1:12 am (PDT), JoAnne: The beam is at Point 8, which is 3/4 of the way around! Thanks to SkyNews for the feed!

1:18 am (PDT), JoAnne: Now the beam is at ATLAS, 7/8 of the way through. They are giving ATLAS some events (not collisions, but beam halo and beam gas). Lyn Evans, LHC project manager, was heard to say that he’s going to win his bet, whatever that is.

1:23 am (PDT), JoAnne: BEAM! We have BEAM! All the way round! Now they’re doing it again.

I love the internet!

From symmetry breaking:

The Large Hadron Collider saw its first protons today, around 6:30 p.m. at CERN (12:30 p.m. US EDT), as scientists conducted the first beam injection test in one section of the collider. The protons traveled just a few meters into the LHC in a clockwise direction. The tests will continue through the weekend to transfer the beam from one section of the accelerator complex to another. A second beam injection test is scheduled for later in August. Protons will circulate around the entire collider for the first time on September 10.

Yay!

CERN has a press release going over the ramp up to September 10th a bit more, as well as a link for a live webcast to be streaming as soon as the LHC is. After that, the collider is set to be officially unveiled on October 21st.

August 8, 2008: The start of the South Ossetia War, Summer Olympics, and, now, the Large Hadron Collider.

Encounters At the End of the World, the new Werner Herzog documentary film about the community of American scientists in Antarctica, is coming to Pittsburgh. Roger Ebert gives the film four stars, saying:

It is a poem of oddness and beauty. Herzog is like no other filmmaker, and to return to him is to be welcomed into a world vastly larger and more peculiar than the one around us.

Here, the film is showing alongside, but sadly not a part of, “Life on Mars: New Perspectives”, a series of films every Sunday during August co-sponsored by the Carnegie Museum of Art. The series of movies “explores similar themes of alienation, dystopia, and new ways of seeing the world,” themes begging to be explored in a film covering the world’s largest desert. And though Encounters is ostensibly about the people living in that cold world, it is ultimately about the cold world itself.

Over the course of Herzog’s journey, nature-in-the wild shares equal time with human nature. His encounters are alternately surreal, absurd, profound and sometimes, all of the above.

Hopefully, Herzog takes us through not only the beauty of Antarctica, but also the unflinching desolation lying just below a thin, cracking layer of ice, or in the midst of a blinding snowstorm. That thick mix, hardly separated from one moment to the next, is where Antarctica’s real wonder comes from.

Clockwise:

1. Assembly and installation of the ATLAS Hadronic endcap Liquid Argon Calorimeter. The ATLAS detector contains a series of ever-larger concentric cylinders around the central interaction point where the LHC’s proton beams collide.

2. Lowering of the last element (YE-1) of the CMS detector into its underground experimental cavern.

3. Transporting the ATLAS Magnet Toroid End-Cap A between building 180 to ATLAS point 1.

More at Boston.com’s The Big Picture.

First mentioned on TEDBlog, the WorldWide Telescope builds a “seamless” view of the universe with images taken from telescopes and satellites all over the world and sky. The software is pretty amazing, but the WWT website is unfortunately a cesspool of terrible promotional videos, so I recommend just heading over to the download page.

In many ways, the WWT is simply a desktop version of Google Sky. It’s just…a lot more robust, detailed, and inspiring to behold.

The Daily Mail has a set of amazing photos of the Chaiten Volcano in southern Chile.

As clouds of toxic ash and dust tower into the sky, they ionise the air, generating an explosive electrical storm. Colossal forks of lightning spark around the noxious plume as it spews from the volcano’s crater, creating an image of raw, terrifying energy – as if the air itself were ablaze.

More than any damage the lava could do, most worrying is the possibility of pyroclastic flow, in which the enormous plume of ash collapses into a wave of hot gas and rock. The wave spreads across the ground at breakneck speeds with temperatures reaching up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit.

The devastating consequences were seen after the eruption of Mount Pelée, which led to the destruction of Saint-Pierre and its roughly 30,000 population.

Galaxies Gone Wild! (via kottke)

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space 18 years ago and to celebrate, NASA has put up a photo gallery of merging galaxies, galaxies as in love with each other as NASA is with the Hubble. Aww.