LHC's infamously accused 'black holes' won't be possible until late September.
The Large Hadron Collider, known as the LHC in the acronym-loving crowd, is both the largest triumph of engineering we've seen in years and the biggest experiment to not-quite-happen yet.
We covered the LHC back in November, back when it was in the first stages of infancy and hadn't yet run into the cooling system malfunction that essentially rendered the entire 27km loop inoperable.
Costing a phenomenal US$5 billion (or even more) so far, repairs are supposed to hit an extra US$16 million just to get it functional again, requiring a complete cleaning and checking of all of the magnets in that giant loop - all 53 of them.
With any luck the LHC will be back to its good old particle-smashing self by the end of October 2009, assuming the first test beams in September perform adequately.
Head over to CNET to grab the scoop, and check out more pics of the LHC.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012