This episode is presented by eBay.

Rob, everyone loves a deal and a bargain from time to time, don't they? Absolutely, mate. And you know where you can grab a great deal? Talk to me. Where? The eBay app. Yes, you are correct. You didn't need to talk to me. I already knew it. I love eBay. When you're buying, you can discover loads of hidden gems. there's so many items where you think I would have never found that anywhere else.

Then when you're buying, you can discover loads of hidden gems. There's so many items where you think I would have never found that anywhere else. Then when you're selling, it's so simple and most

importantly, free. It's free, Rob. When it's this easy to sell for free and there's great deals

on things you love. You can't help but say when it's eBay. It excludes vehicles and business

sellers. Welcome to the vehicles and business sellers.

Welcome to the Scientific American podcast Science Talk posted on December 11, 2011. I'm Steve Murski. Rumors of flying about the search for the long-sought Higgs boson at Europe's

large Hadron Collider. The Higgs is the elementary particle hypothesized to be the origin of the mass of all matter,

so finding it would be a pretty big deal.

And our man in Europe, Davidei, Kastlovak, will be at the press conference on Tuesday, December 13th,

at which the LHC folks will tell us what, if anything, they've got.

For a preview of that event, check out Davides' December 8th article on our website at www.com.

Also to preview the announcement, here's an interview I did months back with Thomas Lecompt.

Only one small section has been previously aired as a 60-second podcast. Tom is with the Argonne National Lab and is the physics coordinator for what's called the Atlas experiment at the LHC.

Atlas is one of the two major detectors at the Large Hadron Collider. So Tom is in the thick of it. We talked about the instrument, the culture at the LHC, and how he wound up at the most complex science experiment in history.

What about the energies that are currently being produced and where that's going to go? We're still going to get significantly higher energies than are currently being

produced there. Is that right? Correct. So we're running at 7TEV trillion electron volts, which is three

and a half times more than the Fermilab Tevatron, which was previously the instrument that was able to get to

the highest energies. We expect to double that sometime over the next few years as we inch our way up.

But for now, a factor of three and a half is a lot.

We're delighted to have this new realm to be looking at,

and it didn't seem to be worth the risk to really push the device.

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