Weasel shuts down world’s most powerful atom smasher

The 17-mile-long Large Hadron Collider is the most powerful atom smasher on the planet, but apparently even such cutting-edge technology is not a match for one tiny weasel, as it had to be shut down temporarily after the creature chewed through a power cable.

According to NPR and International Business Times, the small mammal (which may have been either a weasel or a marten) was electrocuted after gnawing through the cable, and the LHC was taken offline following a short circuit caused by the furry beast’s ill-advised snack.

The issues came as researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) are attempting to use the superconducting instrument to gather new data on the Higgs Boson, the so-called “God Particle” first discovered at the facility in 2012. In addition, the team reportedly has found evidence that the LHC might be producing other, undiscovered fundamental particles.

CERN public relations head Arnaud Marsollier told NPR that the collider had to be shut down after it experienced “electrical problems” likely caused “by a small animal… a weasel, probably” that got into a 66 kilovolt transformer and damaged some of the device’s connections.

Experiments may not resume until mid-May, says CERN

A briefing document released later noted that the creature could also have been a marten, but no matter what it was, its handiwork could delay LHC experiments for several days, perhaps weeks, while repairs are completed and the machine is returned to operational condition.

“It may be mid-May” before the collider is ready to resume regular activity, Marsollier said. He added that such incidents are not unheard of. “We are in the countryside, and of course we have wild animals everywhere,” he said, telling the media that a similar shutdown took in 2009 when a bird allegedly dropped a baguette on some key electrical systems.

CERN, who last summer discovered a pentaquark through experiments conducted at the LHC, released more than 300TB of data from their research online for use by anyone interested in the study of particle physics and who wanted to use the findings for their own studies, according to the International Business Times.

In a statement, Kati Lassila-Perini, a physicist working on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration team, explained that she and her colleagues “put in lots of effort and thousands of person-hours each of service work in order to… collect these research data for our analysis,”

“However, once we’ve exhausted our exploration of the data, we see no reason not to make them available publicly,” she added. “The benefits are numerous, from inspiring high-school students to the training of the particle physicists of tomorrow… This is a crucial part of ensuring the long-term availability of our research data.”

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Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

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