…Water Droplets in Zero Gravity and MORE.

Barely a week after it was powered up for the first time, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was shut down temporarily when an electrical fault struck a cooling system for the high-powered magnets responsible for steering beams of particles through the tunnel, PhysOrg reports.

“A 30-ton transformer that cools part of the particle smasher broke on Sept. 11 after scientists sent a counterclockwise beam around the 17-mile tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border, raising temperatures in the ring to 4.5 Kelvin (-451.57 Fahrenheit),” explains Scientific American’s 60-Second Science blog. The first, clockwise beam had been sent around the tunnel the day before, when the LHC was turned on.

“In layman’s terms, the LHC is a great big fridge, and part of the power supply failed,” CERN spokesman James Gillies told Agence France-Presse.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) has replaced the transformer and cooled the underground ring back down to near zero on the Kelvin scale, its optimal temperature for research.

The LHC still aims to resolve some of the greatest questions surrounding fundamental matter, such as how particles acquire mass and how they were forged in the Big Bang that created the universe some 13.7 billion years ago. The world’s largest particle collider — also the biggest, most expensive scientific instrument in history — is on course for its first collisions “in a matter of weeks,” CERN said in a statement.

Celebratory or Damnable?
Today marks the 26th anniversary of the “head-tilt smiley” emoticon. . .

:-)

. . . first used online by Carnegie Mellon professor Scott E. Fahlman on Sept. 19, 1982, though whether he was the actual inventor of the emoticon is debatable.

Introducing a 13,000,000-Digit-Long Prime Number
From Scientific American’s 60-Second Science blog:

According to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), the volunteer-powered distributed-computing group responsible for finding most of the largest known primes (a prime number is divisible only by 1 and itself), both are larger than any other known primes: one clocks in at nearly 13 million digits in length and the other at a slightly smaller 11.2 million digits.

A computing resource manager in the math department at the University of California, Los Angeles gets to claim the $100,000 prize offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for the discoverer of the first 10-million-plus-digit prime after his machine revealed the large prime (2^43,112,609 – 1 in shorthand).

Beer Can Bobbers
How’s this for an inventive concept? Tiny, replica beer cans used as fishing bobbers. . .

Anthony Taft apparently had his eureka moment when, on a weekend fishing expedition, “he looked at discarded beer cans littering the lake,” Packaging Digest reports. Startup Starlite Products, which offers the bobbers, started through “a friendship between supplier and customer years ago,” operating as a partnership between Peter Brunette and Taft. Combined, the two entrepreneurs offer a combined 40+ years of manufacturing, sales and product development experience.

Now the beer can bobber has two patents and has an exclusive license by Miller Brewing Company. According to Michigan-based startup Shrink Pack Services, which uses its packaging line to produce the beer can bobbers, the packaging startup has produced and shipped 1.5 million bobbers since launching the line at the end of April.

Is your Wine Off? Label Will Tell
Staying on this notion of alcohol-bent tech, the Associated Press is reporting on high-tech shipping labels that warn if a bottle of wine has been exposed to harmful heat.

“About the size of a sugar packet, the labels can be programmed for a range of temperatures and placed directly on the product or its packaging,” AP says. “A light flashes green if the product stays within specifications and yellow if it doesn’t.”

Temperature control is critical for wine, because heat speeds up aging and harms flavor.

Made by Idaho-based PakSense Inc., and on the market for about two years, these temperature monitors were primarily used by the food industry but lately have been finding a market in wine shipping as well, company spokeswoman Amy Childress told AP.

Labels cost a fraction of traditional temperature-monitoring devices, according to the company’s Web Site. “Their price point promotes broader use at the pallet level and even individual item level in some circumstances.”

Water Droplets in Zero Gravity
A cool set of experiments performed on the International Space Station:

Satellite Tech for Kangaroo Rat Counting
Scientists will examine photos taken from the same satellite used by Israeli defense forces — to count Giant Kangaroo Rats as they gather food around their burrows. “The technology replaces trapping and tedious airplane flyovers as a means of taking census,” AP reports.

From that they plan to get the first-ever accurate population count of the rodents, “a bellwether for the health of a parched plains environment,” according to AP. “By comparing the photos to 30 years of satellite images being released this month by the U.S. Geological Survey, researchers hope to better understand how the population has fluctuated” in response to various climate and human factors.

The information is believed to better enable scientists to determine when cattle might be used to reduce nonnative grasses, allowing the rats to more easily find food.

Extra Papal Protection from On High
During a recent visit to France, Pope Benedict XVI got a bit more protection from on high than even he might have expected — when he was watched over by an unmanned air vehicle (UAV).

According to Aviation Week (via The Register), Eagle-1 SIDM autonomous surveillance platforms orbited in the skies above Lourdes a few days ago, providing real-time surveillance imagery to several locations, including the national air operations center at Lyon, the UAV’s home base at Mont-de-Marsan, and the prefecture of the Hautes-Pyrenees region.

“Batteries of Crotale air-defense missiles were also on standby in the event of any impious intrusion being mounted into the Supreme Pontiff’s heavenly exclusion zone,” the Register reports.

(Stay tuned for the next issue of the IMT e-newsletter, focused entirely on safety and security.)

Cheers.