The Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics offers 20 post-doctoral positions in experimental physics to foreigners with a PhD obtained no earlier than November 2008. 
So if have a PhD (in Physics, but I guess other disciplines are also valid as long as your cv conforms), you like Italy, or if you would like to come and work with me at the search and study of the Higgs boson with the CMS experiment (or even if you would like to do something very different, in another town, with another experiment) you might consider applying!

The economical conditions are not extraordinary in an absolute sense, but you would still end up getting a salary more or less like mine, which in Italy sort of allows one to live a decent life.

While I do not believe that this series of posts can be really useful to my younger colleagues, who will in a month have to participate in a tough selection for INFN researchers in Rome, I think there is some value in continuing what I have started last month. 
After all, as physicists we are problem solvers, and some exercise is good for all of us. Plus, the laypersons who occasionally visit this blog may actually enjoy fiddling with the questions. For them, though, I thought it would be useful to also get to see the answers to the questions, or at least _some_ answer.

As a long-time meteor observer, I never lose an occasion to watch the peak of good showers. The problem is that similar occasions have become less frequent in the recent times, due to a busier agenda. 
In the past few days, however, I was at CERN and could afford going out to observe the night sky, so it made sense to spend at least a couple of hours to check on the peak activity of the Perseids, which this year was predicted to be stronger than usual.

As explained in the first installment of this series, these questions are a warm-up for my younger colleagues, who will in two months have to pass a tough exam to become INFN researchers. In fact, now that the application period has ended, I can say that there have been 718 applications for 58 positions. That's a lot, but OTOH any applicants starts off with a one-in-12.4 chance of getting the job, which is not so terribly small. 

The ICHEP conference in Chicago is drawing to a close, and although I did not have the pleasure to attend it (I was busy with real work, you know ;-) I think I can post here some commentary of a few things I find interesting among the multitude of analyses and searches that were shown there. It goes without saying that the selection is biased by my personal interest, plus by my limited patience with peeking at talk slides. In fact, here I only cover one specific Higgs boson decay mode!

But a digression first - and a digression on the digression

So, by now we all know it - there is no 750 GeV resonance in LHC data. But will we ever learn the lesson ?
The facts

Let me start this post by recalling the bare facts, and a quick-and-dirty introduction for anybody who has been on the Moon in the last eight months or so. Last December, the CMS and ATLAS experiments at the CERN LHC collider presented in two back-to-back seminars their first results on data collected at unprecedented proton-proton collision energy of 13 TeV. The 60% higher center-of-mass energy with respect to collisions analized in the previous years left hopes alive for the discovery of some new physics process, which could have been hiding until then thanks to the large required energy to turn on the reactions.