By Michael Banks

Whilst trawling the web this morning I came across a few blog posts showing the first pictures of the damage caused by the magnet failure at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on 19 September.

The pictures were apparently shown during a presentation by the lab’s director general Robert Aymar on Friday at a meeting of the European Committee for Future Accelerators held at CERN.

The US/LHC blog posted a link to slides of Aymar’s talk. However, within an hour of the post (on 1 December) access to the talk had been restricted. Fortunately, particle physicist Stephanie Majewski from Brookhaven National Laboratory, who is at CERN for a year, posted the pictures from the talk on her