Thanks to a friend and follower of this blog, which I will not name for once to protect him from your flaming, I can share today with you one of the best instances of involuntary humor in particle physics graphs I have ever seen in my whole life.

The graph appears to be genuine, so this is a good candidate for the IgNobel prize IMHO.

Back from the beautiful Greek island of Naxos, I find myself in Venice for just a day before leaving to another Greek island - Crete. But this time for business rather than vacations: I will be giving a CMS Overview talk at the International Conference of New Frontiers in Physics, which started yesterday in Kolympari, on the north-western coast of the island.

As usual, I am lagging behind with the task of putting together my presentation slides. This time I had been working at a reasonable pace while on vacation, and I thought I was almost done, when I was notified that due to the absence of the CMS colleague who was in charge of speaking about CMS Heavy Ion Results, I was to cover in more detail that part than I would have.

Yesterday CMS published the results of a new search for a heavy partner of the bottom quark, by looking for the decay b' -> bZ: that is, the heavy b' is sought in a so-called Flavour-Changing neutral current process. The "neutral current" is an old but still used terminology to indicate the emission of a neutral vector boson, the Z.

Despite the shutdown of the Fermilab Tevatron collider, two years ago, and the subsequent disassembling of the glorious CDF detector, the CDF Collaboration continues to produce excellent physics results using the large bounty of data they have accumulated in the course of the past 10 years.

Today you can find in the Cornell arxiv a new paper by CDF, which describes a new very interesting measurement of a property of the top quark - the particle discovered at Fermilab in 1995, the heaviest known elementary particle we know. The property measured is the lifetime of top quarks.

Note: this is the fourth, and last, part of a four-part article (see part I, part II, part III) on the five-sigma criterion for discovery claims in particle physics. If you haven't read the first three installments, the text below may or may not make much sense to you...

Note: this is the third part of a four-part article on the Five-Sigma criterion in particle physics. See part 1 and part 2 to make more sense of the discussion below.