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Green Tea Cleans Hard Drive Heads
mprindle writes "Wired.com has an article announcing that a 'study of the use of green tea extracts for polishing the magnetic heads in hard-disk drives has yielded a compound that works three to four times faster than conventional compounds. If the findings can be reproduced in an industrial setting, the compound could reduce the cost and environmental impact of hard-drive manufacturing.' And you just thought that green tea was good to drink."
I always knew green tea was meant for something other than drinking.
It's nasty stuff.
Silly rabbit
antioxidant
This could only prompt me to ask them: One Lump or Two? [WHACK WHACK]
And you just thought that green tea was good to drink.
No, not really.
And here I thought green tea was only to clean your...uh... "internal soft drives"...
Considering that bio-active materials like green tea (yum!) decay and eventually become unusable and must be disposed of properly, doesn't it make more sense to stick with chemicals which, though bad for the environment, do not decay or degrade and can be used in a specific task indefinitely?
Add to this the fact that landfills are full of "biodegradable" waste which because of the lack of oxygen in the area are unable to break down. It makes far more sense to go with a material which can be reused and/or recycled. Bio-degradable sometimes ain't.
I have been pwned because my
If green tea is all that good, just imagine when they try beer!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_tea
What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?!
Oh... umm... Nevermind.
Yeah, hemp, it's good for "heads."
mouth-clean
throat- clean
digestive tract - clean
nasal cavity - clean if not swallowed properly.
teeth - green.
they have bee cleaning hard drives in china with green tea for a thousand years...
Thats right... All the tea!
(family guy, for the ones without humor)
When I visited the U.S.S.R. in 1988 our assigned 'tour propagandist' in Samarkand, Uzbekistan informed us that the green tea was drunk in part to prevent strontium-90 poisoning. gg Communist science bureau!
I hate Grammar Nazi's
This process is gentler to the components that make green tea such a wonderful beverage. Earl Grey, Ceylon, Bo Lei, and whatever other brown or black tea have been pan-fried or dry-heated to stop the natural oxidation process.
Steaming preserves the EGCG , which is being studied for it's anti-bacterial and cancer fighting properties, and also L-Theanine , which gives real green tea it's flavour and purportedly induces Alpha waves and tranquility in the brain.
Ounce per ounce, Steamed green tea contains more polyphenols than red wine or grape seed extract.
I have an anxiety problem, and had to swear off coffee a few years ago. No caffeine in any form for me, until I stumbled upon japanese green tea. All tea contains caffeine , but it is about 1/2 the amount in the same serving of coffee. The added benefit of the L-Theanine practically cancels out the effect of caffeine on the body and in the brain.
I start the day with a cup of thin matcha (do two of these and can you say "420"?) , then a cup of Gyokuro and in the evening some nice genmai cha.
Unfortuneatly, green tea is only harvested 4 times per year in Japan. Green tea is very perishiable, and is best when fresh. The bags you can purchase in asian groceries here in the U.S. of A. have been sitting on shelves too long and taste like crap. (Bonus note: all the decaffeinated 'green' teas you can purchase in regular supermarkets will not taste like the real thing, pretty bitter and bland. There is no decaffeinating process that doesn't kill all the good things about green tea. Fresh green tea is naturally sweet and not bitter when prepared correctly.)
Interested? I purchase all my teas from here.
Wait, What?
That could really help with hard drives.
Does regular or decaffeinated matter?
On a humorous note, will caffeinated green tea make the hard drive faster?
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Some here are jumping to the conclusion that this will pollute less.
Until somebody spends another $1 million of our taxes (read: NSF grant) in doing the net impact calculation, consider this:
1. More land dedicated to grow green tea = less uncultivated land, less *nature*, as they say
2. Fertilizer & pesticide for green tea, and all of the petrochemicals that went into it
3. Fuels and other energies used to sow, harvest, clean, store & transport green tea
4. Chemical processes to refine bioactive compounds out of the tea itself
And I have not even mentioned the fuels used to create the wealth that is going to get taxed in order to pay for the agricultural subsidies that (of course!) are eventually going to be given to growers of green tea.
The next pasture is always greener
sounds like one of those stupid John C. Dvorak articles that are supposed to be funny bet aren't.
[FromTheMorning]
In his interview at Salon a couple weeks ago, Neal Stephenson wrote, "Every culture can be kind of defined by what they drink in order to avoid dying of diarrhea. In China it's tea. In Africa it's milk or animal blood. In Europe it was wine and beer."
I didn't realize the same would apply to hard drive cleaning...
This sig intentionally left justified.
In Chinese restaurants, waiters pour a bit of the leftover tea onto the table to clean it. They say it works much better than plain water. Ho gon-jeng! (very clean)