Babbage

THE year 2011 abounded in momentous scientific achievements, from hopeful signs in the fight against AIDS (which we put on the cover) to progress in the search for physicists' most elusive quarry, the Higgs boson. Then there was the bombshell from Italy, where an experiment hidden beneath the mountain of Gran Sasso clocked neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light, flying in the face of modern science's most cherished assumptions, Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. The odds are still that a mistake has crept in somewhere. But if it hasn't, and if the ethereal neutrinos really do flout the supposed cosmic speed limit, then that would no doubt rank as the biggest news of the year, if not the past hundred years (as we explain in a leader).

However, we are also committed to keeping abreast of developments in science and technology's seemingly less sober quarters. And, just as last year, we have come up with a shortlist of the most bizarre bits of boffinry and the wackiest widgets to have featured in the pages of The Economist in the preceding twelve months. The contest was fierce, but after much deliberation Babbage managed to winnow the field down to twelve finalists. Here they are, in no particular order.

Bizarre boffinry

Coming to a head: Mathematicians invent a new way to pour stout

Please be seated: An astrophysicist comes up with a faster way to board planes

Facing the truth: Why a man's face can lie but still produce orgasms

How much is too much?: Why some duck livers are delicious, and others nasty

Physical implausibility: A mathematical expression to quantify ballooning bosoms and winnowed waists

Talking to the neighbours: A modest proposal for a neutrino-based interstellar communications network

Wackiest widget

Liquid radio: America's navy is developing an antenna made of seawater

Wholly shit: An Indian company makes paper out of elephant dung

Bottom feeders: Growing edible oyster mushrooms on (used) disposable nappies

A healthy glow: A laser is created from a biological cell

Invitation to the dance: Robot ballerinas take to the air

Put that in your pipe and poke it: Rediscovering the extinct pneumatic pipe for goods distribution

After an arduous, and wholly unscientific, evaluation procedure Babbage decided to award the bizarre-boffinry prize to a crack group of mathematicians from the University of Limerick, led by William Lee, who meticulously modelled bubble formation in stout beers. Their work suggests that lining the rims of cans and bottles with a similar to ordinary coffee filter would ensure the creamiest of heads, without the need for a fiddly beer widget. A well-deserved victory for maths, then.

Speaking of widgets, the prize for 2011's wackiest goes to Seok-Hyun Yun, of Harvard Medical School, and his team for the creation of laser-emitting cells, something that does not, as Babbage's colleague noted, seem to have intuitively obvious applications but certainly scores well in the jaw-dropping department. 

Of course, readers are invited to pick their own favourites and let us know what they think in the comments section. Also, as ever, it is not our intention to disparage odd research and weird gubbins. Far from it. Progress often works in mysterious ways, arriving initially in guises that may, at first blush, seem frivolous. It is impossible to foretell whether any of the above achievements will turn out to be world-changing. Even if none does, though, they are testament to human curiosity—and rollicking fun to boot.

A RUSSIAN friend of Babbage's once laughed after hearing the hoary epigram, "Measure twice, cut once." "In Russian," he said, "we say, 'measure seven times, cut once'." That may reveal much about Moscow, but the Russian turn of phrase should have been observed by the New York Times when it sent 8.7m e-mail missives instead of an intended 300.

On the morning of December 27th, Babbage received a message from the Times about a recent cancellation to his home delivery, offering a 50% deal for re-upping. Since he had not received the paper on his Seattle doorstep for several years, the message seemed odd. On Twitter, however, he found that nearly all of his acquaintances and colleagues had received similar offers, including both those that had active dead-tree subscriptions and those that once had.

Early speculation was that a sophisticated spammer had sent out a huge number of messages, some snaring legitimate current and former print subscribers, and that this was a test message to soften up readers for future phishing expeditions. The Times's official Twitter account initially confirmed this, stating that the message was spam. Given the number of data breaches that have occurred in recent years, recipients of the e-mail unsurprisingly flooded the paper's phone lines and websites (according to experiences related on Twitter and confirmed by the newspaper). A story on the Times website by a media reporter confirmed that the message was indeed spam.

Or was it? One way to tell is to look at e-mail headers. These are received by all e-mail programs, and contain explicit fingerprints of how a message went from its origin to destination, tracking all the servers through which it passed. Such headers are hidden from uninitiated mortals, but can be viewed through various mail client and webmail commands to show full text or the raw message.

The putative spam, it turns out, clearly originated from an outside marketing firm, Epsilon Interactive, that the New York Times employs to handle its e-mail. The message was sent first to a mail server at bfi0.com, a domain owned by Epsilon Interactive (formerly Bigfoot Interactive, hence bfi0), and from there to gridserver.com, a distributed-computing hosting system operated by Media Temple. (Strangely, two separate means of assuring that an e-mail was sent via legitimate e-mail servers for the domain in question failed.)

Further, several of Babbage's friends had received the message to e-mail addresses dedicated to e-mail from the New York Times, and used for no other purpose. That may seem extreme, but many e-mail hosts make it a doddle to set up as many addresses as one desires that drop into the same inbox, but include a specific address for filtering.

Within an hour of the first Times story being posted, it was replaced by one that looks like a more plausible explanation. The outside marketing firm was not to blame. Rather, a Times employee had pushed the button with the wrong settings in place. 

Most people have experienced the shame of choosing "Reply All" instead of "Reply". Your correspondent has, at times, flipped the wrong switch and sent many thousands of people the same message repeatedly. As embarrassing as it is, however, the scale of this error isn't perhaps quite up there with the mistake that caused a space probe to miss the planet Mars because of boffins' failure to define whether the sums were done in foot-pounds or newton-metres. Even so, one imagines that the Times employee's red face may well have been visible from orbit. Perhaps he or she should learn Russian.

PREVIEWING 2012 with a look at the tech world's four largest companies, the smart phone and tablet computer market and futuristic technologies in the coming year

AS A small boy Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, dreamed of going into space. He even tried to launch the hollow aluminium arm of a chair, stuffed with propellant, into orbit. It didn't work out. But his latest adventure in space travel—a joint venture with Burt Rutan, a famous designer of aircraft—looks more promising. Earlier this month, the two of them said they will build an air-launched orbital delivery system. To do this, Paul Allen’s company Stratolaunch Systems will have to build the world’s largest aeroplane.

The Stratolaunch, as the plane will be called, will be big. Really, really big. It will have six engines, a wingspan of 117 metres (385 feet) and weigh about 544 tonnes. (The wingspan of Boeing's 747 is around half that of the Stratolaunch.) Taking off will require 3.6km of runway, and the aircraft will launch its rocket—a shortened version of the Falcon 9 rocket, built by another private space firm called SpaceX—at around 9,100 metres. The whole contraption will be able to put about 6 tonnes of payload into low-earth orbit.

The idea is to offer a cheaper way of getting medium-sized payloads into orbit, and the system is designed to fill a niche that Boeing's Delta 2 rocket once served. Former NASA administrator, Mike Griffin, who now sits on the board of Stratolaunch, says that besides delivering cargo to the International Space Station, the Stratolaunch will tap a thriving market for launching small to middling communications satellites. There are also other customers in the form of NASA and the Department of Defense. Ultimately, however, Mr Allen wants to see the system launch humans into space.

Of course the obvious question is why not launch the rocket directly from the ground in the first place? It turns out that land-based rocket launches are greatly restricted by irritations such as where one’s rocket pad is, and what the weather is like. Air launch, by contrast, makes orbital access to space much more flexible, a particular bonus for military applications. There will also be a small efficiency gain from launching the rocket from above much of the Earth’s atmosphere. Mr Allen is being cautious about saying how much money he will put into the venture. All he will admit is that an effort of this size requires an "order of magnitude" more money than he invested into a previous collaboration with Mr Rutan, SpaceShipOne. This cost Mr Allen $25m.

Meanwhile, Mr Rutan’s company, Scaled Composites in Mojave, will be doing what it is best at: scaling composites. It will be super-sizing its existing White Knight aeroplane, which can carry rockets—such as SpaceShipOne—of suborbital flight. Other components for the Stratolaunch will be scavenged from second-hand 747s. Mr Rutan plans to start work as soon as he has a hanger large enough to build the giant airframe. The current schedule foresees test flights in 2015, and an initial launch by 2016. But the spaceflight business is hard and unforgiving, and the schedule is likely to slip. Mr Rutan has come a long way since he built his first plane, the dinky two-seater VariViggen, in 1972. With its 6-metre wingspan, he would be able to fit 20 along the Stratolaunch.

WHY should you care about the domain name system (DNS)? This inherently dull bit of the internet's plumbing turns the names used to label a single server or a collection of servers (like www.economist.com, say) into machine-readable numeric addresses (like 64.14.173.20). The rub is that DNS can be easily "poisoned" so that legitimate intelligible addresses redirect users to malicious numeric ones leaving them none the wiser. This can happen within a coffeeshop network or affect an entire country's online operations. As a consequence, web surfers and e-mail readers may fall into the hands of criminals or prying government authorities who can grab passwords and intercept communications, transfer money or imprison dissidents.

Now, though, OpenDNS, a firm that provides free and paid DNS-based services, has come up with a fix. It has released an early, working version of a tool that, in effect, packages a computer's request to translate a name into a number inside a secure wrapper on its way to and from the firm's own DNS servers. This prevents interception and tampering at the most likely weakest points along the way. The tool, called DNSCrypt, is ready for Macs; versions for other platforms are in the works. OpenDNS has also released the source code to be freely used, and hopes the protocol might be widely adopted, and perhaps even built into web browsers and other software.

Normally poisoning DNS responses does not trigger alerts in a browser or other software. But it can be detected when a user wants to establish a secured, or "https", connection. Communication with such secured sites is protected by SSL/TLS certificates. Those certificates, vouched for by third-party certificate authorities (CAs) using a cryptographic signature, ought only to be in the hands of the verified owners of a domain's servers. When a computer on a network with a hacked DNS tries to establish a secure connection with a bogus server, and the impostor fails to serve up the right credential, alarms are sounded by the operating system or client software.

The difficulty at present is that a few supposedly trusted CAs have been compromised: in April an affiliate of Comodo leaked a few certificates, and the Dutch authority DigiNotar let slip as many as 250. An illegitimately issued but valid certificate from a trusted CA combined with the ability to poison DNS allows online mischief makers to pose as secured websites. (Certificates can be revoked, but this typically takes time; following this year's incidents, nearly all operating-system and browser makers released updates with the subverted CAs' certificates flagged as invalid.)

For a suborned certificate to work, a cracker has to both have the legit-seeming certificate and make sure that the domain contained within it produces a DNS response to a malicious server. Imagine a postal carrier with a package that must be signed for being waylaid and told that a recipient has moved and presenting the recipient's signature on a letter to prove it. The mailman blithely hands over the box to the wrong home.

With DNSCrypt in place, however, that particular subterfuge falls flat. The software creates an encrypted tunnel between a user's computer and OpenDNS's servers through which all requests are sent. As a result, an impostor has no way of knowing which domain name a user is requesting a numeric equivalent of. A malicious network might try to block OpenDNS, but that would reveal its machinations. And OpenDNS has another clever trick up its sleeve: it can masquerade its secure connection as a regular web page request. (Securing DNS requests in this fashion pairs neatly with a separate effort to spruce up the web's certificate integrity, called notarisation.)

OpenDNS's boss, David Ulevitch, says his firm decided to tackle the problem because it is in a bully position to provide assistance to those users or firms who want to take extra steps to ensure the integrity of their communications. With 30m users, mostly of its free look-up service, it can spread awareness—and plug its paid offerings.

THE post-PC era, China's rising tech power and technology's impact on politics

ELEVEN years ago the world’s leaders made ambitious promises for global health. The toll from HIV, tuberculosis and malaria would plummet by 2015, they said, while the health of mothers and their children would improve. Donations swelled to help reach the so-called Millennium Development Goals. Then came the financial crisis and panic over the rich world’s deficits. The giving mood has waned.  

A new report, with an accompanying paper in Health Affairs, examines how aid for global health has changed. Christopher Murray and his colleagues at the University of Washington track disbursements from 1990 to 2009, then use budget documents, financial statements and other sources to estimate spending for 2010 and 2011. Their findings are not as grim as some might expect. Aid for health reached $27.7 billion in 2011, up 4% each year from 2009 to 2011. But that growth is anaemic compared with what it once was. 

The change is notable for two reasons. First, it marks a shift from what had been an historic wave of enthusiasm. Donations for health doubled from 2001 to 2008. The current trajectory resembles the more measured growth of the 1990s. 

Second, the change marks the first threat to a new model of aid. After 2000 the structure of aid shifted. Government agencies such as the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) funneled more of their money through private organisations. In 2000 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation helped to found the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI). In 2001 Kofi Annan, then secretary-general of the United Nations, announced a new public-private partnership, the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Public donors gave GAVI and the Global Fund $3.24 billion in 2009. Agencies at the UN received just $2.11 billion. Now, however, the Global Fund is struggling. In November it announced that it would give no new grants until 2014. The downturn is largely to blame; concerns over mismanagement have not helped. GAVI has fared better, with a successful fundraiser in June. 

Other shifts threaten health too. Although American aid has been growing the pace has slowed to just 2% from 2010 to 2011. Britain is the rare country that has devoted more money to global health, increasing aid by 14% from 2010 to 2011, but there is pressure to cut it. The World Bank has offset some of the broader drop. However the bank mostly gives loans to middle-income countries, not grants to poor ones. If the World Bank’s loans are excluded from Dr Murray’s tally, health aid would have increased by a meagre 1% from 2010 to 2011. 

It was always doubtful that the world would meet the Millennium Development Goals. Now those goals seem even more distant. The money that remains, however, could have greater impact. Dr Murray estimates that for every dollar donated from the rich world, a poor government redirects 56 cents from health. The Global Fund is working harder to wring value from money, a welcome shift. As aid dwindles, both donors and recipients must find ways to do more with much less. 

HTC, a Taiwanese maker of smartphones, could clearly have done without this sort of Christmas present. On December 19th America’s International Trade Commission (ITC) ruled on one of the most closely watched of the many patent battles being fought over mobile phones. It upheld a judge’s decision, made in July, that some of HTC’s devices that use Google’s Android operating system infringe a patent owned by Apple, creator of the iPhone, but reversed his verdict that another patent had been violated. The offending handsets may no longer be imported into the United States after April 19th 2012. Not only is the ruling plainly unwelcome for HTC, but it illustrates how important an American trade agency has become as an arbiter of disputes that, at first blush, have little to do with international trade.

HTC sells around 40% of its smartphones in North America, nearly all of them using Android. In the third quarter the firm sold more smartphones in America than anyone else, a whisker ahead of Apple and South Korea’s Samsung, according to Gartner, a market research firm. A ban on some of its Android phones is thus a blow, although it or Google may find a way of working around the patent. (Florian Müller, an analyst who tracks patent disputes, believes that upholding the judge’s decision on the other patent would have done more damage.) To make matters worse, last month HTC shocked investors by saying that it expected its revenue in the fourth quarter to be no more than they were a year before. The company’s shares have lost nearly two-thirds of their value since May.

Continue reading "World patent war 1.0"»

IN OCTOBER, a day after Apple iPhone 4S was launched, a little-known London based company named DataWind, in collaboration with the Indian government, unveiled the world’s cheapest tablet computer in New Delhi. The product, christened "Aakash" ("sky", in Hindi) will be sold to students at subsidised price of $35, or available in the retail market for $60. Although the scheme is part of a national education programme, Suneet Singh Tuli, DataWind's boss, aims to sell his tablet to anyone who can afford a cheapish mobile phone. This may sound Pollyannaish as previous such attempts have failed to take off—most notably, Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.

Mr Negroponte sought funding from education ministries in developing countries who promised to buy at least 1m units each priced at just $100. The plan seemed fairly simple: economies of scale would drive down hardware costs and relying on open-source stuff meant that most software was as good as free. However, in the end, the device turned out to be too expensive at $200. Countries like Haiti, Rwanda, Peru and Uruguay cancelled their bulk orders. The product was written off as too clunky and too slow. Admittedly, although the project lacked a sound execution plan, the vision was grandiose. At press gatherings, Mr Negroponte would describe it as an education programme and not a technology project.

This is where Mr Tuli’s vision differs. Unlike his more celebrated counterpart, Mr Tuli considers his project to be a business venture; he is in it to make money. To keep costs in check, his company produced most parts from scratch instead of buying from vendors. “We buy glass and make our own screens,” he says referring to the LCD screens which can cost up to $12 to $15 if sourced from a vendor. Instead of procuring a ready Wi-Fi module, his team assembled the unit. Driving down costs was important, but so was arriving at the right price.

In India, manufacturers of electronic items have learned the hard way that throwaway pricing does not necessarily assure sales. Take netbooks which were introduced at a price much cheaper than the laptops. A no-frills laptop sells at 15,000 rupees ($280); a netbook on the other hand is a third cheaper. In this price range, buyers can afford to pay the difference and upgrade themselves to a laptop—much like the mobile phone market where a 1,300-rupee mobile handset outsells the one priced at just 800 rupees. This is where DataWind’s 3,000-rupee laptop scores over its competitors as the closest substitute costs more than three times as much. Although its technical specifications may seem dodgy at first glance, it covers most bases.

The Wi-Fi enabled seven-inch touch-screen tablet weighs 350 grams and runs on the somewhat older Android 2.2 operating system meant for smart-phones. The current version has a 366MHz processor and a separate video-core processor for playing YouTube-like multimedia content. In addition to two USB ports, it has a 2GB micro-SD card which is expandable up to 32GB. A SIM-card slot allows access to the internet through 2G and 3G network. However, accessing internet on such devices can be tricky. Limited processing power and low memory do not support high speed browsing. Mr Tuli claims that his proprietary browser hogs less data and fetches faster results.

Ordinarily, when a URL is keyed in, the browser establishes contact with the website’s servers. Datawind’s browser functions differently. Instead of fetching data from the website directly, the browser sends a message to its proxy servers located on the cloud. Using DataWind’s patented technology, these servers compress the webpage and render that information back to the browser. This shifts the burden of processing from the client device to the cloud, he says and reckons that the frugal data usage (owing to the compressed data) would translate to smaller broadband bills.

Additionally, Mr Tuli likes to stress that his product will bear a "Made in India" tag. However, this has come at a steep price. The company’s manufacturing unit is located in Andhra Pradesh, a state constantly marred by political strife. Repeated delays in production have postponed the retail launch date to “early 2012”. Mr Tuli also needs to address some product related issues. With just three hours of claimed battery life, schools will need to have desks with charging sockets, an unviable option at most places. Although the device supports USB powered solar chargers, at 2,000 rupees apiece, they are too pricy. A cheaper alternative which may be priced at 500 rupees is in the works, says Mr. Tuli. With such early feedback mainly from students, product revisions are already underway. Also, shunning the much larger Android marketplace over GetJar, a free app store may not be such a smart idea in the long run. In a few months, when the product goes on sale, it will be clear if Mr Tuli’s idea takes off or ends up as another case of grand vision gone awry.

CERN announces sightings, but not proof, of possible Higgs boson signatures in the LHC, and our correspondents take a look inside the world's largest microscope

WHEN it emerged that two experiments at CERN, the world's leading particle-physics laboratory on the outskirts of Geneva, are sending their most senior scientists to present the latest lowdown from the search for the Higgs particle on December 13th, speculations swirled. Will they at last confirm the existence of the boson, famously implicated in endowing other elementary particles with mass, which has eluded physicists for over 40 years? Might they say for sure that it does not exist, consigning the Standard Model, a framework which has governed particle physics for nearly as long on the assumption that it does, to the dustbin of dislodged theories—and sending their theoretically inclined colleagues back to the drawing board?

In the event, Fabiola Gianotti and Guido Tonelli, who lead ATLAS and CMS collaborations respectively, tried to sound a cautionary note. But the excitement during and after their presentations was palpable. For the two experiments have provided the most tantalising, though inconclusive, evidence to date for the existence of the sought-after particle, which Peter Higgs, a British physicist, plucked from mathematical formulae he had been working on in 1964 while trying to spruce up the Standard Model.

The model postulates the existence of 17 particles. Of these, 12 are fermions, like quarks (which coalesce into neutrons and protons in atomic nuclei), electrons (which whiz around these nuclei) and neutrinos (the ubiquitous, diaphanous beasts which have themselves been grabbing headlines of late by seemingly travelling faster than light). These make up ordinary matter. (All have corresponding anti-fermions which, logically, constitute antimatter.)

A further four particles, known as bosons, transmit three fundamental forces of nature. Familiar photons, particles of light, convey the electromagnetic force which holds electrons in orbit around atoms. Gluing quarks into protons and neutrons are appositely named gluons. Finally, W and Z bosons carry the weak nuclear force responsible for certain types of radioactive decay, as well as the hydrogen fusion which fuels stars. (How the fourth force, gravity, fits into all this remains arguably the greatest unsolved puzzle in physics.)

Physicists need the Higgs to make sense of the properties of these other 16 subatomic species. Without it, or something like it, they have no way to explain how fermions and some bosons get their mass. That, though, is not its main virtue. As far as the Standard Model is concerned, one could simply assume that mass is a fundamental property of particles with no need for further explanation. The rub is that a Higgs-less Standard Model predicts that all bosons should have no mass. Photons and gluons abide by this rule. The W and Z, by contrast, flout it, weighing almost as much as 100 protons.

Dr Higgs figured out (as did five other physicists around the same time) that this could be explained by postulating the existence of a field, later dubbed the Higgs field, which pervades all space. To understand how it works consider a ferromagnet which is heated up and then chilled. Each atom inside it acts as a miniature magnet. At high temperatures, they wiggle around willy-nilly, not preferring any one direction to any other. The system is, in a sense, symmetrical: the milling atoms look the same whatever the observer’s vantage point. On reaching a particular temperature, though, they suddenly pick a preferred direction, creating a uniform magnetic field. They no longer look the same to different observers.

Something similar is believed to have happened with the Higgs field. At the scorching temperatures instants after the Big Bang it was in disarray and all elementary particles were oblivious to it. They were, in other words, massless. Moreover, photons, Ws and Zs all looked the same. There was no distinction between electromagnetism and the weak interaction. Instead, the three bosons conveyed the same “electroweak” force. 

As the universe cooled, however, the pleasing uniformity suddenly collapsed: the Higgs field picked a direction. The W and Z feel the resulting field but the photon does not, just as some metals feel the pull of a ferromagnet and others don’t. Physicists say that on reaching a critical temperature, the symmetry between electromagnetic and weak force was spontaneously broken. The upshot may not look at all symmetrical, but it nonetheless reflects a deeper symmetry which just happens to be hidden from view in the low-temperature world. The Higgs boson emerges from the mathematical wizardry used to flesh out this symmetry-breaking mechanism.

Playing hard to get

Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the head of CERN (interviewed here), once quipped that physicists know everything about the Higgs apart from whether it exists. There are several reasons why the particle has proved so elusive. For a start, as Dr Heuer knows full well, his assertion is not strictly speaking true: theory is irritatingly noncommital about the particle’s mass. That means that searching for it involves looking across a wide range of possible masses. Past experiments at CERN's old accelerator, the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP), ruled out masses below 114 gigaelectron-volts (GeV), the esoteric unit particle physicists like to use. Anything higher, though, has been fair game.

Both ATLAS and CMS draw their subatomic cannon fodder from the LEP’s snazzier successor, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN’s (and the world’s) biggest particle accelerator. The LHC, housed in a 27km circular tunnel beneath the Franco-Swiss border, collides protons whizzing around it in opposite directions at a smidgen below the speed of light (see our video of how it works). The colliding protons’ kinetic energy is converted into other particles (since, as Einstein showed, energy and mass are one and the same). More precisely, each proton-proton collision involves a handful of quarks and gluons. It is only two of these that actually collide. The remaining lot cannot exist by themselves and decay to produce obfuscating detritus. 

Moreover, the Higgs, should it emerge from such a collision, is unstable and immediately decays into less fleeting bits. ATLAS and CMS are honed to detect particular patterns of the less chimerical particles that the Higgs is believed to morph into. Unfortunately, such patterns are not specific to the Higgs; other subatomic processes produce an abundance of identical telltales. So the experiments are not after a signature signal but a excess of such signals—a fraction of a percent or less—over what would be expected were the Higgs not real. Each having analysed some 380 trillion collisions recorded since the LHC got cracking in earnest in 2010, both have now seen just such an excess, around 125GeV.

At between one chance in 2,000 to one in 20 of being a fluke—depending on what statistical method is used—the findings fall short of the exacting one-in-3.5m target particle physicists have set themselves to claim discovery with confidence. But the fact that independent measurements of different possible decay patterns (especially extremely rare ones involving the production of two photons) from two separate experiments point to a mass of the putative Higgs within a few GeV of each other has led some physicists to claim that discovery is afoot.

Other see this as premature. Earlier this year both CMS and ATLAS presented alluring bumps around 130-140GeV but these evaporated on closer inspection. However, at the time they also observed smaller spikes around 125GeV which now appear to have grown into something statistically sturdier.

Importantly, ATLAS and CMS have also ruled out pretty much the entire range below 115GeV and between 130-600GeV, beyond which the LHC currently lacks the oomph to whip up anything of interest. This means that they can now focus their efforts on probing the interesting 15GeV-wide band. Dr Tonelli and Aleandro Nisati, who helps co-ordinate ATLAS’s research efforts, are wary of committing to a date by which a definitive answer to the Higgs question will be known. If all goes well, though, it could be as early as a few months from now.

Should the latest findings be confirmed, the next step will be to ascertain that the bump in question really is the sort of Higgs its eponymous conjurer envisaged. That will mean making precise measurements not just of its mass, but also of other properties like its assorted charges. If this ends in success, the Standard Model will finally be complete, and Dr Higgs will no doubt have earned his Nobel Prize, together with two other of the six physicists who came up with the same idea. (The Nobel committee’s rules prevent the prize being split more than three ways.) 

A Higgs with a mass of 125GeV is also, in the words of John Ellis, a former head of theory at CERN, “just dandy” for a theory called supersymmetry which many see as the most viable successor to the Standard Model. It postulates the existence of heavier partners to all the known particles, and by doing so neatly explains many aspects of the physical reality the Standard Model has no purchase on. If a Higgs exists and weighs around 125GeV, then, the LHC ought, in principle, to be powerful enough to create the lightest supersymmetric particles. That is still an “if”. But it just got a bit less iffy.

VIDEO games will be the fastest-growing and most exciting form of mass media over the coming decade, says Tim Cross