Marshall Brain's News Roundup No. 2

hundred or so, I just ran out of time. And I apologize if I wasn't able to personally respond to you, but thanks so much for sending them in, and I will try to use several of the suggestions I got today in doing this. If you'd like to comment more, i'd welcome that, And you can go to how stuff works dot com using the using my email address m bur Ane at how stuff works dot com and send me comments, or the Facebook page is uh facebook dot com slash brain stuff. Feel free um, and I will

try to respond and and thank you again. I really appreciate it. So let's look at the news what happened this week. If I had to pick the most interesting thing, I saw on the web this week. Keeping in mind that I'm a robotics kind of guy, it's the fact that the I Tripoli Magazines I Tripoli Spectrum did an article on David Hansen's robot heads. Now, Hanson has been working on these things for for maybe as much as

a decade. I know, back in like two thousand three or something, Popular Science did a big article on it. So he's been working at this for a long time,

and they are getting so realistic. It really is amazing. Um. You know, if you want to look at one of these heads, you can go to Google right now and you can type in interest reading number six eight four and the top link will be my article that contains a link to the video, and you look at it, and like I said, Hansen's heads are getting very very close. The blinking isn't quite there yet, but otherwise just wow.

I envision one day walking into like a favorite restaurant chain with Lee and this very attractive man or woman comes up, acting as a Greater and says like, hi, Marshall, it's great to have you here. How are the kids? And she will be a robot. I'll be able to walk into any restaurant in the chain, and I will be recognized because all these robots will share the same database, and they'll use facial recognition and they'll be able to talk.

And you know, when you look at the heads that that Hanson is creating, it's not that hard to imagine it happening in the not too distant future. We got to get the natural language processing figure year doubt, and we have to get some of the mechanics of walking and stuff made more fluid. But it's coming. It's coming, and it just wasn't It was really interesting to look

at how realistic the heads are. So a lot of you commented that I need to do some kind of separator between stories because it was a little confusing last time. So here's the separator flip. You might remember the Icelandic volcano that erupted last year. It became famous because it totally shut down the airlines in Europe. You may remember nothing was flying. They couldn't fly in Europe and they couldn't fly between Europe and the United States because of

the ash that that volcano threw up. The ash would get into jet engines and destroy them. So now there's evidence in the form of a swarm of earthquakes, that there may be another eruption coming up, and it could be a lot bigger than the last one. Uh. That article is linked in Interesting Reading them or six eighty

four as well, and it contains this cool quote. The last recorded eruption of whatever the name of this volcano is, because I can't pronounce it, but let's say it's Barta Bunga was in nineteen ten, although volcanologists believe its last major eruption occurred in fourteen seventy seven, when it produced a large ash and plumas fallout. It also produced the largest known lava flow during the past ten thousand years

on Earth. That's a lot of lava, especially if you've ever seen the volcano that's been erupting on Hawaii for you know forever, it's produced a lot of lava. And to think that this was the largest known lava flow in ten thousand years is an incredible amount of lava. So if that volcano blows, we may never fly to Europe again. For all I know. That article was published by the Telegraph. Blip. We now know how fleas are

able to jump so far. Now. I don't know if you've ever experienced fleas, or if you've even ever seen a flea jump, and it may not seem like such a big deal if you never have, but the jumping ability of fleas is utterly amazing when you consider their size. I'm gonna admit that I haven't seen a flea in years, but that's only because someone invented those flea drops that you put on the back of the dog, and they work. Those flea drops work incredibly well and they get rid

of all fleas. But before those drops were invented, I used to live on a farm in Zebula, North Carolina, and I had eight dogs and they would bring fleas into the house, obviously, especially in the summer. And you've got a lot of experience with fleas and they really are amazing. Or if you've ever seen um some of the studies on fleas and flea circuses and stuff, that they're they're cool bugs if you don't mind the fact

that they suck your blood. Anyway, the way these fleas jump is that they have what's essentially a spring mechanism, and the leg muscle doesn't drive the leg directly, It loads up the spring and then releases it. And that springs release is what drives the leg and lets the fleas jump so far, and the leg has this cool kind of multipart lever system that makes the most of

that spring. So they figured all this out by taking these really nice high speed slow motion movies of fleas jumping and kind of reverse engineering what was going on. So again, if you google interesting reading numbers six eight four, you can find an article that has a video showing fleas jumping. And you know, I guess you could go out and this summer get your dog to bring you some fleas and you can watch them do their thing.

It truly is amazing. Blip. You may have heard that Russian scientists have been down in Antarctica this summer, and yes, it's summer in Antarctica right now, because that's the Southern Hemisphere, and they're trying to drill a borehole through the ice to reach an ancient ice entombed lake that's underneath Antarctica, and they're hoping to find cool new life forms there because this lake has been cut off from everything else

they think for something like fourteen million years. So they've been drilling through the ice more than two miles now all summer long, trying to get down into the water of this lake, and they're like a hundred feet from breaking through and getting to the lake. And they ran out of time because summer's ending, and if they were to stay there too long, it gets so cold you can't take off and land airplanes anymore because it freezes up the hydraulic fluid and stuff. And so they had

to get out. So before they left, they filled this two mile deep borehole with kerosene, hopped on their plane and took off. The rasine was put there to keep the whole from closing back up, so that, you know, they don't have to go and redrill the whole thing next year, because it took the whole summer to drill it, so they need to be able to start with with a partially done whole. But as you can imagine, there's a lot of people who just are not happy about

the kerosene. What if the kerosene contaminates the lake, what if you know, who knows what else. So you know, there are international bodies that worry about this kind of stuff, and we'll see how this plays out over the next year. Blip Reuters published an article that says that Facebook and Google are considering the idea of buying Twitter. The thing that's most amazing about the article is the price. It's

as high as ten billion dollars for Twitter. Just to put that into perspective, that's like what that's like two hours of the Iraqi war. Okay, that's a bad analogy, but let's put it in a different perspective. Think about all of the factories and all of the employees and all the stuff that General Motors has to have in order to be a worldwide company making, you know, millions of automobiles. It's a huge, unbelievable, complicated, a massive company.

That company, if they were to sell a hundred thousand Chevy Vaults at forty tho dollars each, that transaction alone, that one model alone, that's four billion dollars. GM is a massive company. That company is only worth fifty billion dollars in market cap, and Forward is about the same.

So you have Twitter, which is little hundred and forty character messages that people randomly flip off to each other, and you have GM, which forges cars and trucks out of steel and aluminum to drive the nation or whatever. Yet GM is worth not that much more than Twitter. It's just it's amazing. So what does this mean? Think about it? What does this mean? This means that we

need to get out there and start us some websites. Wow, we we need to be creating websites because who knows what the next Twitter like idea will be or where it will come from. You know, it's just not that complicated an idea to be worth that kind of money, and it indicates that we should be creating websites. Blip I did a podcast about this a couple of months ago, but it broke into the mainstream news this week. So

let me let me just mention it again. A scientist has developed what is being called a thinking cap or a creativity cap that can enhance your creative abilities by disrupting your left hemisphere. So think about some of the things savants can do. Like, you know, you've probably seen this with certain autistic people. You can, you know, drop a box of matches on the floor, or and they can instantly count all the matches just by looking at

it one time. Or they can draw incredibly well, or they have photographic memories, or they can solve complex math problems in their head. Most normal people can't do this kind of stuff, But it turns out maybe we actually can. And what this thinking cap or creativity cap does is it gets in and disrupts part of the left hemisphere for a period of time like an hour, and these abilities get uncovered in normal people. It's almost like the left hemisphere is masking them or or making these abilities,

uh be suppressed. And once you get the left hemisphere out of the picture, prestoh, these magical abilities become available to normal people. So one professor who's working on this project calls it the biggest cognitive enhancement we are aware of. And you know, this could become a commercial product in the not too distant future because this isn't like you know, it doesn't require a machine the size of a skyscraper or anything like that. It's a really pretty simple device.

So it's something you know, maybe we can buy it at Best Buy in in two years or something like that. Blip. There was a lot of stuff about tablet computers this week. The biggest announcement probably is from HP, which released its new touch pad tablet. So last week there were only three major tablet operating systems. There was Apples, there was Android,

and there was Windows seven. So this week the hp product makes a completely new operating system available, and this one is called web os, which was developed by Palm and hp bot. Palm last year in order to get web os the demos that you can find on YouTube or you know, on on the brain stuff blog. There's a lot of videos out. They look pretty interesting and will know probably in a year whether this operating system

is able to get any traction and take off. Meanwhile, the iPad two has apparently gone into production in preparation for its announcements sometime this spring. Apple has sold something like fifteen million of the original iPads, or more than a million a month, so it needs to start production long before the announcement in order to get enough new

iPads into the pipeline to meet demand. Once the announcement happens, of course, the new one's thinner, and it'll have a camera for FaceTime on the front of it, and the CPU gets upgraded. But you know, it's not that much different from the existing iPad. It certainly can't jump as far as a flea can or anything like that. Blip Wired wrote about a piece of performance art that is

really pretty original. Two people donate their white blood cells and then those white blood cells battle it out in an arena under a my groscope to see who has the stronger immune system. This is not quite as easy as it sounds, because you have to have somebody draw blood, and then the white blood cells need to be isolated from the red blood cells and and put aside, and then they need to be stained with a color so you know which team is winning and which team is losing.

But you have to admit that it's a pretty interesting way for two people to have a competition, and then you know the winner can go on and and fight with somebody else. You can imagine Obama versus Putin or something coming up in the future. Blip. NASA is getting ready to design another new rocket, but it's arguing with Congress right now about the cost of that new rocket.

And as you may recall, NASA is about to have its last Shuttle flight, and last year NASA had its first test flight of its Constellation rocket that was going to replace the Shuttle in terms of getting people into orbit, but the Constellation program was cut with the hope that private companies can pick up the slack. The other rocket that NASA needs to build is a heavy lift vehicle because the Shuttle was good at getting big stuff into orbit.

This heavy lift rocket would use many of the parts from the Shuttle, including the solid rocket boosters and the Shuttle's main engines, in order to cut the costs. But NASA still isn't sure that it has enough money to bring this thing into into flight status. We should be able to see the results of their calculations by this summer, and if the money is available, the new rocket is

supposed to have test flights in five years. Speaking of the Shuttle, there's been some discussion of letting a private company take over the Shuttle after it retires so that it can keep flying. A company called United Space Alliance already is in charge of the thousands of people who process shuttles for flight and launch them. This company would take over and fly the Shuttle as a private enterprise,

rather than seeing it of balled. It might be a win win for both the employees of that company and NASA if they can pull this off. Blip, a new drone for the Navy that is a pilot less aircraft, took its first flight this week. This one's unique because it's stealthy, and it also should be able to replace manned fighters, and if things work out as planned, it will be able to take off and land on aircraft carriers,

which would be a first. It has a longer range than manned fighters, over two thousand miles, meaning that an aircraft carrier could sit hundreds of miles away from the target and launch these drones at enemy targets, particularly at any aircraft installations where you don't want to be flying

people near them anyway. So if things work out in the next couple of years, those things will start landing and taking off from carriers and that will begin, you know, that will be the start of the beginning of the end of manned flight, probably because once you get drones that can replay fighters, robots are going to take over that whole business. Probably. Blip pharmacies in the United States

have a problem. People who are addicted to pain killers have started robbing pharmacies to get the drugs in the same way that people rob banks. You know, like a guy with a mask or a you know, pantyhose over his face comes in with a gun or a machete or a knife for something like that and demands, you know, it's not give me all your money. It's give me your pain killers. And this is happening more and more at local drug stores. There are now hundreds of pharmacy

robberies every year. It's getting so bad that we may have to start buying our prescriptions through cages or through bulletproof glass dividers to keep robbers away from the drugs. If you go to how stuff works and read how OxyContin works, you can understand why this is happening. Blip. And finally I saw this this morning and it it just well, let me say that someone suggested that I end on something that was particularly interesting and funny to be, so this is it. I saw an article in Fast

Company magazine talking about the death of Dig. If you've been following social media sites, Dig started imploding last year when they did a redesign that that absolutely ticked off their audience. So they haven't recovered from that, and so the article is called why dig may never find its

way back. So I was reading this article and way down at the bottom of it, there is this amazing little paragraph that says, and I quote, most would be shocked to learn that some of Dig's competitors actually pay people to generate interesting, witty and intellectual comments. It's not discussed in many circles, but nobody really worries if it makes us laugh, smile or think? Who cares if it's artificial?

End quote? Now is that true? Like when you go to Reddit or slash dot or farc are you you know, are a lot of the comments being produced by ringers who have been paid to put those comments in there? And if it is true, how much do you get paid to put artificial comments into a website? Like? Think about it? If you're addicted to a site like dig or Reddit, how easy would a job like that be you? What do you do for a living? Well? I read articles on websites and I write witty comments and get

paid for it. That would be it, you know, that would be a pretty nice way to make a living if it pays anything. Anyway, That's it for today. I'm Marshall brain and until next time, have a good weekend for moralns 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 hsw the house Stuff Works

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