What is Dark Matter (DM) and why should you care? I feel I should start this article by explaining these two things first, as we live in an age when nobody has time for long historical or context-…

Before you brush off this post with the answer "of course", let me qualify the title. Of course anybody can become a particle physicist, although the learning curve can be steep and hard to climb up…

Particle physics has been historically the ground of long-standing scientific challenges between the US and Europe, especially since the birth of the CERN laboratories in 1954. And in parallel,…

Alessandro Strumia, needs to have had a five minute talk with the late great Ben Barres.  Dr Barres was fond of telling a story where he heard how much his work was “better than your sister’s”.…

The world of particle physics is in turmoil because of a presentation by Alessandro Strumia, an Italian phenomenologist, at CERN's "1st workshop on high energy theory and gender", and its aftermath.…

Casual reader, be warned - the contents of this article, specifically the second part of it, are highly volatile, speculative stuff. But hey, that is the stuff that dreams are made of. And I have one…

What is a photon jet? Despite their exotic name, photon jets are a well studied thing nowadays. The original studies were performed by experimentalists who aimed to test quantum chromodynamics: they…

The famous paradox 'which came first, the chicken or the egg?' was created by philosophers to discuss cause and effect. Since chickens lay eggs, and eggs produce chickens...you get the idea.…

Since yesterday, and for almost a week, the literature festival in Mantova hosts "ScienceGround", a quite innovative initiative at the boundary between a science fair, a workshop, a library, and a…

Two teams have announced the fifth and most prominent way that the Higgs boson - "the God particle" as it was once called - decays into other particles called bottom quarks. This pathway is the…