So, there is a job thread somewhere in here (looks like it got dropped off the bottom of the page) where I foolishly admitted to being a theoretical particle physicist working on predicting what might be seen at the new collider being built under CERN. If this has no interest to you, feel free to skip to other threads, this one will be unashamedly physicsy. I also promised to post here if there was any major news on the collider.

Well, the short version is this - there is a collider being built under the Swiss-French border. Here's a picture of where it sits and how big it is:
cern-lhc.jpg

The big white circle shows the path of the tunnel the collider sits in - it's 100m or so beneath the ground and the tunnel has a length of 27km. Note Geneva airport on the right for scale.

The plan is that protons - the nucleus of a hydrogen atom - will be accelerated around the ring to very close to the speed of light in two beams going in opposite directions. Once they are up to speed these beams will then be crossed (with less dramatic consequences than in Ghostbusters - but this is actually what those beams where based on). The beams will collide at two points on either side of the ring and enormous (6 storey tall) detectors will catch the subatomic debris that comes out.