CERN, the particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, has released its report on what went wrong on 19 September, just as the Large Hadron Collider was firing up. Blame a bad electrical connection that led to the vacuum enclosure rupturing. The full report is a rather grim litany of engineering gone awry: “soot-like dust”, it turns out, contaminated the beam pipes “over some distance”.

The LHC (Nature special here) won’t start working now until spring 2009 — not a happy delay for the particle physicists who have waited for it for years.