Marshall Brain's News Roundup No. 1

get your feedback on the approach. You can post something to Facebook by visiting Facebook dot com slash brain Stuff, or you can send me an email at m brain at how stuff works dot com. So we'll give this a try. If the feedback is really bad, we won't do this again. But if it's okay, then we probably do this every Friday. So first off, let's look at the four blog posts that really resonated and drove a

lot of traffic on the blogs this week. By far, the most popular is the post on the Jerusalem UFO. Over the last weekend, there was supposedly a UFO sighting at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, with four videos supposedly recording the event. In my opinion, this is one of the best orchestrated video hoaxes in YouTube history. But you can go look at the videos and be the judge yourself. The second blog post covered a remarkable speech given by a nineteen year old college student named

Zach Walls to the Iowa House. Zach was speaking out against the constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage. The thing that was so amazing about it was first of all, his ability to deliver such a good speech at age nineteen, and second the content of what he said. The third was a post on the bandwidth caps being put in place in Canada, limiting a household to twenty five gigabytes of bandwidth per month. This is enough for about seven

or eight Netflix or similar movies. Once you reach that gigabyte limit, you pay two dollars per gigabyte above it. What this means is that a Netflix movie costs about eight dollars for the bandwidth once you exceed your cap. The idea caused such a huge uproar that it now looks like the government's going to repeal it. And finally, there was a blog post on a new device that makes it much easier for doctors to treat severe burns.

The device is essentially an airbrush that, instead of spraying paint, sprays skin stem cells derived from the patient's own skin very rapidly. Healing is unbelievably quick. Just a few days, and the healed skin is almost undetectable for second degree burns. Now, let's turn to the best news stories of the week. First off, a Texas student is attending a public high school as a robot. Lynden Batty has a compromised immune system, so he uses a telepresence robot to attend classes at

high school using a computer screen and speakers. He can see and hear through the robot, and his mouse can drive the robot to the different classrooms. It's funny to think about this. Imagine what a high school or college would look like if this really took off. Hallways would be filled with thousands of little robots. It might make for an interesting prom as well. News Corp Is finally unveiled its iPad app for reading the news. The news

is called The Daily. In this case, they used about an hour of time on Fox News to broadcast the announcement of this new product. After downloading the app onto your iPad, users pay nine cents a week for the content. It's essentially an electronic newspaper. It will be very interesting

to see how this experience them it works out. Will people pay fifty two dollars a year for a subscription to an electronic newspaper, presumably because it makes reading the news easy, or would people rather get their news for free alla cart from the thousands of news websites and news aggregators on the web. We will see how this works. Wiki leaks announced that al Qaeda is nearly ready to

use dirty bombs. As you'll recall, a dirty bomb is a normal explosive mixed with nuclear material, so when the bomb explodes, it contaminates a wide area with radioactivity. The type of nuclear material use controls just how toxic and long lasting the contamination is. This information comes according to one of the diplomatic cables that wiki leaks has been

releasing over the last several weeks. There's also concerned that enriched uranium, which could be used to make a full on nuclear bomb, is being smuggled due al Qaeda as well. Denmark is get being ready to build an eighteen kilometer or roughly eleven mile long tunnel to Germany. It was gonna be a bridge, but the tunnel seems to be friendlier to the environment. It will cost about seven billion

dollars to put this thing together. For comparison, the Channel tunnel between England and France is about three times longer, or thirty one miles. Intel has started recalling chips that support its high end Sandy Bridge processors, meaning that if you have a motherboard containing these chips you need to get a replacement. The problem affects the disc drives connected through the chips sat a controller and could really hurt

the performance of a high end computer. It's thought that it will cost Intel about a billion dollars to fix this mistake. Scientists are working on plants, you know, like little house plants and plants for your garden, that can detect certain chemicals and then turn white in their presence. The chemicals get absorbed through the leaves and interact with the plants chemistry to cause the color change in the leaves,

hopefully in just a few minutes. It's thought that these plants could be put around buildings are left in airports, and if chemicals came into play, the plants would let people see what's happening. Would you like to go somewhere where you can really really see the Milky Way at night and all its stars. If you've ever seen it, you know it's a magnificent site. But it's getting harder and harder to see it because of light pollution caused

by cities and suburbs. One option is to get on a boat and go well out to see to escape the lights. Another is to visit the island of Sark near Britain. It is the first place to be certified as a dark Sky community. You won't find any street lights or big illuminated stadiums on this island. The whole goal is to keep it dark so you can actually see the stars at night. Are you looking for a

new graphics card. Tom's Hardware dot com now has a list of the best cards for the money on their website, and they update it every month as the technology advances. For example, if you're on a budget and you want the best card under a hundred dollars, the page on Tom's Hardware dot com will help you find it. Have you seen these locks? They're commonly called simplex locks that have five mechanical buttons on the front. You push the

buttons in the right order to unlock the lock. There are millions of these things all over the world, providing access control to doors. Now it turns out that if you have a big enough neodymium magnet, you can open one of these locks almost instantly. The magnet needs to be pretty big, about the size of half a baseball, which means that it's fairly dangerous to the user because

of a pinch hazard. But it's still interesting that the locks, which self for about three hundred dollars, are so vulnerable. Amazon appears to be ready to start stree naming movies like Netflix does. The pitch is that it quote is unlimited, commercial, free instant streaming of five thousand movies and TV shows at no additional costs to normal Amazon Prime subscribers. This is currently just a rumor. It's been seen by certain people uncertain screens that were publicly released by Amazon and

then retracted. There's not been a formal announcement yet, but because of the screens, it's thought that Amazon is getting ready to announce this. Amazon will have a lot of catching up to do, mainly because Netflix has managed to get its service embedded into so many TV and Blu Ray players. There's word from NASA that a developing plasma engine could make Mars missions a lot quicker. It might

even make a mission to Jupiter possible. The idea is to use nuclear power to create heat and electricity for the engine. The nuclear fuel heats the propellant gas to a plasma state before it gets mag metically accelerated to produce thrust. The goal is a ship that travels at more than a hundred thousand miles per hour, which is about four times faster than chemical rockets can go. One big question that has to be answered is how to

get a nuclear reactor safely into orbit. White space WiFi has moved a step closer this week with the FCC granting licenses denying companies to use the spectrum. As you may recall, white space spectrum uses radio frequencies between accessed frequency bands, as well as TV spectrum that's been released by the switch to digital TV. If we're lucky, it would be possible to create a powerful nationwide WiFi network using white space that lowers the cost of wireless data significantly.

If you've been following the protests in Egypt this week, you know that one peculiar and unexpected event was the shutdown of the Internet in Egypt. Egypt, the entire country disappeared from the Internet for several days, and the text messaging system was also shut down. How did they do that? It's known that the five major Internet providers in Egypt cut off access in sequence, with about three minutes between providers.

According to Scientific American. Based on that sequencing and the timing, it's thought that the government simply called the providers up and asked each one to disconnect. And finally, out of China, there's news that a maglev train there is traveling as fast as an airplane. It's only an experimental model, but it's still promising because it is so fast and because it uses about a tenth of the energy used by

an airplane. The train is able to travel so fast because it's traveling inside a vacuum tube, a tube where all the air has been sucked out. And this is just the first step, and the future speeds could ramp up by a factor of ten. If you would like more details on any of these topics, you can visit the brain Stuff blog at blogs dot how stuff works dot com. Look for the posts marked interesting reading. And as I said at the beginning, your feedback on this

format would be great. Did you enjoy this podcast or not? How is the length and the detail level on each topic? You can post something to Facebook by visiting Facebook dot com slash brain stuff, or you can send me an email at M brain at how stuff works dot com. Thanks a lot 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

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