The lab will take the unusual step of running its brand new €3 billion machine throughout the winter - with a short break around Christmas "to allow people not to get divorced!" says CERN's director for research and computing, Sergio Bertolucci.
With winter energy prices, that will add about €8 million to the LHC's electricity bill - about 40% of its annual cost. But physicists on the LHC's four giant experiments will reap the rewards by late 2010, when they should have collected enough data at a collision energy of 10 TeV to rival the Tevatron at Fermilab, perhaps seeing signs of new fundamental particles.
on 10 September. Just nine days later, an