Free Republic

Almost ever electronic device made today except some for the military have solder joints that contain no lead. This is an effort to save our groundwater and our public health. The fact that the lead has been generally replaced with silver or bismuth, both of which are actually greater health risks than lead, well we’ll leave that one for Ralph Nader. The longer-term trend is toward all-tin connections, anyway, but they don’t work very well, either. Costs have gone up for computers with lead-free solder, mean time between failures (MTBF) has gone down (in this case down is bad) and...

WASHINGTON – Democrats Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania and Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas struggled uncertainly for nomination to new Senate terms Tuesday and tea party activists clashed with the Republican hierarchy in Kentucky in primaries testing anti-establishment anger in both political parties. In a fourth race with national implications, Republican Tim Burns and Democrat Mark Critz vied to fill out the final few months in the term of the late Rep. John Murtha .. ... .. Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden in Oregon faced little opposition .. for .. a third full term. Voters in Pennsylvania and Oregon also selected gubernatorial candidates.

Scientists successfully store "e=mc2 1905" on DNA of living matterFebruary 27, 2007 (Computerworld) -- A Japanese university announced scientists there have developed a new technology that uses bacteria DNA as a medium for storing data long-term, even for thousands of years. Keio University Institute for Advanced Biosciences and Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus announced the development of the new technology, which creates an artificial DNA that carries up to more than 100 bits of data within the genome sequence, according to the JCN Newswire. The universities said they successfully encoded "e= mc2 1905!" -- Einstein's theory of relativity and the...