Let’s start off with the biggest news of the week, even though I’ve already mentioned it. Last week a team at CERN announced that they detected a neutrino at a cite in Italy 60.7 nanoseconds earlier than they had expected, if it had traveled at light speed. Even though or because this has the potential to repudiate one of the most fundamental principles of special relativity the team is continuing the study their results to see if there is an explanation of the “anomaly.” (Wired) This is a story that is certainly far from over and it is important to note that it is just one data point. That is not enough to completely change everything, but it is really cool!

Arctic sea ice reached near record low levels with the current record (for the lowest) being set in 2007 (New Scientist). This allowed bowhead whales from opposite ends of North America to met and a Pacific gray whale to make it’s way to the Mediterranean (also from New Scientist).

It’s probably been a while since you’ve heard anything about Sea Launch, the first private company to launch satellites into orbit, but they’re back in the news. After a rocket failure in 2007 they saw business suffer and they went into bankruptcy. Saturday they made their first launch since reorganization. (BBC)

Medical researches have found a 59 million year old protein that shows promising antimicrobial abilities, including against antibiotic resistant strains. Who would have thought that in the battle to out do the evolution of these pesky bacteria that the answer might be in our past? (New Scientist)
A coroner in Ireland has claimed that a 76 year old man died from spontaneous combustion! Even though he was sitting next to a fire, the investigators ruled it out as the cause. They also ruled out the involvement of a chemical accelerant or another human being the cause. Since the only fire damage was immediately above and below his body, it must have been spontaneous combustion. I’m sorry, but I have to call bull shit here. That is as shoddy of an investigation as it would be for police to give up on finding a missing person so they call it an alien abduction. (CNET)

According to computer simulations our solar system is missing a planet. If they only input the current planets then the end result is not even close to what we have, but if they add an additional gas giant the models work. Rogue planets have already been found so it is possible that one started out in orbit around our sun. (New Scientist)

Using the FOLDIT game, gamers solved the riddle of the structure of an enzyme involved in the reproduction of HIV that had been eluding the supercomputers that had been trying to figure it out. What’s even more surprising is that they did it in only three weeks. (Scientific American)