By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS

GENEVA

The world’s largest atom smasher has recorded its first high-energy collisions of protons, a spokeswoman said Wednesday.

Physicists hope those collisions will help them understand suspected phenomena such as dark matter, antimatter and ultimately the creation of the universe billions of years ago, which many theorize occurred as a massive explosion known as the Big Bang. Read the full story

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is quickly making up for lost time: The first scientific results from the recently restarted particle accelerator have been announced—about two weeks ahead of schedule.

During the first collisions of the LHC’s twin beams of protons, a machine called A Large Ion Collider Experiment, or ALICE, collected the results from a proton-proton smashup. Read the full story

The operators of the Large Hadron Collider have successfully sent a beam of protons around the ring of the world’s largest particle collider.

It is the first time the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, has been operational since September 2008, when an electrical connection in the collider’s magnets melted, causing a tonne of super-cooled liquid helium to leak into the tunnel.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced the success on Twitter on Friday afternoon ET.

“We have completed the ring!” read the post on the social networking and microblogging site. Read the full story

Researchers have discovered a magnetic equivalent to electricity: single magnetic charges that can behave and interact like electrical ones.

The work is the first to make use of the magnetic monopoles that exist in special crystals known as spin ice. Read the full story