We're less than a week away from the end of the world...cough :-)... I mean, the debut of the Large Hadron Collider, which is scheduled to begin test operations on 9/10 :-) Scientists at Fermilab may wax nostalgic when their 25-year-old Tevatron particle collider fades into oblivion in a few years, but for now they're enthusiastically welcoming Europe's much more powerful Large Hadron Collider, set to debut next week, and relishing the role they'll play in mirroring its operations stateside. The European collider will be about seven times more powerful than Fermilab's Tevatron, which for 25 years has smashed together subatomic particles in search of clues about the fundamental properties of matter and the laws of the universe. Officials say the Tevatron likely will be shut down once it is obsolete, in 2010 at the latest.