Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff from stuff works dot com, where smart happens. Hi,
Speaker 1: Am Marshall Brandon, Welcome back for the third installment of
Speaker 1: our Friday News round up. What's the biggest thing that
Speaker 1: happened this week? From a technology and hype standpoint, it's
Speaker 1: probably the whole Jeopardy thing and IBM s Watson supercomputer.
Speaker 1: The system has almost three thousand cores and fifteen terabytes
Speaker 1: of RAM, not fifteen gigabytes, fifteen trillion bytes of RAM.
Speaker 1: That gives it about two thousand times the power of
Speaker 1: today's one thousand dollar desktop machine that you might get
Speaker 1: at best Buy or someplace like that. So how did
Speaker 1: Watson answer all these questions on Jeopardy? According to IBM,
Speaker 1: they fed Watson one terabyte of plain text information. So
Speaker 1: they fed it the entire English version of Wikipedia, which
Speaker 1: is something like seventeen million articles and fourteen gigabytes of
Speaker 1: text information. They also fed it another entire encyclopedia, a
Speaker 1: whole dictionary, a fasaurus, the Internet movie database, and lots
Speaker 1: and lots of other stuff. They didn't have to structure
Speaker 1: that data. It all went in as plain text, so
Speaker 1: it wasn't like human being sat there and made little
Speaker 1: knowledge structures out of it or something like that. This
Speaker 1: plane text went in and that's what Watson used when
Speaker 1: he was answering these questions because they used plain text.
Speaker 1: What they're hoping is that this technology can be used
Speaker 1: to create much better question answering systems in the real
Speaker 1: world in the future, say for a call center or
Speaker 1: for doctors to used with medical information or something like that.
Speaker 1: You could imagine Google one day being able to really
Speaker 1: answer any question you ask it in plain English with
Speaker 1: a good solid answer, and that would be a nice thing. Flip.
Speaker 1: Speaking of supercomputers, the Department of Energy is hoping to
Speaker 1: get a hundred and twenty six million dollars to spend
Speaker 1: on the first excess scale supercomputer. This would be a
Speaker 1: major accomplishment since the fastest supercomputers today are in the
Speaker 1: one pedal flop range. A pedal flop is a quadrillion
Speaker 1: floating point operations per second, which is a thousand trillion
Speaker 1: floating point operations and x a flop would be a
Speaker 1: thousand times faster than a pedal flop or a quintillion
Speaker 1: floating point operations per second. So for comparison, it's thought
Speaker 1: that the human brain the one that's sitting inside your
Speaker 1: head right now is doing about ten pedal flops. Maybe
Speaker 1: they're organized really well. You know, you have a vision
Speaker 1: processor and a language processor, and I don't know a
Speaker 1: Justin Bieber processor if you're a teenager. But we are
Speaker 1: getting there in terms of raw computing power to the
Speaker 1: point where you could simulate a brain in theory blip.
Speaker 1: So how long will it be until you have a
Speaker 1: pedal flop in your pocket? We got a little closer
Speaker 1: this week when in Video announced its new call L
Speaker 1: four core Tegra processor. Supposedly, we will see four cores
Speaker 1: in tablets and smartphones by the end of this summer,
Speaker 1: say August of two thousand eleven. Plus. This chip includes
Speaker 1: a twelve core graphics card on the chip as well,
Speaker 1: and it uses just two watts or so. It's an
Speaker 1: amazing accomplishment considering the same thing in a typical laptop
Speaker 1: consumes about fifty watts. Right now, it means incredible computing
Speaker 1: power and incredible battery life. In Video demonstrated it displaying
Speaker 1: movies on a four d P display, not a ten
Speaker 1: a DP display, a fourteen DP display, which is two thousand,
Speaker 1: five hundred sixty pixels wide, and one was in pixels high.
Speaker 1: That's almost twice as many pixels as HDTV, and it's
Speaker 1: pretty common now to find high end monitors with that
Speaker 1: many pixels. So in theory, you can get a tablet
Speaker 1: computer in August, plug it into your giant p monitor,
Speaker 1: and watch movies in the highest resolution ever Blip. I
Speaker 1: did a podcast a couple of weeks ago where I
Speaker 1: talked about the toy helicopter I bought for the kids.
Speaker 1: It can fly for about seven minutes and it's very
Speaker 1: precise when you're controlling it with the remote control. This week,
Speaker 1: darpest showed off its new spy Hummingbird. It flies and
Speaker 1: looks a lot like a hummingbird. Plus it has a
Speaker 1: wireless video camera and microphone on board, so it can
Speaker 1: fly land and then send an audio and video feed
Speaker 1: to whoever wants to look at it. You can probably
Speaker 1: expect to see one of these perched in a tree
Speaker 1: in your yard in the near future. If you want
Speaker 1: to see a video of this hummingbird flight, type interesting,
Speaker 1: reading number six eighty nine into Google Blip. Scientists have
Speaker 1: discovered a species of multicellular life that can survive in space,
Speaker 1: not in a spaceship, but in actual space, including the
Speaker 1: hard vacuum, the cosmic rays, the extreme temperature changes, and
Speaker 1: all the rest. The species is called a water bear.
Speaker 1: A typical water bear is about a millimeter long. When
Speaker 1: it's an adult, it has eight legs and a hard
Speaker 1: outer shell. They don't mind being completely dried out, and
Speaker 1: then they come back to life when you put them
Speaker 1: in water. Several thousand water bears were sent into orbit
Speaker 1: for ten days, and when they were put into water,
Speaker 1: some of them were still alive and they were able
Speaker 1: to reproduce. None of them became a million times larger
Speaker 1: and started to rampage a nearby city. Though unfortunately, you
Speaker 1: might have to send something else into space to get
Speaker 1: the Godzilla effect blip. Supposedly, the NPR show called This
Speaker 1: American Life is on the verge of cracking the secret
Speaker 1: recipe for Coca cola, and this recipe is now circulating
Speaker 1: on the internet. Everything appears to be known except for
Speaker 1: one super secret ingredient called seven X, which This American
Speaker 1: Life is trying to crack as well. So what's in coke?
Speaker 1: To make five gallons of syrup? You start with two
Speaker 1: and a half gallons of water and thirty pounds of sugar.
Speaker 1: Then you put in things like caffeine, lime juice, vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, lemon,
Speaker 1: and orange oil, and even a cup of alcohol. If
Speaker 1: you go to Interesting Reading number six eighty eight, you
Speaker 1: can find the details of the recipe. But here's the thing.
Speaker 1: I went to the grocery store this week and a
Speaker 1: two lead bottle of coke is only cents. It's probably
Speaker 1: easier to just buy it blip. Do you want to
Speaker 1: get rid of a cold? I did a blog post
Speaker 1: this week about one way to do it, using antihistamine
Speaker 1: and mucus thinner on day one. The idea is that
Speaker 1: if you see a cold coming on, like you start
Speaker 1: to get that scratchy throat and the running nose and
Speaker 1: the sneezing or whatever on that very first day, if
Speaker 1: you hit it with antihistamines and mucus thinner and blowing
Speaker 1: your nose a lot and using warm compresses, you can
Speaker 1: get a lot of the crud out and that takes
Speaker 1: a lot of the virus particles with it. Now science
Speaker 1: has proven that there's another thing you can do to
Speaker 1: stop colds, and this really works according to research, it's zinc.
Speaker 1: They looked across dozens of studies, and they determined that
Speaker 1: if you suck on zinc lozenges on day one, it
Speaker 1: really does help to shorten the duration of the cold.
Speaker 1: It might cut the duration in half, for example, and
Speaker 1: it cuts way down on the cough part of the cold. Blip.
Speaker 1: Colds can make you miserable, but science demonstrated another way
Speaker 1: to bring on misery this week. It's Facebook. The more
Speaker 1: Face Book friends you have supposedly the worst this Facebook
Speaker 1: effect gets, according to tech Gui dot net quote. A
Speaker 1: study from the psychology department of Edinburgh Napier University concludes
Speaker 1: that all in all, the negative effects from being on
Speaker 1: Facebook are outweighed by the benefits of staying in touch
Speaker 1: with friends and family end quote. Plus. A new Jersey
Speaker 1: cop recommended this week that if you're a parent, you
Speaker 1: need to steal your kids Facebook password to keep track
Speaker 1: of what they're doing on Facebook. If that wouldn't make
Speaker 1: you miserable, I don't know what would. You can look
Speaker 1: up interesting reading number six eight for details. Blip. China
Speaker 1: is gearing up to make nuclear power from thorium. I've
Speaker 1: written a fair amount about thorium power on the blog
Speaker 1: because it's theoretically going to have a lot of advantages
Speaker 1: over uranium power if you can get the bugs worked out.
Speaker 1: Thorium is plentiful and it doesn't produce much high level
Speaker 1: nuclear waste at all, meaning that no rogue nations are
Speaker 1: going to be producing nuclear bombs out of a thorium
Speaker 1: power plant. Plus the power plants could be a lot
Speaker 1: smaller than a typical uranium power plant. But the US
Speaker 1: and Canada have largely ignored thorium completely. They aren't looking
Speaker 1: at it really at all. If China can make it work,
Speaker 1: it would bring in a new era of cheap power
Speaker 1: without the carbon emissions of coal, and that would be
Speaker 1: a big deal in China. Blip. You may have heard
Speaker 1: of thermoelectric generators. They turn heat directly into electricity. The
Speaker 1: most famous thermoelectric generators in the universe are on the
Speaker 1: Voyager spacecraft. Here, they take decaying plutonium to generate heat,
Speaker 1: and the thermo electric generator makes electricity from that heat
Speaker 1: for decades. That's why these Voyager spacecraft were able to
Speaker 1: go off like I think they launched in the seventies
Speaker 1: and they're still transmitting little bits of data today. Plutonium
Speaker 1: has a half life of eighty seven years. I think,
Speaker 1: so you can make a radio active thermoelectric generator that
Speaker 1: has a really, really long lifespan. Well, here on Earth,
Speaker 1: it'd be great to have thermo electric generators as well.
Speaker 1: For example, you might hook one up to your hot
Speaker 1: exhaust pipe and be able to generate electricity without having
Speaker 1: to have an alternator that's sucking up engine power. That
Speaker 1: would be a really nice way to increase fuel efficiency,
Speaker 1: but we haven't had materials that generate enough electricity from
Speaker 1: heat to make that practical. This week, scientists announced that
Speaker 1: they have created a new material for thermo electric generators
Speaker 1: that's better at generating electricity. So in theory, if they
Speaker 1: can bring this to market, we could see all kinds
Speaker 1: of interesting ways to generate power from waste heat blip.
Speaker 1: NASA announced its design for a manned deep space vehicle
Speaker 1: this week. This might be the kind of craft, for example,
Speaker 1: to take people to Mars or maybe even to Jupiter.
Speaker 1: It comes complete with a giant inflatable centrifuge to simulate gravity,
Speaker 1: huge storage areas for food and water, living hoarders, robot arms,
Speaker 1: landing craft, and so on. There are pictures of it
Speaker 1: on the brain Stuff blog if you're interested. If you
Speaker 1: type brain Stuff m M s e V, that's M
Speaker 1: M s EV into Google, you can find the blog post.
Speaker 1: Mm s EV stands for multimission space Exploration Vehicle. One
Speaker 1: of the interesting things about it is that it's expandable,
Speaker 1: so you could have a short version of it for
Speaker 1: a Moon mission, and then make it much longer if
Speaker 1: you need to go to Mars or Jupiter blip. Speaking
Speaker 1: of NASA, they announced this week the possibility of a
Speaker 1: gig enormous planet way out beyond Pluto in the ort Cloud.
Speaker 1: They think it might be there because it might explain
Speaker 1: why comments from the ort cloud get deflected towards the Sun.
Speaker 1: It would need to be a out four times bigger
Speaker 1: than Jupiter if it would were to really exist out there.
Speaker 1: Other scientists think the idea of such a huge planet
Speaker 1: as nuts. If you google Interesting Reading number six eight seven,
Speaker 1: you can read about the controversy blip. The Mars five
Speaker 1: hundred mission landed on Mars this week. You may recall
Speaker 1: that this is a big experiment that locks six people
Speaker 1: in a large wooden spacecraft simulator sitting on the ground
Speaker 1: in Russia. They go through all the motions of a
Speaker 1: real Mars flight, including the isolation, the transmission delays, the
Speaker 1: interpersonal relationship messes, and so on. Imagine being cooped up
Speaker 1: with six people in an RV for more than a year,
Speaker 1: and you kind of get the idea of what it
Speaker 1: would be like on this mission. This week, three members
Speaker 1: of the mission you know in simulation, descended down onto
Speaker 1: Mars and got to walk around on simulated Martian soil
Speaker 1: collecting samples. It's called the Mars five hundred thing because
Speaker 1: the whole simulation is going to take five twenty days
Speaker 1: to see, like the trip out and then the landing
Speaker 1: and then the trip back. They launched back on June
Speaker 1: three of two thousand ten. Blip. And finally, you may
Speaker 1: have heard that drug smugglers have used all kinds of
Speaker 1: tricks to bring drugs into the United States. They have
Speaker 1: people swallow the drugs, They put them inside the tires
Speaker 1: of trucks, they fly them in private airplanes. They tunnel
Speaker 1: between Mexico and the United States with great, big long
Speaker 1: tunnels with little railroads inside of them. They've tried all
Speaker 1: kinds of stuff. There have also been some small submarines built,
Speaker 1: but this week the most amazing of the Narco submarine surfaced.
Speaker 1: It was captured in Colombia. It's a hundred feet long
Speaker 1: and it could hold eight tons of cocaine. There are
Speaker 1: photos of it. If you're interested, go to Interesting Reading
Speaker 1: number six eight seven. So until next time, my Marshall
Speaker 1: brain have a great weekend. For more on this and
Speaker 1: thousands of other topics, does that how stuffworks dot com
Speaker 1: and don't forget to check out the brain stuff blog
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