Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuff works dot com where smart happens him Marshall Brain and welcome to this week's Friday news round up, where we look at the week's science and technology news and review. Here are some of the articles that seemed the most interesting this week from the Interesting Reading series on the brain Stuff blog. If I had to pick something that surprised me this week, it would be an article I saw about laser spark plugs.
Spark plugs have been around in almost exactly their current form for more than a century, and it really hadn't crossed my mind that this area needed improvement. But these laser spark plugs are amazing if they can get them working in real life engines at a reasonable price. They're not amazing because they're lasers, even though lasers are always cool. They're not amazing because their thousand watt plus pulse lasers,
although that's definitely cool as well. They're amazing because there is a claim that they can improve fuel economy by and that claim comes from real engines using real prototype laser spark plugs. If you ever look at a spark plug fire, and if you want to do this, you could pull the plug on your lawnmower and watch it fires. Somebody else pulls the string. It's a very tiny little spark.
It's it's practically nothing. It ignites a flame front that has to expand outward from that tiny source of ignition, and there just isn't that much time available for that expansion to occur. An engine running at six thousd rpm, for example, fires spark plugs fifty times per second. In contrast to that, when you use a laser as the spark plug, the flame front is huge by comparison, because
the beam penetrates down into the cylinder. The only problem I have with this idea is that it falls in to that big stack of other ideas that claim they'll improve engine efficiency by I mean, how many times have we heard this claim. Let's hope that this one pans out, or that electric cars really take off and this idea becomes irrelevant. Speaking of electric cars, what would make electric
cars explode in popularity? What we need is something that's better than the current crop of batteries that we're using. I mean, the batteries we have right now are relatively speaking, really big and really heavy and really expensive. Something small and cheap and lightweight that can store or produce lots of power is what is necessary for electric cars to really revolutionize anything. This week there were two announcements that
hold promise for something happening in this arena. There was, for example, a recent announcement that fuel cell prices could drop by a factor of ten. The problem with current fuel cells is that they need a lot of platinum, which is pricey, to help catalyze the reaction that produces the power or scientists have come up with a new catalyst made of much cheaper materials like iron. If this works out, it may be possible to consider using fuel cells in cars in the relatively near future. You can
google Interesting Reading number seven thirty six for details. But even better is a Darper project that's trying to develop tiny fusion reactors. The idea is to shrink atomic accelerators down to chip scale and then collide ions together to create fusion. DARPA is shooting for an energy ratio of twenty, meaning that the power out is twenty times greater than the power in. How hard could it be? But if they could get this idea working, it would certainly make
electric cars more viable. Google Interesting Reading number seven forty to learn more about DARPA's attempts and speaking of electric cars and cars that get really good gas mileage, the Purdue team in the Shell Eco Marathon this year created a car that got an equivalent of two thousand and two hundred miles per gallon. The car weighs only two seventy pounds, it's super aerodynamic, and it got an extra boost from solar panels worked into the carbon fiber body.
The most interesting part is the fact that they hope to make this vehicle street legal at some point. If you google Interesting Reading number seven thirty eight, you can get the details on this, and you can also see Interesting Reading number seven thirty seven for a discussion of Michigan's solar car strategies that's quite revealing. Also in Interesting Reading number seven forty there's a video that's worth watching.
The problem that they're trying to solve is the truck full of explosives trying to drive through a checkpoint problem. It's not easy having a barrier that's strong enough to keep a multi ton high speed truck out, but that's also easy to raise and lower, and is also inexpensive and is also attractive. This company offers a number of solutions that fit the bill, and of course, how better to demonstrate them than to ram some real trucks into some real barriers and show it on a video on YouTube.
The most interesting one is this thing that looks like a flimsy fabric net. When it rises out of its little protective pocket in the road, it is surprisingly effective. However, then there's this bar that looks like a flimsy piece of wood that the guard can raise and lower by hand. Again, you might think that you could drive right through it. This video demonstrates otherwise. If you google interesting Reading number
seven forty you can see the video. Why is it that human beings are sometimes so bad at self control? For example, more than half of Americans are overweight, and that happens because we're not particularly good at controlling what we eat. Why is eating so hard to control? Scientific American has an article this week that tries to explain it. The theory proposed is something called a dual system model
in our brains. According to the article, we have quote two emotional stems, our impulses and our powers of reflection end quote. These two systems are constantly fighting with each other and impulses often went out because they're impulsive, they don't require a lot of processing power or energy. The article goes through the research in this area and offers several techniques to try in order to gain better self control. Simply knowing that obesity is unhealthy is not enough to
stop impulsive behaviors around obesity. One thing you can try is pre planning strategies or rules that you can rehearse and execute whenever temptation arises. For example, if I have a problem with peanut m and m's, I might say, look, if I ever see a peanut eminem, I'm going to physically turn around and walk in the other direction. If
I practice this enough, I do it automatically. The article suggests that an alcoholic person can practice ordering a nonalcoholic beverage at a bar until the behavior becomes automatic, and so on. If you google Interesting Reading seven forty you can get the details on these techniques. So let's say that you're going to buy an hd TV or a bluebery player or something in the video sphere. There are all kinds of headline specs that most people can deal with,
like screen size and resolution and the contrast ratio. But when you get into some of the esoteric stuff, it gets harder. For example, what kind of motion interpolation algorithms should you look for if you're buying an HD TV. The article points out that when a film gets converted from its native twenty four frames per second to a TV refresh rate, there are different ways to do it
depending on the TV you buy. For example, if you're increasing from twenty four frames per second to a sixty hurts TV signal, one way to handle it is called three to pull down processing. The CPU repeats one frame three times and the next frame two times to create sixty frames per second. The article then points out that the imbalance the three and the two ratio creates an artifact called jutter. An easy solution is to jump up
to a twenty hurts refresh rate. Now you can use five five pull down processing and get rid of the jetter. The best TVs can then do some image processing and do frame interpolation, essentially creating new frames between two film frames using computational techniques. Now, Lee and I would end up buying whatever TVs on sale, But if you have the time and the money to explore the high end stuff, it's a really interesting article. Google Interesting Reading number seven
thirty nine for details. Do you own an iPhone? Would you like to get more out of it? If so, there's an article entitled getting the most out of your iPhone twenty easy tips and tricks that you may be interested in this week. A lot of these are tiny little features hidden in the user interface. This simply may
have escaped your notice. For example, there's a way to lock the screen orientation, and Lee has actually been looking for this because she likes to read in bed and when she puts the thing sidewise, it flips on her. There's an easy way to bring up the music controls even if the screen is locked, and so on. Google Interesting Reading number seven thirty eight to read this article. Is peanut butter carcinogenic? Yes? It turns out it can be because of a chemical called a plot toxin that's
common in peanuts. If you're the sort of person who eats a lot of peanuts or peanut butter, you may want to google Interesting Reading number seven thirty seven to learn more about this threat to your existence. What are the chances that you or I will ever travel in space? I'd say they're pretty slim, but it's still fun to imagine. So, while we're imagining traveling in space, what are the six most common space dangers we will face in our dreams?
An article entitled the six Weirdest Dangers of Space Travel tackles this question. The winners are, in order, moon, dust, space debris, static electricity, heat stroke, an inability to stop, and kidney stones. Kidney stones. Yes, kidney stones, because astronauts get kidney stones more often then regular people do. It's because weightlessness causes bone loss, and bone loss drops a lot of calcium into the bloodstream, and calcium causes kidney stones.
If you're interested in these threats to your dream world, you can google Interesting Reading number seven thirty seven for details. And finally, you've probably heard of royal jelly. In a beehive, the worker bees need to sometimes raise up new queens, and they do this by picking an egg at random and feeding it royal jelly. For some reason, royal jelly causes some kind of transformation that turns what would have
been an ordinary worker bee into a queen bee. Scientists obviously have been trying to figure out how a food could do this. What a scientist in Japan named Massaki Kamakura has discovered is a new protein that he is named royal actin. It works by activating a gene that's common in many animals. For example, when he fed royal actin too fruit flies, they increased in size and they laid more eggs. In bees, the genes effects are simply
more pronounced. If you google Interesting Reading number seven thirty seven, you can learn more about royal jelly and how it turns worker bees into queen bees, and it raises the obvious questions should we be feeding this stuff to our kids? So that's it for this week. To learn more about these and dozens of other topics, you can google Interesting Reading number seven thirty six, seven thirty seven, seven thirty eight, seven thirty nine, and seven forty have a great weekend
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