Feb 28, 2011 12:00 PM

Inside the Mad Science of 7 Renegade Researchers

—Wired researches some of today's most ambitious researchers, from a space cowboy to a bee queen to a skin jobber.

Robot Man

Illustration: Max Rose

Owen Holland's robot is not cute. With its single, squidlike eye, bone-white thermoplastic skeleton, and coils of exposed mechanical viscera, the thing looks like the top half of a zombie Cylon. Asimo would run from it; a Roomba would hide under the sofa. But while his bot may not be making trade show appearances anytime soon, Holland believes it will be able to do something much more impressive: think.

When it comes to artificial intelligence and robotics, think is a slippery term. "In what is essentially an engineering discipline, talking about machine consciousness isn't going to get you very far," the psychologist turned roboticist says from his lab at the University of Sussex. "But I'm at the end of my career, and I don't give a toss." His Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered Robot (get it? "ecce robot"?) aims to shed light on cognition with an "anthropomimetic" physical structure that matches ours, down to vertebrae, muscles, and tendons. ECCErobot's floppy body "has no intrinsic stiffness," Holland says. "If we turn the power off, it would collapse in a heap just like you would." And that's the idea—figure out how to control that system and you've probably learned what the brain has to do to control the human body.

To that end, this year Holland plans to upgrade ECCErobot with tension sensors to give it proprioception—the ability to tell where its body parts are—and a Kinect to give it depth perception. The point is to allow better interaction with the environment, which, according to Holland, is what underpins cognition.

So, time to welcome our new robot overlords? Not so fast. ECCErobot might eventually be able to wheel into a room, see a ball rolling atop a table, and pick it up. "And that's only if our control systems don't crash and burn," Holland says. Still, if ECCErobot does work, its body will be so similar to ours that cognitive comparisons will be inevitable—and logical. Let's just hope ECCErobot's descendants get some external upgrades—the thing looks like a frakking toaster.—John Pavlus

Brian McConnell

Space Cowboy

Illustration: Max Rose

Sending humans to another planet—according to conventional wisdom—would be uncomfortable, expensive, dangerous, and (at present) technologically unfeasible. But telecom entrepreneur Brian McConnell thinks he has a solution: Just add water.

Writing in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, McConnell, an engineer and space enthusiast, says his water-powered "spacecoach" could get astronauts to the Martian moon Phobos for less than $1 billion, using existing technology. The cheapest estimates for manned missions to Mars run in the range of $30 billion—roughly twice NASA's yearly budget—a literally astronomical price tag compared with a robot or orbiter. But in space travel, weight equals cost, and to keep astronauts alive and get them home you have to send along a lot of drinking water, which is really heavy. And so is chemical rocket fuel to power a craft through the vastness of space. "It's a very expensive undertaking," McConnell says. "It has a very hard time getting off paper."

McConnell's plan solves the fuel problem. In space, ships don't need instantaneous power to accelerate. They can pick up speed over a long time, which means they can use the economical electrothermal propulsion regularly employed for maneuvering in Earth orbit. These engines superheat gas with microwaves and push it through a nozzle to create thrust. The fuel? Water, which pays for its weight by keeping a garden alive, slaking the thirst of astronauts, providing a shield against the radiation of deep space, and eventually getting used for thrust. (Enough to last the whole trip would be stored frozen in the hull.) A smaller rocket gets the spacecoach to orbit, and the water drive takes over from there. It's all relatively simple off-the-shelf technology.

Sure, for all its streamlined elegance, McConnell's design is optimistic, to say the least. But undaunted, he plans to launch an X Prize-like competition, funded by Laminar Research, to improve the technology and raise awareness. Because with space travel, the hardest part of the journey is the first step (except for all the other parts).—Mario Aguilar

Marla Spivak

Bee Queen

Illustration: Max Rose

If you can't beat the diseases and pests that are killing bees, build a better bee. That's the notion behind the work of Marla Spivak, an entomologist at the University of Minnesota. She bred a strain of pollinating bee that fights varroa, a parasite linked to widespread bee deaths. With colony losses fluctuating around 30 to 40 percent every year, scientists and commercial interests are desperate for anything that'll help these pollinators thrive.

Spivak's breakthrough was literally cool. She used liquid nitrogen to kill a handful of baby bees inside their wax-sealed hexagonal cells. And then she waited. In some colonies, bees would never uncap the cells and clean them out. But in particularly neat-freak colonies, the corpses were gone in 24 hours or less. That's the trait she selected for, eventually coming up with a line she dubbed Minnesota hygienic. In colonies of Minnesota hygienic bees that get invaded by varroa—an eight-legged mite that drinks bee blood and lays its eggs inside cells—the bees uncap and clean out the cells containing infected, sick pupae before baby mites grow and reproduce—a contraceptive counterpunch.

Commercial beekeepers were reluctant to select for the trait themselves, though. Then, during a presentation, Spivak had "an aha! moment at the same time as a well, duh moment," she says. She had to work with breeders in the field. So she left her lab to work in California—hub of the commercial beekeeping industry—for three years.

These days, breeders are using her freeze-kill method to rear hygienic strains. And Spivak, a MacArthur "genius grant" winner, has dispatched a former grad student to identify 2,000 potential breeder colonies. The goals: separate the robust from the sickly, and breed from hives with the highest level of hygienic behavior and the lowest level of disease. Spivak today concentrates on an antimicrobial resin called propolis that wild bees shellac onto the inside of their hives as a sort of collective immune system—maybe pointing the way to an even better bee.—Kirsten Traynor

Ed Adams and Dan Miller

Snow Bombers

Illustration: Max Rose

The best way to learn about snow avalanches? Trigger some. That's the approach employed by Ed Adams and Dan Miller, civil engineers at Montana State University who ski into the backcountry to test new avalanche-prevention methods... with explosives. Many ski patrollers already blow up snow that looks avalanchey, but they don't always do it well. Bomb the wrong spot and a slope stays primed to slide. Avalanches on supposedly slide-controlled slopes have buried at least 26 people in the US since 2008, killing seven of them.

Adams and Miller know about the danger firsthand. Adams spent a few postgrad years ski-bumming in Utah before getting his engineering doctorate at MSU (while shredding the sick slopes of nearby Bridger Bowl). And Miller, a Montana native, pretty much grew up on skis before taking charge of supersonic ground tests for the US Air Force. After witnessing some of Adams' early tests, which included barricading himself inside a shack and then triggering an avalanche on top of it, Miller figured he could switch gigs and help out. "It was a 'don't try this at home' sort of thing, but I like to think we were being safe about it," Adams says.

Their tests today are much less primitive. They're trying to understand hoar, frozen dew layers that can shatter when buried under snow, triggering an avalanche. Ordinarily, ski patrollers destroy hoar with direct detonation. Miller thinks a better approach is to use shock waves to compress the entire snowpack. He uses a microphone and accelerometers to measure his test blasts. (Sometimes with a crash test dummy for vérité.)

In general, the duo has found that blast size matters less than bomb placement. Air trapped inside snow acts like a shock absorber. Mounting a charge on a bamboo pole, Adams and Miller found, gives the blast time to expand, creating a wider and deeper compaction. And canyon walls make good amplifiers. "We consider this figuring out the fundamentals," Miller says. "No one is looking at this." Plus, any day you ski a double black diamond while setting off bombs is a good one.—Ben Paynter

Wes Jackson

Green Thumb

Illustration: Max Rose

For 10,000 years, humans have drained aquifers, poisoned land and sea, and eroded once-fertile plains into wastelands—all so we can grow food. Plant geneticist Wes Jackson wants to reverse all that. His plan: Reboot agriculture by domesticating perennial crops.

Nearly all the problems of traditional agriculture, Jackson says, stem from the fact that grain crops are annuals—they grow, make seeds, and die in a single year. Replanting every season tears up the ground and disrupts delicate soil ecosystems. But don't blame Big Agriculture or the high-input, high-yield Green Revolution of the 20th century. Blame the Neolithic brainiac who first saved a handful of seeds and poked them into the ground instead the stew pot.

The first farmers domesticated annual grains (wheat, corn, barley) and pulses (lentils, peas). They had the biggest seeds and highest yields, but they're parasites, returning little to their environment. It's perennials that build extensive root networks and healthy soil, conserve water, and recycle nutrients. (After harvest in the fall, they grow again from their roots in the spring.) Natural systems function best when diverse species live together. Yet we blanket the Midwest with crops of genetically homogenous corn—and we plow, spray, and fertilize the heck out of them. It's a system that modern agriculture can't sustain, says Jackson, "but without a new green revolution, we'll destroy our soil trying."

So for the past three decades, Jackson has been looking for alternatives. His Land Institute, in Salina, Kansas, is now a booming research center with half a dozen PhD scientists, a new tornado-proof seed-storage facility, seed-sorting robots, and research plots. Newly domesticated Kernza, a perennial relative of wheat, should be farmer-ready within a decade, Jackson says, and perennialized sunflower-Jerusalem artichoke hybrids are undergoing work to improve yield. Illinois bundleflower, a native legume, may be one of the first new legumes to be domesticated. After all, what's 30 more years of effort compared to 10,000 years of toiling in the fields? —Thomas Hayden

Zhenan Bao

Skin Jobber

Illustration: Max Rose

You gotta have thick skin to survive in this crazy world—but that skin has to be sensitive, too. Robots and prosthetic limbs have the first part solved, with shells of titanium and carbon fiber. But the second part? No artificial coating can compare to real skin.

Chemist Zhenan Bao aims to fix that problem. She's working on "pressure pixels" made of stretchable, microscale organic field-effect transistors—building 40 years of advances in silicon chip design and nanofabrication into a flexible sheet. Last year, her team at Stanford University sandwiched finely textured sheets of a polymer called polydimethylsiloxane—PDMS, for short—between flexible electrodes. Apply pressure and the PDMS compresses, causing a measurable change in capacitance, the ability to hold an electrical charge. As a result, her material can theoretically detect pressures as faint as 3 pascals—roughly equivalent to the footfall of a housefly—and can do it quickly enough to "feel" each foot falling.

"Mimicking skin function will still take a long time," Bao says, but several other groups are trying to tackle the problem, and new approaches are beginning to emerge. There's no shortage of possible uses, like prosthetic hands sensitive enough to manipulate small objects, artificial skin-graft material for burn victims, or remote-control surgical tools that let surgeons feel—not just see—the guts they're exploring.

The coolest part is that there's no reason to stop at simply replicating skin. "We could integrate any kind of function beyond what skin already has," Bao says. How about chemical sensors—gunpowder-sensing gloves for enhanced TSA gropes, anyone? Or biological probes to detect infections at prosthetic limb attachment points? And, yes, the potential applications for telepresence sex are self-evident.

For now, Bao and other groups are focused on developing new sensing materials and increasing signal-processing capability. Full integration with the human nervous system is "still very far out," Bao says, "but with the technology being developed, you can see them converging."—T.H.