Scientist Accidentally Turns Lead Into Gold
Also, the Quantum Team’s Excel Spreadsheet Looks Funny

Procurement Finds Massive Asset Overhang in Physics Lab

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, primarily tasked with ensuring the universe still works, has accidentally started producing gold during lead-lead collisions. The ALICE collaboration team made the announcement that the long, desperate dream of medieval alchemy has finally been fulfilled, albeit in the most inefficient manner possible.

According to the memo, the high-energy interactions caused lead nuclei to shed three protons and transmute into gold nuclei. This is technically true, which is the worst kind of true. The financial team can relax though; the total yield during Run 2 was a paltry 30 picograms, meaning the LHC would need to run for an estimated 100 billion years to produce a single gram. Someone ran the numbers on a popular online forum and calculated that the breakeven point would require the price of gold to reach forty-eight trillion trillion dollars per ounce. Management has decided the cost of operating the world’s largest particle accelerator probably outweighs the current market value of one-sixtieth of a grain of sand. The project will continue to focus on the elusive theoretical physics that no one understands, rather than becoming the world's most over-engineered jewelry manufacturer.

The Quantum Computing Division’s Budget Projection Had an Oopsie

A critical study that paved the way for Microsoft’s quantum chip, the high-stakes project focusing on the Majorana fermion, is now under scrutiny for alleged data manipulation. This is the third time this general area of research has required a correction, or in some previous cases, a full retraction.

The problem seems to be an unfortunate case of "cherry-picking," where co-author Vincent Mourik expressed concern that results from certain nanowire junctions were simply excluded from the final presentation slides. Microsoft is maintaining that the issue was addressed with an editorial correction, but critics feel that a simple correction does not suffice when the whole foundation of the company’s quantum bet involves data that was, charitably, "undisclosed." The moral of the story: always back up your raw data; otherwise, you have no recourse when you're accused of fabricating the discovery that your entire multi-billion-dollar division is built upon.

New AI Model Finally Solves the 'Too Tall and Tipping Over' Problem

The tech industry has finally produced an AI capable of solving a genuine human problem; namely, how to make sure your elaborate Lego creations do not immediately fall over. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University unveiled LegoGPT, a generative model that takes a text prompt and generates instructions for a physically stable and buildable Lego structure.

The model, built on a fine-tuned version of Meta's LLaMA, employs a "physics-aware rollback" mechanism. This means if the model tries to stack a two-by-four on the corner of a one-by-one, the AI throws up its digital hands and reverses the last token until it can build something that won't require a cleanup later. The team claims a stability success rate of almost 99 percent when using the rollback feature. You can finally use a state-of-the-art large language model to design a small, sturdy acoustic guitar made of basic bricks. This is progress.

Briefs

• Network Outage: All trains on the BART system stopped due to a "computer networking problem." This confirms that even the subway system is running on a critical script held together by someone’s ancient Wi-Fi card.
• Security Policy Exception: A DOGE software engineer’s credentials were found in public leaks stemming from an info-stealer malware incident. This is what happens when you name a major project after a meme; the security team assumes it is all a joke.
• WASM 2.0: The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the WASM Core Specification 2.0. It is a new version of the WebAssembly standard, ensuring that your browser will soon be able to run even more computationally demanding things you do not need.