Discovery machine
CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - the planet's most powerful subatomic particle accelerator - made it into the record books when, at 10.28am on Wednesday 10 September, in front of the world's hyped-up media, the first beam was successfully steered around its 27km ring. Then, just nine short days later, there was an incident that resulted in a large leak of helium into the beam tunnel, forcing shutdown of this amazing project until spring of next year.