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European Laboratory for Particle Physics or CERN, nuclear research center straddling the French-Swiss border W of Geneva, Switzerland. Founded in 1952 as the European Center for Nuclear Research (the acronym CERN is derived from the French version of this name) and later called the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN is an intergovernmental organization whose activities are sponsored by 19 European countries. It is the principal European center for research in particle physics. CERN's large electron-positron storage ring (the LEP collider) was inaugurated in 1989 and upgraded in 1996, and its planned Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is expected to be operational early in the 21st cent. Russia has applied for membership and, since the demise of the Superconducting Supercollider in 1993 (see particle accelerator), the United States has shown increasing interest in CERN activities. The World Wide Web, a system of internationally distributed, hypertext-linked materials on the Internet, was originally developed at CERN during the 1980s.
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