UPDATE: Since this article was first posted, new experiments have shown that neutrinos from CERN travel subluminally. Additionally, OPERA has since identified errors in their original experiment.

I’m about to use the word neutrino a bunch of times, so I’ll start by telling you what a neutrino is.

For those of you who took Italian in high school, no, a neutrino is not a little neutron. But it is little, and electrically neutral. In fact, neutrinos are so little that they were first thought to have zero mass, like photons, but more recent discoveries revealed that this cannot be true.

Where can we find these little guys? Everywhere. Our sun pumps out neutrinos like Universal Studios does sequels to the Land Before Time. When hydrogen atoms fuse to make helium, a neutrino pops out and starts barreling toward earth at 670 million miles per hour. Each second, trillions of neutrinos tear through …more →