The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a massive internationally-funded particle accelerator located in Switzerland, keeps hitting setbacks.  Originally scheduled to power up around 2005, the project's latest snag—supports for the collider's many powerful magnets are failing—has pushed the start date to May of 2008 [this could also affect the Higgs Boson PPX proposition]. Scientists also reported that cooling the massive magnets to the required 1.9 degrees Kelvin (that's cold) seems to be taking “a little longer than planned." Personally, I'm glad they’re spending a bit of extratime to get everything perfect, since one theoretical failure situation could lead to the creation of a black hole that devours the earth.

Sometimes you have to wonder if physicists are just playing out a
cosmic joke on the rest of us. Harvard's Howard Georgi, a renowned
theorist, has suggested that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the
giant accelerator due to switch on next year, might be able to detect
what he calls "unparticles." The members of this new class of matter
have no mass, and should be difficult to detect, but physicists are
already at work trying to figure out how to find them at the LHC.

While Georgi deserves applause for the clever nomenclature, the
astrophysics community still prevails in this department, having
proposed the existence of such strange beauties as repulsive dark
matter (RDM), self-annihilating dark matter (SADM), and, our favorite,
fuzzy dark matter (FDM).—Gregory Mone

Via Phys Org

When the world’s biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, opens next year near Geneva, the focal point of the high-energy physics world will shift from U.S. soil for the first time in half a century. Bummer, indeed. But America’s brightest are busy devising a rescue plan. In April, a panel of U.S.