Tag: CERN

Google appears to be tired of waiting for potential genius engineers to do things like graduate college. The company has instead decided to launch the Google Science Fair, a competition that asks 13- to 18-year olds with bright scientific minds to pit their projects against one another for prizes. While ostensibly encouraging students to get involved in science and engineering, it is also likely ...

As it's widely argued that the Internet has depersonalized and globalized human communication, it's easy to forget that the Web was invented by a person, and in a place. With that thought in mind, Web entrepreneur and Yelp co-founder David Galbraith decided to find out, once and for all, where and by whom the Internet was brought to life. Over the course of an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, who ...

You've totally heard about this thing called the Large Hadron Collider because 1) it is easily confused by children and poor typists to be a euphemism for an erection, 2) it cost $8 billion to build and yet was easily shut down when a bird dropped a baguette on it, 3) it makes some people fear that it'll open up a black hole or bizarro universe where Justin Bieber is NOT trending on Twitter, and ...

Every now and then, something will randomly fall out of the sky into an extremely insular environment, and chaos and confusion will erupt. Those consequences, as Chicken Little will tell you, can be devastating. Something along those lines recently happened at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) when a bird dropped a baguette on the giant particle accelerator as it was flying overhead, nearly ...

Al Gore may not agree, but this week marks the anniversary of the birth of the Web. 20 years ago, on March 13, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher for the European Organization for Nuclear Research lab outside of Geneva, Switzerland, proposed an idea to counter data-loss at CERN due to personnel turnover and incompatible computers. In the proposal, Berners-Lee described the predicament by stating, ...

The world's scariest technological advancement and Hollywood's most familiar standby will soon meet, according to Crunchgear. In case you'd forgotten, the massive, underground machine the Large Hadron Collider -- engineered to simulate the "Big Bang" -- was first kicked into gear last September. Fortunately for everybody, when the switch was flipped, the world didn't implode. Unfortunately for ...