Shape-shifting collisions offer new tool for studying early matter produced in Big Bang's aftermath

This summer, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) took a breath of fresh air. Normally filled with beams of protons, the 27-km ring was reconfigured to enable its first oxygen-oxygen and neon-neon collisions. First results from the new data, recorded over a period of six days by the ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb experiments, were presented during the Initial Stages conference held in Taipei, Taiwan, on 7-12 September.