The few of you who regularly follow this blog may be rightly wondering why I have not published new posts in the last two weeks. The reason is overload. I have a few deadlines on January 31 that I need to meet, and several other errands to attend in the meantime. Hence I have decided to leave the blog behind until the end of this month.
Besides, January is a rather uneventful month from the physics point of view. Experimenters from the big CERN collaborations are sharpening their tools in the wait of new 13 TeV data which could mean a lot to particle physics... if only the 750 GeV diphoton fluctuation were confirmed. More prosaically, the new data will offer a chance of wiping off more breathing space of SUSY and other competing new physics theories, improve the precision of a few standard model parameters, and little else.

On the personal side, I must report that I had a lot of fun in Chile, where I visited the Atacama desert and got to play with South America's largest amateur telescope, a 28" dobsonian for rent by Alain Maury (www.spaceobs.com). Then, back home I got elected to serve as coordinator of INFN "Gruppo I" in Padova - the group including accelerator physics experiments. Finally, presently I am in Lyon, where I attend a workshop on di-higgs production, a process that we will struggle to put in evidence in the next few years, and which will grant us a unique determination of the Higgs self-coupling parameter, lambda.

Other than that, I must excuse myself and tell you that I will be back in blogging mood on February 1st, when I will have things to report on the publication process of the book I have written, "Anomaly!".
So stay tuned!