CERN

It’s been calculated that dark matter is around five times more common than regular matter – and yet, we still haven’t directly detected it. Now CERN has joined the hunt, testing whether the famous Higgs boson could decay into dark matter.

Particle accelerators could be incredibly useful for medicine – if they weren’t so huge. Now, scientists at Stanford have managed to shrink the tech down to fit on a computer chip, which could lead to more precise cancer radiation therapies.

The world has seen some major scientific achievements in the last 10 years, as discoveries and developments decades in the making were finally realized. New Atlas rounds up five of the most ground-breaking, history-making milestones of the 2010s.

The hunt for dark matter – the mysterious stuff that seems to outnumber regular matter by a ratio of five to one – has so far turned up no direct trace. Now, researchers at CERN have tried a new approach, using another strange substance – antimatter.

The detection of the Higgs boson at CERN in 2012 is one of the biggest scientific discoveries of the decade. Now the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations have made the most precise measurement of its mass to date.

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has made some groundbreaking discoveries for physics, but it’s hard to tell how exactly that benefits the average Joe/Jill. Now CERN has announced that the LHC will soon divert some of the waste heat from the collider to help heat thousands of nearby homes.

Hypothetical “chameleon” particles could be behind dark energy, and physicists at CERN have been searching for these particles streaming from the Sun. Now, the team has reported the first results of their search.

CERN, the European research organization responsible for operating the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has released a report outlining a proposed particle accelerator that would be nearly four times as long and 10 times as powerful as its predecessor.

Scientists at CERN have switched off the Large Hadron Collider following its second round of experiments, gearing it up for a third run that will see particles smashed together harder than ever before.​

Physics tells us that a hammer and a feather, dropped in a vacuum, will fall at the same rate. Now, CERN scientists are preparing to drop antimatter in a vacuum chamber to see if gravity affects it the same way it does matter – or if antimatter falls upwards instead.

The Large Hadron Collider has been responsible for some of the most important breakthroughs in scientific history, most notably the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2013. New Atlas is celebrating the 10-year anniversary with a look back at its achievements and what it could help solve in the future.

Particle accelerators have plenty to teach us, but these facilities involve kilometers of tunnels and equipment. Now, researchers at Imperial College London have developed a new way to accelerate antimatter particles using common equipment already found in many labs, in a much smaller space.