Cutting Edge

Tesla Motors, a start-up focused on high-performance electric cars, appears to be in a bit of trouble.

Although Tesla just raised an additional $40 million, it is asking for $400 million in low-interest loans from the federal government as part of the $25 billion loan package to the auto industry.

Yeah, I know that Tesla is working on cool electric technology for high-performance cars that could help our country ease its heroin-like addiction to foreign oil. That said, are the Valley-based VCs and big-wigs who back Tesla really serious?

Tesla may be a technological marvel and it is located in Silicon Valley, but Tesla is not an IT start-up per se. In the automotive industry, it can take billions of dollars and many years to get a product to market. Didn't the VCs anticipate this type of money and time commitment up front?

As the old saying goes, "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Valley VCs seem to live by this mantra, believing that all business is like the technology business. You know, fund some smart guys with an idea and development chops, get a 1.0 product out, and then enhance the product as you create a sales and marketing team, build channels, and sign customers.

If you execute well with this formula, you may have a lucrative exit in three to five years. The problem is that other industries don't work this way. The next wave of technology breakthroughs will require big dough and lots of patience--a combination that is really an anathema to VCs.

Good luck, Tesla, but Washington ain't Interop. You can throw lots of clean-energy market hype around, but there won't be much support in Congress to bail out VC firms, Valley multimillionaires, and a shoe-string manufacturer of cars for fat cats. There are too many others who really need the money.

The Large Hadron Collider will come back online in late summer 2009 at the earliest, and not in June as previously expected.

The LHC was shut down in September, nine days after it was first fully powered up, following a helium leak caused by an electrical fault. The world's most powerful particle accelerator is designed to smash beams of protons into each other, test fundamental physics theories, and help understand the nature of matter.

The machine is located at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), where it straddles the Swiss-French border.

CERN director Robert Aymar said in October that the LHC would come back online at the beginning of April 2009, following CERN's annual maintenance period. Earlier this month, that date was revised to June 2009.

However, the plan now is to restart the experiment in late summer next year, CERN's head of communications, James Gillies, told ZDNet UK on Friday.

The accelerator operations group at CERN came up with two possible plans to restart the LHC, details of which are included in a CERN presentation. According to the document, written by Jorg Weninger, a member of the operations group, "Plan A" called for a restart of the experiment in late summer 2009, with the beam energy and intensity limited to minimize the risk of another accident. "Plan B" delayed switching on the beam until there had been a complete upgrade to the pressure-relief system, which would mean the LHC would be restarted in 2010 at the earliest.

Gillies confirmed Plan A rather than Plan B will now be implemented. "The priority is to get collision data from the experiment," said Gillies. "The LHC will run next year."

The liquid helium leak in September caused damage to the LHC, mainly as a result of the helium expanding as it warmed. Under Plan B, CERN would have installed pressure-release valves on each of the super-conducting magnets' cryostats. To do that, it would have had to warm the whole 17 miles of the LHC ring.

Each of the eight sectors of the LHC are independently cooled, Gillies said, and at the moment three of the sectors are warm. The plan is to modify these sectors, which will include fitting pressure-release valves to the cryostats on the dipole magnets, to try to prevent damage in the event of another accident. The remaining five sectors will be kept cool, and they will have pressure-release valves fitted as and when other repairs or modifications are needed.

The beam energy of the LHC is designed to eventually be 7 tera electron-volts (TeV), said Gillies, who added that CERN was hoping the experiment would run at approximately 5 TeV next year.

"The five undamaged sections can run at 5 TeV, and the rest of the machine can run at 4 TeV." said Gillies. "The highest we're hoping to run next year will be lower than 7 TeV."

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from London.

A Wakamaru robot, named Momoko for a performance at Japan's Osaka University, appears onstage alongside actress Minako Inoue.

(Credit: AFP Photo/Yoshikazu Tsuno)

The Wakamaru is best known as a domestic robot that can greet guests and provide information like weather forecasts. But soon, it may be signing autographs and being trailed by paparazzi.

Tuesday marked the theatrical debut for the bot, which appeared onstage alongside real-life actors in a play that's being hailed as a first in robot-human artistic collaboration. Hataraku Watashi ("I, Worker"), by playwright Oriza Hirata, focuses on a couple who own two housekeeping robots, one of which loses its motivation to work.

The 20-minute production took place at Japan's Osaka University--where Hirata is also a visiting professor at the Center of the Study of Communication-Design--and was performed for the media ahead of a possible full-scale public run in the next year or so. Hirata and the rest of the project team wrote special software that lets the robots move and deliver the right lines.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industry created the bright yellow Wakamaru, which is designed in the shape of a human being, stands 3 feet tall, and weighs about 66 pounds. It made its debut in 2005, selling for a little more than $14,000.

The robot is primarily meant as a companion for seniors and the disabled. It uses a laser and cameras to track and identify people, and recognizes approximately 10,000 words necessary for daily life. Now it can add thespian to its resume.

(Credit: Lucasfilm)

OK, the whole Star Wars thing? A little misleading.

Basically, the Herald Sun is reporting on a technology that involves firing a laser beam accurate enough to puncture a hole in an individual cell. Sounds more like The Authority--or any other Mark Millar-written comic--than Star Wars to me.

Anyway, Professor Kishan Dholakia and Dr. Frank Gunn-Moore--both of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland--say the "light saber" could be used routinely on cancer patients within the next five years.

The method would allow chemotherapy drugs to be pumped directly into cancer cells. The researchers believe hard-to-reach cancers such as that of the pancreas would especially benefit.

The researchers have managed to mount the light syringe on an optical fiber the width of a human hair. The next step is to develop it for use on endoscopes, the tubes used by surgeons to pass miniature cameras through the body.

"You could think of these as tiny light sabers like they had in Star Wars inside your body," Gunn-Moore said.

"We can use lasers to punch tiny holes exactly where we want them," he continued. "We can produce a rod of light--sometimes described as a sword--that can even go around objects. It really does sound like science fiction."

So not really "Star Warsian," exactly, but mentioning Star Wars has surely led to better coverage of the team's research. But hey, if more coverage leads to more funding, then more power to them.

Scientists at the University of St Andrews in Scotland have developed a novel form of syringe, formed solely from light, that they hope will deliver highly targeted chemotherapy drugs.

(Credit: University of St Andrews)

It's the stuff of science fiction and James Bond. Strap a jet pack to your back and fly like a bird--sort of. But jet packs are science fiction no more.

It's 1,500 feet across from cliff to cliff, and more than 1,000 chilling feet down to the bottom of the Royal Gorge on the Arkansas River near Canon City, Colo.

"You're going to see me on the other side. This isn't an 'Evel-Knievel, get-a-lot-of-media-out-and-just-screw-it-up' gig, you know," stuntman Eric Scott told CBS station KCNC-TV correspondent Rick Sallinger prior to the flight.

And for good measure, Scott was not using a parachute.

"It's going to be sweet; it's going to be an epic ride," said one spectator.

"I hope he survives," said another.

The former Air Force para-rescuer uses hydrogen peroxide-filled tanks to create a propellant of steam. Scott claims to have made several hundred successful launches.

With spectators watching heart in hand, Scott ascended--and 21 seconds of suspense later--was back standing on terra firma, on the other side of the gorge.

"Concrete never felt so good," he said.

Appearing on CBS' The Early Show, Scott said he had been making jet pack flights for 16 years, and decided to make the attempt at this year's Go Fast Games, an annual weekend of base jumping and bungee jumping at the Royal Gorge Bridge.

Scott told co-anchor Harry Smith that the jet pack only has enough fuel for a 30-second flight, and that he expected the flight from one side of the gorge to the other to take from 25 to 29 seconds.

"Boy, if it had been 29," quipped Smith.

"I would have been right," Scott gamely replied.

And he really never thought of taking a parachute?

"People kept saying if you want to put a parachute on it, that's fine," Scott said. "It works beautifully every time--800 flights, the machine has never failed on me."

What was he thinking halfway through, on a picture-perfect day, at 1,000 feet above the Arkansas River?

"I'm picking up enough, I think I'm going to get over there," he said.

And once he landed?

"Man, my hands were just trembling," he said. "When I approached the far west of the canyon I overcorrected. Well, I saw that inflatable Go Fast banner; I thought, I can bounce off that if anything goes wrong."

An artist's concept of how glaciers on Mars might look.

(Credit: NASA/JPL)

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has detected what NASA scientists believe are huge glaciers of water ice lying beneath a layer of rocky debris.

The finding is significant because it helps scientists better understand a feature of the Martian surface that has puzzled them for decades. In the 1970s, the Viking orbiters sent back images that showed what have been dubbed "aprons," or large, gently sloping deposits of debris situated at the base of tall geographic formations like cliffs. Several theories for what created these aprons have been posed over the years. This research indicates that what's just beneath that debris is of much greater interest.

To investigate the planet's surface, the MRO spacecraft uses a radar instrument, donated for the project by the Italian Space Agency, that can penetrate the Martian ground. The instrument detected radio waves bouncing off a layer of material beneath the surface that were consistent with what is found in areas covered with water ice glaciers.

One of the things that makes the glaciers so interesting is their location. They're in the middle latitudes, far from the planet's polar caps where other signs of water ice have been discovered. The glaciers observed in this study are in the southern hemisphere, but similar features have been spotted in the same latitude bands in the northern hemisphere. That led researchers to believe that, however the glaciers got there, they're the result of a climate-based phenomenon.

And they're big, too. The glaciers reach for dozens of miles. One is three times larger than the city of Los Angeles and is up to a half-mile thick.

"Altogether, these glaciers almost certainly represent the largest reservoir of water ice on Mars that is not in the polar caps," lead author John W. Holt, of the University of Texas at Austin, said in a report.

The findings will be reported in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

Mathematica 7 gets genetic data-processing abilities.

(Credit: Wolfram Research)

Wolfram Research on Tuesday released version 7 of Mathematica, bringing new techniques for image processing, building in the entire human genome, and improving the software's ability to run on multicore processors.

The software, not for the faint of heart at $2,495 for the standard version, began as a mathematical and statistical engine, but it's been sprawling across ever more fields where technical processing is required.

For example, with new image processing abilities, the software can convert patterns at a digital image into numeric data. A basic example would be counting spots and recording the position of each.

Some interesting data sets are now built into the software. One is the entire human genome, so researchers can, for example, find the chromosome location for a particular genetic sequence. Proteins also can be shown as 3D models. Another is global weather data stretching back decades, which the company thinks will be useful for economic and marketing research.

The software can automatically take advantage of multicore processors in some cases, but users can also explicitly direct the software to run multiple tasks in parallel on separate cores, too. Support for four cores is standard, but more can be used as well.

Check Wolfram's site for a longer list of new Mathematica 7 features.

Some of the new features of Mathematica 7 on display.

(Credit: Wolfram Research)

Ray Kurzweil has invented and commercialized a raft of innovative technologies--including a text-to-speech synthesizer, voice recognition software, and a print-to-speech reading machine for the blind--garnering a clutch of awards in the process. He has also written extensively on artificial intelligence and robotics.

In several of his published books, including The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near, he describes a vision of the future where machine and human intelligence are increasingly combined, augmenting each other and ultimately, in Kurzweil's view, enabling humans to become both smarter and better. "These technologies can enhance not just our intelligence but our ethical and moral sense, our emotional intelligence, and make us more exemplary of what we consider to be human," he says.

Key to understanding Kurzweil's philosophy is what he dubs "the law of accelerating returns"--or a belief that technological change has an exponential, not linear, progression, and thus information technologies which today seem to be inching forward at a snail's pace will actually reach a tipping point much faster than expected and will accelerate ever more rapidly thereafter, enabling disruptive change in the relatively near term.

"The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful and about a hundred thousand times smaller (than the one computer at MIT in 1965) and so that's a billion-fold increase in capability per dollar or per euro that we've actually seen in the last 40 years," says Kurzweil.

"The rate is actually speeding up a little bit, so we will see another billion-fold increase in the next 25 years--and another hundred-thousand-fold shrinking. So what used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket, what fits in your pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years."

Silicon.com reporter Natasha Lomas recently caught up with Kurzweil--who finished 14th in this year's Silicon.com Agenda Setters list, to discuss his vision of a man-plus-machine future, what intelligent computers will mean for human society and jobs, and what dangers we might encounter in a world awash with advanced technology.

Q: What is the most exciting technology that you've seen in recent years?
Kurzweil: One industry that is just in the last few years transformed from a pre-information era to becoming an information technology is health and medicine. We have software that's running in our bodies that's thousands of years old or more and it evolved when conditions were very different. For example, the fat insulin receptor gene says "hold onto every single calorie in your fat cells," and that was a good idea 1,000 years ago. It's not a good idea today--it underlies an epidemic of obesity certainly in my country. And what would happen if we turned that gene off?

There are other genes that are necessary for heart disease or cancer to progress that we'd like to turn off and we've come up with a new technology, RNA interference, that can turn off selected genes. We also have new methods of adding new genes so...we can update this outdated software that runs in our bodies. We can also turn on and off enzymes and proteins and really reprogram the information processes of underlying biology--and we can design these interventions on computers rather than just try to find some substance that happens to work and we can then test them out in biological simulators.

Now all of these developments...are in an early stage but they're information technologies so they will advance exponentially not linearly. These technologies will be a thousand times more capable in 10 years, a million times more powerful in 20 years and, according to my models, we'll be adding more than a year every year not just to infant life expectancy but to your remaining life expectancy, so the sands of time will start running in rather than running out.

When will the Turing Test be passed? And what will it mean for human society?
Kurzweil: I've been quite consistent that it'll happen by 2029. I think (the rules, that a computer passes the test if it fools the judges 30 percent of the time, are) actually too lenient--in the recent test it fooled the judges 25 percent of the time. Every time they run that test the computers do a little bit better. The first reports (of a computer passing) I probably won't accept it myself...but then as time goes on the computers will pass more and more stringent sets of rules and by 2029 it'll be unarguable that computers have passed. And I do think it's a good test. It's not by the way a test of human consciousness--it's a test of human intelligence, which is something we can objectively measure even though we can argue about how to measure it.

Consciousness is not something we can readily measure in another entity. However, in order for a computer or any entity to pass the Turing Test it has to master human emotion--and human emotion is not some sideshow. What humans do well is both pattern recognition and our emotional thinking, which is a form of recognizing patterns that we find in situations. Getting the joke, being funny, expressing a loving sentiment--these are actually the most complicated things we do, the cutting edge of human intelligence.

In terms of the impact on society, it will be an important threshold but it won't transform things right away...because having a few more equivalents of human intelligence isn't necessarily going to change things. But because non-biological intelligence will be subject to the law of accelerating returns it will continue to progress both in hardware and software because these intelligent entities can access our source code, they can upgrade themselves. Ultimately non-biological intelligence will be much more powerful than biological human intelligence, but it's not an invasion of intelligent machines from Mars--it's coming from our own civilization. And we will use it as we do today to expand our own reach--we will make ourselves smarter. That is what is unique about human beings. We were the first species to create tools to extend our reach and then we use our tools to create more powerful tools and no other species does that.

Will super intelligent machines ever have souls?
Kurzweil: The soul is a synonym for consciousness...and if we were to consider where consciousness comes from we would have to consider it an emerging property. Brain science is instructive there as we look inside the brain, and we've now looked at it in exquisite detail, you don't see anything that can be identified as a soul--there's just a lot of neurons and they're complicated but there's no consciousness to be seen. Therefore it's an emerging property of a very complex system that can reflect on itself. And if you were to create a system that had similar properties, similar level of complexity it would therefore have the same emerging property and this would be more than an abstraction because these future entities...will be convincing.

It also won't be clear--you won't be able to walk into a room and say, "OK, humans on the left, machines on the right," because it's going to be all mixed up. You'll have biological humans but they'll have machine processes in their brain, there may be a lot more complexity in the machine intelligence in their brain than the biological portion of their brain. It's not going to be a clear distinction of where humans or biological intelligence stops and machine intelligence starts. (So) we will attribute consciousness to entities even if they have no biology, even if they're fully machine entities: they will seem human, they will seem consciousness, we will attribute souls to them but that's not a scientific statement.

In seeking to create artificial intelligence, why are we attempting to mimic the human brain when machine intelligence necessarily seems to be a very different type of intelligence?
Kurzweil: There are two different approaches to AI and both of them are showing themselves to be successful. One is just to engineer intelligent solutions without consideration of how the brain does it, which is the way we created flying machines without necessarily emulating birds. And a lot of AI---in fact most of it in use today--was done that way. That's because we really couldn't see inside the brain until quite recently--that's another exponential progression. We now have brain scanners that can actually see inside a living brain at the level of individual synapses and interneural connections and can see the neurotransmitters and...see new spines being created as we think our thoughts--so we can see not only our brain create our thoughts but our thoughts create our brain.

We are able now to actually turn this data into working simulations of brain regions--there are two dozen brain regions that have been modeled and simulated...and as we simulate these regions we are learning how the brain produces this intelligence and there's a lot to be learned there. The best example of human intelligence we have is the human brain and as we learn its methods we can add that to our toolkit. It doesn't mean we're going to just copy exactly how a human brain works. We're going to basically apply those principles. That's what engineering does well. As engineering learns scientific principles it can magnify and focus on those principles and dramatically increase their effects.

Is too much technology--and the sheer volume of accessible information--ruining our ability to concentrate?
Kurzweil: Not at all. This old controversy goes back to kids using calculators, not learning arithmetic. But if you don't have to bother with the mechanics of arithmetic you need to think more about the abstractions of how to solve a problem. And the fact that we can access knowledge and automate some of the more mechanical aspects of thinking allows us to think more creatively and creative projects are getting done more rapidly, so we are increasing human creativity with these tools. There's also the phenomena of the wisdom of crowds which the Internet is able to harness. The blogosphere for example--an individual blog may be unreliable but the whole blogosphere is able to uncover the truth about issues much more rapidly...so a crowd can be much wiser than any of the individuals--it's kinda the opposite end of the spectrum from the lynch mob where you have the lowest common denominator of intelligence. But decentralization tends to harness the wisdom of crowds rather than the wisdom of lynch mobs.

Are there any jobs computers/robots/AI could not eventually do better than humans?
Kurzweil: Ultimately artificial intelligence is going to be able to do everything humans do. (It) will operate at the best human levels and do so tirelessly but...there's in fact a larger number of jobs today than there was 100 years ago and they pay eight times as much in constant currency as a century ago and they're more complex and actually more satisfying--and we've also invested a lot more in education as a result. So these trends are going to continue, work is going to become more and more intellectual. I'd say that already half the population contributes to creating information or intellectual content of one kind or another--none of these jobs existed 50 years ago.

What downsides are there to advanced technologies?
Kurzweil: Technology is a double-edged sword, and the Internet will spread hate and allow destructive groups to organize...but I think the destructive side of the Internet is fairly subtle. An issue I'm more concerned about...is the abuse of biotechnology. I think it's going to be very powerful in terms of enabling us to overcome disease and aging and extend human longevity and health, but it could also be used by a bioterrorist today to reprogram a biological virus to be more deadly or more communicative or more stealthy and so some people have called for a relinquishing of (biotech and other advanced technologies like nanotechnology and AI) because they are too dangerous.

In my view, relinquishing these technologies is a bad idea for three reasons: one it would deprive us of these proponed benefits and there's still a lot of suffering in the world that we need to overcome. Secondly it would require totalitarian government to implement a ban. And thirdly it wouldn't work, and I think that's really the key point--we'd just drive these technologies underground where they would be even more dangerous, more out of control. So my view is the correct response is twofold: one, ethical standards to prevent accidental problems by responsible practitioners...and secondly developing a rapid response system that can deal with people who don't follow the guidelines, who are trying to be destructive like terrorists. The good news is we now have the tools to do that. We can now sequence a biological virus in one day.

Natasha Lomas of Silicon.com reported from London.

Tanya Vlach wants to turn her artificial eye into a bionic eye.

(Credit: Jonathan James)

Three years after losing her left eye in a car accident, San Franciscan Tanya Vlach wants to make her artificial eye more useful: She's planning to put a video camera in her eye socket with the goal of having a bionic eye.

Asked in an e-mail what her inspiration is, Vlach wrote:

The Bionic Woman and maybe Bladerunner! Ever since I lost my eye I would fantasize about having a bionic eye. So I did research and I realized that as technology becomes increasingly smaller it seemed doable to engineer a miniature video camera small enough to put inside my acrylic prosthetic. And then finally I would have a device as close to an eye as I could get. Also, I love photography and video, this would be a true P.O.V (point of view) perspective.

Vlach, a 35-year-old artist and producer, is just getting started with her project and doesn't yet have a technology developer yet. She's actively seeking help with engineering, as well as funding.

Work is already under way in various places that could serve as a starting point for Vlach. For instance, researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have created a contact lens that contains an electronic circuit and LEDs. And scientists at University of Illinois and Northwestern University, meanwhile, have developed what could be a precursor to a bionic eye, though it's unclear whether that eye has quite the Web functionality that Vlach is seeking. There's also work being done in Boston on embedding chips behind the retina.

Tanya Vlach

(Credit: Jonathan James)

In her blog, "one-eyed," Vlach discusses the technical aspects of what she hopes to achieve with her "experiment in wearable technology, cybernetics, and perception."

"I am attempting to recreate my eye with the help of a miniature camera implant in my prosthetic /artificial eye," she writes. "While my prosthetic is an excellent aesthetic replacement, I am interested in capitalizing on the current advancement of technology to enhance the abilities of my prosthesis for an augmented reality."

From her research into miniature video cameras, Vlach lists what seems like an ambitious list of specifications for her technologically advanced artificial eye: DVR capability, MPEG recording, built-in SD mini card slot, 4 GB SD mini card, mini-AV out, Firewire or USB drive, optical 3X, remote trigger, Bluetooth, and inductors (Firewire/USB, power source).

Beyond that, Vlach reckons that the eye technology could even incorporate wireless charging, allow the pupil to dilate and constrict as light changes, and use blinking to take still photos, zoom, focus, and turn on and off.

She's currently working on a science fiction screenplay and has several ideas for the technology, including making a documentary, broadcasting an online "lifecast," and doing art installations.

Since she published the post about a week ago she has received up to 150 e-mails and "some very promising suggestions." She's still poring through all of them, she says.

Vlach was injured in an accident on the way to the arts festival Burning Man in 2005. It was to be her first time at the event, which takes place every Labor Day weekend in northern Nevada.

"It was going to be my first time!" she says. "But I was swooped up in a helicopter and laid up in a hospital instead. I did finally go last year."

(First reported by Kevin Kelly's Lifestream blog.)

The world's most powerful particle accelerator will go live again in June at the earliest, after a shutdown in September.

Click image for gallery on the Large Hadron Collider.

(Credit: Maximilien Brice for CERN)

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which runs the Large Hadron Collider, previously suggested that the apparatus would be restarted in April, following maintenance. On Monday, however, it emerged that June would be the earliest possible date for operations to resume fully. It also became apparent that the cost of the repairs alone could be as high as $16 million.

The LHC is housed in a 17-mile-long circular tunnel nestled beneath the Swiss-French border in the Alps. It is designed to shoot streams of particles around the tunnel in opposing directions, smashing them into each other and thereby hopefully discovering more about the origin and nature of matter and the universe.

The particle beams are held on their paths by dipole magnets and focused by quadrupole magnets. These magnets are made of a superconducting material that needs to be cooled by liquid helium to a temperature of 1.9 kelvins (3.4 degrees Fahrenheit), if it is to avoid overheating and exploding.

The LHC was successfully turned on in September, but little more than a week later, an electrical fault caused a helium leak that necessitated the complete shutdown of the machine.

This week, details began to emerge about the cost of the necessary repairs and the likely resumption date for the LHC. Repair time aside, the process will also be slowed down by the fact that the LHC needs to be out of service throughout winter; as it uses a tremendous amount of electricity, CERN cannot risk power issues at a time when citizens' homes need to be heated.

"We already said the bare minimum (repair time) included two months to warm up the sector (from its cryogenic state)," a CERN representative told ZDNet UK on Tuesday. "It became clear that there was no way of doing that before we shut down the accelerator complex for winter, anyway, so that puts the earliest possible date (for the refreezing of the LHC to start) in May. When we start up our accelerator complex, getting it up and running again takes a few weeks, so that takes you into June."

CERN said the glitch and resulting shutdown had been educational, as "markers" had been identified that show when such an incident is likely to occur.

"Those markers would have allowed us to stop (the LHC before the helium leak), had we known where to look," the representative said. "We're building in additional monitoring and protection systems to make sure this kind of incident won't happen again, and this will take time."

CERN's scientists are currently working on a detailed cost analysis and timetable for the necessary repairs and subsequent reinitiation of the LHC, and will present that timetable to the organization's governing body next month.

"We expect that the repairs and the (installation of additional monitoring systems) will cost us between 10 million and 20 million Swiss francs ($8.4 million to $16.8 million)," CERN's spokesperson said. However, because the repairs will eat into CERN's supply of spare parts for the LHC, a second phase of the resumption operation will involve buying more spares, thereby raising the total costs further.

The costs for repairing the LHC and buying new spares would be "accommodated within CERN's annual budget," the spokesperson said, and the organization would not be requesting additional funds from European member states for those purposes.

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.