Hints of Higgs Boson Appear Weaker

sciencehabit writes: Last month, physicists working with the world's highest-energy atom-smasher reported possible evidence of the long-sought Higgs boson, the last missing piece of scientists' standard model of fundamental particles and the key to physicists' explanation of how all particles get their mass. Today, however, the same two teams reported that, with more data, those signs appear slightly weaker, suggesting that they could be a statistical fluctuation in the "background" produced by decays of familiar particles. Still, the curious excess of possible Higgs bosons remains.