Isn't that simply because in a circular one you can accelerate the particles continuously through several rotations?

I am sure that they like it but the question really is where to find the money. A 80-100 km tunnel surely cannot be cheap. Various sources on the internet indicate a cost of 0.04 to 4 billion dollars per kilometer. And that is for the tunnel alone... Maybe someone from the field could enlighten us?

Religion is a convenient wrapping paper when you need to move the crowds, that's it. As the masses are by definition uneducated and uninterested morons, it's simpler to pitch geopolitical issues in terms easily understood by many rather than telling the truth. Leaving aside natural events, the only two (human) driving factors for history are influence and wealth. These are the things that trigger wars, civil wars, revolutions, migrations, etc... And this will never stop because if you can't compete for resources and influence in a civilised manner, it might be that your best rational option is to use violence. As Emil Cioran wrote "L'heure du crime ne sonne pas en même temps pour tous les peuples. Ainsi s'explique la permanence de l'histoire." which roughly translates to "Murder time does not come at the same time for all nations. This explains the continuity of history."

Or, now that the cat is out of the bag, different fractions within the intelligence community are fighting for its future by leaking information to the press and steering the narrative in the direction they want.

All the labs I know in my field (neuroscience) do most of the data analysis and simulations with MATLAB. It is also used to control hardware for data acquisition.

The reason why this is allowed while it is not allowed with, say, a rat or a cat, is because insects do not have a peripheral nervous system and thus do not feel pain like we do.

And who are you to blame them?

This is the same type of arrogance that has led engineers and physicists who have entered neuroscience to contribute almost nothing of significance to the field. They might think otherwise because they live in a bubble, but people in wet labs usually don't care or just ignore them. I recommend that you read a book about your average cell's intracellular machinery before making this kind of statements. The roadblock is complexity. First, we still don't understand how a single cell works as a whole. Second, we have no theories to deal with that level of complexity. I agree with the Human Brain Project's leaders that we have to start somewhere, but knowing that we know essentially nothing about most of the cells in the brain, I think that this is a project for next century. It is the opinion of most people in the field that this is just going to be an immense waste of money. This is not physics in the early 20th century, your model is only as good as your experimental data and it cannot be compared to the Human Genome Project or to the CERN where people essentially scaled up techniques that had been around for years or decades.

I mean that because neuroscience has extensively focused on neurons, we know very little about glial cells experimentally. So indeed we cannot really study them in simulations because we have no experimental data to base these simulations on. I caricature a bit but that is the idea.

Only 20% of the cells in the cortex are neurons. We have very little idea what the other cells are doing.

It is and the project gets 1 billion euros, not 10. Actually I believe that it gets about 500 M€ in matching funds.

As a London resident, I wish foreign companies had more of a say in the development and maintenance of UK infrastructures. Maybe then the transformer in the street below my apartment would not have spontaneously combusted and exploded some days ago. Anyway they had apparently already abandoned the control of their nuclear plants to the French. How much worse can it possibly get?

Gibraltar would almost for sure not be referred to as "in the Middle East".