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The 2015 Nobel Prize in physics has gone to two scientists for discovering the quirky, shape-shifting behavior of neutrinos — tiny ghostlike particles that fill the universe, traveling close to the speed of light. Takaaki Kajita of the Super-Kamiokande experiment at the University of Tokyo and Arthur B. McDonald of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory at Queen’s University in Canada were awarded the physics Nobel on Tuesday for their discovery that neutrinos oscillate — and thus, that they must have mass. Small as these particles are, the scientists' insight — that neutrinos are chameleon-like particles, switching identities in an instant —...

Six months after physicists shocked the world by announcing they'd found particles seemingly traveling faster than light, the growing scientific consensus seems to be that the results were flawed. Neutrinos are the vampires of physics. Researchers at the ICARUS project in Italy have recreated an independent version of the original Switzerland-based experiment, called OPERA, and found that their particles traveled at a respectable, sub-light speed. Though the results don't automatically disprove OPERA's findings, they add to most scientists' sense that the shocking finding was an anomaly "The evidence is beginning to point towards the OPERA result being an artifact of...

Neutrinos are having a moment. They’re speeding across Europe (just how fast is under review), they’re changing flavors in China and, now, they’re carrying rudimentary messages through bedrock in Illinois. A team of physicists encoded a short string of letters on a beam of neutrinos at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., and sent the message to a detector more than a kilometer away. On the journey the neutrinos passed through 240 meters of solid rock, mostly shale. What was the word they transmitted in the preliminary demonstration? “Neutrino.” The experiment is described in a paper posted to the...

It appears that the faster-than-light neutrino results, announced last September by the OPERA collaboration in Italy, was due to a mistake after all. A bad connection between a GPS unit and a computer may be to blame. Physicists had detected neutrinos travelling from the CERN laboratory in Geneva to the Gran Sasso laboratory near L'Aquila that appeared to make the trip in about 60 nanoseconds less than light speed. Many other physicists suspected that the result was due to some kind of error, given that it seems at odds with Einstein's special theory of relativity, which says nothing can travel...

An international team of scientists has recorded neutrino particles traveling faster than the speed of light, a spokesman for the researchers said on Thursday -- in what could be a challenge to one of the fundamental rules of physics. If confirmed, the discovery would overturn a key part of Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that nothing in the universe can travel faster than light.

The world's largest neutrino telescope – made from a giant cube of ice at the South Pole – aimed at detecting subatomic particles traveling near the speed of light has been completed, researchers announced today (Dec. 20). http://www.livescience.com/environment/south-pole-neutrino-observatory-construction-finished-101220.html

Physicists have confirmed that neutrinos, which are thought to have played a key role during the creation of the Universe, have mass. This is the first major finding of the US-based Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (Minos) experiment. The findings suggest that the Standard Model, which describes how the building blocks of the Universe behave and interact, needs a revision. Neutrinos are believed to be vital to our understanding of the Universe. But scientists know frustratingly little about these fundamental particles. The findings build on work carried out by Japanese physicists. Different 'flavours' Neutrinos are sometimes described as "ghost particles"...

SOUDAN, MINN. -- How long does it take to get from Chicago to Soudan? For tiny subatomic bits called neutrinos, 2.5 milliseconds with never a weather delay. Among the smallest known particles in the universe, neutrinos can take shortcuts straight through the Earth. Scientists hope they'll also provide a shortcut to solving some of the most intriguing mysteries of the universe. Today, at the federal Fermilab outside Chicago, U.S. Rep. Jim Oberstar, D-Minn., and other dignitaries will dedicate a $180 million project that will involve flinging trillions of neutrinos through the Earth to a massive detector in Soudan. The 6,000-ton...

A "telescope" buried deep under Antarctic ice has detected the first signals that scientists hope will allow them to identify the source of mysterious particles that bombard Earth from outer space. For the past ten years scientists have been planning and building an ambitious experiment to explain the mystery of what produces the cosmic rays and elusive particles known as neutrinos, which constantly pepper our planet. more at Telegraph.co.UK

Like exploding stars, black holes, dark matter? How about cosmic intrigue, deep space astronomy , or origins of the universe? Then you’re gonna love this. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin are putting the finishing touches on a giant underground telescope buried beneath the South Pole to help understand said phenomenon.

The ancient sea floor was discovered in southwest Greenland A sliver of four-billion-year-old sea floor has offered a glimpse into the inner workings of an adolescent Earth.The baked and twisted rocks, now part of Greenland, show the earliest evidence of plate tectonics, colossal movements of the planet's outer shell. Until now, researchers were unable to say when the process, which explains how oceans and continents form, began. The unique find, described in the journal Science, shows the movements started soon after the planet formed. "Since the plate tectonic paradigm is the framework in which we interpret all modern-day geology,...

Newswise — Researchers at Northeastern University and the University of California, Irvine say that scientists might soon have evidence for extra dimensions and other exotic predictions of string theory. Early results from a neutrino detector at the South Pole, called AMANDA, show that ghostlike particles from space could serve as probes to a world beyond our familiar three dimensions, the research team says. No more than a dozen high-energy neutrinos have been detected so far. However, the current detection rate and energy range indicate that AMANDA's larger successor, called IceCube, now under construction, could provide the first evidence for string...

The Belle collaboration at the KEK laboratory in Japan has discovered a new sub-atomic particle which it is calling the "X(3872)". The particle does not fit into any known particle scheme and theorists are speculating that it might be a hitherto unseen type of meson that contains four quarks (arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0309032; Phys. Rev. Lett. to be published). The discovery has been confirmed by the CDF collaboration at Fermilab in the US, where the new particle is being called the "mystery meson". Mesons are particles that contain a quark and an antiquark that are held together by the strong nuclear force. Since...

Using a delicate instrument located under a mountain in central Italy, two University of Massachusetts Amherst physicists are measuring some of the faintest and rarest particles ever detected, geo-neutrinos, with the greatest precision yet achieved. The data reveal, for the first time, a well defined signal, above background noise, of the extremely rare geo-neutrino particle from deep within Earth. The small number of anti-neutrinos detected, however, only a couple each month, helps to settle a long-standing question among geophysicists and geologists about whether our planet harbors a huge, natural nuclear reactor at its core. Geo-neutrinos are anti-neutrinos produced in the...

The 120 lead ingots, each weighing about 33 kilograms, come from a larger load recovered 20 years ago from a Roman shipwreck, the remains of a vessel that sank between 80 B.C. and 50 B.C. off the coast of Sardinia. As a testimony to the extent of ancient Rome's manufacturing and trading capacities, the ingots are of great value to archaeologists, who have been preserving and studying them at the National Archaeological Museum in Cagliari, southern Sardinia. What makes the ingots equally valuable to physicists is the fact that over the past 2,000 years their lead has almost completely lost...

Research scientists announced on Monday they had identified the missing piece of a major puzzle involving the make-up of the universe by observing a neutrino particle change from one type to another. Science The CERN physics research center near Geneva, relaying the announcement from the Gran Sasso laboratory in central Italy, said the breakthrough was a major boost for its own LHC particle collider programme to unveil key secrets of the cosmos. According to physicists at Gran Sasso, after three years of monitoring multiple billions of muon neutrinos beamed to them through the earth from CERN 730 kms (456 miles)...

For several decades scientists have been using telescopes to scan the heavens for unnatural-looking radio or optical transmissions coming from intelligent alien life. With this search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) having so far failed to pick up a single signal, however, researchers in the US now believe it is worth extending the search beyond electromagnetic waves and start paying attention to neutrinos. John Learned of the University of Hawaii and colleagues have worked out that advanced alien civilizations could send messages within the Milky Way using neutrinos, and that these messages could be picked up using neutrino detectors currently under...

European physicists have sent a neutrino on a 730-kilometre trip under the Earth's crust and taken a snapshot of the instant it slammed into lab detectors... In 2006, CERN started beaming neutrinos from its accelerator complex near Geneva, and have so far detected several hundred impacts in San Grasso. But the scientists have now taken the venture a step forward by starting to fill the San Grasso detector with small film plates which measure with high accuracy the cascade of particles that are produced when a neutrino impacts. These plates, called bricks, are each made of a sandwich of lead...

Physics giant Wolfgang Pauli told a friend in 1930, "I have done something very bad today." Pauli's sin was "proposing a particle that cannot be detected," which he lamented "is something no theorist should ever do." Three years later, Enrico Fermi christened Pauli's ghost particle the "neutrino." In 1951, physicists Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowen first detected man-made neutrinos in an experiment at a nuclear reactor in South Carolina. Later, researcher Ray Davis detected solar neutrinos at his famous experiment 4,850 feet underground in the Homestake gold mine in Lead. The Homestake rock shielded his detector from interfering cosmic rays....

EARTH'S natural radioactivity has been measured for the first time. The measurement will help geologists find out to what extent nuclear decay is responsible for the immense quantity of heat generated by Earth. Our planet's heat output drives the convection currents that churn liquid iron in the outer core, giving rise to Earth's magnetic field. Just where this heat comes from is a big question. Measurements of the temperature gradients across rocks in mines and boreholes have led geologists to estimate that the planet is internally generating between 30 and 44 terawatts of heat. Some of this heat comes from...