Short answers, pulled from the story.
The first subatomic particle, the electron, was discovered by J. J. Thomson on the 29th of August 1897. This discovery shattered the ancient belief that atoms were indivisible fundamental units of matter. Thomson's cathode ray experiments revealed that these negatively charged particles were much lighter than hydrogen atoms.
Subatomic particles are divided into fermions and bosons based on their spin, with fermions having half-integer spin and bosons having integer spin. Fermions such as quarks and leptons make up matter and obey the Pauli exclusion principle, while bosons like photons and gluons carry forces and can overlap. The Higgs boson is unique as the only known elementary particle with zero spin that gives other particles their mass.
Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig independently proposed the quark model in 1964. Deep inelastic scattering experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center provided the first strong evidence for the model in 1968. The discovery of the top quark in 1995 at Fermilab completed the Standard Model.
The Higgs boson was discovered at CERN in 2012 and is the final piece of the Standard Model. It is the only known elementary particle with zero spin and is responsible for giving other particles their mass through the Higgs field. This discovery closed a chapter of subatomic physics that began over a century ago with the electron.
The proton is believed to be stable, while most other subatomic particles decay in microseconds or less. The electron and positron are theoretically stable due to charge conservation, whereas muons and tau particles decay via the weak force. Neutrinos are stable but exhibit neutrino oscillations, changing from one type to another even in a vacuum.