MichaelSmith writes "Scientists think that there might be arsenic-based life in Mono Lake, California. If it's shown to exist, such life could have evolved independently from our own, or it could have forked from ours at a very early stage."

innocent_white_lamb writes "Starbucks brought out a line of cups with prehistoric Aztec images on them. Now the government of Mexico wants them to pay for the use of the images. Does the copyright on an image last hundreds of years?"

An anonymous reader tips us to an AP story on a recent study of how much data we are producing. IDC estimates that in 2006 we created, captured, and replicated 161 exabytes of digital information. The last time anyone tried to estimate global information volume, in 2003, researchers at UC Berkeley came up with 5 exabytes. (The current study tries to account for duplicating data — on the same assumptions as the 2003 study it would have come out at 40 exabytes.) By 2010, according to IDC, we will be producing far more data than we will have room to store, closing in on a zettabyte.