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Will the LHC be Twitterized?

Folks at the Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border have always been at the cutting edge of communication technology, keeping the public informed via Web site, podcast, video clips, and a team of bloggers. But now, we regret to say, NASA has leap-frogged ahead: its Phoenix probe, which landed on the surface of Mars Sunday evening, is communing and answering questions from the public via Twitter, the free service that lets you keep track of people (and now spacecraft) via brief messages delivered to your cell phone or computer:

Looking forward to moving arm today. Will bend the wrist and flex the elbow. It's been stowed for 10 months so I'll move it slowly/gently.

My robotic arm camera got some great shots around my feet. Is that ice right there? http://tinyurl.com/4bf2hj Can't wait for a closer look!

This is the first official Twitterization of a scientific endeavor we've encountered, which gets us thinking: What if the LHC and its constituents--through their handlers, of course--spoke Twitter?

LHCProton: You think your commute is bad? Try sharing a beam with 280 trillion other protons. And talk about speed demons! Sometimes it's hard to focus.

LHCMagnet: It's been getting a lot colder over the past couple of weeks. I hear we're headed for minus 271 degrees. Anyone know how to knit a magnet cozy?

LHCDetectors: Two weeks since the first collisions, and no Higgs boson yet. But that's fine. We expect it will take a while to flush it out -- if it exists.

The question may not be whether the LHC could Twitter, but whether Twitter could handle the bottled-up curiosity that will undoubtedly explode when the big particle accelerator fires up later this year. As of late afternoon Friday, MarsPhoenix had posted 138 twitter updates and had more than 9500 people following its adventures. Earlier, though, when we tried to click back to some older posts, we got this message:

Twitter is stressing out a bit right now, so this function is temporarily disabled.