The internet is a waste of energy
Now I love surfing the web as the next man, and this blog itself relies on literally dozens of people a day making their way through cyberspace to Weird Science Towers.
But it turns out the interweb is anything but efficient and chucking out around 300 million tons of carbon every year.
White coats at Bell Labs want to make the internet cleaner and greener.
And they say they can do it and that by making a few simple code changes could make the network 99 per cent more energy efficient.
To help implement the changes needed to save that energy, Bell Labs has formed Green Touch, a consortium of networking and computer companies dedicated to reducing the energy waste of telecom networks by 99.9 percent over the next five years.
The savings lie in programs that separate actual messages from electromagnetic fuzz.
Right now, networks use very powerful signals to communicate, that way the signal vastly overpowers the noise. Now that computer programs can easily separate the signal from the noise at much lower energies, networks can transmit the same message at a fraction of the energy cost.
Weird Science Factoid: More people are killed by donkeys annually than are killed in plane crashes. Bad donkeys.
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Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
