Marshall Brain's News Roundup: March 4th, 2011

Want to catch up on the biggest news stories of the week? If so, tune in as Marshall Brain analyzes the latest breaking news from around the world in this weekly news roundup. Tune in to learn more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Brainstuff from house Stuff Works dot com, where
smart happens. Hi Marshall Brandon, Welcome to this week's Friday
news round up. A lot of stuff happened this week,
but in terms of hype, nothing beat Apple's Wednesday announcement

(00:22):
of the iPad two. There was lots of stuff to
like in the announcement. For example, the processor now has
two cores instead of one, so it's twice as fast,
Plus there's now much better support for graphics. There are
two cameras in the iPad two instead of none in
the original iPad, and an HDMI cable can now connect
the iPad directly to an HD TV or projector. That's

(00:45):
a big deal for teachers and business people. Battery life
is the same at ten hours, but there were also
a couple of disappointments. The screen is the same resolution
as the original iPad, and it appears that RAM did
not increase either, although no one knows for sure because
Apple isn't talking about it. The announcement itself was hailed

(01:05):
as a triumph. Chris Taylor on CNN had this to
say quote his introduction of the iPad two did quadruple duty.
It enticed mainstream customers, wowed spec hunting tech geeks, tweaked
his competitors, and pleased Wall Street future presidential candidates would
do well to study it. End quote. That's a pretty

(01:27):
good endorsement. If you type brain stuff iPad two into Google,
you can read more about the announcement and you can
see jobs performance on stage when he announced the product.
To counterbalance that triumph, there was a disaster on the
space front this morning. NASA launched its new Glory satellite

(01:47):
on top of a Taurus rocket. It cost almost half
a billion dollars to build the satellite and get it
on that rocket, and it was scheduled to help with
climate research. Glory was supposed to study total solar radiation
hitting the Earth, as well as the effects of things
like carbon soot, so that we could get a better
estimate on global warming and things like that. Unfortunately, the cover,

(02:10):
the fairing that protects the satellite during launch, failed to
separate from the satellite, so there was too much weight
for the satellite to reach orbit, and the whole thing
re entered the atmosphere and burned up. And all of
that happened this morning. Also on board were several cube SATs,
you can. You can go to brain stuff and learn
about cube sets. There are little tiny satellites maybe ten

(02:34):
centimeters on a side, usually built by college students for
experiments in theory. They could have been deployed because they
were situated differently than the main satellite, but there's no
word yet on whether that happened or not. So maybe
next week I can give you an update on whether
any of those satellites actually made it into orbit. Two

(02:54):
video game events have also gotten a lot of hype
this week. One was the technology nd the upcoming video
game called Battlefield three. They're releasing this new game engine
called Frostbite Too to drive the game, and there were
a number of improvements in this engine that make the
games trailer extremely impressive. If you type brain stuff Battlefield

(03:17):
three into Google, you can see videos that break down
just how impressive the improvements are in terms of adding
realism to the game. The other big event on the
video game front is a live action movie trailer that
came out for a movie called Find Macarrov, based on
Call of Duty Modern Warfare. People are just beside themselves

(03:39):
when describing this trailer. If you type brain stuff find
Macarov where Macarrov is spelled m A k A r
o V. Into Google, you can see what all this
excitement is about. There's also a lot of buzz on
the cell phone front, and it's pretty interesting. There appears
to be a new way to implement cell phone hours.

(04:00):
When you look at the towers today, they are huge,
immensely tall, and ugly. Neighbors don't like the looks, so
they fight every tower that people try to put up.
Now there's a new way to implement the antennas that
is incredibly small, so small it could fit in your pocket.
They could be attached almost anywhere. You can put them
on buildings or water towers, or power lines or just

(04:23):
about anything, and all they need to work is a
network cable and a little power. It's one of those
things where it's hard to believe it's true because the
size difference in the ease of implementation is so immense
from the old way of doing it. If it works,
it would mean the cost of cell phone coverage would fall,
probably dramatically, and the amount of coverage would rise. Google

(04:46):
Interesting Reading number six for details. Also in Interesting Reading,
there's a story about a new way to harvest tidal energy.
Every day all around the world, the eye goes out
and the tide comes back in, and that happens twice
every day. A lot of water is moving around, like

(05:06):
quadrillions of gallons of ocean water is moving around because
of the tides, and it should be possible to harvest
energy from it. But the tides tend to move really slowly,
so energy capture has been difficult without using pinch points
of some sort. A new solution to the problem involves
flying underwater kites and the tidal flow. So you think

(05:28):
about when you see Chinese fighting kites, they're whipping all
through the air. They're moving much faster through the air
than the wind is actually moving because they're going side
to side. Well, these underwater kites are doing that same
kind of thing. They're actually flying figure eight patterns in
the tidal currents and they move through the water ten
times faster than the tide is moving, and that makes

(05:50):
it possible to harvest power more efficiently. In theory, this
development could make it possible to generate tidal power in
many places around the globe where it's in possible to
get it. Now, can technology cause mass protests? There's a
lot of evidence to suggest that Facebook and Twitter had
a lot to do with protests in places like Egypt.

(06:13):
But what about Google Earth. There's an interesting article in
Interesting Reading number six nineties seven that suggests that Google
Earth had an effect in Bahrain. People in Bahrain started
to look at how the country's land is chopped up.
Much of the land is used by immense palaces and estates,
while most of the remaining population is compressed into these

(06:35):
small parts of the country. People started talking about the discrepancy,
so the government shut down the connection to Google Earth.
So then someone did a screen capture of all these
different maps and things that were available on Google Earth,
and those started moving around through email. It certainly fed
into the discontent that led to the protests. Information always

(06:57):
finds a way, it seems just a paraphrase as Jurassic
part Scientists are worried that the planet's sixth mass extinction
event has begun. So far in Earth's history, we know
of five previous mass extinctions that destroyed a third or
more of the species in existence. The asteroid strike sixty

(07:18):
five million years ago is the best known and most
recent of these events. It killed about half of all species.
There were four other mass extinction events prior to that
that humans can detect in the fossil record. Why do
scientists think that we are in another mass extinction event?
Because quote, biologists estimate that within the past five hundred years,

(07:40):
at least eighty mammal species have become extinct out of
the starting total of five thousand, five hundred and seventy
species end quote. That's enough to qualify as a mass
extinction event, especially since the trend is likely to continue
or accelerate. If you google interesting reading number six, you
can see details of what they're talking about. You've heard

(08:02):
of space tourism. It's been pretty limited so far, first
because flights to the space station cost about twenty million dollars,
and second because the number of seats were extremely limited.
But things ought to take off in two thousand twelve
when Virgin Galactic starts offering suborbital flights for just two
hundred thousand dollars on a regular schedule, and x Corp

(08:24):
has a plane that should start flying as well at
half that price. One big benefit this development will provide
is the ability to take many more scientists into space.
In the past, unless you could get a payload under
the Shuttle or the International Space Station. There's been no
way for a scientist to experience more than about thirty
seconds of zero G in one of the airplanes known

(08:47):
as Vomit comments, these suborbital flights will provide a couple
of minutes of time in that zero G realm. If
you google Interesting Reading number six seven, you can see
why scientists are are so excited about this new possibility.
Consumer Reports is reporting that it took its first look

(09:07):
at the Chevy Vault and they weren't particularly impressed, at
least from a pure logic standpoint. The main problem probably
is the fact that the car costs so much. The
model they tested had a price tag of over forty
eight thousand dollars. The amount of money saved with a
plug in hybrid just isn't enough to match that cost,
at least when compared to a Toyota Prius, because a

(09:30):
Prius costs half as much. Using that logic, though, I
would guess the Consumer Reports must really dislike the Corvette
or the BMW for that matter. If you google Interesting
Reading number six six, you can go look at exactly
what Consumer Reports had to say about the volt. Speaking
of cars, there is now an experimental new way to

(09:51):
drive a car. You control the car with your thoughts.
It's kind of a union between a self driving car
and a human controlled car. You think about where you
want to go, and the car handles the details of
getting you there. It's called brain driver. You wear this
headset that has sixteen sensors on it that are reading
your brain waves off your scalp, and you think about

(10:14):
turning left, or turning right or stopping. Is it perfect? No?
Does it have any practical application No? Does the car
go very fast? No? But it does show that the
thought control of devices is improving. Maybe one day we
won't have to type on keyboards anymore. We can just
think about what we want to type and it'll come
out on the screen as we think it. If you

(10:36):
google interesting reading number six nine six, you can see
the details. There is now a new material available that
has the moldibility of plastic and the strength of steel.
The key is an alloy called metallic glass. So instead
of having to forge or cut the steel on a
C and C machine, these new alloys can be poured

(10:58):
into a mold or blown like uh plastic bottle is
blown through blow molding. Scientists are claiming that This could
open up a whole new world of inexpensive metal parts.
They claim it could be as revolutionary as the development
of plastics has been. If that's true, and if you
think about how ubiquitous and cheap plastic is today, you

(11:19):
can get a sense of what's in store. Google Interesting
Reading number six nine six for details. There is a
guy in Spain who has lived to be a hundred
and fourteen years old. Obviously, scientists would like to know
what's going on, so they've been studying the guy. So far,
they've determined that he is not a mutant. He appears

(11:39):
to have a normal genome. So what do they think
is going on? First, he's been on the Mediterranean diet
all his life. Plus, the weather is nice where he lives,
and he stayed active. Apparently he rode his bike every
day up until the age of a hundred and two.
So if you want to live to be more than
a hundred, you might want to get on your bikes

(12:00):
arting tomorrow. You might want to google the Mediterranean diet
and see what he's eating. And maybe you want to
move to Florida or San Diego if you want to
get out of the cold weather. You can Google Interesting
Reading number six s to learn more about the one
hundred and fourteen year old Spaniard. Speaking of humans who
live a long time, there was another article looking at

(12:21):
the number of early human beings on planet Earth. Apparently,
for a period of about a million years, there just
weren't that many of our human ancestors around. There were
maybe twenty thousand breeding humans, twenty six thousand at most,
according to the article. Why such a small number? Apparently
there was a huge volcanic eruption that nearly wiped out humanity,

(12:44):
and possibly a second event at that same scale, and
then it's likely that without rifles and hd TVs and
cars and so on, we just didn't compete exceedingly well
with the local fauna. If you go to Interesting Reading
number six six you can learn more out early humans,
and there are a couple other really interesting evolution articles
in there. And finally there's an article entitled six important

(13:08):
things you didn't know We're running out of And really
that's a good title because it immediately creates curiosity. I mean,
we all know that we're running out of oil and
we're running out of bluefin tuna, But what are the
six things that I didn't know about. I'll give you
the short version here, and you can google interesting reading
number six nine six for the details. The six things

(13:29):
are first of all helium. It could all be gone
in twenty five years. Second is chocolate because there's only
so many places to grow it. Third is radioactive medical
isotopes because there are just not very many suppliers left.
Fourth is tequila, of all things, because of the destruction
of the cactus from which tequila is derived. That number

(13:53):
five is phosphorus, which could all be gone in thirty years,
at least the easy supplies of it, and that would
be a freaking disaster if we ran out of phosphorus.
And finally water. Now, obviously we aren't going to run
out of water per se. It's fresh water that's the problem.
Because we are busy eliminating the aquifers and sucking rivers
dry as it is as the population grows, coming up

(14:15):
with supplies of fresh water is a real problem. So well,
that's not really an upper to end up on. I
guess I'll say that you should go get a glass
of water and be thankful for it, and also be
thankful the next time you see a helium balloon, because
they may not be around that much longer anyway. If
you'd like to learn more, you can google interesting reading
number six and have a great weekend. For more on

(14:43):
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