Cern | featured news

Amid rising tensions in one of the world's most volatile regions, an audacious project to use science for diplomacy is taking shape in the heart of the Middle East.

The "Big Bang" experiment at CERN has set new records for colliding beams of particles this week, and is now shutting down for a couple of months to prepare for even higher energy work, the research center said on Friday.

France arrests a researcher at Europe's top particle physics lab who is suspected of links to al-Qaeda, officials say.