Marshall Brain's News Roundup: March 4th, 2011

Plus there's now much better support for graphics. There are two cameras in the iPad two instead of none in the original iPad, and an HDMI cable can now connect the iPad directly to an HD TV or projector. That's a big deal for teachers and business people. Battery life is the same at ten hours, but there were also a couple of disappointments. The screen is the same resolution as the original iPad, and it appears that RAM did not increase either, although no one knows for sure because

Apple isn't talking about it. The announcement itself was hailed as a triumph. Chris Taylor on CNN had this to say quote his introduction of the iPad two did quadruple duty. It enticed mainstream customers, wowed spec hunting tech geeks, tweaked his competitors, and pleased Wall Street future presidential candidates would do well to study it. End quote. That's a pretty

good endorsement. If you type brain stuff iPad two into Google, you can read more about the announcement and you can see jobs performance on stage when he announced the product. To counterbalance that triumph, there was a disaster on the space front this morning. NASA launched its new Glory satellite on top of a Taurus rocket. It cost almost half a billion dollars to build the satellite and get it on that rocket, and it was scheduled to help with

climate research. Glory was supposed to study total solar radiation hitting the Earth, as well as the effects of things like carbon soot, so that we could get a better estimate on global warming and things like that. Unfortunately, the cover, the fairing that protects the satellite during launch, failed to separate from the satellite, so there was too much weight for the satellite to reach orbit, and the whole thing re entered the atmosphere and burned up. And all of

that happened this morning. Also on board were several cube SATs, you can. You can go to brain stuff and learn about cube sets. There are little tiny satellites maybe ten centimeters on a side, usually built by college students for experiments in theory. They could have been deployed because they were situated differently than the main satellite, but there's no word yet on whether that happened or not. So maybe next week I can give you an update on whether

any of those satellites actually made it into orbit. Two video game events have also gotten a lot of hype this week. One was the technology nd the upcoming video game called Battlefield three. They're releasing this new game engine called Frostbite Too to drive the game, and there were a number of improvements in this engine that make the

games trailer extremely impressive. If you type brain stuff Battlefield three into Google, you can see videos that break down just how impressive the improvements are in terms of adding realism to the game. The other big event on the video game front is a live action movie trailer that came out for a movie called Find Macarrov, based on Call of Duty Modern Warfare. People are just beside themselves

when describing this trailer. If you type brain stuff find Macarov where Macarrov is spelled m A k A r o V. Into Google, you can see what all this excitement is about. There's also a lot of buzz on the cell phone front, and it's pretty interesting. There appears to be a new way to implement cell phone hours. When you look at the towers today, they are huge, immensely tall, and ugly. Neighbors don't like the looks, so they fight every tower that people try to put up.

Now there's a new way to implement the antennas that is incredibly small, so small it could fit in your pocket. They could be attached almost anywhere. You can put them on buildings or water towers, or power lines or just about anything, and all they need to work is a network cable and a little power. It's one of those things where it's hard to believe it's true because the size difference in the ease of implementation is so immense

from the old way of doing it. If it works, it would mean the cost of cell phone coverage would fall, probably dramatically, and the amount of coverage would rise. Google Interesting Reading number six for details. Also in Interesting Reading, there's a story about a new way to harvest tidal energy. Every day all around the world, the eye goes out and the tide comes back in, and that happens twice

every day. A lot of water is moving around, like quadrillions of gallons of ocean water is moving around because of the tides, and it should be possible to harvest energy from it. But the tides tend to move really slowly, so energy capture has been difficult without using pinch points of some sort. A new solution to the problem involves flying underwater kites and the tidal flow. So you think about when you see Chinese fighting kites, they're whipping all

through the air. They're moving much faster through the air than the wind is actually moving because they're going side to side. Well, these underwater kites are doing that same kind of thing. They're actually flying figure eight patterns in the tidal currents and they move through the water ten times faster than the tide is moving, and that makes

it possible to harvest power more efficiently. In theory, this development could make it possible to generate tidal power in many places around the globe where it's in possible to get it. Now, can technology cause mass protests? There's a lot of evidence to suggest that Facebook and Twitter had a lot to do with protests in places like Egypt. But what about Google Earth. There's an interesting article in Interesting Reading number six nineties seven that suggests that Google

Earth had an effect in Bahrain. People in Bahrain started to look at how the country's land is chopped up. Much of the land is used by immense palaces and estates, while most of the remaining population is compressed into these small parts of the country. People started talking about the discrepancy, so the government shut down the connection to Google Earth. So then someone did a screen capture of all these different maps and things that were available on Google Earth,

and those started moving around through email. It certainly fed into the discontent that led to the protests. Information always finds a way, it seems just a paraphrase as Jurassic part Scientists are worried that the planet's sixth mass extinction event has begun. So far in Earth's history, we know of five previous mass extinctions that destroyed a third or more of the species in existence. The asteroid strike sixty five million years ago is the best known and most

recent of these events. It killed about half of all species. There were four other mass extinction events prior to that that humans can detect in the fossil record. Why do scientists think that we are in another mass extinction event? Because quote, biologists estimate that within the past five hundred years, at least eighty mammal species have become extinct out of the starting total of five thousand, five hundred and seventy

species end quote. That's enough to qualify as a mass extinction event, especially since the trend is likely to continue or accelerate. If you google interesting reading number six, you can see details of what they're talking about. You've heard of space tourism. It's been pretty limited so far, first because flights to the space station cost about twenty million dollars, and second because the number of seats were extremely limited.

But things ought to take off in two thousand twelve when Virgin Galactic starts offering suborbital flights for just two hundred thousand dollars on a regular schedule, and x Corp has a plane that should start flying as well at half that price. One big benefit this development will provide is the ability to take many more scientists into space. In the past, unless you could get a payload under

the Shuttle or the International Space Station. There's been no way for a scientist to experience more than about thirty seconds of zero G in one of the airplanes known as Vomit comments, these suborbital flights will provide a couple of minutes of time in that zero G realm. If you google Interesting Reading number six seven, you can see why scientists are are so excited about this new possibility.

Consumer Reports is reporting that it took its first look at the Chevy Vault and they weren't particularly impressed, at least from a pure logic standpoint. The main problem probably is the fact that the car costs so much. The model they tested had a price tag of over forty eight thousand dollars. The amount of money saved with a plug in hybrid just isn't enough to match that cost, at least when compared to a Toyota Prius, because a

Prius costs half as much. Using that logic, though, I would guess the Consumer Reports must really dislike the Corvette or the BMW for that matter. If you google Interesting Reading number six six, you can go look at exactly what Consumer Reports had to say about the volt. Speaking of cars, there is now an experimental new way to drive a car. You control the car with your thoughts. It's kind of a union between a self driving car

and a human controlled car. You think about where you want to go, and the car handles the details of getting you there. It's called brain driver. You wear this headset that has sixteen sensors on it that are reading your brain waves off your scalp, and you think about turning left, or turning right or stopping. Is it perfect? No? Does it have any practical application No? Does the car go very fast? No? But it does show that the thought control of devices is improving. Maybe one day we

won't have to type on keyboards anymore. We can just think about what we want to type and it'll come out on the screen as we think it. If you google interesting reading number six nine six, you can see the details. There is now a new material available that has the moldibility of plastic and the strength of steel.

The key is an alloy called metallic glass. So instead of having to forge or cut the steel on a C and C machine, these new alloys can be poured into a mold or blown like uh plastic bottle is blown through blow molding. Scientists are claiming that This could open up a whole new world of inexpensive metal parts. They claim it could be as revolutionary as the development of plastics has been. If that's true, and if you think about how ubiquitous and cheap plastic is today, you

can get a sense of what's in store. Google Interesting Reading number six nine six for details. There is a guy in Spain who has lived to be a hundred and fourteen years old. Obviously, scientists would like to know what's going on, so they've been studying the guy. So far, they've determined that he is not a mutant. He appears to have a normal genome. So what do they think is going on? First, he's been on the Mediterranean diet all his life. Plus, the weather is nice where he lives,

and he stayed active. Apparently he rode his bike every day up until the age of a hundred and two. So if you want to live to be more than a hundred, you might want to get on your bikes arting tomorrow. You might want to google the Mediterranean diet and see what he's eating. And maybe you want to move to Florida or San Diego if you want to get out of the cold weather. You can Google Interesting Reading number six s to learn more about the one

hundred and fourteen year old Spaniard. Speaking of humans who live a long time, there was another article looking at the number of early human beings on planet Earth. Apparently, for a period of about a million years, there just weren't that many of our human ancestors around. There were maybe twenty thousand breeding humans, twenty six thousand at most,

according to the article. Why such a small number? Apparently there was a huge volcanic eruption that nearly wiped out humanity, and possibly a second event at that same scale, and then it's likely that without rifles and hd TVs and cars and so on, we just didn't compete exceedingly well with the local fauna. If you go to Interesting Reading number six six you can learn more out early humans, and there are a couple other really interesting evolution articles

in there. And finally there's an article entitled six important things you didn't know We're running out of And really that's a good title because it immediately creates curiosity. I mean, we all know that we're running out of oil and we're running out of bluefin tuna, But what are the six things that I didn't know about. I'll give you the short version here, and you can google interesting reading number six nine six for the details. The six things are first of all helium. It could all be gone

in twenty five years. Second is chocolate because there's only so many places to grow it. Third is radioactive medical isotopes because there are just not very many suppliers left. Fourth is tequila, of all things, because of the destruction of the cactus from which tequila is derived. That number five is phosphorus, which could all be gone in thirty years, at least the easy supplies of it, and that would be a freaking disaster if we ran out of phosphorus.

And finally water. Now, obviously we aren't going to run out of water per se. It's fresh water that's the problem. Because we are busy eliminating the aquifers and sucking rivers dry as it is as the population grows, coming up with supplies of fresh water is a real problem. So well, that's not really an upper to end up on. I guess I'll say that you should go get a glass of water and be thankful for it, and also be thankful the next time you see a helium balloon, because

they may not be around that much longer anyway. If you'd like to learn more, you can google interesting reading number six and have a great weekend. 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 I Find app has arrived. Let it Today on iTunes.