As it was told before the fall of 2007 that a mobile telephone would lead people to a better future free of roaming charges and buttons. Times, which likes to anoint things, has named iPhone as the ‘Invention of the Year”. Being pretty and versatile in cases like ‘airplane’ mode (i.e., no cell service, Wi-Fi, etc.), a tiny little orange airplane zooms into the menu bar, make Times to name iPhone as the “Invention of the Year”.

But the article accompanying the awards lays out several reasons why iPhone is very important in computer industry. The relentless buzz around the world, as well as the sales figures, are signs that people really think about what they want in a mobile computer. The iPhone has made wireless industry sit up and realize that it is setting a stage in the future in which mobile computer gradually occupies a larger part of your world. iPhone isn’t just cellphone, it’s also a Platform! Apple engineers use OS X, a full featured operating system, suited in that elegant glass and stainless steel case.

Indeed, iPhone is one little thing you shouldn’t miss!

Trouble sometimes seems to appear out of thin air, and a new experiment suggests that’s exactly what may happen to the world’s biggest science project when it’s scheduled to begin operation in Switzerland next May. In the high-energy maelstrom of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), particles will spontaneously appear out of the empty vacuum, which might just cause the $4-billion accelerator to overheat—and shut down.The idea that pairs of particles (in this case, an electron and a positron) can emerge out of nothingness is well known. But physicists working on a competing extreme machine, New York’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, recently observed the heating effect for the first time. As they slammed together gold ions in a 2.4-mile loop guided by a magnetic field, reaching temperatures of over a trillion degrees, pairs of electrons and positrons were created out of the vacuum. But when some of these electrons latched on to passing gold ions, they diverted part of the beam, causing it to smash into the wall of the loop. The result: a “hot spot” of 0.0002 watts, roughly equivalent to the power output of a firefly.

That’s no big deal for the RHIC—but the LHC will be using heavier lead atoms, speeding along with nearly 100 times more energy, which is expected to make electron-positron creation 100,000 times more likely. As a result, the heat generated will be more like 25 watts, or a low-watt bulb. Given that the superconducting magnets that steer the beam are cooled to a brisk 1.9 degrees above absolute zero (-456 degrees Fahrenheit), the extra heat could cause a risky sudden shutdown, followed by lengthy downtime for the accelerator.

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