Russia seeks collider glory

The space race is on! Ok, not space, but science, at least.

Russian scientists are apparently building their own version of the Large Hadron Collider, that massive science project in Geneva, Switzerland that, according to Wikipedia, “is expected to address some of the most fundamental questions of physics, advancing the understanding of the deepest laws of nature.” How? By speeding up particles and smashing them together.

According to Voice of Russia (if you don’t know what that is, CNN recently ran this story about it), Russian efforts are underway in the Soviet-era science town of Dubna, outside Moscow. It is called the NICA project and has apparently been around for a while (read about it, and another Russian collider project, here). According to VoR, one of the collider’s accelerators, the fabulously named superconductive cryogenic nuclotron, has already been activated. The whole thing is due to be launched in 2017.

Vladimir Putin visited yesterday and hinted that he wanted it to be a Nobel Prize winning project, according to VoR. Science: Medvedev’s beat, Putin’s glory.