Computer Facts

160 billion emails are sent daily, 97% of which are spam.

Spam generates 33bn KWt-hours of energy every year, enough to power 2.4 million homes, producing 17 million tons of CO2.

9 out of every 1,000 computers are infected with spam.

Spammer get 1 response to every 12 million emails they send (yet it still makes them a small profit).

A twillionaire is a twitterer with a million or more followers.

There are some 1 billion computers in use.

There are some 2 billion TV sets in use.

There are more than 4 billion cell phones in use. About 3 million cell phones are sold every day.

The first known cell phone virus, Cabir.A, appeared in 2004.

Since 2008, video games have outsold movie DVDs.

Amazon sells more e-books than printed books.

Facebook has 500 million registered users… about 100 million less than QQ.

About 1.8 billion people connect to the Internet, 450 million of them speak English. See list of Internet
languages.

Google indexed it’s 1 trillionth unique URL on July 25, 2008. That is thought to be about 20% of all the pages on the Internet but a high percentage of the World Wide Web (the public Internet).

One google search produces about 0.2g of CO2. But since you hardly get an answer from one search, a typical search session produces about the same amount of CO2 as does boiling a kettle.

Google handles about 1 billion search queries per day, releasing some 200 tons of CO2 per day.
The average US household uses 10.6 megawatt-hours (MWh) electricity per year.

Google uses an estimated 15 billion kWh of electricity per year, more than most countries. However, google generates a lot of their own power with their solar panels.

The first public cell phone call was made on April 3, 1973 by Martin Cooper.

The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X was the first cell phone sold in the US; launched on April 11, 1984, it was designed by Rudy Krolopp and weighed 2 pounds.

About 20% of the videos on YouTube are music related.

24 hours of video viewing is uploaded every minute on YouTube.

People view 15 billion videos online every month.

On average, US onliners view 100 videos per month each.

Flickr hosts some 5 billion photographs, Facebook hosts more than 15 billion.

1 Bit = Binary Digit
 8 Bits = 1 Byte
1000 Bytes = 1 Kilobyte
1000 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte
1000 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte
1000 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte
1000 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte
1000 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte
1000 Exabytes = 1 Zettabyte
1000 Zettabytes = 1 Yottabyte
1000 Yottabytes = 1 Brontobyte
1000 Brontobytes = 1 Geopbyte

Technically speaking, the sum is 1024 bytes.

A drug that can make your old memories like new

There are drugs that help you remember what you learn, and ones that erase your memory. But until now, there have no substances with the power to enhance and strengthen old memories hovering on the brink of being forgotten. Now a group of neuroscientsts say they've isolated a single enzyme in the brain that can help long-term memories remain crisp in your mind.




Reut Shema and his colleagues knew that the enzyme PKMzeta helped maintain the long-term storage of memories in the brain. But recently they discovered that boosting levels of PKMzeta helped rats recall, in great detail, events they'd experienced many days beforehand. Lowering levels of the enzyme caused the rats to forget old memories more quickly. What's remarkable about this discovery is that the enzyme can help the animals recall these old memories even if they weren't boosting their levels of PKMzeta at the time the memories were formed.
A release about the study, published today in Science, explains:

Shema and colleagues now show that overexpressing the enzyme in the insular cortex region of the rat brain can strengthen more than one memory at a time and improve memories that were established months before the enzyme experiment.

If the same treatment works for humans, we could be looking at a way to deal with age-related memory loss. And a way to help us recall information we once knew intimately, but which has grown cloudy as the years have passed.
You can read the authors' full account of their experiments and how the enzyme works, in Science.