News from the LHC: the integrated proton-proton luminosity at 7 TeV centre-of-mass energy has generously passed the mark of 40 inverse picobarns yesterday. The CMS experiment alone has integrated over 42 inverse picobarns, as shown in the graph below (the blue curve shows the data collected by CMS, the red one the data produced by the LHC).

The priest of Vigevano's Duomo must have been startled to realize that by far the most faithful presence at mass, ever since the altar was built, is not nonna Pina but a real dinosaur -a glaring testimony of the falsity of catholic-diffused pseudoscience and of the true origin of life on Earth. The red circle in the picture on the right shows the location of the marble slab in the altar.

The CMS experiment has just released a new result which excludes the possibility that quarks have a substructure at energy scales below 4 TeV. The result comes from the analysis of just a handful of inverse picobarns of collision data -2.9 to be precise- and shows excellently just how well suited are the LHC collisions for this business. The limit is extended by over one TeV above the former result of the Tevatron experiments, and some 600 GeV above the results of the ATLAS collaboration, who also recently reported on their search for of quark compositeness in 7 TeV collisions, finding a limit at 3.4 TeV.

Week number one of my course on Subnuclear Gauge Physics is over. I think that in the first five hours of lesson I have given to my students a reasonable picture of the early experimental attempts and theoretical developments aimed at understanding the structure of atomic nuclei and individual nucleons with electron scattering. So I thought I might try and simplify the picture further, to reach a wider audience here. Of course, the topic is not terribly entertaining, unless one understands fully just how important these studies are for fundamental physics even nowadays -despite having started over 60 years back.