While it might sound like a joke about a chicken crossing the road, this story from Science Alert is apparently true: a ferret really did run down inside a particle accelerator.
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In fact it did many times, in what might be one of the most unusual day jobs for an animal.
At just 38 centimetres long, Felicia the Ferret was the perfect worker to clean tunnels in Fermilab's particle accelerator at the National Accelerator Laboratory's Meson Laboratory.
After completing construction in 1971, the $250 million laboratory consisted of a 6.4-kilometre-long tube.
Lining it were 1014 powerful magnets to drive protons to energies up to 200 billion electron volts around the loop.
Scientists and engineers were nervous when they first tried to start the device, but they soon discovered that two of the 11-tonne magnets had shorted. With each being about six metres long, it was not a trivial problem.
After a considerable delay they were replaced, but then it happened again. It proved to be recurring and expensive, affecting about 350 magnets.
Eventually, the team discovered that the shorts were caused by metal shavings that had been left in the accelerator.
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They realised that the shavings could be removed, if only they could drag a magnet through the narrow tube.
Enter - literally - Felicia the Ferret.
They fitted her with a nappy to catch any whoopsies she might leave behind. They strapped a leather harness with a strong string attached, and trained her to run down the 100-metre-long dark tunnel sections.
It was a clever solution because ferrets are weasel-like mammals that are happy to squeeze through underground spaces, especially when they're rewarded with pieces of chicken, liver, fish heads and hamburger meat.
With the ends of the tube connected by the string, engineers would draw a cleaning-fluid-soaked cloth to clean out the detritus.
After a while, the engineers learned more about the issues with the magnets. It turned out that poor quality control of joints in the water-cooled copper conductors meant they sometimes didn't seal properly and, after a redesign, the problem was solved.
By then however, Felicia had already been made redundant by technology. Engineers found they could do the same job using an air compressor to blow Mylar disks attached to a flexible cable.
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