The Best of Tech Support: Ken Jeong, Bill Nye, Nicole Stott and More

PancakeDango asks, What's E. coli?

Is that like iCarly?

[laughs] Come on, man.

E. coli is a bacteria that can cause

massive overwhelming body infection.

iCarly is Miranda Cosgrove.

Okay?

[upbeat music]

Hi, I'm Ken Jeong.

I'm Amanda Rousseau.

I'm Anil Seth.

Hi, I'm astronaut Nicole Stott.

I'm Jill Tarter.

Bill Nye here, once again,

to answer your science questions.

Hala writes, When will teleportation happen?

[laughing] I don't know.

Happens all the time in science fiction,

but that's fiction!

No, just the information problem alone

probably makes teleportation impossible.

Converting something like you

into a beam of electromagnetic signals.

It's very, very unlikely.

Just taking you apart and putting you back together

would take extraordinary amounts of energy.

Sojoelous.

Is physical affection worth bronchitis?

Asking for a friend.

[laughing]

Are you french kissing somebody's lung?

I don't know what this question is.

Look, if you're making out with someone

who has a cold.

Just be advised, just be careful.

Like, I love my wife and she is always

worth getting bronchitis for.

In fact, we wrote that in our vows.

From Zara, Are we saying then that tanning in space

would happen just in virtue of being in space

because cosmic radiation and unfiltered UV rays?

When you're in space, of course,

you're above the bulk of the atmosphere

and that makes it a lot more dangerous

to be exposed to the sun's radiation.

So we try to protect ourselves from that.

For the windows that we do look through,

most of them have a UV filter on them

which helps protect us,

but there are some windows that don't.

So we know in particular what those are and we try

to really limit our time in front of them.

E.T. exists.

Oh, I like that.

When will we hear from E.T.?

And there are lots of hashtags here.

I don't know the answer to that question.

I don't know if E.T. is out there.

I think it's likely.

The universe appears to be relatively bio-friendly.

We know about lots of planets around other stars.

We now know about lots of lifeforms

on this planet that exist in extreme,

extreme for us, environments.

There's a chance and the only way that we'll know

is to look and when?

Can't answer that question.

Watching a [bleeps] of 90's music videos today

and I am wondering where in my brain

I've stored all of these really nonessential lyrics

and if I can clear that space for something useful?

Now, I don't know what's nonessential

about 90's music videos.

That's essential part of my own personality for sure,

so I don't want to devote that space

to anything else at all.

But it's a really good question.

How do we store, we seem to be able to remember

an enormous amount of information.

The adult human brain has about 90 billion neurons.

It has about 1,000 times more connections

which means that if you counted one connection

every second, it would take you about three

million years to count them all.

There's a lot of connections in the brain.

And if you think that a memory is just a particular

patterns of connections distributed among a large

number of neurons, the number of memories

that you could potentially store in a brain is infinite.

The bishop or joshharris25.

What is the point of spam emails?

Are they profiting from it?

What do they gain from spending random unnecessary emails?

When people send out spam emails,

they're sending it to thousands and thousands of targets.

Say you had a million emails sent out

and they're requesting one dollar.

These cyber criminals are expecting

that 1% will actually bite.

A lot of these cyber criminals will treat

this as a business, so it becomes very lucrative for them.

Bill Nye, assuming a perfect scenario

where the general disasters don't occur,

if the Earth stopped spinning, would we all feel dizzy?

[laughs] I guess so.

Not a test you'll probably be able to run.

How long does it take to get the moon?

And, How fast can you go in space?

This is a really great question.

It takes about two days to get to the moon

the way we fly to the moon.

So we launch off the Earth, we get going really fast

and we circle the Earth and we do this,

what they call, slingshot method

of then accelerating ourselves toward

and then around the moon.

That's all really cool orbital mechanics

that goes on there and it's really neat to me

how we can use the gravity and spin of our own planet

to accelerate a spaceship off into space.

On the space shuttle, we traveled at 17,500 miles an hour.

The guys that went to the moon, about 24,000 miles an hour.

Can someone tell me why I'm sick after getting a flu

shot that's supposed to prevent me from getting sick?

[screeching]

One, question mark, one.

God [bleeps].

That's actually a very nice question

because sometimes there is this myth

that says, you can get,

I got the flu from the flu shot.

That is not the case.

If you're already having a cold, okay,

and if you get a flu shot, you can get a little bit sick

from the combination of having a cold and that flu shot,

but you cannot the flu from a flu shot.

You have a better chance of having a weaker

flu symptomatology than somebody else

who didn't get the flu shot.

You should get the flu shot.

This Twitter use, cloud_opinion asks,

At this point, hackers know everything there is to know

about everyone of us.

Why do we need passwords now?

Why keep going to the gym if you're gonna die anyways?

Passwords are kind of a necessary evil

and hackers really don't know everything about you.

It all depends if you put that information

out there on the internet.

Toni Philips writes,

A climate change question.

As it gets hotter, more air conditioning is used,

heating up the air even more.

Is there a way to cool indoor spaces

without heating up the indoors, especially in cities?

Well, Toni, probably not,

because what is the one thing

you can count on in this universe?

That's right Toni, the second law of thermodynamics.

Heat just spreads out, man.

So when you pump the heat out of this room

or the room you're sitting in,

putting it outside, the outside gets a little bit warmer,

but the scale of it, I hope surprises you.

The amount of heat we pump out of buildings

ain't no nothing compared with the amount of heat

that we're holding in by adding greenhouse gases

to the Earth's atmosphere.

The heat island effect of cities

is more from hard scape, paved surfaces,

buildings are not soil, for example,

and that's why cities are so hot.

The AC thing is a problem,

but it's just the hard scape that gets us.

And that flipping second law of thermodynamics.

I'm sorry, woman, there's nothing we can do out there.

We gotta deal, it's entropy.

Entropy killing us all.

[sighs]

All right, Joey Povinelli.

Is there wifi in space?

Yes, there's wifi in space!

You might not be happy with it,

because it's not dial up slow, but it is pretty slow.

The Fermi Paradox.

Mathematically, the universe should be teaming

with intelligent life, so why don't we see

extraterrestrial versions in all directions?

Really interesting question,

the answer is we've hardly begun to look.

Let me give you an example.

If that volume of space we need to explore

is equal to the volume of all the world's oceans,

in 50 plus years, we've observed

only about one hot tubs worth of the ocean.

Maybe it is not so surprising

that we haven't detected anything yet.

We need to think in terms of cosmic times

and not human lifetime before we decide we're alone

because we haven't found anything.

Is face blindness a real thing

or just an attention seeking thing?

It's a real thing.

There's a condition called prosopagnosia,

which is the inability to distinguish between faces.

What you find is, people with prosopagnosia,

they're still able to identify people

but they do it in different ways.

They're very good at picking up other cues,

like how somebody walks or what clothes they're wearing

or what voice sounds like,

but they just cannot recognize faces.

This Twitter user, andrewcheeky asks,

What will they think of next?

Is there anything that has been corded in the last decade

that hackers haven't found a vulnerability

to do some damage?

If you think about your fridge at home,

being able to connect to the wifi,

or your pressure cooker being able to connect

to an app on your phone,

a lot of these devices are developed in a way

where they're looking for the lowest possible cost

of manufacturing, so when they get to the security part,

it's kind of like an afterthought.

So, until things change,

we're gonna still have these problems with IOT devices.

Michael Moreno.

Wondering if the astronauts on the International

Space Station ever get bored?

I hope not.

I was never bored in space.

There's the window to look out to see Earth below you.

Sharing stories with your crew mates, floating around,

flying, and you can even bring things

that you enjoy doing on Earth.

I had the chance to paint while I was in space.

My crew mates played music in space.

This is not a place where you get bored.

Thank you for your questions.

This has been neuroscience support.

E.T. support. [upbeat music]

This has been hacking support.

I hope you learned a little something about space.

Most of these questions are really good,

some of them absolutely suck,

and you should be ashamed of yourselves.