Scientists have increased the power levels at which they smash together fundamental particles, sending them speeding toward each other at energies of 4 teraelectron volts (TeV), creating a collision energy of 8 TeV—a new world record. Ultimately, the collider will run at 7TeV each, producing a collision energy of 14 TeV. The power-up will require the machine to shutdown for refurbishment at the end of the year. 

Created by French physician Dr. Louis Auzoux, these rare, collectible plates were used as teaching tools in France from 1900 through the 1960s. Made of chalk paper, the intricate works of art were used by teachers to illustrate the topic of the day.

A true embodiment of medical visualizations graduated to art, Auzoux was also well known for his meticulous papier-mâché anatomical models executed with breathtaking detail. 

A chasm between the humanities and sciences? Snow makes the case for the unification of the seemingly polar opposites by way of a third culture.

“For constantly I felt I was moving among two groups – comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral and psychological climate had so little in common that one might have crossed an ocean.”

“There are few parts of the hard sciences which one can understand so much without mathematical training. What one needs most of all is visual and three-dimensional imagination, and it is a study where painters and sculptors could be instantaneously at home.”

Sapat Gali (Soppat; Suppat; Sumpat), Manshera, Naran-Kagan Valley, Kohistan District, North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan small cabinet, 6.1 x 3.7 x 3.5 cm

Robert Matthew "Rob" Lavinsky, proprietor of The Arkenstone mineral dealership, was born December 13, 1972 in Columbus, Ohio, the son of Richard Lavinsky, an attorney, and Marilyn Rosen, a dental hygienist. He began collecting calcite at age 13, with the support of many mentors in the Columbus Rock and Mineral Society, including Carlton Davis , field collectors John Medici and Henry Fisher, and dealers Neal and Chris Pfaff, among others. He competed with his calcites (which he still owns) for the first time at age 18 in the Berea, Ohio show. He eventually expanded his scope to collecting United Kingdom classics, Sweet Home mine rhodochrosite, and worldwide classics. As a field-collector he dug for minerals in the dolostone quarries and roadcuts throughout Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky (Halls Gap millerite), Ontario (Bancroft), and various other localities.

In the March issue of Scientific American Carl Schoonover, author of Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century, describes a new computer-modeling technique that allows researchers to zoom in on the smallest components of the active brain in 3-D. To accompany the story, we've collected images from his recent book, which describes the tools that scientists have used to observe the nervous system from the second century to the present. During the past 20 years, breakthroughs in these technologies have fueled unprecedented advances in neuroscience.

More here.

That terse message summoned Al Alcorn to Andy Capp's bar in Sunnyvale two weeks after Alcorn had installed the Pong arcade game. Pong's problem? Popularity. Its milk carton coin-catcher was jammed with quarters.

Pong heralded a gaming revolution. Mechanical arcade games like pinball had appeared the late 1800s. Pong, designed by Alcorn for Atari in 1972, launched the video game craze that transformed and reinvigorated the old arcades and made Atari the first successful video game company.

On December 9, 1968, Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart and the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute staged a 90-minute public multimedia demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. It was the world debut of personal and interactive computing: for the first time, the public saw a computer mouse, which controlled a networked computer system to demonstrate hypertext linking, real-time text editing, multiple windows with flexible view control, cathode display tubes, and shared-screen teleconferencing. The 1968 demo presaged many of the technologies we use today, from personal computing to social networking.