The End of All Things.

I'm pretty sure that if the end of the world happens by way of scientific disaster, it's gonna happen here at Utah State. University of Utah and BYU do research, but they mainly focus on education. Utah State, however, is primarily a research institution. I already knew this a while back, but I had no friggin' idea what kind of heat this place was packing.
You've all heard of the Hadron Collider in France/Switzerland, right? The one that they say will end the world (it won't)? It's a type of particle accelerator, and I recently found out that we have a small one here on campus. Oh, and we're also playing with nuclear fusion (that's what they use in hydrogen bombs, kids), plasma containment (which can't be contained by any physical container, only energy), and epidemic research (which could mean we've got some diseases frozen somewhere on campus that we've never heard of). And in the science engineering building that I have my labs in? Just about every one had a radiation warning label on them.
Hey, don't get me wrong, I think all of this stuff is really, really cool. BEYOND cool. But I'm just saying that if you turn on the news and they say an experiment has gone wrong at Utah State, and you're within say, oh, two continents, hunker down, because you might not be leaving your basements for a while.
Trust me, a free-floating radioactive plasma virus is zero fun.