Energy Technobabble

Welcome to Technobabble. I'm the Vlogster and for the next 15 minutes,

you are in for a treat.

A totally tech treat.

A treat of terrific, technological tastiness.

You get the idea?

Roll titles!

So here's what's coming up today...

Marcus finds out how a cup of joe can help to power buildings and vehicles.

I'm going to name this "the Marcus coffee".

Cherry takes a look at games that will make your phone

megabytes more interesting.

-This is Spring Ninja.

-SHE MIMICS NINJA NOISE

And new boy Adam has some brrrrilliant animation tips.

-Hello there, my small bird friend.

-BIRD CHEEPS

But first, here's Lizzie to share a little bit more of her

encyclopaedic knowledge of Minecraft.

Is she a genius?

Minecraft is one of my favourite games ever,

and so, today, I'm going to be sharing my top tips

on how to play the game even better.

You can save yourself from fall damage

with a bucket of water.

Make sure you have a bucket handy

before you make the leap of faith

and, when you're close to hitting the ground,

place the water beneath you

and you won't take any damage.

Be careful, though. If you don't time it right, you will take damage

and possibly lose all of your items.

Take an ender chest mining with you.

Whenever you mine anything precious,

like diamonds or emeralds, put them in the ender chest immediately.

Then, if you happen to fall into lava or get blown up

by a creeper, your items will be safe.

You also won't need to keep going back to the surface

when your inventory gets full, cos you

can just put extra items in the ender chest.

Upside down animals.

You might already know how to make rainbow sheep

using the Jeb nametag, but do you also know

you can turn any mob upside down,

using the Dinnerbone name tag?

This looks absolutely hilarious with every mob,

including your pets, farm animals and even your enemies.

How to create secret areas and passageways.

Are you fed up of intruders wandering all over your house,

uncovering all of your secrets?

Place a doorway, open the doors and then crouch

while you paint a huge painting to cover the door.

Only you will know where to find this secret passageway.

So there you have it, that's a few tips

to make your Minecraft experience even better.

Making the virtual world a better place to be.

Well, somebody has to.

Ooh, that's an incoming message from one of you technobabblers.

Let's open up my new social app.

What are we calling it this week?

Vlogsterer?

Vlogsterer?

No! It's useless! You might as well have called it Ian.

Right, let's have that question.

Vlogster, how will we generate

energy in the future?

Ooh, good work, Noah. That's a great question. So...

who shall I ask to check this one out?

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe...

my mate Marcus has to go!

MARCUS SNORES

VLOGSTER WHISPERS: Oh, Marcus?

Marcie Warcie?

Hang on, technobabblers. This should do it.

VLOGSTER SHOUTS: Wake up!

-What?

-MARCUS STUTTERS

Help me! Mum?

Ha-ha! Got ya!

Second time this week as well. You should know better, Marcus!

MARCUS GRUNTS

Oh, Vlogster. I was having a well good dream!

Trust you to ruin it. What you want anyways?

Up and at 'em, dreamboat.

We've another of the babblers' questions to answer.

All right, fair enough. But do us a favour.

Put the kettle on.

I'm useless unless I've had a little bit of caffeine.

Perfect, because today you're going to be learning about bio energy

that comes from waste coffee grounds.

First up, a local coffee shop, where you can make yourself a cuppa.

Oh, and while you're at it, I'll have a tall, super skinny,

extra wet, soya cup of mocha chocaccino latte, please. Thanks.

I'm going to name this "the Marcus coffee". Let's go.

Put a bit of pressure on it.

I washed my hands, don't worry.

-COFFEE MACHINE WHIRS

-And that is a perfect coffee.

Delicious, but more importantly...

this is what we're left over with.

Bingo! And that's where your next mission comes in.

Now that he's had his caffeine fix,

I'm sending Marcus to a nearby university to meet techy techspert

Arthur Kay, who is one of the brains behind Bio-Bean.

They make energy using coffee. Pretty cool, huh?

This sounds crazy. Energy from coffee? Explain yourself!

I know, absolutely.

I mean, coffee is a strange thing to get energy from, but it has

a huge amount of it contained within the waste coffee grounds.

So you get used coffee and, instead of throwing it away,

you make diesel and fuel pellets from this?

Yeah, absolutely. So coffee also has a really high oil content,

so the oil, like you put in your car, for instance,

for powering transport systems.

And then the rest is little fuel pellets.

Instead of wood or coal, you can use this renewable energy,

which can then heat your building.

We're even looking at how it can be used

as a jet fuel, which would be really cool -

the first coffee-powered plane.

-I'd love to see how you make this happen.

-OK.

-What we have here, if you can see the little top here.

-Mm-hm.

-There's a tiny little bit of coffee in that there.

-Right.

And what's happening here is we have a solvent,

which has been warmed up and being passed through the coffee

and taking the natural oils out from the coffee grounds.

That process then turns it from, essentially, a vegetable oil

into a diesel, which can then be used in your car engine

or your bus engine to get to school.

How do you think we're going to be making energy

in about 20 years' time?

What we're really doing here is we're turning something

that's wasted into something that's useful.

Most of your viewers like a chocolate every now and then

and chocolate waste can actually be used to turn into fuel pellets

and oils as well.

So that whole process makes this oil here,

which you then turn into the fuel?

-Check that out, Vlogs.

-Tasty.

Biofuel!

-MARCUS SIGHS

-I don't know about you, Vlogster,

but after all that talk about coffee, I think I need the...

Hold that thought, Marcus,

because researchers at the University of West England,

or UWE for short, have developed a urine-powered battery.

Are you serious?

Wee-ally serious!

Ha-ha! It's all down to tiny microbes that produce electricity

when they eat organic matter, like urine.

Right now, the battery creates enough electricity to charge

a mobile phone, but could soon power a bathroom shower or lights.

If it's yellow, let it mellow.

Exactly. Now, Scottish scientists plan to harness energy from the sea

using giant oysters.

These buoyant flaps are fixed to the seabed,

but move backwards and forwards in the waves,

pumping high-pressure water that drives hydroelectric turbines.

Does it make an electric current?

You know, ocean...current? Huh?

-Don't go there.

-Oh.

Now, ever wondered what a bladeless wind turbine looks like?

Well, this is it. Spanish techsperts think this wobbly way to harness

wind energy will be smaller, cheaper and more powerful and...

VLOGSTER WHISPERS: ..silent. Shh!

-MARCUS WHISPERS:

-Brilliant, Vlogster,

but I'm really busting, all right?

Moving swiftly on.

PHONE RINGS Oh, is that the phone?

Could someone get that? I can't -

no hands! PHONE CONTINUES TO RING

While I sort this, here's Cherry to talk phone games.

Hi, guys. Aren't phones great?

And did you know that you can actually play games on your phone?

Of course you knew! That's the best thing about phones!

So let's have a look at some of my favourites.

The first phone game that I want to talk about

is called Kitchen Scramble.

Now, I'm not much of a cook in real life,

but, with this game, I am the ultimate chef

cooking for hundreds of hungry customers.

You can upgrade your kitchen to climb up to the top

of the cooking world, but you must be careful not to

burn your food and not to leave your customers waiting too long.

One piece of advice is to memorise what your customers want.

That way you can start preparing the food ahead of time.

Now, you might think that awesome platform games can only be

played best on consoles,

but Replica Island proves you wrong.

This is a game where you lead robots

through over 40 challenging levels.

Your mission is to discover secrets

as you fly around,

collecting germs and squash the bad guys.

Next up is one of my favourites, which looks simple,

but it is hard to master.

-This is Spring Ninja.

-SHE MIMICS NINJA NOISE

Become a Ninja and spring from pillar to post,

but don't be surprised when you fall off into the ocean.

This game is extremely frustrating,

but in the best way possible.

I'm addicted to trying to beat my top score.

As a quick tip, pop your phone onto aeroplane mode while you're playing,

so you're not distracted by those advert pop-ups.

Those are just some of my favourite phone games. Give them a go.

I think Cherry's my new favourite.

I've always liked a lady named after a fruit.

Heed my advice, people, get permission from your parents

before you download anything

and that goes for in-app purchases, too?

OK, loves?

BEEPING Ah! That's another notification

from the Vlogster...Vlogstererer...

Let's get that changed for next time, please. Here's the message.

Will we ever be able to record our dreams?

Dreamy question, Taya.

Let me access my archive drive.

No-one really knows why you humans dream, but,

to be able to record them,

first you need to know how much data you might be dealing with.

Scientists think the human brain is made from around 1 billion neurons,

cells that hold and share information,

a bit like a computer hard drive.

The average brain can store close to 2.5 petabytes of memory,

enough to hold 12 million Technobabble episodes.

All my favourites.

Here's a word that you might not know...

oneironaut.

An oneironaut is someone that can who can tell they are dreaming

whilst they're asleep, then take control of their dream.

This is known as "lucid dreaming"

and a company in America is developing a way to help you do it.

When you go to bed, a special headset detects when you are asleep

and the device uses sound and light to make you aware

that you are having a dream.

The idea is that, then, you can take charge of the dream.

Imagine, you could go anywhere, do anything,

pretend to be someone amazing!

Like me.

Recently, scientists in Japan have found a way to tell

what people are dreaming. CHEERING ON TELEVISION

By hooking you up to a special brain-scanning computer,

then showing you lots of different pictures,

scientists can map how your brain reacts to each image.

When you go to sleep,

the computer compares the dreaming brainwaves to the ones

your brain made when awake... GUITAR PLAYS

..and looking at the pictures.

If the brainwaves match...

CAR HORN BEEPS ..the computer can guess

what kind of things you've been dreaming about.

In tests, it was spot on over 60% of the time.

Ha! I know what my brain dreams about 100% of the time...

cats! MEOWING

Cats dancing the macerena, cats riding a giant space hippo...

VLOGSTER SIGHS

With similar brain-mapping techniques, American scientists

have used computers to create videos of what the brain is seeing.

The results are basic, but technology is advancing so fast

that, in 30 years, it may well be possible to record dreams.

Time to meet our newest blogger, Adam,

who is here to show us how to make cool animations.

Hello there!

HE SHUDDERS

I'm Adam. What's that?

You want to make animated cartoons, just like the ones you see on TV?

That would be cool.

Oh! I can help you with that.

The first thing...

-BIRD CHEEPS

-Whoa! Look!

Oh! Hello there, my small bird friend.

You could learn with us, too.

Let's get started.

-BOING

-The first thing you're going to want

to do is grab a pencil and some paper

and get to work on designing your very own character.

Now, you could go for...

-a cowboy!

-HE MIMICS PISTOL

Or...

a lady?

Grab another piece of paper and draw a number of boxes on it.

In these boxes, you can draw up the different stages of your animation.

Recording voices for your characters.

For this step, you'll need a microphone

and some recording software.

Hello and welcome to Technobabble.

Once you're done, go ahead and save your recording,

so you can use it in your animation programme.

Animating your animation.

Now, it's a good idea to draw

the different parts of your character

on different layers,

so you can move them around individually.

For example, here,

we've got a head layer for his head,

a mouth layer, so that we can move

around with different mouth shapes,

and a bone layer for the arms and legs,

so that we can pose them however we want to.

Now you can go ahead

and import your voice recording,

so that you can start to lip-sync.

So once you've got your animation done and you've saved it,

it's time for the last step -

the final edits.

Here, we can drag in our animation and we can add some music,

some sound effects, transitions and all kinds of cool stuff

to make your animation better.

Once you're done, save it and you can put it online.

-ADAM'S VOICE:

-Hello, and welcome to Technobabble.

Ooh, ooh! Shall we do a bit more babblebusting?

D is for Double Geeking,

and that doesn't describe twins who both love gadgets.

Double Geeking is when you use two computers at the same time

for different tasks, like watching Technobabble on one

and updating Facebook on the other.

But it doesn't stop there.

Triple Geeking is... Are you with me?

..using THREE computers at the same time!

And so on.

And then there's the person who has more than one hand-held device,

a smartphone, tablet, pager.

They're said to be wearing "digital jewellery".

Oh, yes, check it!

My middle name is Bling!

Or Montague. I can never remember.

On that note, ta-ra!

Next time on Technobabble...

Kim takes us behind the scenes at a major gaming festival.

There's just too much to do!

Maya meets robotic artists who can sketch portraits.

I've ruined your face!

And Niki and Sammy show how to punk your unsuspecting mates

with prank apps.

Have you farted, Sammy?

Wh...what?