Beauty Quarks behaving awkwardly, or is New Physics hiding in flavor?

While the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics successfully describes all known particles and their interactions, it is broadly accepted that it is an incomplete description of Nature. Therefore, the search for new particles and interactions is among the dominant goal of experimental particle physics. In the past few years there has been an increasing interest in rare semi-leptonic decays of beauty mesons, mediated through virtual quantum loops, since an intriguing pattern of deviations with respect to the SM is emerging, the so called flavor anomalies. Could this be evidence for the long-awaited “New Physics”? Or are the measurements or the Standard Model predictions not all they seem? In this colloquium, an overview of the latest results in this sector and the perspectives to understand the nature of these anomalies are discussed.