Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (76 page)

Underwear:
Experimental “smart underwear” being developed for the military by San Diego engineering professor Dr. Joseph Wang

What It Does:
Puts a paramedic in your underpants

Details:
Chemical sensors in the waistband monitor heart rate, blood pressure, and numerous biomarkers in human sweat, such as lactate, oxygen, norepinephrine, and glucose, that signal when someone is injured in battle. The information is fed into a microcomputer built into the soldier’s uniform. When the system detects an injury, reservoirs of painkillers and other drugs stored in the soldier’s uniform can be administered on the spot to stabilize the soldier’s condition until help arrives. The sensors are sensitive enough to distinguish between different kinds of injuries and administer treatments accordingly. Because Dr. Wang’s underwear research is funded by a grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the initial applications will be military. But the biometric sensors can also detect the markers for stroke, heart attack, diabetes, and even blood alcohol levels, so if the technology proves workable, the underwear may eventually be used to monitor the elderly and the chronically ill at home. When combined with biofeedback training, they’ve even shown promise preventing motion sickness. Who knows? Maybe one day court-ordered underpants will communicate with automobiles to prevent convicted drunk drivers from driving drunk again.

“No-Wash” hospital boxer shorts have yellow fabric in front, brown in back. “If you have an accident it won’t stand out, and you won’t feel as bad,” says the inventor.

Underwear:
FlowPants, boxer shorts being tested by ThermaRx, a manufacturer of medical devices in Houston, Texas

What It Does:
They’re therapeutic “hot” pants

Details:
Equipped with a battery-powered heating element, these underpants are designed to treat urinary hesitation and retention conditions associated with an enlarged prostate. They’re actually
over
-underwear: You wear them under your pants but over your regular underpants, and the battery pack clips to your belt. The underwear is currently undergoing clinical trials to test the “Jacuzzi effect”—anecdotal evidence that sitting in a hot tub (or hot pants) relieves urinary retention. If the underwear proves to be effective, it could be coming to a pharmacy near you.

Underwear:
4Skins briefs and boxers, manufactured by an Australian company of the same name

What It Does:
The underpants are engineered to absorb the smell of farts. The company’s motto: “Keep It in Your Pants.”

Details:
4Skins’ Contrast and Modern Classic lines of underwear are made using a technologically advanced fabric that incorporates “odor-eliminating nanotechnology” into every fiber. “By doing this, it attracts, isolates and neutralizes unwanted smell immediately,” says the company’s website. So where do all the absorbed fumes end up? “As the smell is absorbed by the fabric, it holds the odor until you place the undies in the wash. This is when the odor is released.” (The underpants only absorb the
smell
of flatulence; how you deal with the
sound
is your problem.)

LIFE ON AMERICA’S
FORBIDDEN ISLAND

What’s life like on the only privately owned Hawaiian island? Here’s the second installment of our story. (Part I is on
page 275
.)

S
TILL THE SAME
If you’ve ever wondered what the Hawaiian islands looked like when Captain Cook first set eyes upon them in 1778, you can get a pretty good idea by sailing around Niihau. The island is almost completely undeveloped: There are no paved roads and no hotels or other commercial buildings. The beaches are pristine. Most of the islanders live in small houses clustered around Puuwai (pronounced POO-ooh-WAH-ee), Niihau’s only village, on the west coast of the island. With the exception of this tiny settlement, most of the island looks as if it is uninhabited by anything other than wildlife, including feral sheep, antelope, and wild Polynesian boar that roam the island.

Another thing that hasn’t changed much since Eliza Sinclair bought the island in 1864 is the odd legal relationship that exists between the Robinson family that owns the island and the native Niihauans who live there. The Niihauans don’t hold legal title to any part of the island, or even to the houses they live in. On paper they are little more than the permanent houseguests of the Robinsons, who have the legal right to do with their island whatever they please. That may not be an ideal set of circumstances for the Niihauans, and yet if they had lived on any of the other Hawaiian islands, where—at least in a property-owning sense—they would have had more freedom, their language, culture, and way of life would have changed long ago.

LIFE ON THE ISLAND

The Niihauans live on the island, and in their homes, rent free. They may live a traditional lifestyle of hunting and fishing if they wish. Or if they want to earn money, there are jobs available on Niihau and on the Robinson family’s sugarcane plantation on Kauai. They are also free to move off the island, which many do, especially those who work on Kauai. And as long as the community is willing to have them back, they can move back onto the island when they are ready.

Niihau was the only Hawaiian island that voted against U.S. statehood in 1959.

OLD SCHOOL

The Niihauans speak Hawaiian as their first language. Classes in the tiny elementary school are taught in Hawaiian through the third grade, after which English is introduced. There are no private automobiles on the island; the Niihauans get around on bicycles or on horseback. There are no police and no jail on the island, but there isn’t any crime, either. The last serious crime took place in December 1941, during the attack on Pearl Harbor, when a Japanese pilot ditched his plane on Niihau and then terrorized the island for several days before he was killed by one of the Niihauans.

Guns and alcohol aren’t allowed on Niihau, and while tobacco hasn’t been banned entirely, the Robinsons will not transport it on the barge that periodically ferries supplies over from Kauai. To outsiders, these restrictions may seem harsh, but alcohol, tobacco, and firearms were never a part of Hawaiian culture, so they’re not part of Niihauan culture now. (So how do they hunt the wild animals on the island? The same way they have for generations: with knives and rope.)

DOLLARS AND SENSE

One more thing that hasn’t changed about Niihau since 1863: It’s still a really bad place to run a ranch. For more than a century, the Robinsons tried to raise cattle, sheep, and honeybees, and even made charcoal from some of the trees that grow on the island—anything they could think of to generate income and provide employment for the Niihauans. But the various enterprises usually lost money, and in dry years they lost a lot of it. Finally, after decades of subsidizing the ranch with income from the sugarcane plantation on Kauai, in 1999 the Robinsons shut down ranching operations on Niihau. Since then they have looked for other ways to earn income and provide jobs for Niihauans. In recent years the largest source of income has come from the U.S. military, which rents part of Niihau for an unmanned radar facility that it uses to track missiles launched from the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai. The military also uses the island as a training site for special forces units, who land there and then try to avoid detection and capture by “enemy” forces (Niihauan trackers who are paid to hunt them down). Any other military programs that take place on the island are classified.

When Barack Obama, born in Hawaii, ran for president in 2008, he carried every inhabited Hawaiian island
except
Niihau. A majority of Niihauans voted for John McCain.

OPEN...JUST A CRACK

Another result of the island’s difficult finances is that after 100 years of nearly complete isolation, in 1987 Bruce Robinson, Eliza Sinclair’s great-great-grandson, decided to open up access to Niihau...but only a little. That year he paid $1 million (100 times what Eliza Sinclair paid for the entire island) to buy a helicopter that would serve as an air-ambulance for the island. There is no hospital on Niihau, and before Robinson bought the helicopter, whenever there was a medical emergency the Niihauans had to travel to Kauai by boat.

Robinson decided to offset the cost of the helicopter by using it to provide tours to the remotest parts of the island. The flights leave from Kauai in the morning, and after a quick aerial tour of the island, the pilot selects a secluded beach and lands for the afternoon. The tourists are free to fish, swim, snorkel, or explore the beach for a few hours until it’s time to return to Kauai. When the population of feral sheep and wild boar grew to unacceptable levels in the early 1990s, Robinson added safaris to the helicopter trips. (Safari trips are the only exception to the “no guns” rule.)

THE FORBIDDEN VILLAGE

The helicopter trips are always day trips—outsiders are not permitted to spend the night on Niihau, and there are no hotels on the island to accommodate them. Any Niihauan who wants to hike out to the helicopter landing site to greet the tourists is free to do so, but the village of Puuwai is off-limits to outsiders. The helicopters always land several miles away from the village to protect the Niihauans’ privacy. Though remote parts of their island have been opened up to outsiders, the Niihauans themselves still live apart. “We have chosen not to change for generations,” a Niihauan named Ilei Beniamina told a reporter in 1987. “I’m proud of what Niihau stands for. That’s more than I can say about anywhere else in the state.”

THE CURSE OF
THE DEMON CORE

The real-life story of a small ball of plutonium, the people it killed, and the researchers who blew it up
.

T
HE BOMB
On the evening of Tuesday, August 21, 1945, American physicist Harry Daghlian was working at the U.S. government’s ultra-secret Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He was performing a very delicate experiment: Daghlian was placing brick-shaped pieces of metal around a chunk of plutonium, the highly unstable fuel used in most nuclear bombs. And he was making it more unstable with every brick he placed around it.

Daghlian (pronounced “DAHL-ee-an”) was part of the government’s Manhattan Project, which since 1942 had worked to develop the world’s first atomic bombs. And they succeeded: Just a few weeks before Daghlian’s experiment, two atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs had killed at least 100,000 people immediately, and many tens of thousands more in the days that followed. Less than a week after those bombings Japan surrendered to Allied Forces, ending World War II.

For Daghlian and his fellow scientists, that meant there was much more work to do.

NEW AND IMPROVED

The United States was the only country in the world with nuclear weapons at the time, but the government knew that wouldn’t be the case for long. If America was going to survive in a world with nuclear-armed enemies, it was reasoned, the nation was going to have to keep producing those weapons, and make them even more effective. This was precisely the reason that Daghlian was doing the particular work he was doing that night at Los Alamos.

Harry Daghlian was just 24 years old. He’d been brought into the Manhattan Project in 1943, while he was still a physics student—an exceptionally brilliant one—at Indiana’s Purdue University. He had helped in the development of the bombs used in Japan, which, their devastating effects aside, were actually not very good nuclear bombs. They were, after all, only the second and third ever exploded (one test bomb had been detonated in New Mexico just three weeks before the two in Japan).

Jaws, Jr.: The spined pygmy shark grows to be only 6 inches long.

One of the chief issues for the scientists was determining how to take full advantage of a bomb’s nuclear fuel. Amazingly, both bombs used in the attacks on Japan used only tiny fractions of their fuel to produce their explosions. (Imagine if they had used it all.) And using a bomb’s fuel efficiently is all about the
neutrons
.

THE NEUTRON DANCE

The most common type of fuel used in nuclear weapons is a type of plutonium known as plutonium-239, or Pu-239.

• Pu-239 is naturally radioactive, meaning that its atoms naturally emit particles from their nuclei. Some of those particles are
neutrons
. (This is known as
neutron radiation
.) Neutrons are very large, as atomic particles go—so large that if a neutron emitted from one atom happens to strike another atom, it can actually “break” it, and cause the second atom to eject some of its own neutrons. (This is the “split” in “splitting the atom,” and scientifically, it’s known as
fission
.)

• This process happens normally very slowly, because most of the radiating neutrons just fly off. The whole idea behind nuclear weapons is to
contain
those neutrons within the plutonium, thereby speeding up the splitting process—with neutrons smashing atoms, causing more and more neutrons to be emitted, smashing more and more atoms—until it is completely out of control.

• The numbers involved in this
chain reaction
are almost too big to fathom: In a nuclear bomb explosion, atoms of the nuclear fuel are split by neutrons trillions and trillions of times...in hundreds of billionths of a second. Because each split of each atom releases energy, the combined splitting of trillions of atoms in such an impossibly short amount of time releases an absolutely phenomenal amount of energy—hence the power of atomic bombs.