely new avenues of re- Heart
search: In 2002, he helped discover how light sensors Disease
at the back of the eyes communicate with the brain’s Firefighters and
ER doctors face
master clock. In 2005, he found that the part of the
similar sleep
retina that uses ambient-light levels to determine when challenges.
the body should sleep or wake is most sensitive to blue light. Working overnight
Panda decided that his only way forward was to prove his shifts—and eating
peer reviewers wrong about eating patterns. Taking a cue at odd intervals—
seems to put them
from Silicon Valley, he open-sourced a human experiment, at a higher risk for
using an app. He called it Mycircadianclock and recruit- heart attacks and
ed 156 people. He asked them to record what they ate and other cardiovascu-
drank, including water and medicines, by simply snapping a lar problems.
photograph and uploading it via the app.
The data proved his point. We think we eat about three
times a day. But we often ignore snacks. In fact, a third
of Panda’s participants ate eight times a day. And 24 hours on, 24 hours off, for eight-day cycles. Unpredicta-
‘WE HAVE they were more likely to eat around the clock. People who ble alarms can play havoc with circadian rhythms. They’re
started their days with coffee and a bagel at 0600h would also left catching up on missed meals at all hours, often with
TO GET post pictures of brownies, Sun Chips, pizza, and wine high-calorie treats from grateful neighbours. Panda wants
WIDER at 2300h. The later it got, the more likely they were to to do a study in which he controls their eating hours to see if
tuck into something fatty or alcoholic. Panda speculates that that alone affects their rate of cardiovascular disease.
SOCIETY the brain “thinks it will be up all night, and so it wants us to Panda hopes his app’s data can persuade the NIH to
TO UN- overeat in preparation.” fund human trials on restricted feeding. Success is the nec-
Panda has since opened his app to the public, and volun- essary imprimatur to move public policy—Panda’s ultimate
DERSTAND teers now number in the thousands. Moreover, wherever he goal. And an urgent one. Rates of diabetes and high blood
THE TOLL goes, he conducts his own informal survey of eating hours
and habits. He asks every cab driver, waitress, and pharma-
pressure are rising in the West, with 85 per cent of adults 65
years or older suffering two chronic diseases.
THIS IS cist he encounters what time they woke and when they ate They are the kinds of conditions that cost $2,500 a year
TAKING.”” their first meal. And he asks when their day will end. “You
will find many of these people work two jobs,” Panda says.
each to manage. Not treat, manage. “If we could delay one
chronic disease by one year in only 1 million people,” Pan-
After hearing of his work, the San Diego Fire-Rescue da says, “that is $2.5 billion dollars in healthcare savings,
Department contacted Panda for help battling the profes- and you’re helping people live healthier lives.”
sion’s high risk of heart attack. Firefighters face the same Many of those benefits, he believes, are perfectly attain-
kinds of challenges as Herring’s ER team. Their shifts run able—if we simply start paying attention to time.

44 POPULAR SCIENCE
 ACK AT THE HIGHLAND ER
in Oakland, Herring outfits 20
of his residents with Actiwatch
wristbands to measure sleep, ac-
tivity, and light levels, while they
underwent a month of cognitive
testing. Michael Gorman, who led UCSD’s
mouse study, is evaluating the data. Ideally, his
findings will help chronobiologists explain how
physicians cope with shift work. At the moment,
though, Herring’s crew is swiftly headed toward
that night’s circadian nadir.
For all of us, this takes place roughly between
0200h. and 0500h, when our bodies seek to
fully shut down. Anyone who has stayed up
late at night, working or studying, knows how it
feels to try to push through this point instead of
dozing: “It is like hitting a wall,” Herring says.
“You become cold, your thinking slows down,
and you become gassy.” Yes. Gassy.
Herring recalls a spooky moment, when the
ER was down to a minimal crew. A middle-aged
patient came in at 0300h with chest pains that
could have signalled either heartburn or a heart
attack. First examination suggested everything
was fine, but Herring’s instinct told him to do
a bedside echocardiogram, which showed
that a massive heart attack was, in fact, in pro-
gress, requiring an emergency catheterisation.
Everything turned out fine for the patient. Her-
ring thinks it was a close call. In the daytime, he
suspects, that kind of decision would have been
much more clear-cut.
Since Oakland is a public hospital with limit-
ed resources, it might not have the ability to ad-
dress Herring’s concerns about shift work. So he
and fellow doctors have come up with a Band-
Aid based on the best science they can find.
They’re adopting a solution used by Ca-
nadian ER doc Pat Croskerry. A professor in
emergency medicine at Dalhousie University
in Halifax, Croskerry is an expert in cognition
and diagnostic errors. He is also a trained ex-
perimental psychologist. He advocates using
a so-called casino shift: Instead of having one
doctor work through the entire night, you have
two doctors split the evening, with each of them
sleeping for a bit during the witching hour. Even
a little shut-eye at this time seems to improve
doctors’ focus and reduce potential errors.
But this won’t make the underlying problem
go away. Herring says we must “bake in” the
cost of night work to hospital budgets.
“The physiological cost on your body,” he
says. “The psychological cost. We somehow
have to get the greater society to understand the
terrible toll this is taking.”
P O P S C I .CO M . AU 45
T
BEGIN?

A new geological finding stirs

questions—and controversy—about
where and when earliest life emerged.

B Y K AT M C G O WA N

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 47
WHERE DID IT ALL BEGIN?

The rock is deep rustyred, shot

throughwith greystripes. It rises
above shrubbytundra, part of a
hummockyterrainthat slopes down
tothe Hudson Bayin northern
Quebec, as it hasforaverylon
time—maybe even sincethe crust
first cooled.This is a rare place, one of
fewwhere rocksthis old survive.
Platetectonics andthe relentless
recyclin of crust have repeatedly
chewed up ourplanet’s surface. Only
afewzones deep in continental Canadian geologist Dominic Papineau schemed for years to visit
OPENING SPREAD: SCIENCE SOURCE/GETTY IMAGES

interiors have escapedthisfate,
places like Greenland andWestern
Australia. Scientistswho specialise in
findin signs ofthe ori ins of life
make pilgrimages intothese
primeval landscapes. Lifewrote its
first chapters inthese rocks.And
scientists hopeto readthem.
this lonely place, known as the Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt. In
2008, he finally rounded up a couple of thousand dollars in funding
and set out from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington,
DC, journeying through three layovers and a final leg on a bush plane.
If you like rocks—and don’t mind mosquitoes—it’s a great place to
ramble for a couple of weeks in the summer. A lichen-flecked stony ex-
panse, polished by glaciers, juts through the thin soil.
Papineau pitched his tent near a creek. At that time of year, at these
latitudes, the sun rises at 0400h, giving him many hours to explore. Three
days before he was due to leave, Papineau found a 20- or 30-metre-long
strike, part of a banded iron formation: reddish haematite layered with
dark magnetite, like a red-and-grey vanilla slice. It had formed not too far

48 POPULAR SCIENCE
 100 mi

NU
ud

H
so
nB
ay
MB

QC

CANADA
NB

Rare Earth
The Nuvvuagittuq
Supracrustal Belt,
where ancient rocks
jut from the ground.

from the location of an ancient deep-sea hydrothermal vent. Blobs the planet. Papineau and graduate student Matthew Dodd pursued a doz-
COURTESY DOMINIC PAPINEAU AND MATTHEW DODD

size of 10 cent pieces dotted the surface, creating thin swirls. In younger
rocks, Papineau knew, such marks can indicate the presence of former
life. “When I saw this material, I knew I needed to sample it,” he says.
With a sledgehammer, he smashed off chunks, the way geologists do.
When it came time to go, he lugged his 50-plus kilos of rocky souve-
nirs back to his lab at Carnegie, where he was a post-doctoral fellow in
geophysics. There, his new specimens joined his collection and waited
en lines of analysis and eventually concluded that these humble rocks
held evidence of some of the oldest life ever found on Earth.
In March, they published their findings in the journal Nature. If cor-
rect, their work bolsters a newish theory in origins-of-life research:
Rather than assembling its building blocks over a billion-plus years, the
earliest forms burst forth in a geological heartbeat of tens of millions—
maybe even hundreds of thousands.
MAP BY JOHN KUHEN

patiently until he could find time to analyse them.
Papineau finally dug in to investigate after he moved to University
College London in 2014. Because the Nuvvuagittuq formation is be-
lieved to be between 3.77 billion and 4.28 billion years old, that would
make his samples only slightly younger than our 4.54 -billion-year-old
Moreover, life may not have required freak coincidences. Rather, it
might have formed as a routine consequence of Earth’s early chemistry,
maybe a default set of conditions that can be found on rocky, wet planets
everywhere—all estimated 40 billion of them in the Milky Way alone.
But the origins-of-life field, like early Earth itself, is a cauldron of

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 49
 WHERE DID IT ALL BEGIN?
roiling theories, each new one challenged and sometimes buried under
pyroclastic flows of criticism. If Papineau and Dodd are wrong—and
some suspect they are—the marks and minerals they found are merely a
mirage, another case of misleading geology that creates the illusion of
long-ago microbes. And there will be consequences. Papineau jokes
about Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake in 1600 for suggesting beings
existed on other planets. Fortunately that form of peer review is no longer
popular. But they might still suffer the modern equivalent.
ORIGIN STORIES
In 1992, Bill Schopf, of the University of California at Los Angeles,
said he had found 3.5-billion-year-old microfossils in rocks from
Western Australia. A decade later, Martin Brasier, an Oxford astrobi-
ologist and paleobiologist, showed that Schopf
had misunderstood the rocks. Brasier claimed
Schopf had cherry-picked his evidence, and
may even have committed fraud.
At that year’s Astrobiology Science Conference,
the scientists hashed it out in public. In front of
hundreds of origins-of-life and extraterrestrial-life
researchers, Brasier and Schopf slammed each
other’s science. The victory went to Brasier. Today,
most researchers in the field do think that Schopf ’s
rocks showed evidence of early creatures—just not
the type he thought he saw.
Almost since the 1870s, when Darwin first
speculated that early life might have sheltered in a
“warm little pond,” the field has given rise to near-
ly as many theories as there are scientists who spe- “YOU SEE
cialise in this work. In general, though, the theories
follow one of two themes: land or sea.
THIS IN THE
Biologists tend to prefer the sea theory, which
posits that life began at deep-sea hydrothermal
MICROSCOPE,
vents, where super-heated, mineral-charged water AND YOU
seeps up from inside the earth to nourish and sus-
tain organisms. It seems reasonable. The sea could SAY, THIS IS
shelter early life from the relentless meteor strikes
and deadly solar UV radiation that once scorched
TELLING ME
the young planet’s surface. And the vents would
provide food, or energy, in the form of hydrogen
SOMETHING”
gas and minerals such as sulphur and iron.
Michael Russell, who heads the planetary chem-
istry and astrobiology group at the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, California, a group charged with preparing to
search for life in space, favours the sea theory. He says that as alkaline
water seeped from certain types of vents, it would have mixed with acid-
ic seawater, creating a tiny electrochemical charge to zap alive the first
organisms. “Hydrothermal vents are great places to live,” Russell says.
That kind of scenario could also produce mineral pillars, where
simple chemicals collect and concentrate in tiny holes. There, trapped
together, they link into the long chains necessary for biology. Then
they begins to form membranes, build systems that capture energy,
and create a genetic code. Eventually these components assemble
into a microbe and leave a mark similar to the ones Papineau sees in
his rocks. That’s the idea, at least.
50 POPULAR SCIENCE
But land theorists say the ocean is too, well, watery for life to start there.
“It’s chemically implausible,” says Armen Mulkidjanian, a biophysicist at
Osnabrück University in Germany. Martin Van Kranendonk, a geologist
and astrobiologist at the University of New South Wales, concurs. “We
regard the oceans as an extreme environment,” he says.
Van Kranendonk and others instead look to the surface of the new
Earth, where briny hot springs, bubbling geysers, and rich gasses
would have served as a cradle for life. Call it Volcano World. There,
compounds of hydrogen cyanide and hydrogen sulphide could collect
in freshwater pools. Cycles of wetting and drying, combined with sear-
ing UV radiation, could cause these chemicals to join up in a way that
allowed them to self-replicate, eventually creating a genetic code. Re-
searchers have shown in labs that the building blocks of DNA can arise
this way. And Van Kranendonk’s own team recent-
ly discovered evidence of 3.5-billion-year-old life
from a former hot spring in Australia.
Sea theorists then counter that life begins not
FACING PAGE: COURTESY DOMINIC PAPINEAU AND MATTHEW DODD; (4); MOE ABDELRAHMAN/EYEEM/GETTY IMAGES / ILLUSTRATION BY JOEL KIMMEL
with a complex genetic code, but with a simple
meal. You need a metabolism and a source of
energy before you can build anything like genes.
Besides, it’s chemically implausible (cyanide?).
“That idea of life coming from organic molecules
in the sunshine is ludicrous,” charges Russell. His
jet-fuelled analogy: You wouldn’t put a guidance
system on a rocket with no engine and expect it to
work. Fuel comes first.
In research, everyone is an expert. And no one
is. Tackling the problem requires a whole univer-
sity’s worth of scientists: physicists, biochemists,
geologists, microbiologists, atmospheric scien-
tists, and astrobiologists. Each has different train-
ing and specialised knowledge. “Physics, van der
Waals forces, the ideas Tolstoy can give me about
self-organisation—for the emergence of life, what
don’t I need to know?” asks Russell.
So far, the only source of information is the
rocks, nearly as old as the planet itself, mostly
twisted and deformed by heat, pressure, and time.
“It’s a bit of a Wild West of geology,” says Nick
Lane, an evolutionary biochemist at University
College London who favours the deep-sea-vent
theory. “It’s difficult to interpret. You risk getting
egg on your face.”
ANALYSING ANCIENT CLUES
It takes just two steps to walk across Papineau’s small lab in the UCL
nanotechnology building. From the threshold, it’s one step to the
cabinet, filled with carefully labelled cloth bags of rocks he has col-
lected from across the world. And it’s one step to the microscope he’s
now hunched over. He is looking for something good to show me.
He turns to a nearby computer and pulls up a micrograph, an image
of the magnified insides of the rock that starred in the Nature report.
To me, it looks like a kitchen counter: black and white blobs, with
spatters of dark red against a grey palette. But to a trained eye, each
colour and shape reveals what the material is and how it got that way.
 ROCKS THAT TALK
Researchers can find multiple messages encrypted in seemingly ordinary material.

After analysing thin slices of a rock similar to this one (centre), Dominic Papineau

A
and Matthew Dodd conclude that it contains evidence of early life. If the
researchers are right, the dark blob in the left close-up once sheltered bacteria. The
tubes in the middle image, they believe, formed as the bacteria extruded waste. At
right, rings of white carbonate and dove-grey quartz form a haematite-flecked
rosette—a shape that arises as biological materials rot, Papineau says.
 WHERE DID IT ALL BEGIN?

Geological sleuthing is a lot like conducting a criminal investigation.

There’s never a smoking gun because everything happened too long ago.
The idea is to launch multiple lines of inquiry that let you explore your
mystery from different angles. And just like when you’re corroborating
witness accounts, if they all say the same thing, you can be reasonably
sure your theory about what happened, when, and how is correct.
The first step in the forensic process required slicing off parts of the
rock and milling them thin enough for light to shine through. Then
Papineau and Dodd began looking for graphitic carbon, which could
be a sign that biological material had been present. They soon found
it, in rosette formations the size of grains of salt.
On his computer screen, Papineau shows me the faint bull’s-
eye mark. The centre is pearly grey quartz with flecks of dark-red
haematite. Rings of white and dove-grey surround it. “Look how
beautiful this is,” he says. “It’s almost perfectly spherical.” This shape
arises, he proposes, as biological materials rot, producing carbon
dioxide that then forms carbonate minerals.
Next, Papineau pulls up a micrograph in which blood-red ribbons
squiggle across a white-quartz background. He and Dodd hadn’t expect-
ed this, but in addition to chemical signs of life, they had also found what
they believe to be actual fossils. These squiggles, or filamentous tubes, are
similar to shapes made by modern iron-oxidising bacteria in deep-ocean
vent systems and are like much-younger fossils—an even more
important clue. “You see this in the microscope, and you say”—he snaps
his fingers—“this is telling me something, but I don’t know quite what.”
He concludes that tiny, dark knobs in the formations are fossils, remnants
of actual cells. The twisted ribbons are microbial waste products, now
coated in rusty-red haematite by geological processes.
To be certain of their case, Papineau and Dodd performed physical
and chemical comparisons with younger fossils and partnered with
other researchers to test samples. Papineau had already analysed the
ratio of light to heavy carbon: Life prefers the lighter version, which he
found in excess in this rock. He and Dodd used micro-Raman spec-
troscopy, firing a laser at the sample to study its composition from the
spectra of scattered light. They aimed a focused ion-beam microscope

ON THE ORIGIN OF ORIGIN THEORIES by Mary Beth Griggs

Ancient Greece 1908 1953 1986 2009

COURTESY DOMINIC PAPINEAU AND MATTHEW DODD

Leading thinkers
conjecture that life
arose spontaneously
—just as maggots
seem to appear
on carcasses.
Svante Arrhenius
popularises the theory
of panspermia—the
notion that life was
seeded by comets
from outer space.
Stanley Miller and
Harold Urey show
building blocks of life
can form in water
when electricity zaps
key ingredients.
Walter Gilbert
proposes that life
starts when RNA
molecules being
combining, separat-
ing, and evolving.
The Deep Carbon
Observatory seeks
the origins of
carbon-based life
deep inside Earth.

1871 1920s 1977 2006 2012

Charles Darwin writes
that life may have
emerged in a “warm
little pond” with the
right mixture of light,
heat, and chemicals.
Alexander Oparin
and John Haldane
independently
theorise life began in a
primordial “soup” of
organic compounds.
Discovery of living
creatures near
deep-sea hydrother-
mal vents raises the
possibility of a
deep-sea origin...
Fossils called
stromatolites found
in 3.4-billion-year-old
rocks in Australia—
the oldest accepted
evidence of early life.
Researchers propose
that life originated in
shallow geothermal
ponds on land instead
of in the chemically
hostile deep sea.

52 POPULAR SCIENCE

Rocky Ground
Papineau’s key
sample came from
this formation of
haematite and
magnetite.
on it to mill away nanoscale bits, looking at its mineral components. In
each case, they found graphitic carbon, or minerals associated with it,
and patterns that indicate life.
After publication, the bubbling factional cauldrons of geology boiled
over with supporters and detractors. Many praised the work without en-
dorsing the conclusion: “Those authors did a really nice job of applying
some advanced techniques,” says Ken Williford, director of the Astrobi-
ogeochemistry Lab at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “More will be required
before we can be sure of the interpretation.”
The scepticism was equally swift. “Papineau strung together a
whole bunch of possibilities that pointed to a probability, but we can’t
make a leap to what the samples definitely are or aren’t,” says Van
Kranendonk, who based his own 2017 finding on a different type of
fossil pattern—those WA tourist attractions called stromatolites. Oth-
ers cast doubt on the filaments and said they didn’t look right. The
concern? That these rocks had, despite escaping most tectonic tur-
moil, still gone through too much heat and pressure to be trustworthy.
Papineau and Dodd say they have thought all this through. It’s true that
any single phenomenon they saw could have been caused by nonbiological
chemistry. But it’s extremely unlikely that every last one of the phenom-
ena would have been present unless life too had once been present. “We
always knew the work would be met with controversy, given the history of
early-life claims,” Dodd says. It’s important to realise that these scientists
are challenging the very foundations of our theories of when and where life
itself began. “It’s not something trivial to claim,” Dodd says.
AN EARLIER TIMELINE
It’s a theory that seeks to explain an enduring existential mystery. It
points to our first beginnings, the stuff that we’re all made of—codes and
chemicals. Papineau and Dodd might be right. Or not. But it looks like-
ly that microbial creatures started swarming Earth almost as soon as it
formed. Even without consensus on how and where life got going, every-
one pretty much now agrees on a basic when: early. And quickly.
In fact, it could have happened more than once around the same
time, in many places. “It’s entirely plausible,” says MIT geobiologist
Tanja Bosak. That also means that it could have happened on anoth-
er planet. In the case of Mars, our closest candidate,life could have
come, flourished, floundered, failed, and gone.
NASA’s Mars 2020 mission will try to find that out. Engineers will
outfit its rover with a micro-Raman spectrometer that can do a bit of
what Papineau and Dodd did in the lab—analyse rocks for chemically
preserved biological content. Williford, who is the deputy project scien-
tist for the mission, will use some of the Nuvvuagittuq samples to test
the rover’s spectrometer during its development.
If a mission one day sniffs out former life in rocks on Mars or else-
where, Papineau thinks it will shift our perception of our uniqueness
in the cosmos. It might even “unify people,” he says. Van Kranendonk
says it’d be like the Apollo astronauts photographing our planet from
space: “It could have a profound impact on our place in the cosmos.”
In the meantime, scientists will continue looking where they always
have—in remote ancient rock, in biochem labs, in clean rooms under
microscopes, and in bubbling vats like the one in Lane’s lab at University
College London. It’s just a block away from Papineau’s office, but it’s a
completely different world. Lane builds origins-of-life reactors to try to
replicate the chemical reactions that lead to creation.
The first version, now retired, looks like something out of Breaking
Bad: a big, smudged glass cylinder with a tube dangling from the bottom,
partly encased in wrinkled alfoil secured with masking tape. A thin bun-
dle of wires snakes out below. When it’s switched on, hot hydrogen-rich
alkaline fluid with common salts such as potassium phosphate and sodi-
um sulphide seeps up the pipe into the chamber. It bubbles through acidic
water rich in dissolved carbon dioxide, iron, and nickel, and starved of
oxygen—like the seas were four billion years ago.
After a few hours, spidery black tubes form amid the alkaline
and acid waters, mimicking early vent structures. One of Lane’s
contraptions yielded formaldehyde, a precursor to complex biochem-
istry. He’s working on control experiments to verify that result. “A few
people are taking this chemistry seriously,” he says. “I hope it’s only a
matter of time before someone cracks it.”
Papineau and Dodd are still looking too. Among many other projects,
they’ll send one of their rock-and-fossil samples to a synchrotron in
France for 3D X-rays that could suggest which modern microbes are most
closely related to their ancient micro-organisms.
“Everything counts,” Papineau says. “These are the best-preserved
microfossils we have. We have to seize that opportunity to character-
ise them as best we can.” In other words, these are among the finest
ones we have now. But maybe one day, somebody will stumble across
something better—older, clearer, more surprising.
If this field of research has proved anything, it’s that life takes any op-
portunity it can get, and it gets there in a hurry. Life happens.
P O P S C I .CO M . AU 53
 W AT C H I N G T H E

54 POPULAR SCIENCE
 Five experts obsess over lines, faces, places, and noses to understand
how every second shapes our world and how our minds shape every second.

by B RYA N G A R D I N E R i l l u s t r a t i o n s by A DA M C RU F T

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 55
 WAT C H I N G T H E C L O C K S

ELISA FELICITAS ARIAS

“I HAVE A VERY BAD
relationship to time” is not a
confession you expect from the
person in charge of the world’s
official time standard. Yet Elisa Felicitas
D i r e c t o r, T i m e D e p a r t m e n t , I n t e r n a t i o n a l B u r e a u o f W e i g h t s a n d M e a s u r e s Arias admits to a certain laissez-faire
approach to personal punctuality.
“I’ve never missed a flight or anything like
that,” she clarifies, “but no two clocks in my
house give the same time.”
This laid-back way with hours and
minutes doesn’t carry over into her day
job. As director of the Time Department at
the International Bureau of Weights and
Measures just outside Paris, Arias formu-
lates Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
It’s the 24-hour standard to which govern-
ments, militaries, and scientific bodies
synchronise every essential clock—from
hyperaccurate global-positioning satellites
to weather warning systems.
Using data from about 75 master atomic
clocks around the world, Arias and her team
analyse, compare, and weight the slight,
billionth-of-a-second discrepancies in those
reported times to formulate a kind of retro-
spective average. This glimpse at the past
gives each of the Bureau’s 58 member nations
a way to steer toward a more uniform future.
Using Arias’ monthly reports, a country can
adjust its clocks in the hopes of achieving
a better UTC and therefore improving the
accuracy of the standard.
Without this guideline, the Internet, the
airline industry, and militaries around the
world would cease to function. Yet there is
no “perfect time,” Arias says. “People say the
UTC is the international reference for time,
but in fact, UTC is just a piece of paper.”
An extremely important piece of paper.
While it might be a social construction (like
every objective measure of time), its monthly
publication is critical to the smooth function
of the global economy. As for us civilians,
Arias maintains that, like her, we needn’t
worry about such meticulous timekeeping in
our day-to-day lives. “Many things in life are
not as urgent as people think,” she says.

56 POPULAR SCIENCE
 Alexandra
Horowitz
∙ P r o f e s s o r, D o g C o g n i t i o n
R e s e a r c h e r, B a r n a r d C o l l e g e

Humans rely on our eyes to help

mark the passage of time. Dogs
have a different sensory bias, says
Alexandra Horowitz, founder of
Barnard College’s Dog Cognition
Lab and author of the book Being a Dog. Our
canine friends possess more than 300 million
olfactory receptor cells (we have 5 million),
which allow them to not only detect smells and
hormones we cannot, but also their relative
concentrations. That gives dogs a unique skill:
the ability to smell time.
“One of the main elements of smell is that it

MATÍAS DUARTE
changes over time,” Horowitz explains. “When
we walk down the street, we’re constantly
giving off odour molecules in our wake, like a
little cloud of smell behind you.” Those molecules
dissipate, she says, so you can think of time as a
dimension of smell. For dogs, that means the
V P, M a t e r i a l D e s i g n , G o o g l e past can reveal itself through a faint odour in a
footprint, and the future could arrive on a stiff
breeze. To canines, scents don’t just reveal who
and what, but also when.
WHETHER IT’S A BUFFERING YOUTUBE VIDEO Horowitz has spent the past 15 years studying
or a stalled app download, waiting online is as inevitable dog behaviour—especially how they play—to
better understand the mind of Canis lupus
(and aggravating) as waiting in real life. Matías Duarte, VP
familiaris. That led to an effort to try to perceive
of Material Design at Google, has been perfecting ways of our world from an olfactory point of view smell.
masking and distracting us from these delays for close to seven years. “As a contrivance of humans, time is a really
A native of Chile, Duarte got his start as a videogame animator in peculiar one,” she says. “To expect that nonhu-
1994, learning how to use exaggeration and editing to play with people’s mans would have the same way of sensing and
experiencing it seems silly.” Next smell-related
perception of time. After designing the SideKick - a smartphone with a mystery for Horowitz? Determining whether
flip up display that revealled a physical keyboard - and building the user dogs can recognise and identify themselves
interface for Palm’s sadly departed WebOS, Duarte arrived at Google in through their own unique odours. Yes Rusty, that
2010 to lead the design for Android. Then he took on an even more mas- WAS you and you KNOW it was you. Ugh!
sive task: unifying the user experience for all platforms and products.
“We had an opportunity to take advantage of a whole bunch of new
technology and understanding of perception and cognitive science,” he
says. Duarte and his team have since tweaked how progress and loading
bars look in apps and even developed touchscreen ripple animations
that give users a better sense of response to their taps. These days,
one of their most common tricks is to deploy what’s called a dynamic
placeholder before content can be fully loaded. For short wait times
(around a second or two), these pulsating cards show up momentarily—
for example, when you launch your Google app or Facebook newsfeed.
Their shapes and sizes hint at the arrangement and type of content to
come, while also distracting impatient viewers.
Although all of this is a work in progress, one thing has become
clear to Duarte: We can’t rely only on speedier networks and pro-
cessors to remedy our online-waiting woes. Making something
objectively faster isn’t the same as making it seem faster.
“The real constraint is human perception,” he says.

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 57
 WAT C H I N G T H E C L O C K S
SYLVIE
DROIT-VOLET
P r o f e s s o r o f P s y c h o l o g y, C l e r m o n t A u v e r g n e
U n i v e r s i t y, C l e r m o n t - F e r r a n d , F r a n c e
SYLVIE DROIT-VOLET STARTED HER CAREER
studying ergonomics and human error for French car
manufacturer Renault. Today, the neuropsychologist
specialises in a different form of human fallibility: our
tendency to misjudge elapsed time. For the past 30 years, Droit-Volet
has been investigating, among other topics, how our brains construct
time and why our perception of it is so malleable. “Our internal clocks
can be very capricious,” she says.
Using visual lab experiments that measure perceived time and
physiological responses like skin conductivity and heart rate,
Droit-Volet thinks she’s identified one culprit: emotions—
particularly highly intense ones. Anger, disgust, and fear prime
our bodies to react, Droit-Volet explains, which causes our internal
clocks to accelerate. A faster internal clock registers more “pulses”
over a given period, which in turn affects our perception of the length
of the elapsed period. “We judge the duration of that past event as if
external time has slowed down,” she says.
We don’t just warp our own time, either. Others can influence our
temporal flow thanks to the human tendency to mirror emotions and
actions. In one study, she showed subjects pictures of young and old
faces; the test group consistently underestimated the duration they’d
seen the latter but not the former. Her theory? We internalise the
slower movements of elderly people, and our internal clocks decel-
erate, making it feel like time passes more quickly. Some might see
this as proof that our bodies are fickle and unreliable timekeepers, but
Droit-Volet has a different perspective. “Time is plural,” she says. “We
have several clocks attuned to the rhythms of our daily life.”
58 POPULAR SCIENCE
Richard
Larson
Professor of Data, Systems,
a n d S o c i e t y, M I T
Richard Larson still remembers
the line that broke him. It was
1985, and the MIT professor had
stopped by Sears to pick out a bike
for his 6-year-old son. After
choosing the model and paying for it, he made his
way to the merchandise-pickup area, handed his
receipt to a clerk, and waited. “Ten, 20, 25 people
came along after me, gave in their receipts, and
then walked off with their lamps, waffle irons,
and quilts as I just sat there,” Larson recalls. “I was
furious.” By the time the clerk called his name
more than half an hour later, the operations
researcher and systems engineer had made two
resolutions: to return the bike and to never shop
at that Sears again. (He stuck to both.)
Weeks later, Larson had a sudden insight: It
wasn’t the wait that had upset him. It was how
people who arrived after him had beat him to the
exit—and that he had not expected a delay. That
was the genesis of his seminal 1987 paper, “The
Psychology of Queuing and Social Justice,” which
highlighted the importance of fairness and
feedback to a person’s waiting experiences.
Today, Larson remains one of the world’s
foremost experts on queues. An engineer by
training, he began his career solving queuing
problems with statistical probabilities and
flow-balancing equations. Over 45 years, his work
has ranged from helping the New York City Police
Department reduce its 911 emergency-call wait
times, to inventing the Queue Inference Engine, a
mathematical method for determining the
length of a line and how long people have to wait
in it when data isn’t readily available.
More recently, Larson has focused on using
customer engagement and information to shape
people’s perceptions in line. He points to
Disneyland and Disney World as places that
are doing it right (though he doesn’t work
with them). Because the theme parks
purposely overestimate wait times, a family
can stand in line for 40 minutes, Larson
says, thinking they were going to wait for
an hour, then get on a four-minute ride
and be completely happy. “That’s
what happens if you manage people’s
expectations such that you can exceed
them,” he says. “I wish airline pilots
understood this better when you’re
on a ground hold.”
59
 BLESSED
ARE THE
WATCHMAKERS
BY JOE BROWN
P HOTO G R A P H S BY C H R I S TOP H E R PAY N E

Roland G. Murphy is the R, G, and M in RGM Watches,

the last American outfit manufacturing fine watches
with bespoke 100-plus-piece movements from raw,
precious metals. After a part-time gig in high school
that involved building clock cabinets, he caught the
horological bug. Murphy went on to study
watchmaking in Switzerland and then took a job
developing timepieces for the Hamilton Watch
Company. Twenty-five years ago he founded RGM.
Here, he works a 1913 Swiss lathe called a Rose Engine.

60 POPULAR SCIENCE
RUBY You might hear the term “jewel”—often preceded by a number—when talking
SLIPPERS watches. They aren’t there just for show, though. Since each watch contains
a number of constantly rotating wheels, the axles of those wheels need to
rest in something that won’t wear away. Diamond (hardness 10) is overkill,
but a ruby (hardness 9) is just right. Watchmakers used to grind jewels out
of actual rubies, but these days synthetic gems can be made-to-order to fit
sockets reamed by this machine, which is about the size of a tissue box.

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 61
 THE INNER Ten people work at RGM; eight of them, including Murphy, fabricate parts,
SANCTUM assemble movements, and repair existing watches. They work the same
tools you’d find in an early-20th-century Swiss atelier. Four cast-metal en-
gine-turning machines dominate the main workroom. These lathes carve
patterns into metal surfaces. The process, known as guilloche, requires ex-
pertise that sets RGM apart. “Guilloche is a whole separate craft from
watchmaking,” says Murphy. “Very few people around the world do both.”

62 POPULAR SCIENCE
BUILT OUT Watchmaker Jake Weaver-Spidel adjusts one of the company’s house-
OBSOLESCENCE made movements, the Caliber 801. It takes about a week to assemble and
adjust one of these machines, and that’s in addition to the months it
takes to fabricate the components. Murphy purposely designs his
movements with servicing in mind, so that, if cared for, they could last
indefinitely. More than watches, these are heirlooms. “I don’t like the idea
of building something with a life span in mind,” he says.

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 63
 BEAUTY If there’s a flat surface inside a high-end watch, chances are it’s decorated,
WHEREVER or, as watchmakers say, finished. The word choice speaks volumes about the
YOU LOOK craft. Even though the recessed areas of this watch’s main plate will soon sit
under a multi-layered complement of gears, springs, and other parts, they’re
subjected to a purely decorative process called perlage (note spelling).
RGM’s artisans grind tiny overlapping circles over every exposed facet of the
plate. It can take a half-hour or more to embellish just this part.

64 POPULAR SCIENCE
THE PRICE Most of the cost of a fully bespoke watch is in development and labour. To
OF PERFECTION reassure well-heeled customers, decorative elements are made from pre-
cious metals like gold, platinum, even rhodium. The custom movements
use very high grade, low-expansion alloys of steel, nickel and brass to en-
sure accuracy. Even so, labour still tops the costings. When it comes to
in-house models, RGM produces only around 60 watches a year. Murphy’s
team fastidiously crafts these beating watch hearts by hand.

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 65
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 HOW 2.0
ISSUE SEPTEMBER
106 2017

THE FINE ART OF

DALEK CONSTRUCTION

SLEEP YOUR
WAY TO MARS

BUILDING A BIG
LITTLE ROBOT ARM
 How 2.0
The Perfect The faceted skirt was
easier to build in 1963.
[and Period- Today, tradition
prevents it being

Correct] Dalek replaced by a

curved piece.

by DAN L ANDER

D espite imbuing one word –

“Exterminate!” – with gloriously
ring-modulated destructive passion, and
despite their militant xenophobia, nobody
really hates the Daleks. Admit it: sometimes,
in your secret heart, you barrack for Davros.
That poor semi-dude is well overdue a win…
It’s not just a limited vocabulary that makes The torso includes mounts for the ico
the Daleks so iconic, of course. It’s their blaster and terrifyingly strong, uh, su
physical design. The universe’s most
terrifying… uh… novelty loudspeaker?
Camera-equipped garbage can? What is a
Dalek, anyway?
Makers around the world try to answer that
question in the best possible way: by building
super-accurate, full-scale Daleks. Specifically,
the classic design that Doctor Who fans first
saw in 1963, juddering around in black and
white, with William Hartnell, the First Doctor,
juddering around alongside them.
Imperial Stormtroopers aside, few other
sci-fi bad guys get their own specific clubs.
Even here, the Australian Dalek Builders Union
(ADBU) has devoted years to recreating not
costumes or models, but super-accurate
replicas of proper, BBC-grade Daleks.
“In most respects, the ones that we make
are exactly the same as the ones used on set,
built to their exact specifications,” says Union
member Roy Gill. “Right down to their
mistakes.” Nothing like a dodgy Dalek to give
something an air of legitimacy, right?

Fibreglass or Timber?
A DIY Dalek is no small project, and ADBU Addition of the Dome completes
members can spend between six months and the iconic look. The rest is fine
six years on a single Dalek. detail. A LOT of fine detail.
“It’s an expensive hobby,” admits Union
President Helen Barnes. “And that’s why it can
take two or three years to build one – you just
have to build it as you can afford the parts.”

70 POPULAR SCIENCE
 CONSTRUCTION: Fibreglass/timber.
Fibreglass is more faithful to BBC
models, but timber is easier.
COMPONENTS: Voice modulator
(Moogerfooger, or the Aussie-built MartMod),
microphone, powered speaker.
UPGRADES: BBC Daleks were foot-propelled,
electric wheelchair motors
are a welcome modern addition.

The (literally) hot seat.

Unlike the original props,
ADBU Daleks can be
“voiced” from inside by
the operator.

This non-moving model

allows convention
attendees to “speak like
a Dalek” via modulator

TIME: 6 months to 6 years (per Dalek)

DIFFICULTY:
COST: $1000+
MORE INFO: facebook.com/groups/ausdalek

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 71

How 2.0
True to the original methods used by
Shawcraft Models – which built the first four
Daleks in November 1963 – many ADBU
Daleks feature a fibreglass body and “dome”,
in which an operator crouches, and pushes the
whole contraption around on castors.
“The fibreglass build starts with a wooden
plug,” says Gill. “From the plug you make a
fibreglass mould, and from the mould you
make the master, so it’s a three-part process.”
A number of Australian builders have also
created timber Daleks, a build which is easier as
a one-off, and actually truer to the original vision
of Raymond Cusick, the BBC designer who came
up with the famous shape and structure.
In his initial designs (before Shawcraft
decided to use fibreglass) Cusick included the
distinctive angular skirt and body panels
because he thought the props would be built
from timber, and curves would be too hard or
expensive to construct.
Of course, there’s a very good reason the
“performance” Daleks were fibreglass. “We
have one that is made fully out of MDF
timber,” says Gill. “But the thing is, it’s really
heavy, it’s like a tank.”
Back in 1963, shoving such a thing around a
BBC set was impractical. Today, many Daleks
get an assist from an electric wheelchair
motor, but that has a downside too: ”If it runs
over your foot, it will break your toes,” says Gill.
Where Iz the Dok-Tor?
The main difference between an ADBU Dalek
and the “real” BBC prop is that the DIY models
have the voice modulator on board, along with
a microphone and speaker, which – in the
context of a TV show - allows the operator to
“act” with other cast members in real time.
The distinctive Dalek voice was originally
Builders use BBC-accurate moulds for even
the tiniest details, such as the “eye” here.
More Dalek-specific than the original Moog
modulator, a MartMod is essential kit.
There are plenty of different Dalek types to
choose from, including pretty coloured ones.
created using a device called a Moogerfooger.
This classic analogue ring modulator module
from Moog is an icon in its own right… and
genuine units cost about $450.
The solution? A custom modulator called
MartMod. It’s a stripped-back Moogerfooger
with various Dalek-specific functions
(including gun sounds), and although there
are different incarnations around the world,
the ones used by the ADBU are made in
Queensland by Glenn Simpson.
“It’s much more user friendly [than the
Moogerfooger],” says Barnes. “For someone
like me who doesn’t want to deal with a
million buttons and settings, I can just set it
and forget.” It’s Dalek-friendly!
The voice modulator also triggers the dome
lights on the Dalek, so voice and visual effects
are synched exactly like the on-screen models.
Add a little of the distinctive shaking –
achieved by the driver wriggling around inside
– and you have a pitch-perfect Son (or
Daughter) of Skaro, accurate enough to
charm not just fans, but even the toughest
anti-Whovian sceptics.
“While I was building,” says Eldridge, “my
wife simply tolerated the thing sitting out
under the pergola, ruining the aesthetic of her
alfresco dining area, and asked who I was
going to give it away to when it was done. But
when I screwed the dome on and called her
out to see the finished product she said,
‘That’s a work of art! It can come into the
house.’” Now it lurks, and unnerves the cat.
Like Aunty Used to Make
“When the BBC brought their Doctor Who
Symphonic to Australia, they used our Daleks
for all the promotional work,” explains Barnes.
“So that’s a pretty good idea of how close
these are to the originals.”
And that’s not the first time the BBC has
taken advantage of the Dalek maker
community. ADBU member Richard White
says when model-maker Mike Tucker was
commissioned to resurrect the Daleks in
2005, he spent a lot of time looking at DIY
creations. He had plenty to choose from: there
are Dalek builders around the world. Shiny
new Daleks were being built, even as the BBC
originals rotted away in store rooms.
“The BBC have never really looked after
their Daleks,” says White. “So [Tucker] didn’t
have much to go on. But he was able to look at
the ones people had made, and get the right
look and dimensions from them.”

DALEK: A Definition
“We do a lot of events,” says Dalek Union
President Helen Barnes. “And little kids love
them, even if they do just think they’re ‘robots’.
Which of course they’re not.”
In the Doctor Who universe, a Dalek is, in
fact, a sort of powered exoskeleton/tank. Deep
inside, a splodgy green squiddy thing is all that
remains of a once-proud race called the Kaleds
(geddit?). After a thousand-year nuclear war,
yada yada, mutation, yada yada, the mad
genius Davros built the Dalek shells to convert
squiddies into fearsome warriors. He also
“removed all their emotions except for hate”.
His decision not to replace the excised emotions
with, you know, legs, has meant the Daleks – or
rather, the scriptwriters – have had to come up
with increasingly complex electromagnetism-
based solutions to help the poor things climb
stairs, operate on cobbled streets, effectively
chase various iterations of The Doctor, etc...

72 POPULAR SCIENCE
 RE
FUTU
PRE V I EW
How 2.0
BAD TO WORSE
Nap your
way to
Mars
by JASON LEDERMAN
Y ou’re on a road trip that lasts six
months—no pit stops, black
night the whole way. That’s how long
it would take you, and how
monotonous it would be, to fly to
Mars. To avoid the boredom (and its
malingering housemates depression
and anxiety), you could spend part of
your trip in artificial hibernation, or
torpor, as it’s medically known. NASA
is funding research into this method
for future planet hoppers, and not
just to reduce the games of I Spy.
Because metabolism slows during
slumber, crew require less food and
water, reducing a mission’s cargo
weight, fuel needs, and price tag.
Also, there will be way less space-
crazy murder. Here’s how to sleep
sweetly (and sanely) on a 54-million-
kilometres space flight.
[ STEP 1 ]
You enter the torpor pod. Using an IV placed
in a central vein in your chest, a crew mate
injects a sedative similar to propofol to
prevent shivering, then tapes sensors to your
skin. These will monitor heart rhythm, blood
pressure, oxygen levels, and other stats.
[ STEP 3 ]
Low Maintenance
The crew pushes anticoagulants through the
central line to prevent blood clots from
forming—if they break free, they can kill your
heart (which is bad). IV antibiotics help stave
off infection. And robotic systems periodical-
ly stimulate your muscles to prevent atrophy.
[ STEP 5 ]
After two to three weeks, it’s time to rise and
shine. A crew member ramps down your
pod’s cooling system, letting your body
gradually warm. Once you’re back to normal
internal temperatures, the crew will turn off
your sedative and allow you to wake.
[ STEP 2 ]
Straight Chillin’
Once the sedative knocks you out, the pod
begins cooling the air around your body. This
lowers your core temperature a few degrees
per hour, from a healthy 37°C to below the
point of hypothermia. Crew members may
also cool you with gel pads or icy nasal spray.
[ STEP 4 ]
Food Tube
In torpor, the average body needs only about
1,000 calories of daily nutrient slurry. You
“eat” via a feeding tube down your throat
or a PEG tube implanted on the inside of
your stomach. Urine- and faecal-collection
systems keep you, and the pod, clean.
[ STEP 6 ]
ILLUSTRATION BY BROWN BIRD DESIGN
You stay up for two to three days, moving
your body and caring for dozing crew mates
(although robots might one day take over
this task). Then you go back under for
another few weeks. Repeat until you arrive
safe and (mostly) sane on the Red Planet.
P O P S C I .CO M . AU 73
 IN LIEU OF A LETTERS PAGE

I Wish Someone
How 2.0 Would Invent…

Faster than Light Travel

ADAM BOOZER VIA FACEBOOK
Mathematically speaking, warp speed is possible,
says Eric Davis, a theoretical physicist with the
Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin. In
theory, he says, a warp drive creates a bubble
that distorts spacetime around a moving vessel.
The problem, though, is the energy required to do
so roughly equates to the sun’s mass. Don’t give
up yet. Physicists brought that energy demand
down from its original estimate (the mass of the
galaxy) by creating a more efficiently shaped
warp bubble. Finding better ways to send that
bubble through space is next.

A Pill That Cures Ageing

@1CENTTHINKER VIA TWITTER
It’s unlikely that any medicine will unlock the secret to
immortality, but certain drugs might slow our decline. One,
called rapamycin, tricks cells into thinking they’re starving,
which allows them to better resist DNA damage and other
stressors, and thus live longer. One study found it extended
mouse life spans by 25 per cent. Longevity researchers such as
Matt Kaeberlein at the University of Washington, are now
testing rapamycin on dogs. But getting it approved for humans
will be hard; ageing isn’t seen as an illness.

A Way to Be Productive While You Sleep

JUSTIN RODGERS VIA FACEBOOK
It would be the ultimate life hack: Instead of ‘wasting’ one third
of your days staring at the back of your eyelids, find a way to
make use of those lost hours. But Matthew Walker, a sleep
researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, says that’s
a backward way of thinking. Snoozing is extremely productive,
he counters. One pivotal 2003 study found participants who
lost between one and five hours of sleep saw steady declines in
scores on tests that measure reaction speeds to visual stimuli.
The effects worsened with each additional lost hour of sleep.

74 POPULAR SCIENCE
 $0- 6<5,);165 .69 ;0-
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BIGGER AND BETTER

Going Out
On A Limb
by DAN L ANDER

WHILE GABE BENTZ MIGHT HAVE A

day job with a robotics manufacturer, his most
inspired creation may turn out to be one that
came together in his garage – the LittleArm.
This deceptively simple robot arm combines
an Arduino Uno micro-controller with a bunch
of quick-to-3D-print elements to create an eas-
ily-assembled, easily-trained personal robot
arm for doing... well, that’s up to the user.
“I made the first LittleArm at home as an ex-
cuse to have a working small demo of a larger
project, to mess around with and test code,”
says Bentz. “Something that I could destroy
less expensively, then later just have fun with.”
When Bentz showed it off to his colleagues
at Idaho-based Slant Robotics, the company
promptly put a kit version into production.
And that’s where the printer farm comes in.

PRINT REVOLUTION
We might still be waiting a while before every-
one owns a 3D printer at home. Why? Because
for most of us, 3D printing is still too slow.
“You’re competing with next-day delivery
from Amazon,” Bentz explains. “Printing at
home is not worth the cost or trouble.” Yet.
What is worth the trouble, however, is 3D
printing components for small scale manufac-
ture: “LittleArm has forced us to explore what
3D printing can do in a manufacturing context,”
says Bentz. “We’ve been able to build a large-
scale printer farm, and from that, we’re starting
to find new ways to use printers in [consum-
er-product, mass] manufacturing, which is a
nut that nobody has really cracked yet.”
Soon, the printer farm could offer an faster,
more affordable, more flexible, and expen-
sive-injection-mould-free alternative to tradi-
tional manufacturing.

SHARING IS CARING A 3D printer farm

Although the various incarnations of the (above) churns
LittleArm are available to buy in kit form, all the units (right) for a
fraction of the
instructions and 3D printing files for each are cost of tooling up
also available for free, allowing more experi- a full factory.
enced makers to tackle the project from scratch
and modify it as they see fit.
Already plans are floating around the web for
Waldo controllers and other mods, and Bentz The LittleArm
hopes to see more in the future. started life as a
home kit (far
“It’s Arduino based,” he says, “so it’s open right), which
source, all the code is online, so they can re- owners operated
design the files, or reprogram the robot from via tablet.
scratch, and just keep adding onto it.”

76 POPULAR SCIENCE

AN ARM WITHIN REACH
Bentz created the first commercial version
of the LittleArm in 2016, and has revamped
it twice since then, first as the LittleArm
2C and most recently the LittleArm Big (we
would have called it the Big LittleArm, just
to mess with people). Th bot’s combination
of accessibility and functionality has prov-
en a hit with educators and home makers.
It’s a perfect introduction to robotics.
“In the kit, you get all the pieces you
need to get the arm plugged into your
TheShed
computer or Android device and train it
do some little task like move a chess pi
or dunk an Oreo cookie,” says Bentz. “W
have a training system where you move
the individual joints and you record wav
points, then you can play them back an
back, just like an industrial arm.”
Self-build kit prices start at less tha
US$100, including Bluetooth connectiv
and all software.
www.littlearmrobot.com
P O P S C I .CO M . AU 77
 SEPTEMBER
1967

From The
Archives
In the days before lithium-
ion, this was all an electric
car could hope to be.
When EVs Were
Celebrated, Not Feared
it still takes 14 seconds to hit 50 km/h. Though
of course, in 1967, that’s not terrible...
For the next thirty years at least, electric cars
stayed like this. Built two or three at a time,
packed with dangerous chemicals, they mostly
just proved that battery tech wasn’t ready.
There’s an irony, somehwere, that it took
the mobile phone and its lithium-based high-
capacity, quick-charging battery, to make EVs
practical. It’s ironic because mobile phones
have made cars otherwise more dangerous.
Technology. It’s a game of give and take.

PART OF THE REASON ELECTRIC
vehicles like the Tesla Model X get so much
negative press (along with glowing adulation
of course) is that they really do pose a credible
“threat” to the internally combusted status-quo.
V8 enthusiasts wail about the loss of the
“throaty roar” because really that’s the only
downside to a modern EV. Well that, price and
the time it takes to recharge on long road trips.
And two of those will get better over time.
None of that applies to “Ford’s first electric”
from September 1967. This is an EV that
knows its place: as a completely impractical
technology demonstrator with a 60km range
and recharge time that the article rather
conspicuously fails to mention.
It’s cramped, it makes weird noises, and the Throughout the 60s, it was the law that women
must remain extremely sexy at all times while
batteries are full of molten sodium and sulphur operating a motor vehicle.
heated to over 300 degrees. Molten-salt
batteries have good discharge capability, but

by ANTHONY FORDHAM

Oils Are In Fact Oils

SEPTEMBER 1967

With the first great oil crisis still a couple of years away, the
word “oil” itself didn’t have the connotation it does today. In
1968, to people outside the industry, oil was the goopy stuff
the mechanic puts in your engine. And apparently still a bit of
an arcane topic. Don’t worry, PopSci is here to tell you all about
oils, including the big names like DINO SUPREME and DEEP
ROCK and RICH LUBE and SKELLY SUPREME and
we swear we are not making any of these up...
78 POPULAR SCIENCE
POPULAR SCIENCE - SEPTEMBER 1

Here’s
First El
by DAVID SCOTT
PS European Editor

It’s more than just

design study - the
company will use
has a test-bed for
more efficient
sodium-sulfur
batteries

Tail-end view of
chassis shows twin

F ord of England has moved a big step nearer the production-line elec-
tric car. The Comuta, designed and built by the British subsidiary of
U.S. Ford, is the first stage in a practical town runabout that is silent, is kid
opposed drive motors
with cooling ducts
fed from blower.
stuff to drive, and licks air pollution.
It is powered by ordinary lead-acid batteries, but is intended eventual-
ly to take the long-life sodium-sulfur package being developed by U.S.
Ford [PS, Dec. ‘66]. That’s stage two of the project. to slow the motors, Ford chops it up into pulses to achieve the same thing.
But the Comuta has some hardware on its own. The drive, speed con- A transistorized oscillator generates square-wave pulses of fixed ampli-
trol, suspension, and interior heating and ventilating systems of this new- tude and width. The frequency of pulses can be varied between 30 and
born baby electric are all cunningly contrived. 400 cycles a second by the throttle pedal, which alters critical circuit val-
Only six feet eight inches long overall, but with room for two adults and ues through a series of micro-switches.
a couple of small children, the tiny car cruises at 25 m.p.h. for a 40-mile Pulses are amplified and fed to thyristors—semiconductors capable of
range, and will do up to 40 m.p.h. With an ultralow center of gravity, it high-frequency on-off switching of large electric currents. These sol-
corners like the proverbial billiard table on wheels. The turning circle is a id-state relays, together with a smoothing choke, are in the supply line
mere 18 feet, and three of these stubby Fords can be parked end-to-curb from the batteries to the motors.
in the space needed for one ordinary auto. At light throttle, the frequency of the pulses is low, which means that
The chassis has a square-section central backbone with a hollow interi- they are spaced far apart. So the effective voltage reaching the motors (and
or partitioned to serve as twin air ducts for ventilation. Outrigger mem- the current drawn from the batteries) is small. With more pedal, the fre-
bers carry the batteries, suspension arms, and fibreglass body. quency, voltage, and speed increase until 18-20 m.p.h. is reached. Then
The power. A pair of motors at the rear drives the car. These are stan- contactors cut in to short out the thyristors and apply full battery voltage...
dard 24-volt aircraft units uprated to draw 400 amps and deliver five
horsepower each. Mounted end to end on the transmission casing, they
drive the rear wheels individually through simple reduction gearing.
They’re wired in series to act as an electrical differential. When the in-
Bucket seats are
side wheel slows on a corner, the opposite motor automatically speeds up
sharply angled.
so that the total power load is constant but unequally divided between the Two pedals are
two motors. sole stop-go
Air cooling is needed because the motors are pushed beyond their nor- controls. Four
mal three-horsepower rating. The exhausted warm air is used to heat the fasteners
release sill
car. The speed-control system is a mile panels to give
stretcher, sidestepping power-wasting resistors that dissipate electrical access to
energy as heat. Instead of lowering the DC voltage by conventional means under-floor

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 79
 The Caesium 133 Atomic Watch
For when being on time is important enough to strap a $6000 chunk of unstable
isotope and a freakin’ laser on your wrist.

by ANTHONY FORDHAM

WE CARE ABOUT MEASURING TIME even more unusual was the kind of movement movement, itself worth about $20 and found in
down to the last picosecond partly because it’s Patterson decided to build. watches priced at around $500.
important to daily life, but mostly because we Under that face though, is the expensive part:
can. The quest for the perfect clock has taken Caesium the Day a Chip Scale Atomic Clock, or CSAC. And at-
4000 years so far, and it shows no sign of ending Patterson’s vision was straightforward: he want- tached to that is the clever part: the circuitry that
any “time” soon. Haha watch pun, geddit? ed to build a wrist-capable (if not exactly wrist- lets the CSAC set the Ronda movement, ena-
The first clocks were made of shadow, sized) atomic clock. So he did. Called the Caesi- bling the watch to actually tell time.
water and flame. Today, we use objects in space, um 133, it keeps time without needing to consult After months of precision electronics work,
sub-atomic particles, a planet-girdling informa- a GPS almanac or some server on the internet, a prototype of the Caesium 133 sprang into - no
tion system, all in the service of being sure it’s and it stays accurate for a thousand years. wait, whirred into - no, actually made absolutely
10:37, not 10:38 and certainly not 10:36:53. As a watch, it’s pretty basic. That nice Bathys no sound at all into to life in 2013.
During the 15th century, clocks become accu- Hawaii style face is driven by a Ronda 509 quartz After that, it was all over bar the Kickstarter.
rate enough that people wondered if it wouldn’t
be awesome to have a little one to carry around,
all th ti always. Miniature time-pieces soon
Full credit to Bathys Hawaii, the watch
became all the rage, but they had an annoying is as small as the CSAC will allow.
problem: they lost or gained time, sometimes There’s a lot of impressive electronics
minutes per day. And so the quest began, to cre- in there to connect to the movement.
ate the perfect watch. And the teeny tiny gears
and mainsprings and capstans did indeed get
very tiny, and ever more accurate.
Then, in 1969, Seiko changed everything by
releasing a watch that exploited the way quartz
crystals vibrate at a specific frequency when
built into a so-called oscillator circuit. Wheel
trains were out, and digital counters were in.
Crystal watches were solid-state, cheaper and
more accurate than clockwork.

Watch This Space

But even quartz movements lose or gain time.
Sure, we were down to seconds per day or even
month now, but it was still annoying. Depend-
encies grew: first radio receivers to get updates
from a central clock, then from the internet, and
eventually from the GPS network itself.
This is why unless you still own a watch, you
probably haven’t actually set a clock for years
now. Phones and computers update automati-
THE OPPOSITE OF KISS
The Chip Scale Atomic Clock (CSAC) was developed back
cally - they even take care of daylight savings. in 2005, by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects
But they rely on networks and that sticks in the Agency, because of course it was. Surprisingly, the CSAC
craw of a certain kind of engineer-artist. Like the was declassified for commercial production in 2011, and
watch-boffins at Bathys Hawaii. today the civilian-spec version is just 40 x 35 x 10mm. It
weighs 35g and runs on a 115mW circuit.
It’s one of an increasing number of watch mi-
Inside, a 2mm capsule of non-radioactive caesium-133 is
crobrands that sells in small batches. Like other heated to 130 degrees and vaporised. Then a semiconduc-
microbrands, Bathys Hawaii typically loads a tor laser shines a microwave-oscillated beam of infrared
custom case with a third party quartz move- light through the caesium onto a photodetector. Electrons
ment, in this case from Swiss company Ronda. in the caesium change “hyperfine energy levels” at an
extremely precise and regular rate, and once per cycle, the
Only a few microbrands make their own laser light is blocked from the detector, which registers as
watch guts (technical term, see p.60) so Bathys a “tick”. Then it’s a “simple” matter of connecting this to a
Hawaii founder John Patterson’s decision to bunch of digital counters, and voila: a clock accurate to one
Kickstart his own movement is unusual... but second over as much as 5000 years.

80 POPULAR SCIENCE
 BUT DOES
IT ALSO
TELL TIME?
While Bathys Hawaii’s
atomic watch is expensive,
it’s still comprehensible to us
mere mortals. For proper
superfluity you always have
to go full English. Micro-
brand Hoptroff London also
uses CSACs (thus the odd
shape of its watches). But
th r than have the
mic circuit” run all the
the wearer pushes a
n to activate it
ntarily, and sync the
ent. The company
s drift of less than one
d a century.
for utility, Hoptroff’s
exclusive and sold out
(a slightly altered
n of which is on our
does indeed tell time.
tells sidereal time,
ude, ‘time error’, moon
e, lunar transit, tide,
ity... and even status
laser inside the CSAC.
e hope you wear that
lose to you heart, rich
n who paid well over
00 for an atomic
t watch. You’re our
f crazy. We salute you.

Buy Some Guy A Watch! strapped to their sleeve.

Over April and May 2014, Patterson
raised US$76,832 from 97 backers to cre-
ate just three examples of the Caesium 133.
Most of the backers received T-shirts or oth
er Bathys Hawaii watches, but three stumped
US$6000 each for a shot at history.
It turns out that Patterson was engaged
in a sort of horological arms-race with other
mad-scientist type microbrands to get the first
wrist-based atomic watch into the market. It was
close (see But Does It Also Tell Time?). And even if
Bathys Hawaii did “win” the Caesium 133 did so
while carrying a few... limitations.
For a start, the sheer bulk of the thing can’t be
ignored. The CSAC is tiny for an atomic clock,
This was the original design vision for the
Caesium 133. The first three prototypes
turned out somewhat more... utilitarian.
but it’s chunky for a wearable. Add to that the
necessary electronics to mate it to the otherwise
standard quartz movement, add a battery, and
the result requires the owner to no so much put
their cards on the table, as wear the entire deck
Even so, the Caesium 133 only runs “a few
hours” on battery, according to Patterson.
That’s what happens when your machine relies
on an entire lab-worth of lasers and oscillators
and photodetectors and whatnot, crammed into
a tiny cube (see The Opposite of Kiss).
And yet, we love the Caesium 133. Patterson’s
DIY determination and maker-vibe creative
process speaks to the mad inventor in all of us.
Does the world need a big, ugly, borderline use-
less atomic wristwatch? No. But we’re glad the
Bathys Hawaii Caesium 133 exists. And who
knows: as well as staying accurate for 1000
years, the next one might also have enough bat-
tery to run for an entire day!

P O P S C I .CO M . AU 81
TRAILER

Next
I !

HYDROGEN Dismissed by the doubters, this fuel

of the future is already hard at work..

WEIRD
IDEUTA S PLUS!
THE
ABO uture of food
BEGINNING OF ent show for
THE UNIVERSE medical tech
possibly fast
hard drives
High-tech
stab vests
Self-driving
supercars
EAPS MORE!

82 POPULAR SCIENCE
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