I mean ALL the comments. 

Fill 1962 happening now. Ramping upto full power as I type.

1380 bunches.

http://lhcdashboard.web.cern.ch/lhcdashboard/
http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/

This fill was a 15 hour run. Best since MD and power cut.

The largest time I've seen was about 22 hours but it's hard to get any data outside the 7 day window of the dashboard.

Apparently they're having problems with 'dump kicker in SPS'. Sounds painful and no, I don't know what it means.

Found this link on BBC website.

Starting to get some results from the LHC but nothing definitive yet. If you read the bullet points by the 2 pence piece picture it will give you an idea what 2-5 sigma events mean.

Only 2 sigma certainty at the moment (low, could be statistical error). 3 sigma is good but not classed as a discovery until 5 sigma (1 in 1 million chance of being error)

Continuing development of the LHC has seen the beams hit total power of 100MJ each. (mega joules)
Though they've broken it again, power cut this time. No beam for 48 hours as I type but they've recently replaced a magnet with a downtime of a about a week. It takes 2 days to get the area back down to 1.9K (Kelvin. 0K = -273C)

There appears to be no more posts in the LHC News section. Last one was feb. I have found a press release section though. Here's the link.

This is what I'll be going to see. Will do a post when I get back.

Hurrah.

I have now been there, seen it and got the t-shirt.

The main snippet of info I gleened was the difference between the Higgs field and the Higgs boson.

The next bit is not confirmed and is what the LHC is trying to proove. Put simply, they are trying to answer the question 'what is mass?'.

The Higgs field permeates everywhere, similar to an electro-magnetic field. It acts on particles (not all) giving them their mass. It also acts on itself and this will cause Higgs's to collect together and create a particle; the Higgs boson. Every particle has a mass/energy spike and the range 140 to 145 GeV (giga electron volts) is looking promising for the Higgs boson. They may collect together in differnet ways/amounts and this will mean there are more than 1 Higgs bosons.

It is impossible to work out the masses of any particle by maths alone and is why these particle accelerators are built in the first place. About half the particles we know have been worked out through theory and half by experiment. All the masses are worked out through experiment to confirm/discard the theories and then create new theories. We are not there yet. One of the other big unanswered questions is 'what is gravity?'.

Does this make sense to you Diesel? Or anyone?

These are my words and I'm not a physicist.  

My oops. Edited mass of Higgs, was out by 100.

Thanks Snowcrash that all makes sense to me. However, having read this article:-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/science-environment-14596367

I'm not sure where this goes now. Any thoughts?.

Where I used the words theory and theories read 'standard model'.

This is the ongoing model of the fundamental forces (bosons) and particles (leptons, quarks).
For the Higgs and the quest for it this wiki has a good graph. Scroll down to 'Experimental search' heading and it shows where the search is headed.
This is a good wiki of the standard model. Alternative here.
And just to thorough here's the wiki I don't get either.

Well, there's still a bit of "area" to search yet. The region surrounding 250GeV, for example, plus lower and higher energy levels still need to be explored. I'm obviously no physicist, but I'm willing to bet it won't be found until they both improve their ability to detect particles/interactions at 500GeV+, and of course, to search that region more closely. In other words, I think it's going to turn out to be a fairly 'heavy' particle. Of course, my chances of being right are... well... I'm an auto mechanic, for cripes sake.

I was reading a discussion at LinkedIn, and ran across this link. Apparently, the LHC is looking into "cloud-sourcing" some of the computations involved in searching for the Higgs Boson, much like Cal State's "protein folding" work, or SETI@home. I think I'll look into it, as my desktop is on 24/7.

I wasn't sure if you folks were already aware of this, so I thought I'd bring it up.

I did do a fair few WU for seti@home on into the boinc client. I have known seti@home to kill machines in hot weather. Not to mention a PC on 24/7 going flat out uses about £20 a month lecky, less what it'd be on for anyway I 'spose.

LHC@home also uses the boinc client.

With the added advantage that graphics cards are sometimes used as well. GPU computing.

Found this CERN facts and figures page.

I do like the bit "just one-eighth of its cryogenic distribution system would qualify as the world's largest fridge"

And this more in depth PDF. All without formulae. 

As an update, I went ahead and followed all of the instructions for setting up LHC@home. I installed VirtualBox, and the BOINC client, and went to the URL mentioned to point BOINC to the correct project...

And found out they're not taking on any new project members. 

So I uninstalled BOINC, and am now using VirtualBox to run Ubuntu, so that I can test more web pages and run other programs that I'm involved with (e.g. ChatScript for Linux).

Good thing I like lemonade. I seem to be making a lot of it from the lemons I'm getting lately.

From what I was reading, the new project has only just come online and is over subscribed at the mo.

They need more servers to handle the data. Keep an eye on it. It'll come back.

Another little snippet fact I've found is...

When the beams are running at 100MJ (the highest I've seen them. Max is 350MJ), each beam has enough energy to melt about 150kg of copper (350MJ = 500kg of copper).

The beams are dumped to stop blocks. "The core of the stop block is made of a stack of various graphite plates with different densities."