Standard Model Higgs?

There was a big exciting seminar at CERN today regarding new Higgs search results. The short summary is that there is 2 - 3 sigma (not good enough to say for sure) evidence for a Standard Model Higgs particle around 125 GeV in a few channels. Awesome scientific summaries can be found here and here.

My first thought: how close was Fermilab? (Second thought: which people think they are getting the Nobel Prize for this). Remember that the Tevatron was also built to find the Higgs. Everyone on it tried really hard, but didn't end up doing it. I did some searching for Tevatron Higgs results (especially looking in the channels where the LHC experiments are seeing signals) and the picture is somewhat painful. The Tevatron had hints in the right region for the two photon channel.

The image above shows the level of exclusion for the different Higgs masses from the Tevatron. The lower the thick black line goes, the more sure the Tevatron people are that the Higgs isn't there. The dotted black line represents how good they thought they could do. It is interesting to not the 125 GeV region. First, it is one of the "highest" points on the plot, meaning that they had the least ability to say "there isn't a Higgs there". Second, it is about 2 sigma up from what they expected to see.

If further LHC data shows that the Higgs is at about 125 GeV, this means that the Tevatron had come very close to seeing it. Perhaps with a little more time they would have gotten it. On the other hand, there could be tricky backgrounds in that area that affected both experiments.

Accepted!

After consulting a proof-reader, cursing the existence of referee 3, and finding one last mistake: my Cerenkov paper has been accepted to Physics in Medicine and Biology! I thought I would feel... different, somehow. But no. My to-do list isn't any shorter and I still don't have a PhD. What was the point of all of that work then?

Gendered Science Kits

Remember the good ol' days of chemistry kits filled with things that could potentially be dangerous in any way whatsoever? I barely do. The only one I ever had like that was 2nd hand - probably originally from the 80s.

From my own experience trying to buy "educational" toys I have found that anything that isn't a videogame is considered educational. Toy trains and trucks? Professional Development. Nerf gun? Hand-eye coordination. Stuffed animals? Biology! I don't buy it.

Sadly, "science kits" have gone a bit downhill as well. I don't think there is anything fundamentally wrong with a slime kit or crystal growth kit, but there is too much "value added" plastic crap in these kits as an attempt to justify the high price tag. But it has gotten worse - these kits are becoming increasingly gendered.

Professor Janet D. Stemwedel at SciAm Blogs has an excellent series on this topic:

• Science Kits for Girls
• Some reasons gendered science kits may be counterproductive.
• Gendered science kits aren’t so great for boys either.
• How do we make room for pink microscopes? (More thoughts on gendered science kits.)