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Interviewed for Nature (the magazine…)
Yesterday I had lunch at the Meyrinoise (courtesy Nature) with Geoff Brumfiel, a reporter from Nature (the magazine, not the bitch) who came to CERN to witness the big media event of today. We talked...
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The Say of the Day
Well, with things moving as fast as today – and with thousands of people around the world frantically clicking links, looking at video feeds, trying to make things make sense to them… Well, for today...
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Google LHC search results
Despite the fact that this blog received several “heavy” links from high-traffic sites (NYT, NEW, Cosmic Variance, plus a dozen lighter ones) between yesterday and today, a good portion of the...
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An agorà of education and scientific communication ?
These are strange days. Information runs around the world so fast, one can be at the center of the action and still learn details of what is really going on from the other side of an ocean. In fact,...
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6 billion euros a year
That is the amount of money, according to a report heard on the radio today, that italians spend yearly to consult magicians, astrologers and other assorted crooks. This, according to the...
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Another pro-LHC top mass measurement
A few months ago I reported here on a CDF technique to measure the mass of the top quark without relying on hadronic jets, whose energy measurement is plagued by many systematic uncertainties....
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Where the heart beats
The picture above made the headlines today in repubblica.it, one of the news sites I read most often. It shows a little mouse, originally intended as a meal supplied to a viper, managing to invert the...
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Scientific wishes for 2009
I wish 2009 will bring an answer to a few important questions: Can LHC run ? Can LHC run at 14 TeV ? Will I get tenure ? Are multi-muons a background ? Are the Pamela/ATIC signals a prologue of a new...
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Some posts you might have missed in 2008
To start 2009 with a tidy desk, I wish to put some order in the posts about particle physics I wrote in 2008. By collecting a few links here, I save from oblivion the most meaningful of them -or at...
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Some posts you might have missed in 2008 – part II
Here is the second part of the list of useful physics posts I published on this site in 2008. As noted yesterday when I published the list for the first six months of 2008, this list does not include...
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Guess the function: results
Thanks to the many offers for help received a few days ago, when I asked for hints on possible functional forms to interpolate a histogram I was finding hard to fit, I have successfully solved the...
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Information control from CERN
A piece by Matthew Chalmers titled “CERN: the view from inside” has appeared yesterday on Physics World’s web site. It is an insightful interview to James Gillies, head of communications at CERN. The...
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Babysitting this week
Blogging is one of the activities that will get slightly reduced this week, along with others that are not strictly necessary for my survival. Mariarosa has left for Athens this morning with three...
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Black holes hype does not decay
While the creation of black holes in the high-energy proton-proton collisions that LHC will hopefully start providing this fall is not granted, and while the scientific establishment is basically...
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CMS and extensive air showers: ideas for an experiment
The paper by Thomas Gehrmann and collaborators I cited a few days ago has inspired me to have a closer look at the problem of understanding the features of extensive air showers – the phenomenon of a...
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What’s hot around
For lack of interesting topics to blog about, I refer you to a short list of bloggers who have produced readable material in the last few days: The always witty Resonaances has produced an informative...
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New CDF Combination of Higgs limits!
A brand-new combination of Higgs boson cross-section limits has been recently produced by the CDF experiment for the 2009 winter conferences. The results are almost one month old, but I decided to wait...
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Anybody with an AAAS subscription willing to do me a favor ?
Here I am, once again improperly and shamelessly using this public arena for my personal gain. This time, I need help from one of you who has a subscription to the American Association for the...
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Higgs decays to photon pairs!
It was with great pleasure that I found yesterday, in the public page of the DZERO analyses, a report on their new search for Higgs boson decays to photon pairs. On that quite rare decay process -along...
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A seminar against the Tevatron!
I spent this week at CERN to attend the meetings of the CMS week – an event which takes place four times a year, when collaborators of the CMS experiment, coming from all parts of the world, get...
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