It's not fair that the folks at Switzerland get all the fun. Now, you can build your very own Large Hadron Collider at your backyard (given that your backyard's big enough, of course). Be the Dr. Evil you've always wanted to be and follow the full how-to guide that CERN's published online to create your very own doomsday device! It's simple enough, given that you can understand it all. But once that's done, it's all a matter of piecing it together, right? Aww, c'mon, it's not as tough as it sounds. Read more for instructions!

In less than two days - 1 day, 18 hours, and 50 minutes as of this writing - the Large Hadron Collider will be activated. Any of you worried? There's nothing to fear but fear itself. And the Large Hadron Collider. But why are we afraid of it, really? What can it actually do besides making a black hole to swallow up the world? Follow the wormhole into the full article.

I wasn't worried at all. Not at all. My fingernails just chewed themselves, in case anyone asks. The ignition of the Large Hadron Collider - which a lot of people believe can cause a black hole to appear and suck us all into a parallel dimension - has been delayed. You have one more month to enjoy life before the end of the world the launch. Story in the full article.

The Large Hadron Collider, the largest and most powerful particle accelerator, is scheduled to be up and running in the very near future. It's so powerful that it is feared to be able to create a black hole that can swallow the Earth, and then some. And that's just one of many other dangers it poses. So, when it becomes fully operational in the next few months... should we worry?

There's a possibility that the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS detector might be able to reveal extra dimensions. But for now the only thing it is able to unveil is the fact that it's facing a lawsuit right now. Fermilab and CERN's project has been put to a halt due to worries and fears by critics. Read more on this in the full article.

In the physical universe, we have time and space. These make up the four dimensions that we experience in our everyday lives. However, just because we can't experience it with the five sense we have doesn't mean they don't exist. String theory in theoretical physics suggests that there are as much as seven more dimensions in addition to timespace that we can't detect. Now, with the largest particle accelerator gearing up for operations later this year, scientists hope to detect these dimensions. Details in the full article.

It's the stuff that science fiction is made of, one of the most ambitious science projects of all time, and is possibly also the most expensive. However, with this experiment, scientists may just finally achieve the Holy Grail of physics: The God particle.

At the Cern particle physics lab in Switzerland, more than 600 physicists are working on the Large Hadron Collider, a machine that they hope will finally reveal details on how the universe began. The Collider will be large enough to house the nave of Westminster Abbey and will be monitored by computers that were built to easily handle information and data that is the equivalent of 150 times of what's on the internet each year.

As side-effects of the machine, "dark energy" which is believed to drive the expansion of the universe, may be revealed. On top of this, as some scientists think that the universe is composed of various dimensions, the machine may momentarily create wedges to other dimensions from which enormous amounts of gravity can seep through. This influx of gravity may then result in the creation of baby black holes.

And all this just so they could hunt down the so-called God particle which is properly known as the Higgs boson particle, which is supposed to make other particles heavier by clinging to them, thus later on resulting into mass, and in turn answering the question of why objects have mass in the first place. "It's probably the closest to God that we'll get," says Cern's chief scientist, Jos Engelen.

Well, either we've found the Higgs boson, or Fred's just put the kettle on

The Barrel Toroid, the world's largest superconducting electromagnet, has been set to full power last November 9. The magnet is built from eight 5 meter by 25 meter rectangular coils cooled to -269 degrees Celsius, and carries a current of 20,000 amps. The energy in its coils is equivalent to around 10,000 cars traveling at 70 kilometers per hour.

As part of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the magnet will be used to bend the paths of particles formed from the collision of protons or lead ions accelerated to near light speeds.

The LHC is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built and will be used to investigate why particles have mass. It will also be used to look into the nature of the as-yet undetected dark mass that's thought to make up all but four percent of the universe.

Researchers also hope to detect the Higgs Boson, a predicted subatomic particle that's supposed to have answers to life, the universe, and everything within three years. Ready your pan-galactic gargleblasters folks, we've got a whole lot of controlled sub-atomic collisions scheduled.

Well, the normal product of mixing significant quantities of matter and antimatter together is that the two annihilate each other in a big explosion of energy. Or warp speed (beam us up, Scotty!). Yet scientists in CERN have actually combined the two to produce an unstable "hybrid" matter called protonium, as reported in the Physical Review Letters journal and NewScientist.com.

The the funny thing is, they did this back in 2002, but they didn't realize it until recently.

Protonium is composed of protons and anti-protons (protons which have a negative charge as opposed to positive). It is also produced in particle accelerator experiments, though in amounts too small to study. The 2002 CERN experiment, on the other hand, involved a chemical reaction that was intended to create antihydrogen (the antimatter form of hydrogen). Protonium was found to be an unintended - and relatively plentiful - byproduct of the process.

The scientists believe that the formation probability of protonium using that method "is very high", and they would like to create more of it to advance the study of particle physics. On the other hand, because it is so unstable, protonium usually lasts for but a very few microseconds before disappearing in a puff of annihilation energy.

U.S. scientists may take the lead in the field of high-energy physics - or lose that position to Europe. Right now, with the U.S. Congress and Administration held hostage to oil industry executives and a small, but influential group of religious fanatics who reject science for a narrow and literal interpretation of the Bible, the future of important new research related to anti-matter is very much in doubt.

Scientists at Fermilab have discovered a "bizarre particle" that whips back and forth between the states of matter and anti-matter at the incredible rate of 3 trillion times a second. This discovery could lead to further discoveries of fundamental particles and potential new forces that may be harnessed for new technology.

Unfortunately, the Fermilab may have to close down by 2010 if Congress does not approve funding for a new linear collider. Given the multi-billion price tag, and the fact that current Congressional priorities focus more on tax breaks for wealthy corporations and the finance of wars to secure oil supplies, it is probable that the U.S. will lose this opportunity to Europe, where a new, even more powerful particle collider is scheduled to go on-line within two years.

The most recent findings shows that the thirty-nine-year-old Fermilab can still make  "breakthrough discoveries. "This remarkable tour de force details with exquisite precision how the antiworld is tied to our everyday realm," said Raymond Orbach of the U.S. Department of Energy. "It is a beautiful example of how, using increasingly sophisticated analysis, one can extract discovery from data from which much less was expected."

These experiments, while promising great advances in technology that could have immeasurable benefits for society and the world, are very expensive. The recent study in which the new particle - known as the B sub s meson - was discovered required a team of 700 physicists from over 60 countries.

Given the priorities of the current U.S. Administration and Congress, chances are that, barring major changes,  the study will not go much further. One can only hope that an increasingly discontented American citizenry will get out to the polls for the mid-term elections in November and demand a more accountable, responsive, and science-supporting government.