• The Environment

    Ocean pH and the Fate of the Food Chain

    By Posted on 5.23.2008 8 Comments

    Global warming is far and away the symptom at the top of the list of indicators that our planet is overloaded with carbon dioxide. Another important, but less considered consequence of the excess CO2 is the effect it has on the world's oceans. The oceans are a natural carbon dioxide sponge, responsible for maintaining the balance of CO2 in the atmosphere by absorbing a measure of the gas in its water. Currently, it is estimated that the ocean is uptaking nearly one-third of all human-produced CO2, which is slowly lowering its overall pH. Put simply: the oceans are becoming acidic.

    5.25.2008 at 08:37am - Comment by whatever

    Luke, Trees / forests wont grow "were the bottom are covered in water" becuase their roots would be suffocated by too much water. Also, "when the tree falls, the c02 captured in the tree lifetime would be passed into the water" won't work either. It doesnt matter if the CO2 would go into the water. It would just rise to the surface and "evaporate" into the air. A fallen tree would have to be covered with several feet of earth to be sequestered. And most coal and oil was created after plant and animal matter was buried and crushed under millions of tons of rock above it for millions of years. When trees and animals died in the Pleistocene, they gave up their C02 and other gases to the atmosphere.

  • DIY

    Can I Recover Deleted Files?

    By Posted on 5.23.2008 4 Comments

    So you finally finished writing your novel and then somehow accidentally dumped it? It happens. Luckily, when you delete a file from your computer’s trash bin, it’s actually just marked for deletion. That means it can be overwritten on your hard drive by other data, but there’s a good chance it’s still intact—for a while, anyway.

    5.25.2008 at 08:27am - Comment by whatever

    You forgot to mention that there is another option, Apple's Time Machine, in the newer versions of Mac OS X (10.5.2 +). You can revert to previous versions of your files / OS / etc by restoring a previous backup version. No extra software to buy, it's built in....only disadvantage is that you'd lose any "newer" files and would need to save them externally on a hard disk or flash drive.....but you could probably do a Time Machine backup of the current state of your computer onto 1 Hard drive, then restore a previous version, grab the old file, save it externally, then revert to the previous "current" version of the computer, get the old file from the external drive.

  • Entertainment & Gaming

    PopSci 5-Minute Project: Disc Doctor

    By Posted on 5.23.2008 11 Comments

    About to chuck that busted CD? Not so fast, young grasshopper. Web editor Megan Miller demonstrates three ways to resurrect those scratched discs using stuff you probably already have sitting on your shelf.

    5.25.2008 at 08:03am - Comment by whatever

    Neo, don't be a twit, the video was good, it was not sloppy. And I think you're wrong about cd's not having a plastic layer. All CD's & DVD's have a plastic layer over the substrate which contains the actual data. THAT'S WHY THEY GET SCRATCHED. The scratches are in the outer layer.

  • Entertainment & Gaming

    Cocktail Party Science: Inside the Iron Man

    By Posted on 4.25.2008 2 Comments

    In our latest episode of Cocktail Party Science, host Chuck Cage and executive editor Mike Haney sit down with Greg Mone, author of May's "Building The Real Iron Man" to learn about the true-life exoskeletons of tomorrow and how they compare to the stuff of science fiction.

    5.16.2008 at 06:26pm - Comment by whatever

    The Cocktail party science podcasts suck. I'm unsubscribing. They are so boring, and who are those bozos ? The format and "guests" needs to be changed into something that is interesting, not just some dorks babbling on and on.



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