Science

Remember last year, when we reported that Italian scientists claimed to have broken the speed of light? Remember the mystical implications of that? The possibility that Einstein was wrong? That our very basic idea of physics was challenged? The idea that you could be shot before a bullet left a gun?

Then you also remember that our friend and astrophysicist Adam Frank warned that these results should be looked at with great suspicion.

It turns out the results from the experiment called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) could have been affected by a problem with the GPS system used to time the neutrinos.

Peter Gleick is not just any scientist. He got his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley and won a MacArthur "genius" Award. He is also an outspoken proponent of scientific evidence that humans are responsible for climate change.

And earlier this week, he confessed that he had lied to obtain internal documents from the Heartland Institute, a group that questions to what extent climate change is caused by humans.

Gleick's deception has shaken the science community. Meanwhile, the Heartland Institute, whose funders and policies were described in the documents, is planning legal action.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is casting doubts on the belief that the Moon is a lifeless piece of rock.

A closed-door meeting to discuss controversial bird flu research is drawing to a close at the World Health Organization in Geneva, and the WHO plans to publicly report on what happened once it's officially over.

"We're very aware that there's a lot of interest in the meeting and that people will want to know, you know, what were the issues that were discussed and did you come to any consensus," noted Keiji Fukuda of the WHO, before the meeting began. "So we will try to make that as clear as possible as quickly as possible."

Surely you've noticed that when people move from place to place and stay for a while, they tend to pick up the local accent. We could use Madonna as an example, but we're pretty sure her British accent started before she jumped the pond.

Anyway, in a new study published in the journal Animal Behaviour, two scientists found young pygmy goats, which are known as kids, do something similar.

Dr. Elodie Briefer and Dr. Alan McElligott from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences at the University of London found that when kids joined social groups, their calls started sounding similar.