Francis Halzen has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics, for IceCube: 5,160 light sensors frozen into a cubic km of Antarctic ice that caught the first high-energy neutrinos from deep space.

Neutrinos are fascinating particles. More than a trillion a second flood through your body, but science has only ever caught a sliver of them. Well now a sphere holding 20,000 tonnes of liquid, buried under southern China, has out-measured every previous experiment combined. It is one of physics’ oldest puzzles. Do these ghosts weigh anything, and how would we ever find out?

On 29 June, the Large Hadron Collider smashes its last protons for four long years. NerdNews raises a glass to the 27-kilometre marvel that caught the Higgs, and peers down the tunnel at what its supercharged successor might find.