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Exclusive photo ops are sometimes only available to those who win an application lottery. The McNeil River bear sanctuary in Alaska is one example -- photographer John Daley recently shared about his experience with that. Here's another one: CERN.

The largest particle physics laboratory in the world is holding a special CERN Photowalk 2015 next month, and a handful of lucky photographers from around the world will be given a behind-the-scenes tour of the prestigious labs.

Scientists are all about recording data, facts and other information meticulously so that others can replicate their experiments. But, sometimes, even scientists can slip up. That, it seems, is what happened with the photography archive at CERN.

Few people without PhDs ever set foot inside CERN's (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) lab in Geneva, Switzerland, home of the Large Hadron Collider. And although we have had the opportunity to share some stunning pics of the world's largest particle accelerator before, Google is one-upping us (go figure) by letting you take a virtual stroll with Street View.

What you see here is the first image ever uploaded to the World Wide Web. It’s a graphic featuring …

A few days ago the people over at CERN -- the guys behind the biggest particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) -- made what has been called "the biggest advance in knowledge about the cosmos for over 30 years," they discovered the long-sought-after Higgs Boson.

Of course particle physics doesn't always pique the interest of us photographically inclined peoples, but what does is a gorgeous photo set, like this one from The Atlantic which celebrates the particle accelerator that helped make the discovery (in truth it did all the heavy lifting). The set goes a long way in showing that ever elusive "beauty in the machine."