Word: acidity
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...billion Web pages. (Google, on the other hand, claims to scan more than a trillion pages, but only indexes those that are useful, according to the company.) The Cuil team generated so much buzz for its venture that it managed to raise some $33 million in financing. But the acid test of any search site is the results it generates, and for now, anyway, Cuil falls way short of the industry's leaders, and even, for that matter, of many startups...
...Danny Goldberg, who managed both Nirvana and Sonic Youth, ''takes itself very seriously. It's very similar to the '60s.'' Plus the jeans, the extremely long hair . . . ''I look at Nirvana and Soul Asylum,'' says Jann Wenner, the 47-year-old founder of Rolling Stone, ''and I practically get acid flashbacks.'' In other words: been there, done that. For any smug baby boomer, it is pleasant to see the young so precisely following in one's footsteps. A century ago, there was Dostoyevsky on the one hand and Dickens on the other. You could be a doomed bohemian...
Another part of that portfolio could focus on a component of the ocean far more plentiful than its plankton: its salt. Sea salt, like table salt, is made of sodium chloride. If you break that compound in two, you create an acid and a base. Remove some of the acid, and you change ocean chemistry in such a way that atmospheric CO2 dissolves into the water, where it is taken up in the shells of marine creatures, which fall to the seafloor and become limestone. Essentially, says Kurt House, a Harvard graduate student who came up with the idea when...
...scale. According to House's calculations, his plan would require 100 seawater-electrolysis plants, each as large as the largest sewage-treatment plant on Earth, built on shorelines around the world. They would draw out 180 billion metric tons of seawater each year, split the salt, keep the acid and pour back the water. And even that would remove just 10% of the more than 30 billion metric tons of CO2 we put into the air annually...
What's more, you'd be left with a lot of hydrochloric acid to get rid of on land, while the changed ocean chemistry would surely kill a lot of fish--though only, says House, in the immediate vicinity of the electrolysis plants. "I would bet against any of this happening in the next half-century," House concedes. Still, he adds, "if global warming gets really bad, we could do it." Harvard has applied for a patent on the process just in case...