One of the most highly anticipated discoveries in all of physics happened this year -- well, probably. Scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said they used the Large Hadron Collider to detect a particle whose characteristics matched those of the Higgs boson.

What is the Higgs boson, you ask? It's basically a component of an invisible field, called the Higgs field, that is responsible for the mass of all the matter in the universe. In essence, it is why we are here.

Finding this particle, sometimes referred to as the "God particle" in popular culture, will fill a large gap in scientists' understanding about how the universe works. But it's not "God" in the way that you might think. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman wrote a book with "God Particle" in the title, but reportedly said he'd actually wanted to call it the "Goddamn Particle."

But wait, what about its mass? The two most precise ways that the particle has been measured have yielded slightly different values for its mass, said Beate Heinemann, scientist with the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. But these measurements are consistent, and with more data that difference should get smaller. "It all points at the moment to that this is indeed the Higgs boson," she said in an e-mail.

More results are expected in March 2013, she said.

3. James Cameron's deep dive

He didn't find The Heart of the Ocean necklace, but director James Cameron did probe the remotest depths of the ocean this year. In fact, using his one-man submersible, the maker of "Titanic" and "Avatar" traveled to the deepest known point in the world's oceans.

Cameron is the first to go alone to Challenger Deep, the name for that part of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean. Here's a mind-boggling fact: Mariana Trench is deeper than Mount Everest is tall. Only two other humans have ever visited it.

In this cold, dark place, miles beneath the ocean's surface, Cameron said he did not see any fish, but did spot some "shrimplike animals." It took him 2 hours, 36 minutes, to get down there.

"It's a completely alien world," Cameron said.