The long, strange tale of one of the more ambitious particle physics experiments ever conceived just got a bit stranger. Just 3 months before it was scheduled to lift off aboard the very last space shuttle flight and be installed on the International Space Station (ISS), physicists working on a particle detector called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) have decided to swap the 2350 kilogram doughnut-shaped superconducting magnet at the heart of the experiment for a weaker permanent magnet that was used in a test run on the space shuttle in 1998. The change will delay by several months the launch of AMS, which will look for antimatter lingering from the big bang, particles of dark matter, and other oddities. Read more on news.sciencemag.org-Antimatter Detector

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