Are you still scratching your head over what a particle accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider actually does? Don't feel bad, the LHC is the most complicated piece of scientific equipment mankind has ever built. And unless you're a physicist, you'll probably never understand its intricacies. But if you're…

The Large Hadron Collider has been pretty busy lately, probably discovering the Higgs Boson, and definitely not destroying the world and whatnot. It's probably earned a little time off, right? You bet it has, which is why it's going down for a two-year nap.

You'd think that with a price tag of billions of dollars the LHC would have more storage capacity than it could ever use. But with the machine producing a petabyte of data every second, the researchers simply can't store it all.

So why exactly did CERN spend billions and billions of dollars building the Large Hadron Collider when Ikea sells a perfectly good alternative, the Hädrönn Cjölidder, for considerably less cash? Sure, its Compact Muon Solenoid is made from ugly particle board, but think of the money you'll save by building it yourself.

I prefer to call it The Force—a particle that "surrounds us and penetrates us, binding the galaxy together"—but Czech physicist Luboš Motl makes a good case as to why the Higgs boson should be called the God Particle.

As if I couldn't hate my ISP any more, researchers at the SuperComputing 2011 conference set a new internet speed record transferring data with a combined rate of 186 Gbps, 67 Gbps faster than the previous record set in 2009.

After much excitement, the Force has not been found. But don't be sad, my fellow nerds. Scientists may have not found evidence of the Higgs boson yet, but they have discovered "tantalizing hints" that may indicate its presence.

If confirmed next week, this will be the biggest news in the history of physics since the birth of the Theory of Relativity: CERN scientists may have already found evidence of the existence of the elusive Higgs boson. THE FORCE, dudes.

The Large Hadron Collider scares me. It's the baddest monster machine on the planet and it's capable of creating material that's denser than anything but black holes, it possibly found the Higgs Boson and probably can destroy humanity. It's an unknown beast. How do you make it less scary? Get to know it. LHSee (heh)…

The Tevatron shut down yesterday. Before its duties were taken up by the the Large Hadron Collider, it accelerated highly charged particles through 4 miles of electromagnetic coil and vacuum tubes to discover the secrets of the universe. How do you turn a beast like that off?