It's now official: the
experiments at LHC have
discovered the Higgs particle. Depending on how you slice and dice the numbers, they just meet the "
5 sigma" criterion to claim discovery. Combined, they will certainly exceed that, but the official combination won't be available for a while. In the meantime,
here's the unofficial combination.

The new particle has a mass of about 125 GeV (about 125 times heavier than the proton). You can read a brief description of the significance of this discovery
here, but if you want the full story,
read the book.