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The scientific community got pretty excited with the discovery of a Higgs-like particle last year, but it turns out it's not all smiles and high fives. Apparently the Higgs boson was the missing piece in a subatomic calculation that could predict a Universe-ending catastrophic event in the future. How worried should you be? Depends on how many billions of years into the future you've made plans, but chances are pretty solid that you'll be long dead before this happens. So will the Earth. Smile! Everything ends!

Sunday saw the first Large Hadron Collider physics beams of the year. Hooray! The scientists at CERN smashed together lead ions and protons in an attempt to study quark-gluon plasma, believed to be the primordial state of matter in the moments after the Big Bang. If that all sounds very complicated and you'd like someone to explain it you who really knows what they're talking about, now's your chance! Rather, Thursday is your chance. The folks at CERN will be hosting another Google Hangout to talk about the new beams, why they're using lead ions, and who would win in a fight between a mouse and a mammoth.

Remember CERN? Sure you do! They were the folks with the Large Hadron Collider who discovered that Higgs boson thing back in July. Well, they're at it again with all their science and their 17-mile-long particle accelerator, and they've even broken a world record. CERN's physicists have created the highest human-made temperature in history with their ALICE heavy ion collider, beating the previous record of four trillion Kelvin. ALICE produced a quark-gluon plasma, a sort of subatomic milkshake if you replace the milk with quarks, the ice cream with gluons, the blender with a large ion collider, and the cherry on top with ground-breaking scientific discovery. This is starting to sound less and less like a milkshake. Read on for the full scoop.

After keeping the physics world on pins and needles for days, scientists working with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN announced that they had discovered a particle which appeared to fit the profile of the long-sought Higgs boson. Though this is a celebratory moment, CERN researchers stress that there is still much to learn about this new "Higgs-like" particle.

When the Sixty Symbols folks asked experts what would happen if your hand happened to find its way into the Large Hadron Collider beam, they were told "nothing good." To get a more nuanced answer, they turned to scientists at CERN. Their response was far more graphic, and gives insight into the incredible forces at work within the LHC. Watch the video after the break, and be amazed.

We all know the Large Hadron Collider is going to bring about the end of the world some day by opening a portal to a hostile alien dimension, and will probably manage that before it manages to locate the Higgs boson. If you aren't a huge LHC fan wearing a big LHC foam hand, you probably only know the general gist of the LHC: It accelerators particles and smashes them together. However, if you wanted a better explanation that is more easily digestible than reading walls of text on your favorite wiki, you should check out this explanatory video that is ready and willing to teach. Foam hand optional.

In order to celebrate the Large Hadron Collider's discovery of its first new particle, here's a LEGO model of the LHC's Atlas experiment. Of course, there's a whole lot more to the LHC than just Atlas, but no one has gotten around to making the whole thing. Yet. For now, we'll just have to marvel at LEGO Atlas and see what it can discover. Maybe the stud isn't the smallest unit of LEGO matter after all.

The Large Hadron Collider, one of the key tools being used in the search for the Higgs Boson, has found its first new particle since being put into operation back in 2009. No, it's not the Higgs boson. The new particle is Chi_b (3P), a more excited state of the Chi particles we already knew existed. New kid on the block Chi_b (3P) should help researchers develop a more complete understanding of the strong nuclear force and to fill in the holes in the Standard Model in general; there are still a lot of holes in the Standard Model.

The most exciting quest in modern physics has been the search for the Higgs boson, a hypothetical particle thought to be responsible for imbuing matter with mass. Today, scientists working on experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider called CMS and ATLAS have said that while a major breakthrough is still in the offing, they've made tremendous progress in the search for what some call the "God particle."

After decades as the workhorse of particle physics in America, the venerable Tevatron shuts down today. While the high costs of maintaining the structure are cited as the primary reason for the closure, the rising star of the Large Hadron Collider no doubt played some role in the Tevatron's demise. The 3.9 mile long particle smasher was completed in 1983 for the breathtaking cost of $120 million. Built in rural Illinois as part of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), the Tevatron was at one point the highest-energy particle collider in the world. During its decades of operation, the Tevatron has confirmed the existence of the Top Quark, discovered a new particle called the "bottom Omega baryon," and even partook in the chase for the elusive Higgs boson. Though the main structure of the accelerator may be used in future experiments, and there are reams of data yet to go over, the Tevatron ended its scientific life today at 2 P.M.. Farewell, Tevatron. We'll spill some for you tonight. (via Wired)

Researchers at Illinois' Fermilab Tevatron are cautiously optimistic that a bump in their data may herald the discovery either a new force, such as gravity or magnetism, or a new elementary particle. And no, it doesn't seem to be the Higgs boson. A new analysis of 10,000 collisions between proton and anti-protons created jets of heavier particles, which was to be expected. What was surprising was that 250 more times than expected, those particles were much heavier than they should have been, clocking in around 144 billion electron volts. This suggests that a new particle was created and decayed before it hit the detector, or a new force acted on the particles.

The Large Hadron Collider has been the center of wild theories since well before the 17-mile long particle accelerator underneath Geneva was even switched on, and there seems to be no end to the speculation surrounding the facility. The latest comes from a group of scientists who theorize that not only is time travel possible, but that the means may be within our grasp thanks to the LHC. The theory hinges on a subatomic particle called the Higgs singlet, a particle related to the Higgs boson. The catch is it is not yet clear if the Higgs singlet, or even the Higgs Boson, exist at all. Assuming they do, MSNBC reports that time travel for the Higgs singlet would work something like this:

[The Higgs singlet] may have a unique ability to jump out of the normal three dimensions of space and one dimension of time that we inhabit, and into a hidden dimension theorized to exist by some advanced physics models. By traveling through the hidden dimension, Higgs singlets could re-enter our dimensions at a point forward or backward in time from when they exited.

Of course, sending a single particle backwards or forward in time is far different than hopping in your flying time-DeLorean and zipping off to the 1950s. But scientists believe that Higgs singlets could be used to send messages backwards or forward in time, thanks to the particle's theorized properties. Vanderbilt physicist Tom Weiler says that this limited time travel is the theory's greatest strength, since it avoids paradoxes and does not violate the current understanding of physics. I'm certainly no expert on deep physics, but even Weiler describes the theory as "a long shot." Only time will tell with this theory, and others, as the LHC continues to enlighten and befuddle us as we try to understand the universe we live in. (MSNBC via Engadget)

Discovery News totally called this one: It turns out that all of those rumors that the elusive Higgs Boson had been discovered by Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator aren't true.

Last week, a physicist and blogger at the University of Padua, Tommaso Dorigo, wrote that "It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal. Some say a three-sigma effect, others do not make explicit claims but talk of a unexpected result." Like a uranium-235 chain reaction, Dorigo's words exploded through the blogosphere and into the mainstream media, which inexplicably turned the rumored discovery into the latest in a nonexistent 'rivalry' between Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider.

Fermilab has laid the smackdown on the Higgs Boson discovery rumors, saying that they have "no merit" and are "just rumors." Fermilab has also taken a few digs at bloggers in the process:

In a column for noted scientific journal The Daily Mail, accomplished physicist Stephen Hawking -- who's been more at ease talking about out-there topics of late -- writes an instructive DIY guide to time machine construction. Though he admits to past concerns that he'd be "labelled a crank" in stodgier scientific circles for his explorations into time travel, he now admits to an open fascination with the subject. The Daily Mail headline ("STEPHEN HAWKING: How to build a time machine") and dek ("All you need is a wormhole, the Large Hadron Collider or a rocket that goes really, really fast") may oversell the piece a bit, but its value is as a popular science primer. Like his remarks about alien overlords, if Hawking has to give some writers easy misconstruable headlines and pop-up jokes in exchange for a lively debate about science (and publicity for his new TV show, Stephen Hawking's Universe, which debuts on May 9th), so be it.

It didn't fail, and it didn't end the world: Early this morning, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland successfully ran a major, highly anticipated experiment, sustaining a 7 TeV particle beam [that is, 7 trillion electric volts] and colliding protons at three times the previous record energy level.