Martin Campbell-Kelly’s September article on the origins of computing traces the history of machine computation from Charles Babbage, the 18th century British mathematician, through the 20th century. Yet according to many of our readers, we made a critical omission.

John Hauptman, a professor of physics at Iowa State University, writes:

The first person to build and operate an electronic digital computer was a physics professor, as correctly noted in your excellent article “Dr. Atanasoff’s Computer,” Scientific American, August 1988 [not online]. Atanasoff’s first computer was a 12-bit 2-word machine running at 60Hz wall-plug frequency and could add and subtract binary numbers stored in a regenerative memory using a logic unit built with seven triode tubes. This was 1937. There was no war, no Pearl Harbor, just a theoretical physicist trying to solve problems in quantum mechanics with his students at Iowa State College in Ames, Iowa.

Despite the tradition-steeped pageantry this week when many of the world's tennis stars take the court in Queens, N.Y., the athletes' experiences may be quite distant from their predecessors' polite volleys in the championship first contested more than 125 years ago. U.S. Open fans will see players sporting sophisticated shoes and rackets with high-tech strings—and, perhaps unfittingly, also hear barbaric battle cries. (With some players now grunting at more than 100 decibels, they may very well be heard as far as Brooklyn.) To what extent are these changes putting players at a greater advantage? Is tennis going the way of swimming with technology making the difference between love and match?

SAN JOSE, CALIF. (March 11, 2009) -- If you want to create a more sustainable world, you need to build better cities. If you want to build better cities, you need to understand the networks that make up cities. And if you want all of those networks to actually connect, you need to improve the "dumb grid" and make it a smart grid.

That, in a nutshell, was the message of the third day of the eTech conference. Perhaps unwittingly, Chris Luebkeman of the global design firm Arup encapsulated the theme in his morning keynote: “We need to build [X] for the elderly population,” he said, “because hopefully, we’ll all get old some day.” His X was cities -- specifically, the need to design cities so that seniors can easily get around without cars -- but X could have been networks, copyright, the environment, energy systems or experimental science itself. Improve the future. Build it better. Here’s how.

SAN JOSE, CALIF. (March 11, 2009)—What are the emerging technologies that promise to change our world two, five, 10, 20 years from now? And what technologies need to be developed to solve the world’s great problems? More than a thousand self-described hackers and geeks have flocked to the eTech conference here to brainstorm them, and energy is a key theme.

Alex Steffen, the executive editor of Worldchanging, kicked off yesterday's agenda with a stark warning: “If poor people become rich like we have become rich,” warned Steffen, “we will destroy ourselves.”

The Western world became rich largely through unsustainable means—denuding forests, burning carbon stored under the Earth, extracting minerals to put into our electronics—and if the developing world does the same, argued Steffen, worldwide environmental catastrophe will ensue. He talked about “vertical emulation,” in which the poorest people in the world can see the conspicuous consumption of the richest people of the world (think Slumdog Millionaire), and how because of that the rich world needs to lead the change.

Among the provisions in the economic stimulus package that President Obama signed today is $1.1 billion in federal funding to investigate how different treatments stack up against each other. The money will likely go to comparing drugs, devices and medical procedures, in an effort guided by a council of 15 civil servants.

The stimulus bill doesn’t direct the 15-member council to dictate coverage. But the council will make recommendations about what to study and coordinate research between three federal agencies: the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

ScientificAmerican.com—in the form of the author of this blog post—had a great experience this weekend. Despite the fact that it was cloudy and snowing heavily much of Saturday night in western Massachusetts, we got to see this month’s perigee moon, the largest and brightest of 2009.

How?

Twitter.

Here’s what happened: A Facebook friend reminded us of the perigee full moon. Then Digg science pointed us at NASA’s posting about it. So we wrote a blog post, only to realize that much of the northeastern U.S. would be snowed in like we were, and wouldn’t be able to see the gorgeous moon.