Clarifications:

• In the original Star Trek series, the medical tricorder prop was made from a salt shaker.

Links:

• Our Show Notes cover the topics of Self-Driving Cars, Giving Sight to the Blind, Robotics in Surgery, Google Glass and Augmented Reality, Oculus Rift and Augmented Reality, Brain Computer Interface, Soylent and Liquid Diets, Genetic Testing, Medical Tricorders, Distributed Computing, Prosthetic Limbs, Exoskeletons, 3D Printing, Commercial Space Flight, and the X Prizes
• As mentioned in Episode 12: Artificial Intelligence, Google’s 12+ self-driving cars are accident free and have driven more than 450,000 kilometers
• The legal hurdles to self-driving cars
• Volvo and Nissan are both setting 2020 deadlines for their self-driving cars coming to market
• 75% of cars will be driverless in 2035
• Steve Mahan, a legally blind driver, and a Google self-driving car
• The May 2012 surgery that restored partial sight to two patients
• Neil Harbisson’s TED talk on being colourblind and learning to hear colour
• The February 2013 surgery with more than 15 times the resolution
• Robot removes brain tumor in Calgary, Alberta, Canada
• A wonderful video on how Google Glass feels, all taken on Google Glass
• The first Google Glass surgery
• General information on Oculus Rift and their official website
• One player’s description of playing Portal 2 on Oculus Rift
• As mentioned in Episode 15: Brain Upload, Emotiv has been creating brain-computer interfaces since 2008
• The costs of Soylent versus other liquid diets
• The crowdfunded campaign page for Soylent
• Genetic testing from 23andMe and some other options
• The genetic markers for living past 100 were found in 2010
• Counsyl and screening couples for diseases
• Medical tricorders are set to ship in March 2014
• Scanadu’s website for the Scout
• As mentioned in Episode 13: Quantum Computing, the World Community Grid is one example of how distributed computing is making the world a better place
• Folding@home is pushing the boundaries of medical science and has more than 100 papers to its name
• DARPA’s recent work on prosthetic limbs and touch sensitivity
• Lockheed Martin’s HULC exoskeleton and promotional video
• The end of 2010 marked the creation of the first 3D printed flute
• 3D printed guns are capable of firing multiple shots
• The amazing goal of 3D printed organs
• Similar to the cybernetic eye mentioned in Episode 14: Nanotechnology, scientists have created a proof-of-concept 3D printed ear that detects radio waves
• NASA tests 3D printed rocket components
• Flights into space are only $250,000 on Virgin Galactic
• The XPrize Foundation
• The original Ansari XPrize
• The Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize
• The Google Lunar XPrize rules
• As mentioned in Episode 16: Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and you can join the search with SETI@Home

Clarifications:

• 50 internets to whoever can tell us the full name of the starship mentioned in this episode!
• The version of the Drake Equation we mention is slightly modified from the original version, but it’s mathematically the same. The number of stars divided by the lifetime of a star gives the rate of star birth which is the usual first term.

Links:

• Our Show Notes for the episode covering Understanding the Signal, Shannon Entropy, and the Drake Equation
• Edwin Hubble changed how we thought of the universe, including the discovery of galaxies
• The history of pulsar discovery
• The Brown Corpus, information on Ziph’s Law, and the intersection of the two
• The list of US Cities by Population
• For the Family Feud bit, we watched some clips of Family Feud with Steve Harvey and used data from A.L.I.C.E., a chatterbot
• Google Instant uses the structure of language to help predict what you’re searching for
• Information on Shannon Entropy, the languages of plants and animals, and what higher order Shannon Entropy languages might be like
• General information on the name Gary, the population of the world that speaks English, and how many Garys there are in the US
• How many stars are there in the Milky Way?
• PLANET’s search for exoplanets
• Information on Kepler’s discoveries
• The Murchison Meteorite
• The Miller-Urey experiment and subsequent tests
• The fastest orbiting star has an orbit of 11.5 years while our sun orbits every 240 million years
• The theory of the galactic habitability zone and other potential hurdles for forming life
• The Drake Equation
• Radio was first used in the 1880s while the first atomic bomb was dropped in 1945
• Our messages to Gliese 581d

Clarifications:

• Like most science fiction shows, our ability to travel through time and that Travis uploaded his brain will be promptly forgotten about next episode.

Links:

• Our Show Notes for the episode including Reading Minds, Understanding the Brain, Brain Simulation, How It Could Happen, and the Implications
  
• Dr. Gallant’s work on reading minds (and the resultant video)
• The resolution of an fMRI (the kind used in Dr. Gallant’s work)
• The size of a neuron
• Emotiv has been creating brain-computer interfaces since 2008
• We can extract sensitive information using BCI
• Information on BigBrain, the project that took a human brain, sliced it into 7404 layers, and created the highest resolution reconstruction of a brain ever
• For a wealth of information on the European Brain Project, check out their website
• The story behind the man leading the European Brain Project
• Simulating the roundworm and its enviroment
• The number of neurons in various animals
• The specs on a Blue Gene supercomputer and what one looks like
• Future estimates on supercomputer power (1 exaflop in 2017, 1 exaflop in 2019, and 100 exaflops in 2017)
• We should be able to communicate with our thoughts within fifteen years according to Mary Lou Jepsen
• A small simulation of a brain indicates that when you try to duplicate intelligence, you lose perfect memory
• Prodigies have incredible working memories and are also benevolent

Links:

• Our Show Notes for the episode including The Future of Nanotechnology, The Physics of Nanotechnology, and Getting to the Future
• Credit for the “roads becoming diamond-plated solar cells” goes to Robert J Sawyer, an incredible science fiction author
• The first reported case of a person being cured of HIV through a blood cell stem transplant
• Vaccines are often made from weakened versions of the virus
• The science behind gold nanoparticles as explained by Sigma-Aldrich (a company manufacturing them) and the corresponding article on Wikipeida
• The structure of diamond
• More on the history of pencils and lead can be found on Wikipedia
• Making graphene from a pencil and tape
• A wealth of information on graphene can be found on Wikipedia
• Research into bullet-proofing our shirts with carbon nanotubes
• Power Felt is made from carbon nanotubes and turns body heat into electricity
• Carbon nanotube clothing could call for help
• The world’s longest carbon nanotube
• Buckyballs are being used as lubricants and antioxidants; as antioxidants they’re better than anything out there, including vitamin E
• How Stuff Works on five applications of nanotechnology

Corrections/Clarifications:

• The feedback episode for miniseries 1 has already been recorded; thanks to everyone who sent us feedback!
• “The Gender Paradox” is also called “The Boy or Girl Paradox”

Links:

• Still one of our longest Show Notes yet (Bayesian vs Frequentist, Gender Paradox, Modelling, 5-sigma, and the null hypothesis, Bias, Error, and Simpson’s Paradox Redux, More than 1% of the universe, Statistical Fallacies, and The Half-life of Facts)
• A good article on the differences between Bayesians and Frequentists
• Wikipedia’s article on Lindley’s Paradox
• An explanation of The Gender Paradox
• A good explanation of 5-sigma as related to the Higgs Boson
• Our additional computations from episode 3 for the standard deviation
• How 3 sigma is usually considered evidence and why the faster-than-light neutrinos were a six-sigma event
• We found out about the Kneedless Surgery through the e-newsletter Now I Know; the original data it cites can be found here
• The rules of the Netflix Prize
• A great article on machine learning and the Netflix contest is available in the July 2012 issue of Scientific American
• An article from Sci News reporting the discovery of the Universe’s Largest Structure
• The names Ian Steele and Sue Windle are common fake names used in The Real Hustle (UK)
• A question and answer with Samuel Arbesman about the half-life of ideas
• Isaac Asimov on getting closer to the truth when it comes to measuring the shape of the Earth

Links:

• Our Show Notes for the episode (Binary in Classical and Quantum Computers, Qubits and Bits, Deutsch’s Problem, and Obstacles)
• Double Slit Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment
• Photoelectric Effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoelectric_effect
• Blackbody Radiation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_law
• How to count in binary
• The four conditions required for quantum computers to be dramatically faster than classical computers
• The World Community Grid is one example of how distributed computing is making the world a better place
• Folding@home’s website
• How to break our standard, large prime encryption scheme with Shor’s Algorithm
• Some possible ways to have encryption that isn’t easily broken by a quantum computer
• Quantum Error Correction
• An approachable account of how quantum computing works
• A much more technical explanation of how quantum computing works (a very good read)

Links:

• Our Show Notes for the episode
• Tic-tac-toe
• Number of possible chess positions
• Deep Blue
• Google Self-Driving Cars are accident free
• How driverless cars work
• Watson and understanding Jeopardy clues
• Strong AI
• Episode 6 and Netflix Prize
• Evidence of Machine Learning
• Watson and Medicine
• Watson and Customer Service

Links:

• Our Show Notes covering Pain vs Itch, Complimentary Colours and Afterimages, Colour Consistency, Language and Seeing Colours, and Divergent Buildings and Ice Cream Headaches
  
• The difference between itch and pain
• How our eyes see afterimages
• Identifying colours based on language
• The BBC’s documentary on how the Himba see things differently than we do
• Susan Hogan, interior designer, is probably a tetrachromat
• Tetrachromacy confirmed in humans, but scientists are still puzzled as to why so few women have it 
• How two identical images of buildings can look like they diverge
• The science behind brain freeze

Links:

• Our Show Notes
• Information on nerve transmission speed
• The different types of neurotransmitters
• For more information on neurotransmitter release, look into Dale’s Principle
• The Wikipedia articles on electrical synapses, the synaptic cleft, and voltage-gated calcium channels
• Inhibitory neurotransmitters
• Perineurium
• General information on neurons and their size
• Conduction velocity of neurons
• The Wikipedia articles on cocaine, treating depression, paralysis, anesthesia, and depressants

Corrections/Clarifications:

• In the episode Travis says it takes 0.2 seconds for a sound to hit our left ear and then the right ear. In actually it’s only 0.2 milliseconds between the two ears detecting the same sound.

Links:

• Our Show Notes for the episode covering Hearing, Smell, Touch (and How We Have More than Five Senses), Taste, Caring for Your Human: The Senses, Miracle Berries, Alcohol on the Skin, and Wrap-up
• How our two ears detect the source of sounds
• Sound intensity and logarithmic hearing
• Here are some examples of different volume levels
• We can hear from 20 to 20,000 Hz
• Humans hear logarithmic pitch and we’ve based our music around it
• Pianos are a great example of logarithmic frequencies
• Follow this link to test what frequencies you can hear
• Anatomy of the olfactory sense
• More on what we can smell 
• How Stuff Works on how our noses work
• Odour fatigue and why it occurs
• Touch is a complicated sense because it’s made up of multiple other senses
• How we learnt that pain and itches were different
• The tongue map is wrong, at least in the absolute sense
• The fifth taste you didn’t know about: Umami
• Spicy is not a basic taste, nor a taste at all
• Pepper Spray means you have a spicy face
• Freshness can be detected by how crisp food sounds when we chew
• Why we sound deeper when we speak
• Smell is an important part of detecting flavours
• A sixth type of taste: Calcium taste receptors
• If you still want to taste more, we might have fat taste receptors
• Airplane food tastes worse at higher altitudes due to pressure and humidity differences
• Astronuat food and how eating in space is very different
• Ricin
• Work is being done on an antidote for ricin
• Adding salt to pineapple makes it sweeter
• A berry can change sour to sweet
• How alcohol makes us feel the heat