Science | WPN World People News

After two years of intense maintenance and consolidation, and several months of preparation for restart, the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, is back in operation. Today at 10.41am, a proton beam was back in the 27-kilometer ring, followed at 12.27pm by a second beam rotating in the opposite direction. These beams circulated at their injection energy of 450 GeV. Over the coming days, operators will check all systems before increasing energy of the beams.

The micrometer-resolution image, taken from roughly half a meter (1.5 feet) away, shows the height of a US penny at various points.

Artist concept of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Graduate student Max Hirschberger lowers the assembled experimental setup into a high-field magnet system, capable of creating fields as strong as 250,000 times the earth's magnetic field.

Graduate student Max Hirschberger lowers the assembled experimental setup into a high-field magnet system, capable of creating fields as strong as 250,000 times the earth's magnetic field.

This collage shows images of six different galaxy clusters taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. The clusters were observed in a study of how dark matter in clusters of galaxies behaves when the clusters collide. Seventy-two large cluster collisions were studied in total.
Using visible-light images from Hubble, the team was able to map the post-collision distribution of stars and also of the dark matter (colored in blue), which was traced through its gravitational lensing effects on background light. Chandra was used to see the X-ray emission from impacted gas (pink).
The team determined that dark matter interacts with itself and everything else even less than previously thought.

The image shows a single human cell (brown) on a bed of nanoneedles (blue).

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has extended its robotic arm for studying a light-toned rock target called "Athens" in this March 25, 2015, image from the rover's front hazard avoidance camera.