Higgs Boson.

Neat things are happening in the world of particle physics! Researchers at CERN are pretty much certain they have found the elusive Higgs boson - the so-called "God particle" because it imbues all the other particles we know of with mass.

Article from National Post

Interesting article on the University of Alberta connection here. (The guy in the picture, James Pinfold? Taught me Relativistic Physics.)

This could be my favorite Higgs related headline... Thanks CNN.

Our current understanding of physics at the smallest level involves a number of particles that have different properties. However, physicists have been struggling for years to deal with one sticky point... there is no reason why any of these particles should have mass. On their own, there is no reason for the universe to really have mass. The Higgs boson was proposed in the 60's to explain why these particles become massive when they stick together, and named after British physicist Peter Higgs.

(A boson is a type of particle that includes photons and the force carriers, like gluons and gravitons. It all starts to get pretty technical. Don't believe me? Just try reading the wikipedia page on bosons and see how far you get.)

For those of you who are wondering why we care... the same could be said about Röntgen's discovery of x-ray radiation that gave us modern medical x-rays, or the understanding of quantum mechanics that allows our computers to work. It will be a while before practical applications of the knowledge of Higgs boson are realized, but it is no small thing to learn that we have that much more understanding of our universe.