This is too weird: A bird reportedly has dropped a "bit of baguette" onto the world's largest atom smasher, causing the machine to short out for a period of time.

It's just the latest mishap for the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, which scientists plan to use to get insight into the universe's origins. The LHC, which has a 17-mile track to circulate protons and is located underground on the French-Swiss border outside Geneva, Switzerland, is the largest particle accelerator in the world and cost about $10 billion.

The LHC booted up in September 2008, but technical problems forced it to shut down shortly after its launch. When the mystery bird reportedly dropped a piece of bread onto the particle accelerator's outdoor machinery earlier this week, the device was not turned on, according to reports, and therefore did not suffer major damage.

Had the machine been activated, the baguette incident could have caused the LHC to go into shutdown mode, the UK's The Register reports. The Register quotes Dr. Mike Lamont, a worker at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (or CERN), as saying that "a bit of baguette" had been dropped on the LHC, possibly by a bird.

A call to CERN's press office was not immediately returned.

ZDNet writes that the baguette in question did not have a chocolate filling:

The [CERN] spokesperson said the bread, which was "naked and unfilled", had caused a short circuit when dropped on an electrical installation that supplies energy to the massive experiment. While the bird was unconfirmed as the definite culprit, it had been spotted beforehand near the substation carrying bread, said the spokesperson.

The avian accident has prompted a number of online parodies and jokes (this photo is my favorite). CNET UK, a CNN content partner, writes jokingly that it's clear the bird was French since it was carrying a baguette:

We're not ones for crude for national stereotyping, but the detail that the bird dropped a bit of baguette suggests this must have occurred on the French side of the LHC. It's unclear whether the bird was actually riding a bike, or indeed wearing onions and a beret.

A Discover blog exclaims: "Zut alors!"

And CrunchGear says the strange incident shows the LHC is "so abhorrent to nature that the universe is contriving to snuff it out."

After a decade of costly construction, the International Space Station is nearing completion. But NASA won't have long to enjoy the achievement.

According to an article from the Washington Post, NASA space station program manager Michael T. Suffredini raised eyebrows when, at a public hearing last month, he declared flatly that NASA plans to de-orbit the station in 2016.

That means the $100 billion research facility, which has been circling Earth since 1998, will ultimately burst into flames as it reenters the Earth's atmosphere and crashes into the Pacific Ocean.

Budget constraints and the lack of a shuttle program, which is set to retire in 2010, may have persuaded NASA to end the space station program.

The Washington Post explains:

The rap on the space station has always been that it was built primarily to give the space shuttle somewhere to go. Now, with the shuttle being retired at the end of 2010, the station is on the spot. U.S. astronauts will be able to reach the station only by getting rides on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft.

There is no official lobbying to extend the mission, but NASA's plans have met with criticism. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) argues, "If we've spent a hundred billion dollars, I don't think we want to shut it down in 2015."

While speaking to a panel charged by the Obama administration with reviewing the entire human spaceflight program, Nelson affirmed, "My opinion is it would be a travesty to de-orbit this thing... If we get rid of this darned thing in 2015, we're going to cede our leadership in human exploration."

What do you feel should be done with the International Space Station? Does the initial $100 billion investment justify extending the program, or should we simply cut our losses and look toward a new future of space exploration?

I tweet, you tweet, but who knew a volcano could tweet?

Mount Redoubt in Alaska has been belching out steam and ash for several weeks now. Images and updates have been streaming out of the Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO) at a steady pace because nothing seems to grab the attention of the public like a good volcano eruption.

AVO is using web technology - live-streaming pictures from the mountain using web cams -– to get more information out to a hungry public. Their Web site has enough techno-speak to make any geologist dance with glee.

But what of the average person who just wants to know when Redoubt is about to burp?

Enter Twitter.

AVO is using the microblogging site (@alaska_avo) to alert followers about steam emissions, ash plumes, and aviation advisories. The tweets are relatively simple (i.e.: There was a small explosion at Redoubt at 16:07 AKDT), but scientists use Twittermail to give more details.

Ken Woods, one of the IT gurus for AVO, said a mom’s concern for her son gave them the idea of using Twitter. “There was a lady in the Midwest whose son lives in Alaska, and she wrote to us asking us to use Twitter so she could find out what the conditions were like for her son,” Woods said.

She was just the beginning - now more than 6,000 people follow Redoubt's status on Twitter. Woods says about 25 percent of those people have relatives living near the volcano. Even a 98-year-old woman in Orlando, Florida, is following the Redoubt tweets on Twitter because her grandson lives in Anchorage.

Woods said having people follow the volcano on Twitter helps keep the load on his main Web site more manageable. AVO is monitoring more than 130 volcanic areas – including 50 that have been active since 1760.

The Redoubt tweets appear to come from the operations center’s log entries. A recent post indicated a change requested by some of the 6,000 people following Redoubt. The tweet read, “If ops center makes log entry 75% equal to immedatly prior entry, will b sent to log, but not twitter. Eliminates same tweet over and over.”

Customer service from a volcano! Now if we can just get earthquakes and hurricanes to follow suit.

– Larry Frum, Internet Broadcasting, for CNN.com

Some final thoughts from our bloggers at Monday's TEDx conference at USC's Stevens Institute for Innovation:

Kellee Santiago

Stevens director Krisztina Holly just announced to the audience that the TEDx USC event is currently No. 2 on Twitter, second only to Jennifer Aniston. She read some of the tweets aloud, many of which are entertaining: "A plethora of hotties at #tedxusc — hooray for smart girls!"

Kellee Santiago, co-founder of thatgamecompany is now speaking on video games, calling them a "catharsis." Santiago has pioneered the creation of gentle, arty games that are closer to visual poetry than traditional, goal-oriented video games.

"How many times does a generation get to witness the birth of an entirely new artistic medium?" she asked the audience. As soon as people recognize video games as an artistic medium, Santiago said, then we can realize the significant impact that these games have on society.

Video games, like radio and TV before them, have been written off as "mindless entertainment." But Santiago believes they will grow within the next century to be more powerful than TV and radio were in the 20th century. "I do think we are on the precipice of an extremely exciting time right now," she said.

Later we heard from Markus Nordberg, resources coordinator for the ATLAS project at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - an underground atom-smasher the size of a seven-story building on the border between Switzerland and France. The goal of ATLAS is to recreate the conditions that might have existed very shortly after the Big Bang — and in doing so, better understand how our universe works.

Nordberg said the project uses a lightning-fast camera with 100 megapixels — enough to fill up multiple iPods with data every second. If ATLAS were a telescope, it would be able to spot a grain of sand on Neptune. “It’s complex,” Nordberg exclaimed, drawing chuckles from the crowd.

It took 15 years to build ATLAS, Nordberg said, and during that time, the hundreds of scientists who built it became family. Nordberg identified three distinguishing traits of the scientists that make the ATLAS collaboration possible:
1. They have the vision to work together to achieve something extraordinary.
2. They have the commitment to contribute.
3. They have a tolerance for freedom and individual expression of ideas.

“We all have our different stories and our different passions, but we all worked together and share the same goal,” he said.

Finally, USC Marshall School of Business professor Dave Logan talked about how people, as social beings, naturally form tribes and tribal cultures. Logan, co-author of a book called "Tribal Leadership," classifies five stages of tribal cultures:

Stage 1 (2% of all tribes): The culture of prisons and gangs
Stage 2 (25% of tribes): The culture of DMVs ("How can people be so dumb and yet live?")
Stage 3 (48% of tribes): "I'm great and you're not!" (It tends to happen with smart, successful people—such as those at TEDx USC)
Stage 4 (22% of tribes): "We're great"
Stage 5 (2% of tribes): "Life is great"

The greatest challenge for most of us, Logan said, is moving from Stage 3 to Stage 4.

For more on TEDx, click here.

– USC students Kate Mather, Greg McDonald, Larissa Puro

One of the challenges in the world of digital innovation is the ability to recreate the human face. During his talk at the TEDx USC conference, Paul Debevec explained that while computer graphics in movies and video games have exploded in recent years, audiences still notice inconsistencies in digitally created human faces (a reason why many video game characters wear helmets, as in "Halo 3").

Paul Debevec

But Debevec, associate director of graphics research at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, said that digital-imaging technology is fast improving. The work is painstaking and precise, requiring a multi-layered process to capture the skin and facial expressions in different forms.

From oil levels in the pores to the way wrinkles move, the human face is documented and the computerized data merged to create a life-like resemblance. In the near future, the technology Debevec is developing will be applied to whole human bodies. The aim is to create near-flawless digital human clones, with differences subtle enough not to be caught by the audience.

The results, as Debevec showcased at the TEDxUSC conference, have already been seen in "Spiderman 2," "Hancock," and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." Didn't notice? That just means it's working, he said.

"We leverage a lot from the fact that computers are literally a million times more powerful than they were when we started," said Debevec. However, his work won't be putting actors out of work anytime soon. Fundamentally, he said, good emotional acting will always be the basis for virtual characters.

The USC audience then experienced the entrancing music of Salman Ahmad, frontman of the international music group Junoon, which blends rock with traditional Sufi devotional music. Ahmad explained he was introduced to rock music as a high school student when he saw Led Zeppelin perform at Madison Square Garden. After the concert, he decided that music was the career for him.

The anecdote is emblematic of the spontaneous innovation we've been exposed to in this event so far. Ahmad's parents wanted him to become a doctor - a noble profession. But instead, as a pioneering musician, he has touched millions more lives. Ahmad is a UN Goodwill Ambassador and defied death threats to play the first rock concert in Kashmir.

Ahmad's spontaneous decision to pick up a guitar, and to create something that had never been created, has empowered profound change, brightened the world and helped spread human understanding. As Ahmad himself noted, "When you see with the heart, all masks fall down."

During his performance Ahmad was joined onstage by a surprise guest: Melissa Etheridge, who dueted with him on "Ring the Bells," a song they wrote together. Audience members joined in by ringing hundreds of tiny porcelain bells - Monday's version of a concert lighter - that had been handed out without explanation earlier.

"Differences are what keeps the change from happening," said Etheridge, explaining how people of diverse cultures must overcome their differences in the quest for peace.

– USC students Matt Harrison, Emily Henry, Kate Mather and Deborah Stokol

Today's TEDxUSC conference – a one-day event at the University of Southern California's Stevens Institute for Innovation - kicked off with the tickling of electronic ivories by Qi Zhang, a doctoral candidate at USC's Thornton School of Music. Roughly 1,200 people packed the school's red-curtained Bovard Auditorium for the conference, which was supported in part by CNN.

Krisztina Holly of USC's Stevens Institute for Innovation

Conference speakers were scheduled to give 18-minute talks on ideas that will change the future. (For more on TEDx, click here.)

Here's an account of the conference from student bloggers inside the hall:

No cell phones allowed. A secret program that wasn’t revealed until today. The announcement that the doors will be closed throughout the event. But I was most intrigued by the miniature porcelain bells we received with our nametags. We jingled up until the very moment the doors opened. We were told the bells would be explained later in the event.

Krisztina "Z" Holly, the director of USC's Stevens Institute, then opened the event with a quick, mind-stimulating event: The audience was asked to watch a video and count the number of times a basketball was passed back and forth. Although a gorilla also appeared on the screen, most people were so focused on the ball passing and the task at hand - counting - that they didn't even see the gorilla. The point of the exercise was to illustrate the importance of serendipity and to be aware of what's going on around us - even while focusing intensely. The conference is off to a great start.

Holly is now talking about the role of innovation at USC and why the university is hosting the TEDx conference for the first time. She is giving a preview of what to expect throughout the day, and says there will be a few "surprises" not listed in the program. She said "innovation is all about taking risks," and noted that USC is the first university to "experiment" and sponsor TEDx.

Chris Anderson of the TED conference is now speaking about TED as a whole and how the organization has broadened its mission to include the nurturing of ideas, how today's event is a "big deal" and that audience members are "guinea pigs." He is asking audience members to send him feedback on today's event, because he hopes to make similar programs available at other universities and groups.

USC Provost C.L. Max Nikias opened his talk with the insight that the so- called "educated classes" are divided between those who believe they understand how their world works and those who want to know but realize they do not. He said the creative insights that represent true progress inevitably constitute a new discovery that no one saw coming. There can be no knowledge without the recognition of past ignorance, and neither can there be discovery without the recognition of absence.

We can view nearly every great scientific discovery as a journey out of simplistic ignorance into complex awareness. Indeed, great discovery inevitably requires repudiating the simplistic truths of earlier eras. In this path of greater knowledge, Provost Nikias encourages us to embrace what he calls "intellectual friction," or the often disconcerting exposure to different views.

– USC students Brooke-Sidney Gavins, Keaton Gray, Matt Harrison, Emily Henry, Kate Mather, Greg McDonald, Larissa Puro and Deborah Stokol

As you may have read, the Obamas are planting a vegetable garden. Seem like big news? Perhaps not, but I have a feeling one reason this tidbit is currently the No. 1 read story on the NYTimes homepage is that many Americans are itching for a lost connection to the land and the outdoors.

Some see the organic garden as a distraction from Obama’s gaffe over the Special Olympics or the ever-present AIG bonus debate, but it seems like it also hits on something larger.

Just take a look at what iReporters are saying about what they’ve learned from past generations about saving money and fending for themselves. (Post your 'victory garden' stories here). Many bring up gardens. And, in a recent interview with a four-generation family, younger members talked about how they wish they had the same survival skills their grandparents did. Gardening is chief among them.

I’m no master gardener. I tried for the first time last year: the jalapenos and Roma tomatoes were delicious, but mostly were overshadowed by the hip-high weeds that I let grow up between them most of the summer. But it was fun to try.

So, in that spirit, here are a couple tips for trying out your green thumb and learning a bit of science this season:

1. Become a volunteer scientists: Hoards of backyard scientists across the country again are participating in Project BudBurst. Check out their Web site and be part of a group effort to map the blooming of plants. Your small effort can help scientists track big trends, like climate change.

2. Learn about your local environment: Check out this USA Today story on planting maps - they’re changing, perhaps because of global warming. Learn what the climate is like in your area to better understand what will grow and when.

3. Find local food: Across the country people are banding together and sharing resources to get fresh food locally. Some join food coops, others, like guerrilla gardeners, take over public spaces to make group gardens. Local farmers' markets are another option.

Feel free to share you stories in the comments or on iReport.

Darwin's views of compassion are curiously similar to those of Buddhism, one researcher says.

Just days after the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory, journalists and scientists from all over the world converged to confront a fascinating connection: Some of Darwin's views have a lot in common with Buddhist teachings.

Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, psychologist Paul Ekman, known for his research showing the universality of facial expressions across cultures, told us that Darwin's descriptions of compassion, as well as his view of morality as it relates to compassion, closely mirror Buddhist ideas.

"There’s always the possibility that two wise people looking at the same species will come up with the same conclusions," said Ekman, who co-wrote a book with the Dalai Lama on compassion called "Emotional Awareness: Overcoming the Obstacles to Psychological Balance and Compassion."

It turns out that Darwin's friend Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, a botanist and explorer, visited Tibet in 1847. He became familiar with Buddhist views there. He also wrote letters to Darwin. This is just one of many ways that Darwin could have been influenced by Buddhist teachings, Ekman said.

For Darwin and Buddhists, the seed for compassion is in the mother-infant relationship - this is "simple compassion," Ekman said. Then there's global compassion - for example, sending money and clothes to victims of a natural disaster. Finally, heroic compassion means risking your own life to save another - and you probably don't know if you have heroic compassion unless you've been in a situation like that, Ekman said.

The fundamental idea in both Darwin's writings and Buddhist views of compassion is that "when I see you suffer, it makes me suffer, and that motivates me to reduce your suffering so I can reduce my suffering," Ekman said.

The curious coincidence of views serves as a backdrop for understanding the nature of compassion, he said.

"I’m not by any means accusing Darwin of plagiarism," he explained.

What do you think? Does this link between Darwin and Buddhism have greater implications? Read more about Darwin on CNN.com

From the West, to Midwest, the Northeast to parts of the South it's cold. I mean banana hammer cold. Never seen that measurement on the thermostat? Well, you've obviously never been to Minnesota in the winter.

How cold is it? Cold enough to turn a banana into a hammer. Photo: Getty Images

Meteorologist Jonathan Yuhas from Minneapolis affiliate KARE showed CNN's Heidi Collins what last week's subzero temperatures could do to everyday items.

According to KARE, on January 15 it was negative 21 degrees Fahrenheit, factoring in the windchill. That's just 17 degrees warmer than the freezing point for liquid mercury. And one more reason I will not visit Minnesota in the winter.

Now, bubbles don't shatter and hot water doesn't turn to a frozen cloud in normal weather conditions. It has to be cold. Very cold. Cold enough to pass those items' freezing limit.

Generally defined, a freezing point is the temperature where the liquid state of a particular compound freezes to form a solid. For freshwater, this temperature is 32 degrees Fahrenheit. For a banana or other foods, it depends.

A work by Dr. Richard W. Hartel of the University of Wisconsin-Madison states that "foods are mixtures of various ingredients, some of which affect phase behavior of water.." Meaning, since foods contain sugars, salts, proteins, fats, flavors, etc., there is no one broadly defined freezing point for food. For fruits, Hartel gave a general freezing point between 30.4 – 27.1 degrees Fahrenheit.

Hartel also gave the average freezing points of some other food categories:

Vegetables: 30.6 – 26.7 F
Meat: 28.9 – 28.0 F
Egg: 31 F
Milk: 31 F

Ice, snow, banana hammers, frozen bubbles–at 21 below, they're all the same. Frozen.

According to bubblemania.com, which is my authority on everything bubble-related, it is possible to freeze bubbles. Our iReporters also proved us that. But once the bubble freezes, it's only a matter of time before they shatter.

This is because when a bubble is blown into subzero temperatures, the warm air inside the bubble quickly contracts. The volume of air becomes lower, and the bubble crumples under its own weight.

CNN iReporters also got in on the action, freezing everything from food to flash-freezing hot water. Others are using the freezing weather to go green. iReporter Kyle Aevermann shared his use of a "natural freezer" in Chicago's subzero temperatures.

The Food and Safety Inspection Service, a branch of the USDA, recommends against doing that, however. The agency's Web site Fact Sheet states: "When it is freezing outside and there is snow on the ground, it seems like a good place to keep food until the power comes on; however, frozen food can thaw if it is exposed to the sun's rays even when the temperature is very cold. Refrigerated food may become too warm and foodborne bacteria could grow. The outside temperature could vary hour by hour and the temperature outside will not protect refrigerated and frozen food."

So besides food, what else have you found freezing point for? Wet laundry? An umbrella? We want to know. Send in your iReports. Leave a comment.

– Brandon Ancil, CNN.com

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Water Bullet!

iReporter Larren Unruh submitted video of a test drop of the MX-311 Water Bullet.

Larren Unruh sent iReport.com a cool video of the test drop of a device called the MX-311 Water Bullet, a high-impact safety harness. Watch the video here.

Inventor Maximus WillHammer has spent the last five years working on it, motivated by what he considers a lack of understanding in the safety industry of the needs of today's tradesmen.

The aircraft was designed around the idea of finding a safer way to bring data or humans back from space. The video shows WillHammer's unmanned test drop earlier this month at the Arrowrock Reservoir outside Boise, Idaho. Check out Willhammer's Web site for more on how it works.

Tell us about a technology breakthrough, and your video could be featured on this blog.

– Stephen Walsh, CNN.com