Update: I have modified the title of this post [originally: "Opera's Statistical Booboo"] and the text below (in places I marked accordingly) upon realizing, thanks to a very good point raised by a reader in the comments thread below, that the idealization I was making of the measurement described below made my conclusions too hasty. Read the text to the end if you want more detail.

A blog is by nature a place where things move on fast. Articles disappear beyond the horizon in the matter of a week or two, and only rarely get resuscitated by a later article linking them back from oblivion.

At Science 2.0 things are no better than in any other blog sites, with the aggravating feature that there is no "archive" button, nor a "random post" feature. Since I believe that many of my articles are not very connected to the specific time at which they have been written, I have in mind to reorganize the material somehow, when I have the time. However, this looks like a grievious task, since the number of posts I have written here is about 500.

Just as you thought it was over for 2011, and you proceeded to hung the Higgs mass plots on the christmas tree as a wish for stronger signals next year, ATLAS comes out with a new particle discovery. That's what I like of particle physics - there's always so much going on that the excitement is never really over.

NASA is featuring the first high-resolution images of asteroid Vesta as taken by the DAWN spacecraft during a low-altitude orbit. The images show a very interesting surface, battered with old and more recent craters, plus "textures such as small grooves and lineaments that are reminiscent of the structures seen in low-resolution data from the higher-altitude orbits. Also, this fine scale highlights small outcrops of bright and dark material." (from the NASA piece).