Where's the best place to hunt down the Higgs boson or mysterious particles that manage to be both matter and antimatter at the same time? While muscular particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) might seem the safest bet, two presentations at the American Physical Society's meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, suggest that traces of such exotica can be found in the lab.

The first result is purely theoretical and suggests that something like the elusive Higgs – the particle thought to give all others mass ndash; might be glimpsed in crystals known as spin ice. The second is more concrete – and may be our first peek at a fabled particle first dreamed up more than 70 years ago.

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