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But in the same week that Congress ended the supercollider, it agreed — by a margin of a single vote — to continue funding the International Space Station, a similarly expensive project whose cost overruns had been widely criticized.

Researchers at the world's biggest particle accelerator in Switzerland have submitted proposals for a new, much larger, supercollider.

The supercollider's detection of the Higgs Boson particle more than 10 years ago was ground-breaking.

A special committee of physicists had already started looking into the matter in 2003, concluding that because particles from space crash into the atmosphere with energies far greater than those at the supercollider without producing black holes, the possibility appeared to be remote.

What to do with the 14-mile supercollider tunnel: Just rename it the Martha Washington Monument.