The beleaguered Large Hadron Collider project has experienced yet another delay, when a leak was discovered in the insulating vacuum around the helium circuit in sectors 8-1 and 2-3; this delay will likely push its restart back to November. The repair to the helium circuit seals have been completed, however, which is good news. The full repair timeline is available at CERN.

That these leaks are being discovered now rather than during the test is great. I’d rather it not break once the thing is going. Not that it breaking is going to have any kind of catastrophic effects outside the scope of the experiment itself — I still don’t get where nutters come up with doomsday scenarios from this project. If anything was going to happen it would have already happened either with the cosmic rays that bombard our atmosphere daily, or with the other, smaller labs like Fermilabs which also have a shot at discovering the Higgs Boson or other unseen but predicted particles. There will be no world-ending black hole (and anyway, even if the Earth collapsed to a singularity, it would still have a mass of exactly one Earth). There’s nothing special about micro-black-holes that suggest that they’ll collapse the world into a singularity before evaporating away.