Proton Beams Sent Around the LHC 115
feldhaus writes "The BBC reports that the first beams for over one year have been successfully sent around the complete circumference of the Large Hadron Collider. Engineers do not yet have a stable circulating beam but they hope to by 0600 GMT on Saturday."
Comment Re:Did anyone else think... (Score 5, Insightful) 371
But the peak current is tens-of-thousands of amps, and the connections are between superconducting cables made of exotic materials, and once the connection is made at room temperature it has to be cooled down by almost 300 degrees (150 times colder than where it started) with all the flexing and stressing that causes, and still can't have more than one or two nano-ohms resistance or the whole experiment blows up.
Yes, the electrical connections in the LHC are the equivalent of rocket science.
Submission + - Anti LGBT Rights Group Blows Web Campaign 1
$robertus writes: "It's an old story by now, but you almost have to feel sorry for the National Organization for Marriage. First, they decide to be called NOM, without knowing that everyone who's heard of lolcats will be snickering every time they hear the name. Then they launch their Two Million for Marriage campaign with The Gathering Storm video, and someone posts the audition tapes to YouTube, since pulled. To make matters worse, they decided they needed their campaign to sound hip, so they want everyone to refer to Two Million for Marriage as 2M4M. Obviously no one involved reads the personals. Rachael Maddow had fun with that. They also did not have the foresight to register the obvious domain before launching their campaign. So a group of marriage rights supporters have secured 2M4M.org, and have set up a site to counter NOM's claims, and support marriage rights. They, or their supporters, have also secured 2M4M on LiveJournal, Twitter, and FaceBook."
