Now here's a gadget. In fact not just a gadget, but arguably the gadget. It's the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, the European laboratory for particle physics near Geneva, scheduled to have its Grand Opening next month. Stephen Hawking explains what the LHC is for: "It will smash particles together to recreate the moments after the big bang, producing a new golden age of discovery for physicists." T...

Every year our block in the South Bay has a wild (but very well-organized ) July 4th Block party. We do it up right - get a permit to close down the street, rent a double slip n' slide, run pop-ups and tables down the middle of the street, set up cooking in "BBQ alley" (Brad's driveway), referee a volleyball and basketball tourney, and string up pinatas. In the evening, the neighborhood band plays...

Far be it from me to encourage you to work while you're on vacation, but . . . If you absolutely must toil while you broil, Download.com has gathered together a nice brief collection of software that will ease the pain. Or at least help you complete your tasks with dispatch and get back to your inflatable pool lounge. Many of these tools were new to me, but I can attest that one of them. Documents...

They've been rumored for a while, but it appears that they will actually be in existence in a couple of months: laptop bags that can get through airport security while your precious laptop remains snug within. If you carry your machine in one of these bags, you won't have to remove it in order to pass X-ray inspection, according to the New York Times. Two major makers, Targus and Pathfinder Luggage...

WEbook (pronounced "we-book"), a collaborative book writing website that launched this past spring, puts to the test several premises about writing and publishing, the first being that every person has at least one book - or one story - in them worth telling (or some variation of that idea). The second premise is their tagline, "Writing loves company," which is already proven, in part, by the fact...