Marshall Brain's News Roundup: March 18th, 2011

As the nuclear situation in Japan continues to deteriorate, Marshall explores how a similar earthquake could affect the United States. And that's not all: Tune in and catch up on the latest, most fascinating news of the past week in this podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Brainstuff from how Stuff Works dot Com, where
smart happens him Marshall Brain and welcome to this week's
Friday news roundup. And what a week it's been. Kind
of a sobering week is we've watched events unfold in Japan.

(00:22):
As you'll recall last Friday, we were just learning about
the massive earthquake in tsunami in Japan. This week, the
news cycle has been dominated by the Japan's story, particularly
because of all of the problems with the nuclear power plants.
We've all gotten a crash course in boiling water reactors,
reactor cooling systems, radioactive iodine and caesium, and the problems

(00:45):
with cooling pools that run out of water. Depending on
how events unfold and how the wind is blowing at
the time, this could evolve into a crisis that's potentially
bigger than Chernobyl. According to some experts, some of the
scenarios are not very pleasant at all for the citizens
of Japan. A number of scientists have warned that the

(01:05):
same kind of thing could easily happen in the United States.
Over in California, most people have heard of the San
Andreas fault, but the more worrying thing is the Cascadia
fault in the Pacific Ocean. It would cause a tsunami
just like the one in Japan, and it would be
hitting huge cities, most notably Los Angeles. And while some

(01:26):
buildings are earthquake proof, the United States is not nearly
as well prepared and well engineered as Japan is. Having
seen how badly things have unfolded in well prepared Japan,
it might be prudent for the United States to take
some steps toward better emergency preparedness. Or alternatively, you personally

(01:47):
could avoid the West coast of the United States for
the foreseeable future. If you google interesting reading numbers seven away,
you can get details on the California outlook, as well
as many of the Japan's stories. Hollywood is in Los Angeles,
and in theory, Hollywood could disappear from the face of
the earth if the tsunami is big enough. But we

(02:10):
will always have the movies from the past in the
form of Hollywood's DVDs. And there's a new company taking
advantage of those DVDs in a very interesting way. The
company is called zedva z E d I v A,
and I might be pronouncing it wrong, but it's a
streaming movie company that's delivering movies over the internet. In fact,

(02:33):
it's streaming movies that you can't get via a stream
from places like Netflix. Z Diva does this by putting
physical DVDs into physical DVD players and then streaming the
content from that pair from the DVD DVD player pair
to you. Your computer is a remote control for the

(02:54):
DVD player. By doing this, Zadeva apparently can get around
all the copyright laws and Hollywood restrictions that hamper the
ability of places like Netflix to stream movies, especially right
after a DVD is released, and the prices right at
the Diva. It's only two dollars to watch a movie.

(03:15):
You can google interesting reading number seven oh eight for details.
There's a really interesting article this week on the price
of solar cells and solar panels. Prices have been coming
down for years, but by two thousand and fifteen, prices
in sunny places are going to break below coal fired

(03:35):
electricity prices for the first time. Those are prices for
installed solar panels, so you can order them, get the panels,
get them installed on your house, and actually have electricity
being produced by those solar panels. That cost the same
as electricity from the power company, by installed solar panels

(03:56):
will cost less than coal across much of the United
States by twenty thirty if trends continue. The article predicts
that installed solar panels could cost half as much as
power from a power plant, which would be fantastic news.
Google Interesting Reading numbers seven oh eight for details on this.
But according to another article, this great development on the

(04:18):
solar energy front may come too late. The article is
called quote the content of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
is accelerating super exponentially end quote, and it contains this
ominous prediction. Quote. Notwithstanding a lot of discussions, international meetings,

(04:39):
prevalence in the media, atmospheric CEO two content growth continues unabated,
with a clear faster than exponential behavior. On the face
of this evidence, using data until two thousand nine, stabilizing
atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions at levels reached in for instance,
seems very ambitious, if not utterly unrealistic end quote. The

(05:05):
notion is that humans emit so much c O two
and the environment has soaked up a lot of it,
but is now full of c O two, and parts
of nature are now starting to create positive feedback loops
as temperatures rise and so on, that things could get
very bad on the c O two front. If you
google Interesting Reading seven oh eight, you can find out

(05:27):
more about this phenomenon. There are several articles on space
junk this week. In one which you can find by
googling Interesting Reading number seven oh eight, there's a video
showing the incredible amount of damage that small pieces of
space junk can do when they run into spacecraft. What
they have is this huge hunk of aluminum that's several

(05:47):
inches thick, and it's struck by this tiny little sphere
of space junk that's traveling at six kilometers per second,
and it makes this huge crater in the aluminum. But
that same video also shows how and why lightweight shields
can protect against that kind of damage. One layer of
the shield breaks up the incoming particle, and then the

(06:10):
second layer absorbs the debris from that first collision. It
makes for a much much lighter package for shielding. But
space junk is still a big concern, so in Interesting
Reading number seven oh five, there's an article about a
ground based laser from NASA that may be able to
zap space junk out of the sky. The idea is

(06:32):
to use a five kilowatt laser that beams photons onto
a piece of space junk for a couple of hours.
The photons slow the object down, and once it slows
down enough, it falls out of orbit. If you google
interesting Reading number seven oh five, you can learn more
about this laser that could clean out low Earth orbits.

(06:53):
Do sperm whales call to each other by announcing their names? Maybe?
Scientists have noticed that there are changes in the vocal
patterns of sperm whales that might indicate that the names
of different individuals are being used. What's interesting about the
article is the idea of these animals having a level
of intelligence that would allow names to occur, as well

(07:15):
as the idea of underwater whale societies that are basically
invisible to human beings. Everything about whales is amazing if
you think about it. So if you google interesting Reading
number seven oh five, you can learn more about this.
We would call the whale names a scientific conjecture. Scientists
have noticed something in the behavior of whales that's interesting

(07:38):
to them, and they have offered one possible explanation. They
could be names, but obviously could be something else. So
now what the scientists will do is more research to
see if that conjecture is true or not. Here's another
scientific conjecture that came to light this week. The Large
Hadron Collider might be able to implement some form of

(08:00):
time travel. The first part of this conjecture is that
the Higgs boson actually exists. The Higgs boson is the
particle that the LHC was created to find. The second
part of the conjecture is that the LHC can create
a Higgs boson. And if both of those become true,
then there's a theoretical possibility that a Higgs singlet might

(08:24):
get created along with the Higgs boson, And if so,
the Higgs singlet might be able to go backward or
forward in time by escaping from the four dimensions of
our universe and re entering at some different point in time.
If this can happen, then it might allow for messages
to travel through time. But it'll be a while until

(08:47):
we find out. We have to actually discover the Higgs
boson first, and the Higgs singlet and figure out how
to make it transfer out of our four dimensions. So
if you google interesting reading number seven oh seven, you
can get details on this scientific conjecture. At the top
of Interesting Reading number seven oh six, there is a
really interesting piece of space video. What they've done is

(09:10):
they've taken high resolution photographs from the Cassini space probe
to Saturn and they've woven them together to make movies.
Because the photographs are high resolution, were able to fly
past the rings of Saturn, past different moons and so on,
and see things with incredible detail. If you play the

(09:30):
video at full screen, you get the full effect, and
it's pretty spectacular. The filmmakers hope to use this technique
to make an IMAX movie. Google Interesting Reading number seven
oh six to see this video. Also in number seven
oh six, there's an article about the drive to make
the world's strongest magnet that doesn't use neodymium. Neodymium is

(09:54):
a rare Earth element that is, as you might suspect, rare,
and China is really the only country you with significant
deposits and they aren't very inclined to share. So the
thing about neodymium magnets is that they are so powerful
compared to what came before them. They've made things like
Walkman headphones and then earbuds, possible. Before neodymium magnets, there

(10:18):
was no way to make a good speaker that's small.
The magnets have also made small hard discs and small
electric motors possible, as well as big things like electric
motors for cars and generators on giant wind turbines. So
if scientists can invent a better magnet that doesn't need
rare earth metals, it would be great. If you google

(10:39):
Interesting Reading number seven oh six, you can learn more.
Google announced a new feature this week that lets you
block certain sites from your search results. So you don't
like results from a particular website, you can add that
website to a list and it won't show up in
your Google listings anymore. It gives you more control over
what you see from Google and lets you reduce the

(11:01):
noise and Google's results based on your taste. You might
also notice that Google is also rolling out its best
Guess feature, where the Google search engine gives you a
Watson like best guests to the answer of certain queries.
For example, type in the CEO of General Electric into
Google and the first result is Google's best guess at

(11:25):
the name of the actual person. Google Interesting Reading number
seven oh four for details. Also in interesting Reading seven
oh four, there's an article looking at the iPad two
graphics performance, a new memory technology that could let cell
phones last much longer on a battery charge, a story

(11:45):
suggesting that the airport X ray scanners that look at
us through our clothing and may emit ten times more
radiation than they should, a new nanotech material that may
make it easy to store a lot of hydrogen in
a all space. And then a cryptic little article about
the lost City of Atlantis. Now we've all heard about

(12:06):
this city. Plato talked about it in his writings about
six hundred b CE, so twenty hundred years ago. Plato
was writing about the lost city of Atlantis, and people
have been hypothesizing and conjecturing about it ever since. Supposedly
it was an island nation that sank into the sea,
presumably because of a giant tsunami. It's been considered something

(12:30):
of a myth until this week. They'll have a lot
of digging and artifact finding to do to prove that
this is a real city and not something that they're
just speculating about. But it does raise the possibility that
Atlantis really exists. That's it for this week. If you'd
like to read more, you can google interesting reading number

(12:51):
seven oh four, seven oh five, seven oh six, seven
oh seven, or seven oh eight for details. Until next time,
let's hope that the news is just a little bit
better in the coming days. This has been a tough
week for the world. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, does that how stuff works dot com
and don't forget to check out the brain stuff blog

(13:13):
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