feldhaus writes "The BBC reports that the first beams for over one year have been successfully sent around the complete circumference of the Large Hadron Collider. Engineers do not yet have a stable circulating beam but they hope to by 0600 GMT on Saturday."

A number of readers let us know of the passing of John W. Backus, who assembled a team to develop FORTRAN at IBM in the 1950s. It was the first widely used high-level language. Backus later worked on a "function-level" programming language, FP, which was described in his Turing Award lecture "Can Programming be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?" and is viewed as Backus's apology for creating FORTRAN. He received the 1977 ACM Turing Award "for profound, influential, and lasting contributions to the design of practical high-level programming systems, notably through his work on FORTRAN, and for seminal publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages."

Google's official blog states they are on an effort to anonymize their search data after 18-24 months. After previously fighting turning over search data to the feds, it looks like they are striking another blow to the "think of the children" crowd. Any bets on whether MSN or Yahoo! will follow suit?

Sarah Giannantonio writes "AtomFilms and LucasFilms launched today the 2007 Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge. This is a yearly competition where the Star Wars community send in their fan films to be judged by George Lucas. Award recipients will have their film shown during Celebration IV and also on Spike TV. New for 2007 is the fan fiction category."

Horar writes "Australian researchers have combined art and science to make dresses from fermented fabric, using bacteria to 'grow' slimy dresses from wine and beer."