Congress and the White House hinted Tuesday they might be willing to compromise on a short-term solution to pay workers and reopen the government as the shutdown hit its eighth day. President Barack Obama and John Boehner continued to argue, though, as the country edged closer to defaulting on its loans. Boehner said there was a crack in negotiations, but he also said it was not enough to warrant optimism.

The researchers who discovered the Higgs boson, commonly known as the “God particle,” won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday nearly 50 years after they came up with their initial theory. The Higgs boson, theorized by prizewinners Peter Higgs and Francois Englert, is the keystone of the theory that helps explain the origins of the universe and how its fundamental building blocks grouped together. The particle was officially discovered last year by a separate team of researchers.

The Supreme Court is set to decide a case about loosening campaign finance limits, and the court appeared Tuesday to be ready to allow individual donors to give more money to political candidates. Chief Justice John Roberts said that telling an individual not to give more than $2,600 per election to a handful of candidates, the current legal limit, seemed to him to be an unfair First Amendment restriction. President Barack Obama said if the court ruled to loosen the limit, it would essentially be “anything goes,” which worried him.

Contact Carrie Blazina at [email protected].