CERN

CERN was put into action in 1954 by 12 European countries in Geneva, Switzerland. Originally CERN was the acronym for “Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire” meaning European Organisation for Nuclear Research. Today CERN is governed by 20 European member states. Other organisations and countries such as the EU or the USA have “observer status”.
As you can probably tell from its name already, CERN’s field of work is mainly the research of atoms. Therefore electrons and protons are accelerated by an electric field in the worlds’ largest particle accelerator (LEP) with a circumference of 27 km to nearly the speed of light and then brought to collision to find out more of the characteristics of elementary particles.
Particle accelerator at CERN

In 1995 CERN managed to produce anti-nitrogen for the first time with particle collision, but the few particles collapsed too fast to carry out measurements. The study of anti-matter should give answers on why we exist at all. Therefore scientists are trying to produce tiny amounts of anti-matter in their laboratories. The production of one gram of anti-matter would still cost trillions of dollars, so research is still in the fledgling stages.
But what’s more interesting about CERN in our context is the fact that it developed and released WWW (or even shorter, W3) – the World Wide Web – as we know it today. In 1989 CERN researcher Tim Berners-Lee worked on a hypertext system whose goal was to easily share the result of the latest research with other scientists and research institutes. Berners-Lee linked scientific works and soon a wide information network emerged. His first (not yet graphical) browser was called “Nexus” and the first webserver in history could be reached by entering  http://info.cern.ch WWW was further developed at CERN and became what you are using right now.