The Higgs boson discovery is a good excuse to learn a bit (and just a bit) about why it was so damn important in the first place. By now, you've probably heard that the Higgs is the final piece of the standard model of physics. But what does that actually mean?

For one, that the Higgs field can "give" us, and everything else in the universe, mass. Here's the MinutePhysics explanation of how mass is actually just things being allowed to travel slower than the speed of light. See? Simple! [minutephysics]