Brief items

Catching up after the APS meeting, here are a couple of links of interest:

• This video has been making the rounds, and it's fun to watch.  It's an updated take on one of those powers-of-ten videos, though in this case it's really powers-of-two.  Nicely done, though I think the discussion of the Planck Length is not really correct.  As far as I know, the Planck Length is a characteristic scale where quantum gravity effects cannot be neglected - that doesn't mean that the structure of the universe is discrete on that scale.
• There have also been a lot of articles like this one implying that new (non-Standard Model) physics has been seen at the LHC.  As is usually the case, it's premature to get too excited.  At the 3\(\sigma\) level, there is an asymmetry in decay channels (electrons vs muons) seen by the LHCb experiment when none is expected.  As the always reliable Tommaso Dorigo writes here, everyone should just take a breath before getting too excited.  At least when the LHC starts back up next year, there should be a lot of new data coming in, and either this effect will grow, or it will fade away.  Anyone want to bet on the over/under for the number of theory papers about leptoquarks that are going to show up on the arxiv in the next month?
• We were fortunate enough to have Pablo Jarillo-Herrero give our colloquium this past Wednesday, talking about some really exciting recent results (here, here) in twisted trilayer graphene.

I'll hopefully write more soon, also touching on a recent paper of ours.