In case we haven't told you this in one of our How-tos already: don't attempt to eat your PC. You'll probably break a few teeth trying it, and a lot of the parts that make up your chunky tower or your sandwich lookalike of a laptop are toxic anyway. PC Magazine outlines some of the common toxic chemicals that make up your PC, and it doesn't make for pleasant reading. For example, did you know that your motherboard's Beryllium base could give you cancer, and your LCD's mercury infused fluorescent bulb, brain damage? OK, so you're not really in any kind of risk unless you go against our wise eating advice earlier, but it certainly makes you think -- specifically, that the innocent box sitting under your desk is trying to kill you. C'mon, these thing are already starting to "randomly" explode; how long until our LCD activates its tilt mechanism and starts dripping mercury into our mouth while we're sleeping, or our laptop sneaks in between two slices of bread? Personally, we're going back to pen, paper, and non-robotic carrier pigeon.

Read - Toxics in your PC
Read - What's inside your laptop

While the folks behind the AACS could probably use a few pointers about constructing a sufficient lock of their own, a group of scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovat, Israel have crafted a molecule-sized "keypad lock" that "only activates when exposed to the correct password, a sequence of chemicals and light." Organic chemist Abraham Shanzer and his colleagues suggest that their invention could "lead to a new level of safeguards for secret information," but we tend think the infamous hackers of the world would inevitably crack the code. Nevertheless, the molecule -- dubbed FLIP -- houses a core linker that mimics a bacterial compound that binds to iron, and attached to it are two molecules that respectively can glow either blue or green. Using three "buttons," which just so happen to be an acidic molecule, an alkaline compound, and ultraviolet light, the lock can be "opened" if given the right sequence of chemicals and light, and there's a grand total of two noticeable results possible. Interestingly, the researchers have insinuated that their creation could be used to recognize "when certain sequences of chemicals (like harmful toxins) are released in the body," but we haven't heard a 10-4 from the US Army just yet.

[Via Yahoo, thanks, Antonio H.]