Friday wrap-up: various links...

Wherein I list some (mostly) recent happenings, ramble a bit, and provide links, in an order roughly determined by importance and relevance to particle physics. Views are my own. Content very definitely skewed by my own leanings and by papers getting coverage, and it may not even be correct. It is a blog after all..

Slow news week, or maybe I was just too busy...?

• LHC is doing 13 TeV physics again, now with 25ns bunch spacing.

• The LHCb pentaquark discovery has been published in PRL. There's a Viewpoint article from Kenneth Hicks here.

• The BOOST2015 7th International Workshop on Boosted Object Phenomenology was on this week (indico/hashtag).

• The 43rd SLAC Summer Institute is going on at the moment: The Universe of Neutrinos (indico).

• Blog post at Backreaction: Why do some people assume that the Planck length/time are the minimum possible length and time?

• John Preskill muses on Kitaev, Moore, and Read's shared ICTP Dirac Medal and anyons, the two-dimensional cousins to our fermions and bosons.

• A couple of articles from Shannon Hall at Nautilus: Is It Time to Embrace Unverified Theories? and; 6 Graphs That Showed Landmark Discoveries—but Were Later Debunked.

• In video/audio media:
• Symmetry, a dance-opera film, premiered this week; trailers at the link.
• Big Bang Aftershock, on the BICEP2 discovery and fallout. [40 minutes]
• Uranium: Twisting the Dragon's Tail. Hosted by Derek from Veritasium, and researched by my officemate Rebecca Leane! [Link for Australians; 50 minutes]
• How Does Symmetry Shape Nature’s Laws? from Quanta. [2 minutes]
• What is Dark Matter and Dark Energy? for laymen, from Nova Project. [6 minutes]
• What Has New Horizons Taught Us About Pluto? at It's Okay to be Smart. [6 minutes]
• Prime knots at Numberphile. [7 minutes]
• Tour Ceres, from Nasa JPL. [2 minutes]

• On 13 Aug, Rosetta witnessed Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko traversing its perihelion.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Those in the Northern Hemisphere were lucky to have an almost-new moon for the Perseids this year. (The shot below is from Ruslan Merzlyakov).
  
  
  
  
  Check out the slideshow at space.com.