Leave it to a bunch of geniuses to waste a good opportunity. Remember how Samuel Morse famously asked, "What hath God wrought?" with the first telegram? Well this week, a group of scientists at the University of Rochester sent the first-ever message using a beam of neutrinos, and spelled out: "neutrinos."


The unoriginal eggheads at Fermilab shot billions of the near-massless particles at the speed of light underground—through 780 feet of concrete!—using one of the most powerful particle accelerators in the world. The tiny, confusing little suckers were translated into binary code and interpreted by MINERvA, a neutrino-detecting machine built specifically for the purpose. And yet, the best thing they could think of to write was the name of the thing they were using to directly defy the rules of physics.

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