Grow a supercomputer in your garden! Someday, maybe.
Transistors might already be growing in your backyard. For decades they’ve been
made from silicon, germanium, and gallium arsenide -- but it’s a lot easier to mine
trees. Researchers at Wallenberg Wood Science Center took the lignin out of balsa wood then
penetrated the wood with a polymer to make its fibers conductive -- and successfully made the
world’s first wooden transistor. This is a step toward what researchers call “electronic
plants” -- live or dead trees that could contain on-off switches for applications like solar cells.
So Team Trees may have planted over 20 million trees -- but they also might
have accidentally planted 20 million computers.
Vsauce! One story down, seven to go. This is Mind Blow.
We now have a perfect 3D scan of the wrecked Titanic.
We’ve seen glimpses of the Titanic and video of its pieces -- and now we can see a perfect 3D
scan that is life-sized and true to scale. The Titanic is just under 900 feet long,
but it broke in half when it sank -- its bow and stern are now 2,600
feet apart and 12,500 feet below the surface. Magellan Limited, a deep sea mapping company,
spent over 200 hours using submersibles to take over 700,000 images of the wreck. The compiled
scan is so detailed that you can see abandoned shoes and unopened champagne bottles -- and
hopefully, it will reveal the secrets of the iceberg collision that made it famous.
It’s been 113 years since the Titanic went down, and 38 years since the wreck
was discovered -- and despite being a cultural and scientific obsession,
we don’t actually really know that much about what happened.
Sniff your pee like a Roman!
The Forum of Caesar was completed over 2,000 years ago as an expansion of the Forum Romanum -- but
500 years ago a guild of bakers built a hospital there. Archaeologists with the Caesar’s Forum
Project have unearthed a cistern full of medical waste from that era including matula,
glass flasks for analyzing a patient’s urine. Urine was a useful diagnostic tool, giving clues
about a patient’s illness through color, smell, and yes even taste. By the 1700s, pee-sniffing was
a medical joke -- but urine analysis continued to be useful for diagnosing kidney diseases.
So I say, “Veni, vidi… wee-wee!”
Teach a robot how to be YOU.
Sanctuary AI has created its 6th-generation robot that starts by learning about you and
your life. Phoenix has a humanoid form controlled by teleoperation,
where users transmit their movements to the robot -- because Sanctuary thinks the
best way to build an artificial mind is to start by collecting data on what you
actually do with your body. So instead of just running a program to wash the dishes,
it’ll replicate how you scrape your mom’s charred meat loaf off a plate.
Sanctuary has focused on hand and finger movements -- Phoenix can’t walk yet. But it can kinda dab.
Electric brain sticker? Electric brain sticker!
Implants on the brain require a hole in the skull that’s at least as big as the implant itself… but
researchers at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne have developed a sticker that works
like a ship in a bottle. It’s a soft robotic electrocorticography grid that its creators
describe as being ‘octopus-like’ -- the silicon rubber is covered in flexible gold electrodes just
400 micrometers thick, and it goes into a hole just a fraction of its size and then unfolds.
It’s a minimally invasive way to monitor neuroactivity, and the researchers see it as being
useful to track implants for epilepsy -- but it’s a major step in brain-computer interfaces, meaning
I’m one step closer to getting a Playstation welded directly onto my cerebral cortex.
Hey! Are you a programmer working on an open source project that could disrupt the Big Tech
oligopolies? And uhh.. Here’s another question. Do you want to be paid to work exclusively on
your project? Well, FUTO, the sponsor of this video, is now accepting applicants for
its Summer FUTO Fellows Program. And there will be another round for Fall jus in case
you miss Summer! I’m actually friends with the guys from FUTO so I’m happy to spread the word
for them and help them find amazing candidates who have open source projects and have or plan
to develop an honest business model, like one that doesn’t sell user’s data. If accepted,
fellows will get up to $80k per team and housing and office space in Austin,
Texas. Does that sound good to you? Yeah? Well then click the link in the description below
or in my pinned comment to apply. Thanks to FUTO for supporting Vsauce2 and good luck, programmers.
We’ve found the world’s oldest blueprints!
Precise architectural plans depend on the careful application of geometry, trigonometry,
and art -- unless you look like this. Engravings from Jordan and Saudi Arabia depict “desert
kites,” which were massive structural funnels used to trap animals -- what’s remarkable is
they’re kilometers long, so they can only be seen from the sky. That means Stone Age homo sapiens,
9,000 years ago, conceived of something they couldn’t actually see and then built it -- it
shows incredibly sophisticated spatial awareness and the successful execution of abstract thought.
Bury your NOSE in virtual reality.
VR is primarily visual and tactile -- but researchers at City University of
Hong Kong want immersive smelling. Olfaction is a major part of a human’s perceptual experience,
and their mask can release 9 different scents and the wearer can detect scents 1.5 seconds
after activation. including mint, jasmine, and pineapple. Scents were first injected
into theaters in 1868, and Smell-O-Vision in 1960 revealed the problems with virtual
odors. They’re easy to pump in, but they’re hard to remove to clear the way for the next
scent, and you end up with a horrible combination of some kind of fart stink.
The chip and bluetooth technology in the mask takes care of that, and researchers see the
device not only for entertainment, but to be used to replicate the smell of a loved one.
They also made a 5 centimeter patch that goes on the upper lip,
which can release 2 different scents -- but me? I don’t think I’ll be wearing that in public.
Flinging pee with a butt catapult… is important, I promise.
Fluid dynamics are an element of life -- and when your diet is xylem fluid, you’re gonna expel a
lot of juice. The glassy-winged sharpshooter is smaller than the tip of your pinky finger, but
it has a mechanism that achieves superpropulsion -- a tiny droplet of pee forms and is immediately
shot like a catapult by its anal stylus -- which one of its researchers calls a “butt flicker.”
The amazing thing is the speed of the droplets in the air is actually faster
than the movement of the stylus by a factor of 1.4 -- the surface tension stores energy,
and with perfect timing, the droplet springs outward.
Glassy-winged sharpshooters drink about 300 times their body weight in xylem sap every day,
so they get a lot of practice pee-flinging. And it actually
is useful to us: studying insect efficiency could help us understand
how to shed water faster from surfaces or removing solvents in manufacturing.
Nobody seems to wanna study me doing this.
And now the surprisingly simple concept of the Sony Walkman in 1983.
Take a cassette out of its case and most people
just see an empty box. But Sony saw something quite different.
Sony introduces the only cassette player
as small as a cassette case. The incredible-sounding super Walkman.