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Scientists moved Saturday to prepare the world’s largest atom smasher for exploring the depths of matter after successfully restarting the $10 billion machine following more than a year of repairs.

The nuclear physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider were surprised that they could so quickly get beams of protons whizzing near the speed of light during the restart late Friday, said James Gillies, spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The machine was heavily damaged by a simple electrical fault in September last year.

Some scientists had gone home early Friday and had to be called back as the project jumped ahead, Gillies said.

At a meeting early Saturday “they basically had to tear up the first few pages of their PowerPoint presentation which had outlined the procedures that they were planning to follow,” he said. “That was all wrapped up by midnight. They are going through the paces really very fast.”

The European Organization for Nuclear Research has taken the restart of the collider step by step to avoid further setbacks as it moves toward new scientific experiments — probably starting in January — regarding the makeup of matter and the universe.

CERN, as it is known, had hoped by 7 a.m. (0600 GMT) Saturday to get the beams to travel the 27-kilometer (17-mile) circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border, but things went so well Friday evening that they had achieved the operation seven hours earlier.

Praise from scientists around the world was quick. “First beam through the Atlas!” whooped an Internet message from Adam Yurkewicz, an American scientist working on the massive Atlas detector on the machine.

“I congratulate the scientists and engineers that have worked to get the LHC back up and running,” said Dennis Kovar of the U.S. Department of Energy, which participates in the project.

“The LHC is a machine unprecedented in size, in complexity, and in the scope of the international collaboration that has built it over the last 15 years,” said Kovar.

The next step, possibly later Saturday, was to decide whether to collide beams in the detectors to get necessary measuring data or to try using the machine to accelerate the protons to higher energy than any machine has ever reached, said Gillies.

In the meantime CERN is using about 2,000 superconducting magnets — some of them 15 meters (50 feet) long — to improve control of the beams of billions of protons so they will remain tightly bunched and stay clear of sensitive equipment.

Gillies said the scientists are being very conservative.

“They’re leaving a lot of time so that the guys who are operating the machine are under no pressure whatsoever to tick off the boxes and move forward,” he said.

Officials said Friday evening’s progress was an important step on the road toward scientific discoveries at the LHC, which are expected in 2010.

“We’ve still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we’re well on the way,” CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said. Hard money training

Microsoft and Nokia will on Wednesday announce an alliance aimed at challenging Research In Motion’s lead in the corporate mobile phone market.

The Finnish mobile phonemaker is planning to use Microsoft’s Office Mobile suite of software on its smartphones – handsets that double up as mini computers.

The partnership could help buttress Nokia’s lead in the smartphone market. The world’s largest mobile phone maker has been losing market share to rivals led by RIM.

For Microsoft, the alliance with Nokia will help defend its position against Google, the US search engine.

Google’s Android operating system for smartphones is gaining ground, and giving the US technology company the chance to put its web-based software on handsets.

RIM has carved out a strong position in supplying smartphones to business people, partly because the Canadian handset maker’s Blackberry devices have user-friendly e-mail.

The partnership between Microsoft and Nokia will seek to make up ground on RIM by including the US technology group’s Office Mobile suite of software – which includes word processing and spreadsheets as well as e-mail.

The first Nokia handsets featuring Microsoft’s Office Mobile suite are likely to be available next year, added one person familiar with the alliance. The handsets are expected to include Nokia’s E series, such as the popular E71. Hard Money Association

Twenty milligrams; that’s the average amount of carbon emissions generated from the time it took you to read the first two words of this article.

Now, depending on how quickly you read, around 80, perhaps even 100 milligrams of C02 have been released. And in the several minutes it will take you to get to the end of this story, the number of milligrams of greenhouse gas emitted could be several thousand, if not more.

This may not seem like a lot: “But in aggregate, if you consider all the people visiting a web site and then all the seconds that each of them spends on it, it turns out to be a large number,” says Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross, an Environmental Fellow at Harvard University who studies the environmental impact of computing.

Wissner-Gross estimates every second someone spends browsing a simple web site generates roughly 20 milligrams of C02. Whether downloading a song, sending an email or streaming a video, almost every single activity that takes place in the virtual environment has an impact on the real one.

As millions more go online each year some researchers say the need to create a green Internet ecosystem is not only imperative but also urgent.

“It is part of the whole sustainability picture,” Chris Large, head of research and development at UK-based Climate Action Group, told CNN.

Google is jumping into Microsoft Windows territory — and threatening to change the way personal computers work — with its own version of a computer operating system.

The company says the forthcoming Google Chrome OS will revolutionize how computers operate, putting more emphasis on Web functionality, making computers faster and opening them up to helpful tinkering by outside program developers.

“The operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web,” Google said late Tuesday on its official blog. “It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.”

Chrome OS will be available this coming fall or winter, Google says.

But why should you care?

A trim and speedy Google operating system, which has been buzzed about online for some time, is interesting for several reasons — even if you think it could flop out of the gate. iReport: What do you think about Google’s Chrome OS?

The first is that Chrome OS will be available as “open-source” technology. That means software developers will be able to mess with the code behind the system, allowing them to develop new applications for it.

In essence, it puts the users in control.