Yesterday evening I chanced to attend, invited by a friend, the opening of the 2013-2014 academic year of the university of Venice "Ca' Foscari", which was held at the Malibran theater. It was the first time I attended one such event, since technically (and practically) I am not an academic, but a researcher at the INFN, the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics. I do occasionally teach university courses (I just took a break from doing so after 5 years of teaching a course of subnuclear physics for 5th year undergraduates); but I do that for the university of Padova, not Venice - my office is at the department of physics of the university of Padova. Besides, Venice does not have a course of laurea in Physics.

Please note: spoiler information in this article!

The recent movie "Gravity", featuring the two hollywood stars George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, is a very interesting experiment in film-making.

I can hardly recall other movies with just two characters, so this must clearly be a rare occurrence and one which shows that the movie treads in largely unexplored territory. Can people be entertained by one-man shows ? Well, yes, if the story is an extraordinary one. Tom Hanks does excellently in "Cast Away", for instance. "Gravity" is similar in the use of the loneliness of the protagonist and the large odds against her survival. But it is more radical in the total absence of other human figures, except Clooney of course.

The president Fernando Ferroni sent today an open, touching message to the personnel of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, the Italian research organization he directs. The INFN contributed to the discovery of the Higgs boson by participating to the CMS and ATLAS experiments at CERN, providing funding and personnel -administrative staff, technicians, and researchers who are active members of the two big collaborations and who gave critical contributions to the discovery.

Today I was in the mood of cleaning up some areas of my labyrintic hard drive, after having performed a periodic backup of its contents. I thus came across some pieces of text that had been sitting in a remote folder, waiting to be used for a project now obsolete. I was about to just dump these files in the trash bin, when it occurred to me that this was stuff that had taken me some good time to put together, and maybe there was a better use for it.

HIGGS AND ENGLERT!

Note: this article is being updated in real time as events unfold... Updates are at the bottom. Note in particular the 12.05 update...!

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