Marshall Brain's News Roundup: April 7th, 2011

you inside this spaceship. Virgin also announced Virgin Oceanic, which has a sub that's supposed to be able to handle the deepest oceans on Earth for the first time. That would be thirty seven thousand feet deep, or roughly the height of Mount Everest underwater. It's fascinating to think about this. Even today, with all our technology, there are parts of the ocean that have not yet been explored by people because we don't have a sub that can handle the depth.

And this Virgin Oceanic sub will be able to explore the ocean in style. It's like an underwater fighter plane. You can google brain Stuff Virgin Oceanic to see the sub and understand what some of its missions might be. There were also interesting articles this week on excursions into two human exclusion zones and the amazing amount of wildlife that's flourishing inside of them. One exclusion zone surrounds the Chernobyl Nuclear power plant, and the other is in the

demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is easy to understand. They just made this great, big circle around the power plant and decided to evacuate all the people and keep them out because of the radioactivity. The Demilitarized Zone is a strip that's two and a half miles wide and about a hundred and sixty miles long that's been fenced off to keep North and South

Korea from killing each other. It's amazing what nature will do once people are eliminated from a piece of land like this. A new human exclusion zone has been created around Japan's stricken nuclear power plant that basically melted down after the earthquake. A thirty kilometer evacuation area is now virtually devoid of all people. A reporter went in this week with a camera to record the state of things, and some of it looks absolutely post apocalyptic, like a

waste land. Parts of it were leveled completely by the tsunami, and then human beings were sucked out, and then radioactive waste from the reactors melt down ended up settling on the land, and all that's left now is the occasional stray dog or cow roaming free. Given the levels of radiation that he observed and documented, it's really hard to say what will happen to these hundreds of square kilometers

of and in Japan going forward. If you check the brain Stuff blog, you can find the video that he took. There were also several technological fiascos reported this week, and two of the more interesting involved the Nintendo three DS and the Motorola Zoom tablet. With the Zoom, the pre release hype was intense and it was built as the tablet to take on the iPad too. Unfortunately, it's not lived up to those expectations, selling only about a hundred

thousand copies since the launch. What's holding it back The prices a problem. It's more expensive than the iPad too, so as the lack of familiarity on the part of the buying public. It's also invisible if you try to find it in a place like Best Buy. Add to that the fact that it came out at the same time as the iPad too, and the iPad to just essentially completely overshadowed it in the marketplace. So it's starting point hasn't gone really well, and it's hard to say

what will happen to it going forward. On the three DS side, there are are a surprising number of complaints about the three D screen. As you'll recall, this screen does not require three D glasses. Instead, lens is built into the screen direct two different images into your left and right eyes. To get the full three D effect, you need to be centered on the screen, and the screen needs to be the correct distance from your eyes. Apparently, the new screen causes a bad experience for some people.

They get dizzy, or they get headaches, or you know, it just doesn't feel right to them as they look at it. And Nintendo is suggesting using the three D feature for only thirty minutes at a time and not letting kids under seven use it at all. The whole thing has been a little uncomfortable for the launch of

this amazing new device. If you google Interesting Reading number seven twenty and seven twenty two, you can get details on these two situations we've all heard of riddling It's a drug that's supposed to help kids suffering from a d D or a d h D, essentially attention deficit disorder. Lots of college students also use it, however, because they think it improves their concentration one studying as well as improving retention. Now scientists are studying why riddle in might help.

It turns out that it really does help. If you give riddle into rats, they learn things faster. It appears to do this by increasing two different kinds of dopamine. One type of dopamine affects the speed of learning and the other type effects focus. Right now, using riddle in in this way is ill advised because it's a prescription drug. But in the future the drug might be relabeled as a brain boosting drug, so it becomes much more widely available.

If you google interesting Reading seven twenty one, you can get details on using riddle in in this way. Remember a couple of weeks ago we talked about a streaming DVD service called z Diva. They set up physical DVD players playing physical DVDs, and then they routed the video signals from these DVD players over the Internet to create

a streaming service. The goal is to get around Hollywood's restrictions on movie streaming, and the Diva claim that their service is the same as a video rental store because they're using physical DVDs and physical DVD players and they're only allowing one person to watch each DVD at a time. This week, Za Diva got sued by six of the biggest studios in Hollywood, which is pretty amazing. Since the Diva launched in March and has only five employees, it'll

be interesting to see how this shakes out. If you google Interesting Reading number seven twenty one, you can get the details. There's a fascinating article this week that discusses seven common things that people do wrong. Take, for example, showering. Now, this seems like something that's really simple and hard to screw up, but it appears that we really are doing

this wrong. Many of us take showers daily or even twice daily, with hot water, soap, and maybe even a bonge or a washcloth or a loofer or something to get the pores really clean. The problem is that showering like this damages the skin, so the article recommends fewer showers, cooler water, and safer soap without the abrasion, and we're supposed to avoid a towel and air dry ourselves instead

to minimize the effect on our skin. Now, if you like that idea, you'll enjoy the articles other entries on things like pooping we're supposed to use a squatting action rather than using a toilet, breathing, sleeping, toothbrushing, childbirthing, which fortunately half of us don't really have to think about. And finally, sitting, What you're supposed to do about sitting is not sit basically, that's one recommendation. Anyway, you're supposed to get a standing desk or an exercise desk so

that you can avoid the whole sedentary sitting thing. Another is a seat that lets you recline at a hundred and thirty five degree angle. If you google Interesting Reading number seven twenty, you can find this article. It really is pretty amusing to read it. Lots of people are unemployed right now, so where are the decent paying jobs. It has been well known for some time that jobs in the medical field have openings and they tend to pay well. I also did an article on the BAJA

s A program this week. S a A stands for the Society of Automotive Engineers and Baja SEE is a college student program where college students build little ten horsepower Baja style cars and race them. One of the videos in that article suggests that mechanical engineers and manufacturing engineers are in demand right now. If you google brain stuff Baja s a E. You can see the details and

watch that video. And then there was a piece in Interesting Reading seven twenty entitled fifteen overlooked and underappreciated blue collar jobs pay well. This is pretty interesting because the jobs are esoteric. At number one is and if you think about this, what you know what could be the number one most overlooked under appreciated blue collar job in America? It's elevator installers and repairers, with an average salary of sixty nine thousand dollars a year. That would at least

be a job that's indoor. Some of these jobs are not, and that might make them less desirable to some people. The best paying job on the list is mining engineer at seventy nine thousand dollars per year. Number twelve is commercial divers at fifty eight thousand dollars per year, and so on. Google Interesting Reading number seven twenty for details

on these jobs. Speaking of elevators, a hack was released this week that will supposedly let you get to your floor more quickly, especially if someone has tried the old push all the buttons for every floor gag. It will also prevent your car from stopping for other people on the way to your destination floor. Supposedly, all you have to do is hold the closed door button down and keep it down while you press your floor number, and then as the elevator starts moving, you can release those

two buttons. It can't hurt to try it next time you're on an elevator. If you google interesting Reading number seven nineteen, you can get instructions for this hat. In the past, cows obviously have produced cow's milk, but now some cows, about three hundred of them, are producing human milk thanks to genetic engineering, and thanks to relax genetic engineering regulations that are in place in China, scientists have

inserted human genes into cows to make this possible. The ultimate goal is to create milk from cows that's nearly identical to human milk as a way to improve the milk for infants that are bottle fed. One of the key differences in human milk is a protein called lyso zyme, which can kill bacteria. Other human proteins help boost a baby's immune system. It's not yet a perfect duplicate of human milk, but it's much closer than straight cow's milk

would be. Google interesting reading number seven nineteen for details. How much data can your cell phone or smartphone collect about you? Quite a bit, it turns out, as discovered by a European politician who requested his records to find out what the cell phone company was keeping about him. Apparently, his cell phone company logged his GPS information tens of thousands of times over the course of a year or so,

along with his call history. A newspaper then cross correlated that data stream with his Twitter feed and other publicly available information to basically map out his life. It's kind of shocking, really. There's a little tool you can run in the article where you can see on a map exactly where he's going and what's happening in his life at those different moments as they go by, and it shows that we are completely unanonymous if we have a phone in our pocket, whether we like it or not.

This kind of data keeping will be happening more and more in the future. If you google interesting Reading number seven nineteen you can see how much information can be gathered from a smartphone. And finally, there are several news items this week on stem cells. One involved an effort to grow a human eye from stem cells. Another is an attempt to grow a full human heart from stem cells.

The idea of growing replacement hearts for people is getting closer to reality, and if you can grow a heart, then it's probably likely you can also grow other organs like kidneys or livers or stomachs for that matter as well. The heart technique involves starting with a donor heart and washing away everything but the kellagians scaffolding to give the

new hearted shape. Then that skeleton or the saffolding is seated with stem cells from the person who will receive the heart, which then grow to create a new heart on that scaffolding. One problem during the growth process is a blood supply. As the cells thicken, they need blood to get oxygen and nutrients, so there really needs to be a circulation system that can handle the delivery of

that blood. And another problem is the nerve cells to control beating, which are fairly complex in a natural heart. But if these hurdles can be overcome, then replacement hearts could become a reality. Google Interesting Reading seven nineteen for details. That's it for this week. If you would like to learn more information about these topics, or about a hundred other topics, you can google interesting reading numbers seven twenty three, seven twenty and seven nineteen. Have a great weekend for

more on this and thousands of other topics. Doesn't how steffworks 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.