And after all I said about Supersymmetry being an invention, I fear I now have to eat it all with my hat to boot ! The ATLAS Collaboration has just released results of a very striking search for gluinos, which increases the sensitivity over past analyses by employing a much improved and cleaned-up version of missing transverse energy along with a higher-resolution version of the effective mass variable used in the past, and has found a first strong evidence for Supersymmetric decays !!

Antonio Ereditato (left), spokesperson of the Opera collaboration, announced today he stepped down. He is no longer leading the Opera experiment.
 
The Opera experiment last September made headlines around the world with their announcement that neutrinos sent from the CERN laboratories to the Gran Sasso cavern appeared to be moving at superluminal speed.

While most High-Energy Physicists nowadays are kept busy with the idle search for non-existent new physics beyond the standard model in the form of improbable Supersymmetric particles, phantom leptoquarks, fairy Z' resonances, putative colorons, invented gravitinos, and what not, the subset of lucky experimentalists who decided to go against the flow and kept their feet on the ground are provided with endless entertainment in the study of resonances that are as real as your breakfast today. 

Whenever I try to explain something about particle physics to a layman, I run into the problem of mass/energy units. A Giga-electronVolt is not something you may expect people to be familiar with, and on the other hand it is not appealing to explain directly how it is defined: "if you take an electron and accelerate it by passing it through a potential difference of one billion Volts, that's the energy it has at the end: one GeV": this distracts the listeners by forcing them to focus on electrostatics, with the potential outcome that the conversation may diverge due to additional questions, like "Does the electric field need be uniform ?" or even, "What is a potential difference ?".