A "No Hype" Science Journalism Stand-Out

Science journalism aimed at the educated (or not so educated) layman in the general public is prone to sensationalism and claims of new discoveries that aren't supported by the body text, or at least, aren't supported by the source and the general scientific community. But there are exceptions. 

One stand out is an article from Phys.org which is a source that often offends in this regard but doesn't this time. Its headline accurately states:

Theoretical physicists find Higgs boson does not seem to contain any harbingers of new physics

The headline conclusion, reached after twelve years of study since its discovery was announced on July 4, 2012, is familiar to readers of this blog, but deserves recognition for resisting sensationalism and restating the scientific consensus.  See, e.g., noting decays to a Z boson and a photon and here (summarizing the data to date). 

The article used as its touchstone has the following abstract and citation (and isn't itself, the headline suggests, a broad review article, and is instead one more mundane article confirming that the experimental study of the Higgs boson confirms the theoretical expectations for it):

We evaluate the top-bottom interference contribution to the fully inclusive Higgs production cross section at next-to-next-to-leading order in QCD. Although bottom-quark-mass effects are power suppressed, the accuracy of state-of-the-art theory predictions makes an exact determination of this effect indispensable. The total effect of the interference at 13 TeV is −1.99⁢(1)+0.30−0.15  pb, while the pure 𝒪⁡(𝛼4𝑠) correction is 0.43 pb. With this result, we address one of the leading theory uncertainties of the cross section.

Michał Czakon et al, "Top-Bottom Interference Contribution to Fully Inclusive Higgs Production", Physical Review Letters (2024). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.211902

As additional context, Peter Higgs after whom the Higgs boson  is named, died in April of this year.

There is actually a slight Higgs boson anomaly, that is barely statistically significant locally (2.2 sigma), which would probably lose its statistical significance after considering look elsewhere effects, involving lower than expected Higgs boson decays to fermions (but the expected number of decays to bosons).

There are also a couple of low significance resonance "bumps" that have been touted as possible additional electromagnetically neutral Higgs bosons that have not been confirmed, one a bit below the Higgs boson mass of about 125 GeV, at about 96 GeV, and one or two a bit above it. Even if these "bumps" were confirmed to be real particles, there is no a priori reason to have any  confidence that they have anything to do with the Higgs boson.