Business as usual: A process unit at the ExxonMobil refinery restarted today after it was shut down Monday because of a hydrogen sulfide leak. Officials at the refinery say the leak was stopped and contained with no injuries or external impact.
Too much information: According to a new study, humans were able to store 295 exabytes of information as of 2007. Now what, you might ask, is an exabyte? As you may recall, a bit is a single piece of information, “1” or “0,” and a byte usually contains eight bits. An exabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Martin Hilbert and Priscila Lopez of the University of Southern California say that if all that data were stored on compact discs, the stack of CDs would reach beyond the moon—if the stack didn’t topple over. That’s a lot of data, and presumably we have collected a lot more since then. After all, Lopez and Hilbert estimate the storage capacity of the world’s computers doubles every 18 months. Their findings, looking at the growth of information storage capacity from 1986 to 2007, appear in this week’s edition of the journal Science. Hilbert and Lopez also calculated that in 2007 people sent 1.9 zettabytes of information through broadcast technology such as televisions and GPS. A zettabyte is equivalent to 1,000 exabytes. And that’s equivalent to every person in the world reading 174 newspapers every day.
