Some snippets of RNA can be a real pain.

A microRNA called miR-30c-5p contributes to nerve pain in rats and people, a new study finds. A different microRNA, miR-711, interacts with a well-known itch-inducing protein to cause itching, a second study concludes. Together, the research highlights the important role that the small pieces of genetic material can play in nerve cell function, and may help researchers understand the causes of chronic nerve pain and itch.
MicroRNAs help regulate gene activity and protein production. The small molecules play a big role in controlling cancer (SN: 8/28/10, p. 18) and other aspects of health and disease (SN: 2/20/16, p. 18). Usually, microRNAs work by pairing up with bigger pieces of RNA called messenger RNAs, or mRNA. Messenger RNAs contain copies of genetic instructions that are read by cellular machinery to build proteins. When microRNAs glom onto the messengers, the mRNA can be degraded or the microRNAs can prevent the protein-building machinery from reading the instructions. Either way, the result is typically to dial down production of certain proteins.

In the case of nerve pain, miR-30c-5p limits production of an important protein called TGF-beta that’s involved in controlling pain, María Hurlé, a pharmacologist at the University of Cantabria in Santander, Spain, and colleagues report August 8 in Science Translational Medicine. The researchers discovered the link in experiments with mice, rats and people.

In the rat experiments, researchers cut the sciatic nerve in the thigh, making the rodents more sensitive to pain caused by heat or cold. These rats had more miR-30c-5p in their blood and cerebral spinal fluid than uninjured rats did, Hurlé and colleagues found. And the amount of the microRNA in the rats’ blood correlated with their pain sensitivity. People with nerve pain caused by a lack of blood flow to a limb also had elevated levels of the microRNA in their blood and spinal fluid.
Hurlé’s group confirmed that the microRNA was causing pain by injecting uninjured rats with miR-30c-5p
or an imposter microRNA. Those rats that got the imposter injected into their brains had normal pain sensitivity, but rodents shot up with miR-30c-5p became sensitive to cold pain. Researchers also blocked miR-30c-5p by using another piece of RNA that would latch onto it and prevent it from interacting with the mRNA for TGF-beta. Pain-sensitive rats that got the blocker RNA recovered normal pain responses. “This was a spectacular result,” Hurlé says.
But the finding doesn’t mean that doctors can treat nerve pain by blocking the microRNA in people, she says. Both the microRNA and TGF-beta do too many other important jobs throughout the body to mess with them. The research, however, does suggest that the level of miR-30c-5p in people’s blood and spinal fluid might be a good indicator of nerve pain.

Having a nerve pain indicator would be useful, says Marzia Malcangio, a neuropharmacologist at King’s College London who was not involved in either study. Pain doctors don’t know of any biological molecules that can distinguish nerve pain from pain caused by inflammation or other causes, Malcangio says. Making that distinction is important because different types of pain are treated differently.

A different microRNA, miR-711, seems to be the culprit causing chronic itching in people with lymphoma, neurobiologist and pain researcher Ru-Rong Ji and colleagues report in the Aug. 8 Neuron.

Cancerous immune cells called T-cells secrete miR-711, the team showed in experiments with mice. And giving mice the microRNA by itself made the rodents scratch. Surprisingly, the researchers found, the microRNA gloms onto a well-known pain and itch sensing protein called TRPA1 outside of a cell, instead of binding to an mRNA inside a cell like other microRNAs.

That finding may be a big advance in understanding how itch works, Malcangio says. Chemicals that trigger TRPA1 from inside a nerve cell open a floodgate that allows calcium to pour in and launch a pain signal. Tickling TRPA1 with the microRNA on the outside of the cell causes just a trickle of calcium into the nerve, producing itch instead of pain, Ji, of Duke University School of Medicine, and colleagues propose.

The team designed a peptide (a small protein or portion of a protein) that could block miR-711 from binding to TRPA1. Itchy mice that got the blocking peptide scratched about half as often as mice that got miR-711 injections alone.

Ji thinks the blocking peptide may be able to reduce itch in lymphoma patients, but the team needs to do more research before giving it to people. About a third of Hodgkin’s lymphoma patients and 15 percent of people with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma have severe itching. The researchers are also investigating whether the microRNA is involved in other types of itchy conditions, such as eczema.

Landing sites on the asteroid Ryugu for the Hayabusa2 spacecraft and its hitchhiking landers have been picked out, scientists with Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency announced in a news conference on August 23.

Hayabusa2 arrived at the 1,000-meter-wide asteroid on June 27, and has been scanning the surface since. More than 100 mission team members met on August 17 to choose the first spots for the spacecraft to land.

The team decided that the two landers, called MINERVA-II and MASCOT, will touch down on the diamond-shaped asteroid’s surface first. MINERVA-II, which carries small hopping rovers equipped with cameras and other instruments, will land at a spot near Ryugu’s north pole on September 21. MASCOT, a tumbling rover, will land closer to the south pole on October 4. The craft will roam the landscape making measurements of the asteroid’s composition, temperature and magnetic properties.
The main body of Hayabusa2 will join them in late October, touching down at a point near the asteroid’s equator and gathering a sample of dust there.

The mission team looked for regions 100 meters in diameter that were relatively flat, with slopes less than 30 degrees and with few boulders. Ryugu turned out to be strewn with more boulders than expected based on the first Hayabusa mission, which brought back bits of a smoother asteroid called Itokawa.

But the observations from orbit suggest Ryugu’s surface is well-mixed, meaning that no matter where Hayabusa2 lands, it has a good chance of picking up something interesting. The spacecraft will collect samples from two other, still unknown sites over the next 15 months before returning the samples to Earth in 2020.

A firefly’s blinking behind is more than just a pretty summer sight.

It’s known that fireflies flash to attract mates (SN Online: 8/12/15) — but the twinkles may serve another purpose as well. Jesse Barber, a biologist at Boise State University, had a hunch that the lights also warn off potential nighttime predators. He wasn’t the first person with this hypothesis. As far back as 1882, entomologist G.H. Bowles wrote of fireflies: “May not the light then serve … as a warning of their offensiveness to creatures that would devour them?” But the theory hadn’t been tested, until now. “We always assumed that bats don’t use vision for much,” Barber says.
Many species of fireflies are “chemically protected,” meaning they taste awful to predators, Barber says. Yet if an insect doesn’t offer a warning of its bad taste, it may get sampled anyway. Barber noticed that, unlike moths, which signal their toxicity to bats with noises, fireflies don’t make a peep (SN Online: 7/3/13). He wondered if lightning bugs were warning bats of their disgusting taste with their blinking lights.
Barber and colleagues wanted to see if it took bats longer to learn to avoid fireflies when the flashings were masked. The team began by introducing fireflies to three bats that had never encountered the bugs before. The bats learned to avoid the bright creatures “after just a few interactions,” Barber says. Those early exchanges went something like: catch, taste, drop. Soon, the bats avoided the fireflies completely.
Next came the tricky part: The team needed flying fireflies that wouldn’t blink. Painstakingly, the researchers secured each firefly with a minuscule paper belt under a microscope, and, with a tiny brush, applied two coats of black paint to the flashing back end. Each bug rump — they painted dozens — took about 45 minutes to cover. That’s one of the reasons the experiment took three years, Barber jokes.
But the work paid off: When the researchers exposed a new set of bats to the darkened fireflies, the bats took about twice as long to learn that the bugs had an awful taste.

Those bats that eventually learned to avoid the dark fireflies may have sensed the insects’ distinctive straight-line flight pattern via echolocation, the researchers hypothesize. Bats may avoid fireflies through a combination of senses, echolocation to sense the insects’ flight patterns and vision to glimpse those double-duty flashers.

The sleepy sun turns out to be a factory of extremely energetic light.

Scientists have discovered that the sun puts out more of this light, called high-energy gamma rays, overall than predicted. But what’s really weird is that the rays with the highest energies appear when the star is supposed to be at its most sluggish, researchers report in an upcoming study in Physical Review Letters. The research is the first to examine these gamma rays over most of the solar cycle, a roughly 11-year period of waxing and waning solar activity.
That newfound oddity is probably connected to the activity of the sun’s magnetic fields, the researchers say, and could lead to new insights about the mysterious environment.

“The almost certain thing that’s going on here is the magnetic fields are much more powerful, much more variable, and much more weirdly shaped than we expect,” says astrophysicist John Beacom of the Ohio State University in Columbus.
The sun’s high-energy gamma rays aren’t produced directly by the star. Instead, the light is triggered by cosmic rays — protons that zip through space with some of the highest energies known in nature
— that smack into solar protons and produce high-energy gamma rays in the process ( SN: 10/14/27, p. 7 ) .
All of those gamma rays would get lost inside the sun, if not for magnetic fields. Magnetic fields are known to take charged particles like cosmic rays and spin them around like a house in a tornado. Theorists have predicted that cosmic rays whose paths have been scrambled by the tangled mass of magnetic fields at the solar surface should send high-energy gamma rays shooting back out of the sun, where astronomers can see them.

Beacom and colleagues, led by astrophysicist Tim Linden of Ohio State, sifted through data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope from August 2008 to November 2017. The observations spanned a period of low solar activity in 2008 and 2009, a period of higher activity in 2013 and a decline in activity to the minimum of the next cycle, which started in 2018 (SN: 11/2/13, p. 22). The team tracked the number of solar gamma rays emitted per second, as well as their energies and where on the sun they came from.

There were more high-energy gamma rays, above 50 billion electron volts, or GeV, than anyone predicted, the team reports. Weirder still, rays with energies above 100 GeV appeared only during the solar minimum, when the sun’s activity level was low. One photon emitted during the solar minimum had an energy as high as 467.7 GeV.

Strangest of all, the sun seems to emit gamma rays from different parts of its surface at different times in its cycle. Because cosmic rays that hit the sun come in from all directions, you would expect the entire sun to light up in gamma rays uniformly. But Beacom’s team found that during the solar minimum, gamma rays came mainly from near the equator, and during the solar maximum, when the sun’s activity level was high, they clustered near the poles.

“All of these things are way more weird than anyone had predicted,” Beacom says. “And that means the magnetic fields must be way more weird than anyone had thought.”
Beacom and colleagues tried to connect the excess gamma rays to other solar behaviors that change with magnetic activity, like solar flares or sunspots (SN: 9/30/17, p. 6). “So far nothing has really held up to any sort of scrutiny,” says astrophysicist Annika Peter, also at Ohio State.

High-energy gamma rays may offer a new way to probe the magnetic fields in the uppermost layer of the solar surface, called the photosphere. “You can’t see [the fields] with a telescope,” Beacom says. “But these [cosmic rays] are journeying there, and the gamma rays they send back are messengers of the terrible conditions there.”

More observations are coming soon. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which launched on August 12, will take the first direct measurements of the magnetic field in the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona (SN: 7/21/18, p. 12). And as the sun enters the next solar minimum, the highest-energy gamma rays are starting to return. In February, Fermi caught its first gamma ray with an energy above 100 GeV since 2009.

“There really is something strange afoot,” says solar physicist Craig DeForest of the Southwest Research Institute, who is based in Boulder, Colo., and was not involved in the work. “When there’s some new discovery, scientists don’t shout ‘Eureka!’ They go, ‘Hm, that’s funny. That can’t be right.’ This is a classic case of that.”

A new material that converts light into heat could be laminated onto airplanes, wind turbines, rooftops and offshore oil platforms to help combat ice buildup.

This deicer, called a photothermal trap, has three layers: a top coating of a ceramic-metal mix that turns incoming light into thermal energy, a middle layer of aluminum that spreads this heat across the entire sheet — warming up even areas not bathed in light — and a foam insulation base. The photothermal trap, described online August 31 in Science Advances, can be powered by sunshine or LEDs.

Engineer Susmita Dash of the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru and colleagues laid a 6.3-centimeter-wide sheet of the deicing material out in the sun on a day averaging about –3.5° Celsius, alongside a sheet of aluminum. Within four minutes, the photothermal trap heated to about 30° C, while the aluminum warmed to only about 6° C. After five minutes, snow on the surface of the photothermal trap had mostly melted off, but snow remained caked on the aluminum.

Deicing surfaces typically involves energy-intensive heating systems or environmentally unfriendly chemical sprays. By harnessing light to melt ice away, the new photothermal trap may provide a more sustainable means of keeping surfaces ice-free. “This is a new direction for anti-icing,” says Kevin Golovin, a materials scientist and engineer at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna not involved in the work.

New images of gas churning inside an ancient starburst galaxy help explain why this galactic firecracker underwent such frenzied star formation.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, researchers have taken the most detailed views of the disk of star-forming gas that permeated the galaxy COSMOS-AzTEC-1, which dates back to when the universe was less than 2 billion years old. The telescope observations, reported online August 29 in Nature, reveal an enormous reservoir of molecular gas that was highly susceptible to collapsing and forging new stars.
COSMOS-AzTEC-1 and its starburst contemporaries have long puzzled astronomers, because these galaxies cranked out new stars about 1,000 times as fast as the Milky Way does. According to standard theories of cosmology, galaxies shouldn’t have grown up fast enough to be such prolific star-formers so soon after the Big Bang.

Inside a normal galaxy, the outward pressure of radiation from stars helps counteract the inward pull of gas’s gravity, which pumps the brakes on star formation. But in COSMOS-AzTEC-1, the gas’s gravity was so intense that it overpowered the feeble radiation pressure from stars, leading to runaway star formation. The new ALMA pictures unveil two especially large clouds of collapsing gas in the disk, which were major hubs of star formation.
“It’s like a giant fuel depot that built up right after the Big Bang … and we’re catching it right in the process of the whole thing lighting up,” says study coauthor Min Yun, an astronomer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Yun and colleagues still don’t know how COSMOS-AzTEC-1 stocked up such a massive supply of star-forming material. But future observations of the galaxy and its ilk using ALMA or the James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch in 2021, may help clarify the origins of these ancient cosmic monsters (SN Online: 6/11/14).

Obesity can affect brainpower, and a study in mice may help explain how.

In the brains of obese mice, rogue immune cells chomp nerve cell connections that are important for learning and memory, scientists report September 10 in the Journal of Neuroscience. Drugs that stop this synapse destruction may ultimately prove useful for protecting the brain against the immune cell assault.

Like people, mice that eat lots of fat quickly pack on pounds. After 12 weeks of a high-fat diet, mice weighed almost 40 percent more than mice fed standard chow. These obese mice showed signs of diminished brainpower, neuroscientist Elizabeth Gould of Princeton University and colleagues found. Obese mice were worse at escaping mazes and remembering an object’s location than mice of a normal weight.
On nerve cells, microscopic knobs called dendritic spines receive signals. Compared with normal-sized mice, obese mice had fewer dendritic spines in several parts of the mice’s hippocampi, brain structures important for learning and memory.

The dendritic spine destruction comes from immune cells called microglia, the results suggest. In obese mice, higher numbers of active microglia lurked among these sparser nerve cell connections compared with mice of normal weights. When the researchers interfered with microglia in obese mice, dendritic spines were protected and the mice’s performance on thinking tests improved.

Figuring out ways to stop microglia’s damage might one day prove to protect against obesity-related brain trouble, a concern relevant to the estimated 650 million obese adults worldwide. Obese people are also at a higher risk of dementias such as Alzheimer’s, and some researchers suspect microglia may be a culprit in those brain diseases more generally.

I’m relatively new to Oregon, but one of the ways I know I’m starting to settle in is my ability to recognize marijuana shops. Some are easy. But others, with names like The Agrestic and Mr. Nice Guy, are a little trickier to identify for someone who hasn’t spent much time in a state that has legalized marijuana.

A growing number of states have legalized both medical and recreational marijuana. At the same time, women who are pregnant or breastfeeding are using the drug in increasing numbers. A 2017 JAMA study described both survey results and urine tests of nearly 280,000 pregnant women in Northern California, where medical marijuana was legalized in 1996. The study showed that in 2009, about 4 percent of the women tested used marijuana. In 2016, about 7 percent of women did. Those California numbers may be even higher now, since recreational marijuana became legal there this year.
Some of those numbers may be due in part to women using marijuana to treat their morning sickness, a more recent study by some of the same researchers suggests. Their report, published August 20 in JAMA Internal Medicine, found that pregnant women with severe nausea and vomiting were 3.8 times more likely to use marijuana than pregnant women without morning sickness.

So some pregnant women are definitely using the drug, and exposing their fetuses to it, too. Ingredients in marijuana are known to make their way to fetuses by crossing the placenta during pregnancy (and by entering breast milk after the baby is born). But what actually happens when those marijuana compounds arrive?

That’s the question the American Academy of Pediatrics grapples with in a clinical report published in the August issue of Pediatrics. In an effort to provide guidance to caregivers and women, the AAP sums up the existing scientific literature on how marijuana affects mothers and babies.

While it seems like a bad idea to expose developing babies to marijuana, the science to back up that intuition is frustratingly slim. Some studies have turned up negative outcomes for babies, such as lower birth weight and a greater likelihood of needing the neonatal intensive care unit. And marijuana use during pregnancy has been tied to a greater risk of anemia in mothers. But other studies found no such effects.
This subject — and any topic that involves drugs and babies — is hard to study. Ethical reasons prevent scientists from assigning some pregnant women to use marijuana and others to abstain. Such randomization is a key feature of a solid study, and one that’s just not available in this case. That leaves scientists to study women who are already using marijuana while pregnant, and those women may have other characteristics that make a direct comparison difficult. That makes it harder to say whether it was marijuana, or something else, that is linked to a particular outcome.

Still, despite what the AAP calls “limited research,” there may be enough hints, from observational studies of women already using marijuana and from animal studies, to make pregnant women pause before using marijuana. Add to those red flags the fact that today’s marijuana is a lot more potent than it used to be, meaning that more of the active compound THC could reach the developing baby. And toxins such as pesticides might come along for the ride, perhaps causing other kinds of trouble.

These questions are more pressing as marijuana becomes easier to get legally, and as more pregnant women use it. Hopefully this shift will prompt scientists to figure out better ways to study the drug’s effects — or lack thereof.

Slow-motion large land snails made for easy catching and good eating as early as 170,000 years ago.

Until now, the oldest evidence of Homo sapiens eating land snails dated to roughly 49,000 years ago in Africa and 36,000 years ago in Europe. But tens of thousands of years earlier, people at a southern African rock-shelter roasted these slimy, chewy — and nutritious — creepers that can grow as big as an adult’s hand, researchers report in the April 15 Quaternary Science Reviews.
Analyses of shell fragments excavated at South Africa’s Border Cave indicate that hunter-gatherers who periodically occupied the site heated large African land snails on embers and then presumably ate them, say chemist Marine Wojcieszak and colleagues. Wojcieszak, of the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage in Brussels, studies chemical properties of archaeological sites and artifacts.

The supersized delicacy became especially popular between about 160,000 and 70,000 years ago, the researchers say. Numbers of unearthed snail shell pieces were substantially larger in sediment layers dating to that time period.

New discoveries at Border Cave challenge an influential idea that human groups did not make land snails and other small game a big part of their diet until the last Ice Age waned around 15,000 to 10,000 years ago, Wojcieszak says.

Long before that, hunter-gatherer groups in southern Africa roamed the countryside collecting large land snails to bring back to Border Cave for themselves and to share with others, the team contends. Some of the group members who stayed behind on snail-gathering forays may have had limited mobility due to age or injury, the researchers suspect.

“The easy-to-eat, fatty protein of snails would have been an important food for the elderly and small children, who are less able to chew hard foods,” Wojcieszak says. “Food sharing [at Border Cave] shows that cooperative social behavior was in place from the dawn of our species.”

Border Cave’s ancient snail scarfers also push back the human consumption of mollusks by several thousand years, says archaeologist Antonieta Jerardino of the University of South Africa in Pretoria. Previous excavations at a cave on South Africa’s southern tip found evidence of humans eating mussels, limpets and other marine mollusks as early as around 164,000 years ago (SN: 7/29/11).

Given the nutritional value of large land snails, an earlier argument that it was eating fish and shellfish that energized human brain evolution may have been overstated, says Jerardino, who did not participate in the new study.
It’s not surprising that ancient H. sapiens recognized the nutritional value of land snails and occasionally cooked and ate them by 170,000 years ago, says Teresa Steele, an archaeologist at the University of California, Davis who was not part of the work. But intensive consumption of these snails starting around 160,000 years ago is unexpected and raises questions about whether climate and habitat changes may have reduced the availability of other foods, Steele says.

Researchers have already found evidence that ancient people at Border Cave cooked starchy plant stems, ate an array of fruits and hunted small and large animals. The oldest known grass bedding, from around 200,000 years ago, has also been unearthed at Border Cave (SN: 8/13/20).

Several excavations have been conducted at the site since 1934. Three archaeologists on the new study — Lucinda Backwell and Lyn Wadley of Wits University in Johannesburg and Francesco d’Errico of the University of Bordeaux in France — directed the latest Border Cave dig, which ran from 2015 through 2019.

Discoveries by that team inspired the new investigation. Excavations uncovered shell fragments of large land snails, many discolored from possible burning, in all but the oldest sediment layers containing remnants of campfires and other H. sapiens activity. The oldest layers date to at least 227,000 years ago.

Chemical and microscopic characteristics of 27 snail shell fragments from various sediment layers were compared with shell fragments of modern large African snails that were heated in a metal furnace. Experimental temperatures ranged from 200° to 550° Celsius. Heating times lasted from five minutes to 36 hours.

All but a few ancient shell pieces displayed signs of extended heat exposure consistent with having once been attached to snails that were cooked on hot embers. Heating clues on shell surfaces included microscopic cracks and a dull finish.

Only lower parts of large land snail shells would have rested against embers during cooking, possibly explaining the mix of burned and unburned shell fragments unearthed at Border Cave, the researchers say.

The battle over the heft of a hard-to-detect particle is heating up. What’s at stake? Only the leading theory describing all known matter in the universe.

A recalculation of the mass of an elementary particle, the W boson, has increased the tension between measurements from competing particle collider experiments. The ultimate outcome could bolster the standard model of particle physics, which describes the fundamental forces and quantum bits that make up everything we see in the cosmos. Or it could reveal signs of the standard model’s breakdown, depending on which lab’s answer prevails.
A reanalysis of old data from the Large Hadron Collider’s ATLAS experiment yields a W boson mass of about 80,360 million electron volts, or MeV. Researchers with the experiment, at CERN in Geneva, reported the measurement March 23 at the Rencontres de Moriond conference in La Thuile, Italy. The revised value is closely aligned with predictions from the standard model.

It also boasts reduced uncertainty from the researchers’ previous analysis of the data, which they reported in 2018, increasing their confidence that they got the mass right.

But the updated mass is at odds with that of another group. In 2022, scientists from the Collider Detector at Fermilab, or CDF, experiment shocked the physics community with a measurement of 80,434 MeV — about 100 MeV heavier than expected (SN: 4/7/22). If the CDF report is correct, it implies that something is off with the standard model that has persevered in the face of every experimental challenge thrown at it over the last 50 years.

The W boson is responsible for the weak force, one of three fundamental forces in the standard model (SN: 2/5/83). And “it’s the only mass of a particle in the standard model that can be calculated,” says theoretical physicist Sven Heinemeyer of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. That is, the standard model theory yields a specific mass for the W boson, whereas the masses of other particles such as electrons and quarks are inputs and can be — as far as the theory is concerned — any value. Finding a W boson mass that’s different from standard model predictions would show the current theory is wrong.

The ATLAS reanalysis offers a stronger counterpoint to the CDF claim than the earlier ATLAS analysis of the same data. “The new analysis is an important confirmation of our previous result,” says Andreas Hoecker, a physicist at CERN.

The latest ATLAS value widens the chasm that separates CDF’s mass measurement from the herd of other studies. But it shouldn’t be seen as erasing CDF’s standard model challenge, says Duke University physicist Ashutosh Kotwal, a member of the CDF collaboration.

“The perspective on the CDF [announcement of a heavy W boson in 2022] does not change because of the ATLAS reanalysis,” Kotwal says. Because the reanalysis is based on data that ATLAS already released in 2017, he says, “the fact that ATLAS obtains a similar value as before is to be expected.”
Heinemeyer, who is not affiliated with ATLAS or CDF, sees a shift in the W boson mass landscape, but no sign of a resolution of the discrepancy.

“Having one new measurement is not enough,” Heinemeyer says. “If more and more measurements were to come out now from ATLAS and [other experiments], and they would all be in the same ballpark, at some point the community would decide CDF did something wrong.”

The next word on the W boson mass will probably come with pending studies from ATLAS and other experiments at CERN. The CDF experiment shut down in 2011, so it will not contribute further to the debate.

In the meantime, researchers hope to scrutinize each other’s analyses to search for clues that might help explain discrepancies in W boson mass measurements. “The CDF April 2022 paper provides a number of cross-checks of the CDF methodology and is transparent,” Kotwal says. “I look forward to detailed discussions of the ATLAS methodology.”

In the end, the conflict might reveal a new crack in the standard model. Or it could turn out to be another example of one of the most successful theories in history standing strong.