The Cosmic Ray Destroyed My Computer File

At least people have another excuse to use if their computer crashes and they lose their files.

How can distant supernovae, black holes and other cosmic events cause a desktop computer to crash?

The answer is that they produce cosmic rays, which produce high energy particles in the atmosphere that can occasionally hit RAM chips. The moving particles trail electrons, which can infiltrate chips' circuits and cause errors.

That's why computer chip giant Intel was in December awarded a US patent for the idea of building cosmic ray detectors into every chip (full patent). . . .

I guess we will soon be able to note that our computers have another neat feature: cosmic ray detector.