This is IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English.This week, scientists in Switzerlandreported a big discovery about a very small particle.They think they have finally found a Higgs boson,or what some people call the "God particle."It could answer some basic questionsabout the universe and the creation of planets and life.Rolf Heuer is the director-general of CERN,the European Center for Nuclear Research.ROLF HEUER: "I think we have a success today.We have a discovery. We have discovered a new particle, a boson -- most probably a Higgs boson,but we have to find out which kind of Higgs boson this is.Does it have the propertieswhich we expect from the Standard Model?If not, what are its properties and where do they point to?"In particle physics, the Standard Model is sometimes called"a theory of almost everything" that affectshow subatomic particles interact and affect each other.Subatomic means smaller than an atom.Scientists believe the Higgs bosoncould explain how matter gets its mass.Mass is the amount of material in an objectthat gives it weight in the presence of gravity.The subatomic particle that scientists have foundfits the description of the Higgs bosonpredicted by physicist Peter Higgs.Scientists have been searching for it for forty-five years.Peter Higgs attended the event at CERN on Wednesdaybut did not want to say much about the findings.PETER HIGGS: "I think it is not appropriate for meto answer any detailed questions at this stage.This is an occasion celebrating an experimental achievement,and I should congratulate the people involved."Theorists believe the Higgs boson existed onlyduring the first millionth of a millionth of a secondafter the Big Bang.That was the huge explosion when the universewas created more than thirteen billions years ago.Physicists at CERN are trying to recreate the high energiesthat existed at the time of the Big Bang.CERN has the world's biggest atom-smasher,the Large Hadron Collider.This ten-billion-dollar colliderproduces high-energy crashes to investigate mysterieslike dark matter and the creation of the universe.The results presented Wednesday are based on findingscollected last year and this year from two experiments,called Atlas and CMS.The scientists involved say more research must be doneto be sure of their results.However, a spokesman for one of the experiment teams,Joe Incandela, says the boson is unlike any particle found so far.JOE INCANDELA: "We are reaching into the fabric of the universeat a level we have never done before.This is telling us something.It is key to the structure of the universe.We are on the frontier now.We are at the edge of a new exploration and this could open up-- maybe we see nothing extraordinary, and we understandthat maybe this is the only part of the story that is left.Or maybe we open up a whole new realm of discovery."CERN had been planning to shut down its atom-smasherfor two years for maintenance work.But because of these results,it will keep the Large Hadron Collider in servicefor another two to three months.About two hundred people gatheredat the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the United Statesat two o'clock in the morning to watch the announcement from Geneva.Fermilab's Robert Roser points out the scientists at CERNwere careful to say they found a "Higgs-like" object.ROBERT ROSER: "It's a subtle difference and so what they will doover the course of the many years,they will start to investigate all of its properties to see if it acts,if it smells, tastes, and behaves the way they expect it to."And that's IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English.