Author: John Timmer

The world's biggest particle collider, CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), suffered a disastrous failure during its initial startup. After basic repairs, scientists ran it cautiously for a few years, enough time to gather data to confirm the discovery of the Higgs boson.

With that success in the books, the whole assembly was taken apart and upgraded. There is no clear target to search for, so the LHC is being run at its full design energy (13 Tera-electonVolts) in the hope that new physics will pop out. With the end of proton collisions less than a month ago, CERN hosted a series of talks today in which researchers described the first analysis of the data from the new, high-energy run.

The talks reaffirmed that the leading candidate to replace physics' Standard Model, called Supersymmetry, was still not showing up in any of the data. But the two main detectors in the LHC, CMS and ATLAS, both see hints of a signal that could represent a new, heavy particle. The hints aren't very statistically significant and are likely to disappear into the noise as more data is gathered next year. But they'll undoubtedly get theorists very excited in the meantime, as they showed up in a search for theoretical particles predicted by a model developed using the approaches of string theory.

Video by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

Update: It's New Year's eve and Ars staffers are enjoying a winter break (inevitably filled with some joy rides and whatever that choose-your-own Black Mirror thing is). As such, we're resurfacing a few favorites from the site archives appropriate for the occasion—like this tour of a facility that will inevitably be busy post-holidays. Our story on the Sims Municipal Recycling Center originally ran on December 7, 2015, and it appears unchanged below.

BROOKLYN, New York—A conveyor belt is keeping material flying past at speeds that require both concentration and rapid eye movement if you wanted to track a single item. Above the constant roar of all the heavy equipment, it's just possible to make out the brief hissing of jets of high-pressure air. Those jets are produced where the conveyor belt ends, and most of the material plunges onto a second belt below. Each hiss, however, causes a carefully chosen item to leap off the end of the belt and soar into a different collection area, where yet another conveyor belt takes it on its way.

The process of carefully choosing which items to sift out is all done without human intervention. It's based on how that object reflects light that's outside the range of human vision.