Swamped by my course of Subnuclear Gauge Physics, I have little time left to surf the web and keep an eye on what happens in the blogs I usually visit. Nevertheless, today is Saturday and I have allowed myself a short tour. Below is a list of the most interesting things I have read.

• First of all, there's an interesting new blog out there, with experimental particle physics explained to laymen. The language is not English, but it is a language you should learn, too.

"Since two fermions cannot turn into three fermions, the experimental observation of three-jet events in e+e- annihilation, first accomplished by the TASSO collaboration in June 1979 and confirmed by the other collaborations at PETRA two months later, implies the discovery of a new particle. Similar to the quarks, this new particle hadronizes into a jet, and therefore cannot be a color singlet. These three-jet events are most naturally explained by a hard noncollinear bremsstrahlung . [...] Thus the 1979 discovery of the second gauge particle, the gluon, occurred more than fifty years after that of the photon. This particle is also the first [...] gauge particle with self-interactions.

On October 13th 1985 the Tevatron collider started operations, producing the first man-made proton-antiproton collisions at 1.6 TeV center-of-mass energy in the core of the CDF detector. 25 years have passed. It is frankly unbelievable that the machine is still operating today, and with it CDF, which was back then the only game in town (D0 came later).

I find it even more unbelievable if you consider that much of the technology, the magnets, the devices that produced the collisions and the ones that recorded them are still those of 25 years back. 25 years are like a two glaciations time span for particle physics standards.