In the evening of May 30 a giant fireball lit up the skies south of Venice, Italy. The object, which was traveling very slowly along a south-north trajectory, was captured by three video stations in the area, plus observed by countless bystanders and recorded in pictures. The video data allowed to precisely measure the trajectory, which made it clear that the rock was headed straight toward the Venice metropolitan area, and that it would have landed there if it had not disintegrated in flight.

This article continues the series of postings in this blog on the results of artistic work by high-school students of three schools in Venice (out of five who took part initially) that participate in a contest and exposition connected to the initiative "Art and Science across Italy", an initiative of the network CREATIONS, funded by the Horizon 2020 programme of the EU.

Today I gave a seminar at the Physics Department of the University of Helsinki, to talk of "Controversial Phenomena in Collider Data and the 5-Sigma Criterion in HEP", invited by Juska Pekkanen and Mikko Voutilanen, two CMS colleagues. 
The seminar is more or less the same I have given several times in the past year around Europe and the US. It contains some statistics, some HEP history, and some material taken from my recent book, "Anomaly!".

The CMS collaboration at the CERN Large Hadron Collider has pulled off an extremely neat new measurement of the Higgs boson production rate - one which, for some reasons, is extraordinary in its own right.

Despite being the decay mode with the highest probability (two thirds of Higgs bosons die that way), the H->bb process is among the most elusive to put in evidence in LHC data, because b-quarks are quite commonplace there. 

As I explained in the previous post of this series, students in high schools of the Venice area have been asked to produce artistic works inspired by LHC physics research, and in particular the Higgs boson.

This is the first of a series of posts that will publish the results of artistic work by high-school students of three schools in Venice, who participate in a contest and exposition connected to the initiative "Art and Science across Italy", an initiative of the network CREATIONS, funded by the Horizon 2020 programme