Science News

The Large Hadron Collider is shorted out when a bird drops part of a baguette into its external machinery. The $10 billion atom smasher has already been beset by various technical glitches, but the baguette-toting bird took the LHC staff by surprise. Luckily the massive gizmo was powered down at the time of the incident, and suffered no major damage.

Twenty years of research convinced Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Jon Franklin that people wouldn't be where they are today if it weren't for our four-legged panting friends. Some doubt his conclusions, likening him to a dyslexic churchgoer. But others support his findings.

Scientists successfully send a robot up a cable in the sky via laser power, watching it climb nearly 3,000 feet in four minutes. The experiment was part of a NASA contest in the Mojave Desert that ultimately seeks to create a space elevator.

The small earthquakes that periodically rattle the central U.S. may be aftershocks from a giant seismic event that hit the region two centuries ago, says a new study. The New Madrid Earthquakes, which convulsed the area for nearly three months starting in December 1811, were powerful enough to make the Mississippi River run backward.