Science & Technology Today

CERN announced on Thursday that it had shut down the collider a week ago after a successful start-up that had beams of protons circling in both clockwise and counterclockwise directions in the collider . It was at first thought the failure of an electrical transformer that handles part of the cooling was the problem, CERN said. That transformer was replaced last weekend and the machine was lowered back to operating temperature to prepare for a resumption of operations. But later it turned out to be a much serious problem. A faulty electrical connection between two magnets that stopped superconducting, melted and led to a mechanical failure and let the helium out and this will keep it out of commission for at least two months.

That bottled water is not only hurting your pockets and the environment but also giving you diabetes and heart disease. An ubiquitous ingredient in plastics known as Bisphenol-A or BPA. BPA is the chemical once studied as a synthetic form of estrogen, but more recently known to leach out of some plastic water bottles and baby bottles, and that is found in all kinds of plastic products. A resent JAMA (Journal of American Medical Association) study has found a connection between BPA and diabetes and heart disease in adults. Scientists reviewed the health of 1,455 American adults and found that people with higher concentrations of BPA in their urine were slightly more likely to have heart disease and diabetes. This study was one of the largest BPA studies done in humans; it could only provide convincing circumstantial evidence that, where high levels of BPA lurked, so do diabetes and poor heart health. The study's authors wrote that their work could not definitively prove that BPA ha...

The first - clockwise - proton beam completed its first circuit of the underground tunnel at just before 0930 GMT. The second - anti-clockwise - proton beam successfully circled the ring after 1400 GMT. The beams have not yet been run continuously. So far, they have been stopped, or "dumped", after just a few circuits.Cern has not yet announced when it plans to carry out the first collisions, but some low-energy collisions could happen in the next few days. This will allow engineers to calibrate instruments, but will not produce data of scientific interest. The vast circular tunnel - the "ring" - which runs under the French-Swiss border contains more than 1,000 cylindrical magnets arranged end-to-end. The magnets are there to steer the proton beam around this 27km-long ring. In order to get both beams to circulate continuously around the LHC, engineers have to "close the orbit". The beams themselves are made up of several "packets" - each about a...

Tomorrow the Large Hadron Collider is set to be fired up and everybody is wondering will it bring about the end of the world or provide the answers to the beginning of the universe . Built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research -- known by its French acronym CERN ,the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) buried deep underground along the border of Geneva and France is expected to reveal the secrets of Universe. The collider fires particles into accelerator until they almost acquire the speed of light. They gain enormous amount of energy as 2 beams of light travel in opposite directions, circling the structure 11,000 times per second. Scientists hope to put under the scanner the existing laws of physics describing the fundamental nature of matter. Giant detectors are placed inside huge caverns to record data. With 600 million collisions taking place per second, there is huge amount of data generated, which will be recorded in special computing system called the Grid. Some of the scien...

Kate McAlpine the 23-year-old Michigan State University graduate and science writer raps about the Large Hadron Collider, the groundbreaking particle accelerator that has been built in a 17-mile circular tunnel at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. A must see on the YouTube. Click the link below http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM McAlpine honed her physics rapping skills at Michigan State's National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, where she was part of a student research program two years ago.