If you’re one of the few people who still believes the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could accidentally destroy the world, I’d recommend you get your affairs in order before September 10th. CERN, the European physics agency that oversees the LHC, has announced that the proton beam in the world’s most powerful collider will be turned on for the first time this September.
It's a win-win situation either way... We all die, which means nobody's unhappy, being dead and all. Or, we get a new view of the universe.
When it launches in 2009, NASA's Kepler Mission will include the most sensitive detection system ever put into service for discovering exosolar planets. In the meantime, our toolkit on Earth is getting better with each passing year. Astronomers using the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) at La Silla Observatory in Chile have discovered three new rocky planets orbiting a single star, all within ten times the size of Earth.
Well, we could always use a backup planet in case we ever screw this one up beyond repair... Now the only problem is getting there...
While the MacBook Air showed how slim a laptop could be, the Voodoo Envy ($2,100; voodoopc.com) demonstrates how much can fit in that space. Using the same compact CPU as the Air, the carbon-fiber-clad Envy measures just 0.7 inch thick—a tad thinner than the Mac at its thickest point. And it packs in more features, including a slot for high-speed cellular data cards, two USB ports, and an HDMI port for attaching to a high-def TV.
Once again, Macs fail.
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