Happy birthday, artificial intelligence! The controversial branch of computer science is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and the luminaries of the field are holding a conference at Dartmouth College to thrash out the latest findings. Technology Review takes the opportunity to perform an interview with Marvin Minsky, a leading thinker in AI and proponent of the ‘society of mind’ theory of consciousness.

Curious about CERN’s Large Hadron Collider project, currently being built underground in Europe? Interested in seeing how it all fits together, what the facilities look like and (probably most importantly) what the hell it’s actually good for? Then you’re in luck – web on over to Seed Magazine, who have a little documentary movie (Quicktime) all about it. Big physics on the small screen.

Everyone knows at least one guy with one of those fancy laser-pointers – and they always seem to be the kind of guy who won’t shut up about the things, too. Next time your acquaintance offers to light your cigar for you, remind him that the National Ignition Facility will have the most powerful laser in the world, which will focus 500 trillion Watts of power in 20 nanosecond bursts onto materials that the lab boys want to blow up. That’s the equivalent of 1,000 times the electrical output of the entire US in each burst…and it doesn’t take standard batteries, either.

Another challenge to the ubiquity of the silicon chips we know and love has appeared. Canadian researchers have created semiconductor devices that outperform the hard-to-manufacture standard formats we have today, by merely painting a liquid onto a glass substrate. This sort of ‘wet’ semiconductor tech has been tried before, but this is the first time it has trumped the old-school grown-crystal devices.

While the successful Shuttle launch (justifiably) stole the limelight, almost everyone forgot about the ESA’s poor little Venus Express. But the probe is doing fine; after a long period of careful maneuvers, it has settled into a steady orbit and is busily pumping data back to planet Earth for boffins to pore over. It has already shed light on Venusian features never seen before, such as the double-eyed vortex at the planet’s South Pole.