The Higgs boson is still missing – but perhaps we should be more worried about what else the Large Hadron Collider hasn't found yet.
That's the main message to come out of a conference in Grenoble, France, this week, where physicists have gathered to chew over the first results from the world's most muscular particle smasher, sited at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.
Finding the Higgs would complete the "standard model", our best stab yet at explaining the fundamental particles and forces of nature. But we already know that some weighty questions, such as the relationship between the strengths of different forces in the cosmos, or the nature of the dark matter thought to make up about three-quarters of its mass, lie beyond the standard model's scope. To answer these questions, physicists look to a grander construction known as supersymmetry.
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