GENEVA (AP) — The world's largest atom smasher — which was launched with great fanfare earlier this month — has been damaged worse than previously thought and will be out of commission for at least two months, its operators said Saturday.

Experts have gone into 17-mile (27-kilometer) circular tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider under the Swiss-French border to examine the damage that halted operations about 36 hours after its Sept. 10 startup, said James Gillies, spokesman for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

In a single day’s work, Prof. W. B. Currie, animal science had chartered an airplane, battled a flood, and stood knee-deep in thousands of sheep placentas. With a grin, Currie recalls an Australian experiment synchronizing 10,000 sheep pregnancies at once.

Using a syringe full of semen, the sheep were all impregnated on the same day so they would all give birth around the same time using a syringe full of semen. The researchers Currie worked with then waited five months for nature to take its course. The scientists then gave the sheep a hormone injection that induces pregnancy in 24 hours.

A group of hackers identifying themselves as the 2600 succeeded in hacking into a computer network of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. CERN scientists said the network is used to analyze data from the new accelerator’s Compact Muon Detector.

The Large Hadron Collider, (LHC) began operation in early September, but will not begin smashing particles until late in the year. The particle collisions will recreate conditions the universe has not seen since a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

The hacker team 2600 also identified themselves as the “Greek Security Team” and was competing against a rival hacker group to successfully tap the computer system of history’s largest physics experiment.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Before killing himself last week, Army scientist Bruce Ivins told friends that government agents had stalked him and his family for months, offered his son $2.5 million to rat him out and tried to turn his hospitalized daughter against him with photographs of dead anthrax victims.

The pressure on Ivins was extreme, a high-risk strategy that has failed the FBI before. The government was determined to find the villain in the 2001 anthrax attacks; it was too many years without a solution to the case that shocked and terrified a post-9/11 nation.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Space shuttle Discovery and a crew of seven blasted into orbit Saturday, carrying a giant Japanese lab addition to the international space station along with something more mundane — a toilet pump.

Discovery roared into a brilliantly blue sky dotted with a few clouds at 5:02 p.m., right on time.

The shuttle's trip to the space station should take two days. Once there, Discovery's crew will unload and install the $1 billion lab and hand-deliver a specially made pump for the outpost's finicky toilet.

The school-bus-size lab, named Kibo, Japanese for hope, will be the biggest room by far at the space station and bring the orbiting outpost to three-quarters of completion.

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — A NASA spacecraft plunged into the atmosphere of Mars and successfully landed in the Red Planet's northern polar region on Sunday, where it will begin 90 days of digging in the permafrost to look for evidence of the building blocks of life.

Cheers swept through mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory when the touchdown signal from the Phoenix Mars Lander was detected after a nailbiting descent. Engineers and scientists hugged and high-fived one another.

"In my dreams it couldn't have gone as perfectly as it went," project manager Barry Goldstein said. "It went right down the middle."

Among Phoenix's first tasks were to check its power supply and the health of its science instruments, and unfurl its solar panels after the dust settled. Mission managers said there would be a two-hour blackout period as Phoenix conducted the checks while out of view from Earth.

Phoenix plunged into the Martian atmosphere at more than 12,000 mph after a 10-month, 422 million-mile voyage through space.