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

If you have ever worked in a biology lab, you must watch this ad from Eppendorf.

If you have not worked in a biology lab, let me explain. A lot of modern biology is done by moving around lots of tiny drops of liquid. Say, a bunch of DNA samples that you mix with various chemicals, then run through big machines. The liquids are moved by, basically, sucking up a bit of liquid in an eyedropper.

But this is science, so you can’t go around wielding actual eyedroppers. The samples have to be exactly the right size and they must not be mixed. Thus, every grad student’s friend: the Pipetman, a tool that sucks up precise quantities of liquids into disposable tips.

If you ever find yourself in a situation that requires a Pipetman: Jab it into a box of tips until one sticks. Use your thumb to push the button down and hold it. Put the tip into the liquid. Let the button up slowly. Move to the new container. Push the button all the way down to expel the liquid. Push the other button to dump the tip. Repeat. For hours.

If this sounds like a recipe for repetitive motion disorders, that’s because it is. There are machines that pipette automatically, but they aren’t always practical, and nobody gives ‘em away for free, either.

Ok, now you’re ready for a boy band to sell you an automatic pipetter.

— Helen Fields

Madeleine L'Engle died yesterday in Connecticut. She was 88 years old. Madeleine L'Engle's books were some of my favorites in childhood. Her books weave stories that include science, but never make you feel as if you're being taught something. A Wrinkle In Time is based in part on Einstein's ideas about space and time. In A Wind in the Door, Meg travels her brother's mitochondria (the tiny powerhouses of the cells) to cure him of a mysterious disease. Limb regeneration plays a major part in The Arm of the Starfish.

The books were wildly successful, and they certainly resonated with me - to live in a big old house like Meg's, with lots of siblings and brilliant scientist parents, eating dinners cooked on bunsen burners, was my romantic ideal of childhood. Now cooking on bunsen burners just seems like a bad idea - lab chemicals and food preparation belong in separate rooms. But the interest in unknown worlds sparked by the books lived on, for me and many other readers. I still reread A Wind in the Door every few years - maybe now it's time to pick it up again.

— Helen Fields