On its Tuesday debut, the
Encyclopedia of Life logged 11.5 million page views in 5 1/2 hours -- and two of those hours were downtime. The Encyclopedia of Life is so popular, it keeps crashing. But it may be worth bookmarking. With plans to give each of Earth's 1.8 million species its own page, its creators compare The Encyclopedia of Life's coming impact on our lives to the invention of the microscope. The sprawling database will pool information much as Google does, and receive contributions from visitors, as Wikipedia does. In the early 1990s, Harvard University professor E.O. Wilson said the biological sciences needed the equivalent of a "Moon Shot." This is it.
