Happy 'Big Bang' Day! You are obviously reading this, so we will all assume that the universe has not changed, Earth was not sucked into a massive black hole (unless we are a part of some twisted LOST episode) and the most brilliant humans are the planet are gathering data on how our universe began.

Confused yet? In what is probably the biggest (literally and figuratively) sci-tech news of the past century, the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN facility in Geneva (known to most normal humans because of it's reference in Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, which is, coincidentally, being made into a movie as you read this) became fully operational today.

What is the LHC? It's a huge underground circular tube -- the biggest machine ever built, with a 17-mile diameter -- that speeds up protons around and around and collides them more 30 million times a second, which smashes them up and releases the particles hidden inside the proton at nearly the speed of light. This gives scientists an absolutely unreal an, until now, unheard of amount of information on particle physics, which relates back to the Big Bang and how our universe works. According to Scientific American, 'You could think of it as the biggest, most powerful microscope in the history of science.'

Much beyond that, things get a little too complicated for me to wrap my head around. But, yay! I'm really looking forward to the news coming out of CERN from the analysis of the LHC particles.