large hadron collider

Today, both teams at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) delivered an update on their search for the Higgs boson “God” particle, the quantum unit that gives mass to everything else in the universe.

Back in the late 1990s, when I was still struggling to make my love of computers educationally official, I found myself in particular awe of a mysterious program that appeared in the Comp Sci lab one day.

Rather than being one of the usual suspects — probably FrontPage or Visual Basic — it was a simple, highly visual program displaying a couple of graphs and a red bar that progressed slowly across the screen.

Within seconds of discovering SETI@home, I was hooked.

Researchers at CERN in Geneva may have figured out exactly what the universe looked like around a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.

The Large Hadron Collider has been busy destroying protons by the billions. But now it's set to do something completely different: generate miniature Big Bangs.

NewsBiscuit: "Swiss police were yesterday involved in a high-speed pursuit after the Large Hadron Collider was hotwired and stolen by teenagers."

The Register: "CERN today unveiled the upgraded grid that will support the Large Hadron Collider when the titanic particle-punisher finally kicks back into life."

It's been the better part of a year since the Large Hadron Collider — the massive particle accelerator operated by the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) — was in the headlines, and even then it wasn't good news.

The LHC has suffered from everything from poor craftsmanship to hackers to death threats from a paranoid populace — but it looks like the Device of Doom or Discovery will be back online and launching us into the future, or oblivion, by the time Santa makes his annual appearance.