When your non-physicists friends start to send emails with links to headlines of big newspapers (usually titled ‘Einstein was wrong’: that’s apparently the best the average reporter can come up with) it means something potentially interesting is happening. In fact, after days of rumors, the results of the Opera experiment have been announced

http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897

And they are frankly bizarre. Ready? Neutrinos (in this specific case those fired from CERN to the Gran Sasso laboratories) seem to travel faster than the speed of light, therefore violating one of the pillars of modern physics. Now, the members of the Opera collaboration themselves are very cautious. Before throwing away our theories, let’s see if other experiments are able to reproduce this result.