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For those of us that came of age during the 1980s and after, the threat of nuclear oblivion has never seemed to be a real threat. The dangers of AIDS, economic failure, terrorism have loomed large in the lives of Generation X, Y and the Millennials, but very few of us ever had to hide under our desks during a bomb drill or watch Dad obsess over the backyard underground bunker.

In 2003, Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto created a time-lapse video map of every nuclear bomb explosion in the world between 1945 and 1998. There were 2053 explosions in that time, including the tests that the United States made during the "Manhattan Project" and the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ostensibly ended World War II. The 14-minute long video (below) is a beautiful and terrifying look at the nuclear era that defined world politics, warfare and humanity for more than half a century.

Want to hang out with the people who run the CMS? No, not the content management system. The Compact Muon Solenoid. It's one of the two big detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest and highest-energy particle accelerator in the world.

CERN physicist Dr. Albert De Roeck is hosting a Google+ Hangout tomorrow from inside the cavern where the experiment takes place, about 100 meters underneath Cessy, France. He'll explain the CMS experiment and take questions about the crazy frontiers of particle physics.

Google has announced the second annual Google Science Fair, an online science competition opened to students aged 13-18 from anywhere in the world. Google touts this as "the largest online science competition in the world," and it touts CERN, The LEGO Group, National Geographic and Scientific American as partners.

Participants can have up to three partners. They pose a question, develop a hypothesis, test it with an experiment and submit the findings online. Last year's winners became scientific superheroes, meeting the president, speaking at TEDx Women, just generally kicking butt. There are also prizes, including a $50,000 college scholarship, a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands with National Geographic or an internship at Google or any of the partner organizations.

YouTube has just announced a new channel that truly deserves the overused adjective, "epic." It's called YouTube Space Lab, a partnership with Lenovo, Space Adventures, the National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA), the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

Space Lab will allow students to submit a science experiment by video, and a panel of scientists and astronauts, including Professor Stephen Hawking, will pick the best submissions. The winners' experiments will be performed aboard the International Space Station and streamed live on YouTube to the whole world.

At their annual conference this week in St. Louis, an international group of botanists are working on two efforts to integrate the Web into their efforts. Called the US Virtual Herbarium and the Open Science Network for Ethnobiology, both are trying to make education and use of plant materials easier for scientists around the globe.

SciVal Strata, a new project from Elsevier, is a web-based modeling tool that allows users to play scientists in teams in much the same way football fans do with players. Call it Madden NSF.

Dr. Lisa Colledge, project manager for Strata, identified the problem that gave rise to its creation: "At the end of the day everything comes back to resources."

Last June, Google made a $700 million offer to acquire ITA Software, a flight information company. ITA's reservation management system includes a number of major clients in the airline industry and a group of online travel sites have come out in opposition as FairSearch.org in hopes of convincing the Justice Department to block the deal.

Computer scientists at the University of California's School of Engineering have launched an Android app called Visibility, which crowd-sources the task of analyzing and measuring air pollution. Using the phone's camera, Android users simply point their phone at the sky and snap a photo. The app then taps into the device's GPS and compass to determine the direction and location of the photo and compares the visibility levels in the image with established models of sky luminance. The end result is a crowd-sourced measure of air quality.

Though augmented reality (AR) as a technology has existed for roughly two decades, it has only just begun to break into the mainstream by way of immersive desktop and mobile experiences. Much of what has been seen so far has been either in the entertainment, marketing and location-based sectors, but one area that is sure to benefit from AR is education. One of the most obvious ways AR will impact education is by enhancing learning materials for students, and a new demo from a Bangkok-based organization shows just that.

The explosion of "big data" has prompted many people to ask the question "How will we store all this data?" And while cloud computing offers the promise of infinite scalability for storage, the Biocep R Project hopes to address two related questions associated with the growth of big data: "How will we analyze all this data?" and, more importantly, "How can we analyze it virtually?"