Marshall Brain's News Roundup: February 25th, 2011

USB three point oh. To put it into perspective, Thunderbolt can transfer a one gigabyte file in about one second if the device holding the file can keep up with that rate. If you Google interesting reading number six, you can see a video demonstrating the speed of Thunderbolt. The video shows a file streaming in one direction and a video beam going in the other direction to drive a monitor. It is a pretty amazing speed for a little cable, and it ought to make it possible to transfer huge

files in the future. Flip. Speaking of speed, the new McLaren MP four Dash twelve C for two thousand twelve has gotten a lot of attention this week. This truly is a supercar. It's made out of aluminium carbon. It has a twin turbo V eight engine that generates nearly six hundred horsepower and it can go from zero to sixty in three point two seconds and has a top speed of about two hundred and five miles per hour. But one of the most interesting things about it is

the air brake. In heartbreaking from high speed, the spoiler on the back of the car tilts up vertically like a little wall to grab air and slow the car down faster. The only problem is the two dollar price tag. But ignoring that, it's a beautiful car. If you google brain Stuff MP four you can see a couple of videos showing this car in action. Blip. Speaking of cars, there's a great article in Interesting Reading number six two

that talks about changing your oil. Do you need to change your oil every three thousand miles as many of the oil change places will suggest to you, or can you go longer? The three thousand mile oil change turns out to be a myth. It's a myth because the motor oil made today is much better than it used

to be. It contains detergent stabilizers and viscosity enhancers. If you look at your owner's manual, it probably tells you to wait six thousand miles or more between oil changes, and the reason for that is because that is how long the oil really does last. Now and many cars now have automated systems that either calculate oil changes based on things like engine temperature in rpm, or that actually measure oil life by doing little chemical analysis on the

oil in the crank case. If your car has a system like this, let it tell you when to change the oil. You do not need to change it every three thousand miles. Blip In tablet news, the Motorola Zoom made it out to reviewers this week and got a lot of buzz. People are generally happy with it, and they see it as a major iPad competitor, but they note a lot of little uncomfortable drawbacks and the price, which is said at about eight hundred dollars right now,

is making nobody happy. You can find a review by googling Interesting Reading number six, which brings us to the second piece of tablet news, which is that the iPad two will be announced next week on March two. Although the Zoom looks pretty good right now because it's being compared to the year old iPad one, it's likely that the iPad two will fix many of the differences in terms of things like cameras and screen resolution, and that will really narrow the gap. One other thing on the

tablet front to consider is battery life. This week, both think pad and HP are claiming incredible battery life of up to thirty hours or more on a charge in

some of their new notebook computers. Expect some of these batteries saving technologies to make it down to tablets as well in the near future, and their battery life could get to be extraordinarily long, both because of the battery technology, the energy saving technology, and the fact that processors for tablet computers are starting to consume less and less power blip.

This week, the world's tiniest computer was announced. It's a one cubic millimeter computer in size, yet it is a complete computer that includes the processor itself, memory, and a wireless transmitter. One amazing feature is the low power consumption, only five point three nanowatts. It marks the beginning of millimeter scale computing and it should help to bring field of smart dust much closer to reality. You can read more by googling interesting reading number six nine two blip.

There's this thing called space weather, and it sounds like something out of a sci fi horror film. A giant solar flare erupts on the Sun, hits Earth and completely cripples a power grid and much of the communication infrastructure. But it could happen. In fact, it already has happened, but it was back in eighteen fifty nine, before there were power grids and cell phones. In eighteen fifty nine, the flare was so bright that people could read at night.

The last flare of any real importance happened in nine eight nine. It was minor compared to eighteen fifty nine, but it took out a power grid in Ontario. The reasons scientists are talking about solar storms now is because the solar cycle lasts eleven years and we're due for a peak in the next year or two. The problem is that a strong storm now could affect so many different things, not just power grids, but also the GPS system and cell phones and much more prolific computer systems.

Is there anything you can do? A large scale power grid failure could create problems with things like access to drinking water, refrigeration, gasoline, and money. To be prepared, you would want to stock up like you would for a major hurricane blip. Can a shirt make you a better athlete? Maybe, at least if you play in the NFL. Imagine a shirt that contains sensors for things like acceleration, pulse, and breathing rate. The shirt can also transmit the data out

to Bluetooth devices. NFL players have started to wear shirts like this from under Armour, and it's thought that the extra data will help coaches improve player performance. Eventually, the shirts will make their way down to the retail market and normal human beings will be able to wear them. I guess to make us better, stronger, faster, and all that. Blip. Amazon started to compete with the Netflix streaming service this week. Amazon has been competing with Netflix sort of with its

pay per view movies. You pay Amazon two or three dollars to rent a movie for a twenty four hour period of time. But now Amazon is streaming movies and TV shows just like Netflix, and the services free to people who have already signed up for Amazon Prime. Amazon Prime is best known for giving you free to day shipping on your purchases. The selection on Amazon right now is a little sparse compared to Netflix, but it's also

cheaper than Netflix. Another company who appears to be getting into the same kind of space is Direct TV, which has been talking about its ability to stream six thousand movies and TV shows at no extra charge to its customers. Blip. When you buy a PC, you pay for the computer itself. We all know that, but if you ever considered the cost of the computers elector tricity, this could be especially relevant if you have a desktop machine and it contains

a high end graphics card. It turns out these graphics cards consume a lot of power, as do high end CPUs. Tom's Hardware did an analysis of this, and your computer plus it's graphics card could in theory be costing over a hundred dollars a year just for the electricity it takes to run it. So when you're purchasing a PC, you might want to keep the energy consumption in mind. If you're on a budget, a hundred dollars per year

is not an insignificant amount of cash. Blip. One thing that took the Internet by storm in February is a video that shows an Esure waterfall that really works. You've probably seen the drawings by mc escher that show an impossible waterfall. The water runs downhill in a channel, but because it's an optical illusion, the water is really running uphill and then it spills over a waterfall to drive

a water wheel where the process we're peats. It makes sense in a drawing, but the YouTube video shows one of these waterfalls working in real life. Obviously, it can't be true because it would be a perpetual motion machine, but it certainly looks real. You're left to wonder how they made the video. If you google brain stuff waterfall, you can see the video and also an explanation of how the video might have been created. It's really an

interesting trick if the explanation is correct. Blip. Another water based video this week is a promotional video for something called the jet lev Flyer. This is a piece of technology that uses the power of water jets to let a person fly over a lake. The person wears a backpack that contains two water nozzles that look a lot like the ends of a fire hose. There's one on

either side attach to this backpack. Water shoots out of these nozzles to create enough thrust to lift the person out of the water up to about twenty ft high hand controls allow the person who's wearing the backpack to change the angles of the nozzles to control flight. Supplying all the high pressure water that these nozzles need are two large hoses that connect down to this boat like

object in the water. The boat has an engine driving a pump, and it follows along behind the person in the air as the two hoses kind of drag it along. Is this practical? No? Is it inexpensive? Probably not? But would it be fun to try? Probably? You can watch the video by googling interesting Reading number six nine and decide for yourself if you give something like this a try blip. Also an interesting Reading number six nine is the latest robotic hand that is quote nearly identical end

quote to a human hand. It's called the DART hand, where DART stands for dexterous anthropomorphic robotic typing. Yes, the hand is precise enough to do tie, being at about twenty words per minute, and it's laid out much like your human hand. Is laid out with muscles in the forearm and wires carrying the motion down to the fingers like tendons do in a real human hand. So in theory, one day Watson will be able to not only press the button, but also type out his answers if he

wants to blip. An accidental discovery involving lab mice may have uncovered a cure for baldness. The accident involved a chemical designed to block a stress hormone called CRF. The mice, because of genetic modifications, produced too much of this hormone. As a result, the mice would become bald on their backs. By blocking CRF. As part of another experiment on digestion problems, the scientists noticed that the blocking chemical fix the baldness as well. Now it's time to test the same idea

in humans and see if it works there as well. Blip. Google is sponsoring a thirty million dollar prize for the first team that can land on the Moon and drive for five meters with a little rover. This week, Google pick twenty nine teams that will be allowed to compete for the actual prize. One of the front runners is a team called Astrobotic Technology. They already have a contract for a ride that will get them to the Moon

on top of a SpaceX Falcon nine rocket. Their craft will soft land on the Moon and then deploy its solar powered pyramid rover. In theory, this competition could be completed as early as two thousand and fifteen, and from there is anybody's guess how many different missions can be launched to the Moon by private explorers. Blip. In two thousand and ten, we heard a lot about solar and wind power, and there was a good reason for it. According to one report, the amount of solar energy being

captured on Earth doubled in two thousand and ten. The world added the ability to generate about sixteen billion watts of solar electricity in a single year, roughly doubling the amount of electricity previously generated from the Sun. This happened despite the economic downturn. People think it happened because the price of solar power is falling very quickly, and because big players are getting into the solar power field now,

especially in Europe. The price of solar panels are down to dollar eighty per watt right now, half that three years ago. The United States and China accounted only for about seven percent of the total. It really is Europe that's driving the solar energy push right now. Blip. And finally there's a piece of really really good news on the medical front this week. Currently, there are a number of diseases that modern medical science can cure. Things like

scurvy and ricketts are virtually unheard of anymore. We've taken giant steps with things like ulcers, and vaccines have cut way out on many viral diseases. But there's only one disease that human beings have completely eradicated, and that smallpox. No one on earth gets smallpox anymore. We could be at the point of eradicating another disease next year. It's a parasite called the guinea worm. This worm can get to be up to a meter long inside a patient

and it's disgusting. Used to be that millions of people had this parasite, but now it's down to hundreds. So how has it been eradicated? In order to reproduce, this worm has to wiggle its way through the skin and release its eggs into water. By quarantining everyone with the disease and keeping them away from water, the number of worms has been decimated. With luck, the last cases will be contained as well, and this worm will be history. It will be completely dead and no one will get

this disgusting parasite anymore. That would be a major triumph for people in Africa. Flip and finally there's a new car that shows that the arrival of robotic automobiles is getting closer and closer. They're already cars that can automatically steer themselves into a parallel parking place, and now the Volvo S sixty sedan is gaining the ability to stop

if it sees a pedestrian in front of it. It uses a radar system that can look out in front of the car as well as a camera, and it allows it to see, so to speak, pedestrians that are in the path of the vehicle, and if it detects a pedestrian that's out there, it will automatically break the vehicle for you if you don't take steps to avoid the pedestrian. Obviously, this is great news if you are a pedestrian and a Volvo S sixty is headed right towards you, but it also shows how much more automated

cars are becoming. In the near future. We can expect to see things like pedestrian avoidance, lane following, automatic breaking if a horrors stopped in front of you, and so on on more and more cars. All of the articles that we've discussed this week are available on the blogs at how stuff works dot com. The easiest way to find them is either to go to the blogs, or you can just go to Google and type in the

words interesting reading plus the number of the article. This week we've covered interesting reading number six nineties and six three. Until next time, I'm Marshall brain Have a great weekend. For more on this and thousands of other topics, doesn't 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

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