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fork(2) writes:

Science News reports:

Rumors swirling on the internet are casting doubt on hints of a new particle reported by scientists at the particle physics laboratory CERN in Geneva. But researchers say it's still too soon to know whether the particle exists or not.

"Currently the data are still being recorded and analyzed and it is too early to conclude," says Beate Heinemann of the University of California, Berkeley. "We hope to be able to present the new data in early August." Heinemann is the deputy spokesperson of ATLAS, an experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. ATLAS scientists, along with those from a second LHC experiment, CMS, reported signs of the new particle in December (SN: 1/9/16, p. 7).

Physicists have rumored on Twitter and on blogs that evidence of the particle is disappearing with additional data -- an outcome that would disappoint hordes of eager scientists.

After CMS and ATLAS researchers reported an unexpected bump in their data, physicists went into a frenzy (ScienceNews: 5/28/16, p. 11), posting hundreds of papers about the result online at arXiv.org.

But with the data they had in hand, physicists couldn't tell if the signal was real, or just a random fluctuation that would vanish as quickly as it had appeared. Since May, the LHC has been colliding protons at a fever pitch (ScienceNews Online: 5/9/16).

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