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It was with great fanfare that the Large Hadron Collider first fired up at CERN in Switzerland back in September of 2008. Nine days after coming online, the $10 billion project had to be taken offline, due to some bad soldering, of all things. The magnets, pictured here courtesy of gamsiz via Wikipedia, which direct the proton beams were severely damaged. Well, a little more than a year (and an additional $40 million) later, the LHC is back….big-time. The supercollider provided a super collision today: 7 trillion electron volts worth. Two proton beams had been flying at each other for ten days, in a 17 mile tunnel 300 feet under the ground. At 1:06PM local time, they collided at nearly the speed of light, creating microscopic bursts of energy that scientists say mimicked the conditions at the beginning of the universe. “We’re within a billionth of a second of the Big Bang,” CERN spokesman James Gillies said. In the podcast, you’ll hear from Gillies and others at CERN, and get their reaction to the days events. Here are some useful links:

• BBC Video: CERN LHC sees high energy success
• BBC: LHC explained (highly recommended)
• CERN: The LHC

We’ve also got an update on Google move to relocate its search engine to Hong Kong, and gauge Chinese response. There seemed to be some confusion today, as mainland users struggled to access the Hong-Kong site at all. There were some initial reports that China was blocking access entirely, although other reports put it down to a technical fault on Google’s part.

Afghanistan figures into this week’s podcast too. Apparently, explosive growth in the use of the Internet there is causing the Afghan government to consider some censorship moves of its own. We check in with a BBC correspondent on the ground in Kabul.

And we end this week with a piece on I’m Halal, which bills itself as the world’s first halal search engine! Check it out for yourself, although it appears that the English version is in private beta.

Oh, and here’s where you go to check out The World Science Podcast!

Since you asked, that clip at the start of this episode of WTP comes courtesy of the most reviled, and loved, episode I think I ever did. It’s from back in 2006, and yes…that’s Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington. You can hear the entire episode here.

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• I’mHalal search engine
• BBC: A beginner’s guide to Islam

Read the Transcript
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MARCO WERMAN: Yesterday, there was another question on the subject in the British Parliament.  Prime Minister Gordon Brown was asked how his government would prevent future attempts to keep Parliamentary debate out of newspapers.  Here is what he said.

PRIME MINISTER BROWN: This is an issue where an injunction has been awarded but it’s been awarded in the context where it has to remain a secret, and people are not told what the outcome is generally.  The Justice Secretary has talked to the parties concerned.  He is looking into this issue, and I hope that on the basis of what he suggests progress can be made not just in this case but in more generally to clear up what is an unfortunate area of the law.

WERMAN: Tweeters and other Internet users face severe access restrictions in several countries around the world.  China and Iran, for example, most of the time any restriction on the Internet is frowned upon by users.  But our next story turns the issue on its head.  Cyrus Farivar reports on a new Internet search engine designed to help Muslim Internet users avoid certain kinds of content.

CYRUS FARIVAR: Halal is an Arabic adjective meaning something that is permissible in Islam.  The opposite of halal is haram, or “forbidden.”   That explains the message you get after you search for “alcohol” on IMHalal.com.

SOM POURFARZANEH: Oops, your search inquiry has a haram level of one out of three. This means that the search results fetched by IMHalal could be haram. If you still think the results will be clean, click me.

FARIVAR: That’s Som Pourfarzaneh, a doctoral student at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He studies Muslims in America, like himself. He says IMHalal is an example of Muslims trying to negotiate their theology and their values in a secular, public sphere like the Internet.  IMHalal.com was created by Reza Sardeha, a 20-year-old Iranian studying business in Amsterdam.

REZA SARDEHA: Our goal was actually to create a safe and clean environment for those people and Muslims from all over the world who really don’t want to bump into explicit content.

FARIVAR: Sardeha says that he consulted for months with imams and other Muslim scholars in the Netherlands to come up with a list of search terms that could potentially be problematic for observing Muslims. His site launched in early September.  It has three levels of warnings for users.   The first one being for relatively minor things that are haram, like alcohol and pork.

SARDEHA: Level 2 is probably a search term which could be risky because some keywords for example like the term sexual education is perfectly fine. People still got the chance to click through and see the result and inform themselves.

FARIVAR: So what’s Level 3?

SARDEHA: Level 3 is really a no go. If you get a Level 3, the content that will be fetched as highly inappropriate, and therefore you won’t get the chance to click through.

FARIVAR: This isn’t the first religious themed search engine.  There are already a number of Christian ones, and at least one Hebrew language ultra-Orthodox Jewish search engine.  In January, a Moroccan company started “Islamic Google,” a way to filter Google searches for Islam-friendly sites. And in June, a Saudi company even launched NaqaTube, a clean and Islamically pure version of YouTube.  Sam Pourfarzaneh says there’s a growing demand for such websites.  Porfarzaneh also points out that the finer points of what exactly is Haram and Halal are up for constant debate depending on the particular religious school or tradition.  Still, in its first two weeks of operation IMHalal reported that it had received hundreds of thousands of visitors to its site. Some are skeptical that Muslim Internet users around the world will really embrace the concept of a restrictive search engine.   Helmi Noman is a Yemeni researcher with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He studies the Internet in North Africa and the Middle East, which he says is already very restrictive.

HELMI NOMAN: Governments and authorities implement and impose different forms of censorship, installing cameras in Internet cafés, requiring Internet users in cyber cafes to provide their names and I.D.s before they can use the services in Internet cafés in addition to arresting and harassing online writers and activists.  So I do not think that users in the region would add another layer of filtering by using these services.

FARIVAR: But the creator of IMhalal is optimistic. Reza Sardeha says he’ll continue to improve the searching mechanism, and he hopes that by this time next year IMHalal will be the number one search engine in the Middle East.   For The World, I’m Cyrus Farivar.

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