On September 10, 2008 the Large Hadron Collider will fire its first beam at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Live satellite broadcasts and webcasts from the CERN Control Centre will be available on the CERN website as CERN scientists attempt to circulate a beam of particles around the collider. In the U.S., scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago will be hosting a pajama party for visitors and the media as they participate in the experiment via videoconference. Short movies will be shown explaining the four planned experiments, LHCb, CMS, ALICE and ATLAS, which will each be managed and webcast from four separate control rooms. The LHC is expected to produce 15 million gigabytes of data every year and will be analyzed with the LHC global computing grid, which will be officially launched October 3 at the LHC Grid Fest.

• Large Hadron Collider First Beam Webcast
• Official U.S. LHC Website
• LHC First Beam Events in the U.S.
• Interactions.org - Particle physics and high energy physics news
• Quantum Diaries Survivor Blog

Every year the Buckminster Fuller Institute gives away $100,000 to "support the development and implementation of a solution that has significant potential to solve humanity's most pressing problems in the shortest possible time while enhancing the Earth's ecological integrity." The 2009 Challenge begins this week on September 18th. The judges are looking for designs that follow the trimtab principle. That is, something that uses the smallest amount of energy and resources to produce the greatest result. Click here to find out more.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has over 20,000 maps of coastlines, oceans, lakes, and other waterways dating back to 1747 available free for download on the Office of Coast Survey's Historical Map & Chart Project website. The maps and charts were scanned from paper originals beginning 1995 by the Office of Coast Survey. You can search by keyword, state or region, year, and map type, including bathymetric, gravity, magnetic, and more. Two file formats are available: high-resolution JPG and SID for ArcView. A Flash-based preview allows you to examine and zoom in on each map such as in the Gulf of Mexico nautical map above. The series also contains an amazing Civil War collection that includes battlefield maps and plans of attack.

We've gotten so used to using Google Maps, that perhaps we've forgotten that there are many other sources of maps on the intertubes. The New York Public Library has a webpage devoted to its Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, which contains the world's largest public map collection with over 400,000 maps. Their website has a long list of links to a wide range of maps, from antique to digital, dating back to the 17th century. They also have a cool introductory video about their collection called Mapping the World.