The Large Hadron Collider, the atom smasher that has hunted for antimatter and the elusive Higgs boson, shut down in February 2013 for an overhaul and upgrade. Now, scientists are getting ready to fire up the collider, which has been called “one of the greatest engineering milestones of mankind,” again.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research that operates the facility, reported that the atom smasher is nearly cooled to its perfect operating temperature of 1.9 degrees above absolute zero. That means the scientists can soon run needed tests before they circulate proton beams again for the first time in more than two years.

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