The energy economy remains reliant on fossil fuels, which is leading to the continued accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. But it may be possible to continue burning fossil fuels without affecting the atmosphere; pilot studies are already underway to evaluate the potential of techniques that extract CO2 from the exhaust stream of power plants. Of course, once the carbon is removed, there's still the issue of what to do with it afterwards. Most plans involve placing it in geological formations that are already known to trap gasses: those that we've extracted natural gas from, to be precise.

Chemically, however, CO2 has very different properties from hydrocarbons, so it's not guaranteed to behave in the same way once we stick it underground. Even a small rate of release, less than one percent annually, would mean that sequestration would simply delay any problems associated with high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. So it's essential that we have some idea of what might happen to underground reservoirs of CO2. A paper that appears in today's issue of Nature takes a big step in that direction by exploring the fate of some naturally occurring CO2 reservoirs.

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[PICS] Called the Mondi, the touchscreen, pocket-sized device is designed for use on the Clear mobile WiMax network from Clearwire, Samsung officials announced on Tuesday evening.

In August 2008, the Fedora team noticed irregularities on its server. Project leader Paul W. Frields has now released a detailed report of the break-in. Paul Frields's Update and Report on Fedora August 2008 Intrusion on the fedora-announce-list reads like a detective novel. It all started on August 12, 2008, when a cron job on a Fedora host repo

Would you like the iPhone as much as you do if it came from Redmond instead of Cupertino?

Is Harvard Law professor Charlie Nesson crazy? As Nesson himself admits, "this does seem to be a question on many people's minds."

In our recent conversation with Nesson, the professor said he hopes to turn the Joel Tenenbaum P2P file-swapping case into a wide-ranging discussion on copyright. But a set of newly published e-mails indicate that Nesson wants to go further than anyone—including the most prominent "free culture" academics—previously suspected. Not content to argue that massive statutory damages are unconstitutional in such cases, Nesson plans to press an audacious claim: noncommercial P2P file-swapping is "fair use" and thus totally legal.

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Microsoft today announced that the forthcoming Windows 7 would come in just one single version, despite rumors that there would be five versions of the software. The operating system will simply be called "Windows 7." The decision was reached after customer surveys revealed that Vista's multiple versions confused customers.

Moments after Paul Jorgensen realized the commercial jet he was aboard was about to land in the Hudson River, he turned to the passenger next to him, grabbed his arm and asked him, "Are we going to die?"

It looks like Hulu's trying yet another ill-fated tactic to keep its content restricted to traditional browsers and off things like Boxxee -- TunerFreeMCE's Martin Millmore says Hulu's HTML is now encrypted at the source and then decrypted using Javascript on the client...

There has been turmoil at Facebook and MySpace.That may be because neither one of them will ever make a cent of profit.

Even as sex crimes against minors decline, a new report from the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center released this week found an massive increase in the number of online child predators arrested in undercover sting operations. Despite this, the survey rejects the idea that the Internet is an especially perilous place for minors, and finds that while the nature of online sex crimes against minors changed little between 2000 and 2006, the profile of the offenders has been shifting—and both differ markedly from the popular conception.

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Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin says that Microsoft is hostile to open technologies and that product makers should ditch the company's patent-encumbered FAT filesystem.

These PCIe SSD drives can't arrive fast enough for our needs... ok, wants considering the thousands they cost. The latest announcement comes by way of Super Talent Technology with its new 2TB RAIDDrive. The card slips into a PCIe x8 slot and ships in Enterprise (battery backed), Workstation, and Gamer (I hope this isn't an april fools post)

There are plenty of good things about the new version of Microsoft's browser. But I found its interface sluggish.

After only two weeks from its initial release, Apple has released a second beta version of their iPhone 3.0 operating system. The new seed is available only to registered iPhone developers. The iPhone 3.0 beta was first introduced earlier this month and includes a number of enhancements.

These tech products and services may be forgotten, but they're far from gone. How have these geezers managed to hang on for so long?

The European Commissioner for Consumers today called out Facebook, Web advertisers, and Internet companies of all kinds to get better about transparency, privacy, and data protection—or regulators will step in.

According to Web analytics firm StatCounter, Firefox 3 has finally surpassed the popularity of Internet Explorer 7 in Europe. Internet Explorer's total marketshare across all versions, however, still exceeds that of Firefox.

According to the Wall Street Journal, HP and other major PC builders are considering building netbooks using the Google Linux-based Android operating system.

There is a general feeling among consumers in the U.S. that we are “trapped” with the cellular, cable and internet providers we have due to a general lack of competition in the marketplace. Will this always be the case?

One of the biggest challenges of science is figuring out what to do with unexpected results. They can reflect anything from a statistical anomaly to a deep problem that cuts to the heart of our understanding of the universe. There seems to be something unexpected lurking in the cosmic rays that strike the earth, which appear to be comprised of an unusual amount of antimatter.

Our universe is dominated by matter, rather than antimatter. We don't know why one predominates at the expense of the other, or why there were clearly uneven amounts in the early universe—those question will keep PhD students busy for a while—but we have a good sense of the general ratio of matter to antimatter in the current universe. Given that ratio, it's more than a little surprising that a group of measurements, from different sources and using different techniques, are all showing an excess of antiparticles.

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