Apple’s iPad mini: The rumor mill kicks into high gear [FORTUNE]

Why would Apple make a device that Steve Jobs famously described as too small for “great apps … unless your tablet also includes sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of the present size”? To cut off the air supply of Google’s Nexus 7, Microsoft’s Surface, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Samsung’s 7-inch Galaxy Tabs, that’s why.

Luring online shoppers offline [THE NEW YORK TIMES]

Now some big retailers are taking a new approach to the dreaded showrooming by transforming their stores into extensions of their own online operations. Walmart, Macy’s, Best Buy, Sears, the Container Store and other retailers are stepping up efforts to add Web return centers, pickup locations, free shipping outlets, payment booths and even drive-through customer service centers for online sales to their brick-and-mortar buildings.

Is this what a “focused” Google looks like? [FORTUNE]

But staying focused is hard to do, as Google showed last week when it introduced a series of new products including a tablet computer, a home entertainment hub and a corporate computing service. As if that was not enough, Google previewed futuristic Internet-enabled eye glasses that are supposed to make smartphones obsolete. “Google is focused. On everything,” Aaron Levie, chief executive of Box, an online file storage service, joked in a post on Twitter.

Newly discovered particle appears to be long-awaited Higgs Boson [WIRED]

Discovering the Higgs boson is not likely to radically change life for most people — it will not lead to better communications devices or fancy new electronics. But knowing its characteristics will bring physicists a better understanding of nature. The Higgs is important because it is the manifestation of the Higgs field, which is thought to permeate all of space and interact with all other subatomic particles. This interaction leads to the different mass for each elementary particle. Some particles, like protons, are slowed by this field, like a tennis ball going through molasses, and are relatively heavy while others, like electrons, shoot rapidly through like BB gun pellets, making them light.

Here’s why it really sucks to be an app reviewer for Apple [BUSINESS INSIDER]

“People have this idea that there are 100 people in India doing app reviews,” [Mike] Lee tells Business Insider. “It’s just people in a building at Apple, and like every other part of Apple, they can’t get enough really good people. Apple will not compromise the quality of its teams to fill it in. I promise you its a lot smaller than you imagine.”

Doing apps and start-ups while still in high school [THE NEW YORK TIMES]

While budding moguls in high school clubs like the Future Business Leaders of America invest make-believe money in the stock market or study the principles of accounting, the Entrepreneurs Club members have a distinctly Silicon Valley flavor: they want to create start-ups. They have met weekly during the school year to discuss their ventures and ideas, explore matters like money-raising strategies and new markets, and host guest speakers. Once, they held a Skype chat with a software engineer in Sweden who described the intricacies of running an online music business.