As yesterday in Italy was the equivalent of Labor Day, and today is a Saturday, with people around me exploiting the three-day rest for a recreational trip, I do not feel in a very productive mood, so rather than writing something original here I will exploit other people's work, pointing at what I found interesting or anyway worth my attention among the papers appeared on the Cornell Arxiv in the last few days, and other assorted material.
First of all, I was happy to see that the original CDF work on the bottom-quark asymmetry in proton-antiproton collisions, which I have discussed in some detail here last year, has been finally submitted for publication. You might recall that the top quark asymmetry measurements at the Tevatron caught the attention of the high-energy physics community during the last few years, due to anomalous effects seen both by CDF and DZERO in Run 2 data. Now we can study the same thing with the lighter brother of the top quark. I believe the article linked above is still a valid introduction to the topic, but for a technical discussion see the paper.

A paper that surprised me for the bold use of data collected as far back as in 1988 (!) is this one. It compares data taken by the "CZERO" experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron, E735, with more recent ion-ion collisions, showing that in high-multiplicity, non-jet-producing proton-antiproton collisions the Tevatron did produce a signal of deconfinement. 
A paper I already mentioned earlier this week -just for a fun quote- is this one, by distinguished theorists Ellis, Gaillard and Nanopoulos. In it you may find a very clear account of the history of the Higgs boson. Definitely stuff worth a look.



And finally, an article summarizing the theoretical situation which I think is worth reading is Alessandro Strumia's summary of Moriond 2015. Besides being a quite readable document and a very informative one, it is quite entertaining. The pictures in particular are very descriptive. Take for instance this one, which compares theoretical guesstimates (in gray) of the value of theta_13, one of the neutrino mixing angles on which theorists concentrated their work in the past decade, with the experimental determination (in green).




Or take the picture on the right, the one with which Alessandro visually explains how the riddle of naturalness is confusing us nowadays. It is a sign found in southern Italy, which should allow you to take an informed decision on which way to go... Theorists do not seem to have a better clue on what to do with naturalness.

And then there are blogs. One of the topics that has caught everybody's attention is this NASA experiment that is allegedly the first step toward a "warp drive". B******t or serious stuff ? I let you decide. You can get informed about it in Marco Frasca's blog, or in other sources linked there.

Or you could read Jester's take on dark photons, or Peter Woit's report on an interview with Weinberg (I now see he is also pointing to Strumia's article). All in all, there's enough stuff out there to keep you entertained during the weekend, if bad weather or a sore ankle kept you home. So I rest my case for today.