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The only particle physics laboratory in the United States has received a $5 million grant to continue operating.

An anonymous donor gave the gift to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, of Batavia, Ill., to keep the facility from laying off more employees and prevent some planned furloughs.

"This is very unusual," Fermilab Director Piermaria Oddone said of the gift in an address to employees on Friday, according to a report in Science magazine. "It's not a building that carries a name. It's really a commitment to...particle physics as a long-range, important undertaking … Read more

Updated 11 p.m., with details from Microsoft's Live Search site.

REDMOND, Wash.--Microsoft is looking to buy its way into search, and I'm not talking about Yahoo.

The software maker plans on Wednesday to launch a cash back program to those who buy things after using its search.

Microsoft has details of the program up on its Web site, including a list of frequently asked questions.

"We want to earn your loyalty and reward it with cashback savings for your everyday online shopping," Microsoft said. "We are 'The Search That Pays You Back!' " … Read more

Call me a killjoy, but I usually find it difficult to get excited about small business accounting software. I just took a look at CashView, though, and talked to a few people about what it does. It performs a much-needed function for small businesses and could save a lot of them a lot of time and hassle.

Here's what it does: When you get an invoice from a service provider, you either e-mail it (for PDFs; if it came as a Word or Excel file, convert it) or fax it (if it came in the mail) to the address … Read more

Wait, there are still more tools for small businesses to get stuff done shown here at the conference this morning.

CashView.com lets small business users see all their documents online. It's a service for sending and receiving invoices, approvals, and commenting on them. There's also a calendar that shows when money is due or to be paid to you. It lets you review and zoom in on documents. The docs get online by faxing them to CashView and they upload them for you. Some people might actually have to buy a fax machine first.

Batch Book is … Read more

Forty years ago this week, life changed. There's been plenty of hoopla over the 40th anniversary of the "Summer of Love" and the Beatles appearing on American TV, but this event even affects life on Antarctica: the birth of the ATM. Yes, there's an ATM for researchers down at McMurdo Sound.

Before the first ATM was installed by Barclay's Bank near London in 1967, there was a lot of standing in line and writing of checks, though there were probably a lot fewer $20 bills in the United States back then.

More than $25 billion … Read more

The alternative, open-source operating system Linux has been making news recently. Last week, Dell began shipping PCs with the Linux distribution Ubuntu pre-installed, and on Friday I took a look at Wubi, free Windows software that lets you install and run Ubuntu on your Windows machine without creating a boot CD or partitioning your hard drive.

According to recent stats from W3Counter, Linux still holds only a tiny fraction of the personal-computing market share (slightly less than Windows 98!), but there's definitely a convergence going on within Windows, Mac, and Linux software development. The excellent personal-finance software GnuCash was … Read more

Apple will likely have some wiggle room to cut prices on the iPhone, if a report from iSuppli proves correct.

The consulting firm just released an analysis of what the components will likely cost for the iPhone. The $499 phone, which comes with 4GB of memory, will likely have a component budget of $229.85. Assembly costs will raise the total manufacturing price to $245.83.

Meanwhile, the $599 iPhone, sporting 8GB of memory, will have a component budget of $264.85 hardware cost and a manufacturing cost of $280.83. The large margins make price cuts inevitable. "They … Read more