Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from how stuff Works dot com
Speaker 1: where smart happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain and today's podcast
Speaker 1: is going to be a little bit different because today's
Speaker 1: podcast is an experiment. Every day on the how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works blog, I do a roundup of the day's science
Speaker 1: and technology news. What I'm gonna do here in this
Speaker 1: podcast is summarize the week's most interesting news stories in
Speaker 1: podcast form. After you listen to this, I'd love to
Speaker 1: get your feedback on the approach. You can post something
Speaker 1: to Facebook by visiting Facebook dot com slash brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: or you can send me an email at m brain
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com. So we'll give this
Speaker 1: a try. If the feedback is really bad, we won't
Speaker 1: do this again. But if it's okay, then we probably
Speaker 1: do this every Friday. So first off, let's look at
Speaker 1: the four blog posts that really resonated and drove a
Speaker 1: lot of traffic on the blogs this week. By far,
Speaker 1: the most popular is the post on the Jerusalem UFO.
Speaker 1: Over the last weekend, there was supposedly a UFO sighting
Speaker 1: at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, with four
Speaker 1: videos supposedly recording the event. In my opinion, this is
Speaker 1: one of the best orchestrated video hoaxes in YouTube history.
Speaker 1: But you can go look at the videos and be
Speaker 1: the judge yourself. The second blog post covered a remarkable
Speaker 1: speech given by a nineteen year old college student named
Speaker 1: Zach Walls to the Iowa House. Zach was speaking out
Speaker 1: against the constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage. The thing
Speaker 1: that was so amazing about it was first of all,
Speaker 1: his ability to deliver such a good speech at age nineteen,
Speaker 1: and second the content of what he said. The third
Speaker 1: was a post on the bandwidth caps being put in
Speaker 1: place in Canada, limiting a household to twenty five gigabytes
Speaker 1: of bandwidth per month. This is enough for about seven
Speaker 1: or eight Netflix or similar movies. Once you reach that
Speaker 1: gigabyte limit, you pay two dollars per gigabyte above it.
Speaker 1: What this means is that a Netflix movie costs about
Speaker 1: eight dollars for the bandwidth once you exceed your cap.
Speaker 1: The idea caused such a huge uproar that it now
Speaker 1: looks like the government's going to repeal it. And finally,
Speaker 1: there was a blog post on a new device that
Speaker 1: makes it much easier for doctors to treat severe burns.
Speaker 1: The device is essentially an airbrush that, instead of spraying paint,
Speaker 1: sprays skin stem cells derived from the patient's own skin
Speaker 1: very rapidly. Healing is unbelievably quick. Just a few days,
Speaker 1: and the healed skin is almost undetectable for second degree burns. Now,
Speaker 1: let's turn to the best news stories of the week.
Speaker 1: First off, a Texas student is attending a public high
Speaker 1: school as a robot. Lynden Batty has a compromised immune system,
Speaker 1: so he uses a telepresence robot to attend classes at
Speaker 1: high school using a computer screen and speakers. He can
Speaker 1: see and hear through the robot, and his mouse can
Speaker 1: drive the robot to the different classrooms. It's funny to
Speaker 1: think about this. Imagine what a high school or college
Speaker 1: would look like if this really took off. Hallways would
Speaker 1: be filled with thousands of little robots. It might make
Speaker 1: for an interesting prom as well. News Corp Is finally
Speaker 1: unveiled its iPad app for reading the news. The news
Speaker 1: is called The Daily. In this case, they used about
Speaker 1: an hour of time on Fox News to broadcast the
Speaker 1: announcement of this new product. After downloading the app onto
Speaker 1: your iPad, users pay nine cents a week for the content.
Speaker 1: It's essentially an electronic newspaper. It will be very interesting
Speaker 1: to see how this experience them it works out. Will
Speaker 1: people pay fifty two dollars a year for a subscription
Speaker 1: to an electronic newspaper, presumably because it makes reading the
Speaker 1: news easy, or would people rather get their news for
Speaker 1: free alla cart from the thousands of news websites and
Speaker 1: news aggregators on the web. We will see how this works.
Speaker 1: Wiki leaks announced that al Qaeda is nearly ready to
Speaker 1: use dirty bombs. As you'll recall, a dirty bomb is
Speaker 1: a normal explosive mixed with nuclear material, so when the
Speaker 1: bomb explodes, it contaminates a wide area with radioactivity. The
Speaker 1: type of nuclear material use controls just how toxic and
Speaker 1: long lasting the contamination is. This information comes according to
Speaker 1: one of the diplomatic cables that wiki leaks has been
Speaker 1: releasing over the last several weeks. There's also concerned that
Speaker 1: enriched uranium, which could be used to make a full
Speaker 1: on nuclear bomb, is being smuggled due al Qaeda as well.
Speaker 1: Denmark is get being ready to build an eighteen kilometer
Speaker 1: or roughly eleven mile long tunnel to Germany. It was
Speaker 1: gonna be a bridge, but the tunnel seems to be
Speaker 1: friendlier to the environment. It will cost about seven billion
Speaker 1: dollars to put this thing together. For comparison, the Channel
Speaker 1: tunnel between England and France is about three times longer,
Speaker 1: or thirty one miles. Intel has started recalling chips that
Speaker 1: support its high end Sandy Bridge processors, meaning that if
Speaker 1: you have a motherboard containing these chips you need to
Speaker 1: get a replacement. The problem affects the disc drives connected
Speaker 1: through the chips sat a controller and could really hurt
Speaker 1: the performance of a high end computer. It's thought that
Speaker 1: it will cost Intel about a billion dollars to fix
Speaker 1: this mistake. Scientists are working on plants, you know, like
Speaker 1: little house plants and plants for your garden, that can
Speaker 1: detect certain chemicals and then turn white in their presence.
Speaker 1: The chemicals get absorbed through the leaves and interact with
Speaker 1: the plants chemistry to cause the color change in the leaves,
Speaker 1: hopefully in just a few minutes. It's thought that these
Speaker 1: plants could be put around buildings are left in airports,
Speaker 1: and if chemicals came into play, the plants would let
Speaker 1: people see what's happening. Would you like to go somewhere
Speaker 1: where you can really really see the Milky Way at
Speaker 1: night and all its stars. If you've ever seen it,
Speaker 1: you know it's a magnificent site. But it's getting harder
Speaker 1: and harder to see it because of light pollution caused
Speaker 1: by cities and suburbs. One option is to get on
Speaker 1: a boat and go well out to see to escape
Speaker 1: the lights. Another is to visit the island of Sark
Speaker 1: near Britain. It is the first place to be certified
Speaker 1: as a dark Sky community. You won't find any street
Speaker 1: lights or big illuminated stadiums on this island. The whole
Speaker 1: goal is to keep it dark so you can actually
Speaker 1: see the stars at night. Are you looking for a
Speaker 1: new graphics card. Tom's Hardware dot com now has a
Speaker 1: list of the best cards for the money on their website,
Speaker 1: and they update it every month as the technology advances.
Speaker 1: For example, if you're on a budget and you want
Speaker 1: the best card under a hundred dollars, the page on
Speaker 1: Tom's Hardware dot com will help you find it. Have
Speaker 1: you seen these locks? They're commonly called simplex locks that
Speaker 1: have five mechanical buttons on the front. You push the
Speaker 1: buttons in the right order to unlock the lock. There
Speaker 1: are millions of these things all over the world, providing
Speaker 1: access control to doors. Now it turns out that if
Speaker 1: you have a big enough neodymium magnet, you can open
Speaker 1: one of these locks almost instantly. The magnet needs to
Speaker 1: be pretty big, about the size of half a baseball,
Speaker 1: which means that it's fairly dangerous to the user because
Speaker 1: of a pinch hazard. But it's still interesting that the locks,
Speaker 1: which self for about three hundred dollars, are so vulnerable.
Speaker 1: Amazon appears to be ready to start stree naming movies
Speaker 1: like Netflix does. The pitch is that it quote is unlimited, commercial,
Speaker 1: free instant streaming of five thousand movies and TV shows
Speaker 1: at no additional costs to normal Amazon Prime subscribers. This
Speaker 1: is currently just a rumor. It's been seen by certain
Speaker 1: people uncertain screens that were publicly released by Amazon and
Speaker 1: then retracted. There's not been a formal announcement yet, but
Speaker 1: because of the screens, it's thought that Amazon is getting
Speaker 1: ready to announce this. Amazon will have a lot of
Speaker 1: catching up to do, mainly because Netflix has managed to
Speaker 1: get its service embedded into so many TV and Blu
Speaker 1: Ray players. There's word from NASA that a developing plasma
Speaker 1: engine could make Mars missions a lot quicker. It might
Speaker 1: even make a mission to Jupiter possible. The idea is
Speaker 1: to use nuclear power to create heat and electricity for
Speaker 1: the engine. The nuclear fuel heats the propellant gas to
Speaker 1: a plasma state before it gets mag metically accelerated to
Speaker 1: produce thrust. The goal is a ship that travels at
Speaker 1: more than a hundred thousand miles per hour, which is
Speaker 1: about four times faster than chemical rockets can go. One
Speaker 1: big question that has to be answered is how to
Speaker 1: get a nuclear reactor safely into orbit. White space WiFi
Speaker 1: has moved a step closer this week with the FCC
Speaker 1: granting licenses denying companies to use the spectrum. As you
Speaker 1: may recall, white space spectrum uses radio frequencies between accessed
Speaker 1: frequency bands, as well as TV spectrum that's been released
Speaker 1: by the switch to digital TV. If we're lucky, it
Speaker 1: would be possible to create a powerful nationwide WiFi network
Speaker 1: using white space that lowers the cost of wireless data significantly.
Speaker 1: If you've been following the protests in Egypt this week,
Speaker 1: you know that one peculiar and unexpected event was the
Speaker 1: shutdown of the Internet in Egypt. Egypt, the entire country
Speaker 1: disappeared from the Internet for several days, and the text
Speaker 1: messaging system was also shut down. How did they do that?
Speaker 1: It's known that the five major Internet providers in Egypt
Speaker 1: cut off access in sequence, with about three minutes between providers.
Speaker 1: According to Scientific American. Based on that sequencing and the timing,
Speaker 1: it's thought that the government simply called the providers up
Speaker 1: and asked each one to disconnect. And finally, out of China,
Speaker 1: there's news that a maglev train there is traveling as
Speaker 1: fast as an airplane. It's only an experimental model, but
Speaker 1: it's still promising because it is so fast and because
Speaker 1: it uses about a tenth of the energy used by
Speaker 1: an airplane. The train is able to travel so fast
Speaker 1: because it's traveling inside a vacuum tube, a tube where
Speaker 1: all the air has been sucked out. And this is
Speaker 1: just the first step, and the future speeds could ramp
Speaker 1: up by a factor of ten. If you would like
Speaker 1: more details on any of these topics, you can visit
Speaker 1: the brain Stuff blog at blogs dot how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com. Look for the posts marked interesting reading. And
Speaker 1: as I said at the beginning, your feedback on this
Speaker 1: format would be great. Did you enjoy this podcast or not?
Speaker 1: How is the length and the detail level on each topic?
Speaker 1: You can post something to Facebook by visiting Facebook dot
Speaker 1: com slash brain stuff, or you can send me an
Speaker 1: email at M brain at how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: Thanks a lot for more on this and thousands of
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