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

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 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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,

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 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, 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, 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

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

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.

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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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, 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. 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, 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 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, 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

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

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.

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

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 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 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. 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 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

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 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. For more illness and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and don't forget to check out the brain stuff blog on the house stuff works dot

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