Scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN nuclear research centre in Geneva have announced the most compelling evidence yet for discovering the Higgs Boson, and the role the Isle of Man has played in it.

The tiny particle is essential to understanding the development of the Universe as we know it.

The CERN experiment consists of focusing a beam of high-energy, positively-charged particles called protons, travelling at very close to the speed of light, onto a small target made from a heavy metal.

The breakthrough came when they changed the target material from gold to lead.

Senior scientist Stan Chatoli stated at a press conference at CERN on Friday afternoon that they could only use the purest lead available, which originally came from ore extracted from the Great Laxey Mine almost two hundred years ago.

He went on to say that the elusive entity (the Higgs Boson) had 'probably been lurking under Laxey for millions of years'.