Welcome to Brainstuff from how Stuff Works dot Com, where smart happens him Marshall Brain and welcome to this week's Friday news roundup. And what a week it's been. Kind of a sobering week is we've watched events unfold in Japan. As you'll recall last Friday, we were just learning about the massive earthquake in tsunami in Japan. This week, the news cycle has been dominated by the Japan's story, particularly because of all of the problems with the nuclear power plants.
We've all gotten a crash course in boiling water reactors, reactor cooling systems, radioactive iodine and caesium, and the problems with cooling pools that run out of water. Depending on how events unfold and how the wind is blowing at the time, this could evolve into a crisis that's potentially bigger than Chernobyl. According to some experts, some of the scenarios are not very pleasant at all for the citizens
of Japan. A number of scientists have warned that the same kind of thing could easily happen in the United States. Over in California, most people have heard of the San Andreas fault, but the more worrying thing is the Cascadia fault in the Pacific Ocean. It would cause a tsunami just like the one in Japan, and it would be hitting huge cities, most notably Los Angeles. And while some buildings are earthquake proof, the United States is not nearly
as well prepared and well engineered as Japan is. Having seen how badly things have unfolded in well prepared Japan, it might be prudent for the United States to take some steps toward better emergency preparedness. Or alternatively, you personally could avoid the West coast of the United States for the foreseeable future. If you google interesting reading numbers seven away, you can get details on the California outlook, as well
as many of the Japan's stories. Hollywood is in Los Angeles, and in theory, Hollywood could disappear from the face of the earth if the tsunami is big enough. But we will always have the movies from the past in the form of Hollywood's DVDs. And there's a new company taking advantage of those DVDs in a very interesting way. The company is called zedva z E d I v A, and I might be pronouncing it wrong, but it's a
streaming movie company that's delivering movies over the internet. In fact, it's streaming movies that you can't get via a stream from places like Netflix. Z Diva does this by putting physical DVDs into physical DVD players and then streaming the content from that pair from the DVD DVD player pair to you. Your computer is a remote control for the
DVD player. By doing this, Zadeva apparently can get around all the copyright laws and Hollywood restrictions that hamper the ability of places like Netflix to stream movies, especially right after a DVD is released, and the prices right at the Diva. It's only two dollars to watch a movie. You can google interesting reading number seven oh eight for details. There's a really interesting article this week on the price
of solar cells and solar panels. Prices have been coming down for years, but by two thousand and fifteen, prices in sunny places are going to break below coal fired electricity prices for the first time. Those are prices for installed solar panels, so you can order them, get the panels, get them installed on your house, and actually have electricity
being produced by those solar panels. That cost the same as electricity from the power company, by installed solar panels will cost less than coal across much of the United States by twenty thirty if trends continue. The article predicts that installed solar panels could cost half as much as power from a power plant, which would be fantastic news. Google Interesting Reading numbers seven oh eight for details on this. But according to another article, this great development on the
solar energy front may come too late. The article is called quote the content of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is accelerating super exponentially end quote, and it contains this ominous prediction. Quote. Notwithstanding a lot of discussions, international meetings, prevalence in the media, atmospheric CEO two content growth continues unabated,
with a clear faster than exponential behavior. On the face of this evidence, using data until two thousand nine, stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions at levels reached in for instance,
seems very ambitious, if not utterly unrealistic end quote. The notion is that humans emit so much c O two and the environment has soaked up a lot of it, but is now full of c O two, and parts of nature are now starting to create positive feedback loops as temperatures rise and so on, that things could get very bad on the c O two front. If you google Interesting Reading seven oh eight, you can find out more about this phenomenon. There are several articles on space
junk this week. In one which you can find by googling Interesting Reading number seven oh eight, there's a video showing the incredible amount of damage that small pieces of space junk can do when they run into spacecraft. What they have is this huge hunk of aluminum that's several inches thick, and it's struck by this tiny little sphere of space junk that's traveling at six kilometers per second,
and it makes this huge crater in the aluminum. But that same video also shows how and why lightweight shields can protect against that kind of damage. One layer of the shield breaks up the incoming particle, and then the second layer absorbs the debris from that first collision. It makes for a much much lighter package for shielding. But space junk is still a big concern, so in Interesting Reading number seven oh five, there's an article about a ground based laser from NASA that may be able to
zap space junk out of the sky. The idea is to use a five kilowatt laser that beams photons onto a piece of space junk for a couple of hours. The photons slow the object down, and once it slows down enough, it falls out of orbit. If you google interesting Reading number seven oh five, you can learn more about this laser that could clean out low Earth orbits. Do sperm whales call to each other by announcing their names? Maybe?
Scientists have noticed that there are changes in the vocal patterns of sperm whales that might indicate that the names of different individuals are being used. What's interesting about the article is the idea of these animals having a level of intelligence that would allow names to occur, as well as the idea of underwater whale societies that are basically invisible to human beings. Everything about whales is amazing if
you think about it. So if you google interesting Reading number seven oh five, you can learn more about this. We would call the whale names a scientific conjecture. Scientists have noticed something in the behavior of whales that's interesting to them, and they have offered one possible explanation. They could be names, but obviously could be something else. So now what the scientists will do is more research to see if that conjecture is true or not. Here's another
scientific conjecture that came to light this week. The Large Hadron Collider might be able to implement some form of time travel. The first part of this conjecture is that the Higgs boson actually exists. The Higgs boson is the particle that the LHC was created to find. The second part of the conjecture is that the LHC can create
a Higgs boson. And if both of those become true, then there's a theoretical possibility that a Higgs singlet might get created along with the Higgs boson, And if so, the Higgs singlet might be able to go backward or forward in time by escaping from the four dimensions of our universe and re entering at some different point in time. If this can happen, then it might allow for messages to travel through time. But it'll be a while until
we find out. We have to actually discover the Higgs boson first, and the Higgs singlet and figure out how to make it transfer out of our four dimensions. So if you google interesting reading number seven oh seven, you can get details on this scientific conjecture. At the top of Interesting Reading number seven oh six, there is a
really interesting piece of space video. What they've done is they've taken high resolution photographs from the Cassini space probe to Saturn and they've woven them together to make movies. Because the photographs are high resolution, were able to fly past the rings of Saturn, past different moons and so on, and see things with incredible detail. If you play the video at full screen, you get the full effect, and it's pretty spectacular. The filmmakers hope to use this technique
to make an IMAX movie. Google Interesting Reading number seven oh six to see this video. Also in number seven oh six, there's an article about the drive to make the world's strongest magnet that doesn't use neodymium. Neodymium is a rare Earth element that is, as you might suspect, rare, and China is really the only country you with significant deposits and they aren't very inclined to share. So the thing about neodymium magnets is that they are so powerful
compared to what came before them. They've made things like Walkman headphones and then earbuds, possible. Before neodymium magnets, there was no way to make a good speaker that's small. The magnets have also made small hard discs and small electric motors possible, as well as big things like electric motors for cars and generators on giant wind turbines. So if scientists can invent a better magnet that doesn't need
rare earth metals, it would be great. If you google Interesting Reading number seven oh six, you can learn more. Google announced a new feature this week that lets you block certain sites from your search results. So you don't like results from a particular website, you can add that website to a list and it won't show up in your Google listings anymore. It gives you more control over what you see from Google and lets you reduce the
noise and Google's results based on your taste. You might also notice that Google is also rolling out its best Guess feature, where the Google search engine gives you a Watson like best guests to the answer of certain queries. For example, type in the CEO of General Electric into Google and the first result is Google's best guess at the name of the actual person. Google Interesting Reading number
seven oh four for details. Also in interesting Reading seven oh four, there's an article looking at the iPad two graphics performance, a new memory technology that could let cell phones last much longer on a battery charge, a story suggesting that the airport X ray scanners that look at us through our clothing and may emit ten times more radiation than they should, a new nanotech material that may make it easy to store a lot of hydrogen in a all space. And then a cryptic little article about
the lost City of Atlantis. Now we've all heard about this city. Plato talked about it in his writings about six hundred b CE, so twenty hundred years ago. Plato was writing about the lost city of Atlantis, and people have been hypothesizing and conjecturing about it ever since. Supposedly it was an island nation that sank into the sea, presumably because of a giant tsunami. It's been considered something
of a myth until this week. They'll have a lot of digging and artifact finding to do to prove that this is a real city and not something that they're just speculating about. But it does raise the possibility that Atlantis really exists. That's it for this week. If you'd like to read more, you can google interesting reading number seven oh four, seven oh five, seven oh six, seven oh seven, or seven oh eight for details. Until next time, let's hope that the news is just a little bit
better in the coming days. This has been a tough week for the world. For more on this and thousands of other topics, does that 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 House Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes.