Besides providing something to bet on (see next article), competition has the desirable side-effect of spurring progress. As far as the physics of tiny things is concerned, the race is a two-horse affair between the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located at CERN in Geneva and the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) near Chicago. Both are hadron colliders: machines that smash protons into each other, or into their antimatter kin, at a smidgen below the speed of light in order to create shrapnel in the form of other particles. And both have recently produced promising results, presented to the biennial International Conference on High Energy Physics held in Paris on July 22nd-28th.
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