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

Twitter makes it. To understand this, think about how the time to publication has been reduced over the years. With books, an author would write for a year or two and then publish the book. With magazines, it might take a week for an author to write an article. With newspapers, the creation time for an article falls to about a day or two. With a blog, it might take an hour or two per post. With Twitter, it takes just a minute or two per post. And now with color

it is actually immediate. The instant you take a photo with your smartphone, the photo goes up to the cloud, tagged with your I D, your location, the date and time, and so on. Anyone else in the general vicinity gets a stream of all the photos being taken near by, and they get that stream instantly. There's no thinking involved. You simply snap a photo and it immediately goes live to everyone. It doesn't get any more immediate than that.

Speaking of immediate, this company apparently sprang up and secured forty one million dollars in venture funding from two of the most prestigious venture capital firms in the business in about half a year. As with Twitter, some will wonder what the point is. Who's going to sit and look at streams of bad photo graphs. But knowledgeable people believe this is the next big thing, given all the buzz that it's been generating. We'll see if it works a

year from now. If you google Interesting Reading number seven thirteen, you can get the details on color. Also in Interesting Reading seven thirteen, there are two articles from the World of Physics. In one, best selling author and scientist Brian Green talks about multiverses. A multiverse is the idea that there are bigger places outside of our universe. That how

is multiple universes. The reasons scientists talk about the multiverse is that there are mathematical patterns suggesting that the multiverse might actually exist. The amazing thing is that the Large Hadron Collider may provide a platform to test the mathematics and therefore the multiverse theory. It's also possible to look for energy leaving our universe in lhc illisions, meaning that

it might be going into other universes. It's a very interesting article, especially since it's written in English rather than physics speak. The other article is about a twelve year old prodigy who's already in college in Indiana and he

believes that the Big Bang theory is wrong. He bases this belief on the number of heavier elements like heavier than hydrogen, found in today's universe and the amount of time available to manufacture them in the cores of stars under the current theory of where these elements come from. Both of these articles can be found by googling Interesting Reading number seven thirteen. Interesting Reading number seven twelve opens

with a very interesting concept. The desert nation of Qatar is hosting the World Cup soccer games in a decade, so they will be needing to construct nine new air conditioned stadiums because temperatures and guitar get quite hot in the summer. One proposed solution is a very bizarre flying machine, essentially a large roof that hovers over the stadium, powered by solar cells down washed from the propellers. Keeping the roof aloft would provide a cooling effect in this approach.

When you look at it, you immediately start wondering about the safety of this whole idea. Nonetheless, it is interesting to think about it, and it would be the world's largest hoverboard. If you google Interesting Reading seven twelve, you can get its details. It's hard to believe, but it's been two weeks since Japan's giant earthquake tsunami nuclear disaster hit the island nation. Many of the nation's roads and

systems are coming back online now. Early estimates for repairing and replacing all the damage are hovering around two fifty billion dollars, and it's been discovered that about twenty seven thousand people have died in this catastrophe. The nuclear meltdown scenario also seems to be under control. There's an article in Nature magazine this week that describes some of the unbelievable steps taken inside the plant that prevented it from

being an even bigger disaster. It really is amazing some of the things that these people thought of and did in order to keep these reactors cooled down. If you go to Interesting Reading number seven twelve, you can get details. The Apple iPad also went on sale the same day that Japan's earthquake hit. Now manufacturers are showing new tablets that hope to compete with Apple's flagship machine. The Galaxy Tab from Samsung has been updated and comes in two sizes.

These tablets seem to beat the iPad two in every spec category. They're thinner and lighter, they have better displays, they have better cameras, they allow you to plug in st memory cards, and they run Android Honeycomb. The pricing is identical to the iPad too, and then there's Rims new playbook tablet with similar respects and similar pricing. It looks like the Apple iPad two could have some major competition this summer. If you google Interesting Reading seven twelve

you can get details. There's been a lot of talk this week about cell phones turning into wallets. This movement has been underway for some time in Japan and some other countries, but it's easy to imagine it happening in the US as well. Your phone would have a near field communication chip and there are rumors that the iPhone five may contain this chip. You hold your phone near a payment terminal and the transaction happens automatically between the

phone and the terminal. Given that the technology is already deployed in other countries, you might wonder what's holding it up in the United States. If you guessed money and arguments over money amongst the entrenched corporate players, you are correct. Existing credit card companies and banks which handle all credit at card transactions now want their money, and the smartphone carriers now on a piece of the action as well, and blah blah blah. You've heard of this kind of

stuff before. Ignoring this clash of the titans, the technology is really interesting, and you can google interesting reading seven twelve to learn more. Which type of energy causes the most deaths? After the disaster in Japan this past couple of weeks, nuclear isn't looking so good at the moment, but nuclear just does not cause very many deaths in the grand scheme of things. In fact, from a death standpoint, nuclear is the safest energy source available, even after counting

the nine thousand deaths attributed to Chernobyl. Natural gas is second hydro, and here Hydro is weighed down by a huge damn collapse that happened in China and killed over two hundred thousand people several decades ago. Is third, if you ignore that big tragic event, hydro is pretty safe. And then there's coal, which is by far the most dangerous because of all its emissions. If you see interesting Reading seven twelve, you can learn more about these different

energy options and the number of deaths they cause. Speaking of deaths, who is the worst enemy of birds? Is it windmills whose giant blades knocked birds out of the sky. No? Is it big living room windows and sliding glass doors, which birds seem to run into with surprising frequency. No Is it cars which run into birds at sixty miles No, No, it is house cats. Now you might wonder how scientists

figured this out. They did it by attaching tiny radio transmitters to birds and then waiting for the birds to die. Some estimates put the total bird kill due to cats. We might call this a catastrophe at half a billion birds per year. Now, when you consider that there's only three million people in the United States, we're talking about almost twice as many birds dying every year just due to cats. Wind turbans kill one one thousand that number.

But think about the giant uproar that occurs when windmills kill anything. Probably a lot of the people who cause those uproars are cat owners. Anyways, see interesting reading seven eleven for details. Think about all the spam you get, where does it come from? One source is bot nets. People let their machines get infected with viruses or trojans, and then their machines start sending spam. Millions of machines have been infected in this way, and that's why there's

so much spam that's being produced. One of the biggest spam producers is known as rust Stock, producing more than half of the world's spam, and it got decapitated this week. Microsoft was a big player in the decapitation of rusts Stock, and so was Fiser. You know all that viagrasas spam you get, Yeah, Well, Fiser, the maker of VIAGRAA, isn't so keen on that. So the decapitation was an important

milestone event for lots of different people. Decapitation means that a handful of computers that controlled the botan net needed to be disconnected from the infected machines, and this was done by eliminating domains and blocking certain IP addresses. It's actually a really fascinating world involving a lot of illicit money. If you go to Interesting Reading number seven eleven you can get the details on this. There was a new bicycle created this week that is unique for at least

two reasons. First, it's made completely out of plastic nylon to be exact, and second, almost the entire thing was printed on a three D printer. Also fascinating is the fact that everything except the chain and the tires and everything here means axles, ball bearings, pedals, seats, handlebars, and so on, we're all printed as a single object. The process is called additive layer manufact lecturing. The best part is that the bike is about a third lighter than

metal bikes. It means that manufacturing has the potential to get quite a bit simpler, especially on low run parts and assemblies. If you see Interesting Reading number seven eleven, you can find photos in a description of the process. Firefox four came out this week. There are about ten million people per day downloading the new version of this browser right now if you haven't seen it yet. There are two features called Panorama and sink that are especially interesting.

Panorama lets you organize open web pages into groups so that's easy to retrieve them. Sink lets you put everything about your copy of Firefox up in the cloud, all your open pages, your favorites, your passwords, everything and access at all from any machine. These two things together make for a great browser experience. If you google brain stuff Firefox four, you can get details and see how many

copies are being downloaded every minute. Interesting reading Number seven ten has a lot of cool stuff in it, but two things deserve special recognition. The first is a camera so tiny that it should be able to go inside your body. Imagine a cube measuring one millimeter on each side. That's about the size of this camera. It's also so inexpensive that it's disposable. The article contains this quote. If you think about very very small cameras, you will find

dozens of applications end quote. For example, you can stick this camera into almost any human orifice. You can look at all kinds of tight places in cars. You can poke it into nooks and crannies of a house by drilling very small holes. You can use it to monitor all kinds of stuff that really would have been hard to monitor previously, either because of the size or the cost of the camera. The other article is about a new,

very inexpensive way to make quite led. These l eds can be made using normal silicon wafers rather than any kind of exotic process, meaning the price can drop by more than a half. If they can scale this technology up, it could mean cheap LED light bulbs could arrive a lot quicker than expected. Google Interesting reading seven ten for details. So to wrap up this week, I'm gonna end with Rebecca Black because I wrote an article about her this

week that's gotten a lot of traffic. The article is answering this question, how did Rebecca Black make her music video and how much money has that video generated. This question came up because I have a preteen daughter and she wanted to know if she could make a video like this. A little research reveals that Rebecca's mother paid about two thousand dollars to a place called Arc Music Factory to produce that video, in much the same way you might pay a hundred dollars to glamour Shots to

have a fashion model photo shoot experience. If you mute the sound on Rebecca Black's video and just watch the video itself, you can see that this is an extremely credible video, with over a hundred shots and over a dozen locations, all cut together very professionally. Rebecca also looks very professional and almost all of the shots, and many of these shots have other actors moving and or interacting with her. In other words, they didn't just do this

in an hour. They had to do repeated shots and a lot of work to make this thing happen. Off of this video, they've made tens of thousands of dollars off the ads on the YouTube side, and then by selling it on iTunes, they've made something approaching two million dollars more from the iTunes royalties. The whole thing is amazing,

and it points to two things. First, the amount of money that can be made by a video that goes viral, and the ability to take a viral video like this one and make money off of it in several different kind of synchronized ways. It also says that within the next couple of months we should see a huge number of companies producing these little videos popping up at all kinds of places in the same way that glamour shots spread all across the country. Once people realized how much

they enjoyed this whole fashion model photo shoot experience. Every teenager theoretically will be begging for one of these little music videos. If you google brain Stuff Rebecca Black, you can learn more about this whole process. So that's it for this week. Have a great weekend, and if you want to look up any of this stuff, you can google interesting reading numbers seven seven, seven hundred twelve or seven hundred thirteen. Thanks for more on this and thousands

of other topics. Does that house 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 HSW. The haustufforks iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes.