Marshall Brain's News Roundup: April 22nd, 2011

From the Dukan Diet to gigantic super organisms, there's no shortage of fascinating news stories each week -- so how can you keep track of the best? Never fear: Tune in as Marshall catches you up to speed with his weekly news roundup.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to brain Stuff from house Stuff Works dot com
where smart happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain and welcome did
this week's Friday news round up. To start off with,
I should probably mention something about the Ducan diet. There

(00:22):
was a huge amount of traffic that came into the
blogs this week because Dr Ducan released his book in
the United States this week. There was a huge publicity
hit around the book, so lots of people in the
United States are now thinking about the Ducan diet. As
you may know, I started the Ducan Diet almost exactly
a year ago and was able to lose fifty two

(00:44):
pounds in about six months while on this diet, and
that made a big difference in my life. If you're overweight,
you can give this diet a look at least take
a look at it because it has been successful for
a lot of people in France and Britain in other
countries around the world, so we know it works at

(01:04):
least for some people. So in a nutshell, this is
a low carb diet. You can eat all the protein
and vegetables you like, and while on the diet you
shun all carbs. The advantage of that lack of carbs
in your diet is that it tends to eliminate hunger
pangs and food cravings, and that tends to make weight
loss a lot easier. The diet does require some discipline.

(01:29):
You have to be able to say no to all carbohydrates.
And that means that, for example, if you walk into
a convenience store and you see you know, candy or
candy bars, or ice cream or soda or something like that.
Or if you're at a party and you see potato
chips or slices of pizza, or you know the other
things you might see at a party, or and this

(01:51):
is really hard if you're in the kitchen and you
have kids and you see goldfish or cheese it's or
potato chips or you know whatever you're feeding your kid,
gummy bears, you know, sitting on the counter. You have
to be able to look at that and say, I'm
not going to eat those carbohydrates. But the diet does
have a safety valve and that anytime you get hungry

(02:13):
or tempted, you can eat all the protein you like.
And protein here is going to mean things like meats
and cottage cheese and tofu and plain yogurt things where
you know there are no carbs or significant source of
carbs in the food. There's no calorie counting on this diet.
You basically just if you get hungry, you eat protein

(02:35):
or vegetables and you're good to go. So if this
sounds like something you'd like to try, or if you'd
like more information, you can google how the Ducan diet
works and you'll find an article I've written about it.
And I did a complete daily diary through the six
months where I was in phase two of this diet,
and you can see, you know, you can see first
that it worked for me, and you can also see

(02:56):
that I was not the very best diet or as
in terms of discipline, and it's still worked for me.
So the other thing that caused a huge uproar this
week is the fact that the iPhone and the three
g iPad from Apple are tracking user location coordinates in
a hidden file. This file is not encrypted, and it

(03:18):
also gets copied to iTunes on your PC when the
device backs itself up. An application has been developed that
plots all the data on a map, and it's possible
to see everywhere your phone and you therefore have been
for the last year or so from a novelty standpoint,
the maps are pretty interesting, but lots of people don't

(03:38):
like the privacy implications. Congress is getting involved, privacy advocates
are getting involved, and so on. One funny thing about
the whole episode is that this file, this coordinate tracking
file that Apple has has been around for a long
time and other people have talked about it, but it's
never exploded into the public consciousness like this. If you

(04:00):
were one of the people who is talking about this
last year and being ignored, you're probably pretty miffed at
this point. Anyway, if you google brain stuff iPhone uproar,
you can get details. You can see the application that
maps out the coordinates. You can see uh an interview
with the people who announced this thing, and and so on.

(04:20):
It's pretty interesting. One thing that amazed me this week
is something called graphing super paper that came out of Australia.
It's made by taking layers of graphing that are derived
from graphite and once it's formed into the paper, it's
incredibly strong in light. According to the article, it has

(04:40):
one six the way of steel but ten times the
tensile strength. If you can figure out how to make
graphing in large quantities, or somebody can figure that out.
This material is going to take off and have a
big effect on just about anything we manufacture in human society.
Right now, if you google Interesting Reading number seven thirty five,

(05:02):
you can learn more about graphine super paper. Also in
Interesting Reading seven thirty five, there's an article entitled five
bad ideas humanity is sticking with out of habit. These
are things that we use on a daily basis that really,
you know, in in common terms, make no sense because

(05:23):
they're incredibly inefficient or you know, silly. The first one,
and the most obvious one, is the Corty keyboard, the
keyboard arrangement that's on nearly every keyboard you see in
in computers and cell phones and so on. Another is
the Imperial measurement system that we use in the United
States in defiance to nearly the rest of the entire world,

(05:46):
which is on the metric system. One thing that they
don't mention is the calendar. If you think about how
ridiculous our calendar is. You know, some months have thirty
one day, some have thirty. Then there's one with twenty
eight and sometimes twenty nine, and it's just that is
really a silly system to use to chop up the days.
Every year, the days of the week fall on different dates,

(06:08):
and you can't use any kind of calculations with the
dates and so on, and it's just nuts. Instead, we
could have thirteen twenty eight day months in a year
and then there'd be one day left over, or in
leap years, two days left over at the end of
the year for some kind of big party. That's not
likely to change either. It's an interesting article, though if
you google Interesting Reading seven thirty five you can see

(06:30):
the details. Why do fake phone numbers start with five
five five on things like television shows are in the movies?
This question is answered in Interesting Reading seven thirty four
sort of. It turns out that no one really knows
for sure where the five five five prefects started, but
it's been around an incredibly long time, and it's like

(06:51):
the whole industry just standardized on it. It seems like
one of those things that built up inertia over time,
and it is a courtesy of Hollywood in the TV
industry to avoid prank calls to people if they were
to use real phone numbers. The funny thing mentioned in
the article is that there was an effort in the
nineteen nineties to make five five five numbers a reality.

(07:13):
Had this system been implemented, there would have been nine thousand,
nine hundred five five five numbers where anywhere in the
country you would have been able to dial a single
seven digit number without an area code of any kind
and gotten connected to somebody. One hundred numbers were reserved
for use in TV shows and movies, but the rest

(07:34):
would have worked in this seven digit way. Actually, it
sounds like a pretty cool idea, but the problem is
that the phone companies didn't really like the idea and
it hasn't been implemented uniformly. You can learn more by
dialing five five five O one two three or googling
interesting reading number seven thirty four. Do you get a

(07:55):
headache when you watch a three D movie? Apparently about
ten percent to the population, or roughly thirty million people
in the United States suffer from this problem. Since many
movies are now available only in three D when they
appear in theaters, what are these people who get headaches
going to do? It turns out that you can now
buy two D glasses. These two D glasses take a

(08:19):
three D movie and turn it into a two D
movie to eliminate headaches. The three D glasses that you
use in a movie theater use polarized filters. One lens
orients the filter horizontally and the other vertically, so each
eye receives a different image. The two images merged together
in your brain to create the three D effect. To

(08:39):
create these new two D glasses, the same filter is
used in both lenses, so both eyes see the same image.
No more three D effect means no more headaches for
people who get them. What an incredibly simple solution. If
you google brain stuff two D glasses, you can get
details and watch a video about a guy who actually

(09:00):
lead came up with this idea and turned it into
a real product. If you fall into the category of
a poor college student, or if you simply are frugal
and hoping to cut your food bills, then you know
that ramen noodles are a cheap and readily available food source.
Plus they cook incredibly quickly. So there's an article this

(09:20):
week called the Top five Ramen Hacks that shows how
to turn mundane ramen noodles into gourmet fair Here's one example.
You boil the noodles normally add a handful of frozen
peas while they're cooking, and then drain. You add an
egg and mix it until the egg is cooked. That
idea works just as well with rice. By the way,

(09:42):
I've actually tried it with rice and it it works good.
And sometimes if you buy rice in bulk, it's less
expensive than ramen noodles. If you google interesting Reading number
seven thirty three, you can find four more recipes for
turning ramen noodles into a gourmet dish speak king of cooking.
It seems more and more likely with each passing day

(10:04):
that we are cooking our planet with global warming? What
can we do? An article entitled ten crazy ideas to
combat climate change that just might work offers several thoughts.
Some of these ideas have been around for a while,
like space umbrellas and ocean seeding with iron. Others seem
incredibly simple, like replacing black roofs with white roofs, or

(10:28):
increasing cloud cover by spraying an ocean mist into the sky.
And then there's the idea of synthetic trees. C O
two is captured out of the air with these man
made trees, and the capture process happens with a chemical reaction. Somehow,
it seems like it would be a lot easier to
simply stop burning fossil fuels. But if that can't happen,

(10:49):
and apparently it really cannot happen, since it hasn't happened
for decades, then these ideas offer some alternatives. See Interesting
Reading number seven thirty two for details. Here's a headline,
gigantic new super organism with social intelligence is devouring the Titanic.

(11:10):
How is it possible to not click on that headline?
The basic idea is that the steel and the Titanic,
which lies in near freezing oxygen pour water over a
mile deep, is being eaten by extreme aphile bacteria. They
form rust sickles with that steel as they process it,

(11:31):
and they seem to have some sort of communication system
to coordinate activities. The wreck is nearly a century old,
and it won't be around for that much longer, because
eventually the bacteria will turn all of the steel into
this rusty dust. If you google Interesting Reading seven thirty two,
you can read this article and see the research that's

(11:52):
being done to figure out how these bacteria live and intercommunicate.
Lots of people are now using smartphones, either apples, iPhones
or Android phones. How are the sales of these phones
affecting the gadget ecosystem. This question is explored by an
article entitled ten things killed off by the smartphone. Basically,

(12:15):
what's happening is that instead of owning five or six gadgets,
people simply use the equivalent functionality that they find for
free in their smartphones. The victim gadgets include MP three players,
gps is, digital cameras, and wrist watches, among others. You
can see all ten items by googling Interesting Reading number

(12:35):
seven thirty one. There's also an article in Interesting Reading
seven thirty three on Android's voice recognition capabilities, and that
shows a completely new capability made possible by smartphones. Basically,
you can take your Android phone and you can say
almost anything to it, and it's speech recognition capabilities can

(12:57):
understand what you say with remarkable act received. It's made
possible by cloud computing, where what you say get sent
to Google servers in the in the data center somewhere
and it's analyzed there and then the results are sent
back to your phone. So it's not like their software
running on your phone that's uh doing the speech recognition.

(13:17):
It's software in a giant server farm. The servers take
advantage of millions and millions of voice samples, and that's
what gives this thing it's uncanny accuracy, even with people
who have accidents. It's like a revolution and speech recognition,
and it's made possible by Google's ability to handle massive
amounts of data. If you google interesting reading number seven

(13:40):
thirty three, you can get details. Imagine having a construction
toy like legos or connects, but the pieces are adult
size and have adult strength, so you can build real
stuff like bicycles with the pieces and then actually ride
the bike that you built. That's the idea with a
new construction toy that is seen this week. Even if

(14:01):
this company doesn't do it itself, it seems like some
company has to do it. Think about how cool it
would be to build something like a bicycle or a
real treehouse and then take it apart and build something else.
It's just too good an idea. If you google brain
stuff erector set, you can see images of this new
prototype toy in action. And finally, there is the flying

(14:25):
nano plane idea. The name of the idea is flying
nano And here we have a carbon fiber airplane that
is incredibly light, only about a hundred fifty pounds. And
because it's so light, you do not need a license
to operate it. You don't have to go get pilot
lessons and learn how to operate instruments and so on.

(14:46):
It falls into a category where you don't need a license,
and it's priced at about forty dollars. Supposedly it is
not exactly cheap, but that's within the reach of many people.
It's the price of a kind of expensive automo beal.
It allows one person to take to the air in style.
Because this plane looks incredibly interesting. It has a very

(15:08):
interesting wing design and the wings are only about fifteen
feet wide. The only catch is that this plane has
no landing gear. You have to use a lake to
take off in land. This is what the inventor has
proposed anyway, and supposedly the real thing will be on
sale later this year. Once you know the manufacturing details,
I'll get worked out. If you google brain stuff flying

(15:31):
Nano you can get details. That article points out that
if you like the idea of cheap license free flying,
and you don't have forty dollars, and maybe you'd like
to have some landing gear. You could consider a powered
paraplane instead. These flying machines use a parachute like fabric
wing for lift and a small propeller for power. They

(15:53):
can be very inexpensive at roughly fifteen thousand dollars. So
that's it for this week. If you would like more
information on any of these topics and about a hundred others,
you can google interesting reading number seven thirty number, seven
thirty one, seven thirty two, seven thirty three, seven thirty four,
and seven thirty five. Until next time, have a great weekend.

(16:18):
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