Saturday, November 21, 2009 ZURICH: A team of scientists in Switzerland have restarted the world's largest sub-atomic particle collider for the first time since the nearly $10bn machine suffered a massive malfunction last year.Scientists switched on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the Swiss-French border on Friday after 14 months of repairs, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) said.The LHC 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 13.7bn years ago.Scientists hope sub-atomic particles flung around the 27km of tunnel will collide at close to the speed of light.A spokesman for the organisation said scientists hope to have beams circulating by early Saturday.The machine circulated its first beams on September 10, 2008, but it was shut down days later because of a fault in the cooling system.
Friday, August 14, 2009 MUMBAI: A 26-year-old woman died Thursday of H1N1 swine flu in the southern city of Bangalore, raising India's death toll from the virus to 20, authorities said.The death was the first reported in India's information technology capital, the Press Trust of India reported.Meanwhile in Pune, the worst-affected in India, two more victims of the virus died Thursday, raising the death toll in that western city near Mumbai to 12, the report said. The victims were an 11-month-old boy and a 75-year-old old woman.US media reported movie halls, schools and colleges were ordered closed Thursday for three days to a week in Mumbai, the commercial and financial capital of the country, as fear of the pandemic spread.Prajakata Lavangare, a spokeswoman for the government of Maharashtra state of which Mumbai is the capital, said similar orders were issued in Pune, which is also located in the state.The woman who died in Bangalore was identified only as Roopa, a teacher in...
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