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Seeing how they keep failing to find the Higgs boson, I guess they felt they had to do something to generate buzz.

I hope this is tongue in cheek as it's clear from both AP and BBC that this is not a sensationalist release. Also note that the false alarm discovery of the Higgs in CERN this year was not an official release and rather the actions of a rogue researcher.

"We have data that suggest we saw particles moving faster than light and we are showing everybody the data because we must have made a mistake, but we can't find it by ourselves after trying a lot" is pretty much sensational enough for those who can understand the implications of the unlikely possibility they measured something that really happened.

The odds are they made a mistake. But, if they didn't, the universe just got much more interesting.

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