Equipment failure hits LHC

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which straddles the Switzerland-France border, was beset by an unfortunate equipment failure on Friday - only nine days after it first hurled particles around its 27km track, says Ars Technica.

Scientists with the European Centre for Nuclear Research acknowledged the severity of the damage will delay research at the particle accelerator for a minimum of two months.

LHC operators were putting the most recently installed electrical circuits through their final paces late on Friday morning when they noticed a helium leak between the Alice and CMS detectors.

Vodafone has introduced Australia's first unlimited music download service, allowing customers to access as many songs as they like for $2.75 a week, reports The Sydney Morning Herald.

The subscription can be switched off at any time with one button on the handset, but all tracks are then disabled until the user resumes paying the fees.

All four major record labels - Sony BMG, Universal, EMI and Warner - as well as a range of independent artists, have signed on to the Vodafone MusicStation service. It offers access to more than a million tracks and does not charge any fees aside from the weekly subscription cost.

Sergey Brin, one of the billionaire founders of Google, is carrying a mutant gene regarded as an indicator of Parkinson's disease, according to Times Online.

Brin, 35, revealed that his DNA had been examined by 23andMe, a genetic testing company co-founded by his wife, Anne Wojcicki. The results showed his genetic make-up included a mutation of a gene known as LRRK2, which several studies have linked to Parkinson's.

Writing in a new blog, Brin acknowledged the implications of his discovery were "not entirely clear", but he added: "It is clear that I have a markedly higher chance of developing Parkinson's in my lifetime than the average person."

The switching gear made by Cisco Systems tends to lurk in the deepest, darkest parts of data centres. It pushes information between servers and storage systems, and funnels data out to the myriad networks that combine to form the Internet. When everything functions well, Cisco's hardware lives in relative anonymity, The New York Times states. However, over the last couple of years, Cisco has worked to get itself more directly onto workers' desks.

The company sells voice over Internet Protocol phones, along with video conferencing systems. It also acquired WebEx for $3.2 billion in March 2007, adding an online meeting and collaboration software element to its arsenal, and last month purchased e-mail and calendar software provider PostPath for $215 million.

On Friday, Cisco rounded out that online play with the acquisition of Jabber, a privately held messaging specialist.