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Goodbye Peter Higgs, And Thanks For The Boson

Peter Higgs passed away yesterday, at the age of 94. The scottish physicist, a winner of the 2013...

Significance Of Counting Experiments With Background Uncertainty

In the course of Statistics for Data Analysis I give every spring to PhD students in Physics I...

The Analogy: A Powerful Instrument For Physics Outreach

About a month ago I was contacted by a colleague who invited me to write a piece on the topic of...

On The Utility Function Of Future Experiments

At a recent meeting of the board of editors of a journal I am an editor of, it was decided to produce...

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Tommaso DorigoRSS Feed of this column.

Tommaso Dorigo is an experimental particle physicist, who works for the INFN at the University of Padova, and collaborates with the CMS and the SWGO experiments. He is the president of the Read More »

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X-Rayed Pin-Ups: Too Much Of A Good Thing

X-Rayed Pin-Ups: Too Much Of A Good Thing

Jun 22 2010 | comment(s)

Naked girls as you have never seen them before: Eizo, a Japanese company, has an interesting way to advertise their radiological products.





I'd comment that seeing underneath clothing might be good for a pervert, but it takes a bigger pervert to appreciate this total see-through...

Your Thoughts On Peer Review Needed

Your Thoughts On Peer Review Needed

Jun 21 2010 | comment(s)

On July 4th I will speak at ESOF 2010, in Torino (Italy), about the topic of "What's up with peer review: The future of peer review in policy, research and public debates", in a panel which includes Philip Campbell, editor in chief of Nature (the magazine, not the bitch), and Adrian Mulligan from Elsevier.

As you might imagine, the topic is varied and spans several levels. Each of us will have 8 minutes to make a few points, and then a debate moderated by Tracey Brown (from Sense about Science, the organizer of the session) will ensue.
Who Has The Best Limit On Bs Mesons ?

Who Has The Best Limit On Bs Mesons ?

Jun 20 2010 | comment(s)

The DZERO collaboration just sent to the Cornell ArXiv a paper which presents their new precise cross-section limits for the rare decay of mesons into pairs of muons. This important new article hides a small controversy, at least to my untrained eye. And since I am a bitch who thrives in the mud of controversies (or, at least some would describe me that way), let me do precisely that here.
The Say Of The Week

The Say Of The Week

Jun 18 2010 | comment(s)

"If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you"

G. Marx
Plot Of The Week - A SUSY Higgs At 150 GeV ?

Plot Of The Week - A SUSY Higgs At 150 GeV ?

Jun 15 2010 | comment(s)

The CDF Collaboration has recently produced results of a search for Supersymmetric Higgs bosons in events with three or more bottom-quark jets. Here I wish to give just the highlights of this analysis, but before I do I will try to spend 5' on making sense of the previous sentence.

In good order, below I explain first of all 1) what is CDF, 2) what is the Tevatron, 3) what are Higgs bosons from Supersymmetry, 4) how can these be sought with bottom quarks, and 5) what are bottom quark jets. After I am done with these five explanations, those of you who are still here will no doubt appreciate the results I am showing today. Can I make it in 5 minutes ? Sure, but can you read forty lines of text in the same amount of time ?
Will Do Physics For A Meal

Will Do Physics For A Meal

Jun 13 2010 | comment(s)

Today, for the first time in 18 years of association to the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN), I leave for a trip abroad, to the CERN laboratories, on my own wallet.

The situation into which basic research has been thrown by our crazy government borders the ridiculous, but is pretty darn serious. Italian physicists often travel to foreign laboratories to attend their apparata, collect data, perform their research, discuss with colleagues. If they lose money to do this, they will stop their foreign activities. I think in particular at graduate students and young post-docs, who earn salaries insufficient for a living, and whose per-diem compensation when abroad used to allow them to cover their expenses.