Atom-smasher starts operations

Particle physicists fired up the world's biggest atom-smasher on Wednesday in a mission to answer some of the most perplexing questions about the nature of the Universe.
Built in a tunnel 100 metres (325 feet) below ground in a complex straddling the French-Swiss border, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is designed to accelerate sub-atomic particles to nearly the speed of light and then smash them together.

The collisions will briefly stoke temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the Sun, fleetingly replicating conditions which prevailed in split-seconds after the "Big Bang" that created the Universe 13.7 billion years ago.