On July 13, 1978, Soviet physicist Anatoli Bugorski was checking a piece of equipment at the U-70 synchrotron in Protvino when the unthinkable occurred. Due to a mechanical failure in the safety interlocks, he leaned directly into the path of an active 76 GeV proton beam. The beam entered the back of his head and exited near his nose at nearly the speed of light, delivering a local radiation dose of 300,000 rads. This dose is over 600 times the amount required to kill a human being. The horror r

Misaligned Sensors

A teaspoon of neutron star material weighs about 6 billion tons