The LHCb collaboration spent Sunday doing what particle physics does most of the time — waiting for more data. [1] The four-sigma anomaly in the charming-penguin B-meson decay, reported Saturday and named in the paper as a binary between five-sigma confirmation and quiet collapse, will be resolved by the Run 3 dataset — which already contains roughly three times the integrated luminosity of the full 2018 set and is still running. [2]

That arithmetic is the contrast piece. Run 3 began in July 2022 and is scheduled through 2026; the next long shutdown follows. [2] A discovery in particle physics is an apparatus, a calibration, a paper, a pre-print, an independent reanalysis, and a five-sigma threshold that survives statistical look-elsewhere correction. None of those steps are dismissable by email.

The National Science Board, fired April 24, was. [3] Nine days later no replacements have been named. The Forest Service shuttered fifty-seven wildfire research labs the same week. The MMWR queue under the new CDC principal-deputy line authority has not moved on the unpublished Covid-vaccine report or the hep-B birth-dose operational guidance two Fridays in a row. [4]

The charming penguin is not a coincidence on the calendar; it is a different kind of clock entirely. CERN's clock ticks in fb⁻¹. Washington's, this season, ticks in inboxes.

-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Geneva