Drs. Peter Higgs and François Englert have been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for their work in identifying and discovering the Higgs boson, the so-called "God particle" that could explain how the universe's elementary particles obtained their mass shortly after the Big Bang. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners at a press conference held this morning in Stockholm, Sweden, following an unusually lengthy delay. The two will share a prize of 8 million Swedish krona (about $1.2 million) that will be awarded at a ceremony in Stockholm in December.

Higgs, an 84-year-old British professor at the University of Edinburgh …

Read the full story at The Verge.

In a special photographic feature yesterday, The Atlantic published 34 pictures showing the construction of the Large Hadron Collider, the massive particle accelerator that made this week's discovery possible. It's a dramatic set - aside from our favorite above, which shows the interior of the LHC, there are detailed photographs of the individual parts and of the computing grid that processes the results. It's been a heavy few days for CERN-centric news, but this is one feature that's really worth checking out - head over to The Atlantic for the full story.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Scientists at CERN say they've found a new particle consistent with the Standard Model Higgs boson with 5-sigma certainty - a false positive probability of about 1 in 9 trillion. Evidence of the particle's existence in the 126GeV mass range was gleaned from the CMS (video below) and ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela explains, "this is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it's the heaviest boson ever found."

Definitely a new particle, but is it the Higgs?

Before the particle can be determined to be the Standard Model Higgs, scientists will need to find out more about it …

Read the full story at The Verge.

CERN has confirmed that the anomalous results which indicated that neutrinos traveled faster than the speed of light were caused by faulty machinery. The findings were reported on heavily last September, and since then scientists the world over have been trying to explain how the neutrinos broke one of the fundamental laws of physics. Earlier this year, there was word that the team behind the results had found possible faults in its test equipment, and the error has now been confirmed.

While it may seem like a huge blow to the team, CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci was pragmatic in his summary of the events. He thanked the scientifi …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Leonardo da Vinci didn't invent the Large Hadron Collider, but if he had, this is what his sketches may have looked like. These drawings are the work of Dr. Sergio Cittolin, a research physicist who's been at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) for more than 30 years. A lifelong doodler, Cittolin is in charge of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the LHC, and was inspired to compose his da Vinci-style sketches years before collider operations became a reality. His first rendering appeared on the cover of a CMS design report, replete with da Vinci's trademark inverse typography, which can only be deciphered when r …

Read the full story at The Verge.