Cell phones are quite tough, but they sometimes break. Nothing does the trick like water. I recently put my cell phone in the washing machine, and I am trying to get it to work again.

If you are lucky, and pull the phone out right away, you can often just take the battery out, dry the phone, and it will work again. A good way of drying the phone is to put it in a closed container of dry rice for a few days. The rice absorbs the moisture. If you have access to a vacuum chamber, you can put the cell phone in that. The zero pressure will cause the water to essentially boil of the phone.

If you dropped the cell phone in salt water, or something sticky like coffee, simply drying it may not work. In this case you have to actually clean the phone. A good way of doing this is an alcohol bath. The alcohol will dissolve the corrosion and sticky stuff, and after you take the phone out of the bath, it will evaporate without a trace. Make sure to use the highest concentration of alcohol you can find. Make sure you've taken the battery out, and keep in mind that alcohol can damage some plastics, so carefully with the screen.

Save a Wet Cell Phone WikiHow

Here is a short video giving some advice about how to deal with a wet cell phone:

In the US many people have a land line in addition to a cell phone. In much of the developing world, there are many areas where the reach of the cell phone is greater than the almost non existant reach of the land line. This is because setting up a cell phone system requires less physical infrastructure than a land line. One does not need to run a physical line from customer to customer, isolated cell towers are enough.

Nairobi has many cell phones, and a thriving cell phone repair industry called Cell phone alley.

AfriGadget is a blog covering innovation and technology in Africa.

Cell phone repair in India.

A code cracking computer, rebuilt from old photos and partial plans "is trying to crack messages enciphered on Nazi hardware in an event sponsored by the National Museum of Computing, located at Bletchley Park."

This is part of a Cipher Challenge. Amateur radio operators can intercept the same messages that the Colossus rebuild is trying to crack and try to crack it for themselves using a virtual Colossus.

In fact the Colossus took longer to crack the cipher than a home computer.

Here is a brief history of cryptography.

A German church has received the dubious honor of becoming the "most tilted tower" around.

Look at a photo comparing the leaning tower of Pisa to the Suurhusen church.

Here is the English version of the offical leaning tower of Pisa web site.

Leaning tower of Pisa by Elvis Santana

Here is a companion web site to a 1999 NOVA broadcast about the leaning tower of Pisa.

October 4th was "the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, the world's first man-made sattelite."

10 questions about Sputnik and a photo of it.

Long before the Soviets, people were thinking about how to get spaceships off the ground. In 1856 Jules Verne described a fictional giant cannon that launched a manned ship toward the moon. The previously linked page describes some of the predictions Jules Verne made, and how accurate they were.

Here is a NASA page that discusses Sputnik.

In August Science Friday had an episode that contained a segment about the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. The mp3 is available here.

These two unmanned spacecraft have been going for the past 30 years, and may continue to go for another decade or more.

NASA provides information about the two space craft here, including information about the golden records on board that were designed with the help of Carl Sagan.

Above: An image of one side of the golden record placed on board Voyager 1 and 2 from Nasa's JPL

The Voyager program was a great success as it was completed with one third of the original budget and it greatly surpassed the goals it was supposed to meet.

The Voyager made an appearance in the first Star Trek movie, and their are many references to the Voyager program in popular culture.

Here are two Nasa pages about the voyager program:

Voyager Project Information

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