This year, the CERN Bulletin is marking the Christmas season of goodwill and good neighbourliness by knocking on the doors of some of our neighbours in the particle physics community. Join us as we go beyond CERN on a short tour of this very ‘particular’ world of research, which will take us from France to Japan, via Germany, Italy and the United States. >>

A couple of years ago ‘LHC’ made a list of the top ten words of the year. This year, it should be the turn of ‘sigma’ to feature on such a list. It’s been a year in which the importance of statistics in particle physics has really come to the fore, along with the caution and rigour necessary in statistics-based analyses. >>

The LHC finished with beams for 2011 on Wednesday 7 December after a pretty good year of operation. The cryogenics team has emptied the magnets of helium for the winter technical stop and a full maintenance programme has started. The LHC is running long operational years at present with only a few short technical stops during operation with beam. This leaves very little time for much-needed maintenance and upgrades. Thus, the hardware teams involved have to take full advantage of the time available during the winter stop. >>

This week saw the increasingly familiar sight of hordes of journalists descending on CERN to hear the latest news from the LHC. There were 66 of them to be precise, many of whom announced to us they planned to come for the seminar long before they were invited. It’s a sign of the times that science that used to be conducted in private is now carried out in the public domain. That has the potential to be very good news for science, and for society as a whole, particularly when CERN’s scientists do such a great job of conveying the passion and excitement of their research. >>

While 2011 will go down in history as the construction year at DESY, there might even be more of it in 2012. The construction activities will spread across the entire DESY campus and will go from mere digging in the dirt to high-tech installations. >>

The upcoming year will be busy at Fermilab, and the largest projects are already beginning. Friday 16 December marks the ground-breaking for the Illinois Accelerator Research Center, a 3,900-square-metre building for accelerator research and development, industrialisation and training of the future generation of accelerator scientists. The centre is expected to open in about two years. >>

The coming year is expected to be a rich and exciting one, and researchers in the 24 laboratories and platform facilities of the French National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics (IN2P3) are at the heart of this dynamic new science. >>

The numerous achievements made by particle physicists in recent years have raised interest and triggered high expectations not only among physicists around the world, but also outside the circle of insiders. The hope for 2012 is to be able to meet as many of these expectations as possible. >>

The 2000 or so people from around the world who are planning and developing the International Linear Collider (ILC) are starting to get this funny feeling when something that you have been working on and looking forward to for a long, long time is suddenly just around the corner. >>

2011 saw a pivotal moment in KEK's history: we endured severe damage and needed a recovery period following the earthquake in March. >>

Since a few weeks, the CERN Library has been offering online access to "Scientific American" and "Nature" within a longer timespan. This is part of a long-term plan to extend our e-collections in order to include prestigious scientific journals from the beginning of publication. >>