As you read this, we will be winging our way back home to Los Angeles after a lovely stint across the pond. The Time Lord has much to be thankful for, since — defying our expectations and the bookie odds — his book about the hunt for the Higgs boson , The Particle at the End of the Universe, won the Royal Society’s 2013 Winton Prize. (Watch Sean read an excerpt from the book here .) Much celebration ensued!

This was truly the year of the Higgs: not only the Nobel Prize in physics and the Winton Prize, but an intriguing new result appeared this week: The Higgs boson does a new trick (probably). The ATLAS experiment at CERN announced the strongest evidence so far that the Higgs gives mass to leptons.