Forget Science Fiction. Here's the Science.
| The Super Power Issue
| A User's Guide to Time Travel
01 * X-RAY VISION
| 
Eric Siry
For decades, young horndogs have been duped into buying X-ray specs, little more than plastic frames with shapely silhouettes painted on the lenses. The next generation of tweens may be luckier, thanks to the sonic flashlight, invented by Carnegie Mellon engineer George Stetten. This handheld scanner uses ultrasound to penetrate barriers. Unlike older devices, it doesn't require a bulky monitor; the image is displayed on a 2-inch mirror that surrounds the device's tip. The only downside is that, because ultrasound doesn't travel well through air, the scanner must be pressed up against an object or surface.
A miniature version could someday send images not to a tiny display but straight to the user's eyeballs. Already, retinal implants are being used to transform video signals into electrical current that stimulates the optic nerve. "The challenge is to take information from a camera and convert it into neural code," says Mark Humayun, a University of Southern California researcher working on such implants. Last May, the USC team restored limited vision to blind test subjects.
Once fitted with an implant, you could simply switch from the camera to the sonic flashlight when you wanted to look through walls. Getting cyborged might be too much trouble for 13-year-olds who merely want to see through skirts, but not for law enforcement and other moneyed snoops.
02 * REGENERATION
| 
Eric Siry
Newts do it. Tadpoles do it. Even zebrafish do it. So what's to stop human beings from regenerating damaged organs? Not much, says Anthony Atala, director of tissue engineering at Children's Hospital Boston. His team has pioneered a technique to help terminal patients regrow healthy bladders or kidneys.
The process begins with a biopsy of the diseased organ, which results in a cross-section containing three types of cells: muscle, epithelial, and collagen. The first two are grown on a tissue plate for four weeks or so. Meanwhile, an artificial collagen "scaffold" is created, shaped with the help of CT scans of the patient.
"When we have enough cells, we layer them on the collagen scaffolding, like building a cake," Atala says. The regrown organ is placed in an incubator, for a week, after which it's ready for transplantation. The researchers are waiting for FDA clearance to use the procedure on patients.
Harvard biologist Mark Keating is studying the zebrafish, which can regrow its spine, retinas, and heart. He has found the enzyme that appears to trigger muscle regeneration when the organ is damaged. The challenge now is to figure out what genetic factors kickstart the process. The same mechanism may enable the human body to perform similar restorative feats.
03 * TOTAL RECALL
| 
Eric Siry
Quick: What did you have for dinner on June 17, 1986? You're stumped because of all the protein phosphatase 1 coursing through your brain. PP1 is an enzyme that plays a crucial, albeit little understood, role in memory. The less you have, it seems, the more likely you are to remember your spouse's birthday or the names of your boss's kids.
Or, if you're a mouse, how to navigate a maze. Last year, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich disabled the gene responsible for PP1 production in a number of mice. Compared with their untweaked peers, the engineered rodents performed far better at memory-intensive tasks. If humans could be similarly modified, our corresponding brains might become extraordinarily retentive.The next step is to identify the PP1 gene in humans and find a way to shut it down.
Meanwhile, Memory Pharmaceuticals is working on a drug that slows the destruction of the molecule cyclic-AMP. This compound helps activate proteins that strengthen connections between neurons, which in turn spark memory formation. The company, founded by Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, is looking to boost the body's c-AMP production. Flood your brain with enough of the stuff, and perhaps you'll be able to rattle off pi to a zillion decimal places – or at least find your car keys.
04 * TELEPORTATION
| 
Eric Siry
The ability to atomize objects and reconstitute them elsewhere was always one of sci-fi's most far-fetched conceits – until June 2002. That's when Australian physicist Ping Koy Lam teleported a laser beam, a first, tiny step toward beaming humans to and fro.
Starting with a beam made of billions of photons, Lam's team set out to measure each particle's spin and polarization, then reproduce those conditions in an equal number of photons nearby. The problem is that it's impossible to gauge these quantum attributes precisely; the more you know about one, the less you can know about the other. To solve this conundrum, Lam and company relied on a mysterious state called quantum entanglement. For reasons that aren't fully understood, entangling the photons negated the weirdness and allowed the scientists to pinpoint their characteristics, destroying them in the process. The researchers encoded their measurements in radio waves, zapped them to a receiver a meter away, and applied them to the new photons.
It was a dramatic achievement, but photons are just the start: Lam predicts that within five years, someone will successfully teleport a single atom or molecule. Alas, teleporting people is a different story. A human body comprises some 10 27 atoms, a seemingly insurmountable number at present. Then again, Leonardo da Vinci couldn't get his flying machines off the ground, either.
05 * WEATHER CONTROL
| 
Eric Siry
The phrase weather modification is so 1960s, harkening back to an age when the dubious technique of cloud seeding was cutting-edge science. Today, those who dare to fool with Mother Nature prefer disaster mitigation, since their efforts are focused on slowing hurricanes and tornadoes. It's no small challenge, as MIT's Kerry Emanuel can attest.
Weather scientists believe that tropical storms derive their force from evaporated water, which transfers heat into the atmosphere. To stave off evaporation, Emanuel proposes coating the sea in a hurricane's path with an oily film just a few microns thick. Early tests have been disappointing; the coating won't stay put in a gale.
Ross Hoffman, chief scientist at R&D firm Atmospheric and Environmental Research, is also working the anti-hurricane angle. Taking his cue from chaos theory, Hoffman believes the right jolt of energy can knock a hurricane off course or even dissipate it before landfall. "One way to get energy down through the atmospheric column is with microwave downlinks from satellites," he says. Field tests are in the works.
06 * FORCE FIELDS Energy capable of blocking incoming projectiles would come in handy on the battlefield. Just ask any tank crew:
A $10 rocket-propelled grenade can shred even the hardiest tank armor.
To defeat such giant-killing ordnance, Britain's Defense Science and Technology Laboratory has developed a grenade-frying force field. Researchers have found that rocket-propelled grenade is most lethal right after impact, when it shoots forward a jet of molten copper at 1,000 miles per hour. The key is to stop the searing metal before it reaches the tank's hull.
DSTL's "electric armor" consists of two metal plates constructed of top-secret alloys and separated from the tank by insulation. The plates are connected to a high-energy capacitor fed by the tank's power supply. The outer plate is grounded, while the inner plate is charged. When the copper stream pierces the first layer and touches the second, it completes the circuit. The liquid metal is instantly vaporized by thousands of amperes of electricity.
The system passed initial testing in spring 2002, when an electrified troop carrier survived a rocket attack with nary a scratch. It may not be the invisible, impermeable bubble of Hollywood (and Washington) fantasy, but it could one day protect everything from missile batteries to humvees.
07 * UNDERWATER BREATHING
| 
Eric Siry
For those who dream of life under the sea, water must seem a cruel joke: It's replete with oxygen, yet humans lack the physiological equipment to extract that life-giving element. Meanwhile, fish happily pump H 2 O through their gills, which separate the precious O from the extraneous H.
Gill envy, however, may be facing its last gasp. Taking a cue from the breathing mechanisms of dogfish and carp, researchers at Tokyo's Waseda University are perfecting an artificial gill designed to allow divers to stay submerged indefinitely. The device's exterior is woven from silicone strands, which protect a membrane filled with a concentrated hemoglobin solution. The brew draws oxygen through the membrane while keeping out the superfluous hydrogen. When heated, the hemoglobin releases its cargo, which then can be funneled into the swimmer's windpipe through a scuba mouthpiece.
The Waseda team has been working on the gill since the mid-1990s and only recently created a version compact enough for field tests. The trick now is to figure out how to get a breathable amount of oxygen out of the hemoglobin solution. Once that's ironed out, it shouldn't be too long before humans and fish swim side by side for hours on end – which should finally prod science into solving the age-old riddle of wrinkled fingertips.
08 * SUPER STRENGTH
| 
Eric Siry
Take all the anabolic steroids and human growth hormone you can stomach, and you still won't be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. No, to pull that off you'll have to slip into one of the battle suits designed by MIT's Institute of Soldier Nanotechnologies. Funded by a $50 million Army grant, the institute is working on clothes fitted with artificial "exomuscles." Made of polymers that contract and expand in response to electrical charges, these devices mimic the twitch of human muscle fibers, though at a much slower rate. Ultimately, researchers hope their exomuscles will be 100 times stronger than the human analog.
With a working battle suit a decade or more away, some scientists are tinkering with genes instead. Se Jin-Lee, a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins, is the progenitor of Mighty Mouse, a rodent altered to block expression of the gene that codes for myostatin, a protein that limits muscle growth. This creature is ripped beyond belief, a four-legged version of Arnold Schwarzenegger at his Pumping Iron peak.
Doing the same to a human embryo would, of course, be a legal and ethical nightmare. But don't be surprised if it happens anyway. Some parents will stop at nothing to ensure Junior a spot in the NFL.
