We are less than 24 hours away from taking the most powerful machine ever created by man online. It is 17 miles long, 300 feet underground, and chilled down to -476 degrees Fahrenheit before it can be used.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a gigantic scientific instrument thatspans the border between France and Switzerland. It is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the fundamental building blocks of all things - the smallest particles of our universe.

So it just cost me $86 to fill my gas tank. It used to cost me $13 when I first started college almost eight years ago.

I understand that I will never have the answer to the world's energy crisis, and will have to wait for one or more people to come up with a breakthough.

As we strain to keep pace with energy demands, it is expected to increase eightfold by 2050. The population will swell toward 12 billion by this time. It's sometimes scary to think about what my life will be like when I am 68 at this time.

Every August, the skies above the Northern Hemisphere are peppered with little bits of space debris that create the Perseid meteor shower.

Perseid meteoroids (which is what they're called while in space) are debris from a comet called Swift-Tuttle. Most are the size of sand grains; a few are as big as peas or marbles.

This comet is classified as the largest object that makes repeated passes near earth. It is 6 miles in diameter, roughly the size of the object that wiped out the dinosaurs.