It's not quite a do-it-yourself particle accelerator for the home, but as part of an outreach project at the Niels Bohr Institute, Physics postdoc Sascha Hehlhase has assembled a stunning model of ATLAS, one of the ongoing experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, entirely out of Lego bricks. The attention to detail is quite impressive, capturing the "muon and magnet system to the innermost pixel detector." Hehlhase breaks down his work by the numbers: about 9,500 pieces, 1 x .5 x .5m in size ("roughly 1:50 in scale"), and about 81 hours of work total — 48 hours to build the 3D model and 33 hours of construction ("spread out over several weekends and happy hour").

A construction manual is said to be forthcoming, with alternate instructions for finding the missing Higgs boson brick (key to the Standard Model in both particle physics and subsequently in Lego brick physics, as well) and for building a medieval fort with a dungeon and working catapults. The LHC's other five particle detector experiments are not included.