The ATLAS experiment is one of the five particle detector experiments being constructed at the Large Hadron Collider, a new particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland. It will be 45 meters long, 25 meters in diameter, and will weigh about 7,000 tons. The project involves roughly 2,000 scientists and engineers at 151 institutions in 34 countries. The construction is scheduled to be completed in 2007. The experiment is expected to measure phenomena that involve highly massive particles which were not measurable using earlier lower-energy accelerators and might shed light on new theories of particle physics beyond the Standard Model. ATLAS is designed as a general-purpose experiment, so that regardless of what is produced by the collision of the accelerator's proton beams, the results can be measured as accurately as possible.

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_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1034: Malcolm II of Scotland died. Duncan, the son of his second daughter, instead of Macbeth, the son of his eldest daughter, inherited the throne to become the King of Scots. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macbeth_of_Scotland)

1795: Stanisław II August Poniatowski, the last King of Poland, was forced to abdicate after the Partition of Poland by Austria, Prussia and Russia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislaus_II_Augustus_Poniatowski%2C_King_of_P...)

1960: The Mirabal sisters, who opposed the dictatorship of military strongman Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, were beaten and strangled to death. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirabal_sisters)

1984: Band Aid: 36 leading pop musicians of Britain and Ireland gathered in a Notting Hill studio to record the song "Do They Know It's Christmas" to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Band_Aid_%28band%29)

1992: Velvet Divorce: Legislators in Czechoslovakia voted to split their country into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, effective January 1, 1993. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velvet_Divorce)

_____________________ Wikiquote of the day:

"Only by not forgetting the past can we be the master of the future." -- Ba Jin (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ba_Jin)