MIND-READING DEVICE

She loves me, she loves me not. Why not throw away those flower petals, peel back her forehead, and go directly to the source? The human skull isn’t as thick as it once was. Current technology can bridge the gap between mind and reality, between thought and action, between Kant and Descartes. Modern mind reading is simply a matter of collecting and interpreting the electrical activity that courses through the human brain.

Let’s start out simply: Humans constantly use external signals to read others’ minds. Toward this end, much research is directed at using clever information to spot liars. The current standard is a polygraph test, which is known to have abysmal accuracy rates — somewhere at or below 50 percent. A polygraph also requires strapping elastic straps around a person (to measure breathing rate), placing blood-pressure cuffs on their arm (to measure heartbeat), and putting electrodes on their fingertips (to measure conductivity caused by perspiration). What a hassle. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is now developing camera-based systems that read facial features and body language in its goal to spot liars. The system registers “micro-expressions” and “micro-gestures” that may be imperceptible to humans. These reactions are hard to regulate and fairly similar across race, gender, and culture. Better start practicing your poker face.

Or not. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic are developing an advanced polygraph test that doesn’t stop at the skin’s surface. An infrared camera can track the heat of blood flow through the smallest vessels of the human face. Preliminary research has uncovered a distinctive blood-flow pattern when someone is lying, with blood surging to the eye area — probably caused by a fight-or-flight response. Researchers dubbed this ghostly infrared camera image the “face of fear.” People can learn to modify their respiration, perspiration, and even their heart rate — but it’s next to impossible to avoid the face of fear. If you come home late from work again and your wife is wearing infrared goggles and a frown, expect a long night.

An exposed human brain has the consistency of room-temperature butter.

You may wish that, like a stage performer with a thick unibrow, you too could read other peoples’ minds. Well it isn’t all that hard — with the right machinery. The human brain emits electrical activity as 100 billion neurons communicate and operate. Two varieties of mind-reading machines can eavesdrop on these mind-currents: invasive (a subdural electrode directly on your brain, called a neural implant) and noninvasive (a sticky patch containing an electrode on your forehead, called a brain-computer interface). After the brain signals are collected, a computer program (not a stage performer) analyzes and attaches meaning to them. However, instead of learning your deepest, darkest secrets, most computer-controlled mind readers are designed to help people with physical disabilities by converting thoughts into commands that can potentially control items as diverse as a computer cursor, a prosthetic limb, or the floodgates of the Hoover Dam.

So there you are, lying on your back with your head shaved, about to undergo minor brain surgery in order to control that massive robot arm that you’ve always wanted. This isn’t going to hurt — really. The brain itself has no pain receptors — the pain fibers are entirely in the dura mater and other external coverings, all of which are nicely anesthetized. Thus, the surgery will be performed while you are awake and conscious. Your only discomfort will likely be neck pain caused by holding your head in one position for a long time. A tiny silicon chip (about the size of a baby aspirin) will be placed on the surface of your brain called the motor cortex — a strip that runs just above and in front of your ears. A matrix of hair-thin wires will penetrate your brain and begin listening to your brain waves. (Each “wire” is actually a small spike with a minuscule golden electrode.) The sensor will communicate with a dime-sized pedestal, a Matrix-style plug-in attached to your scalp. After a quick incision, you’ll be stitched up, they’ll fasten a few titanium screws, and you’ll be ready to enjoy your new life as a superhuman man-machine.

A company called Cyberkinetics has already performed some of the first human trials, establishing an interface between the human cortex and a computer. Implanted patients who were previously “locked in” (completely unable to move but mentally sound) were able to move a cursor around a computer screen — their only interaction with the world. The BrainGate system goes one step further, allowing a paralyzed person to control a rubbery, disembodied artificial hand by brain power alone. Cyberkinetics also offers a neural monitoring product that can be used for up to thirty days to record and monitor brain activity. The ultimate goal is a wireless, unobtrusive system that enables those with severe motor impairments to control any available devices by thought alone. Too bad the initial medical trials are open only to those with severe impairment and not to the incurably lazy.

Let’s not forget about the cyborg monkeys. In one experiment at the University of Pittsburgh, a test monkey was able to retrieve bananas by controlling a prosthetic arm with good old-fashioned monkey-thought. The system works like this: A sensor in the monkey’s brain collects electrical signals from the motor cortex and a computer program interprets the signals and sends the appropriate command to a mechanical arm, which the monkey can see. (The monkey’s real arm is strapped to its side, so there is no need to call in an expensive monkey-arm-amputation service.) The feedback loop has an imperceptible delay of only twenty milliseconds. For humans, however, controlling a robot arm in three dimensions is a difficult task: The human brain probably uses hundreds of millions of neurons for this, but the computer can only listen to a relative few. Current prototypes can control simple artificial limbs, but controlling complicated limbs like Dr. Octopus’s metallic tentacles from Spider-Man 2 is much more difficult.

Sure, people love to cram bundles of wires into the back of their heads, but isn’t there an alternative? Another class of “intimate interfaces” can listen to your thoughts from outside the skin by paying attention to biosignals, such as isometric muscular activity generated from small or imperceptible movements (like breathing, tongue movements, or even thinking about making a movement). However, the most common brain-computer interface reads electroencephalogram (EEG) signals (brain wave activity) from an electrode-studded skullcap to figure out which parts of the brain are generating electrical activity. A team of Austrian researchers taught a quadriplegic patient to open and close a prosthetic hand in this manner, but the patient required five months of training. Cutting-edge techniques use artificial intelligence algorithms to reduce training times by helping the computer figure out what the user is trying to do. So far, these interfaces have been used as sort of a secret TV remote, but in the future they could be used to control cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDA)s, or even automobiles.

A new crop of advanced devices is allowing humans (and cyborg chimps) to harness the mysterious power of mental concentration. The conduit between brain and reality has always been the body, but bio-implantable neurosensors are cutting out the middleman and helping people — paralyzed or not — lay hands on the world directly from the mind. Someday soon you could have your ass scratched by a robot arm before you’ve even finished thinking about doing it — and that’s worth every single monkey trial.

ANTI-SLEEPING PILL

In the land of the future we are all going to live forever, so there will be no time for sleep. For those of us who want to skip our solid eight, the solution is already here and, as usual, it is in pill form. The U.S. military is hell-bent on creating an army of metabolically enhanced supersoldiers with nerves of steel and bloodshot eyes. The same advanced technology that will allow an army of zombie soldiers to stalk the battlefield will allow you to finally watch the entire Sopranos series nonstop.

Anti-sleeping pills have a very practical application for people suffering from narcolepsy, an affliction that causes people to instantly fall asleep (usually as the punch line of a joke). To battle the cheap jokes, a French firm has developed a drug sold in the United States under the name Provigil (and Alertec in Canada). The active ingredient, called modafinil, was approved by the FDA in 1998 and is officially used to treat excessive sleepiness and to help cocaine addicts kick their habit. The U.S. Air Force has also tested modafinil on fighter pilots, instead of giving them the usual amphetamines that long-haired truck drivers have been using for decades. This wonder drug is set to banish sleep forever.

In trials, Provigil has been shown to successfully keep people awake for up to eighty-eight hours with negligible side effects and little risk of addiction. Unlike amphetamines, which stimulate the entire nervous system, modafinil simply shuts off the feeling of drowsiness. It may sound great, but calm down, ace; there is none of the euphoria induced by stimulants like cocaine or ecstasy. Modafinil keeps you awake and alert, but it doesn’t prevent you from getting bored.

Federal legislation requires U.S. truck drivers to rest for at least 12 hours in a 24-hour period. Taking the weekend off is also mandatory (partying hard is optional, but recommended).

ALERT SOLIDER USING ANTI-SLEEPING PILLS

Of course, nobody understands exactly how modafinil really works. One key discovery, however, is that the urge to fall asleep and the urge to wake up may be independent of each other. There is a reason that we wake up five minutes before the alarm goes off — humans are each outfitted with a biological “master clock.” In 1972, scientists identified the biological clock portion of the brain, called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). The SCN controls your circadian rhythm and is located in the hypothalamus, deep in your forehead behind the optical cortex. In one study, a group of squirrel monkeys had the SCN portion of their brains removed (ablated) and were found to sleep excessively (a condition called hypersomnia). It appears that the SCN does not cause sleepiness, but rather wakefulness — and without the SCN you can’t fight the urge to sleep. Modafinil precisely targets and stimulates the SCN; otherwise, as the day wears on, the SCN will reduce the urge to stay awake until the impulse to sleep becomes nearly impossible to resist — and that’s when your car plunges off the side of the road.

WEARY SOLIDER WITHOUT ANTI-SLEEPING PILLS

The FDA has only approved the use of modafinil to treat narcolepsy, obstructive sleep apnea, and shift-work sleep disorder, but regular folks with lesser sleep problems may soon be able to get their fix as well. The drug is expected to attract a wide market, including truckers, students, or anyone pulling an all-nighter. The drugmaker is optimistic, as no serious side effects of modafinil have been identified, however, sleep researchers urge caution — there is evidence that a lack of sleep hurts the endocrine and immune systems.

Although modafinil is readily available, research continues on creating a sleepless supersoldier. The DARPA “metabolic dominance” program is currently funding a study of the natural alertness mechanisms that allow the white-crowned sparrow to stay awake for up to two weeks during migration. Sleep deprivation is unavoidable during combat, and the goal is to produce a GI who can go without sleep for seven days by fine-tuning his or her metabolism on demand. The metabolically dominant soldier will be in peak physical and cognitive condition for three to five days, twenty-four hours a day (no sleep) and won’t need calories (no food). Just think of the ridiculous dance parties this research will make possible. In the meantime, somebody please give DARPA a few battle droids so that its soldiers can get some rest.

If you can’t get a legal prescription for modafinil, just stick to the world’s most widely used stay-awake drug: caffeine. It works in a pinch, and anyway, people are far more likely to crave sleep than to avoid it — an estimated two thirds of Americans don’t get enough sleep. Anti-sleep drugs may contribute more to our vision of a space-age future, but tranquilizers — called hypnotics by sleep doctors — potentially affect more people. Insomniacs outnumber those who crave painless all-nighters, so look for improvements in hypnotics before anti-sleeping pills proliferate.

INVISIBLE CAMOUFLAGE

In 1897, H. G. Wells imagined a hellish existence for a young scientist who managed to find the key to invisibility but not how to reverse it. More recently, in the movie Predator a big green extraterrestrial hunts humans while concealed in blurry, almost invisible battle armor. Harry Potter goes even further, disappearing completely beneath his wizard’s cloak. Now the invisibility technology once reserved for sci-fi mags, movie theaters, and comic books is quietly sneaking up on us.

While hiding from your little brother is fun, the ability to hide from bullets can save your life. To that end, adaptive camouflage for personnel and vehicles has become a military priority. Traditional camouflage — common to the animal kingdom — uses a static color and shape pattern to blend in visually with the background. Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have defined adaptive camouflage as a form of camouflage that actively changes to best match the environment. The key idea is to wrap yourself in real-time images of the surrounding environment — sort of like wearing a flexible television screen.

You can get started right now: Aim a webcam backward over your shoulder and stand behind the computer monitor. Because the computer screen is displaying an image of what’s behind you, anyone standing directly in front of you will see a rectangular hole where your totally ripped abs should be. Then imagine crouching inside a box made of flat-panel monitors with cameras pointing in every direction. Now imagine the U.S. military imagining a tank inside that box. The basic idea is sound, but don’t sneak into the womens’ locker room quite yet — the edges of the computer monitor are still visible and each view looks convincing from only one perspective.

Researchers from Tokyo University in Japan have developed an early prototype of adaptive camouflage. Their approach is simple: A video camera on the back of a white rain jacket collects an image that is projected onto the front of the jacket as if it were a movie screen. The jacket is made of a retroreflective material that clearly shows the projected image. Although casually glancing at the jacket reveals a ghostly image of whatever is behind it, this approach is little more than a parlor trick; it requires a separate projector and only works from front-on.

The real problem is to make adaptive camouflage show the right image from every angle at once, not just from the front. This is a challenge, but it isn’t impossible. Remember those cheap holographic stickers — the ones that show a different image depending on how much they are tilted? Using a similar principle, it is theoretically possible to go invisible. First, the system needs at least six stereoscopic pairs of cameras (that’s twelve in all) and they must be pointed in every direction. This will capture a complete image of the surroundings. Second, a dense array of display elements is needed, each capable of aiming light beams on their own individual trajectories. The refresh rate must be faster than the human eye in order to avoid creating a flickering effect. Anyone who plays video games knows that a high frame rate is tough to maintain when there is a lot of motion; the entire screen must refresh quickly without blurring, ghosting, smearing, or juddering. Finally, a hardworkin’ wearable computer has to calculate the virtual scene to send to each element of the display. All the above technology then has to be stitched together into a wacky robe covered with moons and stars.

Invisibility applications extend past the battlefield and beyond the womens’ locker room: Surgeons could see through their own fingers during operations, pilots could orient themselves by seeing through the airplane floor, and you could finally get a decent window in your basement apartment. Unfortunately, current technology only works at short distances, in dim places, and at select viewing angles. The only way to transcend these boundaries is to develop faster processors, brighter LEDs, and more-flexible display elements. Alternately, you could join a team of battle-hardened jungle commandos and track down and capture a Predator alien, being sure to remove its quasi-invisible battle gear before it has a chance to self-destruct.

ARTIFICIAL GILLS

A goldfish is arguably the most boring pet ever — only slightly more boring than sea monkeys. Yet a simple goldfish can plumb the mysteries of the briny deep while we humans flounder on dry land. Are you going to take that from a goldfish? The time has come to don a bright orange spandex suit and join Aquaman for a lifetime of underwater adventure! But beware: Starting life anew below the sea will only last about three and a half minutes unless you have the proper equipment — like a set of surgically attached gills.

Historically, humankind’s underwater escapades have been strictly BYOO (bring your own oxygen). For centuries, free divers have been exploring the sea between deep breaths (the deepest recorded free dive was about 400 feet). In the fourth century B.C., Aristotle described the diving bell, a weighted bell-shaped container full of air. And by the nineteenth century, Europeans were wearing bulky diving suits with air hoses snaking up to the surface. Encased in these hose-fed monstrosities, brave mariners clambered around the bottom of the sea like ancient astronauts, wearing pressurized suits of solid metal. As time passed, diving suits became more high-tech, including features like claws, huge barrel joints, and interior seats. Even romantic diving suits built for two became available. By the twentieth century, advanced technology finally snipped the umbilical cord to the surface entirely.

The modern age of diving arrived in 1943, when Captain Jacques Cousteau and Emile Gagnan prototyped the aqualung — the first self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA). Essentially, a scuba diver carries down a bag full of air. The trick is to fill the a cylindrical metal tank with around thirty pounds of compressed air — enough for about an hour. The air within the cylinder is compressed to 3,000 pounds per square inch, a hundred times the pressure of a car tire. Alas, breathing air at that pressure would pop your delicate lungs like festive party balloons. Therefore, the key contribution of the aqualung was the regulator — a two-stage device that instantly and safely reduces tank pressure, delivering a sip of air whenever a diver takes a breath. These days scuba diving is a common leisure activity, but it is hardly the most advanced way to swim with the fishes.

It is easy to spot a scuba diver — just look for all the bubbles. Traditional open-circuit scuba divers waste the vast majority of compressed oxygen that they carry. Human lungs do not absorb oxygen perfectly, and when a diver exhales, a good amount of precious oxygen (and not-so-precious carbon dioxide) bubbles back to the surface. On the other hand, a fully closed-circuit scuba (a type of rebreather) recycles exhaled air, getting rid of the carbon dioxide and returning extra oxygen to the tank. The result is a streamlined breathing system that produces no bubbles and lasts for hours on a small tank of oxygen. Be careful, rebreathers are only safe as long as they can “scrub” out poisonous carbon dioxide, and they may become saturated before you run out of oxygen.

Rebreathers maximize oxygen use, but an observant person may have noticed that fish rarely use tiny scuba tanks; on the contrary, fish rely on frilly red gills. Oxygen permeates most of the ocean, especially near the water’s surface, where wind, waves, and currents pull air down from the atmosphere. Fish breathe by drinking — water enters the mouth and filters through the gill area, flowing past sheetlike filaments that are covered with red, spongy lamellae. These specialized organs filter oxygen from the water to keep our cold-blooded friends alive. Thus, drawing inspiration from fish, scientists have begun developing artificial gills.

Mice submerged in oxygen-rich water have been able to survive for up to a day.

With the use of artificial gills, you may soon be able to breathe underwater as easily as a delicious bass. It is simple to construct a crude artificial gill (although not the surgically attached variety): Just take a watertight box and replace one wall with a gas-permeable membrane — like a sheet of silicone. The submerged box will stay filled with air (mostly oxygen and nitrogen) even if oxygen levels inside the box drop and carbon dioxide levels increase (which is what happens when someone decides to breathe). The simple design really works; Walter Robb (the inventor of highly permeable silicone) used such a box to support a submerged hamster for as long as fresh water flowed past the membrane to supply new oxygen. Unfortunately, this breakthrough never led to an underwater hamster ball.

Unless you have tiny hamster-lungs, artificial gill prototypes are not quite ready to use. The problem is that human beings consume too much oxygen for a portable system to keep up. The less efficient an artificial gill is, the more water it must process to retrieve oxygen. An early Prototype from Fuji Systems (called the Donkey III) kept a diver alive for a thirty-minute demonstration in 2002. The Donkey III is a box the size of a refrigerator that pumps water through oxygen-harvesting membranes. Aside from being unwieldy, the machine only maintained oxygen levels at a brain muddling 16 percent (normal air is 21 percent oxygen). Meanwhile, the Infoscitex company is developing a biomimetic silicon-based polymer membrane mask that closely imitates fish gills. Instead of a massive pump, the artificial gills will have a fractal microscopic structural form that maximizes surface area and access to oxygen.

Other researchers are ignoring the talents of fish altogether and applying good old hard-core physics. The aquagill consists of a cylindrical tank containing a rapidly spinning centrifuge; the device spins water to the outside of the cylinder, leaving a vacuum in the middle that pulls in air from the surrounding water. The challenge is to process enough water to keep a diver alive, which means a big water pump and enough batteries to power it. Due to these limitations, this technology will probably be used to supply oxygen to underwater habitats and not individual divers.

There is another creature of the deep that does not require scuba tanks — the nuclear submarine. With access to a nuclear reactor, these monsters can electrocute the air out of water. Electrolysis refers to a method used to separate unwanted leg hair from women and a method used to separate oxygen from water. We call water H₂O for a reason: Each molecule is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Passing a powerful electric current through water will blast the liquid into hydrogen and oxygen gas. Pure water is a poor conductor, so a liquid called an electrolyte is added before the Tasering begins. The process requires a lot of energy, so until portable atomic backpacks are available, divers will have to find oxygen elsewhere.

As we have seen, oxygen is getting easier to come by under the sea, but the pressure of living life underwater is still high. High pressure at around thirty feet below causes nitrogen gas to collect in the blood. This can quickly cause nitrogen narcosis (sensuously referred to as the “rapture of the deep”), which can cause a diver to become suicidally disoriented. On the other hand, if the diver ascends too quickly, the dissolved nitrogen will suddenly convert back into air, sending nitrogen bubbles throughout the body that can destroy joints, damage cartilage, and block capillaries in the brain. Worse yet, pure oxygen becomes toxic at depths of more than thirty feet. Straying below that depth requires a mixed-gas rebreather, which delivers exotic gas mixtures (and only a sip of oxygen). Arrr, the sea is indeed a harsh mistress.

Many years ago Captain Jacques Cousteau predicted the coming of homo aquaticus — a new race of protohuman with surgically attached fishlike gills connected directly to the circulatory system. Lamentably, fish-gill surgery is not yet an option (although fish-gill tacos are delicious). Nevertheless, inventors have devised an array of ingenious techniques to bring air into water or to extract air from water. For now, however, wannabe menfish will have to make due with tried-and-true scuba gear.

X-RAY SPECS

A lot of promises are made in the bedroom and on the campaign trail, but the biggest, most important promises are made in tiny print on the last few pages of comic books — like the promise of glasses that let you see through things. For a modest price these advertisements guarantee the Superman-like ability to see through walls; but honestly, X-ray spectacles were really all about seeing through clothes. The “scientific marvel of the century” offered in comic books may be a gimmick, but modern defense contractors are not playing around.

X-rays are a real phenomenon discovered in 1895 by a German physicist named Wilhelm Röntgen. Wilhelm was experimenting with cathode rays (airless glass tubes that discharge electricity) and found that the flowing electron beam caused a certain nearby screen to glow. Like a good primate, Wilhelm promptly stuck his hand in between the beam and the screen and saw the ghostly projected image of his hand bones. After some (more disciplined) experimenting, Wilhelm earned a Nobel Prize and became the father of diagnostic radiology. Later, he helped discover that while X-rays may not penetrate human bone, they are powerful enough to cause radiation sickness, genetic mutations, and possibly sterility — which is why radiologists wear a lead apron over their private bits.

Such safety measures are not necessary on an everyday basis, because light in the visible spectrum is much less powerful than X-rays. That’s why we can’t see through bikinis — visible light insists on bouncing off even the flimsiest nontransparent objects. Visible light is composed of streams of photons that wiggle in a certain range of frequencies. An X-ray is like visible light except that it wiggles faster — it has more energy. High-energy photons (which are invisible to our eyes) tend to penetrate farther into objects before they bounce off — or they can go all the way through. To develop X-ray spectacles, the trick is to use light with just enough power to penetrate clothing but not enough to penetrate skin. Because let’s face it, no matter what the fashion magazines say, walking skeletons are just not that sexy.

The need for better airport security led to the development of a new backscatter machine that uses low-power X-rays with just the right finesse — they penetrate clothing but not skin. Specifically, the machine emits and measures the position of X-rays that “scatter back” from a person and generate a photograph-quality image. The process is sometimes referred to by the vaguely disgusting term “backscatting.” Very dense objects (like guns) show up dark, medium-dense objects (like skin) come out grayscale, and not-very-dense objects (like clothes) don’t show up at all. To summarize, it’s a magical machine that spits out naked images of fully clothed people. But a backscatter machine won’t fit on your face; it’s the size of a refrigerator and takes about eight seconds to scan a person standing about eight inches away.

Backscatter machines can see through clothing, but they see through hair as well. Would that good-looking girl you’re checking out be just as cute with a shaved head?

When X-ray eyes leave the realm of gimmicks and enter the local airport, privacy becomes an issue. Who should wield such awesome power? Though backscatter devices are commonly used in prisons, diamond mines, and customs searches, introducing the machines to airports has been a tough sell. Critics warn against bombarding children and adults with X-rays, even low-power X-rays. Meanwhile, the CEO of an X-ray machine company cheerfully reports that radiation levels are similar to that of good, clean sunlight. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) describes the process as a “virtual strip search.” Travelers in the United Kingdom, however, are unfazed — virtual strip search machines have been used at London’s Heathrow Airport for years.

Despite British nonchalance, in the United States there exists a new middle ground between security and privacy. “Cloaking” software turns explicit images into something resembling a generic chalk outline of the body while still identifying plastic, ceramic, biological, and other nonmetallic and metallic objects. (Yes, your nipple chains will show up.) The device is not a cure-all, however; a backscatter machine cannot see into body cavities or body folds.

Gawking at naked people is always good fun, but what about using your abilities for the forces of good? Superman used his X-ray vision to see through walls in an endless, obsessive search for truth and justice. Now lowly humans can do the same using the Radar Scope. Research funded by DARPA recently produced the Radar Scope, a device the size of a telephone handset that can sense human beings through up to twelve inches of concrete. The “through-wall personnel detector” uses radar to sense movements as small as breathing up to fifty feet into the next room. Put simply, it is a motion detector that works through walls.

Whether your goal is to see through walls or bikinis, the technology is here. And unlike the swirly sunglasses that disappointed so many of us, these gadgets actually work. Finally, humankind has mastered the power of light and put it to a noble purpose. For around a thousand dollars, you can buy a Radar Scope and dominate future games of hide and seek, but at a reported cost of six figures, backscatter portals are likely to be out of the reach of most comic book readers.

UNIVERSAL TRANSLATOR

The universal translator of Star Trek fame made talking to your dog just as easy as talking to Leonard Nimoy. It was small, rectangular, and only vaguely threatening when pointed at a member of an alien race. Though it looked like a foil-wrapped electric razor, it was one high-powered sumbitch — the translator routinely deciphered alien languages and delivered them in the listener’s mother tongue. The gadget also picked up brain waves to translate languages spoken by creatures with no slobber holes (a paunchy Captain Kirk even used one to communicate with a cloud of gas called the Companion). Luckily, a real-world universal translator has a much simpler problem: it just has to listen to what people say and then translate — no brain waves required.

Over six thousand languages exist in the world, and odds are you only speak one or two of them. A universal translator can help by providing three extremely impressive abilities: speech recognition, language translation, and text-to-speech synthesis. In reality, a universal translator is a wearable computer (a little bigger than a deck of cards) equipped with a microphone (for listening) and a speaker (for spitting out words). Some versions even come with digital cameras that can translate written material or street signs. Many products exist and even more are in the pipeline, so prepare yourself to communicate.

The first generation of universal translators are on store shelves, waiting to be purchased by wealthy monoglots. The Phraselator P2 is a pumped-up PDA programmed to translate English phrases into other languages. The Phraselator is deaf and mute, requiring human operators to type in words and then read them off the screen. The Clark County Sheriff’s Office in Springfield, Ohio, adopted the Phraselator P2 as a short-term approach to communicating with Spanish-speaking constituents. Police used the device to generate simple phrases like “Hello,” “Good-bye,” and “Take the bag of kittens out of the trunk, ma’am.” Meanwhile, Casio recently produced an electronic dictionary that can say words out loud in six languages: English, Spanish, German, Italian, French, and Chinese. Words must be typed in by hand, but by using text-to-speech capabilities the pocket-sized gadget can speak certain phrases. These devices are impressive (and available), but a true translator will not need a keyboard.

On the battlefield, using your words instead of using your bullets can be exceptionally dangerous. That’s why war-zone translators — even electronic ones — are in great demand. The DARPA-funded TransTac system builds on the Phraselator P2 — adding speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis to automatically translate spoken English into another language, such as Iraqi Arabic, which is then spoken out loud in a computerized (but manly) voice. The system recognizes natural, continuous speech without requiring the user to train it in advance (called speaker-independent recognition) and has a lag of about five seconds before translating and saying the phrase out loud in another language. According to soldiers, the machine is more trustworthy than local translators, and it works even when there is background noise or variation in pronunciation. Don’t expect deeply philosophical conversations, however; the highly practical device does not translate word for word, but strives to deliver only the gist of what is being said.

Commercially available universal translators are practical and useful, but they fall short of the ideal used in Star Trek. The ultimate dream is to be able to translate quickly between every language that exists. Translating all six thousand languages would require almost 36 million translation schemes. However, if every language could be translated to a single universal intermediate language (called an interlengua) and then to the desired language, only 12,000 translation schemes would be necessary. By creating a new superlanguage, researchers would remove the need to translate between every single language and reduce the problem to two steps: translating the given language to the interlengua, and then translating from the interlengua to the target language. Many prototypes, including systems from Carnegie Mellon University (JANUS), Fujitsu (ATLAS II), and NEC (PIVOT), use this two-step method. Future universal translators that follow this efficient approach will be able to translate every known human language and will fit in the palm of your hand.

The portable universal translator is extremely useful technology — it could help soldiers and police officers, as well as tourists, airport employees, border patrol and customs agents, and phone operators. As computing power increases and chip size decreases, we may see a future in which a jelly-bean-sized piece of plastic can translate between every known human language. Until then, the most advanced universal translators are battle-hardened PDAs. Instead of reading alien brain waves, real-life universal translators understand two or three languages and allow only very simple conversations to take place. “Donde esta el baño, anyway?”