The second day of the “Neutrino Conference XIII” in Venice was dedicated to, well, neutrino telescopes. I have written down in stenographical fashion some of the things I heard, and I offer them to those of you who are really interested in the topic, without much editing. Besides, making...

It was with great pleasure that I found yesterday, in the public page of the DZERO analyses, a report on their new search for Higgs boson decays to photon pairs. On that quite rare decay process -along with another not trivial decay, the reaction- the LHC experiments base their hopes to see the Higg...

While putting together the scores to evaluate the answers to the 11 questions of the previous post, I realized that they are not enough for a fair classification. So here are a few more quizzes for those of you who found my effort worth paying back with five more minutes of your time. K) You are fou...

In my ongoing effort to convince my readers that experimental high-energy physics is easy and fun, and to make it more appealing to everybody, I am presenting you with a small test, which should measure your ability to think as an experimental particle physicist. They should be enough to sketch your...

Two years ago I used the combined Higgs search limits produced by the D0 experiment to evaluate how well the Tevatron was doing if compared with the predictions that had been put together by the 1999 SUSY-HIGGS working group, and later by the 2003 Higgs Sensitivity Working Group (HSWG), two endeavou...

The case of Eluana Englaro, a woman in irreversible coma since 1992, is causing an institutional conflict in Italy, as well as a pitiful example of “insolence of office”. The story is long, and if you have not followed it on the newspapers, it is hard for me to summarize its salient poin...

The other day, while waiting for my turn to operate the automatic coffee machine in the basement of the physics department, I read a small newspaper clip hung by somebody on the bulletin board in front of the machine. It was a comment by Michele Serra, who sarcastically thanked an italian archbishop...

The paper by Thomas Gehrmann and collaborators I cited a few days ago has inspired me to have a closer look at the problem of understanding the features of extensive air showers - the phenomenon of a localized stream of high-energy cosmic rays originated by the incidence on the upper atmosphere of a...

While the creation of black holes in the high-energy proton-proton collisions that LHC will hopefully start providing this fall is not granted, and while the scientific establishment is basically unanimous in claiming that those microscopical entities would anyway decay in a time so short that even ...

In this post -the fourth of a series (previous parts: part I, part II, and part III)- I wish to discuss a couple of attributes possessed by the “ghost” events unearthed by the CDF multi-muon analysis. A few months have passed since the publication of the CDF preprint describing that resu...