chemicals
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A PC is like an ogre; it's full of toxic layers
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 PCRead - What's inside your laptop
Protein-coated discs could enable 50TB capacities
We know that it shouldn't come as a shock anymore when researchers announce new storage technologies that promise to hold tantalizingly large amounts of data, but we were still pretty stoked to learn that a recent breakthrough at Harvard Medical School may eventually lead to DVD-size discs whose capacities approach an eye-popping 50TB. Unlike traditional optical or magnetic solutions, the disc developed by Professor V Renugopalakrishnan and his colleagues is coated with thousands of light-activated proteins called bacteriorhodopsin which are found in the membrane of a particular salt marsh microbe -- and which temporarily convert to a series of intermediate molecules when exposed to sunlight. That property allows the proteins to act as individual bits in a binary system, but since they have a tendency to return to their grounded state after mere hours or days, Renugopalakrishnan and his team modified the requisite microbes' DNA to produce proteins capable of maintaining that intermediary state for several years. Unfortunately we won't see this technology come to market anytime soon, and even when it does, 50TB capacities will still be a ways off, so it looks like we'll have to settle for those disappointing 200GB Blu-ray discs for the foreseeable future.[Via Gotakon]
