I am very happy to report here (after having done the same on my Greek blog first, for a change) that the "Max Planck" medal for 2011 has been assigned to Giorgio Parisi, a distinguished Italian theoretical physicist. I first got the welcome news from Facebook, thanks to my e-friendship with Parisi.

They start bad but they improve with time. I cannot say I like Pope Benedikt XVI yet, but I have the feeling that he is getting better as he ages, pretty much like Pope Johannes Paul II, Karol Woytila. Woytila started his adventure as a Pope by playing the head of state, flying overseas to shake hands with dictators, spelling pages over pages of reactionary speeches -and then he improved. He become, so to speak, more human: a strange feat for a man whose mandate was to impersonate the link between Man and God.

The DZERO collaboration  published a few days ago the results of their search for multi-b-quark signatures of Supersymmetry in a large dataset of proton-antiproton collisions at 1.96 TeV. The possible large coupling of higgs bosons to b-quarks makes searches with many b-quark-jets worth pursuing at the Tevatron.

The arxiv is featuring a new paper by Darien Wood, member and spokesperson of the DZERO experiment and a distinguished physicist with lots of experience in hadron collider physics. The paper is titled "The Physics Case for Extended Tevatron Running" and it is an explanation of the benefits that a Run III until 2014 will bring to our knowledge of high-energy physics.