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This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichten.

And I'm Ira Flato. Some new insights into noitrinos.

You know, they're sometimes called ghost particles because

they are nearly weightless, rarely interact with any other matter, and have very little electric

charge, spooky stuff. Well, now adding to the intrigue, the discovery of a neutrino with a

record-breaking level of energy. Yes, joining me to tell us more about

that story and other science stories of the week is Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New

Scientists based in New York. Welcome back, Sophie. Always good to have you. Thank you.

All right, start us off with the ABCs of a neutrino. What exactly is it?

So a neutrino is a fundamental particle, but instead of, you know, linking up with other particles to form an atom, for instance, a neutrino really very, very rarely interacts with regular matter. And to catch a glimpse of it, researchers build these huge detectors

filled with a dense substance like water or sometimes they use ice. And the idea is on the off

chance a stray neutrino might pass through this detector. It could bump into an atom in the water

or the ice. And that could make a reaction of other particles that the

detector is able to pick up. So you have these really big detectors in places like Antarctica,

and now one in the Mediterranean Sea, this relatively new detector, that found a very powerful

neutrino. It's about 10 times more energy than the other, the previous record holder,

which was found by the Antarctic detector. Wow. It's 120 peta electron volts.

That's a lot, I'm guessing. Right. I mean, on a larger scale, it's not a ton. But when we're

talking about the particle scale, that's big. That is

thousands of times more energetic than the particles you would get at a particle collider like the one at

CERN. All right. So what does this tell us about neutrinos that we don't already know or teach us

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