Number 158 (Story #1), December 30, 1993 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER moved closer to approval when the CERN Council (consisting of representatives from 19 member nations) renewed its support for the LHC proposal and promised to make a formal decision on the matter in the first half of 1994. The $1.7 billion (2.6 billion Swiss franc) machine would provide two colliding 7-TeV beams of protons and would have physics goals similar to those of the now-terminated SSC. If approved LHC and its two detector facilities, ATLAS and CMS, would be housed in the existing tunnel used by the LEP electron-positron collider. And just as the U.S. Congress had expected the SSC to receive foreign contributions, so the CERN governors are counting on a $300 million ante from overseas, in this case possibly from the U.S. and Japan. (Nature, 23 Dec. and Science, 17 Dec. 1993.)