The results of the LUX experiment are out - and they are negative: no dark matter signal has been spotted by the extra sensitive detector. This is a normal day for you and me, but a gloomy day for those that counted on the neutralino to be the first supersymmetric particle to show up and redeem decades of claims.

Do you remember the dijet bump at 140 GeV that CDF published in March 2011 ? This was a surprising excess in the mass distribution of pairs of jets found in events containing a leptonic W boson decay.

Yesterday evening I chanced to attend, invited by a friend, the opening of the 2013-2014 academic year of the university of Venice "Ca' Foscari", which was held at the Malibran theater. It was the first time I attended one such event, since technically (and practically) I am not an academic, but a researcher at the INFN, the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics. I do occasionally teach university courses (I just took a break from doing so after 5 years of teaching a course of subnuclear physics for 5th year undergraduates); but I do that for the university of Padova, not Venice - my office is at the department of physics of the university of Padova. Besides, Venice does not have a course of laurea in Physics.