Welcome to brain Stuff from House Stuff Works dot com where smart happens. Hi Marshall Brandon, Welcome to this week's Friday news round up. Let's start with a couple of interesting vehicles that showed up on the web this week. The first comes from SpaceX, which has a video up that's teasing a big announcement on April five. SpaceX, as you'll recall, is the company that NASA chose for replacing the Space Shuttle for carrying people and stuff up to
the space station. They have the Falcon one rocket, the Falcon nine rocket, and the Dragon capsule, able to hold either people or cargo. Given the way that the teaser video ends, it appears that SpaceX is ready to announce the new Falcon nine Heavy rocket for carrying bigger stuff into space. This rocket is approximately a normal Falcon nine rocket plus two additional booster rockets strapped on the sides
of it. The extra rockets give it the ability to lift more cargo weight than the Space Shuttle into low Earth orbit and also the ability to lift a significant payload into geosynchronous orbit. If this were to come to pass, it would be a big boost to getting cargo and people and other kinds of stuff up into space. The second vehicle is more down to Earth. It's a drug submarine and the most sophisticated one that's ever been captured.
It's claim to fame is the fact that it's actually a real submarine with the ability to go underwater using two hundred and fifty lead acid batteries that can run its electric motors for up to eighteen hours submerged, plus a diesel engine to recharge those batteries and run the ship on the surface. The goal of this submarine is to bring something like eighteen thousand pounds or two hundred fifty million dollars worth of cocaine to the United States
without being detected. Now, since it was captured, that's not gonna ever happen, but it gives you the impression that these drug lords have the ability to build quite sophisticated ships now, and if there's one, there's probably more than one. You can google interesting reading number seven eighteen for more
information on both of these vehicles. Speaking of vehicles, the Pioneer spacecraft Pioneer ten and eleven have been traveling to the outer reaches of the Solar System for decades, but there's been a small problem with their trajectory called the Pioneer anomaly. These spacecraft have not traveled quite as far as they should have according to orbital calculations, and the discrepancy has been bugging sciencests for many years. Could it be that gravity does not behave as we expect. Could
it be that dark matter plays a role. Could it be some unknown planet having this gravitational effect on the probes, or is it space aliens and some low level tractor being Now they have solved the mystery, and the solution is a little bit more mundane than any of those suggestions. The Pioneer spacecraft give off heat in the form of
infrared light, and this light affects the trajectory. The spacecraft gives off the I R light directly and parts of the spacecraft also reflected, and the effect is a very slight thrust that slows the spacecraft down. The anomaly is solved. If you google Interesting reading number seven eighteen you can get the details. Imagine a telescope with a collecting surface
as big as a square kilometer. It would be unbelievable given that optical telescopes measure their mirrors in terms of meters and Even the largest radio telescope in the world is only three d and five meters in diameter. But a new radio telescope will have a collecting surface that really is that big, and it will get it by combining thousands of small antennas together across a significant portion of the planet. Each antenna will be about fifteen meters
in diameter. It will cost about one point five million euros or more than two billion dollars to build the whole thing. One possible site is in Australia, which has large parts of the continent that are nearly uninhabited and therefore low on radio interference. Via Google interesting reading seven eighteen, you can get the details. Speaking of googling, Google has been in the news several times this week. First is Google's announcement that it will now let its users rate
search results. Many social media sites offer this kind of rating capability, including Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. But the technique Google uses to show results is interesting. It sniffs out people who you may have a connection with, for example, from contact lists, so unlike Reddit, it does not show an aggregated score from the world and bubble up the highest rated results. It just adds a little plus one indicator to let you know that somebody you know thought
this was a good link. The second thing is Google's announcement that it's going to take more control of the Android marketplace to make sure that phone manufacturers don't start making phone specific apps. If Google didn't do this, then the app marketplace for Android phones would fragment, and many apps would work on only one phone, or one company's phones, or on one carrier's phones. If Google allowed this to happen, the Android app marketplace would become a lot less useful
for customers. Plus, there's already a lot of fragmentation because there's so many versions of Android. As a result of this change, Android, in theory will become much less open for manufacturers and much more uniform for users. Maybe we'll have to see how things shake out over the next year or so to determine whether this is a good move or a bad move on the part of Google. Probably, behind the scenes, Google is trying to figure out a way to make the Android app market places powerful as
the Apple app marketplace. Then the third thing is Google's announcement that Kansas City will get Google Fiber. You may recall that Google was going to pick one city and provide fiber optic internet access and one gigabit speeds for that city. Kansas City is the chosen city, and it'll be the prototype for possibly future implementation as well. Two thousand twelve is the rollout date. If things do go well in Kansas City, then other cities should get gigabit
service from Google. If you google interesting reading seven seventeen and seven hundred eighteen you can get the details. It's possible that air conditioning and refrigeration will get cheaper in the near future. That's because the technology for turning heat into cold is about to get smaller and less expensive.
Unlike typical air conditioners and refrigerators, which use lots of electricity to run a compressor, absorption chillers use something like silica gel to absorb water, which is then later released using heat. The problem is that silica gel is really inefficient, meaning that the chillers have to be big and they have to use a lot of heat to get the job done. A new nanotech material works a lot better,
meaning that everything gets smaller and more efficient. In theory, solar heat could one day be used to run an air conditioner, essentially for free. You google interesting reading number seven seventeen, you can get the details. Will you get Alzheimer's disease, say twenty years from now, There may soon be a test that will tell you that it all
has to do with the way your brain uses glucose. Apparently, long before you get actual Alzheimer's disease, the mitochondria in brain cells start producing less energy because of a toxic chemical in the brain. In theory, scientists may be able to discover a way to block or inhibit that chemical to reduce Alzheimer's effects. If you google interesting reading them or seven seventeen, you can get details. iTunes is getting some competition from Amazon on the music front this week.
Amazon's product is called the Cloud Drive, combined with a product called the Cloud Player. Instead of storing music on a device like a laptop or an iPod, you store your songs on an Amazon server up in the cloud. Then you play your songs using a little app that runs on your Android phone or on your laptop. It's very likely that Apple and Google will soon release identical products, but for now, it gives Amazon a unique way to compete in the music arena. Should you use this service,
the advantages that you can access your music anywhere. The disadvantages that you have to have a connection to the Internet and it consumes bandwidth. If you look at interesting Reading seven seventeen, you can get more information on the product. Can magazines and newspapers save themselves by using digital subscriptions. Most of these digital magazine runs apps on things like the iPad, and many media outlets are hoping that the
idea of digital subscription apps takes off. Popular Science is one magazine that's taken the plunge and has done so very early. In five weeks, it's sold ten thousand digital subscriptions through Apple's app store. The subscription price is fifteen dollars per year, making it more expensive than a print subscription, reportedly because Apple takes a thirty percent cut of the
subscription price. On the other hand, popsi has no printing or mailing costs with these digital subscriptions, so it seems amazing that they would charge this much. Is ten thousand subscriptions good or bad? Popsi has about one point two million print subscribers, so they have a long way to go to replace that base. If you google interesting Reading numbers seven seventeen, you can get details what if you could put something in your coffee that would quickly cool
it down to the right temp. Picture, store that heat, and then keep your coffee at that temperature for a long time. That's the idea behind something called coffee julies. Imagine a little stainless steel capsule that contains a special wax. The wax melts at the perfect coffee temperature. It takes heat to melt the wax, cooling the coffee down to the right temperature, and then as the wax releases that heat, it re solidifies. Lots of things already used this phase
change idea to store heat. This is simply a novel application with a very specific temperature range that it's working in. If you look at Interesting Reading number seven seventeen, you can learn more about coffee Julies. There was a good bit of buzz this week about artificial leaves. Solar cells create electricity directly. The idea in an artificial leaf is to use the sun's energy to power a photosynthesis kind of reaction to create a fuel. Imagine an index card
and you put this index card into water. Then you put the water out in sunlight. The card catalyzes a reaction that breaks the water down into hydrogen and oxygen, which you then store, combining the hydrogen and oxygen back together, saying, a fuel cell lets you create electricity when you need it. This would be perfect for powering a home and could in theory power cards as well. It is essentially a cheap way to store electric energy generated by the sun
for later use. See Interesting Reading number seven sixteen for details. So that's it for this week. If you'd like to catch up on any of these topics and more than a hundred others, google Interesting Reading number seven fourteen, seven fifteen, seven sixteen, seven seventeen, and seven eighteen. Have a great weekend for more illness and thousands of other topics. Doesn't house 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 h s W. The house Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes.