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April 29th, 2016 
Awake Goy The 17-mile-long superconducting machine, designed to smash protons together at close to the speed of light, went offline late Thursday.
“We had electrical problems, and we are pretty sure this was caused by a small animal,” said Arnaud Marsollier, the head of press for CERN, the organization that runs the $7 billion particle collider in Switzerland, as quoted by NPR.
“We are in the countryside, and of course we have wild animals everywhere,” Marsollier continued, adding that the culprit was probably a weasel.
The little critter caused a big disruption for the LHC. Putting the machine back online isn’t a simple fix and could take until mid-May.
But hey – it’s not like the LHC was preparing to do anything important. It was merely getting ready to collect new data on the Higgs boson, a particle considered to be a cornerstone of the modern theory of particle physics.
It’s not the first time that the LHC has suffered at the hands of animals. In 2009, a bird is believed to have dropped a baguette into the system’s machinery, causing an electrical short.
When the LHC isn’t being shut down by mischievous critters, it focuses on solving the mystery of our universe, aiming to study a state of matter that existed shortly after the Big Bang took place.
Source Article from https://www.rt.com/news/341408-large-hadron-collider-weasel/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS
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