He had worked his way up the local party machine before narrowly winning the leadership of the Socialist Party against its grandees at a congress in 2000.

ECONOMIST: Flirting with nationalists, provoking the opposition

"In the 1970s it became respectable to model the economy as if it was a perfectly functioning, self-regulating machine, " says Edmund Phelps, a Nobel Prize winning Professor of Economics at Columbia University in New York.

BBC: A lesson in history

Jasper is making up for the revenue shortfall by pitching his audio technologies to new customers, winning a place for it in both the hot Xbox 360 game machine and as an option in all new Volvo models, which will offer home-theater-quality Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound.

FORBES: Seeing in Dolby

The old linear accelerator at Stanford was repurposed, turning it from the machine that co-discovered a particle known as the charm quark (thus winning its operators a Nobel prize) into a factory for making particles called B mesons.

ECONOMIST: The arrow of time

By analyzing the results of every play in every NFL game in history and the circumstances surrounding them Prediction Machine was able to build a formula that can estimate a team's chances of winning the game before and after any play.

WSJ: NFL: The Plays That Decided the Playoffs