Note: updated list of links at the bottom.

(Older Note: Bet on this signal! See at the bottom of the article! Odds are two to one in your favour now!)

(Older note: Update at the bottom.)

It seems I am late on this one -an internal note by the Atlas collaboration seems to contain the discovery of a bump in the diphoton mass distribution from data collected in 2010 and 2011. They find a signal that seems consistent, in mass and resolution, with what one would expect from a Higgs decay, if the Higgs were sitting at 115 GeV, the value at which LEP II found some hint (a 1.7 standard deviation signal) before being shut down in 2001.

Amira Pharmaceuticals, Inc. announced today that AM152, the company's lead LPA1 antagonist, has been granted an orphan drug designation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Commonly referred to as IPF,  
idiopathic pulmonary fibrosisis scarring or thickening of the lungs without a known cause.   This fibrotic disease affects the lungs of patients and their ability to breathe. 

No one knows what causes pulmonary fibrosis or why some people get it but the condition is believed to result from an inflammatory response to an unknown substance. "Idiopathic" means no cause can be found.     

Access to water is a pressing global issue; the World Health Organization and UNICEF estimate that nearly 900 million people worldwide live without safe drinking water.   Taking a cue from the beetle Stenocara gracilipes, researchers from MIT think one solution to providing water in dry regions may be doing what the Namib beetle does - harvest fog for water.

The Namib Desert is on the west coast of Africa and when the morning fog rolls in, the Namib Beetle collects water droplets on its bumpy back, then lets the moisture roll down into its mouth, allowing it to drink.

If you're not one of the 172,000 Japanese people living within a dozen miles of the Fukushima Daiichi plant who have been advised (read: forced) to leave, you are breathing a sigh of relief while you hope things turn out okay.

But a new analysis carried out by Nature and the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center at Columbia University says two-thirds of the world’s 211 nuclear power plants have more people in the same radius than the ones who have had to flee their homes in Japan.  They're not all on known earthquake faults, obviously, but disaster concerns are an important public policy issue in times of disaster.

Nephila, orb web weavers of golden silk traps up to five feet in diameter that snare bats in tropical regions, have a new relative that lived with the dinosaurs 165 million years ago and named it Nephila jurassica.   

The previous oldest member of the family found was Cretaraneus vilaltae from Spain and the new find stretches nephila genus evolution back another 130 million years - and to Mongolia, when the north China block was part of the Pangaeasupercontinent.

Nephila jurassica is also only the second female fossil nephilid to be described.

In its first years the development of quantum physics occurred violently. As a consequence some cracks sneaked into the fundaments of this branch of physics. A careful investigation brings these cracks to the foreground. The endeavor to repair these cracks delivers remarkable results.

In the early days of quantum physics much attention was given to equations of motion that were corrections of classical equations of motion. The Schrödinger approach was one and the Heisenberg approach was another. Schrödinger used a picture in which the state of a particle changes with time. Heisenberg uses a picture in which the operators change with time. For the observables this difference makes no difference.

Mixing Science and Religion is always a hot topic. Recently, there was for example a debate between Sam Harris and Robert Winston in the Guardian, about, you guessed it, science versus faith! Harris is all for science:

We have Christians believing in the holy ghost, the resurrection of Jesus and his possible return -- these are claims about biology and physics which, from a scientific point of view in the 21st century, should be unsustainable.

A new study says that an individual’s intestinal bacteria flora organizes itself in certain clusters and they hypothesize this intestinal bacteria flora will have an influence on how we react to diet and medicine absorbed through the gastro-intestinal tract.

That's because you never learn anything new.

[By the way: if you were coming here to learn the solution of my riddle about the mysterious plot I posted here yesterday, be patient - I will publish an answer tomorrow on that issue.]

After the disturbance created by the Higgs rumour in ATLAS, I think we can go back to normal business - in this case, keeping my word on discussing things that were left hanging.

Your response to my small riddle was quite good, forcing me to provide a timely and exhaustive explanation of what is in the plot I posted a few days ago.