“Geneva, 20 November 2006. The largest superconducting magnet ever built has successfully been powered up to its nominal operating conditions at the first attempt. Called the Barrel Toroid because of its shape, this magnet provides a powerful magnetic field for ATLAS, one of the major particle detectors being prepared to take data at CERN1’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator scheduled to turn on in November 2007.”

The english translation : they’ve gotten a really, really, really big magnet turned on, at a really really low temperature, because superconductors work better the cooler they are (in this case, -398.2 degrees F)

. . .

“he ATLAS Barrel Toroid was first cooled down over a six-week period in July-August to reach –269°C . It was then powered up step-by-step to higher and higher currents, reaching 21 thousand amps for the first time during the night of 9 November. This is 500 amps above the current needed to produce the nominal magnetic field. Afterwards, the current was switched off and the stored magnetic energy of 1.1 GigaJoules, the equivalent of about 10 000 cars travelling at 70km/h, has now been safely dissipated, raising the cold mass of the magnet to –218°C.”

More plain english : Superconducting magnets use a lot of energy (read the bold.) These superconducting magnets are a part of a device called a particle accelerator that is used to take two very, very small particles (atoms and smaller) , get them going very very fast, and then crash into each other. collide with each other. The resulting destruction can yield other very, very very very small particles, along with the release of some energy. The results of these collision, and the produced particles, are used to learn more about the nature of science on the atomic scale. CERN, mentioned in the quotes, will be the worlds largest particle accelerator.
Instead of me rambling on, trying to explain science i’m not an expert about, here’s a link to “How Stuff Works – Particle Accelerators” that explains what they do in simple terms. (It’s really a lot like crash testing a car – what holds it together, what comes apart in the crash, etc., but instead of cars, it atoms and resulting sub-atomic particles created.)

How Stuff Works :

http://science.howstuffworks.com/atom-smasher.htm

And, for the article in its entirety

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2006/PR17.06E.html