Welcome to Brainstuff from stuff works dot com, where smart happens. Hi, Am Marshall Brandon, Welcome back for the third installment of our Friday News round up. What's the biggest thing that happened this week? From a technology and hype standpoint, it's probably the whole Jeopardy thing and IBM s Watson supercomputer. The system has almost three thousand cores and fifteen terabytes of RAM, not fifteen gigabytes, fifteen trillion bytes of RAM.
That gives it about two thousand times the power of today's one thousand dollar desktop machine that you might get at best Buy or someplace like that. So how did Watson answer all these questions on Jeopardy? According to IBM, they fed Watson one terabyte of plain text information. So they fed it the entire English version of Wikipedia, which is something like seventeen million articles and fourteen gigabytes of
text information. They also fed it another entire encyclopedia, a whole dictionary, a fasaurus, the Internet movie database, and lots and lots of other stuff. They didn't have to structure that data. It all went in as plain text, so it wasn't like human being sat there and made little knowledge structures out of it or something like that. This plane text went in and that's what Watson used when he was answering these questions because they used plain text.
What they're hoping is that this technology can be used to create much better question answering systems in the real world in the future, say for a call center or for doctors to used with medical information or something like that. You could imagine Google one day being able to really answer any question you ask it in plain English with a good solid answer, and that would be a nice thing. Flip.
Speaking of supercomputers, the Department of Energy is hoping to get a hundred and twenty six million dollars to spend on the first excess scale supercomputer. This would be a major accomplishment since the fastest supercomputers today are in the one pedal flop range. A pedal flop is a quadrillion floating point operations per second, which is a thousand trillion floating point operations and x a flop would be a thousand times faster than a pedal flop or a quintillion
floating point operations per second. So for comparison, it's thought that the human brain the one that's sitting inside your head right now is doing about ten pedal flops. Maybe they're organized really well. You know, you have a vision processor and a language processor, and I don't know a Justin Bieber processor if you're a teenager. But we are getting there in terms of raw computing power to the point where you could simulate a brain in theory blip. So how long will it be until you have a
pedal flop in your pocket? We got a little closer this week when in Video announced its new call L four core Tegra processor. Supposedly, we will see four cores in tablets and smartphones by the end of this summer, say August of two thousand eleven. Plus. This chip includes a twelve core graphics card on the chip as well, and it uses just two watts or so. It's an amazing accomplishment considering the same thing in a typical laptop
consumes about fifty watts. Right now, it means incredible computing power and incredible battery life. In Video demonstrated it displaying movies on a four d P display, not a ten a DP display, a fourteen DP display, which is two thousand, five hundred sixty pixels wide, and one was in pixels high. That's almost twice as many pixels as HDTV, and it's pretty common now to find high end monitors with that
many pixels. So in theory, you can get a tablet computer in August, plug it into your giant p monitor, and watch movies in the highest resolution ever Blip. I did a podcast a couple of weeks ago where I talked about the toy helicopter I bought for the kids. It can fly for about seven minutes and it's very precise when you're controlling it with the remote control. This week, darpest showed off its new spy Hummingbird. It flies and
looks a lot like a hummingbird. Plus it has a wireless video camera and microphone on board, so it can fly land and then send an audio and video feed to whoever wants to look at it. You can probably expect to see one of these perched in a tree in your yard in the near future. If you want to see a video of this hummingbird flight, type interesting,
reading number six eighty nine into Google Blip. Scientists have discovered a species of multicellular life that can survive in space, not in a spaceship, but in actual space, including the hard vacuum, the cosmic rays, the extreme temperature changes, and all the rest. The species is called a water bear. A typical water bear is about a millimeter long. When it's an adult, it has eight legs and a hard
outer shell. They don't mind being completely dried out, and then they come back to life when you put them in water. Several thousand water bears were sent into orbit for ten days, and when they were put into water, some of them were still alive and they were able to reproduce. None of them became a million times larger and started to rampage a nearby city. Though unfortunately, you might have to send something else into space to get
the Godzilla effect blip. Supposedly, the NPR show called This American Life is on the verge of cracking the secret recipe for Coca cola, and this recipe is now circulating on the internet. Everything appears to be known except for one super secret ingredient called seven X, which This American Life is trying to crack as well. So what's in coke? To make five gallons of syrup? You start with two and a half gallons of water and thirty pounds of sugar.
Then you put in things like caffeine, lime juice, vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, lemon, and orange oil, and even a cup of alcohol. If you go to Interesting Reading number six eighty eight, you can find the details of the recipe. But here's the thing. I went to the grocery store this week and a two lead bottle of coke is only cents. It's probably easier to just buy it blip. Do you want to get rid of a cold? I did a blog post this week about one way to do it, using antihistamine
and mucus thinner on day one. The idea is that if you see a cold coming on, like you start to get that scratchy throat and the running nose and the sneezing or whatever on that very first day, if you hit it with antihistamines and mucus thinner and blowing your nose a lot and using warm compresses, you can get a lot of the crud out and that takes
a lot of the virus particles with it. Now science has proven that there's another thing you can do to stop colds, and this really works according to research, it's zinc. They looked across dozens of studies, and they determined that if you suck on zinc lozenges on day one, it really does help to shorten the duration of the cold. It might cut the duration in half, for example, and it cuts way down on the cough part of the cold. Blip.
Colds can make you miserable, but science demonstrated another way to bring on misery this week. It's Facebook. The more Face Book friends you have supposedly the worst this Facebook effect gets, according to tech Gui dot net quote. A study from the psychology department of Edinburgh Napier University concludes that all in all, the negative effects from being on Facebook are outweighed by the benefits of staying in touch
with friends and family end quote. Plus. A new Jersey cop recommended this week that if you're a parent, you need to steal your kids Facebook password to keep track of what they're doing on Facebook. If that wouldn't make you miserable, I don't know what would. You can look up interesting reading number six eight for details. Blip. China
is gearing up to make nuclear power from thorium. I've written a fair amount about thorium power on the blog because it's theoretically going to have a lot of advantages over uranium power if you can get the bugs worked out. Thorium is plentiful and it doesn't produce much high level nuclear waste at all, meaning that no rogue nations are going to be producing nuclear bombs out of a thorium power plant. Plus the power plants could be a lot smaller than a typical uranium power plant. But the US
and Canada have largely ignored thorium completely. They aren't looking at it really at all. If China can make it work, it would bring in a new era of cheap power without the carbon emissions of coal, and that would be a big deal in China. Blip. You may have heard of thermoelectric generators. They turn heat directly into electricity. The most famous thermoelectric generators in the universe are on the
Voyager spacecraft. Here, they take decaying plutonium to generate heat, and the thermo electric generator makes electricity from that heat for decades. That's why these Voyager spacecraft were able to go off like I think they launched in the seventies and they're still transmitting little bits of data today. Plutonium has a half life of eighty seven years. I think, so you can make a radio active thermoelectric generator that
has a really, really long lifespan. Well, here on Earth, it'd be great to have thermo electric generators as well. For example, you might hook one up to your hot exhaust pipe and be able to generate electricity without having to have an alternator that's sucking up engine power. That would be a really nice way to increase fuel efficiency, but we haven't had materials that generate enough electricity from
heat to make that practical. This week, scientists announced that they have created a new material for thermo electric generators that's better at generating electricity. So in theory, if they can bring this to market, we could see all kinds of interesting ways to generate power from waste heat blip. NASA announced its design for a manned deep space vehicle this week. This might be the kind of craft, for example, to take people to Mars or maybe even to Jupiter.
It comes complete with a giant inflatable centrifuge to simulate gravity, huge storage areas for food and water, living hoarders, robot arms, landing craft, and so on. There are pictures of it on the brain Stuff blog if you're interested. If you type brain Stuff m M s e V, that's M M s EV into Google, you can find the blog post.
Mm s EV stands for multimission space Exploration Vehicle. One of the interesting things about it is that it's expandable, so you could have a short version of it for a Moon mission, and then make it much longer if you need to go to Mars or Jupiter blip. Speaking of NASA, they announced this week the possibility of a gig enormous planet way out beyond Pluto in the ort Cloud.
They think it might be there because it might explain why comments from the ort cloud get deflected towards the Sun. It would need to be a out four times bigger than Jupiter if it would were to really exist out there. Other scientists think the idea of such a huge planet as nuts. If you google Interesting Reading number six eight seven, you can read about the controversy blip. The Mars five
hundred mission landed on Mars this week. You may recall that this is a big experiment that locks six people in a large wooden spacecraft simulator sitting on the ground in Russia. They go through all the motions of a real Mars flight, including the isolation, the transmission delays, the interpersonal relationship messes, and so on. Imagine being cooped up with six people in an RV for more than a year, and you kind of get the idea of what it
would be like on this mission. This week, three members of the mission you know in simulation, descended down onto Mars and got to walk around on simulated Martian soil collecting samples. It's called the Mars five hundred thing because the whole simulation is going to take five twenty days to see, like the trip out and then the landing and then the trip back. They launched back on June three of two thousand ten. Blip. And finally, you may have heard that drug smugglers have used all kinds of
tricks to bring drugs into the United States. They have people swallow the drugs, They put them inside the tires of trucks, they fly them in private airplanes. They tunnel between Mexico and the United States with great, big long tunnels with little railroads inside of them. They've tried all kinds of stuff. There have also been some small submarines built, but this week the most amazing of the Narco submarine surfaced. It was captured in Colombia. It's a hundred feet long
and it could hold eight tons of cocaine. There are photos of it. If you're interested, go to Interesting Reading number six eight seven. So until next time, my Marshall brain have a great weekend. For more on this and thousands of other topics, does that how stuffworks dot com and don't forget to check out the brain stuff blog on the house stuff works dot com home page. You can also follow brain stuff on Facebook or Twitter at brain stuff h s W. The House Stuff Works iPhone
app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes.