Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff from how Stuff Works dot Com, where
Speaker 1: smart happens him Marshall Brain and welcome to this week's
Speaker 1: Friday news roundup. And what a week it's been. Kind
Speaker 1: of a sobering week is we've watched events unfold in Japan.
Speaker 1: As you'll recall last Friday, we were just learning about
Speaker 1: the massive earthquake in tsunami in Japan. This week, the
Speaker 1: news cycle has been dominated by the Japan's story, particularly
Speaker 1: because of all of the problems with the nuclear power plants.
Speaker 1: We've all gotten a crash course in boiling water reactors,
Speaker 1: reactor cooling systems, radioactive iodine and caesium, and the problems
Speaker 1: with cooling pools that run out of water. Depending on
Speaker 1: how events unfold and how the wind is blowing at
Speaker 1: the time, this could evolve into a crisis that's potentially
Speaker 1: bigger than Chernobyl. According to some experts, some of the
Speaker 1: scenarios are not very pleasant at all for the citizens
Speaker 1: of Japan. A number of scientists have warned that the
Speaker 1: same kind of thing could easily happen in the United States.
Speaker 1: Over in California, most people have heard of the San
Speaker 1: Andreas fault, but the more worrying thing is the Cascadia
Speaker 1: fault in the Pacific Ocean. It would cause a tsunami
Speaker 1: just like the one in Japan, and it would be
Speaker 1: hitting huge cities, most notably Los Angeles. And while some
Speaker 1: buildings are earthquake proof, the United States is not nearly
Speaker 1: as well prepared and well engineered as Japan is. Having
Speaker 1: seen how badly things have unfolded in well prepared Japan,
Speaker 1: it might be prudent for the United States to take
Speaker 1: some steps toward better emergency preparedness. Or alternatively, you personally
Speaker 1: could avoid the West coast of the United States for
Speaker 1: the foreseeable future. If you google interesting reading numbers seven away,
Speaker 1: you can get details on the California outlook, as well
Speaker 1: as many of the Japan's stories. Hollywood is in Los Angeles,
Speaker 1: and in theory, Hollywood could disappear from the face of
Speaker 1: the earth if the tsunami is big enough. But we
Speaker 1: will always have the movies from the past in the
Speaker 1: form of Hollywood's DVDs. And there's a new company taking
Speaker 1: advantage of those DVDs in a very interesting way. The
Speaker 1: company is called zedva z E d I v A,
Speaker 1: and I might be pronouncing it wrong, but it's a
Speaker 1: streaming movie company that's delivering movies over the internet. In fact,
Speaker 1: it's streaming movies that you can't get via a stream
Speaker 1: from places like Netflix. Z Diva does this by putting
Speaker 1: physical DVDs into physical DVD players and then streaming the
Speaker 1: content from that pair from the DVD DVD player pair
Speaker 1: to you. Your computer is a remote control for the
Speaker 1: DVD player. By doing this, Zadeva apparently can get around
Speaker 1: all the copyright laws and Hollywood restrictions that hamper the
Speaker 1: ability of places like Netflix to stream movies, especially right
Speaker 1: after a DVD is released, and the prices right at
Speaker 1: the Diva. It's only two dollars to watch a movie.
Speaker 1: You can google interesting reading number seven oh eight for details.
Speaker 1: There's a really interesting article this week on the price
Speaker 1: of solar cells and solar panels. Prices have been coming
Speaker 1: down for years, but by two thousand and fifteen, prices
Speaker 1: in sunny places are going to break below coal fired
Speaker 1: electricity prices for the first time. Those are prices for
Speaker 1: installed solar panels, so you can order them, get the panels,
Speaker 1: get them installed on your house, and actually have electricity
Speaker 1: being produced by those solar panels. That cost the same
Speaker 1: as electricity from the power company, by installed solar panels
Speaker 1: will cost less than coal across much of the United
Speaker 1: States by twenty thirty if trends continue. The article predicts
Speaker 1: that installed solar panels could cost half as much as
Speaker 1: power from a power plant, which would be fantastic news.
Speaker 1: Google Interesting Reading numbers seven oh eight for details on this.
Speaker 1: But according to another article, this great development on the
Speaker 1: solar energy front may come too late. The article is
Speaker 1: called quote the content of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
Speaker 1: is accelerating super exponentially end quote, and it contains this
Speaker 1: ominous prediction. Quote. Notwithstanding a lot of discussions, international meetings,
Speaker 1: prevalence in the media, atmospheric CEO two content growth continues unabated,
Speaker 1: with a clear faster than exponential behavior. On the face
Speaker 1: of this evidence, using data until two thousand nine, stabilizing
Speaker 1: atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions at levels reached in for instance,
Speaker 1: seems very ambitious, if not utterly unrealistic end quote. The
Speaker 1: notion is that humans emit so much c O two
Speaker 1: and the environment has soaked up a lot of it,
Speaker 1: but is now full of c O two, and parts
Speaker 1: of nature are now starting to create positive feedback loops
Speaker 1: as temperatures rise and so on, that things could get
Speaker 1: very bad on the c O two front. If you
Speaker 1: google Interesting Reading seven oh eight, you can find out
Speaker 1: more about this phenomenon. There are several articles on space
Speaker 1: junk this week. In one which you can find by
Speaker 1: googling Interesting Reading number seven oh eight, there's a video
Speaker 1: showing the incredible amount of damage that small pieces of
Speaker 1: space junk can do when they run into spacecraft. What
Speaker 1: they have is this huge hunk of aluminum that's several
Speaker 1: inches thick, and it's struck by this tiny little sphere
Speaker 1: of space junk that's traveling at six kilometers per second,
Speaker 1: and it makes this huge crater in the aluminum. But
Speaker 1: that same video also shows how and why lightweight shields
Speaker 1: can protect against that kind of damage. One layer of
Speaker 1: the shield breaks up the incoming particle, and then the
Speaker 1: second layer absorbs the debris from that first collision. It
Speaker 1: makes for a much much lighter package for shielding. But
Speaker 1: space junk is still a big concern, so in Interesting
Speaker 1: Reading number seven oh five, there's an article about a
Speaker 1: ground based laser from NASA that may be able to
Speaker 1: zap space junk out of the sky. The idea is
Speaker 1: to use a five kilowatt laser that beams photons onto
Speaker 1: a piece of space junk for a couple of hours.
Speaker 1: The photons slow the object down, and once it slows
Speaker 1: down enough, it falls out of orbit. If you google
Speaker 1: interesting Reading number seven oh five, you can learn more
Speaker 1: about this laser that could clean out low Earth orbits.
Speaker 1: Do sperm whales call to each other by announcing their names? Maybe?
Speaker 1: Scientists have noticed that there are changes in the vocal
Speaker 1: patterns of sperm whales that might indicate that the names
Speaker 1: of different individuals are being used. What's interesting about the
Speaker 1: article is the idea of these animals having a level
Speaker 1: of intelligence that would allow names to occur, as well
Speaker 1: as the idea of underwater whale societies that are basically
Speaker 1: invisible to human beings. Everything about whales is amazing if
Speaker 1: you think about it. So if you google interesting Reading
Speaker 1: number seven oh five, you can learn more about this.
Speaker 1: We would call the whale names a scientific conjecture. Scientists
Speaker 1: have noticed something in the behavior of whales that's interesting
Speaker 1: to them, and they have offered one possible explanation. They
Speaker 1: could be names, but obviously could be something else. So
Speaker 1: now what the scientists will do is more research to
Speaker 1: see if that conjecture is true or not. Here's another
Speaker 1: scientific conjecture that came to light this week. The Large
Speaker 1: Hadron Collider might be able to implement some form of
Speaker 1: time travel. The first part of this conjecture is that
Speaker 1: the Higgs boson actually exists. The Higgs boson is the
Speaker 1: particle that the LHC was created to find. The second
Speaker 1: part of the conjecture is that the LHC can create
Speaker 1: a Higgs boson. And if both of those become true,
Speaker 1: then there's a theoretical possibility that a Higgs singlet might
Speaker 1: get created along with the Higgs boson, And if so,
Speaker 1: the Higgs singlet might be able to go backward or
Speaker 1: forward in time by escaping from the four dimensions of
Speaker 1: our universe and re entering at some different point in time.
Speaker 1: If this can happen, then it might allow for messages
Speaker 1: to travel through time. But it'll be a while until
Speaker 1: we find out. We have to actually discover the Higgs
Speaker 1: boson first, and the Higgs singlet and figure out how
Speaker 1: to make it transfer out of our four dimensions. So
Speaker 1: if you google interesting reading number seven oh seven, you
Speaker 1: can get details on this scientific conjecture. At the top
Speaker 1: of Interesting Reading number seven oh six, there is a
Speaker 1: really interesting piece of space video. What they've done is
Speaker 1: they've taken high resolution photographs from the Cassini space probe
Speaker 1: to Saturn and they've woven them together to make movies.
Speaker 1: Because the photographs are high resolution, were able to fly
Speaker 1: past the rings of Saturn, past different moons and so on,
Speaker 1: and see things with incredible detail. If you play the
Speaker 1: video at full screen, you get the full effect, and
Speaker 1: it's pretty spectacular. The filmmakers hope to use this technique
Speaker 1: to make an IMAX movie. Google Interesting Reading number seven
Speaker 1: oh six to see this video. Also in number seven
Speaker 1: oh six, there's an article about the drive to make
Speaker 1: the world's strongest magnet that doesn't use neodymium. Neodymium is
Speaker 1: a rare Earth element that is, as you might suspect, rare,
Speaker 1: and China is really the only country you with significant
Speaker 1: deposits and they aren't very inclined to share. So the
Speaker 1: thing about neodymium magnets is that they are so powerful
Speaker 1: compared to what came before them. They've made things like
Speaker 1: Walkman headphones and then earbuds, possible. Before neodymium magnets, there
Speaker 1: was no way to make a good speaker that's small.
Speaker 1: The magnets have also made small hard discs and small
Speaker 1: electric motors possible, as well as big things like electric
Speaker 1: motors for cars and generators on giant wind turbines. So
Speaker 1: if scientists can invent a better magnet that doesn't need
Speaker 1: rare earth metals, it would be great. If you google
Speaker 1: Interesting Reading number seven oh six, you can learn more.
Speaker 1: Google announced a new feature this week that lets you
Speaker 1: block certain sites from your search results. So you don't
Speaker 1: like results from a particular website, you can add that
Speaker 1: website to a list and it won't show up in
Speaker 1: your Google listings anymore. It gives you more control over
Speaker 1: what you see from Google and lets you reduce the
Speaker 1: noise and Google's results based on your taste. You might
Speaker 1: also notice that Google is also rolling out its best
Speaker 1: Guess feature, where the Google search engine gives you a
Speaker 1: Watson like best guests to the answer of certain queries.
Speaker 1: For example, type in the CEO of General Electric into
Speaker 1: Google and the first result is Google's best guess at
Speaker 1: the name of the actual person. Google Interesting Reading number
Speaker 1: seven oh four for details. Also in interesting Reading seven
Speaker 1: oh four, there's an article looking at the iPad two
Speaker 1: graphics performance, a new memory technology that could let cell
Speaker 1: phones last much longer on a battery charge, a story
Speaker 1: suggesting that the airport X ray scanners that look at
Speaker 1: us through our clothing and may emit ten times more
Speaker 1: radiation than they should, a new nanotech material that may
Speaker 1: make it easy to store a lot of hydrogen in
Speaker 1: a all space. And then a cryptic little article about
Speaker 1: the lost City of Atlantis. Now we've all heard about
Speaker 1: this city. Plato talked about it in his writings about
Speaker 1: six hundred b CE, so twenty hundred years ago. Plato
Speaker 1: was writing about the lost city of Atlantis, and people
Speaker 1: have been hypothesizing and conjecturing about it ever since. Supposedly
Speaker 1: it was an island nation that sank into the sea,
Speaker 1: presumably because of a giant tsunami. It's been considered something
Speaker 1: of a myth until this week. They'll have a lot
Speaker 1: of digging and artifact finding to do to prove that
Speaker 1: this is a real city and not something that they're
Speaker 1: just speculating about. But it does raise the possibility that
Speaker 1: Atlantis really exists. That's it for this week. If you'd
Speaker 1: like to read more, you can google interesting reading number
Speaker 1: seven oh four, seven oh five, seven oh six, seven
Speaker 1: oh seven, or seven oh eight for details. Until next time,
Speaker 1: let's hope that the news is just a little bit
Speaker 1: better in the coming days. This has been a tough
Speaker 1: week for the world. For more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics, does that how stuff works dot com
Speaker 1: and don't forget to check out the brain stuff blog
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