The Higgs Boson particle, confirmed by the Large Hadron Collider in 2012, was the last piece of the jigsaw of the Standard Model - a framework for almost everything we know about physics today. The LHC was upgraded last year and will very soon resume operation after its annual maintenance shutdown. The reason everyone is so excited by this next phase is that there is a distinct possibility that a new particle will be discovered that will break the Standard Model. As this article from Aeon explains, there were faint traces at the end of last year, before the shut down, of a particle that could be six times as massive as the Higgs boson and 800 times the mass of a proton. The beauty of physics (and any science) is that there is a constant quest to find new and better theories, and when old theories are disproved this is something to be celebrated. The successor to the Standard Model, if it is found (or even exists) will hopefully be able to address some of the big unknowns (as well as incorporating all of the knowns that the current model describes), including the nature of dark matter, the imbalance between matter and antimatter and some fairly fundamental questions about mass. Should be an exciting few months for physicists everywhere.

One of the biggest risks of Artificial Intelligence is that no-one really understands how it works. By that I mean that when a complex algorithm works something out, it is extremely difficult to reverse engineer the process that was followed to get to that decision (a bit like recreating an egg from an omelette). This opaqueness of the inner workings of the algorithms is a worry to people who rely on the types of decisions it is making, such as credit approvals, medical diagnoses and financial trading. This report from Kurzweil.ai claims that researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created a system that shows the relative weightings applied to the various decision factors the algorithm has used. This allows it to test for discrimination, either in the underlying models used or in the way the AI has been trained - any adaptive system will inherently reflect the biases of the information (and people) used to train it. So, if a system to filter job applications is built, it could easily do that role with, say, gender bias if the training data and any subsequent reinforcement included that bias. The new system will highlight the decision factors and therefore help identify any bias. The downside is that any transparency raises privacy concerns and potentially opens up companies to prejudice claims. The irony, of course, is that one of the key benefits of AI systems is the dispassionate decision making - it seems that humans are still the weakest link in being able to deliver that.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the most celebrated photographers in the history of the art, talked about the 'decisive moment' in any photograph - that fleeting point in time when everything comes together to create the perfect image. The photographers' agency, Magnum, which Cartier-Bresson helped found, has just commissioned their photographers to interpret his idea through their own pictures. The images that are shown in this Guardian article are wonderful in their own right - my favourites include the waiters passing trays of tea on the outside of a train in Pakistan, by Steve McCurry, and Stuart Franklin's picture of kids playing with junk on the council estate in Moss Side, Manchester. The combination of composition and timing, epitomised on the image shown here by Jonas Bendiksen, certainly do justice to Cartier-Bresson's ideal.

I've been a long-term fan of Hot Chip, especially last year's LP, 'Why Make Sense?' - the combination of Alexis Taylor's frail voice and the hard synths and drums give the band a unique sound. Now the lead singer has created a very different LP; just him and a piano. Apparently it was inspired by the death of a close friend, so none of the tracks are going to be jaunty numbers, and by the evidence of 'I'm Ready' it certainly sounds like a sombre affair. Taylor's voice is exposed beautifully, complemented by his stripped down piano accompaniment. There are Hot Chip covers included as well, giving a completely different feel to the originals. You can listen to the opening track on Soundcloud below, and the rest of the LP is available on Apple Music.