As many of you know, I expressed here my strong doubts that the rumoured Higgs signal found by members of the ATLAS collaboration in the two-photon final state was due to a real particle, and went as far as to bet 2:1 against it (you can take the bet by just writing in the comments thread, but you must be a well-known individual who has a reputation in physics if you want to be taken seriously).

Now Peter Woit, whose blog was the original recipient of the ATLAS leak, informs us that CMS appears to have leaked information to New Scientist, in the form of a internal document "shown" to them. I have no comment whatsoever on this - as you know I am a member of CMS so I am quite unwilling to diffuse internal information from the experiment.

What I can write here, though, is my own reaction to this. I think that the New Scientist reporter made this up. Yep, that's what I think, and I challenge him to prove otherwise. And let me stop here, lest I get kicked out of CMS for no reason at all.

UPDATE: in the comments thread (see below) the NS editor Valerie Jamieson gives more detail on the CMS leak, making the story more credible. I do not think any longer that the NS reporter made this up, but they did make it look like they received a paper draft (they deceptively write "The internal CMS document has not been released to the public" in their piece: now they themselves know well that powerpoint slides shown at a working group never get released), while they now say it's a set of slides. So they were imprecise, and they should only blame themselves for this...