World's largest atom smasher disabled by a weasel

One of the world's most complex machines was immobilised by a weasel. Credit: Reuters/Creative Commons

The world's largest atom smasher has been temporarily immobilised - by a weasel.

The Large Hadron Collider at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern), outside Geneva, suspended operations after the animal burrowed inside a transformer that helps power the machine, setting off an electrical outage.

Spokesman Arnaud Marsollier said that the weasel died and little remains of its body.

The atom smasher has played an important role in making physics discoveries. It most famously discovered experimental evidence for the Higgs boson particle in 2012.