RHIC Operational

Stephen Adler/John Lajoie writes "No, the universe did not implode! Nor did we destroy the vacuum. But some very nice science will begin with the advent of collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, just completed and colliding beams, at Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island NY. Check out the first nice pictures of exploding mini-bang. (And by the way, the lab is using linux boxes up the wazoo to analyze all this data. up to 60 megabytes a second over a 40 week running period each year from now until the government stops funding this collider.)"