Before it stopped colliding for good, America's defunct Tevatron collider saw a hint of the elusive Higgs boson, physicists have announced. Even more interesting: scientists spotted something unusual in the same energy range when their European colleagues glimpsed something unusual at the Large Hadron Collider last year.

Though researchers think the Higgs boson is running out of places to hide, the LHC has yet to provide conclusive proof of its existence. But the ATLAS experiment at the LHC - one of the two main experiments taking precise measurements of particle collisions - has found what is thought to be the first observation of a new particle at the world's largest science experiment. Known as cb(3P) - or Chi-b (3P) - observations of the particle should yield new insights into the strong force that holds atomic nuclei together.

There's no official announcement yet but word on the street and around the cafeteria at CERN says that scientists may haveglimpsed the elusive Higgs boson. Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have been saying that they are closing on the so-called God Particle for a while now, and while a rock-solid 5-sigma event isn't in the offing we might soon see our first experimental data that points toward a real Higgs sighting.

As we all know, the Large Hadron Collider has been grievously behind the times technologically. Sure, its giant array of superconducting magnets, kept cool by almost a hundred tons of liquid helium is pretty neat, and the muon spectrometer is no slouch. But the LHC hasn't put it all in a convenient smartphone app -- until now.

Fermilab's Tevatron collider runs out of money and time at the end of this month, but physicists there say that they are on track to establish whether the Higgs can exist within the most likely predicted mass range before their September 30 deadline. That's not the same as actually finding the Higgs boson of course, but physicists say they'll either rule out the possibility of its existence or not by month's end.