In the latest models, plastic cylinders inside the cushions absorb energy from collisions.

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Assuming there are no further glitches, the energy of the collisions will be cranked up over the next few months and the new subatomic goodies will start pouring out of the machine and into the pages of physics journals.

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The two rattled the boards at Consol Energy Center with a series of collisions, some of them legal, some of them not so much.

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The U.S.-based scientists outlined their final analysis based on more than 10 years of research and 500 trillion particle collisions using the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab Tevatron collider near Batavia, Illinois, whose budgetary woes shut it down last year.

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In 1966 Kenneth Greisen, Vadim Kuzmin and Georgiy Zatsepin showed that high-energy charged particles (cosmic rays are mostly atomic nuclei, and thus positively charged) should be slowed by collisions with the photons of the cosmic microwave background (radiation left over from the Big Bang that permeates all space).

ECONOMIST: Cosmic rays: They came from outer space | The