Dan Brown's book Angels and Demons is a detective story about a secret society that wants to destroy the Vatican using an antimatter bomb. In the book, the antimatter is stolen from CERN.
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Hover over the images below to find out what is truth and what is fiction . . .
 
[Q:] Did CERN scientists actually invent the internet?

[A:} No. The internet was originally based on work done by Louis Pouzin in France, taken up by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in the US in the 1970's. The web however was invented and developed entirely by Tim Berners-Lee and a small team at CERN during 1989-1994. The story of the Internet and the Web can be read in "How the Web was born". Perhaps not as sexy as Angels and Demons, but everything in "How the Web was born" was first-hand testimony and research.

CERN's debunking page

(1/12/2006 update): Somebody in DC wrote to me with a concern about CERN's page, which I'm repeating here verbatim: I take issue with what the CERN folks said. They are simply incorrect. The "internet" is really an extension of ARPANET. Which was funded by ARPA (the precursor to DARPA), BBN Tech was one of the prime movers in that space. France, (she has done some wonderful things over the years) did not have very much to do with the internet (please remember the internet is more than the web). BBN's work on the ARPANET was done in the 60's (1962, I think). Louis Pouzin did work on packet networks, but claiming he 'invented' the internet is hubris.

CERN's 'Fact and Fiction' page about Dan Brown's novel 'Angels & Demons'

Pirated copies of the new Harry Potter book have hit the streets of Mumbai (Bombay) barely two days since its worldwide release.
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In its first 24 hours, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince sold 6.9m copies in the US and more than two million in the UK, beating all previous Potter records.

Because of the sheer size of the novel, I'm intrigued to learn more about how the bootleggers produced copies so quickly. Did they get their hands on an electronic version? Was it a simple case of OCR? Or a team of really fast typists? "You do chapter 1, I'll do chapter 2, she'll do chapter 3...". Cheap labor is easy to come by in Bombay, and fluency with English is common, so my guess is the latter. There's probably even a 'factory' for bootlegged books, copying and reproducing -- so it may have been unwise for them to choose something this high profile. ;)

If anyone learns more about the process of the India "booklegging," please let me know?

Pirated Harry Potters hit Mumbai