The new PDG - a full-size copy of the glorious "Review of Particle Properties"- is on my desk since its arrival a few weeks ago, but only today did I get some time to browse it.

It is always awesome to observe how much information is contained in it. It is 1526 pages long, and I wonder how many typos and mistakes are contained in the data-thick pages... Probably much fewer than an ordinary book. Some of the review articles are of exceptionally good quality, because they have been passed from hand to hand in the last few dozen years, and constantly improved. If you want an example, for instance, go to the "Statistics" section - you will find a lot of new material which, along with the old one, still meets the highest standards.

I may have been unattentive to recent papers on Supersymmetry, but I got the impression that during the last few months the majority of SUSY phenomenologists have been keen on speculating on the few apparently non-standard features of the recently discovered Higgs boson, as published last June (such as the alleged copious decay of photon pairs, or the dearth of decays to tau lepton pairs or b-quark pairs - note: all are mostly back to what the standard model predicts, after the analysis of more data following the discovery announcements), but rather improductive on the front of taking the new signal as a pivot point for new global fits.

I just read with interest and awe the nice article appeared today in the arxiv about the search for dark matter annihilation in the sun's core by the Baksan Underground Scintillator Telescope (BUST), a facility operating since December 1978 (!) in the Caucasian valley of Baksan.