Two Labs Close In on 'God Particle'

Science teams in both Europe and America are reporting promising new data in the hunt for the elusive Higgs boson particle—the so-called "God particle" believed to give mass to matter that remains the only particle predicted by the Standard Model of physics that has not yet been seen in experiments. So far, researchers are only calling them "excess events." But unusual "bumps" in the data were detected in particle collisions around 130-150 gigaelectronvolts at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, reports Nature.

"I'm excited," says a spokesman for CERN. "We have been working in this field for 20 years and now in a matter of months we'll know the answer." Meanwhile, Fermilab, the Illinois-based physics lab, also reported getting some similar results over the weekend. "No reputable scientist is going to tell you anything more than 'this is very, very interesting, and we'll keep an eye on it.' But it is indeed very, very interesting," says one researcher at Fermilab, according to MSNBC's Cosmic Log. (More Large Hadron Collider stories.)