I received news on a brand new discovery by the MAGIC collaboration today, and I wish to inform you about it. Here follows the communication from Mose' Mariotti on behalf of the MAGIC team:

The MAGIC Collaboration reports the discovery of VHE (E >100 GeV) emission from the new source MAGIC J0317+413. The source was in the field of view of the MAGIC telescopes between October 2009 and February 2010. The emission position is consistent with the head-tail radio galaxy IC310 (z=0.0189, RA: 03 16 43.0 Dec: +41 19 29, J2000) located in the outer region of the Perseus cluster of galaxies (Abell 426). A gamma-ray signal with a significance corresponding to >6 standard deviations was obtained from 20 hours taken in stereoscopic observation

A very personal blog posting today. Well, at times it so happens that I feel like writing something about myself... That is the whole purpose of a blog for many, while I, like most of the writers here, usually have additional reasons; today the chance to write about myself comes handy though.

Twenty-five years ago this evening I was at a birthday party, with a bunch of friends. It was the birthday of two nice girls, and the party was held at the home of one of them. We were barely 20 years old back then (the two girls in fact were turning 20), and in similar occasions we used to smoke a lot, listen to music of the seventies, drink quite a bit, and party until late night.

The replication of fermion generations is one of the outstanding puzzles in particle physics. Could there be also a fourth generation of quarks and leptons ? There is no convincing theoretical or experimental reason why not. In some grand unified schemes consistency with the evolution of masses and couplings may indicate only three generations, but these models are not uniquely established. Thus it is important for collider experiments to continue the search [...]