LHC

Recently CERN's biggest particle collider was in news. It's called Large Hadron Collider (LHC). There are few interesting things about this accelerator-

1. Biggest Machine: LHC is 26659m in circumference. It has 9300 magnets inside it. Its is worlds biggest machine. 
2. Largest Cable: The combined strands of the superconducting cable being produced for the LHC would go around the equator 6.8 times. If you added all the filaments of the strands together they would stretch to the sun and back 5 times with enough left over for a few trips to the moon.
3. Biggest Fridge:  It is worlds biggest fridge. It operates on liquid nitrogen,  helium and cryogenic distribution system. It  brings down the temperature to -271.3 C. 
4. Hottest Spot in Entire Galaxy: When two beams of particles collide, they product temperature which is 100000 times hotter than temperature of core of sun ! Thus, at the same time LHC has two opposite extremes of temperatures in it.
5. Emptiest Space in Solar System: The pressure inside LHC is kept 10^-13 atm.
6. Most Precise Detection System: The detectors of LHC can detect movements of particles to the temporal precision of billionth of a second and locations of particles to the millionth of a meter.
7. Most Powerful Supercomputer: Experiments in LHC generate so huge amount of data that it can easily fill 100000 dual layer DVDs per year. To allow thousands of scientist across the world to analyze this data a distributed computing network is built using tens of thousands of computers all over the world. It's called Grid.