On January 25th 1996 the CDF collaboration submitted for publication to Physical Review Letters  the result of their measurement of the rate of jet production as a function of jet transverse energy, performed on 20 inverse picobarns of data collected by the experiment in the 1992-93 run of the Tevatron collider. That measurement deviated at its high-energy tail from predictions of quantum chromodynamics, suggesting that the underlying model -and most likely, the parton distribution functions (PDF) which describe the probability of finding partons with given fractions of their parent momentum- was at fault.

Black holes are all the rage these days, with theorists arguing about firewalls and Hawking's paper being handled by the press in rather improper ways. Meanwhile at the Large Hadron Collider ATLAS and CMS are furthering their searches for microscopic versions of the same objects, which could exist if the energy scale at which quantum gravity effects make themselves felt is orders of magnitude smaller than the place where they ought to be -i.e., at the Planck energy.

I received yesterday a copy of the brand-new book by Ilya Narsky and Frank Porter, "Statistical Analysis Techniques in Particle Physics" (Wiley-vch 2014), and I would like to offer here my impressions and thoughts on the material.

Chapter 10 of the report on the 2013 community summer study held at Snowmass, titled "Communication, Education, and Outreach" is available since Jan 24th in the Cornell ArXiv. It is a 26-pages document describing the importance of outreach activities to foster the development of particle physics, and offering ideas and strategies to improve the communication between scientists and policy makers. This is none other than the problem I have often referred to as the one of "filling the gap" between science and the general media.