A quick update on the state of the world: we have not been sucked into an artificially created black hole. Hooray!
In other news, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) started today. I mention this on a website dedicated to nature because it's the world's biggest experimental facility for physics, and the "natural history" that we study is all here, and so are we, thanks to the sorts of things physicists study. The scientists using the LHC are hoping to figure out fundamental physics questions like what happened during the Big Bang, and what kinds of other dimensions are out there.
I'll admit, I'm not a physicist and I know very little about physics. But even I think an experimental particle accelerator that is long enough to span the entire border between France and Switzerland, 100 m underground, is pretty cool. I don't understand what a hadron is, but I know they're now colliding them at high speeds, like a sub-atomic demolition derby. This is a great opportunity for physicists, and all of us, to learn about the forces that created our universe.
Pretty nifty, I think.
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