Tonight:

Safe and sound, but shaken. Steve Dennis, the Canadian aid worker kidnapped from a Kenyan refugee camp last week tells us about his remarkable rescue.

Cruel customs. A Human Rights Watch report warns that thousands of Bangladeshi Boarder Guards imprisoned for their role in a 2009 uprising are being abused.

Itsy-bitsy, teeny-tiny, mini-wini. That's roughly the size of a Higgs Boson, the elementary particle whose discovery is huge news in the world of particle physics.

Hot under the collar. Fans of the indie website, Weather Underground, are steamed that it's been sold to arch-nemesis, the Weather Channel.

Plumped feathers. Researchers somehow convinced ptarmigans to run on a treadmill and found that even when the birds are fat, they're still fit.

And....Scissorgate. An N.P.R. reporter has some hard-hitting questions for his five-year old daughter after she gives her younger sister a botched D.I.Y. haircut.

As It Happens, the Wednesday Edition...Radio that's having a bad hair day.

It was a very, very long weekend. And, in no way was it enjoyable.

Last Friday, four relief workers with the Norwegian Refugee Council were abducted by Somali gunmen from a refugee camp in Kenya. Among them, two Canadians, Qurat-Ul-Ain Sadazai and Steve Dennis. The four workers were spirited away to Somalia; their families feared the worst.

But on Monday, all four were rescued in a joint operation carried out by the Kenyan and Somali armies.

We reached one of those aid workers, Canadian Steve Dennis in Nairobi, earlier today over Skype.

That was the director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Rolf Heuer, speaking in Geneva earlier today.

He was announcing the discovery of a sub-atomic particle scientists believe to be the elusive Higgs boson.

The Higgs boson -- which has been nicknamed the "God particle" -- has been a missing link of sorts in physics. For years it was merely a theoretical concept. Scientists used it to explain how matter gets its mass.

The hunt for the particle has been one of -- if not the single largest scientific collaboration in history. The experiments were conducted at CERN's massive underground facility -- the Large Hadron Collider -- which spans the Franco-Swiss border. They required the work of at least ten-thousand scientists and engineers from more than a hundred countries. But, behind that massive collaboration was a single man, the physicist after whom the particle is named -- Peter Higgs.

Here, for the record, is Professor Higgs speaking to the BBC earlier this year about the hunt for the Higgs boson.

"If you understand comedy, you understand life: drama, death, tragedy - everybody has these."

Those are the words of the English comedian Eric Sykes. Mr. Sykes, a giant of British comedy, died today. He was eighty-nine.

Mr. Sykes got his start writing radio scripts for the BBC, most notably for the program The Goon Show.

One of his best known works was the virtually-silent 1967 film, The Plank.

He also performed widely on television sitcoms with his comic partner, Hattie Jacques.

He was known for his remarkable timing -- it was more remarkable considering Mr. Sykes suffered from severe hearing loss for decades.

He coped, in part, by installing a hearing aid in his eyeglasses.

In 1992, Mr. Sykes was honoured with a lifetime achievement award for his work. He was made a Commander of the British Empire in 2004.

Here is Eric Sykes -- along with Hattie Jacques -- in a 1962 comedy sketch called Bedtime Story.

Marrow-devouring zombie worms sound more like science-fi than fact but they're real alright.

Last night we spoke with a researcher who has figured out how the worms -- zombie worms -- manage to gnaw their way through the bones of dead sea animals to get to the marrow, even though they have no teeth.

As I mentioned last night, the fact that these little critters exist gives me the creeps. Frankly, I had some pretty disturbing dreams last night.

But I find solace in some of the emails we recieved.

Like this one, from Terry Pitt-Brooke in New Westminster, B.C.:

"Just to set your mind at ease, Jeff: if you ever sank down to the realm of Osedax, you'd be, well, dead. And before Osedax could get to work, the hagfish would slip in through your mouth and anus and devour your viscera. Then dinnerplate-sized copepods and other arthropods would strip every particle of soft tissue from your bones. Only then could those bones become an Osedax garden."

ThanksTerry. I feel much better now.

If you've got some ideas gnawing inside your head, let them out and send them to us. Our toll-free Talkback number is 1-866-481-5718, and our e-mail address is aih@cbc.ca.

When Sadie, who is five, gave her three-year-old sister, Eva, a haircut, neither of them expected an accountability interview. But they ought to have -- their dad, Jeff Cohen, is a reporter with W.N.P.R. in Hartford, Connecticut.

So, after the lop-sided haircut incident, Mr. Cohen did what he does best. He got to the bottom of the story, microphone in hand. Then he posted the interview online. It's now gone viral.

Have a listen:

It was a bloody crime -- and those who allegedly committed it may be paying with their own blood.

Today, Human Rights Watch released a report warning that the government of Bangladesh is meting out cruel and inhumane punishment to some of its former border guards.

In 2009, thousands of the country's border guards took part in an uprising that left over seventy people dead, including several military leaders. Today's report claims that those guards still being held in custody are suffering widespread abuse.

Brad Adams is Human Rights Watch Asia Director. We reached him in Dhaka, Bangladesh on his mobile phone.

The Weather Underground has sold out.

No, not the grassroots radical leftist group. The grassroots weather data-gathering organization.

The much-loved, independent website -- wunderground.com -- has now been bought up by its corporate nemesis, the Weather Channel.

And the sale has got the attention of self-described weather geeks across North America.

Natalie Campbell is one of them. She's an artist who helps run a personal weather station on a roof in New York. We reached her today in Baltimore.

This weekend, at a important science conference in Salzberg, Austria, researchers from the University of Manchester presented their important research to other important scientists. Naturally, it involved convincing ptarmigans to run on treadmills.

We reached Jonathan Codd - a co-author of the research - in Salzburg.

This may be a case of the pot calling the kettle black. If you're a fan of this program, you know we have a fondness -- some might say a weakness -- for puns.

That said, there's a line -- a quota of silly word-play which simply shouldn't be crossed.

Well, yesterday the mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, stepped well over that line....or, to be fair, was pushed over it by one of of his scriptwriters.

The Mayor was speaking about the Coney Island National Hot Dog eating competition, which got underway today. Now, at this point, I'm sure you're expecting me to make some sort of hot-dog related pun. I'm not going to do that. Not because I don't want to but because, as you'll hear in this clip, Mayor Bloomberg has used them all.

This is our sound of the day: