Two international teams of physicists have found subtle hints of what could be the Higgs boson, a particle whose existence would help explain why other particles have mass. The researchers today announced that they may have uncovered a whiff of the Higgs in data collected at the Large Hadron Collider, the massive particle accelerator outside Geneva that accelerates protons to nearly light speed before smashing them together so physicists can sift through the wreckage for new particles and phenomena.