"Popular Mechanics" talks Fringe science: Season 1, episode 5

Author: Kate Schweitzer
Published on: October 15, 2008
Source: Popular Mechanics

This week's episode of Fringe, "Power Hungry," was full of high-voltage twists and turns—literally. From the electromagnetic fields of humans to GPS-enabled birds, one can't help but question the plausibility of this latest installment. With the help of experts across the globe, we found out that sometimes where there's fiction, there's also some bona-fide science.

Can someone have an electromagnetic field?

Plenty of people have a fear of cellphones, microwaves and power lines. For those who got close enough to Joseph, a depressed employee at a shipping company, those fears should have extended to alarm clocks, computers, pacemakers and conveyor belts. In a day's work, this guy manages to cause all of those electrical appliances to malfunction. Worse yet, he accidentally causes an elevator to plummet several stories and drive itself into the ground. Joseph survives the crash and runs away, setting off car headlights as he goes. Everyone else in the elevator is dead—not from the fall, but from electrocution.

At his lab, Dr. Walter Bishop says that "beings are merely highly complex electrical systems" explaining that he believes that someone has secretly amplified Joseph's electromagnetic field (EMF) so that he has the ability to control electrical devices either intentionally or entirely by accident.

According to real-life physicist Robert Park, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and author of Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud, humans are, in fact, electrical machines (which is one reason we can't capture the last image a dead person sees). "Our senses convert external inputs, such as sound or light, into tiny electrical currents that are processed by the brain," Park says. "A stationary electric charge has an electric field, and a moving charge has a magnetic field. We have electrical and magnetic fields, but we don't give off electrical charges."

But that is where the similarities between Bishop and Park end. Park discounts Joseph's abilities because such electrical charges result only from the transmission of EMF, as in radios, lights, X-rays or even the sun. If someone were to be exposed to radiation from EMF, it wouldn't cause Electroman-like qualities. Instead, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, it could result in anything from sunburn to cancer to death.

The closest one can get to giving off some sort of power surge is by building up a static charge. Commonly seen when a silk shirt clings to itself, this charge is also created when someone drags his shoes across a carpet and then leans in for a kiss. "An electrical spark is just the flow of electrons across a gap, so when you kiss someone who is not charged up, the electrons on you try to spread out onto both of you," Park says. "It can end a relationship!" So does this mean someone like Joseph can kill with a kiss? Park says not. "The flaw is that both participants feel the spark. That means the voltage is very high but the power is too low to do anything serious because the current flows for such a short time."

He continues, "There were errors right from the start. See, what [Joseph] had was an electrostatic charge, but there's just no way you can stay charged. He'd keep discharging. Every time he touched a doorknob, he'd release it."

And regarding Joseph's ability to levitate in the elevator? Park compared this to the urban legend that if you jump in a careening elevator, right at its moment of impact, you'd survive. It's just not true.

Can a pigeon actually track a human being?

When the Fringe Pattern-solving trio can't find Joseph, they call in reinforcements-in the form of 24 homing pigeons. Dr. Bishop says that he's used this type of pigeon in the past to tap into a person's unique electromagnetic signature, because pigeons contain traces of magnetite on their beaks.

Cordula Mora, a biological sciences researcher, studied the magnetic senses of homing pigeons at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and her findings concur with some aspects of Fringe's storyline.

"Pigeons are one of the few species that we know of that is capable of true navigation," Mora says. "They know where they are in relation to their goal at any point in time. For this, they are born with a magnetic compass and use a map system."

Mora's experiment shows that pigeons detect a magnetic stimulus in their upper beaks by using the ophthalmic branches of their largest cranial nerves. This study reinforced the theory that homing pigeons navigate by using tiny iron-rich particles in their beaks to map changes in the Earth's magnetic fields.

"What is not yet fully understood is how pigeons determine position," Mora says, regarding the ability of these birds to follow a map from one point to another.

Tim Guilford, the professor of animal behavior at Oxford University, runs a research group that studies navigation mechanisms of birds. He believes that pigeons use visual landscape features to identify where they are. "Often, birds will use prominent landmarks such as major roads, rivers or railways," Guilford says. "They learn individual habitual routes home once they become familiar with a place." Hence, not all birds take the same route, and often, it's far from direct.

Whether or not homing pigeons are reliable crime-fighting tools remains to be seen. We've been able to arm birds with GPS chips for five years, according to Mora. But the technology behind the GPS in Fringe, however, doesn't yet exist. "We now have GPS units small enough to be carried by pigeons, though not to track in real time, as this would require direct transmission from the bird," she says.

In the end, the pigeon flight wasn't a bad move for Dr. Bishop and his team. Guilford and Mora agree that the birds' visual acuity is incredibly reliable. "Until modern technology replaced them, pigeons have served very important roles as messengers," Mora says. "Battles have been won or lost and cities have fallen or survived because of a message carried by a pigeon."

Source: Popular Mechanics

"Popular Mechanics" talks Fringe science: Season 1, episode 4

Author: Kate Schweitzer
Published on: October 1, 2008
Source: Popular Mechanics

This week's episode of J.J. Abrams's Fringe, "The Arrival," steered clear of matters of the mind—with the exception of the occasional brain-scanning torture device, of course. What was more mind-bending was the 2-ft-tall metallic cylinder at the episode's center that may or may not be transmitting something. We ask the experts if a similar object would survive an explosion, and if it could tunnel through the center of the earth.

Could a metallic cylinder survive a major explosion unscathed?

Crane accidents at New York City construction sites are all too commonplace these days, but when a crane collapsed and killed three people at the start of "The Arrival" in Williamsburg in Brooklyn, its cause wasn't a strap failure or faulty weld, but an explosion. The fiery eruption happened when a mysterious cylinder blasted through an unused subway tunnel and into a gas main. When the dust settled, the cylinder was the only thing intact among the rubble.

If the cylinder was at the center of the explosion, how did it not break apart, melt or bend in that fireball? "It was probably kryptonite or unobtainium," jokes Jack Waddell, the president of Florida-based BlastGard. Waddell's company produces BlastWrap, a lining consisting of mineral-filled pockets that, when placed on an object, mitigates shock waves and quenches fireballs. According to Waddell, something like BlastWrap would have worked in this situation because the cylinder was right where the blast began. "The sooner the mitigation process starts, the greater the degree to which it prevents the full development of the energy release."

Assuming this cylinder wasn't wrapped in Waddell's perlite-pellet blanket or some similar protective lining, he says the shape of the object might be a reason for its safety. "It's the perfect vessel to survive because it manages internal and external pressure more efficiently than any shape on the planet," he says.

Alan Pense, professor emeritus of material science at Lehigh University's ATLSS Research Center, is no stranger to superstrong materials either. Engineers at the center have been experimenting with high-melting-point steels and oxides that can bend, stretch and compress without breaking. But superstrength might not even have been necessary for this object.

"It's not outlandish at all," he says. "In order to melt a structure, you have to have a very high temperature—close to 3000 degrees Fahrenheit—for an extended period of time." This is a hard threshold to reach, so in a normal, contained explosion, the material would typically survive. "Now, if you had a nuclear explosion, there's no question you could melt anything."

Is it possible for the cylinder to tunnel through the earth's core?

The mysterious cylinder may be able to survive fiery explosions, but what about its supposed ability to tunnel through the planet at any point in the world and come out on the other side? On the show, another cylinder—discovered in 1987—quickly disappeared when it shot like a missile down into the Earth's core.
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"The idea that you could somehow send something through the Earth's core is very unlikely because there are no materials I know that can survive that temperature," Pense says. The inner core is thought to have a temperature up to about 13,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is hotter than the surface of the sun. When refractory materials that can handle very high temperatures—bricks, ceramics and so on—begin to melt at 5000 F, it seems impossible for a material such as this cylinder to survive the trip.

Even if melting weren't an issue, Pense says the metal might dissolve into the core. He explains that when you throw salt on an icy road, those two solid materials are not at a temperature where they would individually melt. But if you clamp them together, they form an alloy where they are in contact and they dissolve. "What you may find is that these materials, when put in the iron core of the planet, may dissolve into that."

Pense wonders if perhaps the cylinder isn't going so deep that it actually hits the Earth's core. "We can drill many miles into the Earth's surface and not melt the drilling equipment or the piping, so certainly it could travel at that level," he says. But then, what about its ability to tunnel through the core at all? "What would be the energy source?" Pense asks. "How would it eliminate the material in front of it? Would it get so hot that the rocks would melt? That's not a good idea because you might begin to erode the surface of the cylinder."

Source: Popular Mechanics

"Popular Mechanics" talks Fringe science: Season 1, episode 3

By Kate Schweitzer
Published on: September 24, 2008

To see the original article, follow the link.

In this week's episode of J.J. Abrams's sci-fi hit Fringe, "The Ghost Network," we learn that Dr. Bishop plays the piano to help him think, and we get more clues about the mysterious "Pattern" that's caused much of the sci-fi phenomena we've seen so far on the show. This week, like last, was full of situations in need of a reality check. We check in with a neurologist to debunk more of the show's junk science.

Can metal really get inside your brain without you noticing?

This week, Dr. Bishop's guinea pig is Roy, a man plagued by pre-cognitions of Pattern-related atrocities. Roy has a bit of trouble in the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine: Once inside, his veins begin to protrude from his skin, looking as though they'll explode if exposure continues. Unfortunately for Roy, he spent his high school years participating in Dr. Bishop's science experiments. Bishop surmised that the result of those mysterious tests was metallic compounds in Roy's brain and bloodstream. (MRIs use huge magnets to create images. If any metal is left in a room with an MRI, it's usually bad news for the patient: The magnets will pull any piece of metal, big or small, into the machine).

Metal compounds can definitely accumulate in the brain, generally from toxic exposure, says Dr. Mark Milstein, a neurologist and assistant professor of neurology at a major New York City hospital. There have been instances, for example, when metal welders developed an accumulation of manganese in their brains. According to Milstein, such accumulation may result in abnormal movement disorders or dementia, but often, it's asymptomatic.

That's where Fringe's facts end. In the show, the metal in Roy's bloodstream multiplied over the years, either by environmental factors or diet. In reality, unless Roy had continued exposure, there's no way this scenario could happen. Metal just doesn't grow or multiply within your body.

Can you really navigate someone's brain while they're awake?

The quick answer to this question is "yes." "There are some [brain] surgeries done with patients partially conscious, in order to insure that important areas of the brain are not inadvertently damaged during an operation on the brain," says Dr. Mark Milstein. "The truth gets twisted after this." In order to access Roy's visions, Dr. Bishop uses a magnetic neuro stimulator to operate on his brainÑwhile Roy is conscious. Bishop moves the clusters of metal from the visual centers of Roy's brain to the regions that process sound. In the end, Roy doesn't see his visions anymore. Instead, he speaks them.

Dr. Bishop shows Roy a picture of a horse and a picture of a car, and as Roy processes the images, sometimes he'll call them out ("horse!") or sometimes another cortex will take over ("I taste gasoline!"). According to Milstein, if you show an awake patient a picture of a horse, he will always name it as long as he is capable of recognizing the picture. "A patient may hear a funny noise if you stimulate the auditory cortex, but he will still say 'horse' if that is the picture he sees." Most direct stimulation of the brain results in poorly defined responses, such as one's arm jerking when the motor cortex is stimulated, or flashes of color when the visual cortex is stimulated. The detailed responses depicted on the show, says Milstein, just don't happen.

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"Popular Mechanics" talks Fringe science: Season 1, episode 2

By S.E. Kramer
Published on: September 17, 2008

To see the original article, follow the link.

Last week after Fringe's pilot episode, we debunked the show's forays into junk science, from the idea that a toxin injected in one person could kill the entire population of an airplane in a matter of minutes, to the show's insistence that it's possible to interrogate dead people (within 6 hours after death, of course). This week, the show continued to perplex our experts with its creative explanations of neuroscience and superfast aging.

Can you turn from embryo to old man in a matter of hours?

This week's fringe science centered around a mysterious baby who had grown from a fertilized egg to an infant in less than an hour, and then from infant to old man to deceased in 4 hours. According to Dr. Walter Bishop, the show's resident mad scientist, "Advanced rapid aging, like the disease called progeria, can be induced artificially by manipulating the pituitary gland."

Progeria, the disease to which Bishop refers, is real, but its timeline is nothing like the one posited in the show. Early-onset progeria is a rare genetic disease known as Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome. Children are born without symptoms (after the normal nine months of pregnancy) and are usually diagnosed at around 18 to 24 months, according to the Progeria Research Foundation. The children die at an average age of 13 years, usually from a stroke or heart attack caused by premature, progressive heart disease.

Werner's syndrome is sometimes called "adult-onset progeria." With Werner's, parents don't notice anything wrong with the children until they become teenagers, according to Dr. George Martin, a professor of pathology and adjunct professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Though sufferers of Werner's syndrome appear to "age" more quickly than normal adults, in fact, they have a "whole panorama of disorders that are similar to what happens with aging, but not identical," Martin told PM yesterday. They tend to look old by the time they're in their 30s and die in their 40s or 50s.

In both cases, a mutated gene, not a manipulated pituitary gland, causes the disease. Werner's syndrome is an inherited recessive trait, but Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome is not passed down in families. Instead, researchers believe that it's caused by a chance mutation that occurs in a sperm or egg just before conception, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Either way, Martin reassured us, "It's not going to happen overnight."

Can you recover the last image a murder victim saw?

A murder victim on the show is killed with an overdose of anesthetic. According to the show's experts, because she was given a muscle relaxant, "The drug would have frozen her neural pathways at the moment of death and the last images she saw would be there." With this in mind, the scientists borrow an "electronic pulse camera" from possibly evil corporation Massive Dynamics. The camera shines at the victim's eyeball, which has been extracted from her but is still attached via the optic nerve. The special "laser-optic" hardware translates the frozen image—a bridge in Stoughton, Mass.—and projects it so that our detectives can find the killer.

Dr. Mark Milstein, a neurologist and assistant professor of neurology at a major New York City hospital, finds this scenario laughable. "They seem awfully dependent on the use of anesthetics to explain their medical science," he noted, remembering Fringe's use of anesthetics last week (combined with LSD) for brain-wave sharing. Milstein explains, "the minute [an image] hits your retina it is no longer an image anymore. It becomes electrical information because that's the language of the nerve. At that point there would be no way to retrieve it no matter how conscious or unconscious the patient was."

It would be great if we could understand how the brain transmits and stores images so we could read them, Milstein says, but right now it's just not possible.

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"Popular Mechanics" talks Fringe science: Season 1, episode 1

By Kate Schweitzer

To see the original article, follow the link.

From LSD Brain to Dead Autopilot, Fringe Premiere Skirts Reality

When it comes to fringe science—that occasionally dubious study of mind control, teleportation, invisibility and reanimation—the only true expert might be Dr. Frankenstein. That is, until J.J. Abrams moved beyond the sci-fi-bending universe of Lost—the Large Hadron Collider, time travel and all—and set out to create Fringe, the new X-Files-esque show that debuted last night on Fox. Now, he's trying to convince the disbelievers that science and technology have advanced to the point where anything is possible. While we wait for the return of Lost in 2009, PM's Hollywood Sci-Fi vs. Reality team geared up for a week-by-week breakdown of this cult "hit" in the making by asking real-world experts—from the FAA to the CDC, neurologists to geneticists—to deconstruct six of our biggest questions from the the most expensive pilot in TV history and separate the science from science fiction, and everything in between.

Can an injected toxin infect everyone on a plane?

Abrams opens Fringe in much the same manner as another show we love—onboard a 150-passenger plane that's experiencing a fair amount of turbulence. A nervous diabetic injects himself with an insulin pen, which incites a far different reaction than controlled blood-sugar levels would. Instead, the skin begins to melt off his face, and as he flails for help, he projectile-vomits on a horrified flight attendant. Within moments, everyone on the plane is infected with the mysterious—and deadly—contagion.

Some chemicals can cause a rapid skin infection or necrosis, but none that result in this kind of down-to-the-bone, Indiana Jones-style mess, says Dr. Lisa Rotz, an infectious disease expert and director of bioterrorism preparedness at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

And as far as the contagious nature of the infection—which morphs into an airborne toxin in mere moments—Rotz confirms that the spread of the toxin as depicted on Fringe is officially impossible. "The only way for a virus to become airborne is if it were to move through the bloodstream at the point of injection and create an infection in the lungs that is then coughed or breathed out," she says. And that's not including the days-long incubation period needed for the bacteria to replicate to the point where it can cause illness. If this epidemic were a toxin, only those in contact with the original compounds—the diabetic and possibly the flight attendant—could be exposed, and that's assuming the chemicals could have made their way through the diabetic's body, into his stomach and out the other end in seconds. No puke is that potent.

Can you really fly and land a plane entirely on autopilot?

Fringe's ill-fated aircraft was on its way to Boston's Logan Airport from Hamburg, Germany, when disaster struck. Despite everyone—including the pilot—dying midflight, the aircraft landed right on time because of Logan's new Pearl Autopilot System. It's hard enough to believe that an international flight would be without delay these days—never mind the fact that no airline currently flies direct from Hamburg to Boston—but what about this cutting-edge autopilot? Although Logan Airport won 2008's Airport of the Year for its advancements in technology, including foreign "object" debris detection cameras and runways that can land planes in zero visibility, it doesn't have any Pearl system, according to Flavio Leo, Logan's manager of aviation planning. "We're always going to have the interplay of the airplane, pilot, technology on air and on ground, and the physical airport," he says.

"All airliners have autopilots and almost all are capable of following a programmed path to the destination airport," says Alison Duquette, a spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration. "But the plane will fly over the airport and then go on by, straight ahead, until it runs out of gas." While many large airline jets can land themselves after the pilot selects the right frequencies and manually engages the wheels and wing flaps within 10 miles of the airport, no current commercial autopilot will go from the en route phase to the landing phase without some human input.

Still, the flight technologies experts at the FAA aren't ruling out that possibility altogether. Completely automatic flights and landings are performed by the military all the time with their UAVs, Duquette notes. For a commercial airliner, however, extensive software updates and changes in the landing gear would be necessary to make a pilot obsolete—something that's not in the interest of public safety.

Would the CDC really burn a plane?

In Fringe's premiere episode, the CDC was the first in the plane, and after taking some air samples, the government agency set it ablaze on the runway—but even this is fabricated. In reality, state and local health departments are the first on the scene, and the CDC has to be invited in. Even then, they wouldn't actually be the ones with the torches.

"When appropriate, we make recommendations for ways to decontaminate things," says the CDC's Rotz. This would most likely involve quarantining the plane in a separate hanger or, at most, applying heat using autoclave-like equipment to burn off any hazardous contaminants before disposing of the plane. "It wouldn't be lighting a match."

Can LSD and probe-laden tanks connect your brain to the comatose?

After an explosion douses her boyfriend with synthetic chemicals that turn his skin clear and land him in a coma, FBI agent Olivia Dunham is desperate to get inside his head—literally. In order to see the face of his assailant, Dunham takes a drug cocktail that includes lysergic acid diethylamide (yes, that's LSD), then lies in a tank of water with an electromagnetic probe attached to her skull. It's a technique Dr. Walter Bishop calls synaptic transfer, or a shared dream state. Once Dunham is unconscious and her brainwaves are synchronized with her boyfriend's, she's able to access his memories—and get a crystal-clear look at the guy responsible for his condition (and that plane).

Doctors and researchers do have ways of monitoring brainwaves, but not in such a far-fetched way that would allow Olivia to chat up her boyfriend. "There is no current science that allows two people to share information directly between their brains, though admittedly, ketamine and LSD—both major hallucinogenic drugs—might make the user think she was sharing someone else's dreams and memories," says Dr. Mark Milstein, a neurologist and assistant professor of neurology at a major New York City hospital. At this point, the closest one can get is with the electroencephalogram (EEG), which uses multiple simultaneous scalp recorders to pick up electrical currents from the brain and find patterns that might help diagnose disorders like epilepsy. Other forms of this recording, says Milstein, focus on patterns of metabolism in different parts of the brain required for different activities, such as throwing a football, reciting a speech or recalling a distant memory.

Is a cow actually that genetically close to a human?

Mad scientist Walter Bishop requests a cow for his lab because, he claims, humans and cows are separated by only a couple lines of DNA. It's true that a cow is genetically similar to a human, but real scientists never use the word “line” to refer to DNA—you'd deal in percentages. "The human and chimpanzee genomes are roughly 99-percent identical, the mouse and human genomes are 70-percent identical, and the cow is somewhere in between," says Timothy Bestor, a professor of genetics and development at Columbia University Medical Center. "They probably share upwards of 90 percent of genes, but each of those genes can differ markedly in sequence."

No species is a perfect model organism for people, but cows better mimic the situations a scientist might be studying, and their large size makes testing easier—cow hearts are often used to assess human cardiovascular conditions, for example. Although mice aren't as close to people as cows, they represent the best compromise: They are extremely cheap and easy to manage. "Cows are a thousand times more expensive. If there were no cost constraints, then cattle would be good, and pigs and primates would be better still," Bestor says. "If you were to get a cow, you might as well get a monkey."

Can you interrogate a dead person?

In the pilot's final scene, the dead body of an FBI agent is secretly brought to Massive Dynamic, a mysterious corporation more innovative than Apple and Google combined (just what role the company plays in a series of events known as "the pattern," Fringe's central mystery, remains to be seen). When Massive Dynamic employee Nina Sharp—who boasts a a breakthrough-worthy prosthetic arm—finds out the body has only been dead for five hours, she orders that he be questioned.

It's apparently quite possible to extract information from a corpse as long as it's been dead for no more than six hours—and as long as it's only on Fringe. "There is no way to gather information from a dead person's brain," says Dr. Milstein. "However, if a patient dies suddenly, there is a short period of time—between minutes and hours—during which a neuron might be able to transmit a signal." Nonetheless, Milstein says that without specific pathways set by a living brain, it serves no purpose. The experiment would be similar to sending a current down an electrical wire with nothing attached to either end. Good thing Fringe is far from over. Stay tuned toDigital Hollywood for more.

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