2011

The bartender says, “We don’t serve neutrinos here” A neutrino walks into a bar. The blogosphere is all abuzz about the CERN neutrino experiment that reported “faster than light” travel for the neutrinos. We all heard the news first from the blogs, and now the arXive pre-print server has the details. This immediate publication is already truly amazing, given the months before the paper copy appears in the library journal. The comments and consequences are flying so thick and fast, one hardly has time to absorb the impact. Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity some 107 years ago, and this has been the first, contradictory laboratory evidence for “superluminal” transport. But already, one day later, the first theorist has chimed Read More ›

I’ll just let the scientists speak for themselves. “In the last two decades there have been dramatic changes in our understanding of how evolution works,” said Gunter Wagner, the Alison Richard Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) and senior author of the paper. “We used to believe that changes only took place through small mutations in our DNA that accumulated over time. But in this case we found a huge cut-and-paste operation that altered wide areas of the genome to create large-scale morphological change.” Liz Liddle certainly continues to believe in “cummulative selection”, but some scientists have a differing view. Indeed, “These transposons are not genes that underwent small changes over long periods of time and eventually grew into Read More ›

Space: rocks floating around in the dark. Who cares? Canadian blogger Five Feet of Fury offers her blunt opinion, which may be more widespread than many science nerds suppose: After the novelty wore off, NASA spent decades getting borderline bitchy about how nobody else cared about their launches and missions anymore. But they had turned into Marge Simpson in that one where she keeps wearing the Chanel suit to everything. When nobody else is looking, nobody over the age of 12 gives much of a crap about real life space travel. They care more about imaginary space travel; who gets asked for his autograph more often: the second man on the moon (whoever that was) or Leonard Nimoy? Proof that Read More ›

In “Faster-than-light neutrino claim bolstered” (New Scientist, September 23, 2011), Lisa Grossman notes, Representatives from the OPERA collaboration spoke in a seminar at CERN today, supporting their astonishing claim that neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light. The result is conceptually simple: neutrinos travelling from a particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland arrived 60 nanoseconds too early at a detector in the Gran Sasso cavern in Italy. And it relies on three conceptually simple measurements, explained Dario Autiero of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Lyon: the distance between the labs, the time the neutrinos left Switzerland, and the time they arrived in Italy. Here comes the horseshoe: But only time will tell whether the result holds up Read More ›