Things evidently went extremely well over the weekend at the LHC, with simultaneous circulating beams achieved this morning. Speculation is that first collisions (at the injection energy of 450 GeV/beam) are imminent. Places for up to the minute...

This past winter a combined analysis of data from the two Tevatron experiments showed at 95% confidence level that the Higgs mass could not be in the range 160-170 GeV. This was a better result than expected: statistically the experiments should not...

Yesterday the LHC Hardware Commissioning Coordination Team announced the end of the 2009 Hardware Commissioning Campaign as all 8 LHC sectors were declared commissioned and ready for beam. A two day checkout period is now underway, which should have...

Joao Magueijo has a new book out about Ettore Majorana, entitled A Brilliant Darkness. It’s a lot of fun to read, and could be described as an example of Gonzo history of science. While it contains a lot of factual information, much of which I was...

There’s another article here about Michael Green succeeding Hawking as Lucasian chair. It emphasizes the idea that this is all about more funding for string theory: MICHAEL Green, the 18th holder of Cambridge University’s Lucasian Professorship of...