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Never hurts to ask -

if there's any way you can translate the article (and your reply) into "something that I can understand", it would be appreciated.

I know a few things about sub-atomic physics (like QED, and what quarks are) but I have no idea what this article is talking about. (I have the feeling though, that it's all just too far over my head.)

It's actually very simple. There's a particle lurking out there. We don't know what its mass is. But if we did know its mass, we'd know how likely it is to be produced when we throw a proton and an antiproton at each other at a given collision energy.

Let's say that for a given collision energy and a given Higgs mass, there's a chance in a hundred billion that a Higgs will be produced in each collision. So if we crashed a proton into an antiproton 100 billion times, we'd have about a 2/3 chance of seeing one Higgs particle.

Typically in high energy physics, we require a 3-sigma effect to claim that we see evidence for something, and a 5-sigma effect to claim discovery. Since in a counting experiment, sigma--the standard deviation--goes as the square root of the number of counts, we'd need 9 Higgs events to claim evidence for the existence of the Higgs, and 25 events to claim discovery (which would require several trillion collisions).

But it's not so easy as all that. First of all, there are numerous inefficiencies. Particle detectors aren't 100% hermetic, and not all events can be reconstructed. But worse is the fact that there are background events: events from other physics processes that look very much like the signal events you're trying to find. Most of the background gets eliminated by placing cuts on the data (requiring that the decay particles be above a certain energy, for example). But this reduces the efficiency, because some of the real Higgs events will fail the cuts, so that means you need even more data. And then there will always be some background left, which means that the sigma is not so simple as the square root of the number of events.

This also requires that you be able to calculate the background very accurately. Fortunately, in the case of the Higgs, the background is probably the most thoroughly studied in the history of particle physics. At this point, all that remains is counting events and applying basic statistics.