Weasel knocks out CERN's powerful particle accelerator

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Weasel knocks out CERN's powerful particle accelerator

CNN wrote:
The largest scientific experiment has gone offline because of a foreign intruder.

CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest particle accelerator located near Geneva, Switzerland, lost power Friday. Engineers who were investigating the outage made a grisly discovery -- the charred remains of a weasel, CERN spokesman Arnaud Marsollier told CNN.

The little critter gnawed through a 66-kilovolt transformer inside an electrical facility outside the main building. Just for perspective, one kilovolt is 1,000 volts of energy.

Chewing the wiring ended up frying the creature into oblivion and causing a wide power outage around CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The unexpected power loss has shut down the Large Hadron Collider for at least a week as engineers work to make repairs and address other issues, Marsollier said.

The weasel's unfortunate demise is not the first time CERN has faced technical issues due to animals. The facility is in the countryside, sitting between the French and Swiss border.

In 2009, a bird had a case of the butter fingers -- er, we mean talons -- when it dropped a baguette onto the electrical system. The toasty loaf caused a short circuit, sidelining work at the facility for a short time. Unlike the weasel, the bird survived.

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Click to play embedded YouTube video.

<<The Chief Weasel is the main antagonist of Kenneth Grahame's novel The Wind in the Willows. He is the leader of a rogue band of weasels living in the Wild Wood, and thus inspires fear amongst the local riverbankers. When Mole ventures into the Wild Wood, the weasels and their Chief spy on him menacingly, and scare Mole witless. Later, the weasels and their Chief forcefully invade Toad Hall when Toad himself is being impeded in prison. The Chief declares Toad Hall his and has the weasels do his bidding. However, Toad breaks out of prison and rejoins his friends. Badger decides that they must get the Hall back but Toad underestimates his own courage and tries to march up to the weasels and demand the Hall back but they shoot at him to get him running off. Toad therefore joins Badger, Rat and Mole in an expedition to get the Hall back for Toad and they break in through an underground tunnel when the Chief Weasel is having a feast with the weasels. Toad and the others jump out of a trapdoor right into the dining room and scare the weasels senseless, making it easy for them to drive the weasels out of the place. The Chief Weasel is beaten senseless by Toad and is presumably later arrested.>>