Short answers, pulled from the story.
Particle physics is the study of subatomic particles and the forces that hold them together. It explores fundamental units of matter such as quarks and leptons and their interactions through mediating gauge bosons.
Physicists formulated the Standard Model during the 1970s and it gained widespread acceptance in the mid-1970s after experimental confirmation of the existence of quarks. This theory explains the strong weak and electromagnetic fundamental interactions using mediating gauge bosons.
Physicists with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN announced on the 4th of July 2012 that they had found a new particle that behaves similarly to what is expected from the Higgs boson. This discovery confirmed the mechanism by which particles acquire mass.
The Large Hadron Collider is located at CERN on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva Switzerland. It had its first beam circulation on the 10th of September 2008 and became the most energetic collider of heavy ions after it began colliding lead ions.
Ordinary matter is made from first-generation quarks and leptons collectively called fermions which have a quantum spin of half-integers. Bosons are the mediators or carriers of fundamental interactions and all bosons have an integer quantum spin of zero or one.
Particle accelerators are used to produce medical isotopes for research and treatment and for external beam radiotherapy. The World Wide Web and touchscreen technology were initially developed at CERN and superconductors have been pushed forward by their use in particle physics.