The CDF Collaboration blessed yesterday afternoon the results of a search for massive Gravitons decaying into pairs of Z bosons. And it is a startling new result!
Usually after a blessing (which is the result of a collaboration-wide presentation when the analysis is given a final scrutiny) the results are not immediately made public: this non-written rule has the purpose of allowing the analysis authors to be the first to present the results at a conference or other public event. But the rule written in the CDF bylaws, on the other hand, say that after a blessing the result is public, so for this time I will stick to the written one, and fair play be darned this time... The chances to announce what might be the first evidence of gravitons is too appealing!
The formulation of a fun physics problem with practical -and pleasant- applications occurred to me yesterday. I am currently spending a week in Madrid with my family, and we have chosen a very nice hotel in the suburbs, sacrificing travel time to the center for comfort. Among other things, the hotel offers a nice pool with several water jets along the sides. These are meant to allow you to swim against the water stream, so that you keep the same position as you push yourself against the stream.
We are on. This afternoon just after 1PM the LHC beams have started to produce proton-proton collisions in the heart of the experiments, at the never-before achieved energy of 7 TeV.
It was a long journey to get here -the project is twenty years old- but this is just the start of a new, more exciting one: In the course of the next two years, the Large Hadron Collider will gradually increase its power, allowing the CMS and ATLAS detectors to collect enough data to significantly extend into discovery territory.
"Berlusconi at times has some remorses, but then he thinks at how rich he is and he feels fine again".
Daniele Luttazzi
I received news on a brand new discovery by the MAGIC collaboration today, and I wish to inform you about it. Here follows the communication from Mose' Mariotti on behalf of the MAGIC team:
The MAGIC Collaboration reports the discovery of VHE (E >100 GeV)
emission from the new source MAGIC J0317+413. The source was in the
field of view of the MAGIC telescopes between October 2009 and February
2010. The emission position is consistent with the head-tail radio
galaxy IC310 (z=0.0189, RA: 03 16 43.0 Dec: +41 19 29, J2000) located
in the outer region of the Perseus cluster of galaxies (Abell 426). A
gamma-ray signal with a significance corresponding to >6 standard
deviations was obtained from 20 hours taken in stereoscopic observation
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Marco Silva (right) is an amateur astronomer since the 1997 Hale-Bopp comet passage. He is also an amateur scientist. His studies can be found 
