A $12 computer of sorts - a cheap keyboard and Nintendo-like console - already exists in India, where people hook the devices to home TVs to run simple games and programs. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology students hope to soup up these 1980s-era desktops with rudimentary Web access and more.

The video containing this statistic, “An anthropological introduction to YouTube”, is a presentation given by Dr. Michael Wesch, an anthropologist from Kansas State University, at the Library of Congress on June 23, 2008.

Normally, unpowered DRAM memory chips lose their contents after a several seconds. But a team of researchers have discovered if those chips can be kept very cool, then they might retain their contents for up to an hour or more. According to the researchers’ findings, that gives someone plenty of time to read the memory in the chips and recover a user’s encryption keys.