Inside the Large Hadron Collider tunnel. Photo courtesy of CERN.
If you like your science in clear, vivid bites, check out this very cool package on the Large Hadron Collider featuring BBC science correspondent David Shakman. It's the clearest and most succinct explanation I've seen of the collider's purpose, its detectors, the elaborate computing system set up to handle all the data it will generate and more. Shakman has a way of translating complicated things into terms anyone can grasp. We've been told, for instance, that the LHC's circular tunnel is 27 kilometers long; but until I heard him say it would take five hours to walk around the thing, I really didn't have a feeling for its enormous scale.
The BBC's Radio 4 will be broadcasting live from CERN, the European particle physics lab near Geneva, all day Wednesday Sept. 10, when scientists will attempt to send a beam of protons all the way around the collider for the first time. Check out the programming schedule here.
