But weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines. No, instead weasels just shut down the worlds most powerful atom smasher.
Good day all. This is the Angry Systems Administrator. While I was perusing the STEM sites, I saw this rather interesting story on Fox News. It seems that a weasel decided to commit suicide and take out the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva Switzerland the other day. According to Fox News:
A weasel’s encounter with the world’s most powerful atom-smasher didn’t turn out that well for the complex machine or the animal. The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, was shut down Friday after a weasel chewed through its wiring and caused a power outage, Sky News reports.
Hmm, normally, when a very expensive piece of equipment is taken out by a rodent, it’s usually a squirrel that does the deed. I guess the weasels became jealous and decided that two can play at this game.
The furry creature met its demise after nibbling on a wire connected to a 66,000-volt transformer powering the collider, Sky News reported.
What a shocking development!
In an internal incident report the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which runs the 17-mile circuit under the Swiss-French border, said it was “not the best week for LHC!”
“I can confirm that the Large Hadron Collider is on standby mode, following technical issues in the last 24 hours, including a power cut due to the passage of a weasel,” CERN spokesperson Arnaud Marsollier told the National Geographic in an email Friday.
“The concerned part of the LHC stopped immediately and safely, though some connections were slightly damaged due to an electrical arc,” he said.
I would assume they have to scrape the charcoal briquet that was formally known as Wally the Weasel off the electrical systems.
It’s unclear why weasels, or martens, and other small mammals might munch on electrical wires but it’s not uncommon, Roland Kays, head of the Biodiversity Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, told the National Geographic.
What can I say? Birds gotta fly and rodents gotta gnaw on live high tension lines. I guess the other big questions is, how did that now ex-weasel get into the facility in the first place? I would have thought the designers and builders would have taken precautions against kamikaze runs by our small and toothy friends. I guess not and now Wally is no more.
Thank you
~The Angry Systems Administrator~
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