We all remember the hype and controversy that followed after the OPERA collaboration at CERN released their report saying that they measured neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light. The report can be found here.

The OPERA collaboration how identified a rather mundane possible solutions to this…

CERN has released a statement to confirm that the OPERA collaboration has identified a feature of its experiment that could explain its puzzling superluminal-neutrino discovery – a faulty optical fibre. The collaboration is now investigating this, and one other potential source of error, and it plans to carry out new experimental runs in May.

James Dacey is multimedia projects editor for Physics World

There now appears two potential faults with the experiment. First is a faulty optical cable which transmits data in the experiment. Second there maybe issues with the way the GPS systems were synchronised giving an over estimation of the distance travelled by the neutrinos.

Looks like Jim Al-Khalili will not have to eat his boxer short live on TV. Unless he wants to that is!

See the Physics World report here.

See the CERN news report here.

The UK has overtaken the US in terms of the quality of physics-research output, according to a new report carried out by Evidence, which is owned by information-services provider Thomson Reuters. The report, Bibliometric evaluation and international benchmarking of the UK’s physics research, states that the UK is now second to Canada when ranked on the quality of research papers, measured as the average number of times that such papers are cited.

Michael Banks, news editor of Physics World.

For a relatively small country the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (to use the full name) does rather well in the impact of science research.

You can read the full Physics World news report  here.