Page 88 - Technology Facts

If locked in a perfectly sealed room, you could die from CO2 overdose before dying from a lack of oxygen.

This a condition that called hypercapnia, when there is too much carbon dioxide in the blood. When this happens, the body goes into emergency resuscitation mode, with an increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, muscle tremors, and short rapid breathing. This is actually designed as a reflex to get your body to breathe properly while you are sleeping if your breathing is being obstructed.

Hypercapnia is also caused by too much CO2 in the air, or if you are re-breathing the CO2 you already exhaled. This can lead to respiratory acidosis, causing an increase in the acidity of your blood. The symptoms of this are diarrhea, vomiting, headaches, coughing, sleepiness, irregular heart rates, comas, and seizures. Overall, a pretty nasty way to die.

This condition has been induced when people are in closed spaces for long periods of time (e.g. submarines, hyperbaric chambers, spacecraft). When CO2 levels were too high in the Apollo 13 spacecraft, the astronauts had to rig up a CO2 absorber to prevent life-threatening acidosis.
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A blind artist can draw near-perfect portraits of people he's never seen using just his hands.

John Bramblitt is so talented, that he made this Tony Hawk portrait despite never seeing him before!

Before going blind from complications due to epilepsy at the age 30, John Bramblitt didn't even know how to paint! With no hope of ever regaining his sight, Bramblitt overcame his anger and depression by turning to the easel. He eventually learned how to mix colors by feeling the different textures of the oils within the paints. John also became skilled at 'seeing' his subjects through the use of fingertips.

He has even developed a unique way of applying paint, by first outlining his images and then using his fingers to guide each brushstroke. Remarkably, Bramblitt has never seen his wife or son, but it is clear that he knows EXACTLY what they look like because he is able to paint their likenesses so well!

To watch this artist at work, make sure to read this article on CBS and watch the video!

A variety of ant in South America runs the risk of dying by walking in a circle.

These ants can be found circling around en masse until they die from exhaustion or starvation. This seems insane, so why do they do it?

These ants can't see. They get around by sense of smell, and they learn where to go by following the scent of their comrades. The lead ants voyage out for food to return to the nest, and the rest sniff their trails and follow suit. This all goes awry if the lead ant begins following the ants behind them, so that everyone travels in an unending circle.

The lead ant in this case, is often just some ant that happened to get out in the front of the group and assigned the duty to lead by default. If they don't realize this, then all of the ants will end up being followers. Thus, the "circle of death" is formed, which is probably the most metal thing I've heard today. \m/

Watch this video to see for yourself!



This video, as well as a computer simulation and more in-depth explanation of the death spiral can be found at NPR.

Microsoft is begging people to stop using Internet Explorer 6.

The computer giant has even launched a website encouraging people to upgrade to a newer version. They even encourage people who have switched to tell all there friends, put banner ads on their sites, and tweet it out, as a way to "join the cause".

By most accounts, IE6 is considered to be obsolete, having launched an entire decade ago. Two subsequent revisions (IE7 and IE8) have launched in that span of time, with the newest version coming out in 2009.

Currently, 12% of the world's internet users are using IE 6. In the U.S. and the U.K., those numbers are down to 2.9% and 3.5% respectively. In China, however, a whopping 34.5% of its internet users are running IE6.
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Believe it or not, the first Internet search engine was created in 1990!

Google has been synonymous with Internet searches for years now, so it's hard to remember what the Internet was like without it. Yet, before Google, Yahoo search, Bing, or even Ask Jeeves and Alta Vista (anyone remember those?) there was Archie.

Archie was the brainchild of Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. This was in 1990, years before there were web pages to actually search! The program really didn't function the way modern search engines worked. Instead of searching for content on web pages, Archie searched for files in the various servers in the network, based on file names alone. This was before the creation of web browsers and the World Wide Web, so Internet use was limited to file transfers.

Read more about Archie.

For more information about early search engines, check out Search Engine History.