Cosmos Study Dashes Hope for New Neutrino

Cosmos Study Dashes Hope for New Neutrino: [caption id="attachment_11298" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Planck's map of the cosmic microwave background, courtesy of ESA and the Planck Collaboration"] [/caption]First particle physicists discovered " a boring old Standard Model Higgs boson ," as my colleague Michael Moyer put it, meaning that the particle hewed closely to theoretical predictions and offered little in the way of guidance to new and exciting physics. This week the European Space Agency's Planck satellite gave a significant boost to cosmology's own standard model, the so-called lambda-CDM cosmology in which dark energy and dark matter rule the universe. But the situation here is hardly boring, given that the very nature of dark matter and dark energy remain a mystery. [More]