The internet is hungry for news about neutrinos, and it is being fed – even if that news is, well, old.
Last week, the OPERA collaboration announced the results of new tests that bolstered their stunning result, first announced in September, that neutrinos go faster than light.
The saga of those Einstein-defying neutrinos appeared to take a dramatic turn today, with a flood of news stories reporting that a second experiment in the same lab showed that the subatomic particles are obeying the speed limit after all.
Time and repeated experiments will tell which group is right. But it bears mentioning that the results of the second experiment are not new. A number of outlets – including New Scientist – reported it a month ago after a paper about it was posted online.
The feeding frenzy seems to have been sparked by a press release that landed in our inboxes this morning from the UK Science Media Centre, "an independent venture working to promote the voices, stories and views of the scientific community to the national news media when science is in the headlines". The centre offered a comment from physicist Jim Al-Khalili of the University of Surrey, who, when the initial news broke in September, had publicly vowed to eat his boxer shorts on live television if the result held up.
To read more, click here.