No one can control the weather, but certain clouds can be deliberately triggered to release rain or snow. The process, known as cloud seeding, typically involves dispersing small silver iodide particles from aircraft into clouds. These particles act as seeds on which water molecules accumulate, forming ice crystals that grow and eventually become heavy enough to fall to the ground as rain or snow.

The experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) detect rare events on a daily basis, but some are exceptionally rare, such as this latest result from the CMS collaboration. For the first time, the collaboration has observed the production of a single top quark along with a W and a Z boson, an extremely rare process that happens only once every trillion proton collisions. Finding this event in the LHC data is like searching for a needle in a haystack the size of an Olympic stadium.

There is a limit to how big we can build particle colliders on Earth, whether that is because of limited space or limited economics. Since size is equivalent to energy output for particle colliders, that also means there’s a limit to how energetic we can make them. And again, since high energies are required to test theories that go beyond the standard model (BSM) of particle physics, that means we will be limited in our ability to validate those theories until we build a collider big enough.