I read their preprint[1] and they did a thorough job. They investigated a number of the things I'd suspect if I were looking for mis-reconstructed events or weird backgrounds.

So it's certainly interesting!

That said, particle physics history is full of 3 sigma particle "discoveries" that disappeared with more data. They're collecting more, so hopefully we'll learn more in a few more years.

[1] https://lz.lbl.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2026/08/LZ_Pre...

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matthewdgreen 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This sort of thing is really useful for helping people to understand what the purpose of scientific publication is. It's not about presenting finished products to society, it's more like a Discord where you communicate new findings with other authors. Often the reason for a communication is because you found something weird, and you want other people to know about it so they can help you confirm or rule it out as bad data. People shouldn't feel gunshy about this. (My field even has a conference for failed results, CFAIL.) I like to highlight examples of this stuff, because I see so many angry online comments when a paper turns out to be "wrong" or doesn't replicate.

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stouset 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yep. Publishing like this gives a heads up to those operating similar observatories to keep an eye out for similar events. And it gives a nudge to theorists that might help them start looking in a more fruitful direction, appropriately caveated that it may be a statistical fluke.

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irishcoffee 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You have accurately described a email mailing list. Where in the value-add here?

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EthanHeilman 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> You have accurately described a email mailing list. Where in the value-add here?

Pre-prints are basically a mailinglist where you post your paper prior to peer review.

The value over a simple mailinglist is:

1. Stable URL and citation to enable other work and discussions to cite and reference it.

2. Versioning of the paper, allowing updates to be made without having mail out the paper, while allowing everyone to find all prior versions

3. Host for a PDF and data that might be quite large

4. Centralized searchable long term archive of scientific papers

5. Scalability, arxiv gets 30,000 submissions a day, no one wants to receive 30,000 PDFs in their inbox everyday

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ajkjk 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You think that people's findings should be communicated by email? that their email chains are what should go into the permanent record and be cited and printed out and included in journals and such?

would you include all the quoted text in the reply-alls, or is that too much?

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tomrod 4 hours ago | parent [-]

That's how Linux is built.

Science has too many threads to do it successfully though

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Charon77 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> would you include all the quoted text in the reply-alls, or is that too much?

Only quote the relevant part and reply to it, just like this very comment.

And Linux has a large mailing archive of various lists and threads that are searchable and available to everyone and get this: free access

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ajkjk an hour ago | parent [-]

The linux developers' mailing lists are not producing anything like scientific papers...

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bdamm an hour ago | parent [-]

Kind of arrogant no? Linux kernel development mailing lists are producing something immensely valuable with a much clearer impact on economic indicators than your average scientific paper. Comparing them is hard, but it's patently absurd to say there's nothing being produced compared to scientific papers.

	▲	ajkjk an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Dunno who you're arguing with, I didn't say they didn't produce anything of value. I said they aren't producing scientific papers. Conversations are not like papers. The scientists have conversations (sometimes on mailing lists!) as well. The analog to scientific papers in the Linux world are... scientific papers. And the occasional essay on the mailing list, which---get this---would be more valuable to humanity if it was subsequently reproduced as a paper with references and explanations and the like. (Notwithstanding the absurdity of academic publishing, of course.)
	▲	23 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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gus_massa 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No so wrong. The oldest journals started as smailing list :)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/information-culture/...

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matthewdgreen 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If I had the email address of every researcher in my field, I would never send a mass email to them describing my latest goofy idea. I would, however, send my latest goofy idea to a conference with those same reviewers (if I felt it was technically appropriate and correct.)

	▲	XorNot 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I mean we use to have newsgroups which basically implemented this. Which of course is the point: it is in fact quite similar to a mailing list, just with some extra protocol surounding it to make it manageable. So the attempted snark about it up thread is stupid.

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colechristensen 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Instead of reading everybody's spam or having to have a centralized body decide who gets to send messages to the mailing list, journal editors filter which things are worthy of publication and in which journal such that readers don't have to wade through garbage or uninteresting results.

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megagpt2 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They were - in the past. I imagine that right now, Discord is their Discord.

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smueller1234 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Or this[2] 2007 Science paper on ultra high energy cosmic ray source candidates ("anisotropy") that we had to retract because significance started dropping almost the day the paper was approved.

It was a fascinating experience as a junior member to follow the collaboration internal conversation and investigation on this, because a lot of extremely principled scientists were clearly deeply worried about losing their hard earned reputation. In the end, I am convinced that we were simply unlucky.

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/0712.2843

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WarmWash 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Reminds me of the FTL neutrinos too, where the scientist where pretty much "hey, something is wrong, can you help us figure it out?" and the general public were the ones screaming "OMG! Physics is dead!"

Then when it comes out as measurement error, the public is all "Damn these scientists are all hype machine clowns..."

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dd8601fn 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’m fine with that. Put it at the feet of pop science blogging.

I’m less fine with the time and resources spent on mouse models. They already know you’d get the same utility from a magic 8 ball, but they do it anyway.

	▲	gus_massa 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Mouse models are useful to discard very bad ideas. There was a recent experiment to use bacteria to kill cancer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46306894 They tried like 40 bacterias in vitro, then like 9 in mice, and only 1 was useful in mice and they will continue only with that, perhaps in humans. Anyway, as you suggest, there is a high chance it will fail. Also, you can do nasty stuff to mice that would never be allowed with humans. In that experiment they injected cancer cells in mice with a bad inmune system, so they could get like 90 mice with cancer and run the experiment in a short time. No ethical committee would approve that in humans.

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pfdietz 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That was a fiendish thing to debug; if I recall correctly it was a slightly and intermittently defective connector.

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logdahl 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wow haha, that is a lot of authors! Never seen this before!

	▲	thiagotomei 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The ATLAS-CMS joint Higgs boson mass measurement paper has close to 6000 authors: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.191803 I think the final COVID consortium report has something like 30k authors.

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alexpotato 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> we had to retract because significance started dropping almost the day the paper was approved.

It's stories like this that raise my p(we are in a simulation).

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derektank 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Are there any other candidate particles besides WIMPs that the observation could be from, assuming it’s a real signal?

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SaberTail 8 hours ago | parent [-]

In one sense anything that passed all their background rejection is a WIMP. To interact with a nucleus through so much matter, it's not interacting electromagnetically. The main candidate for a strong force interaction would be a neutron, and they did a lot of work to model that and eliminate it as a background. So definitionally it would be a WIMP.

They were pretty model agnostic in what they were looking for. They modeled and simulated a number of different ways a WIMP could interact with normal matter. If this is a discovery, more data will be needed to figure out the nature of that interaction and how it fits into particle physics.

But there's always a chance it's something completely new, or some extremely rare manifestation of things we already know about, but have never seen before. And even if it is WIMP, it may not be the right type of WIMP (wrong mass, or wrong interaction strength) to explain cosmological dark matter.

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imglorp 6 hours ago | parent [-]

If neutrons are on the list, how are they ruled out from a random decay event emitting particles, from some mineral in the surrounding rock?

	▲	physicsdude 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The detector from which data is taken to do this analysis contains 7 tons of liquid xenon. It is inside of a larger detector, which contains hundreds of tons of water and more than 10 tons of a scintillator. One of the functions of that outer detector is to absorb neutrons and other infiltrates coming from the rock. When doing this kind of thing, the analysts will plot the rate of events as a function of "distance from the outer surface" and confirm that it decreases, and in this case "is 0" inside of the detector used for analysis. But keep in mind that all statements are made statistically, so it's not that the event _can't_ be an external neutron, but that it is _very_ unlikely to be.
	▲	Nevermark 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		The experiment is set up to make any already understood interactions some combination of easy to identify or extremely improbable.
	▲	SaberTail 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		They have a lot of shielding for the detector, and also if there were a significant source of neutrons they'd expect to see other evidence, both in the detector and in the separate "veto" detector that surrounds the main detector. That's not to say it can't be a neutron, but it would be surprising if it were.