The Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratories in Geneva is currently in shutdown, finalizing the upgrades that will allow it to restart next year at the  centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV - over 60% more than the last 8 TeV run. ATLAS and CMS have collected no more proton-proton collisions since almost two years ago; yet the collaborations are as busy as ever producing physics results from the analysis of the 2012 data.

Rather than focusing on any single result, below I give some highlights of the most recent publications by CMS. Another post will discuss ATLAS results in a few days.

I am spending a few days in Aix Les Bains, a pleasant lakeside resort in the French southwest, to follow the works of the second ECFA workshop, titled "High-Luminosity LHC". ECFA stands for "European Committee for Future Accelerators" but this particular workshop is indeed centred on the future of the LHC, despite the fact that there are at present at least half a dozen international efforts toward the design of more powerful hadron colliders, more precise linear electron-positron colliders, or still other solutions.

Yesterday the ATLAS collaboration published the results of a new search for dark matter particles produced in association with heavy quarks by proton-proton collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Not seeing a signal, ATLAS produced very tight upper limits on the cross section for interactions of the tentative dark matter particle with nucleons, which is the common quantity on which dark matter search results are reported. The cross section is in fact directly proportional to the rate at which one would expact to see the hypothetical particle scatter off ordinary matter, which is what one directly looks for in many of today's dark matte search experiments.

Do you remember the E-Cat ? That is an acronym for "energy catalyzer", the device invented by the Italian philosopher Andrea Rossi. The E-Cat is claimed to produce nuclear energy through the heating of a "secret" powder made up of nichel, hydrogen, and lithium plus some additives. A new chapter was added to the saga of the E-Cat this week, with the publication of a new study by an allegedly independent group of Italian and Swedish researchers.