This week's episode begins with what appears on the surface to be a seemingly innocent Twitter question...
Q: How do you avoid brain freeze when you eat ice-cream?
Well, after a couple of rather fully hectic tangents (3 * ‘ALERTS' in 5 MINUTES!!), Dr Karl finally gets around to the answer. Don't worry though cause there's a load of interesting extra information coming your way during this little journey...
For those after a more succinct answer, pop this little video explanation on...
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Big floods in Thailand...via one rather large Tangent, ALERT!
Shave explains Signal to Noise Ratio, no wait, Karl explains Signal to Noise, no wait Shave does...
Onwards, compression algorithms of the audio and visual kind. JPEGS, GIFs, MPEGs 1, 2 & even 3!
Back to Thailand, hard drives and backups. The factories that make 90% of the hard drives in the world were located in Thailand, and most of them were destroyed during the huge floods at the end of 2011. It's a convoluted path, but what Dr Karl and Dr Shave are trying to say here is that this ‘single point' failure in Thailand has resulted in a world shortage of hard drives.
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Karl questions Shave about the gig he'll be playing at Wembley Stadium...impressive much. Shave gives Karl the low down on Keytars.
And onwards... This episode includes the following topics for discussion:
The Viking Sun Stone & Viking Berserkers
Physicists and archaeologist have been working together and it seems they have some fairly concrete ideas about the Norse legend of the "sunstone" and its use as a navigational tool. Looks like those clever little Berserkers were right across the polarisation of light, which would have allowed them to navigate on a cloudy day.
Read the full academic article here:
Or the overview style article here:
And the Monty Python version of events...
The bacteria that live in your gut can make you fat or skinny. How so? For more information, grab yourself of Karl's new book, BRAIN FOOD or read the GMIS related stories HERE, HERE and HERE
Toxoplasmosis gondii is a parasite that is hosted/breeds inside members of the cat family. If infected by this parasite, some pretty interesting stuff can happen - you might become slightly more suicidal and, you can have up to 6 times increased rate of car accidents...
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Karl's hoping to see the Northern Lights (aurora) while he's on his current holiday...he tells a little about his previous aurora experience via a rather large tangent.
Karl and Shave discuss CMEs, the possibility of magnetic pole reversal and other tangents, including: the fascinating world of gut microbes, and the incredible story of a woman who's life was saved by a poo transplant - that's right, she had a ‘Transpoosion.'
FREE EXTRACT FROM NEW BOOK, BRAIN FOOD HERE!
This time lapse footage of the Northern Lights, taken in a single night from Norway, is beautiful. It does not look real. Unfortunately there's an ad to sit through, but it is well worth the wait.
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Dr Karl is currently on hoiidays in Europe. The tour bus stopped off briefly so that Karl could pop into Large Hadron Collider at CERN to check that things are in working order...
This tiny bottle of hydrogen, bought from an ordinary commercial gas supply company, is the source of all the protons in the Large Hadron Collider. A "Hadron" is a sub-atomic particle that can interact easily with other particles. A proton is a hadron. A hydrogen atom is the most simple atom of all - one single proton in the core of the atom, with a single electron orbiting around it. It is quite easy to strip the electron off a hydrogen atom, leaving behind a single proton. This tiny bottle has enough hydrogen/protons to supply the Large Hadron Collider with 2 years' worth of protons.
This is the Secure Entry through which I had to pass, to get through to get to the actual Beam of the Large Hadron Collider. The thick steel and glass doors open up, if you have the proper authorisation. You step into the box, and the doors close behind you, locking you in. The Iris Scanner is the glowing blue box on the right hand side. You place your face against the Iris Scanner. If it likes you, the other doors open. If not, you are locked in.
This is 100 metres underground. Under the bright light in the middle is a large yellow pipe. On its left side, a shiny steel pipe emerges. This is the beam pipe. It's currently open for maintenance. Burt normally, inside is a vacuum ten times thinner than is present on the surface of the moon. A beam of protons (hydrogen atoms minus the electrons), about the thickness of a human hair, travels at very close to the speed of light. This tiny beam carries as much energy as a express train travelling at 160 kph. On the left side, is the CMS.
The CMS is now behind me. It's the Compact Muon Solenoid - but at 7,000 tonnes and twice the height of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, it's not very compact. Inside the CMS, two beams of protons (each carrying the energy of a speeding express train, but travelling in opposite directions) collide. The CMS "captures" these collisions (600 million every second), and thus begins the long process of analysing the data. The discoveries that this machine will give us will revolutionise our science, our technology, our society and the way that we live. Already, CERN has given us the PET Scanner (1980s) and the World Wide Web (21st Dec, 1990).
It's snowing outside, and we are all going out to frolic on this lovely Monday morning.
Karl
Dr Karl is fascinated & impressed that as a muscian Shave is the proud owner of a telescope, and isn't just busy lying around drunk, and hitting the clubs like a real rockstar would!
In this return Blogcast episode, Dr Karl and Dr Shave discuss, via a MASSIVE tangent about Karl's upcoming journey to Iceland and space elevators...
The rock that nearly hit us! In November 2011, Asteroid 2005 YU55 came 200,000 miles of the Earth, just inside the orbit of the Moon. In astronomical terms, it's what you might call a close Shave? Close...Shave...get it? Oh, tough crowd. Watch it yourself.
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Special Blogcast: Brain Food Twitter Launch
To celebrate the launch of his 31st book Brain Food, Dr Karl answered questions that were sent in via Twiitter. There was a barrage of interesting, fun and quirky questions. The entire hour was broadcast live on the internet and we captured it. It's pretty loose and, is well worth a checking out.
To download the broadcast as audio podcast, click here or here for iTunes.
Or
Watch the broadcast:
BRAIN FOOD, OUT NOW!
Karl has been on holidays with his family, here's a special edition Blog covering some of their travels....
I have been in a Strange Part of the World - the Australian Tropics
1. In the middle of winter, the temperature reaches 30C. The ocean and rivers are a lovely cooling delight, but you can't swim in them (crocodiles). The roads are sealed twin-lane blacktop, but you can't drive on them after dark (kangaroos and wallablies)
2. Montgomery reef. The ocean is at high tide, with the ocean flat to the horizon, with only some patches of land visible on the horizon. Then, quite quickly, the clear water becomes turbulent, as 400 square kilometres of sandstone rise out of the ocean at the rate of 3 cm/minute, to a final height of 7 metres - a strange reverse Altantis. Various marine creatures are stranded on the new land, and birds swoop in to feed. Six hours later, the sandstone begins to sink, and then then it all happens again another six hours later. In reality, the Montgomery Reefs are just under the surface at High Tide, and the massive tides of 7 metres reveal and submerge the land twice each day. (These massive tides are common in the NW of Australia)
Click pic to see rest
3. The Horizontal Water Falls, where the Indian Ocean tries to get through a narrow gap. So the water gushes through at over 32 kph, and the difference in height from one side to the other (over a 15 metre length) is 2 metres.
4. 17,000+ year-old Bradshaw/Gwion-Gwion Art, made by peoples unknown to us, and unknown to the modern local Aborigines. I attach photos of what seems to be a Diprotodon - a 2-tonne, 3-metre animal that looked like a rhino without a horn, and the largest marsuipal known. However, Diprotodons seem to have gone extinct about 45,000 to 25,000 years ago. In the background, you can see Lola crawling through the access to the site. There seem to be major technical problems to accurately dating the Gwion-Gwion Art - even today!
Looks like a diprotodon to me Lola crawling into the cave, diprotodon to the right
5. The tropical island, Bandar, that was the original source of nutmeg was a British island surrounded by unfriendly Dutch. After a few centuries, they swapped it with the Dutch for a Dutch island surrounded by unfriendly British. What was this new island? (And, within 400 km of Darwin is a 400 year old Dutch fort, in magnificent condition).
6. 12 metre tides at Derby, about 220 km out of Broome. Click here to read a story I wrote some years ago about these tides.