THE WORLD DIDN'T END

Physicists brushed off suggestions that the experiment could create tiny black holes that could suck in the planet.
"The worries that scientists had were nothing to do with being swallowed up by black holes and everything to do with technical hitches or electronic failure," said Jim al-Khalili, a physicist at Britain's University of Surrey.
"Now, after a collective sigh of relief, the real fun starts," al-Khalili said. "No matter what we find, we will be unlocking the secrets of the universe."
The LHC will send beams of subatomic particles called protons whizzing around the tube at just under the speed of light.
The hope is they will smash into one another and explode in a burst of new and previously unseen types of particles -- recreating on a miniature scale the heat and energy of the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe 13.7 billion years ago.
At full speed the LHC will engineer 600 million collisions every second. Data will be transmitted via a network called The Grid to scientists at 170 institutions in 33 countries.
"It is sort of a virtual United Nations," said Michael Tuts, a physics professor at Columbia University in New York and program manager for 400 U.S. physicists working on one LHC project.
The experiments could confirm the existence of the Higgs Boson, a theoretical particle named after Peter Higgs, who first proposed it in 1964.
Also referred to as the "God particle," the Higgs Boson could help explain how matter has mass. "I think it's pretty likely" that it will be found, Higgs told reporters at the University of Edinburgh, where he is a retired professor of physics.
Scientists halted the particle beam's counter-clockwise spin temporarily on Wednesday afternoon after problems with the machine's magnets caused its temperature to warm slightly.
CERN officials said such minor glitches were to be expected given the intricacy of the machine, which is cooled to minus 271.3 degrees Celsius (minus 456.3 degrees Fahrenheit).
(Additional reporting by Michael Kahn in London, Laura MacInnis in Geneva, Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago and Maggie Fox in Washington; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)