Marshall Brain's News Roundup: March 25th, 2011

From streaming photo albums to Rebecca Black, this week has been chock-full of fascinating (or, at least in Rebecca's case, unavoidable) events. Tune in as Marshall Brain helps you catch up on the latest and most interesting news from around the world.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Brainstuff from how Stuff works dot com where
smart Happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain and welcome to this
week's Friday news roundup. One thing that has gotten a
lot of buzz this week is something called Color. Yes, Color,

(00:23):
How in the world did they get color dot com
for their domain? You ask? They spent three dollars for it.
Colors goal seems to be and this is open to interpretation,
to make intercommunication between people even more immediate than, for example,
Twitter makes it. To understand this, think about how the

(00:44):
time to publication has been reduced over the years. With books,
an author would write for a year or two and
then publish the book. With magazines, it might take a
week for an author to write an article. With newspapers,
the creation time for an article falls to about a
day or two. With a blog, it might take an
hour or two per post. With Twitter, it takes just

(01:06):
a minute or two per post. And now with color
it is actually immediate. The instant you take a photo
with your smartphone, the photo goes up to the cloud,
tagged with your I D, your location, the date and time,
and so on. Anyone else in the general vicinity gets
a stream of all the photos being taken near by,

(01:27):
and they get that stream instantly. There's no thinking involved.
You simply snap a photo and it immediately goes live
to everyone. It doesn't get any more immediate than that.
Speaking of immediate, this company apparently sprang up and secured
forty one million dollars in venture funding from two of
the most prestigious venture capital firms in the business in

(01:51):
about half a year. As with Twitter, some will wonder
what the point is. Who's going to sit and look
at streams of bad photo graphs. But knowledgeable people believe
this is the next big thing, given all the buzz
that it's been generating. We'll see if it works a
year from now. If you google Interesting Reading number seven thirteen,

(02:12):
you can get the details on color. Also in Interesting
Reading seven thirteen, there are two articles from the World
of Physics. In one, best selling author and scientist Brian
Green talks about multiverses. A multiverse is the idea that
there are bigger places outside of our universe. That how

(02:34):
is multiple universes. The reasons scientists talk about the multiverse
is that there are mathematical patterns suggesting that the multiverse
might actually exist. The amazing thing is that the Large
Hadron Collider may provide a platform to test the mathematics
and therefore the multiverse theory. It's also possible to look

(02:56):
for energy leaving our universe in lhc illisions, meaning that
it might be going into other universes. It's a very
interesting article, especially since it's written in English rather than
physics speak. The other article is about a twelve year
old prodigy who's already in college in Indiana and he

(03:16):
believes that the Big Bang theory is wrong. He bases
this belief on the number of heavier elements like heavier
than hydrogen, found in today's universe and the amount of
time available to manufacture them in the cores of stars
under the current theory of where these elements come from.
Both of these articles can be found by googling Interesting

(03:36):
Reading number seven thirteen. Interesting Reading number seven twelve opens
with a very interesting concept. The desert nation of Qatar
is hosting the World Cup soccer games in a decade,
so they will be needing to construct nine new air
conditioned stadiums because temperatures and guitar get quite hot in

(03:58):
the summer. One proposed solution is a very bizarre flying machine,
essentially a large roof that hovers over the stadium, powered
by solar cells down washed from the propellers. Keeping the
roof aloft would provide a cooling effect in this approach.
When you look at it, you immediately start wondering about

(04:19):
the safety of this whole idea. Nonetheless, it is interesting
to think about it, and it would be the world's
largest hoverboard. If you google Interesting Reading seven twelve, you
can get its details. It's hard to believe, but it's
been two weeks since Japan's giant earthquake tsunami nuclear disaster
hit the island nation. Many of the nation's roads and

(04:42):
systems are coming back online now. Early estimates for repairing
and replacing all the damage are hovering around two fifty
billion dollars, and it's been discovered that about twenty seven
thousand people have died in this catastrophe. The nuclear meltdown
scenario also seems to be under control. There's an article

(05:02):
in Nature magazine this week that describes some of the
unbelievable steps taken inside the plant that prevented it from
being an even bigger disaster. It really is amazing some
of the things that these people thought of and did
in order to keep these reactors cooled down. If you
go to Interesting Reading number seven twelve, you can get details.

(05:24):
The Apple iPad also went on sale the same day
that Japan's earthquake hit. Now manufacturers are showing new tablets
that hope to compete with Apple's flagship machine. The Galaxy
Tab from Samsung has been updated and comes in two sizes.
These tablets seem to beat the iPad two in every

(05:46):
spec category. They're thinner and lighter, they have better displays,
they have better cameras, they allow you to plug in
st memory cards, and they run Android Honeycomb. The pricing
is identical to the iPad too, and then there's Rims
new playbook tablet with similar respects and similar pricing. It
looks like the Apple iPad two could have some major

(06:09):
competition this summer. If you google Interesting Reading seven twelve
you can get details. There's been a lot of talk
this week about cell phones turning into wallets. This movement
has been underway for some time in Japan and some
other countries, but it's easy to imagine it happening in
the US as well. Your phone would have a near
field communication chip and there are rumors that the iPhone

(06:32):
five may contain this chip. You hold your phone near
a payment terminal and the transaction happens automatically between the
phone and the terminal. Given that the technology is already
deployed in other countries, you might wonder what's holding it
up in the United States. If you guessed money and
arguments over money amongst the entrenched corporate players, you are correct.

(06:56):
Existing credit card companies and banks which handle all credit
at card transactions now want their money, and the smartphone
carriers now on a piece of the action as well,
and blah blah blah. You've heard of this kind of
stuff before. Ignoring this clash of the titans, the technology
is really interesting, and you can google interesting reading seven
twelve to learn more. Which type of energy causes the

(07:20):
most deaths? After the disaster in Japan this past couple
of weeks, nuclear isn't looking so good at the moment,
but nuclear just does not cause very many deaths in
the grand scheme of things. In fact, from a death standpoint,
nuclear is the safest energy source available, even after counting
the nine thousand deaths attributed to Chernobyl. Natural gas is

(07:43):
second hydro, and here Hydro is weighed down by a
huge damn collapse that happened in China and killed over
two hundred thousand people several decades ago. Is third, if
you ignore that big tragic event, hydro is pretty safe.
And then there's coal, which is by far the most
dangerous because of all its emissions. If you see interesting

(08:05):
Reading seven twelve, you can learn more about these different
energy options and the number of deaths they cause. Speaking
of deaths, who is the worst enemy of birds? Is
it windmills whose giant blades knocked birds out of the sky. No?
Is it big living room windows and sliding glass doors,

(08:26):
which birds seem to run into with surprising frequency. No
Is it cars which run into birds at sixty miles No, No,
it is house cats. Now you might wonder how scientists
figured this out. They did it by attaching tiny radio
transmitters to birds and then waiting for the birds to die.

(08:47):
Some estimates put the total bird kill due to cats.
We might call this a catastrophe at half a billion
birds per year. Now, when you consider that there's only
three million people in the United States, we're talking about
almost twice as many birds dying every year just due
to cats. Wind turbans kill one one thousand that number.

(09:09):
But think about the giant uproar that occurs when windmills
kill anything. Probably a lot of the people who cause
those uproars are cat owners. Anyways, see interesting reading seven
eleven for details. Think about all the spam you get,
where does it come from? One source is bot nets.
People let their machines get infected with viruses or trojans,

(09:33):
and then their machines start sending spam. Millions of machines
have been infected in this way, and that's why there's
so much spam that's being produced. One of the biggest
spam producers is known as rust Stock, producing more than
half of the world's spam, and it got decapitated this week.
Microsoft was a big player in the decapitation of rusts Stock,

(09:54):
and so was Fiser. You know all that viagrasas spam
you get, Yeah, Well, Fiser, the maker of VIAGRAA, isn't
so keen on that. So the decapitation was an important
milestone event for lots of different people. Decapitation means that
a handful of computers that controlled the botan net needed
to be disconnected from the infected machines, and this was

(10:17):
done by eliminating domains and blocking certain IP addresses. It's
actually a really fascinating world involving a lot of illicit money.
If you go to Interesting Reading number seven eleven you
can get the details on this. There was a new
bicycle created this week that is unique for at least
two reasons. First, it's made completely out of plastic nylon

(10:38):
to be exact, and second, almost the entire thing was
printed on a three D printer. Also fascinating is the
fact that everything except the chain and the tires and
everything here means axles, ball bearings, pedals, seats, handlebars, and
so on, we're all printed as a single object. The
process is called additive layer manufact lecturing. The best part

(11:01):
is that the bike is about a third lighter than
metal bikes. It means that manufacturing has the potential to
get quite a bit simpler, especially on low run parts
and assemblies. If you see Interesting Reading number seven eleven,
you can find photos in a description of the process.
Firefox four came out this week. There are about ten

(11:22):
million people per day downloading the new version of this
browser right now if you haven't seen it yet. There
are two features called Panorama and sink that are especially interesting.
Panorama lets you organize open web pages into groups so
that's easy to retrieve them. Sink lets you put everything
about your copy of Firefox up in the cloud, all

(11:45):
your open pages, your favorites, your passwords, everything and access
at all from any machine. These two things together make
for a great browser experience. If you google brain stuff
Firefox four, you can get details and see how many
copies are being downloaded every minute. Interesting reading Number seven

(12:05):
ten has a lot of cool stuff in it, but
two things deserve special recognition. The first is a camera
so tiny that it should be able to go inside
your body. Imagine a cube measuring one millimeter on each side.
That's about the size of this camera. It's also so
inexpensive that it's disposable. The article contains this quote. If

(12:27):
you think about very very small cameras, you will find
dozens of applications end quote. For example, you can stick
this camera into almost any human orifice. You can look
at all kinds of tight places in cars. You can
poke it into nooks and crannies of a house by
drilling very small holes. You can use it to monitor
all kinds of stuff that really would have been hard

(12:49):
to monitor previously, either because of the size or the
cost of the camera. The other article is about a new,
very inexpensive way to make quite led. These l eds
can be made using normal silicon wafers rather than any
kind of exotic process, meaning the price can drop by
more than a half. If they can scale this technology up,

(13:11):
it could mean cheap LED light bulbs could arrive a
lot quicker than expected. Google Interesting reading seven ten for details.
So to wrap up this week, I'm gonna end with
Rebecca Black because I wrote an article about her this
week that's gotten a lot of traffic. The article is
answering this question, how did Rebecca Black make her music

(13:33):
video and how much money has that video generated. This
question came up because I have a preteen daughter and
she wanted to know if she could make a video
like this. A little research reveals that Rebecca's mother paid
about two thousand dollars to a place called Arc Music
Factory to produce that video, in much the same way
you might pay a hundred dollars to glamour Shots to

(13:56):
have a fashion model photo shoot experience. If you mute
the sound on Rebecca Black's video and just watch the
video itself, you can see that this is an extremely
credible video, with over a hundred shots and over a
dozen locations, all cut together very professionally. Rebecca also looks
very professional and almost all of the shots, and many

(14:18):
of these shots have other actors moving and or interacting
with her. In other words, they didn't just do this
in an hour. They had to do repeated shots and
a lot of work to make this thing happen. Off
of this video, they've made tens of thousands of dollars
off the ads on the YouTube side, and then by
selling it on iTunes, they've made something approaching two million

(14:40):
dollars more from the iTunes royalties. The whole thing is amazing,
and it points to two things. First, the amount of
money that can be made by a video that goes viral,
and the ability to take a viral video like this
one and make money off of it in several different
kind of synchronized ways. It also says that within the

(15:01):
next couple of months we should see a huge number
of companies producing these little videos popping up at all
kinds of places in the same way that glamour shots
spread all across the country. Once people realized how much
they enjoyed this whole fashion model photo shoot experience. Every
teenager theoretically will be begging for one of these little

(15:23):
music videos. If you google brain Stuff Rebecca Black, you
can learn more about this whole process. So that's it
for this week. Have a great weekend, and if you
want to look up any of this stuff, you can
google interesting reading numbers seven seven, seven hundred twelve or
seven hundred thirteen. Thanks for more on this and thousands

(15:47):
of other topics. Does that house stuff works dot com
And don't forget to check out the brain stuff blog
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