A group of interns at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, are helping to build out an Innovation Lab stocked with “rapid prototyping machines like 3-D printers, micro mills, lathes, laser cutting and marking systems, and other advanced technologies.”

You know what that means! More MakerBots at NASA. That’s NASA intern Kirby Carmack in the photo above working on one of the Thing-O-Matics in the Innovation Lab. This article says that once the Lab is complete, it will “support Goddard research and development at low or no cost.”

MakerBots supporting research and development at Goddard Space Flight Center?

We’ll take it.

It’s been about 30 days since scientists at the Large Hadron Collider announced they had discovered very strong evidence of the existence of a sub-atomic particle they’ve been looking for.  It’s known as the Higgs boson particle, and it is believed that other particles get the property of mass from interacting with a field of these Higgs bosons.  If you don’t understand it yet, check out this pretty awesome cartoon video which may give you a little more insight, but be sure to read after the jump!

So the CERN scientists say they are about 99.9999998% (5.9 sigma) sure that they’ve found the Higgs boson particle, but I’d like to make them 100% sure that it exists.  I’ve created this cute model and want to send it over to the Large Hadron Collider so they have definitive proof of its existence, but I need your help!

I’ve hidden four of these little guys in a few geocaches around; two in New York near MakerBot, and two down in the Baltimore area.  They’re geocaching.com track-able travel bugs.  If you find one, move it to a cache closer to CERN and hopefully it’ll get there eventually!  That way we can prove to them it exists.

Be sure to log your visit on the site, and take some photos to share!  The destination is the geocache located a mere 200 meters from the LHC in Switzerland.  If you want, you can make one of them for yourself by grabbing the files here on Thingiverse.