Nature sent intrepid reporter Eric Hand to cover the American Physical Society’s April meeting, which took place over the last week in Washington (sic*).

Here’s what he found out…

In future the Higgs Boson (artist’s impression pic right) may be known as the ‘BEHHGK Boson’, after Brout, Englert, Higgs, Hagen, Guralnik, and Kibble, who all received the Sakurai Prize for their work on the particle. …read more…

Is science secrecy getting worse? Or better? There were 23 million classification decisions in the US in 2008, up from 8.6 million in 2001. But the amount of classified science, as a percentage of all science, is shrinking fast. …read more…

The Joint Dark Energy Mission was short of staff at the APS: funding problem or call of the coffee machine? …read more…

Those trying to crack an encoded CIA sculpture (pic right) may have to wait for clues contained in its creator’s new book. …read more…

Pictures of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way may be in the pipeline:

“On Saturday at APS, there were talks showing how two rival approaches are getting up close and personal to the hole, called Sagittarius A*. One group even says that they will soon be able to actually image the hole — and that the data they have already shows that the hole’s accretion disk is oblique to us, rather than facing us perpendicularly, like a doughnut.” …read more…

And of course there’s the obligatory blog about snow, as Washingtonians attempt to topple the British stranglehold on the ‘going on and on about the weather’ championships. …read more…

• The APS says: “The APS April Meeting 2010 will be held in February 2010. It’s not a typo. By holding the meeting in February, APS is able to join the Winter Meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT)”.

Image of sculpture: CIA

Image of snow: Cycle the Ghost Round via Flickr