Catherine Price

The Sun-Powered Sailboat

A Turkish design team dreams up a self-sufficient craft for the eco-conscious yachting class

FOUR-WING STABILITY: Volitan may look more like an X-wing fighter than a boat, but the four-wing structure keeps it stable while maximizing maneuverability.  Bob Sauls
For most of history, sailboats were by definition pollution-free. Now, however, even purists use outboard motors to get their three-sheeters in and out of the harbor. Including conventional motorized boats, there are more than 10 million hydrocarbon-burning marine engines in the U.S. alone.

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Cocktail Party Science: The Anonymity Experiment

Mix some drinks and listen in as PopSci’s editors discuss privacy rights, space kimchi and more

Cocktail Shaker:

In our second episode of Cocktail Party Science, host Chuck Cage, executive editor Mike Haney and Web editor Megan Miller sit down with Catherine Price, author of "The Anonymity Experiment." Find out how to keep your online activity hidden, what the spy bill means for our civil rights, and whether its possible to truly "disappear."

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The Anonymity Experiment

During a week of attempting to cloak every aspect of daily life, our correspondent found that in an information age, leaving no trace is nearly impossible

In 2006, David Holtzman decided to do an experiment. Holtzman, a security consultant and former intelligence analyst, was working on a book about privacy, and he wanted to see how much he could find out about himself from sources available to any tenacious stalker. So he did background checks. He pulled his credit file. He looked at Amazon.com transactions and his credit-card and telephone bills. He got his DNA analyzed and kept a log of all the people he called and e-mailed, along with the Web sites he visited.

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