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Large hadron collider shut down by bird dropping bread
Josh:
The 27-kilometer (16.8 mile) LHC suffered serious overheating in several sections after the small piece of baguette landed in a piece of equipment on the surface above the accelerator ring.
Dr Mike Lamont, the LHC’s Machine Coordinator, said that a “a bit of baguette”, believed to have been dropped by a bird, caused the superconducting magnets to heat up from 1.9 Kelvin (-271.1C) to around 8 Kelvin (-265C), near the mark where they stop superconducting.
A failure like this, known as a “quench”, can be expected at around 9.6 Kelvin, CERN engineer Dr Tadeusz Kurtyka told The Register.
In theory, had the LHC been fully operational, this could cause a catastrophic breakdown like that which occurred shortly after it was first switched on last year. However, the machine has several fail-safes which would have shut it down before the temperature rose too high.
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From the horses mouth
40hz:
There's a lesson in there somewhere... ;D
f0dder:
They need to make that thing highly radioactive, to KILL ALL LIVING. That'd solve that problem.
icekin:
Pigeons - 1 | Nerd Scientists - 0
Deozaan:
Why would they leave a sensitive device like that vulnerable in the open air above the ground? I just don't get it...
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