Marshall Brain's News Roundup: April 15th, 2011

a hundred and fifty five giga hurts. If a CPU could clock at that speed, it would be roughly fifty times faster than the typical CPU chip available today. That's quite unlikely because the clock speed of a chip is a lot more complicated than the speed of one transistor, and these transistors are more designed for radios rather than

for you know, computing kinds of applications. But even so, if you could take graphing and get even a two x or a four x speed up, so you know, a chip running at ten giga hurts or twenty giga hurts, that would be impressive. Given that speed increases of pretty

much stalled at three giga hurts for several years. We'll have to see where IBM and other manufacturers take this, but it appears possible that graphing or some derivative thereof, could be the thing that replaces silicon over the next decade. If you go to Interesting Reading number seven twenty seven,

you can get details on these new transistors. But if I were to pick the thing this week that has the coolest buzz factor, that would have to be a guy talking about building a life size functional at at Yes and at at. This is the all terrain armored transport that came out in the Empire Strikes Back film. You remember in the hot scene at the beginning of the film, there's this ice planet and these giant walkers are walking across the ice to destroy the rebel base

and the power reactor or whatever it was. The idea being that these walkers can somehow handle terrain that's you know, rough and complex, much better than a wheeled vehicle could. So let's ignore the obvious, like kind of silliness of such a tall vehicle that's connected to such a narrow chassis, especially since the legs in the film appear to have little or no sideways mobility to handle tipping over. But you know, these design problems have no effect on the

utter mind blowing power of the machines. When you saw them in the film, especially when you saw them for the first time in theaters, it was just an amazing spectacle. So building a real one and having it walk around would be a triumph. There's a guy named Mike Kohler who's hoping to raise money for the project on Kickstarter. If you google Interesting Reading number seven twenty eight, you can you can read more about it. There's an interview with him there. Speaking of legs, there is a female

double leg amputee who's making lemonade out of lemons. She um, you know, as I said, as a double leg ampute so that's the lemon part. But she's able to now don a prosthesis that turns her into a mermaid. The prosthesis combines her two stumps into a single tale for swimming, and she swims so well that she would like to compete.

But obviously this would have to be a new category of competition, since you know, normal people who are in swimming competitions aren't wearing fins or tails or anything else currently, so we'll have to see how this develops. If you google Interesting Reading number seven seven. You can read more about her story. We all have lithium ion batteries and things like our cell phones, are iPods, are iPads, our cameras, and our laptops. How could we get the most life

and power from these batteries? Because they are expensive and we do use these devices a lot, it would be nice if the batteries could last as long as possible. So Popular mechanics study this question and has four recommendations. First, a lithium ion battery prefers an intermediate state of charge that is given a choice, it would last longest if it is not ever fully charged to its maximum voltage and if it's not ever fully drained down to you know,

no charge left on the battery. Those two conditions can shorten the life of the battery by quite a bit. The second tip is, you know, following on that, to avoid full charges at full discharges at any time, But the number of cycles if you're at an intermediate charge is irrelevant. So you know, if you charge it three times a day to keep it at an intermediate charge, that's okay. The number of times it comes on and

off the charger is not relevant. Then number three is something we probably already knew heat and cold are bad for lithium ion batteries, as they are for a lot of other batteries. And also you don't want to keep lit em I on batteries constantly on a charger because for one, that keeps him at this fully charged level,

which is bad, and for another it adds heat. So if all of this is true, and really there's no reason to believe that it's not, it makes you wonder why all these tricks aren't built into chargers already, Like why would a charger take a battery up to full charge if that's bad for the battery? But you know we have to wait, I guess for these chargers that are smart enough to avoid these problems. So if you want to learn more about this, you can go to

Interesting Reading seven to get the details. It really is a pretty fascinating article. Speaking of making things last longer, there was a story in Interesting Reading seven five where a z Camaro with the sticker still on the window and just a few miles on the odometer had been left in a sort of time capsule and then got

pulled out of hybridation more than twenty years later. Except for a lot of dust, it appeared to be in pristine shape, which might suggest that if you're going to do your own time capsule with a car and it, you might want to invest in one of those fabric car covers and put it over the car before you stuff it in the box or the trailer or whatever

you're gonna store your time capsule in. Anyway, it was, you know, a fun video to see them pull the car out, and they had done a nice job of preserving the seats with plastic and stuff, so it was it was a neat little thing to see. But that brings up a great point. If you are going to buy a car today and save it for the future yourself, and you wanted to hold its value, what car should you buy? So you know, you don't want to buy a car that people are gonna look at as junk

in twenty or thirty years. You want to pick a good car. And so there's this article and interesting reading number seven six that explores this question. The article recommends, you know, the obvious stuff like keeping the car pretty much exactly as this time capsule car was kept. You buy the car, it has very low mileage. If you can leave the around the window, that's great because it shows you you know exactly what's on the car and

how much it exactly costs. You want to have all original equipment on the car, you want it to be in mint conditioned. But what kind of car should you pick? And this is where it gets very strange, at least with the first car in the list, because it's the PT Cruiser, and I would never have picked that particular car is one that would be valuable in the future, but apparently because of its body style and so on,

it has the potential to really hold its value. Then you go down through the list and the rest of them are a lot more obvious than that, including things like the Dodge Viper and the Plymouth Prowler and the BMW Z three and even the Chevy Vault, which I, you know, thought was interesting. Of course, the Vault is in there because it's unlikely that anyone will ever own one.

They're making so few of them. And I actually went to the Chevy dealer here and Raleigh and asked about the Vault, and apparently if it even ever makes it to North Carolina, it would be in something like two thousand and twelve. Maybe the Dler was really sketchy on whether he would ever have Chevy vaults on his lot. So anyway, if you want to see all the recommendations,

google Interesting Reading number seven twenty six. Everyone knows what skyscrapers look like today, you know, they all have these different embellishments to make them a little different from the other. Sure, but they're all pretty much tall, thin, tower like buildings. So what is the skyscraper the future going to look like? And a magazine called evol had a competition, and some of the designs that came out of that competition are mind blowing because most of the designs look nothing like

skyscrapers look today. Many of them don't even scrape the sky. They are much squatter and and flatter but immense. You know, they spread out instead of necessarily going up, and you can have complete communities inside a single structure with these things. It really is interesting to look at the pictures from the competition because many of them are quite quite unexpected.

So if you google Interesting Reading number seven eight and look for the article in the future of skyscrapers, you can go through those pictures and see what's coming down the road in terms of skyscrapers. Some of these skyscrapers could house what might be the latest in farming technology. More and more farming is moving indoors, and lettuce is

the most important example. Currently, much of the lettuce grown today is grown indoors because the process of growing it indoors cut it down on all sorts of problems, and because lettuce is a pretty quick crop, it doesn't take long for it to go from seed to maturity relatively speaking.

So an interesting reading number seven seven there's an article on future farms where more and more of this ends up happening, and every single thing, including the lighting, the temperature, the humidity, everything is under human control, so the plants grow optimally. This to me is a little hard to imagine, especially on the lighting, because lighting is pretty expensive. You know, not only do you have to buy the fixture and the bulb, but then you have to pump electricity into it.

And plants need a lot of light. They need bright, bright light to do their thing. Whether it's completely comes to pass or not is open to question, but the indoor part is definitely understandable. On most vegetable crops, grains I would expect like wheat and corn will be grown outdoors well into the future, but the indoor farming of vegetables seems very likely. So if you go and google Interesting Reading seven you can learn more about the future

of farms. Scientists, engineers, and inventors are known for experimentation. They are out on the cutting edge and they do experiments to discover what will work and what won't work. Some of these experiments do work out, some don't, and then some are horrific, horrific failures. So this week there's an article entitled fifteen Bizarre Experiments Gone Tragically Wrong and has fifteen experiments that fall into that terrible, horrible category.

There are several that you would expect to find if you're you know, if you're up on your weird human scientific experiments, psychology experiments like the Stanford prison guard experiment that show how truly awful human beings can be when left in peculiar situations. There are also some medical experiments from the era where apparently experimental doctors had no ethics. There's the token aviation experiment that you know ended in death, as many aviation experiments did in the early years, and

even you know some today. And then there's the truly weird stuff. A couple of which I had never even heard of. So if you go to Interesting Reading number seven twenty eight you can learn more about these bizarre experience. It was a pretty interesting read. One article that got a lot of hits this week is the brain Stuff

article on the wave disc engine. This engine design is coming out of Michigan State University and has gotten two and a half million dollars in federal funding to you know, bring it from the um, you know, the not even a prototype but just sort of an idea stage into a reality stage. It is a completely unconventional design like nothing I've ever seen before, and the claims are amazing,

like sixty percent efficiency. This would be three to four times more efficient than the typical piston engine of today, which you know might get fifteen to twenty percent efficiency out of the gasoline that goes into it. So this wave disc engine would be a huge deal. If this engine really pans out at a sixty percent efficiency, even if it panned out at a forty percent efficiency, that would double the efficiency today and that would be amazing.

So one thing about this engine is it's a fixed rpm turbine like design, and that means it would likely be running a fixed load electrical generator or something like that in a hybrid vehicle. But you know, when I look at this, I am I am pretty skeptical. The articles that have been published so far on the wave disc engine have been very high on hype and very low on details of how this engine is going to

actually work. So if you read the articles, we're supposed to actually see a working model of this engine by the end of two thousand and eleven, and we'll get to see if it lives up to all the expectations fairly quickly. If you google brain stuff Wave disc Engine, you can learn more about the engine, and some of you know my thoughts on whether or not this might work.

I am going to be fascinated to see what happens when the when the first real engines come out, and I really hope that I'm wrong, but I'm quite skeptical at the moment. There was a story about myth Busters, in particular about Jamie Hyneman this week and his work with the US government to develop better armor for vehicles that will protect them from explosives like I E. D

s and minds that are embedded in roads. The idea is to make much lighter armor so if you look at some of the current designs for armorund vehicles, they already show a fair amount of creativity. There's of course heavy steel plating, and sometimes that plating is glued or stickered onto thinner sheet metal to provide a quick fix, uh, you know, a quick layer of extra armor. For example,

on humvees. There are some V bottom vehicles where the V shape tries to deflect the blast waves away from the vehicle after the blast, so instead of coming right up through the bottom of the vehicle of the blast waves are are blown outward. There's something called reactive armor that explodes when something like an RPG hits it to blow the grenade away from the vehicle. So it'll be interesting to see what Jamie comes up with. If you google Interesting Reading seven eight you can read more about

his thoughts on armor design. And finally, there's head track. If you've seen the demos of any of the head tracking displays, the results are spectacular, and you know they've been around for several years. The displays were used to looking like don't do any head tracking at all. They work more like paintings. When you move your head, it has no effect on the screen. A head tracking display

is instead like the window of a building. As you move your head around, the view of the window changes, So if you walk closer to a window, you see more, If you walk further back, you see a narrower range. If you walk up close to the window and look out to the left, there's actually you know, a lot more stuff you can see out to the left, and so on. A window works a lot different from a painting.

So people have been, you know, goofing around with head tracking for I don't know, three or four or five years, and amazingly, even though it's such a cool looking thing, it's never made it into a widely used application. So now there's an iPad two app location that uses the iPads FaceTime camera to implement head tracking, you know, inexpensively obviously basically for free, because the camera's already there, and

maybe this will be the version that breaks through. This is you know, it's an application that really deserves the limelight because it is cool when you see it in action. So if you google interesting Reading number seven twenty six, you can get a discussion in a video demonstration. So that's it for this week. If you'd like to get more details on these topics or about a hundred others. You can google interesting Reading number seven seven and seven

nine for details. Until next time, have a great weekend. 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 on the house stuff works dot com home page. You can also follow brain stuff on Facebook or Twitter at brain stuff hs W. The house Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes.