Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuff Works dot com
Speaker 1: where smart happens. Hi. I'm Marshall Brain and it is
Speaker 1: time once again for the Friday News Roundup, where we
Speaker 1: feature some of the most interesting science and technology articles
Speaker 1: of the week. If you were to pick the thing
Speaker 1: that has the probability of having the most effect on
Speaker 1: humanity in the future, it would probably be IBMS demonstration
Speaker 1: of a graphine transistor running at an impossible to imagine
Speaker 1: a hundred and fifty five giga hurts. If a CPU
Speaker 1: could clock at that speed, it would be roughly fifty
Speaker 1: times faster than the typical CPU chip available today. That's
Speaker 1: quite unlikely because the clock speed of a chip is
Speaker 1: a lot more complicated than the speed of one transistor,
Speaker 1: and these transistors are more designed for radios rather than
Speaker 1: for you know, computing kinds of applications. But even so,
Speaker 1: if you could take graphing and get even a two
Speaker 1: x or a four x speed up, so you know,
Speaker 1: a chip running at ten giga hurts or twenty giga hurts,
Speaker 1: that would be impressive. Given that speed increases of pretty
Speaker 1: much stalled at three giga hurts for several years. We'll
Speaker 1: have to see where IBM and other manufacturers take this,
Speaker 1: but it appears possible that graphing or some derivative thereof,
Speaker 1: could be the thing that replaces silicon over the next decade.
Speaker 1: If you go to Interesting Reading number seven twenty seven,
Speaker 1: you can get details on these new transistors. But if
Speaker 1: I were to pick the thing this week that has
Speaker 1: the coolest buzz factor, that would have to be a
Speaker 1: guy talking about building a life size functional at at
Speaker 1: Yes and at at. This is the all terrain armored
Speaker 1: transport that came out in the Empire Strikes Back film.
Speaker 1: You remember in the hot scene at the beginning of
Speaker 1: the film, there's this ice planet and these giant walkers
Speaker 1: are walking across the ice to destroy the rebel base
Speaker 1: and the power reactor or whatever it was. The idea
Speaker 1: being that these walkers can somehow handle terrain that's you know,
Speaker 1: rough and complex, much better than a wheeled vehicle could.
Speaker 1: So let's ignore the obvious, like kind of silliness of
Speaker 1: such a tall vehicle that's connected to such a narrow chassis,
Speaker 1: especially since the legs in the film appear to have
Speaker 1: little or no sideways mobility to handle tipping over. But
Speaker 1: you know, these design problems have no effect on the
Speaker 1: utter mind blowing power of the machines. When you saw
Speaker 1: them in the film, especially when you saw them for
Speaker 1: the first time in theaters, it was just an amazing spectacle.
Speaker 1: So building a real one and having it walk around
Speaker 1: would be a triumph. There's a guy named Mike Kohler
Speaker 1: who's hoping to raise money for the project on Kickstarter.
Speaker 1: If you google Interesting Reading number seven twenty eight, you
Speaker 1: can you can read more about it. There's an interview
Speaker 1: with him there. Speaking of legs, there is a female
Speaker 1: double leg amputee who's making lemonade out of lemons. She um,
Speaker 1: you know, as I said, as a double leg ampute
Speaker 1: so that's the lemon part. But she's able to now
Speaker 1: don a prosthesis that turns her into a mermaid. The
Speaker 1: prosthesis combines her two stumps into a single tale for swimming,
Speaker 1: and she swims so well that she would like to compete.
Speaker 1: But obviously this would have to be a new category
Speaker 1: of competition, since you know, normal people who are in
Speaker 1: swimming competitions aren't wearing fins or tails or anything else currently,
Speaker 1: so we'll have to see how this develops. If you
Speaker 1: google Interesting Reading number seven seven. You can read more
Speaker 1: about her story. We all have lithium ion batteries and
Speaker 1: things like our cell phones, are iPods, are iPads, our cameras,
Speaker 1: and our laptops. How could we get the most life
Speaker 1: and power from these batteries? Because they are expensive and
Speaker 1: we do use these devices a lot, it would be
Speaker 1: nice if the batteries could last as long as possible.
Speaker 1: So Popular mechanics study this question and has four recommendations. First,
Speaker 1: a lithium ion battery prefers an intermediate state of charge
Speaker 1: that is given a choice, it would last longest if
Speaker 1: it is not ever fully charged to its maximum voltage
Speaker 1: and if it's not ever fully drained down to you know,
Speaker 1: no charge left on the battery. Those two conditions can
Speaker 1: shorten the life of the battery by quite a bit.
Speaker 1: The second tip is, you know, following on that, to
Speaker 1: avoid full charges at full discharges at any time, But
Speaker 1: the number of cycles if you're at an intermediate charge
Speaker 1: is irrelevant. So you know, if you charge it three
Speaker 1: times a day to keep it at an intermediate charge,
Speaker 1: that's okay. The number of times it comes on and
Speaker 1: off the charger is not relevant. Then number three is
Speaker 1: something we probably already knew heat and cold are bad
Speaker 1: for lithium ion batteries, as they are for a lot
Speaker 1: of other batteries. And also you don't want to keep
Speaker 1: lit em I on batteries constantly on a charger because
Speaker 1: for one, that keeps him at this fully charged level,
Speaker 1: which is bad, and for another it adds heat. So
Speaker 1: if all of this is true, and really there's no
Speaker 1: reason to believe that it's not, it makes you wonder
Speaker 1: why all these tricks aren't built into chargers already, Like
Speaker 1: why would a charger take a battery up to full
Speaker 1: charge if that's bad for the battery? But you know
Speaker 1: we have to wait, I guess for these chargers that
Speaker 1: are smart enough to avoid these problems. So if you
Speaker 1: want to learn more about this, you can go to
Speaker 1: Interesting Reading seven to get the details. It really is
Speaker 1: a pretty fascinating article. Speaking of making things last longer,
Speaker 1: there was a story in Interesting Reading seven five where
Speaker 1: a z Camaro with the sticker still on the window
Speaker 1: and just a few miles on the odometer had been
Speaker 1: left in a sort of time capsule and then got
Speaker 1: pulled out of hybridation more than twenty years later. Except
Speaker 1: for a lot of dust, it appeared to be in
Speaker 1: pristine shape, which might suggest that if you're going to
Speaker 1: do your own time capsule with a car and it,
Speaker 1: you might want to invest in one of those fabric
Speaker 1: car covers and put it over the car before you
Speaker 1: stuff it in the box or the trailer or whatever
Speaker 1: you're gonna store your time capsule in. Anyway, it was,
Speaker 1: you know, a fun video to see them pull the
Speaker 1: car out, and they had done a nice job of
Speaker 1: preserving the seats with plastic and stuff, so it was
Speaker 1: it was a neat little thing to see. But that
Speaker 1: brings up a great point. If you are going to
Speaker 1: buy a car today and save it for the future yourself,
Speaker 1: and you wanted to hold its value, what car should
Speaker 1: you buy? So you know, you don't want to buy
Speaker 1: a car that people are gonna look at as junk
Speaker 1: in twenty or thirty years. You want to pick a
Speaker 1: good car. And so there's this article and interesting reading
Speaker 1: number seven six that explores this question. The article recommends,
Speaker 1: you know, the obvious stuff like keeping the car pretty
Speaker 1: much exactly as this time capsule car was kept. You
Speaker 1: buy the car, it has very low mileage. If you
Speaker 1: can leave the around the window, that's great because it
Speaker 1: shows you you know exactly what's on the car and
Speaker 1: how much it exactly costs. You want to have all
Speaker 1: original equipment on the car, you want it to be
Speaker 1: in mint conditioned. But what kind of car should you pick?
Speaker 1: And this is where it gets very strange, at least
Speaker 1: with the first car in the list, because it's the
Speaker 1: PT Cruiser, and I would never have picked that particular
Speaker 1: car is one that would be valuable in the future,
Speaker 1: but apparently because of its body style and so on,
Speaker 1: it has the potential to really hold its value. Then
Speaker 1: you go down through the list and the rest of
Speaker 1: them are a lot more obvious than that, including things
Speaker 1: like the Dodge Viper and the Plymouth Prowler and the
Speaker 1: BMW Z three and even the Chevy Vault, which I,
Speaker 1: you know, thought was interesting. Of course, the Vault is
Speaker 1: in there because it's unlikely that anyone will ever own one.
Speaker 1: They're making so few of them. And I actually went
Speaker 1: to the Chevy dealer here and Raleigh and asked about
Speaker 1: the Vault, and apparently if it even ever makes it
Speaker 1: to North Carolina, it would be in something like two
Speaker 1: thousand and twelve. Maybe the Dler was really sketchy on
Speaker 1: whether he would ever have Chevy vaults on his lot.
Speaker 1: So anyway, if you want to see all the recommendations,
Speaker 1: google Interesting Reading number seven twenty six. Everyone knows what
Speaker 1: skyscrapers look like today, you know, they all have these
Speaker 1: different embellishments to make them a little different from the other. Sure,
Speaker 1: but they're all pretty much tall, thin, tower like buildings.
Speaker 1: So what is the skyscraper the future going to look like?
Speaker 1: And a magazine called evol had a competition, and some
Speaker 1: of the designs that came out of that competition are
Speaker 1: mind blowing because most of the designs look nothing like
Speaker 1: skyscrapers look today. Many of them don't even scrape the sky.
Speaker 1: They are much squatter and and flatter but immense. You know,
Speaker 1: they spread out instead of necessarily going up, and you
Speaker 1: can have complete communities inside a single structure with these things.
Speaker 1: It really is interesting to look at the pictures from
Speaker 1: the competition because many of them are quite quite unexpected.
Speaker 1: So if you google Interesting Reading number seven eight and
Speaker 1: look for the article in the future of skyscrapers, you
Speaker 1: can go through those pictures and see what's coming down
Speaker 1: the road in terms of skyscrapers. Some of these skyscrapers
Speaker 1: could house what might be the latest in farming technology.
Speaker 1: More and more farming is moving indoors, and lettuce is
Speaker 1: the most important example. Currently, much of the lettuce grown
Speaker 1: today is grown indoors because the process of growing it
Speaker 1: indoors cut it down on all sorts of problems, and
Speaker 1: because lettuce is a pretty quick crop, it doesn't take
Speaker 1: long for it to go from seed to maturity relatively speaking.
Speaker 1: So an interesting reading number seven seven there's an article
Speaker 1: on future farms where more and more of this ends
Speaker 1: up happening, and every single thing, including the lighting, the temperature,
Speaker 1: the humidity, everything is under human control, so the plants
Speaker 1: grow optimally. This to me is a little hard to imagine,
Speaker 1: especially on the lighting, because lighting is pretty expensive. You know,
Speaker 1: not only do you have to buy the fixture and
Speaker 1: the bulb, but then you have to pump electricity into it.
Speaker 1: And plants need a lot of light. They need bright,
Speaker 1: bright light to do their thing. Whether it's completely comes
Speaker 1: to pass or not is open to question, but the
Speaker 1: indoor part is definitely understandable. On most vegetable crops, grains
Speaker 1: I would expect like wheat and corn will be grown
Speaker 1: outdoors well into the future, but the indoor farming of
Speaker 1: vegetables seems very likely. So if you go and google
Speaker 1: Interesting Reading seven you can learn more about the future
Speaker 1: of farms. Scientists, engineers, and inventors are known for experimentation.
Speaker 1: They are out on the cutting edge and they do
Speaker 1: experiments to discover what will work and what won't work.
Speaker 1: Some of these experiments do work out, some don't, and
Speaker 1: then some are horrific, horrific failures. So this week there's
Speaker 1: an article entitled fifteen Bizarre Experiments Gone Tragically Wrong and
Speaker 1: has fifteen experiments that fall into that terrible, horrible category.
Speaker 1: There are several that you would expect to find if
Speaker 1: you're you know, if you're up on your weird human
Speaker 1: scientific experiments, psychology experiments like the Stanford prison guard experiment
Speaker 1: that show how truly awful human beings can be when
Speaker 1: left in peculiar situations. There are also some medical experiments
Speaker 1: from the era where apparently experimental doctors had no ethics.
Speaker 1: There's the token aviation experiment that you know ended in death,
Speaker 1: as many aviation experiments did in the early years, and
Speaker 1: even you know some today. And then there's the truly
Speaker 1: weird stuff. A couple of which I had never even
Speaker 1: heard of. So if you go to Interesting Reading number
Speaker 1: seven twenty eight you can learn more about these bizarre experience.
Speaker 1: It was a pretty interesting read. One article that got
Speaker 1: a lot of hits this week is the brain Stuff
Speaker 1: article on the wave disc engine. This engine design is
Speaker 1: coming out of Michigan State University and has gotten two
Speaker 1: and a half million dollars in federal funding to you know,
Speaker 1: bring it from the um, you know, the not even
Speaker 1: a prototype but just sort of an idea stage into
Speaker 1: a reality stage. It is a completely unconventional design like
Speaker 1: nothing I've ever seen before, and the claims are amazing,
Speaker 1: like sixty percent efficiency. This would be three to four
Speaker 1: times more efficient than the typical piston engine of today,
Speaker 1: which you know might get fifteen to twenty percent efficiency
Speaker 1: out of the gasoline that goes into it. So this
Speaker 1: wave disc engine would be a huge deal. If this
Speaker 1: engine really pans out at a sixty percent efficiency, even
Speaker 1: if it panned out at a forty percent efficiency, that
Speaker 1: would double the efficiency today and that would be amazing.
Speaker 1: So one thing about this engine is it's a fixed
Speaker 1: rpm turbine like design, and that means it would likely
Speaker 1: be running a fixed load electrical generator or something like
Speaker 1: that in a hybrid vehicle. But you know, when I
Speaker 1: look at this, I am I am pretty skeptical. The
Speaker 1: articles that have been published so far on the wave
Speaker 1: disc engine have been very high on hype and very
Speaker 1: low on details of how this engine is going to
Speaker 1: actually work. So if you read the articles, we're supposed
Speaker 1: to actually see a working model of this engine by
Speaker 1: the end of two thousand and eleven, and we'll get
Speaker 1: to see if it lives up to all the expectations
Speaker 1: fairly quickly. If you google brain stuff Wave disc Engine,
Speaker 1: you can learn more about the engine, and some of
Speaker 1: you know my thoughts on whether or not this might work.
Speaker 1: I am going to be fascinated to see what happens
Speaker 1: when the when the first real engines come out, and
Speaker 1: I really hope that I'm wrong, but I'm quite skeptical
Speaker 1: at the moment. There was a story about myth Busters,
Speaker 1: in particular about Jamie Hyneman this week and his work
Speaker 1: with the US government to develop better armor for vehicles
Speaker 1: that will protect them from explosives like I E. D
Speaker 1: s and minds that are embedded in roads. The idea
Speaker 1: is to make much lighter armor so if you look
Speaker 1: at some of the current designs for armorund vehicles, they
Speaker 1: already show a fair amount of creativity. There's of course
Speaker 1: heavy steel plating, and sometimes that plating is glued or
Speaker 1: stickered onto thinner sheet metal to provide a quick fix, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a quick layer of extra armor. For example,
Speaker 1: on humvees. There are some V bottom vehicles where the
Speaker 1: V shape tries to deflect the blast waves away from
Speaker 1: the vehicle after the blast, so instead of coming right
Speaker 1: up through the bottom of the vehicle of the blast
Speaker 1: waves are are blown outward. There's something called reactive armor
Speaker 1: that explodes when something like an RPG hits it to
Speaker 1: blow the grenade away from the vehicle. So it'll be
Speaker 1: interesting to see what Jamie comes up with. If you
Speaker 1: google Interesting Reading seven eight you can read more about
Speaker 1: his thoughts on armor design. And finally, there's head track.
Speaker 1: If you've seen the demos of any of the head
Speaker 1: tracking displays, the results are spectacular, and you know they've
Speaker 1: been around for several years. The displays were used to
Speaker 1: looking like don't do any head tracking at all. They
Speaker 1: work more like paintings. When you move your head, it
Speaker 1: has no effect on the screen. A head tracking display
Speaker 1: is instead like the window of a building. As you
Speaker 1: move your head around, the view of the window changes,
Speaker 1: So if you walk closer to a window, you see more,
Speaker 1: If you walk further back, you see a narrower range.
Speaker 1: If you walk up close to the window and look
Speaker 1: out to the left, there's actually you know, a lot
Speaker 1: more stuff you can see out to the left, and
Speaker 1: so on. A window works a lot different from a painting.
Speaker 1: So people have been, you know, goofing around with head
Speaker 1: tracking for I don't know, three or four or five years,
Speaker 1: and amazingly, even though it's such a cool looking thing,
Speaker 1: it's never made it into a widely used application. So
Speaker 1: now there's an iPad two app location that uses the
Speaker 1: iPads FaceTime camera to implement head tracking, you know, inexpensively
Speaker 1: obviously basically for free, because the camera's already there, and
Speaker 1: maybe this will be the version that breaks through. This
Speaker 1: is you know, it's an application that really deserves the
Speaker 1: limelight because it is cool when you see it in action.
Speaker 1: So if you google interesting Reading number seven twenty six,
Speaker 1: you can get a discussion in a video demonstration. So
Speaker 1: that's it for this week. If you'd like to get
Speaker 1: more details on these topics or about a hundred others.
Speaker 1: You can google interesting Reading number seven seven and seven
Speaker 1: nine for details. Until next time, have a great weekend.
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics. Does
Speaker 1: that how stuff works dot com and don't forget to
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