We first became aware of Kate Findlay's work thanks to Symmetry Magazine, which publishes articles relating to particle physics. Kate isn't a particle physicist; in fact, she's not even a scientist. She works as an art teacher at a private elementary school in the UK, and also makes these amazing quilts. Symmetry's interest (and ours, and yours, we think) comes from her inspiration for one particular line of quilts: the hardware of the Large Hadron Collider. We've put together a little Q&A with her which you can read after the jump.

There's no official announcement yet but word on the street and around the cafeteria at CERN says that scientists may haveglimpsed the elusive Higgs boson. Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have been saying that they are closing on the so-called God Particle for a while now, and while a rock-solid 5-sigma event isn't in the offing we might soon see our first experimental data that points toward a real Higgs sighting.

As we all know, the Large Hadron Collider has been grievously behind the times technologically. Sure, its giant array of superconducting magnets, kept cool by almost a hundred tons of liquid helium is pretty neat, and the muon spectrometer is no slouch. But the LHC hasn't put it all in a convenient smartphone app -- until now.

The latest news from the Large Hadron Collider: scientists still cannot explain why we're all here. In the most detailed analysis of strange beauty particles - that's what they're really called - physicists cannot find supersymmetric particles, which are shadow partners for every known particle in the standard model of modern physics. This could mean that they don't exist, which would be very interesting news indeed.