In a project with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, inaugurated yesterday, Google has updated its Google Earth service with high resolution satellite images of the Darfur region in western Sudan to document destroyed villages, displaced people and refugee camps.

Sara Bloomfield, the museum's director, said museum staff members had approached Google about the project as they sought ways to highlight what they believe is genocide.

In Google Earth, which the company says has been downloaded by 200 million people worldwide, they found an ideal medium. "This is like the world's biggest bulletin board," Ms Bloomfield said.

Researchers have spent eight years constructing the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in New York state. Its goal is to smash the nuclei of atoms together and study their wreckage to determine the fundamental properties of matter.