With the Large Hadron Collider now finally up and running after the unfortunate weasel incident, physicists at CERN and around the world are eager to put their hands on the new 2016 collisions data. The #MoarCollisions hashtag keeps entertaining the tweeting researchers and their followers, and everybody is anxious to finally ascertain whether the tentative signal of a new 750 GeV particle seen in diphoton decays in last year's data will reappear and confirm an epic discovery, or what.

The twelfth edition of “Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum“, a particle physics conference specialized in QCD and Heavy Ion physics, will be held in Thessaloniki this year, from

While tediously compiling a list of scientific publications that chance to have my name in the authors list (I have to apply for a career advancement and apparently the committee will scrutinize the hundred-page-long lists of that kind that all candidates submit), I discovered today that I just passed the mark of 1000 published articles. This happened on February 18th 2016 with the appearance in print of a paper on dijet resonance searches by CMS. Yay! And 7 more have been added to the list since then.

Exclusive production processes at hadron collider are something magical. You direct two trucks at 100 miles per hour one against the other head-on, and the two just gently push each other sideways, continuing their trip perfectly unaffected, but leave behind a new entity (a cart?) produced with the energy of the glancing collision. 

Okay, this one was not about the umpteenth statistical fluctuation, hopelessly believed by somebody to be the start of a new era in particle physics. It's gotten too easy to place and win bets like that - the chance that the Standard Model breaks down due to some unexpected, uncalled-for resonance is so tiny that any bet against it is a safe one. And indeed I have won three bets of that kind so far (and cashed 1200 dollars and a bottle of excellent wine); plus, a fourth (for $100) is going to be payable soon.