I wrote last week that the heads of the two groups that work on the Atlas and CMS detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will give the talks. Last month, scientists at the lab said that if the particle exists, it was most likely to have a mass somewhere between 114 and 141GeV (gigaelectronvolts), where one GeV is roughly equivalent to the mass of a proton, a subatomic particle found in atomic nuclei. A couple of blogs, including viXra and Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong, have now posted rumours that the Atlas and CMS teams see Higgs-like signals around 125GeV, though they say the evidence is not robust enough to claim an official discovery. Image caption The search for the Higgs boson could be approaching its conclusion at Cern 
 
 A respected scientist from the Cern particle physics laboratory has told the BBC he expects to see "the first glimpse" of the Higgs boson next week. Fact is that in our present theoretical descriptions, most of the mass terms in the equations for the fundamental particles appear to violate an important symmetry (chiral symmetry) unless they can be connected to an additional field, the Higgs field, which would also require the existence of a not yet discovered particle, the Higgs particle … 
 
 "However, since chiral symmetry is unavoidable for the inner consistency of our description of the fundamental particles, the beautiful theoretical prediction of a Standard Model Higgs particle still stands out, and I still consider the near discovery of such a particle very likely.
– The Higgs boson "God particle" may or may not exist, and physicists at the Large Hadron Collider may or may not be close to spotting it, but one thing is clear: There are some very excited scientists at CERN. Rumors that the elusive particle believed to endow matter with mass has been spotted have circulated before, but experts believe confirmation of its existence may finally be unveiled at the European research lab next week, when teams that have trawled data from 350 trillion collisions release their results, the Guardian reports. The teams have been gradually narrowing the energy range where the Higgs may lurk, and expect to see the first glimpse within days, a top CERN scientist tells the BBC. CERN's director of research is more cautious, saying only that "indications that are not consistent with its non-existence" may surface. "This hunt for the Higgs is like fishing in an ancient way," he says. "Instead of using modern tools you are removing the water from the pond. It might look tedious but it is the only way, at the end of the day, when you have removed all the water from the pond to find the smallest fish."