So exciting! This morning I’ve read the news everywhere on the Internet: The ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN today presented their latest results in the search for the long-sought Higgs boson. Both experiments see strong indications for the presence of a new particle, which could be the Higgs boson, in the mass region around 126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). Can you imagine how it would change our understanding of the Universe? Amazing! You can visit CERN website and for the non-specialists, read this article. You can also read Max Dana’s post about it, she is even more excited than me about the Higgs boson! A proton-proton collision event in the CMS experiment producing two high-energy photons (red towers).This is what we would expect to see from the decay of a Higgs bosonbut it is also consistent with background Standard Model physics processes. © CERN 2012

It is now official: neutrino researchers admit Albert Einstein was right. Mark Brown, Wired UK, writes: Back in September 2011, a team of particle physicists detected neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light as they traveled from CERN to the Gran Sasso lab. They smashed the universal speed limit by 60 nanoseconds — a result that was constant, even after 15,000 repetitions of the process. The results seem to run counter to a century’s worth of physics and would overturn Einsten’s special theory of relativity if true. As such, CERN called for more experiments to double-check the findings. […] At the International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto on June 8, CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci presented results on the travel time of neutrinos from CERN to the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory, on behalf of four experiments — Borexino, Icarus, LVD and Opera. All four experiments measured a neutrino time of flight that was below the speed of light, confirming that neutrinos respect Einstein’s cosmic speed limit. The previous anomaly was “attributed to a faulty element of the experiment’s fibreoptic timing system.” If you don’t get why it would have been a big deal to prove Einstein’s…

I read this news last month and I’m eager to know more about what kind of creative work artist Julius von Bismarck, the winner of the Collide@CERN prize, will present on his experiences at the laboratory in September. From the article published by Symmetry Breaking Magazine: If attendees at the welcome reception for CERN’s first artist-in-residence learned one thing last night, it was that Julius von Bismarck is not afraid to disrupt others with his art. In a way, this trait puts him right at home with CERN scientists: the kind of people who always question, the kind of people who fill an auditorium to discuss the possibility that a long-held law of physics could be broken. But von Bismarck is not a CERN scientist. So inviting him into the laboratory, where he will stay for the next two months, is a sign of trust – not that he won’t disrupt the scientists, but that, if he does, the experience could be worthwhile […] Von Bismarck, 28, has used invention, experiment and, in many cases, the participation of an unsuspecting crowd to address questions about how we interact with the world around us. In 2006, he created a white, spherical…