The Large Hadron Collider, a giant new particle accelerator near Geneva, is set to be switched on for the first time next week. It's the world's largest particle accelerator; it will smash beams of protons into each other at really, really high speeds and look at the bits and pieces that come out of the collision.

Physicists hope to find the Higgs boson, a particle that theorists thought up in the 1960s but no machine has been able to detect. Until now. To learn more about the Higgs boson and the Large Hadron Collider, you could read "The God Particle," from the March 2008 issue of National Geographic.

Or you could watch this video. Because nothing goes together like hip-hop and particle physics.

— Helen Fields

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