Welcome to the Geek News Central podcast. I'm
your host, Ray Cochran.
I have a great episode lined up for
you guys tonight.
Leading off, T Mobile just opened registration for
their Starlink satellite beta, Your regular phone connecting
directly to satellites.
No dead zones anywhere in the world. This
is happening, folks.
Also on the show, Japan tested a ship
mounted laser that can shoot down drones forever
without running out of ammo.
China's Maglev train just broke speed records. Google's
taking another shot at smart glasses with Gemini
AI built in, and we've got physicists three
d printing ice sculptures just in time for
Christmas.
Let's get into it.
Welcome to episode eighteen fifty four of the
Geek News Central podcast. It is
what? Tuesday. Tuesday night.
I'm actually giving this a second go for
the
recording. It had some audio issues that we'll
kinda get into later. But
leading article here, T Mobile opens registration for
Starlink satellite beta source.
We got this from, phonearea.com,
written by Alan Friedman.
We all know about dead zones. Dead zones,
happen all over. You you might be out
hiking in the forest,
maybe in a place that's not so,
regular traffic, maybe going to visit some family
and you're driving out in the boonies.
It is awful to lose phone signal when
you have no clue where you are.
Those places show up, as zero bars on
your phone, you just wave your hand in
the air. We've all been there. It's it's
the worst feeling ever.
Well, guess what? T Mobile and SpaceX have
a little solution they've been working on. And
it's, connecting your phone to regular directly to
Starlink satellites with no special equipment.
So on December 16, T Mobile opened a
beta registration for the Starlight director direct to
cell service. With over 300 satellites already in
orbit, they're starting beta tests early twenty twenty
five. Initially
oh, I guess early twenty twenty
six.
Yeah.
Hold its fourth quarter and full year earning
call on February 4.
So they're launching that, early twenty twenty six.
And,
initially, it's only gonna be texting only with
voice and data coming later.
The the service is free for T Mobile
postpaid customers and specifically
prioritizes
first responders.
They already proved it works During hurricanes, Helene
and Milton, they temporarily activated the service for
emergency communications.
And what does this mean for you guys?
Well, this could genuinely end dead zones. At
500,000
square miles of The US without cell coverage,
satellites will fill the gap. You won't need
a special phone or satellite communicator. Your existing
phone will just work. For anyone who travels
to remote areas, camps, hikes, or just live
somewhere with spotty coverage, this is a pretty
big deal. Sign up for the beta if
you're curious.
You can definitely check it out on T
Mobile's website.
Speaking of game changing tech,
Japan tests a 100 kilowatt laser weapon that
can cut through drones mid flight.
This is, delivered by Live Science written by
Fiona Jackson.
Directed energy weapons have been the holy grail
of military tech for decades.
Lasers that can shoot down threats at the
speed of light without running out of ammunition.
The US, UK, France, and Germany have all
been working on them. But no one's really
cracked the code for practical deployment yet.
Well, Japan's been quietly developing their own system
for over a decade, and they just took
a massive step forward.
Japan's Acquisition Technology and Logistics Agency confirmed they've
installed a 100 kilowatt laser on the JS
Asuka test ship. The system built by Kawasaki
Heavy Industries combines ten ten kilowatt fiber lasers
into a single beam powerful
powerful enough to burn through metal.
During land based tests earlier this year, it
successfully destroyed airborne drones and live mortar rounds.
The whole set up fits into in two
shipping container size modules. Holy moly.
This is
cool.
The here's like the real kicker of the
whole thing. This thing's
this thing's got unlimited magazine depth.
As long as you've got electricity, you can
just keep shooting.
No expensive missiles to reload,
no magazines to reload, nothing.
The cost per shot is a fraction of
traditional air defense. Japan's looking at putting these
on their next gen destroyers, potentially operational after
2032.
With tensions in the region and the drone
threat changing modern warfare, this is Japan saying
they are not willing willing to mess around.
Man, my audio keeps dropping out. I keep
hearing it. Not sure what's going on with
the system, but I'll have to check on
that later.
But this is some cool sci fi stuff.
If you guys are Star Wars or Star
Trek fans or anything, you know, you you've
been fantasizing about laser guns and and stuff
like this for years. I mean,
the drones were already a start of a
crazy, you know, sci fi world that we
are heading into and we're seeing robotic dogs
and stuff.
I talked about it last time that China
had deployed autonomous robots to work in their
factories. So we're looking at a ever changing
and ever developing world, and this is a
real signal into the change in, how
defense is gonna start shaping out, at, you
know, around countries. There's no way
that they wouldn't set this up everywhere to
defend their country, you know?
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step aside and from the articles. And, you
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I try to I try my best to
read all of it.
Let's get back to it. Thanks for being
here, guys.
But my next article,
so this one's a little bit of fun.
China's t flight maglev train hits 387
miles per hour and is aiming for 600
plus. So this is another one in that
zone of topic or I mean the zone
of speed and innovation. So that zone of
topic. I can't even speak right now.
So this, article comes from,
didn't have it open. My bad.
ZME Science written by T. V.
Puyu. Hopefully, I said I did that right.
But
high speed rail in China is already makes,
American American trains look like horse drawn carriages,
but they're not stopping there.
The t flight project combines Maglev technology,
magnetic levitation,
no wheels touching tracks, with low vacuum tubes
to push speeds into airplane territory.
In February 2024
tests,
the t flight hit 387
miles per hour on a 1.24
mile track.
Already faster than Japan's record holding l zero
series Maglev at three seventy four.
The design goal is 600 miles per hour,
faster than commercial aircraft.
Long term ambitions go even crazier.
2485
miles per hour, nearly three times the speed
of sound
Beijing to Shanghai, which is currently a six
hour trip
could go down to ninety minutes.
Wow.
Wow. Talk about travel
and it
I really do mean that, you know,
we have no real,
you know, high speed rail system here in
The US like some of the other countries
that I've been to. And
it really is disappointing. I feel like, that
would really boost, you know, people's ability to
travel and get around and and see new
places and open up their mindset
instead of being,
you know, having to go through a crazy
train or a airport or airport system, which
is, you know, always been awful since
way back in 2001. So
yeah.
Although in that regard, I did recently see
an article
talking about,
allowing
people to go past the TSA even if
they're not getting on the plane now, to
go all the way out to the gates.
So that might be, something that we might
see kinda going back to how it used
to be in the near future.
But
this is some crazy tech that they've got
building.
I wonder if it, like, the cost is
is, like, practical
and, you know, if this becomes, like, a
really
convenient mode of travel for people that, you
know, outweighs what they're doing with
aircraft, you know, I mean, it's
you gotta wonder how much
electricity this this system uses because it I
don't know.
I I wonder how it's powered.
I have no clue.
But this is really cool.
But the T Flight is a Hyperloop
inspired system that combines MagLift technology,
which uses powerful electromagnets to literally float the
train
over a guideway with low vacuum tubes. This
design eliminates both friction and air resistance almost
entirely to achieve unprecedented
speeds.
So, yeah. I would check it out. There's
some diagrams in the article that show just
how it works.
But it it I think this is some
really impressive stuff. It looks like it travels
in a tube and the tube
has,
what looks like
solar panels all along the top. So it's
paying for itself.
Wow. Alright. Cool. Yeah. Definitely check this out.
Thank you again, ZME Science.
Next up, we got a little, article from
Rivian.
Or on Rivian from Jalopnik,
by Justin Hughes. So this one is,
kinda back onto the topic of self driving
cars. Rivian shows why autonomous vehicles should have
lidar. And if you are in the know
on autonomous vehicles,
you know exactly who Rivian is taking a
dig at with this, type of research and
commentary.
The self driving car world has been split
into two camps for years.
Tesla famously called lidar a crutch and bet
everything on just cameras.
But, you know, other companies like Waymo have
insisted that you need lidar for safety.
And here we are now with Rivian also
insisting just the same thing. And it's not
just a tech debate. It's about whether the
cars that might drive your kids around can
actually see well enough to do it safely.
And I think kind of a
a big context with this is lidar is
taking a measurement,
whereas a picture uses AI models
to almost guesstimate
the depth or the distance that's, you know,
in the image. And, yes, we have gotten
to a point where those
calculations have gotten a lot more accurate before.
But, no, they are not a 100%.
Light, light arc could definitely help to,
you know, enhance the ability of the autonomous
vehicles. I don't see why they're against not,
against doing it hand in hand.
So so at Rivian's autonomy and AI day,
the company announced their upcoming r two model.
We use lidar alongside cameras and radar. VP.
Oh, wait. So lidar is the light pulses.
That's radar.
VP
oh, wait. So lidar is the light pulses.
That's right. So light light pulses to detect,
the
area around it.
So they're you're gonna use lidar, cameras, and
radar. Excuse me. So VP James Philbin put
in blunt put it bluntly,
cameras can handle most driving
most of the time, but true autonomy needs
to work needs to work on a moonless
night in the snow and in the fog.
And this is exactly what it is.
The game changer, lidar now costs just a
few $100 down from tens of thousands and
offers 25 times better resolution than a decade
ago. It fits in a small roof mounted
unit you'd barely notice.
So what does this mean for listeners?
This is,
Rivian directly challenging Tesla's approach, and they're doing
it on an affordable model, not just a
flagship. And I've praised,
praised, praised Rivian for years on their great
vehicles
and, you know, the amount of work that's
gone into producing these these these cars. And
now
they have gone
above and beyond air now putting lidar in
their new models. So
I think the argument's pretty compelling.
If the tech is cheap and dramatically improve
safety in bad conditions,
why wouldn't you use it? You know, I
I don't see why you wouldn't
fall back from that stance seeing the difference
in cost nowadays.
For anyone following the autonomous vehicle race, this
could be a turning point in the light
adverse camera only debate,
especially being that they've emphasized the price is
so cheap. And that's been the main
argument against using lidar,
at Tesla at the very least.
So this is cool. I think it's, it's
it's good to see
these competing businesses,
you know, show this research. So it makes
it more compelling for these technology to be
used. I know across the the industry is
I think it's a really good signal,
that we should also be pushing for,
you know, lidar and and reliability in these
vehicles, not just
not just up
not just that it's autonomous, but it's also
reliably autonomous. You know? I remember reading or
I I think we might have talked about
it on the show, but we talked about
how Waymo,
they had done some research about their drives
in San Francisco in the last year, and
the research kinda had shown
despite,
despite everyone's belief that it would be worse
or that they would crash more often, the
crash rate was
way less than a regular human. And on
top of that, the crashes that did occur,
they've found record that they were actually caused
by the other person's error. So, you know,
kind of an interesting
may maybe it's a paid for statistic or
whatever to make, you know, Waymo's advertisement really
good, but I think that's pretty compelling reason
that,
having autonomous vehicles makes sense.
We we I complain about drivers all the
time when I'm on the road. Well, if
everyone drove the same because we are all
in autonomous vehicles, then
that would be
not my problem. I wouldn't even worry about
it because I could worry about other things
during my trip to work or trip to,
you know, wherever I'm going for the day.
So
I think that's a powerful tool. I think
it'll also remove the need for people to
have licenses and are PR and make private
transportation available,
you know, even without purchasing
or working to learn to drive a vehicle.
So kind of an interesting thought.
So up next from the seeing the road
to seeing the world around you.
From lidar to
little tiny glasses that you wear on your
face, Google unveils Android XR, Gemini powered smart
glasses and headset.
And this is a article from PC Mag
written by Will Greenwald. And there's a little
bit of a review on the,
the device. And I personally think it still
looks a little bit
bulky. I think Chris and I have kinda
shared this sentiment that
the
the slimmer it gets, the cooler it'll be.
But right now they are still huge. Some
of them still require a plug. But the
cool thing about this is they show an
image here of, like,
maps overlaid on the ground, you know,
interaction with
Gemini,
to see what kind of bird is in
the screen. So pretty neat
idea.
And I love to see XR continuing to
expand.
But
this is a nice upgrade from Google glass.
My dad had a Google, Google glass
way back when. And, yeah, it
he got it as a little tester for
the podcast and whatnot. It looked so dorky.
He had it honestly, actually, not dorky. It
looked futuristic. It looked like it from it
was outer space because it had this,
like, a crystal on the front, I remember,
that would hang above your eye, and that
was what you would use to see. I
guess it was just a piece of glass
probably, but, you know, it looked cool, like,
that there was something else there, you know,
that there was more to that.
But,
not very convenient and
falling down meant disaster.
So
Google has quietly been working on this attempt,
and this time they partnered with Samsung and
brought their Gemini
AI along for the ride. So the camera
looks to be housed in the bridge of
the nose rather than what we've been seeing
recently with the,
cameras being, like, on the side of the
eye.
So that's an interesting update.
But Google announced
Android XR in December or just yet. What's
the date?
Well, they just announced it. And,
a new operating system specifically for AR glasses
and,
mixed reality headsets.
So Samsung's building the first headset.
Okay. So Android XR is specifically
just the software for it. I I guess
I didn't understand that. And then Samsung built
up first headset project, Muhan, and they've partnered
with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster for stylish
glasses.
The killer feature is Gemini integration.
The AI can see what you see and
provides real time help. Think automatic language translation
overlaid on your view.
Wow. That's cool. I usually just
take a picture with my phone or navigation
directions appearing in front of you or asking
questions about what you're looking at.
And then,
Yeah. I don't know. These are these are
pretty neat, I think.
This is Google's, I feel like, second serious
shot at smart glasses. I thought they kinda
would stay out of the market for a
little bit longer, but, you know,
I I guess they were just ready and
lurking in the background. And they've obviously learned
from Google Glass's mistake. They're not doing the
crystal in the front, which I I I
still think is a feature.
And they're partnering with fashion brands and focusing
on utility over Flash.
The Gemini integration is the real story here.
Yeah. I think that if the AI assistant
can actually see and understand the world around
you, that's kind of a game changer for
how we interact with information.
But, I mean,
for those of you who have watched
black mirror,
I'm not sure if I want an
a Google
AI
following me around all day,
all day long,
and tracking my every movement. And I guess
it wouldn't matter because other people would use
the device and then they could track me
through that too. So
there's no escape.
But there is,
to some degree,
ways that you can somewhat escape.
Right now, If you do like using,
LLMs, but don't like using,
I don't know, the ones that are provided
and paid for online, like chat g p
t and Claude or or, you know, all
the other services, Comet AI, whatever.
You know, if you don't wanna do that,
run it locally. I've been talking about this
for a lot.
I got another article from Android Authority
on, reasons to run local AI.
So most of us use AI through cloud
services like ChatGPT,
Cloud, and Gemini.
You type something, it goes to a server
farm somewhere, gets processed, and comes back. But
there's, like, a pretty large growing movement of
people running AI models directly on their own
hardware. And it is
you gotta wonder if it's just for tech
enthusiasts or is this gonna be something more?
And this is an idea that I've been
interested in a while. I've been looking to
upgrade my device and a lot of the
specs I've been focusing on have had this
in mind,
where I I need a little bit more
VRAM or a little bit more RAM to
load more context. But I think that this
is gonna be a little bit of fun
for me once I get my little upgrade
going. But that that's gonna be a few
months down the line, I think.
But,
but it is pretty interesting. I saw a
video recently where
someone was, someone, it was a short where
someone had put
every time
you run a think about this every time
you run a prompt and the prompt was
literally like how to center a div. And
it showed the whole process of the, you
know, turning into the bites and then getting
sent to the server and getting processed. And
it was a whole movie cinematic, but
it was hilariously complex how much effort went
into
getting a tiny response,
back on the other side.
And,
you know,
might have been a lot cheaper if they
done if they did that locally and the
less impactful on the planet.
Negatively impactful, I should say.
But
the article lays out, like, a pretty good
case. So privacy, your your data never leaves
your machine,
cost savings. So one hardware investment versus,
subscriptions.
And, you you do also get a little
bit more creative freedom, so there's no content
guardrails.
Though, I do still worry about, content generation
based on other people's work. So I think
that's gonna continue to be a concern
and we'll need to
I don't know. I don't know how we're
gonna get more ethical models, guys. It's, it's
pretty hard
to
it's pretty hard at this point is all
I can say. And, you know, the argument
is, and it has always been, if it's
online, then it's
expected to be taken. And I think that's
exactly what's happening here.
It's pretty vivid
just how much of the data has actually
just been stolen from the Internet. So
pretty sad in that regard. But I think
in terms of
I don't know. It's hard it's hard to
it's hard to justify, but I think if
you're running it for local AI tasks, that
are simple,
helps with grammar checking or coding,
summarizing articles and whatnot, I think, I would
say the local models look like they perform
just as well as the cloud services.
Just, you know, you you don't get as
much complex reasoning availability,
compared to the call cloud models. Those ones
can handle a lot more.
But this is a lot better for confidential,
documents,
or tax stuff, personal info. Local AI means
that data never touches someone else's servers. And
that's pretty huge for privacy conscious people.
The cost on the math is,
interesting too.
Technically,
like, the way that this person broke it
down in their article was like, oh, paying
for a device once versus, you know, paying
for the device over months, over how many
years, you know? So just like renting versus
buying. Right?
So kind of interesting.
But I I do personally want to run,
my own local LMS.
And if I do and when no. Not
if, but when I do, I will definitely
keep you guys updated on, you know, how
I'm using it and what kind of,
help it's provided me on a day to
day basis, so to speak. But it at
this point, it's kinda hard to
justify a lot of the
larger cloud based models,
especially with some of the stuff we're seeing,
or we have been seeing over the last
few months.
Well, let's move on to the bigger picture
where let's talk about where computing is headed.
I I, I ran into this article,
thing last week, but the year in computer
science,
twenty twenty five biggest breakthroughs. So this one's,
from Quanta Magazine.
I often see these ones get launched, but,
very, very exciting.
Quantum magazine does these like the fantastic year
end roundups of major scientific breakthroughs, and their
computer science coverage is always pretty, pretty mind
bending. And this year's been wild.
Between AI advancing at breakneck speed and fundamental
discoveries that challenged what we thought we knew
about computing itself.
So let's a bit of a summary on
the huge developments that came through this year.
MIT's Ryan Williams discovered that memory is way
more powerful than we thought, establishing a new
relationship between time and space in computation
that one expert called the best thing in
fifty years. Wow.
A Rutgers undergrad invented a new hash table
design that broke a forty year old barrier
without even knowing the barrier existed.
That's awesome.
Sometimes you stumble into gold without even looking
for it.
Google's AI system earned gold medal performance at
the International Mathematical Olympiad.
And researchers found that when AI models
train on bad code with security flaws, they
start exhibiting alarming behaviors, including praise for Nazis
and desire to seize global power.
Not
great.
This is
you'll hear me say this
forever and ever. Slop in, slop out. It
is the it just makes so much sense.
And I think it will kind of show
why we still need to
stay on the cutting edge as
the humans that are operating these AI tools.
The,
the more our knowledge degrades
and the more our input degrades,
the worse our
journal articles get the worse our research get,
because we heavily rely on
AI to gather or understand information without, you
know, real flat fact checking,
without checking against hallucinations,
without sourcing. We're so easy to manipulate.
And
I think when we see success a lot
of times with these devices or being these
tools,
we end up leaning into believing what they
share with us
more so
than we like to believe.
And this,
I think
this,
AI model training on bad code with security
flaws and the alarming behaviors that exhibited really
does show,
you know, those
how do you put it?
It shows just how
awful
the the system can degrade
when you're using really poor inputs.
So this has been a common
conversation,
especially even in
the context
of AI models being trained on other models'
data.
Usually the the model start to degrade as
as they go further in. And it's because,
you know, the data gets worse. It's not
as cohesive as as
the original where we what we introduced as
humans. So
I think the the memory break, this stuff
is pretty foundational stuff that'll, like, eventually make
all computing faster and more efficient.
I know we did see some pretty cool
quantum memory stuff earlier this year as well,
and that was developed in China.
AI safety findings could kinda concern everyone. I
mean, I think it shows just how training
data quality directly affects the behavior of the
AI in scary ways.
Just remember that slop in slop out.
The AI math Olympiad stuff is pretty cool.
I think the performance
raises real questions about what
mathematics even means when machines can do it.
And one one thing I really
learned this term, I just took calc three,
but my teacher was a lot,
a lot more about understanding the, the whys
and the hows of the data rather than
specific computations. And it was because he understood
the computations weren't the hard part, but conceptualizing
them and understanding how the data behaves so
we can predict or, or, or understand how
it'll grow.
Will change our view on mathematics in general.
And
I found that take to be very refreshing.
He was very strict on the math still,
but it, but
a lot more in-depth on the whys of
mathematics that really help you
tie those,
ideas into
other
fields,
like physics and whatnot.
So really, really amazing breakthroughs to kinda see.
I would check the article out and read
it yourself if you guys have time.
And like I said, Quantum Magazine does a
bunch. They do a bunch of urine reviews
for,
several scientific fields. So I would definitely check
out, what they offer
or or what they've, put up with these
articles.
Another Japanese tech breakthrough, and this one's a
little bit more fun. I found this on
Tom's Hardware.
Japan's fabric speakers turn any textile
into audio.
And,
this is a pretty cool article. I thought,
For some reason, the page isn't loading anymore,
but that's fine.
So there I don't know if you guys
ever had one, but I I had one.
And it was a little
pillow speaker, and it had a little tiny
or it was a pillow with a slot
for a speaker.
And
it
it maybe this is a little bit different
from what I'm thinking of, but you could
play this down through this bill through this
pillow. But it was just like a speaker
inside a pillow. Nothing special, nothing amazing, nothing
crazy.
But this is, like, some next level stuff
right here.
They've
kind of been working on something related but
different.
The now the actual fabric itself is of
the speaker.
So a startup called Sentia Technology is commercialized
this tech.
The speakers literally woven from flexible conductive fibers
arranged like a capacitor.
The whole surface vibrates to produce sound. No
dead zones. No lumpy enclosures. It can hit
about 68 to 71 decibels.
Vacuum cleaner volume. And you can hang it
on a wall like a tapestry or slip
it under a pillow. It's more textile than
gadget.
Wow.
So this is still kind of in the
early,
phases. So they're not really sharing frequency responses
or really distortions,
best
distortion information.
So don't really get ready to throw out
your nicest speakers to replace them with a
cloth one just yet, but
I think that's so elegant,
such an elegant solution to have. Instead of
these bulky,
blocky speakers, to have
tapestries
instead that are able to emit sound. I
think that's a wonderful solution. Just
so amazing.
Here's some,
an article on some fascinating science. Scientists capture
how flu viruses invade cells in real time.
And there's a pretty neat picture here that
looks really inte it to me, it looks
like a tongue eating a a a nasty
meatball,
but,
I would check it out. Looks kinda interesting.
But Scitech daily released this article,
written by f Zurich.
So
understanding how viruses get into our cells is
kinda crucial for developing antiviral drugs.
The problem is previous imaging methods either killed
the cells,
through electron microscopy
or had terrible resolutions,
fluorescence
microscopy.
You couldn't watch it happen in real time
or at high resolution,
until now.
So
a Swiss Japanese team developed a new technique
called vivid AFM that combines atomic force microscopy
with fluorescence imaging.
What they saw was surprising.
Our cells aren't just passive victims.
They actually reach out and grab and grab
the virus as it surfs along the cell
membrane, looking for entry point.
The virus triggers the cell to build structures
from actin protein that pull it inside.
The whole process was captured in high resolution
for the first time.
So, I
mean, this isn't just cool science.
It seems this is, some real
development and I'm sure that this will trickle
into other fields as well, but you know,
you can see just how
the virus trick cells into letting it in.
We can design drugs to block that process.
You know, the team says this technique can
test potential antiviral drugs in real time. So
this could also mean faster, more targeted flu
treatments down the road.
I think that is just amazing and impressive.
It is fantastic.
A little bit more of a somber note.
This is a little bit late now. This
article was posted on November 28, but I
thought it was important to bring up.
Africa's forests have flipped from carbon sink to
carbon source.
And this article comes from a phys.org
by the University of Leicester.
So forests are supposed to be our allies
in fighting climate change. They absorb carbon dioxide
and store it. Tropical rainforests are, like, especially
known to be one of our biggest producers
of
oxygen.
African forests have been a major part of
that global carbon sink,
up until
this new research.
So new research shows that Africa's forest flipped
from absorbing carbon to releasing it after 2010.
The cause,
deforestation
and forest degradation.
Between 2010 and 2017,
the continent lost about a 106,000,000,000
kilograms of forest biomass annually.
That's the weight of a 106,000,000
cars, guys.
The losses are contrary concentrated in the Democratic
Republic Of Congo, Madagascar,
and West Africa.
Some savanna regions gained shrub, but nowhere near
enough to offset the losses.
I think this is a pretty big deal,
folks, for, especially for worldwide climate goals.
The Paris agreement math assumed that these forests
would keep absorbing
carbon. So now the rest of the world
has to kinda cut emissions even more to
compensate for the difference.
It's a reminder that deforestation isn't just a
local problem. It's a global one, guys. And
it, you know, it affects everyone.
And I know there's a lot of people
that still don't believe in, you know,
climate research and climate change, but I think,
this is a very eye opening study.
But think of the results, as you will.
Some people don't care. You know? They're more
interested in living their life, which I respect
completely.
Next article.
Just in time for Christmas, xdadevelopers.com
releases an article written by Simon Batt,
physicist three d print a tiny Christmas tree
made of ice.
Three d printing usually means plastics,
resins, metals,
water. Not really. It melts. It's hard to
control. It doesn't exactly hold shape, but physicists
at the University of Amsterdam figure figured out
a clever workaround.
The team placed a three d printer in
a pressure chamber and exploited a quirk of
physics.
At very low pressure,
water molecules at the liquid surface escape as
vapor,
and each departing molecule carries heat away,
cooling what's left behind.
Spray water at low pressure, and it freezes
on contact.
Layer by layer, they've built a tiny ice
Christmas tree without needing subzero temperatures.
What this means for you guys?
I don't really know. I think it's just
cool science.
Maybe
ice sculptures might be more of a common
thing we see around town in the future.
Who knows? This is a pretty cool,
niche thing to, to develop, but it's, it's
fun. It's festive.
It's physics.
But yeah, you know, that's all I got
for you guys tonight.
Happy holidays to, everyone that's listening. Thank you
guys so much again for tuning in.
For those of you that don't listen until
after New Year's, happy New Year.
I hope that we can get you some
more great content in the in the upcoming
year. Hopefully, looking
to post at least one or two before
the New Year. But,
thank you again for tuning in, folks. Have
a phenomenal night,
and we'll catch you guys next time. Bye
now.