The Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at Cern has been taken offline…by a weasel….apparently The poor creature did not survive the encounter with a high-voltage transformer at the site near Geneva in Switzerland. The LHC was running when an apparent “severe electrical perturbation” occurred in the early hours of Friday morning. A CERN spokesman said that the weasel did not get into the tunnels, just the electrical facilities. New Scientist reports: According to internal documents placed online, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva has suffered a power outage after the critter chewed on a 66-kilovolt electrical transformer. The unfortunate animal was fried and caused a CERN-wide power cut. “I can confirm that we had some issues overnight with electrical trouble,” says CERN spokesperson Arnaud Marsollier. “We suspect it might be due to a small animal.” It will likely take a few days to bring the collider back online, says Marsollier, but the equipment is fine and should be easily fixed. .The incident is reminiscent of a widely reported story in 2009 that a similar power cut at the LHC was caused by a bird dropping a piece of baguette on a substation, but Marsollier says that was a [...]