The ATLAS particle detector at the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside Geneva is 150 ft. long, 82 ft. high, weighs 7,000 tons, and contains enough cable and wiring to wrap around Earth's equator seven times. It's a mammoth machine, designed for the delightful purpose of detecting particles so tiny, you can fit hundreds of billions of them into a beam narrower than a human hair. ATLAS occupies just one small corner of the strange and wonderful ...

The private dining room in Manhattan's timelessly tony 21 Club is packed with more than 60 CEOs, corporate presidents and managing partners. They represent a cross section of mostly midsize New York City-area businesses. There's a biotech exec from Manhattan, an aerospace guy from Long Island, the head of a jewelry firm in New Jersey, a manufacturer of architectural lighting--all of them members of the Young Presidents' Organization , an international fraternity of business leaders who have won their corner ...

As the founder and chairman of his eponymous computer company, Michael Dell changed the way PCs are made and sold. In the past year, though, rivals have gained on him. So this year he's going for a green advantage: he wants to erase some of the environmental cost of running computers by offering a way to neutralize the carbon dioxide emitted by a PC. Dell, 41, spoke with TIME's Bryan Walsh about climate change, the media and small, shiny objects. ...

After Harvey Milk became the first openly gay man elected to any substantial political office in the history of the planet, thousands of astounded people wrote to him. "I thank God," wrote a 68-year-old lesbian, "I have lived long enough to see my kind emerge from the shadows and join the human race." Sputtered another writer: "Maybe, just maybe, some of the more hostile in the district may take some potshots at you--we hope!!!" There was a time when it ...

Every year around this time, millions of American kids graduate from high school, throw massive parties and get drunk. Police end up arresting a lot of these kids, causing them legal trouble for months or even years. So, every year around this time, there's a new debate about whether we should lower or even abolish the legal drinking age. What's different this time is that an entire organization — a conspicuously sober group led by a ...

The earthquake that hit Burma last week wasn't the deadliest disaster to strike the Southeast Asian nation this month. While the 6.8 magnitude earthquake in the country's northeast killed hundreds, a storm that raged off Burma's southern coastline in mid-March took the lives of thousands of fishermen caught out at sea. With the government making no public statement, news has been scant and details sketchy about a tragedy that has left thousands of poor families in an ...

In a hospital ward in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, Fatmata Conteh, 26, lay on a bed, having just given birth to her second child. She had started bleeding from a tear in her cervix, the blood forming a pool on the floor below. Two doctors ran in and stitched her up, relatives found blood supplies, and nurses struggled to connect a generator to the oxygen tank. One nurse jammed an intravenous needle into Conteh's arm, while another hooked ...

Barack Obama arrived in Strasbourg on Friday for this weekend's NATO summit enthusing about the military organization, which he described at a joint press conference with French President Nicolas Sarkozy as "the most successful alliance in modern history." That it may have been. But Obama's praise contrasts starkly with the scathing assessment of the state of NATO, now 60 years old, by European military analysts, who say that the gap in military capability between the United ...

There is a well-known saying in Afghanistan: "You can rent an Afghan, but you can't buy him.""There's been an amnesty program for low-level Taliban in place for many years now and thousands of people have taken advantage of it," he said. "So this is not entirely a new idea. The idea of bribing people, local guys, to come over. ... It's one of the most cost-effective ways to get people to lay down their arms, either to negotiate a peace ...

Over the last two decades humanitarian organization International Medical Corps has cared for hundreds of thousands of victims of wars and natural disasters in more than 25 countries.