The Large Hadron Collider has slowly been making progress towards being a fully operational Death Sta ... physics tool. It's had mishaps along the way such as being shut down completely thanks to a bird dropping bread into the mechanisms and conspiracy theorists were disappointed when the Earth wasn't destroyed during initial testing. But recently, the LHC was used for something other than proton smashing, rather the scientists smashed lead ions together and succeeded in creating a mini-Big Bang. The resultant particle soup was temporarily more than ten trillion degrees creating a plasma the scientists hoped would allow them to study the Strong Force.