Weird News

[Lamplighter]

Although it's for real and is important, I find this announcement almost comedic
Pay attention, they are talking about inverse femtobarns of data,
not the usual sort you find around farms, ranches and colliders.

Have physicists in two experiments independently found evidence for
the Higgs particle with a mass of 125 giga*electronvolts (GeV)
— right in the ballpark predicted by the standard model of particle physics. ?

Nature
09 December 2011

Rumours of a Higgs signal at ATLAS and CMS intensify ahead of 13 December seminar.

Physicist Bill Murray, who is leading the ATLAS search for the Higgs,
tells Nature that he cannot comment on the latest rumours.
That is because work is still in progress to analyse 5 inverse femtobarns of data
that have amassed over the summer, with a final decision to approve the current analysis
scheduled for Wednesday, 7 December. Murray also notes that such approvals are often delayed.
An additional level of management approval will also be necessary before the result
can be released at a seminar scheduled for 13 December.
"We are moving forward in our understanding of the data and approval process
but nothing will be solidly releasable for a while," Murray says<snip>

And besides all that, we need to get a new and much bigger collider:

ViXra comments that a Higgs at 125 GeV is good news for particle physics,
because it is favoured by supersymmetric models that would imply that
other heavy particles may be found. A heavier Higgs would mean that the masses
of those particles would be too high to be accessible by the Large Hadron Collider.