Supercollider is back and (so far) smashing

GENEVA: The world's largest atom smasher made another leap forward on Monday by circulating beams of protons in opposite directions at the same time and causing the first particle collisions in the $10 billion machine after more than a year of repairs, organizers said.

The true test of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will come in the first two months of 2010, when scientists plan to start deliberately crashing protons into each other to see what they can discover about the makeup of the universe and its tiniest particles.

The collisions - seen by massive detectors - were a side effect of the quick advances being made by the LHC during its startup phase, which began on Friday night, said Rolf Heuer, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN.