Word: cern
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sources: TigerWoods.com CERN press release; AP; CNN; TIME.com AP; Men's Journal...
...Large Hadron Collider (LHC), outside Geneva, began to dangerously overheat. Scientists rushed to diagnose the problem, since the particle accelerator has to maintain a temperature colder than deep space in order to work. The culprit? "A bit of baguette," says Mike Lamont of the control center of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which built and maintains the LHC. Apparently, a passing bird may have dropped the chunk of bread on an electrical substation above the accelerator, causing a power cut. The baguette was removed, power to the cryogenic system was restored and within a few days the magnets...
...alternative explanation: perhaps a time-traveling bird was sent from the future to sabotage the experiment. Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have published several papers over the past year arguing that the CERN experiment may be the latest in a series of physics research projects whose purposes are so unacceptable to the universe that they are doomed to fail, subverted by the future. (See pictures of the Large Hadron Particle Collider...
...multibillion-dollar United States Superconducting Supercollider, which was designed to search for the Higgs, was abruptly canceled by Congress. In 2000, scientists at a previous CERN accelerator, LEP, said they were on the verge of discovering the particle when, again, funding dried up. And now there's the LHC. Originally scheduled to start operating in 2006, it has been hit with a series of delays and setbacks, including a sudden explosion between two magnets nine days after the accelerator was first turned on, the arrest of one of its contributing physicists on suspicion of terrorist activity and, most recently...
...French-Algerian physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) was arrested Oct. 8 after French officials discovered encoded e-mails between him and members of an al-Qaeda cell based in North Africa. Adlčne Hicheur, who worked at CERN's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, allegedly offered to help the group plan attacks in France. Initial news reports focused on Hicheur's work at the high-energy research lab, prompting speculation that al-Qaeda might be attempting to create nuclear or radioactive weapons. But a spokesman for CERN said the lab has been closed since last September...