Remember all that fuss about the Higgs-Boson? The fundamental particle is required for The Standard Model to work yet evidence eluded researchers for decades. There were plenty of times that scientists rang a false alarm for it's discovery.

In 2012, François Englert of CERN at long last found the Higgs and subsequently was awarded a Nobel Prize. Appropriately, Englert shared the prize with Peter Higgs - the man who originally theorized the particle.

Now we may have another fundamental discovery OR another false alarm regarding another theorized particle - the so-called "sterile neutrino".

An experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago has detected far more electron neutrinos than predicted — a possible harbinger of a revolutionary new elementary particle called the sterile neutrino, though many physicists remain skeptical.

Universal Background Radiation

Like Higgs-Boson must exist for The Standard Model to work, the sterile neutrino's existence would account for a whole lot of otherwise unexplainable things: primarily dark matter, dark radiation and baryogenesis.

Excuse me while I take a deep-dive into Wikipedia.

h/t Kottke.org