22 March

Over the weekend, physicists and engineers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) nudged proton beam energies to a new record: 4 Tera-electron volts (TeV). This record comes shortly after CERN announced last month they’d be cranking up the juice through 2012.

Racing to beat competitors around the world to make a key measurement, they worked through the 23 January holiday and surrounding festivities. “Those of us working on the data analysis didn’t take time off,” says Yifang Wang, co-spokesperson for the Daya Bay collaboration and director of the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing. “We were determined to do this.”

Albert may still be right. An attempt to repeat an experiment that showed a subatomic particle traveling faster than the speed of light suggests that the earlier result may have erred, and that Einstein’s famed special theory of relativity remains intact.

Scientists recently proved possible a new way to converse when radio waves won’t do. For the first time, physicists and engineers have successfully transmitted a message using neutrinos.