Above: what travelling at hyper speed would really look like It is a quirk of Hollywood and derivative science fiction that most of us are pr...

This Nature blog post reports on some possible sources of error that may rule out the problem of the superluminal neutrinos reported by the OPERA team earlier in September 2011.

When the news broke recently that a ghostly particle had reportedly smashed the speed of light record by a huge 60nanoseconds over 455 miles, my scientific smugness degenerated to near tree worship. If you cannot trust the speed of light as a constant, then hug weeping willows.

The spectacular aspect of such a detectable neutrino beam would be less the discovery that neutrinos may be actually tachyons, but an information speed above the speed of light barrier.

Neutrinos have become a buzzword this week since the OPERA collaboration released a pre-print last Thursday suggesting some neutrinos had been found travelling faster than the speed of light.

PRESS ASSOCIATION -- British scientists are to investigate astounding results which suggest Einstein was wrong when he said nothing could travel faste...